Elie Wiesel’s Apocalyptic Prophecies (Part 3/3)

The following is an article, based on two tapes of Elie Wiesel in Yiddish on WEVD, that Zach wrote in 2024 but was never published. Due to the length of the article, this is going to be serialized. This is part 3 of 3. Read part 1 here. Part 2 is here.

The enigmatic Henry Kissinger

The euphoria of the Six Day War was soon sharply reversed the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Israel was caught by surprise by Egyptian and Syrian forces. Israel’s survival depended on an American arms airlift, Operation Nickel Grass.

Israel suddenly “felt the experience of the Diaspora,” explained Berenbaum. “It depended on the goodwill of an American president who was an antisemite but pro-Israel, and that's Nixon, a Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, who had converted at Harvard at 18 from Judaism to Lutheranism, had a Bar Mitzvah and then became a Lutheran.” 

They were also dependent on Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a German-Jewish Holocaust survivor who suspiciously swore his oath of office on a Protestant bible. This was especially worrisome because Kissinger made sure that there was no decisive victor to the Yom Kippur War, not permitting Israel to capitalize on some of its military victories. He wanted to make sure that the United States had leverage to negotiate with all parties, including the Soviet Union, who had taken the side of the Egyptians. 

Because of this Nixon administration arms airlift, the Arab world retaliated and raised the global price of oil to crisis level heights. Making matters worse, the West and the Soviet Union were selling arms to countries throughout the Arab world, competing with each other for influence, potentially making Israel vulnerable. 

“They all have weapons and soldiers and Russian help, American help, French help — the whole world helps the Arabs. So, something is happening here. Why am I scared? Because whatever the world does, it does it first to the Jews,” opines Wiesel to Weber, referencing his op-ed in the New York Times.

In 1976, Nixon was gone, but Kissinger was still there under Gerald Ford, more powerful than ever. Weber wondered, considering Wiesel knew Kissinger personally, could Kissinger be trusted to prevent the worst from happening to Israel? After all, it seemed to him that, on the world stage, friends were becoming neutral, and neutral states were becoming enemies.

In one interview, Wiesel spoke positively about his conversations trying to steer Kissinger into viewing himself through the lens of Jewish history, not American history. But in the other, Wiesel succumbs to Weber’s skepticism. 

Kissinger seemed unwilling to understand, as they did, that Israel’s success meant America’s success. He instead wanted to play the role of American Secretary of State as Weber astutely noted, balancing interests and powers in the region to keep maximum influence.

Even more frighteningly, right in their backyard in New York, the UN was becoming a lonely place for Israel’s eloquent ambassador Yosef Tekoah. While the halls would empty out during Tekoah’s speeches, Palestinian Liberation Organization head Yasser Arafat once came to give his speech with a holster showing, intending to bring a gun. The PLO had already carried out a series of terroristic actions, including the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes.

“Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand,” he said as he concluded the address. Wiesel imagined that in a different scenario, Arafat would conclude the address, ‘let’s have a pogrom,’ and the seated delegations would join in. 

The Hasidic Rebbe Menashe Klein, a fellow evacuee from Auschwitz to France and close friend of Wiesel’s, suggested to him that now was a more dangerous time than the Holocaust, given that the Communist sphere was now aligning itself with the Arab world against Israel.

Wiesel reports his friend’s warning in one of the interviews. “You know, he said, that today we have more enemies than we did during the war. During the war we had fascists, Nazis, Hitlerists, but the world was with us. Now it’s like this: the whole Communist world — the Chinese, the Africans, the Asian countries, the Arab world. We have billions of people against us.”

Two histories

God’s apparent silence and inaction during the Holocaust drove many Jewish thinkers to explain the Holocaust theologically, particularly in the 1960s, when public discussion of the Holocaust became more of a norm. The televised trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, which Wiesel covered for the Forverts, is, as Borger writes, “often cited as the first of several events that tore away the postwar shroud of silence.” 

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg declared that God had broken the covenant with the Jewish people, but that Jews voluntarily kept it anyway, keeping their religious traditions and loving the dream of universal redemption. The theologian Richard L. Rubenstein, rather than affix blame to the Jewish people or the idea of God, asserted that God is not involved with this world. 

Most prominently, the Reform rabbi Emil Fackenheim coined the 614th commandment, one additional commandment to the normative 613: one shall not give Hitler posthumous victories, specifically by surviving as a Jewish people, remembering the Holocaust, and not despairing of God and Judaism. 

Elie Wiesel, who had met Fackenheim and Greenberg at a panel in Montreal (and noted that between them “not a word was spoken about the Holocaust”), was also certain that the Holocaust played a role in Jewish theology. But it was very important to Wiesel that his views align with the ability to stay religiously observant, even if he wasn’t always himself. His relationship with God was frayed; he argued and quarreled with God, and took inspiration from stories in Torah and Talmud to contextualize these quarrels.

A relationship to God was not the only aspect of Wiesel’s theology. The threat of Jewish annihilation, both in Israel and the Soviet Union, and the seeming indifference to these causes from Jewish leaders and figures, led Wiesel to craft a theological theory of history, which acted in its own right.

Wiesel proposed that the Holocaust provided “protection” against antisemitism and the threat of Israel being destroyed for one generation. After one generation, the harmonious alignment of universal history and Jewish history is over, and doomed to come into conflict. 

This apocalyptic vision has only one antidote: a Jewish awakening. Wiesel wishes, in a similar way to his fantasies about the rabbi in the Soviet Union, that Jewish leadership would urge Jews to flood the UN and show their support for Israel, and assure Tekoah that history is on his side. 

But there are grim obstacles: a Jewish leadership that is inert, just as they were during the Holocaust, and Jews who have joined the New Left, the Third World aligned movement which turned against Israel. 

In this, Wiesel sees his role as a teacher to be fundamental, to bring students to a grounding in Jewish tradition — which is something he seeks for himself as well. Wiesel, who rejected religion to various degrees because of the Holocaust, expresses his desire for it in his life to give him strength.

Afterword

After these interviews, Wiesel took even more prominent roles in American politics and international activism. He received the Nobel Peace Prize, had Night become national school curriculum, travelled the world advocating against genocide, stood up to Ronald Reagen in his attempt to visit a cemetery where Nazi officers lay, and initiated the United States Holocaust Museum. 

His life was not without controversy: an allegation of unwanted touching, numerous accusations that he was profiting off of the Holocaust, losing money to Madoff and advocating for extreme right-wing politicians later in life. But Wiesel’s impact is undeniable — and in these interviews, in the privacy of Yiddish, you can hear how he dares to say what haunts his thoughts and nightmares more clearly than any public speech or biography.