When Oprah speaks, America listens. When Oprah points, America turns and looks. Perhaps most stunningly, Oprah can wave a book in front of us, and some of us may even put down our television remotes and plunge into its pages.
Her recent selection of Night, Elie Wiesel’s classic memoir of the Holocaust, as this month’s book-club feature on the Oprah Winfrey Show promises to capture the attention of a huge audience that still knows little or nothing of that shattering and defining catastrophe of our time. In her broadcasts with Wiesel, scheduled to include a filmed visit to Auschwitz, we will see an African-American woman stepping into the kingdom of night and marching among the shadows. This educational odyssey may open the door to new understandings, not least between Christians and Jews.
Who can object? Why should I, in particular, be vexed with doubts? Wiesel’s book served as my initiation into issues that have shaped my life’s work in the field of Christian-Jewish studies. I continue to find his masterpiece, published as La Nuit in France in 1958, and in this country in 1960, to be one of the most searing portraits ever composed of the Holocaust, and I am impressed that Oprah had the daring to choose it as the focal point of her own and her viewers’ encounter with that earth-shaking trauma. Why, then, do I have so little confidence that this unique combination of talents will work any miracles within our collective psyche?
My unrest is generated by a suspicion that the reading and discussion of Wiesel’s Night will constitute the entire curriculum. Thanks to the power of the largest book club on the face of the globe, the American public will travel to Auschwitz, survey a limited parcel of a vast and complicated landscape, and fail to notice an array of difficulties much closer to home—meaning the mental and cultural home inhabited by so many of my fellow Christians. Literary genius and cathartic TV may momentarily captivate us, but most viewers are likely to pass through the experience secure in unexamined and potentially dangerous assumptions.
My anxiety has three aspects. The first arises out of the intimate character of the book’s narration. A Jewish boy from a small town in Eastern Europe is swept into the machinery of mass murder, and readers are held spellbound by a voice recounting events in a world twisted beyond recognition. We see these events unfolding through the eyes of a child, whose grip on his family, his faith, and his sense of self is methodically broken. We enter a realm of radical uncertainty and despair, our gaze forbidden to extend beyond the barbed wire that encloses and contains it.
And here is the problem. In the world that Wiesel portrays, the organizers of genocide lie outside the perimeter of the camp and hence outside the uninformed reader’s ken. The politicians who devised the plans, the bureaucrats and technocrats who executed them with deadly efficiency, remain faceless. There is no reckoning with the carefully choreographed performance of mass murder.
Similarly, we pass though Wiesel’s narrative without noticing Hitler’s “willing executioners,” the ordinary people who obediently followed instructions or acquiesced through their silence. Many of them were products of the best educational system on earth; most had been baptized in the very heartland of Christendom. The silent majority did not want to know too much. They were busy, they did not want to run afoul of the authorities or put themselves and their families at risk. They turned a blind eye to the atrocities. The righteous, those who risked their lives to save the innocent, were rare exceptions who proved the rule.
But the commanding voice that issues from the crematoria requires that we confront the ideological underpinnings of this mass murder, and this confrontation lands us on the doorstep of the Christian tradition. Over the centuries, Christian teachings cultivated the soil of hostility out of which sprang a pervasive contempt for Judaism and the Jewish people. The ethos of disdain was amplified in the traditional Christian interpretation of the Bible, disseminated through the work of brilliant theologians, reinforced in preaching and liturgical practices, and embodied in art and architecture.
Today, most Christians are oblivious to this disturbing heritage, or are prone to deny its virulence and durability. That is so despite the overwhelming consensus among historians, and in recent decades among many church hierarchies, that the animus embedded within Christianity was in fact an indispensable precondition for the emergence of modern anti-Semitism. For that reason, the Holocaust lays a particular obligation on Christians, and disarming this still-toxic bias is a Christian imperative of the utmost urgency.
