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June 4, 2004/Sivan 15 5764, Vol. 56, No. 37
Father and son celebrate Wiesel
DAVID BODNEY
Special to Jewish News
What makes life worth living? Better yet, worth celebrating?
What causes a father to take his son from Arizona to New York to celebrate a stranger's 75th birthday?
And what do these questions have in common?
Elie Wiesel: author, teacher, witness.
Wiesel is the Holocaust survivor who took a vow of silence in 1945 and waited more than 10 years to write "Night," his first of 45 books, "to be sure that what (he) would say would be true." Published in English in 1960, Wiesel's account of his Holocaust experiences has been translated into 30 languages and read by millions around the world.
Wiesel is the recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor who used his award ceremony at the White House in 1984 to implore President Ronald Reagan not to visit a Nazi cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany. ("That place is not your place, Mr. President. Your place is with the victims of the SS," Wiesel famously said.) Though his speech failed to persuade Reagan, Wiesel realized that he had touched "a thousand times more people" than he had with all his previous books and writings.
On May 24, the Anti-Defamation League celebrated Elie Wiesel's 75th birthday at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. "I owe you the truth," Weisel said. "Today is not my birthday." Wiesel was born in 1928, and his 75th birthday came and went without great fanfare last Sept. 30. Still, the ADL wanted to honor the Nobel Laureate, and the Waldorf's grand ballroom was filled with statesmen and politicians, fellow Holocaust survivors and friends, to praise this beacon of memory and hope.
I traveled some 2,100 miles with my 12-year-old son, Christian Steven, to honor and better understand the life and teachings of Elie Wiesel. The trip was intended as a reward for Christian's good grades in school, especially his social studies paper on Auschwitz.
Hosting the celebration was NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw. Joining Brokaw on stage for tributes to Wiesel were United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), actor Jon Voight, violinist Joshua Bell and actresses Lynn Redgrave and Ellen Burstyn. Vocalists Camellia Johnson and Terry Cook sang excerpts from the Gershwin classic, "Porgy and Bess," one of many musicals banned in Nazi Germany. ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman presented Wiesel with honors after an evening of song and praise.
A thousand or so friends of Wiesel and supporters of ADL attended the black-tie event and came away with a renewed appreciation of the man who set the standard for moral authority in our time.
Today Wiesel's words are carved in stone at the U.S. Holocaust Museum: "For the dead and the living we must bear witness."
Wiesel teaches us: "We must not turn away."
In presenting the ADL award to Wiesel last month, Abe Foxman, himself a Holocaust survivor, obser-ved: "Survivors of the Shoah do not know why they survived. But they know why (Wiesel) survived." To tell their tale. To remember. To inspire them to carry on.
Wiesel reminds us to "love thy neighbor as thyself." In Foxman's words, Wiesel's teachings also underscore the importance of our "11th Commandment - never again." Never again shall we be silent in the face of hatred, bigotry, oppression, whether those noxious fumes be visited upon the Jewish people or any member of the human family.
Little wonder Wiesel would lend his name and support to the ADL. Wiesel is fond of citing a beautiful story in the Talmud about Rabbi Ishmael, one of 10 martyrs of the faith in Roman times. When Ishmael was led to his death, a heavenly voice was heard, saying, "Ishmael, Ishmael, should you shed one tear, I shall return the universe to primary chaos." According to the Midrash, Rabbi Ishmael was a gentleman and did not cry.
He didn't cry because he was a martyr and because he obeyed. But he also didn't cry because he wanted to teach us a lesson in Judaism. Rabbi Ishmael taught: "Yes, I could destroy the world, and the world deserves to be destroyed. But to be a Jew is to have all the reasons in the world to destroy and not to destroy." According to Wiesel, "(to) be a Jew is to have all the reasons in the world to hate the Germans and not to hate them. To be a Jew is to have all the reasons in the world to mistrust the church and not to hate it. To be a Jew is to have all the reasons in the world not to have faith in language, in singing, in prayers, and in God, but to go on telling the tale, to go on carrying on the dialogue, and to have my own silent prayers and quarrels with God." Like Rabbi Ishmael and Elie Wiesel, the ADL has all the reasons in the world to hate, and yet - as Barbara Balser, the ADL's National chairwoman, has written - it advocates "compassion and education (to) bridge the divide of hatred and hostility."
When I first shook Elie Wiesel's hand, at the reception before these festivities began, I was struck by its gentle softness. No callouses, no cuts. This, the hand that survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald to bear witness.
How odd, that I should expect to feel his wounds.
And yet, when I last shook Elie Wiesel's hand, at the end of the evening, as my son and I bid him farewell, I was struck by the strength and intensity of his grip. His handshake at 75 was like no other. Resolute, life-affirming. It was as if 4,000 years of spiritual strength had been summoned in one bare hand - and passed on to another, if only for a moment.
David J. Bodney is a partner at the law firm of Steptoe & Johnson LLP and vice chairman of the ADL's Arizona Region.
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