"Night" by Elie Wiesel

I just finished reading "Night" by Elie Wiesel. I didn't plan it this way, but being given this book is turning out to be pretty amazing timing given that I'm heading off to the AIPAC conference this weekend.

Elie Wiesel was a spiritually minded fourteen year old when he was taken in to the concentration camps of the Holocaust. The book tells of his horrific experiences while there which ultimately led to the demise of his faith. I don't even have words that can summarize. Instead, I'll use Elie's.
....

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never."

....

After witnessing the hanging of a child, Elie heard a man behind him ask...

"For God's sake, where is God?"
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
"Where is He? This is where -- hanging here from this gallows."

....

And the quote that moved me the most...

"All this under a magnificent blue sky."

....

I found it curious that the foreword of this edition was written by a Christian man. He wrote of his first introduction to Elie and his story:

"And I, who believe that God is love, what answer was there to give my young interlocutor whose dark eyes still held the reflection of the angelic sadness that had appeared one day on the face of a hanged child? What did I say to him? Did I speak to him of that other Jew, this crucified brother who perhaps resembled him and whose cross conquered the world? Did I explain to him that what had been a stumbling block for his faith had become a cornerstone for mine? And that the connection between the cross and human suffering remains, in my view, the key to the unfathomable mystery in which the faith of his childhood was lost? And yet, Zion has risen up again out of the crematoria and the slaughterhouses. The Jewish nation has been resurrected from among its thousands of dead. It is they who have given it new life. We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Almighty is the Almighty, the last word for each of us belongs to Him. That is what I should have said to the Jewish child. But all I could do was embrace him and weep."

....

There is no way for me to say this without risking sounding like an idiot, but that has never stopped me before. So here it is... For so long I have felt tremendously alone in my angst and wrestling with the pains of our world. Somewhere in this book, I realized that I am not alone. I'm not the first lover of God who has had a rude awakening and I certainly won't be the last (though thankfully in my case, it was not caused by such horrible events as Elie's). Elie Wiesel had always been a spiritually minded man and was en route to becoming a devotee of the Kabaalah. His faith journey was shipwrecked at his witnessing of enumerable atrocities commited by mankind all 'under a magnificent blue sky'. In that regard, I feel like we share something.