Wiesel’s Night provides a window onto the horrifying experience of the victims; it does not hold up a mirror, compelling Christians to confront the underbelly of their own tradition. I would like to believe that, going beyond the confines of the book, Oprah will explore the currents of Christian anti-Judaism that animated the perpetrators of the Holocaust and paralyzed the bystanders. In so doing, she would help many Americans, especially Protestants, meet a difficult challenge, and make a contribution of her own to the revolutionary witness first voiced by the Roman Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council in 1965, when it issued the declaration Nostra Aetate.
But, for reasons that constitute the second aspect of my anxiety, I have my doubts.
Christians learn to read and interpret the world through the lens of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. By placing their own struggles within the light of this story as it is told in the Gospels, they are enabled to discern meaning in the midst of human failure, order amid chaos, and hope in the thick of despair.
What happens when Christians “read” Wiesel’s Night through the prism of their own sacred story? What, if anything, does the Christian narrative help reveal about the realities Wiesel confronted? What does the Christian view of the world conceal, or distort, about this quintessentially Jewish experience?
I have yet to meet a reader of Night who has not come away limping from the encounter. Wiesel’s memories are indelibly imprinted on the imagination of anyone with the stamina to turn the pages. Few accounts of the Holocaust, indeed, are as effective in helping readers feel the harrowing metamorphosis of a human person into a victim. Yet this identification, made possible by Wiesel’s artistry, may deliver catharsis without yielding either historical understanding or theological insight. Specifically, Christians can imaginatively enter this memoir and situate its horrors within their own religious framework: the framework of death-and-resurrection.
In one of the most poignant moments of the book, Wiesel recalls the Nazis’ execution of a young boy. The child is suspended on a gallows between two men. As the prisoners are lined up and forced to witness the hanged victims, they cannot avoid the boy, who is too slight for the rope to have completed the job of strangulation. The child’s agony as he dangles helplessly between life and death evokes the question: “Where is God?” And Wiesel answers out of the depths: “Where is He? This is where—hanging here from this gallows.”
The words signal a breakdown of faith. To Jewish readers in particular, they may seem words of ultimate protest, an indictment of the God Who once acted in history to redeem His people Israel, but Who in this most critical hour of need has failed to deliver them. Perhaps there is the faint echo of the Psalmist’s lament, intended to rouse the Lord from His slumbers. Yet God’s silence ruptures hope. The overwhelming awareness of His absence, His betrayal, threatens to shatter the very possibility of faith. The narrator, a young man raised in a pious Jewish home, is left with a numbing loss, an emptiness that nothing can fill.
For many Christian readers, however, this episode resonates very differently. Where Jews find evidence of God’s absence, Christians discover, in the midst of anguish and darkness, a confirmation of God’s redeeming presence. Entering into the heart of darkness, God refuses to abandon those who call upon Him. No wonder many Christians have read Wiesel’s portrait as “the crucifixion of the Jews,” and the murders of Auschwitz as sacrificial offerings, atoning for the sins of humanity.
The inference is all but irresistible—an ingrained religious reflex. François Mauriac, the French Catholic writer who did so much to bring Night before the public, expresses just this view in the book’s foreword:
Did I explain to [Elie Wiesel] that what had been a stumbling block for his faith had become the cornerstone for mine? And that the connection between the cross and human suffering remains, in my view, the key to the unfathomable mystery in which the faith of his childhood was lost?
One may ask: so what? The fact that, staring into Wiesel’s abyss, Jews and Christians may derive a divergent set of meanings need hardly disturb us. Each religious community regards the world through its own narrative spectacles, reaching disparate conclusions. What is wrong with that?
What is wrong is this: Mauriac’s musings are indicative of a longstanding tendency to force the horror of the Holocaust into the contours of the Christian story. But once the irreducibly singular character of Jewish suffering under Hitler is situated under the shadow of the cross, becoming subordinated to the pain of the man from Galilee who took on the sins of the world 2,000 years ago, the fate of a million and a half murdered Jewish children becomes overlaid with a theological significance that falsifies the very essence of a people’s catastrophe.
