UFM The Holocaust & The Problem of Evil on Ellie Wiesels Night Paper

This week we continue probing the Problem of Evil through reading and commenting

on Ellie Wiesel’s NIGHT. Prepare to be shocked by the Human Condition therein. Last

spring a new study came out on the complicity of the neighbors who helped round up

the Jews that they had lived alongside for generations…..in Germany and in Poland.

Besides pleasing the NAZI officials, what seemed to drive the assistance was the

opportunity to gain a cow, the dishes, the jewelry, the land…..the material leavings

of their neighbors. Judy Chicago explored the complacency of the neighbors who lived

near the death camps and how they could not have avoided the stench and the activities

of those camps. She made images which illustrated the banality of that evil, and then

shocked everyone when she also added animal experimentation and images of the

feedlots.

Here’s the prompt for Response 5:

Read Elie Wiesel’s NIGHT and observe instances of human evil that came into

his life from 1944 through 1945.

Summarize as best you can how Elie Wiesel as a young man witnessed unspeakable

crimes against humanity and wrestled with his faith in trying to come to terms with

why God didn’t seem to be doing anything to prevent the carnage and the cruelty.

You can include PARAPHRASE or a DIRECT QUOTE in your summary.

Respond from your own reader’s experience (sometimes this means responding the

experience itself; otherwise, respond to the writing or the information that has been

presented). How does Wiesel manage to give this story so much life and presence?

Can you empathize with Wiesel’s loss of faith and the theological implications of the

questions he raises? How does his account compare with other Holocaust literature

you may have read?

For further pondering (not required):

Never Again.

When I visited The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2012, I learned

the mission of the museum as a place of remembrance is to ensure that something

like the NAZI death camps could never happen again. How did those who perpetrated

the genocide conducted by the Third Reich justify their actions? What human impulses

and ideas were behind their actions? How did religion contribute to climate of justification?

And lest we forget, genocide has happened again and again in the meantime…..Cambodia,

Rwanda, Darfur, Bosnia, Nigeria/Biafra, and now maybe Syria. So do we as a human society

have the will and the means to prevent Never Again?