Sleeping or deluded? Lights to action

And again, I am stunned by our reading.  This week I was fortunate enough to read Night by Elie Wiesel: an account of Elie Wiesel’s memories as he is taken from his home and struggles to survive in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald at the end of WWII.  We see yet another perspective of lives in WWII.  The Book Thief gave us a view into some of the experiences of Jews in WWII through Max and other glimpses of Jews during the holocaust: being marked with yellow stars, being thrown out of homes, marching to camps.  We see all this through the eyes of Liesel, a German child.  With Night, we encounter an intensity of experience through the eyes of Elie, who was a Jewish child during the holocaust; his experience is hard to even fathom.  We get an understanding of the horrors and horrific acts committed against Jews in World War II.  We see a startling view of the depths of evil in humanity. This view of our base degradation and capabilities will penetrate any reader and is horrific.  This book does not leave me.

After I finished reading the book, I wrote in my journal “what are we doing to help the world and those in it?  What am I doing?”  Not enough.  Not enough.  I hear calls for movement. 

In Wiesel’s Nobel Price Acceptance Speech in 1986, he reminds us that we must take action for “action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all.”  He reminds us that “one person of integrity can make a difference, a difference of life and death.”    Wiesel’s writing is a call to take sides for humanity.  Wiesel talks about how his boyhood self, before he discovered the “Kingdom of Night” – “The ghetto.  The Deportation.  The sealed cattle car.  The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed” – turns to his older self and says, “Tell me… what have you done with my future, what have you done with your life?”   Wiesel reminds us that “[W]herever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views” that we must “take sides.” 

There’s so much running through my head after reading this book.  Wiesel understandably questions, “Where is God?”  How does mankind inflict this suffering on others?  How do we?  What are we made of?  What really constitutes our souls?  Who are we at our base?   What are we doing to bring change? to save lives?

I’ve sat in inaction for awhile now doing very little.  I thought I would know more about life and God and people and myself by this point in life.  I look to my children and my family and my friends as guides towards answers or resolution or peace.  We’ll see if there’s real action.  “We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them.  Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.” 

It’s nighttime now.   “To sleep.  To dream.”  Maybe the answers and action will come.

More on ideas for teaching this powerful book Wednesday….

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover'd country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

[Hamlet]