The tortured screams of those children and their parents did not mend the world. Nor was theirs a sacrificial offering that can reestablish the bonds of intimacy between God and humanity. Any effort to squeeze the Jewish community’s pain into a Christian paradigm compounds the original violence with another layer of violation.
Indeed, the domestication of Jewish pain by means of comparison with Jesus’ execution indicates a failure on the part of Christians to understand the mystery at the heart of the crucifixion. As the disciple Peter reminds Christians, the fundamental human reflex in the presence of disfiguring pain is either to turn away or to gawk in fascination from a safe distance. The crucifixion challenges Christians to confront someone else’s affliction, a confrontation that brings them to a place that they have never been before and from which there is no return to the comforts of home. Imposing a transcendentally fixed meaning on the suffering of others distorts that challenge.
Differently stated, an encounter with the Holocaust brings Christians face to face with the limits of their own theological prowess, compelling them to reexamine the claim that new life invariably follows in the wake of death. If they decline the challenge, they will read and interpret Wiesel’s Night in ways that simply reaffirm what they have always known. They will learn nothing from the encounter either about others or about themselves.
The third aspect of my anxiety arises from readings of this book that end up enshrining the Jewish people as “victims.” That is understandable enough. In Wiesel’s memoir, the imagination of the reader is seized by the demonic alchemy of the Nazi genocide, which indeed flattened and transmuted everyone into a helpless victim. But this sliver of historical experience does not begin to suggest the depth and breadth, the diversity and heterogeneity, of Jewish culture, let alone convey a sense of the core values of the civilization being assailed and destroyed.
I wonder how many of Oprah’s viewers will misread this destruction as a proof of the Jewish people’s immutably tragic destiny. In the early pages of the book, Wiesel presents the Jews of his town as skilled in the practice of denial and avoidance, habits that seem to have blinded them to the Nazi program of mass murder. Rather than mounting a campaign of armed resistance or pursuing strategies of escape, they continue to trust in the underlying goodness and rationality of humanity. The suggestion seems unmistakable that an irrepressible aptitude for hope has historically bred a dysfunctional passivity. All the other heroic resources of the Jewish tradition appear to have broken easily under the boot of the Nazi occupiers.
In the land of Auschwitz, the Jews are simply delivered up to death. Yet even the slaughter of millions fails to appease the Nazi appetite, which only grows by what it feeds on. Is this, then, the Jewish fate—endless recapitulations of the destruction of the Temple, of the Crusades and Inquisition, of the expulsions and pogroms? Or is this murder something altogether unique?
No doubt many readers, empathizing with Jewish suffering, will see a certain grandeur in the ability to endure and to survive a long history of affliction. But the role thereby assigned to God’s chosen people hardly meshes with the record of, for example, the Jewish community of the United States, which has scaled the ladder of social success, achieved enviable economic stability, and actively contributed to every aspect of our national life. Nor does the status of victim fit the state of Israel, which has successfully stood up to the onslaught of its Arab enemies in the conviction that only military might and political grit will secure its future.
The resulting dissonance has had baleful implications. Today, in the querulous reactions of many European and American Christians to Israel’s unblinking refusal to submit to Arab terrorism, we have seen all too clearly the distorted moral priorities of a world prepared to welcome Jews only when they follow an ancient script, achieving tragic nobility through impotence and passivity—through sacrifice. Any Holocaust curriculum that does not move beyond Elie Wiesel’s Night will fail to teach mainstream American Christians the falsity and dangerous arrogance of that stereotype.
There may be educational possibilities lurking within my doubts. Christians and Jews live entangled in a web of complex relations, and neither can hope to grasp the significance of their own tradition, much less each other’s, without exacting labor. A reading of Wiesel’s masterpiece will not substitute for that labor. Sooner or later, we will need to travel the road out of Auschwitz. One can only hope that Oprah’s visit to Wiesel’s camp of ultimate horror will signal a beginning and not an end to that journey.
CHRISTOPHER M. LEIGHTON, a new contributor, is a Presbyterian minister. For the past twenty years, he has served as executive director of the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies in Baltimore, Maryland.
