Forgiveness and Faith
Elie Wiesel was 14 years old when he was taken, along with his mother, his father and his sister, to Auschwitz in 1944. After the war and liberation he was the only member of his family to leave Auschwitz alive. For ten years he never spoke about these experiences. But a little more than ten years later he wrote Night, an accounting of what he went through.
Elie talks of his anger toward God, asking God, “What could we possible have done to deserve this? What evil could we ever be capable of that we all should die?” His anguish and overwhelmed senses threatened to end his faith in God. He says, “Yom Kippur is translated as the Day of Atonement. Yom Kippur is plural. Why in the plural? Because it’s a double forgiveness. Just as we ask God to forgive us, maybe we should forgive Him. In the New York Times three years ago I published a letter to God for Rosh Hashana. “Mr. God, let’s make peace. We’ve quarreled long enough. Let’s make peace. You thought I would forget, but I won’t forget. Let’s make peace.”
In the Jewish faith, if a man offends someone else, only the offended person can forgive him. The offender must go and ask for forgiveness. If it is withheld, he should go again, later, and ask. If it is withheld again, he must go once more to ask for forgiveness. If it is refused him a third time, then the person withholding the forgiveness bears the blame.
In the year 2000, during a speech in the German Parliament commemorating the holocaust, Elie Wiesel said to the assembled German leaders, “You have been helpful to Israel after the war, with reparations and financial assistance. But you have never asked the Jewish people to forgive you for what the Nazis did.”
Two weeks later, the Bundes president, Johannes Rau, went to the Israeli Knesset and did just that.
