Testimony, Unfortunately, Only Goes So Far
- It was so hard, at first, to testify. Hard to find the words to capture all that grief.
- But even when they finally got the words right, people refused to listen. Even the people who listened didn't believe them, and even the people who believed them couldn't really understand.
- Who can even understand something like that?
- Elie Wiesel sometimes thinks that he and the other survivors have failed in testifying.
- If someone went back to 1945 and told them that, forty years later, children still starved, racism and fanaticism was still going strong, and governments still lined up to squash all dissenters, they would have called them crazy. How does any of it make sense in a post-Holocaust world?
- The Apartheid government of South Africa still keeps running, unchecked. Nelson Mandela's still stuck in prison. How can one help but compare Apartheid to Nazism—besides the "final solution," which defies comparison—in their ways of doing business?
- Terrorist attacks still run rampant; in Iran, in Paris, in Istanbul.
- There are also people still detained in their own countries, unable to leave.
- And Israel still has no peace after the good part of forty years. Wiesel would like Israel and its neighbors to sit down at the bargaining table and hash out the terms for a lasting peace.
- And finally, we're back to memory. We need to remember the suffering of so many other groups as well as we do the suffering of the Jewish people (and we need to do better about remembering all of those in general).
- It's good to remember Job at times like these. Job, who got suffering upon suffering heaped on him thanks to a bet between God and the Devil, somehow kept faith after the deepest despair you can think of.
- His memory kept him going, as it should keep us all moving forward.
- Even when we can't fix everything, we should never fail to speak up against injustice.
- None of us can just end war cold turkey, but we can all condemn it and call for peace.
- And when nuclear annihilation is a breath away, peace is definitely what we need right now.