Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor.
I first read Elie Wiesel's "Night" in my early 20s, having been primed for it by my mother's stories about Nazi atrocities that she learned during her World War II adolescence. Wiesel's account of his imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps scarred my soul.
Some 30 years later, when I returned to college, I read "Night" again in a class on philosophy of religion. One of my classmates, a young woman about the age of our son, broke down in tears during the class discussion. "I never imagined that people could do such things to other people," she sobbed.
Although I ached for her pain, I thought at the time what a great service Elie Wiesel had done. He had borne witness to the very worst that humans can do to one another. On the recent occasion of his death at age 87, I find myself wishing that the entire world could read "Night" together, and come away with the same wounded souls, and the same resolve toward peace.
By "peace" I don't mean merely the absence of armed conflict. Reducing or even eliminating war and violence marks only the first step on a long journey. Peacemaking, as Wiesel has shown us, requires a lifetime of work, study and commitment. Peacemaking demands we look for the best and the worst of ourselves at the same time, because in order to achieve the best for humanity we must restrain its worst. In order to restrain its worst, we must confront the evil within us and own our capacity for it in every moment of our lives.
Wiesel's witness isn't what we want to hear at this dangerous time in human history. We want to divide the world into good guys and bad guys, with ourselves – Americans, Westerners, Christians, United Methodists – as the good guys. We want to think of ourselves as better than those who threaten us, when in reality we are just as capable as our "enemies" of inflicting suffering on those we deem "other." Like the great German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber in his seminal work "I and Thou," Wiesel grasped that viewing another human being as an "other," an object, makes harming them justified intellectually and emotionally – and even religiously, as the Nazi cult proved.
Sadly, we United Methodists need only look at our recent global legislative assembly, the 2016 General Conference, to see how viewing people as "other" enables us to violate John Wesley's first General Rule: "Do no harm."
A political machine composed of an alliance between American and African fundamentalists gained control of the denomination's lawmaking power and used it to impose a tyranny of the majority on the worldwide church. The arrogant behavior of those exercising that raw power inflicted much emotional and spiritual pain during General Conference, even to threats of physical violence. The behavior became so obviously scandalous that delegates were chastised from the dais. Indeed, the arrogance rose to the level of voting fraud, as some delegates used the electronic voting devices of absent delegates to cast additional votes. The fraudulent ballots led to having marshals remove voting pads from empty seats and tables so that no illegal votes could be cast.
Compared to the Nazi atrocities that Elie Wiesel documented in "Night," these General Conference behaviors seem trifling, perhaps even justified. After all, we are defending God and the Bible against the blasphemers and apostates, correct? We aren't evil; we're the good guys. They – the "others" – are the bad guys, be they gays or immigrants or indigenous people or poor people or women or any others we make into the objects of our hatred. Sadly, Mr. Wiesel was a tragic symbol of this flaw himself, for even as he defended Israel, he refused to see that Israel, in its quest never again to be victimized, has itself become an abuser through its treatment of Palestinians, Muslim and Christian alike.
What is most damaging about the 2016 General Conference isn't merely votes cast or legislation passed. It's that so many people exhibited toward one another the kind of nasty, brutish behavior that repels people within and outside the church from knowing Jesus Christ, or even wanting to know about him. Why bother with some prophet-sage-wonderworker-savior from 2,000 years ago if his professed followers don't live by his teachings and example?
This is the spirit of the times, the zeitgeist, we face now as United Methodists, as Christians, as citizens of a dangerous world. It's the motivation behind every terrorist attack, behind Brexit, behind the candidacy of Donald Trump, behind the shooting of Alton Sterling, behind every public policy that trades compassionate community for the illusion of safety through repressive order. It's a world that Elie Wiesel knew intimately from his childhood, and one that he never forgot still exists beneath the veneer of civilization. It's a world of power much like that of Jesus' time. His dying words, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," mean far more than solely his execution. Jesus' words extend to the cruelty that humanity perpetrates upon itself when we reject relationships with God and one another. It is a world without love, truly hell on earth.
We desperately need peacemakers of the caliber of Elie Wiesel. We need the peacemakers that Jesus called "children of God." We need peacemakers who can forge "I and Thou" relationships that make for common good. We need peacemakers who can recognize the evil in themselves, even at its most banal, and dare to confront and reject it. We need genuine followers of Jesus, the Christ whom we claim to serve. Where will we find them?
A journalist for more than four decades, Cynthia B. Astle serves as editor of United Methodist Insight.