Five Biblical Portraits

By Elie Wiesel and Ariel Burger

Nobel Peace Prize–winner Elie Wiesel brings ancient religious leaders to literary life, framing his commentary with pressing and enduring questions as a survivor and witness to the Holocaust.

Five Biblical Portraits represents an old-new approach to Jewish textual commentary. This sequel to Elie Wiesel’s Messengers of God continues the work done in that volume of bringing religious figures to life and studying their place both in the text and in our lives. Wiesel reflects on his own life as well as the tragedy of the Holocaust as he discusses each figure and adds personal framing and insight into the religious study. Through sensitive readings of the scriptures as well as the Talmudic and Hasidic sources, Wiesel illuminates Joshua, Elijah, Saul, Jeremiah, and Jonah. He seeks not simple answers but fully complex responses to the crucial questions of human suffering as he examines each religious figure in turn.

Originally published in 1981, this new edition of Five Biblical Portraits includes a new text design, cover, and an introduction by Ariel Burger, which examines how Wiesel’s post-Holocaust Midrash teaches us not only how to read the Bible but also how to read the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780268207304

Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel was the author of more than forty books, including his unforgettable international bestsellers Night and A Beggar in Jerusalem, winner of the Prix Médicis. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States Congressional Gold Medal, and the French Legion of Honor with the rank of Grand Cross. In 1986, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and University Professor at Boston University for forty years. Wiesel died in 2016.

Book preview

Cover: Five Biblical Portraits by Elie Wiesel, with a new Introduction by Ariel Burger, published by University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana.

PRAISE FOR

Five Biblical Portraits

This collection of biographies of prophets does a masterful job of humanizing these figures. Elie Wiesel does more than inform us about their lives and supposed thoughts. He asks today’s questions in the context of the past. There is no ambiguity or vagueness in Wiesel’s writing. He promises us portraits, and there is not a wasted brushstroke, not a blurred line.

—The Christian Century

Deeply moving and enlightening.

—Chicago Tribune

Jonah the unlucky, Joshua the lucky, Saul the complex, Jeremiah the tearful—all stride through semi-narrative episodes which the masterful story-teller weaves as a historical vignette of prophetic destiny.

—Commonweal

Wiesel’s sketches will stir the imagination in ways that will open readers to new depths in ancient texts.

—Religious Studies Review

Elie Wiesel asks: What went on within the minds and souls of these biblical figures; what were their hopes and their hurts; and what do they have to say to our hopes and our hurts?

—America

Five Biblical Portraits

WORKS OF THEOLOGICAL BIOGRAPHY BY

ELIE WIESEL

Souls on Fire

Messengers of God

Four Hasidic Masters and Their Struggle against Melancholy

Five Biblical Portraits

Somewhere a Master

Sages and Dreamers

Wise Men and Their Tales

Filled with Fire and Light

FURTHERS ELECTED WORKS BY

ELIE WIESEL

Night

Dawn

The Accident

The Jews of Silence

A Beggar in Jerusalem

The Trial of God

All Rivers Run to the Sea

And the Sea Is Never Full

Open Heart

ELIE WIESEL

FIVE BIBLICAL PORTRAITS

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY

ARIEL BURGER

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Published by the University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Copyright © 1981 by Elie Wiesel

New introduction copyright © 2023 by Ariel Burger

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023942252

ISBN: 978-0-268-20731-1 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20733-5 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20730-4 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

For

Andre Neher

in Jerusalem

and

Robert McAfee Brown

in California

CONTENTS

Introduction to the 2023 Edition

by Ariel Burger

Joshua

Elijah

Saul

Jeremiah

Jonah

Sources

INTRODUCTION TO THE 2023 EDITION

In the beginning there was the Holocaust. We must therefore start all over again.

—Elie Wiesel, in Irving Abrahamson,

Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel’s Five Biblical Portraits, first published in 1981, is one in a series of seven books that he somewhat astonishingly called celebrations. This series, which includes Souls on Fire (1972), Messengers of God (1976), Four Hasidic Masters and Their Struggle against Melancholy (1978), Somewhere a Master (1982), Sages and Dreamers (1991), Wise Men and Their Tales (2003), and the posthumously released Filled with Fire and Light (2021), represents an old-new approach to Jewish textual commentary. In the essays presented in these books, Wiesel reread great Jewish texts through the lens of his most pressing and enduring questions as a survivor and witness.¹ In doing so, Wiesel reinvented a new and essential post-Holocaust Midrash: a bridge between the millennia-long Jewish tradition of sacred text study and the realities of a compromised world in need of moral clarity.

