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Obituaries from page 49

Goodbye, Dear Friend

I

was in North Carolina this week when
and Elisha greeted me at the door. I
Elisha Wiesel informed me that his
offered whatever comfort I could to
father’s health had taken an irrevers-
Marion, Elie’s remarkable wife of 47 years
ible turn for the worse. Elie, or Reb Eliezer and world-renowned translator. Marion
as I always affectionately called him, had
and Elisha then invited me into the
been battling illness for more
room with Elie. I will remember
than two years. But each time
those last moments with the man
he fought back. Hearing this was
President Obama called “the con-
now not the case, I was stunned
science of the world” as some of the
and numb.
most precious and haunting of my
I have loved Elie Wiesel my
life, and I was consciously aware
whole life, and I have known
that I was being granted an unprec-
him for the past 26 years. He has
edented privilege to spend the last
served as inspiration, mentor,
Sabbath with the Jewish people’s
Rabbi Smuley
guide and loving friend. Every
greatest living son.
Boteach
moment I have spent with him
Elie was lying down, and I pulled
had been an honor and privilege Times of Israel
my chair up close to his bed. His
and I visited with him just last
family, including his daughter-in-
week.
law Lynn and grandson Elijah, were
I decided that though we planned to
all at his side.
remain in the South for the Fourth of July
I shared with him how much I loved
weekend, we would begin the long drive
him and what he meant to the Jewish peo-
back so that I might have the privilege of
ple and the world. I told him that in the
spending Shabbat with him. For the next
last few hundred years the Jewish nation
hours I lived with the constant dread that
had rarely produced a personality that had
we would not make it in time.
made more of a global impact.
I arrived minutes before the Sabbath
I did not know quite what to say. I felt

inadequate to the task. But
I did not want to choose my
words. I wanted them to flow
from my heart.
I told him he had been the
Jewish people’s great light to
the nations, the man who had Elie Wiesel
lent eternity to the 6 million
of the Holocaust. The martyrs
of the Holocaust honored him for honor-
ing them. I shared with him that without
his books, especially Night, the 6 million
would not be remembered in the same
way.
And I sat there, I remembered his hon-
esty and integrity, his righteousness and
unending truth.
I remembered that only a few months
ago I asked Elie at his home about the
searing honesty he expressed toward the
end of Night when he revealed that his
father, consumed with fever, asked him in
the death camp barracks for water. Elie,
emaciated, starving, infirm and famished,
had hoped that after spending weeks tak-
ing care of his typhoid-ravished father he
would finally be liberated from his care.

When his father begged
him for water in the middle
of the night, Elie, freezing
and barely holding on to life
himself, could not summon
the energy to even respond.
In the morning the pleas
had ceased. Elie’s father had
expired. Elie was free at last.
“How did you write those haunting
words?” I asked him those months ago.
How could anyone be so painfully honest?
“I wrote them,” he said, “because if I was
not honest in the book there was no point
in writing it at all,” he said.
That commitment to the truth allowed
Elie to become the greatest chronicler of
the greatest crime in human history.
Though I am not a kohen, a priest, I
turned to Marion and Elisha, and said I
would like to give Elie the priestly bibli-
cal blessing. And I kissed him repeatedly
on the cheek, telling him each time how
much I loved him.

*

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is executive director of the
World Values Network and is author of 30 books.

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50 July 7 • 2016

Obituaries