Night:

I read Elie Wiesel's Night late into yesterday's evening. Understandably, it left me feeling angry and sad. Most of us would probably agree with Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov that the suffering of children is the most impossible, unbearable, and unexplainable thing in the Universe. Wiesel writes of his seven year old sister with long blond hair and a bright red coat marching silently off to the crematoria, and one can't help but insert the children in one's own life into that situation. For me it's Camie, my precious little sister with bright blue eyes who loves to read and imagine and dance. It's Vinny, the enthusiastic little boy who tries to outrun the van when I arrive to pick him up for school. And it's Giuwels, who when I tell her it's time to stop playing with her dolls and clean up her room responds, "But Carolyn, I was just about to marry my boy and girl!"

Wiesel's account gripped me on two levels. One--the unspeakable, unnameable, incomprehensible things experienced by real children, just like the ones I love so completely. But I was also struck by the spiritual anguish and pain of the Jewish people in the face of their apparently utter abandonment by God. The sense of desertion and despair overwhelmed me. I found it best summed up in the statement a Hungarian Jew made to Wiesel one evening in the infirmary, "I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people."

I found myself startlingly angry at God after reading this book. There's the million-dollar-question of Why? And then How? And also, Who are you that you could let this happen? That you would sit by and do nothing? Our questions pinpoint the most painful part: our perceived silence on God's behalf. Perhaps more unforgivable than the fact that it happened is the fact that God has remained silent. He hasn't provided an explanation for any of it. That is what we find unacceptable. Yet there is a strange comfort and peace in lobbying all this anger and all these questions at God: He is there. Being angry at him, however miserable, confirms his presence as well as the intimacy of our relationship.

I almost always respond with a burning emotion first, and just as inevitably that emotion eventually cools to a point where I can logically assess the information and make rational judgments. I usually make decisions out of this calm point, base my life on what I know to be true in this purified stillness. What I know to be true manifests itself in the song of Zechariah, which I was memorizing before I ever picked up Wiesel's book: "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel for he hath visited and redeemed his people and hath raised up a mighty salvation for us in the house of his servant David..." The key word there is visited. God was not absent for any of these horrors. And somehow the fact that the Kingdom of Heaven slipped into the world over 2,000 years ago with the birth of a baby means that the Nazi's Kingdom of Night is far from being the last word on God's love, his Justice, or his ability to care his People.