1. Though I always refer to my teacher as Professor Wiesel, editorial convention requires me here to use the family name alone. I attended his classes at Boston University in 1996, and from 2003 to 2008, when I served as his teaching fellow. Where I refer to quotes from the classroom setting in this essay, it is from my lecture notes from this period of time. Beyond the BU classroom, I was privileged to be in conversation with Professor Wiesel from 1990, when I was fifteen, until his passing in 2016. I continue to learn from him every day.

The Need for a New Approach

Wiesel’s reading stands in a long tradition that extols creative reinterpretation. Yet he went further—he had to go further—than the traditional approach. As he expressed in the epigraph above, the destruction of one-third of the Jewish people, including the murder of one million Jewish children, made it necessary to begin again and to question inherited ideas. The challenges posed by the Holocaust to faith, to traditional ideas about God, humanity, and the notion of progress, required new responses and new methods. Wiesel’s experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, where his mother, little sister, and father were murdered, provoked in him a passionate quest for responses to unanswerable questions: Where was God during the Holocaust? Why was the world silent? What is the significance of the victory of overwhelming evil?

Note that his quest was not to find answers to these questions. Wiesel found the explanations and religious justifications offered by some thinkers unsatisfying and offensive. As Wiesel has one of his characters say in Gates of the Forest, If their death has no meaning, then it’s an insult, and if it does have a meaning, it’s even more so.²

2. Elie Wiesel, Gates of the Forest (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 197.

Instead of answers, he sought responses, ways of living that would somehow transform the unresolvable questions themselves into generative forces for good. An answer closes, while a response opens new possibilities. And, unlike an answer, a response requires the embodied participation of the respondent. For Wiesel, this meant living a life burdened by the knowledge of and sense of responsibility for those suffering in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda,Darfur, and many other places. As he said publicly many times, Because we suffered, no one else should ever have to suffer. The questions remain questions, but positive advances in human rights, genocide prevention, and the quest for justice emerged from those questions and Wiesel’s lived response.

Wounded Faith

Wiesel’s early life was one of traditional Jewish faith, a sustaining belief in the mystery and presence of God in human affairs, in the power of kindness to advance the purpose of human history, and in the ultimate promise, even the proximity, of the messianic redemption. This childhood faith was shattered in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, as he recounts in Night, his first book. Over many years he developed what he called a wounded faith, a faith expressed precisely through questions and questioning, through wrestling with doubt and struggling with God.

Wounded faith departs from traditional terms of theological engagement. It insists that we demand the same level of ethical behavior from God that we would from human leaders. Whereas traditional views posit a binary choice between faith and doubt, Wiesel’s wounded faith allows them to coexist, insisting that no question is taboo, no line of inquiry heretical. Questions express a high form of faith when those questions are in the service of morality. The only true blasphemy is to passively accept an unjust or dehumanizing divine decree, religious policy, or sacred text. The only real heresy is to refuse to argue on behalf of humankind, even against God when necessary. Like the biblical Abraham, like Moses, like Job, like the Hasidic master Rabbi Levi-Yitzchak of Berdichev, Wiesel was unafraid to challenge God; he felt it was his religious duty.

His wounded faith was the result of years of study and labor. But there was one powerful and formative experience that showed a young Elie Wiesel what is possible. In Auschwitz, he witnessed a rabbinical court hold a trial of God, complete with prosecutors and defense lawyers, arguments for and against the defendant and his role in allowing the mass slaughter of the Jewish people to take place. As Wiesel recounts in his memoirs and elsewhere, after several days of deliberation, the head rabbinic judge announced the court’s verdict: "In the matter of omnipotent God allowing His children to be oppressed, attacked, and destroyed en masse, our verdict is: guilty. The rabbi paused, then continued: Now it is time for the evening prayer: let us pray." This scene, the basis for Wiesel’s play The Trial of God, remained with him all his life. It perfectly captured a seemingly paradoxical Jewish ethos of arguing against God within a faith context—the essence of what would become Wiesel’s wounded faith.

Wiesel once ended a classroom lecture with the following statement: "When it is time for me to come before the heavenly tribunal, I will ask God my question. It will consist of one word: Why? This emphatic, passionate Why?" lies behind Wiesel’s reading of biblical tales. It is both the primal wound the Holocaust conferred upon the traditional Jewish approach to exegesis and the reason Wiesel could not remain entirely within that approach.

