Ethics, Religion and Memory in Elie Wiesel's Night (Critical Essay‪)‬

Philosophical ethics, religion and memory One can seize the complex relations between ethical and religious aspects in limit situations. Such a situation can be illustrated using Elie Wiesel's reflections on the Holocaust. Reading Wiesel's Night one could be tempted to believe that, due to the life conditions in death camps, man is driven away from his faith--and, according to some authors, one could find there an early form of a theology of the death of God. However, in his subsequent works, Wiesel brings more and more arguments in favor of a normal relation between doubt of or even rebellion against divinity and the affirmation of faith in limit situations. One of Night's most important contributions consists in the fact that the ethical interrogation of faith and the deconstruction of religion are achieved using religious tools. Furthermore, in Night, Wiesel succeeds to establish an ethics of responsibility towards otherness, without minimizing the importance of God's presence in history. One can see that the human component is important from a religious point of view precisely because it involves an ethics that presupposes the responsibility of man towards the other man with whom he has a face-to-face relationship. In this respect one must understand Wiesel's contention that: "Remember, God of history, that You created man to remember". (1) From the very first meeting with Elie Wiesel's texts, the reader will note the central place of the necessity of keeping alive the memory of the holocaust. Beginning with this, I will attempt to emphasize the way in which the memory of the Holocaust is constituted as a communication channel among humans and between man and God. At the same time, memory is more than a simple communication from past to future, it is also an ethical way of assuming responsibility for the horrors humankind experienced during the twentieth century.