T’ruah joins with the Jewish community and the entire world in mourning the death of Elie Wiesel, z”l, who awakened the world to the horrors of the Holocaust and advocated tirelessly to ensure that such genocide never happens again. He taught us that “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”
His writings illustrated the horrors that human beings are capable of inflicting on each other when they fail to recognize that we are created b’tzelem elohim, in the image of God. In The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code, he laid out the moral and deeply personal imperative for human rights and dignity: “We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.” May his memory be for a blessing and may he inspire us to carry on his work.
