Jewish Religious Humanism and Christianity

In a chilling episode from Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night, the author describes an incident that took place during his internment in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. A young boy, a Jewish prisoner who was accused of blowing up a power plant in the camp, is hanged for his “crime.” Wiesel explains that the boy, being so small and light, did not die immediately from the hanging, but remained alive, dangling from the rope for half a day. “Where is God?” one prisoner implores, responding to the utter horror of this child struggling for life at the end of the hangman’s rope. “And I heard a voice within me answer him,” the author ponders. “Where is He? Here he is… he is hanging here on this gallows.”

It is striking that a Jewish Holocaust survivor recalling this tragic event would use an image so markedly laden with Christology; that at this moment the suffer would be struck with a vision of a suffering, incarnate God.