Elie Wiesel lived in a world, the one here still, where gray ruled over black and white. And it was the gray that he fought relentlessly.
His spoken and written words were shorn of adjectives. Evil and good were nouns and verbs, his weapons. They needed no embellishment. He stood as exclamation point. Read “Night,” his riveting recollection of his existence in Nazi death camps. Listen to his presentations, interact with him as I did as a Fresno Bee reporter during his May 1990 visit to Fresno.
What he experienced in surviving the Holocaust suspended his belief in God and the value of memorializing his existence. Fortunately, he reawakened and never ceased shining a spotlight on the authenticity and invasiveness of evil until his death July 2 at age 87.
It is in the gray areas of our lives – the formative, the evolving, the dissolute – that good and evil forever vie. We take a turn. We shrug a shoulder. We respond to a message. A primal urge takes the lead. Instinct squares off with intellect – and the devil takes the hindmost.
The gray that leans toward evil is too easily excused by hormonal powers, bowing to rather than questioning illicit authority and the contrivance of waiting for evanescent better times to stand one’s moral ground.
The gray that bends toward good paradoxically has some of the same mettle as evil. Goodness requires the churning and fertilization that Wiesel wielded. He knew that it is in the gray that the good fight must be fought and won, and won again as though for an eternity of first times.
“We must always take sides,” he told the world in his 1986 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.”
He spoke before a crowd of 2,000 at a Fresno State lecture – “Building a Moral Society.” The world of 1990 is alien to many in the black, white and gray bubbles of today.
Iraq invaded Kuwait, setting the stage for the first US Persian Gulf War. Nelson Mandela was released from prison in South Africa. East and West Germany had reunified. The World Wide Web had been born, and the Hubble Space Telescope launched. The Exxon Valdez tainted Alaska with its oil. The Baltic states declared independence from the Soviet Union amidst the era of “perestroika” or “openness” of Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule. And tens of thousands of Soviet Jews were allowed to emigrate to Israel, while some who remained were targeted by an anti-Semitic pogrom. The Soviet Union was a year away from collapse.
Wiesel saw the contradiction between the sudden freedom of Soviet Jews and the unvarnished remaining hatred.
“Does it mean that liberty, in a paradoxical way, could bequeath hatred? If so, what is the meaning of liberty?”
He had little stomach for religious fundamentalism of any stripe. “It is dangerous because fanatics believe that they possess the holy truth, that they possess God. They keep God prisoner. And I believe it is our duty and our privilege to free God from their prison.”
He joined scores of Nobel laureates in calling for an end to the political sidestepping and affirming that a genocide had indeed occurred to millions of Armenians at the turn of the 20th Century. Referring to Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic who oversaw the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims, Wiesel said, “How can you ever adequately punish a man who is guilty of ordering the assassination of 8,000 human beings [in Srebrenica]?” Only last March was the longtime fugitive Karadzic sentenced to 40 years for the genocide that occurred in the early 1990s.
Freeing prisoners of conscience. Challenging “it’s not my fight” placidity. Examining the word “tolerance” – and finding in it a dangerous permissiveness, something that can be bestowed or revoked.
What would be his greatest fear on his deathbed, I asked. Society’s forgetfulness, he said. That all his efforts to bear witness had changed nothing.
That’s no less our fear now, lacking as we do the presence of this moral lightning rod.