Wiesel’s "Why?" spans six million deaths and countless moments of suffering. As a religious question, it is a protest against what appears to be a breaking of the covenant between God and the Jewish people. Given the many biblical and liturgical texts that speak of God’s love for his people, the Holocaust should be impossible. Instead, its reality challenges the foundations of faith. How can one believe in a just and loving God after such an Event? How is it possible to go on as a believer, as a Jew, and why should one even try? The choice Wiesel faced was between the complete dissolution of faith and a new way of understanding faith.

In the end, his love of Judaism and his loyalty to his ancestors made the critical difference. When asked why he maintained a life of faith, even of traditional observance, he replied, My ancestors include Rashi [an important early medieval commentator] and the holy Shl’ah [nickname of Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, an influential seventeenth-century Jewish mystic]; how could I be the last in that chain? His devotion to his family and history kept him from turning his back on Jewish tradition; but this was simply the beginning of a lifelong project to develop a new, plausible approach to faith and to restore the credibility of the great texts of Judaism for Jews and non-Jews alike.

Texts against Humanity?

It is a historical fact that humanity’s great religious texts have often been used to cause harm. As a Holocaust survivor who saw his childhood world destroyed by radical evil, Wiesel came to understand that, though the Nazis drew upon pagan motifs and pseudoscientific racial theories, centuries of Christian antisemitism played a role in the Holocaust as well. (This was epitomized by the phenomenon of SS officers receiving communion and immediately returning to their genocidal activities.) Wiesel became keenly aware of the dangers of fundamentalism and literalist readings of sacred texts, and he recognized the power and the danger involved with sacred texts that shape the behavior of millions of people. A single dehumanizing interpretation can lead to the marginalization, persecution, oppression, and destruction of entire communities.

Witness the uses and abuses of religious ideas in the persecutions of the Jews from antiquity to the Holocaust, including the portrayal of the Jews as Christ-killers.

Witness nineteenth-century pastors like Samuel How, who published a sermon in the 1860s in the southern United States justifying slavery as God’s will, based on the notorious Hamitic myth, an early interpretation of Genesis 9:24–25.

Witness the Belgian missionary who brought that same perfidious interpretation to the Congo over a century later, planting seeds of hatred that would later explode in the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

Witness the ways aspiring theocrats of various faiths today draw upon religious ideas and scriptural quotes to prop up dehumanizing policies and calls to arms, justifying the persecution, expulsion, and murder of religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities. The sins of religious leaders and their followers throughout history leave one wondering whether religion is not inherently harmful. Is it possible to find hope within religious traditions?

In response to these dangers, Wiesel sought a moral and ethical hermeneutic, one that would sensitize the listener and the reader to the concerns of humanity and that would eschew abstract dogma in favor of the needs of actual human beings. As he often said to students, One life is worth more than all the pages that have been written about life.

A frisson of creative tension characterizes Wiesel’s writing: between his love of and reverence for Jewish tradition, and his radical honesty in confronting new questions posed by the Holocaust. Wiesel writes of Jeremiah that he transmitted only what he received—and so do we.³ This claim is more complex than it appears. Wiesel only transmitted what he received; but what he received was a tradition and methodology ardently dedicated to innovation and insight. Each essay in this volume and in Wiesel’s other works bespeaks a passionate love of Jewish tradition, and therefore a willingness to offer audacious and far-reaching interpretations. Let us examine the three aspects of traditional Jewish tradition which shaped him most: the Bible, Midrash, and Hasidism.

3. See 116 in this volume.

Biblical Roots

Wiesel’s fascination with the Bible began in childhood, as he shared numerous times in his lectures and writings. That childhood was permeated with the sacred study of traditional texts, beginning with the Hebrew alphabet and the Hebrew Bible, at the age of five or six. Imagine a young boy swaying over a large leatherbound book in a synagogue in Sighet late in the afternoon. He is alone: school hours have ended, and the other children are playing ball or doing chores at home. But he remains, seemingly hypnotized by the words he reads, and the ancient melody that accompanies them.

When I was a child, I read these Biblical tales with a wonder mixed with anguish. I imagined Isaac on the altar and I cried. I saw Joseph, prince of Egypt, and I laughed.⁴

4. Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985),

In later years, Wiesel often said that he preferred works of literature that have outlasted empires. The biblical accounts of all-too-human figures—kings and wanderers, strangers and poets, messengers and victims of fate— wrestling with history and the divine, captivated Wiesel from childhood to the end of his life. Themes of exile, sibling rivalry, liberation, memory, dreams, and the unfolding of a hidden but colossal destiny appealed to his