The place was a suburb...
Illustration
The place was a suburb of Detroit. The speaker: Nobel Prize-winning novelist Elie Wiesel. The subject of this great Jewish writer's address was "After Auschwitz, Can We Still Believe?"
Jews and Gentiles alike filled the massive synagogue to listen to the memories of a man who, as a boy and then a teenager, survived the death camps. For nearly an hour, Elie Wiesel spun story after story of horror and bleak despair. He told of family members separated from one another forever ... of prisoners who went mad and threw themselves onto the electric fence ... of lives hopelessly confused and shattered, even years after their liberation. In solemn, respectful silence, the audience relived the speaker's pain.
Finally, he stopped talking. His eyes dropped to the floor. There was no sound at all in that huge auditorium for what seemed an eternity. Then, slowly, Wiesel repeated the title of his talk: "After Auschwitz, can we still believe?"
He shook his head slowly, sadly. "No, no, he said ... but we must!"
Faith is a verb. It's something we do; something we decide to do -- not a static body of ideas we believe. "Our knowledge of God," writes theologian Alan Richardson, "is not like our knowledge of electrons or square roots: we know truth about God only by doing it, not by talking or reasoning about it, just as we know love only by loving. Truth in the biblical sense is something to be practiced."
Jews and Gentiles alike filled the massive synagogue to listen to the memories of a man who, as a boy and then a teenager, survived the death camps. For nearly an hour, Elie Wiesel spun story after story of horror and bleak despair. He told of family members separated from one another forever ... of prisoners who went mad and threw themselves onto the electric fence ... of lives hopelessly confused and shattered, even years after their liberation. In solemn, respectful silence, the audience relived the speaker's pain.
Finally, he stopped talking. His eyes dropped to the floor. There was no sound at all in that huge auditorium for what seemed an eternity. Then, slowly, Wiesel repeated the title of his talk: "After Auschwitz, can we still believe?"
He shook his head slowly, sadly. "No, no, he said ... but we must!"
Faith is a verb. It's something we do; something we decide to do -- not a static body of ideas we believe. "Our knowledge of God," writes theologian Alan Richardson, "is not like our knowledge of electrons or square roots: we know truth about God only by doing it, not by talking or reasoning about it, just as we know love only by loving. Truth in the biblical sense is something to be practiced."
