Welcome. Sabbath Time is a regular weekly series that started almost a year ago on MyLeftWing and is now also a feature on Street Prophets each week – usually on Saturdays. The goal of the series is to remind us to find balance in our lives between work, play, and rest. We cannot pour from an empty cup.
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I’ve found this helpful recently – thought some of you might as well. The bulk of the content is taken from Krista Tippett’s radio program / web site Speaking Of Faith – specifically an episode titled “The Tragedy of the Believer”
An excerpt…
Wiesel’s faith, as he wrote in Night , had been consumed forever by the flames of the ovens at Auschwitz.
…snip
There is a terrible moment in Night when Wiesel watches a young boy die slowly by hanging and repeats the question posed by someone in the crowd: “Where is God now?” Wiesel writes, “I heard a voice within me answer him. Where is He? He is hanging here on this gallows…”
But I [Krista] could never quite imagine that as the last word on God in Wiesel’s life, especially after he began to publish volumes of Hasidic tales in more recent years. Two decades after our first meeting in Berlin, I sat across from him in a hotel room that my producers had turned into a makeshift studio. I asked him the questions I’d come to care about in the intervening years. I asked him to tell me what happened after he lost his faith forever at Auschwitz. He answered: “What happened afterwards is in the book. I went on praying.”
Krista notes – ” If you catch nothing else of this week’s program, listen to the marvelous prayer Elie Wiesel recited near the end of our conversation.” – transcript of that prayer is below the fold.
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Please use this space to give yourself some space – a moment to breath, perhaps to accept that it doesn’t make sense, and to restore your energy to keep working anyway.
This is the complete intro text in an email sent to promote the episode
Faith in the Face of a Destructive World”
I first met Elie Wiesel in 1985, when I was a young New York Times stringer in West Berlin. He was visiting that city, the former capital of the Third Reich, for the first time since the Holocaust. He had requested a meeting with a group of young Germans — the new, post-Holocaust generation. Afterwards, another journalist and I sat with him and his wife and talked. He was visibly surprised, even shaken. He said this: “I had never before considered that it could be as difficult to be a child of those who ran the camps as to be a child of those who died in them.”
I was not a religious person at that time. I was caught up in political crises — the enduring geopolitical consequences of Germany’s descent into Nazi terror. I was an idealistic, ambitious young American, enthralled with politics and military strategy. Yet I felt Wiesel’s words belonged on the front page of newspapers, that they should be shouted to the world. I was finding that politics could not penetrate the complexities of human nature that shape the problems it arose to address. Through Elie Wiesel’s eyes, paradoxically, a goal like redemption — and not just retribution — appeared possible, even necessary. But this had nothing to do with God. Wiesel’s faith, as he wrote in Night, had been consumed forever by the flames of the ovens at Auschwitz.
I became a religious person in the years that followed — in part because I continued to wonder at the limits of politics and to love large questions of meaning. As I began to read literature about faith, I often found Elie Wiesel cited as an icon of a reasonable loss of faith. He was at once a quintessentially Jewish figure and a thoroughly modern intellectual. There is a terrible moment in Night when Wiesel watches a young boy die slowly by hanging and repeats the question posed by someone in the crowd: “Where is God now?” Wiesel writes, “I heard a voice within me answer him. Where is He? He is hanging here on this gallows…”
But I could never quite imagine that as the last word on God in Wiesel’s life, especially after he began to publish volumes of Hasidic tales in more recent years. Two decades after our first meeting in Berlin, I sat across from him in a hotel room that my producers had turned into a makeshift studio. I asked him the questions I’d come to care about in the intervening years. I asked him to tell me what happened after he lost his faith forever at Auschwitz. He answered: “What happened afterwards is in the book. I went on praying.”
When you read Night, it’s easy to dismiss those prayers as hollow ritual, to skim past them to the horrors that seem to defy their validity. But Elie Wiesel holds human beings responsible for the evil of Auschwitz and Birkenau, he tells me, not God. “God gives us the world which he wanted — not perfect but beautiful. And what are we doing to it?” He cites an idea first described by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, that in certain historical periods there is an “eclipse of God.” Elie Wiesel imagines that perhaps the Holocaust was so massive and unbearable that God “turned his face away.” Still, he can not help but be angry with God for that. All of Wiesel’s writing about faith is rich with paradox and infused with the anger he feels up to this day.
Somewhere along the way in America, we came to think of religious people as those who have all the answers. Elie Wiesel is an exceptional — and exceptionally wise — example of the way I have come to believe religious traditions actually function in the lives of real people most of the time. That is to say, faith and religious ritual are there precisely in the midst of life’s ambiguities, when there are no easy answers and the world does not make sense. After the horror of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel went on venting his anger at God, writing his stories, grieving, rediscovering Hasidic legend, visiting other people in places of horror, and praying. His life is a model of religious faith and practice in a world where faith can seem purposeless, even destructive.
Prayer
by Elie Wiesel
The prayer originally appeared in a diary and was included in the collection One Generation After.
I no longer ask you for either happiness or paradise; all I ask of You is to listen and let me be aware of Your listening.
I no longer ask You to resolve my questions, only to receive them and make them part of You.
I no longer ask You for either rest or wisdom, I only ask You not to close me to gratitude, be it of the most trivial kind, or to surprise and friendship. Love? Love is not Yours to give.
As for my enemies, I do not ask You to punish them or even to enlighten them; I only ask You not to lend them Your mask and Your powers. If You must relinquish one or the other, give them Your powers. But not Your countenance.
They are modest, my requests, and humble. I ask You what I might ask a stranger met by chance at twilight in a barren land.
I ask you, God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to enable me to pronounce these words without betraying the child that transmitted them to me: God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, enable me to forgive You and enable the child I once was to forgive me too.
I no longer ask You for the life of that child, nor even for his faith. I only beg You to listen to him and act in such a way that You and I can listen to him together.
I encourage you to listen to the whole thing – as well as other episodes – I really enjoy this program’s approach. Here is the archive .
