Parashat Korach פָּרָשַׁת קֹרַח

Our Parshiyot these several weeks, including that of this week’s portion, Korach, narrate what life was like for the Israelites, as they wandered through the wilderness.   We learn so many lessons in these narratives.  Important cautionary tales teach us about the pitfalls of lashon hara and sibling rivalry.  

The stories of miracle after miracle in the desert make clear to us God’s love for the Jewish people but also remind us of the sins of ingratitude.  And we also learn, through the lesson of Moshe, invaluable lessons about leadership - not only what to do but also what not to do.

I think we all have an image of a leader. A leader has a formal title - like President or Chair of the Board or General or Prime Minister or Chief Rabbi.

We often associate leadership with symbols - epaulets and insignia and crowns, for example. And we know that leaders have power - even when leaders are disliked, no one can deny the power that they have. And when leaders lose their power, they are either forced out of their leadership positions or they themselves recognize that it’s time to step down.

All that is pretty much common sense. But there is another kind of leadership, a kind of leadership that is less flashy and less formal.  It is a leadership that operates through influence and not through power.  These so-called “quiet leaders” may not have any formal authority, yet they can dramatically change the world. Elie Wiesel was such a leader. He was not a rabbi, not a president, not a king, and not a chair of the board. He was, simply put (and so understated), a survivor of the Holocaust. And he also changed the world.

Rabbi Gerry Scolnick of the Forest Hills, Queens spiritual center described what his Hebrew education had been like:
The Shoah was not at all on the curriculum of my Yeshiva education in the 1950’s and the 1960’s. Though some of my Jewish studies teachers had numbers on their arms, spoke with thick Polish accents and were clearly suffering from one version or another of PTSD, not a one of them ever even tried to educate us as to what they had gone through. I imagine it was a combination of the fact that they simply couldn’t – they weren’t yet able – and that those guiding our education were themselves unsure whether or not their experiences should be spoken of with young children.
I think that Rabbi Scolnick’s experience was similar to so many of us growing up in the 1950s and 1960s.  I know that my family personally knew many Holocaust survivors, but their experiences were never discussed - in fact, I remember that my parents, as enlightened as they were, referred to them as “refugees”  

A well-known book called Children of the Holocaust documents how much dysfunction there was in these families because they were unable and/or unwilling to discuss the horrors that preceded their lives in America.  People were expected to move on, to start new lives, to forget the past.
 
Elie Wiesel changed all that
It might seem strange to refer to him as a ‘quiet leader’ because he was anything but quiet about the Shoah. His masterpiece Night and his many other written works struggled to find a language to describe what I think we would all agree is beyond description. His teaching and his public speaking all sought to give voice to those who had no voice, to those who could neither mourn nor be mourned.  

As Wiesel put it in his work One Generation After...

“The truth [about the Shoah] will never be written. Like the Talmud, it will be transmitted from mouth to ear, from eye to eye.  By its uniqueness, the holocaust defies literature.”
Elie Wiesel was also a staunch defender of Israel, and he was eloquent in his responses to critics from both the left and the right.   For Wiesel, Israel was the miracle that directly responded to the Shoah.

Elie Wiesel had no official title but his influence was profound and lasting.  He seemed in his speaking a fearless man, but I think that he had one fear, and that fear was the driving force for his life’s work. What was that fear? Writing in 1965, 25 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Wiesel expressed his fear that the lessons of the holocaust - indeed, the very existence of the holocaust - would be forgotten.  

“Soon,” he wrote, “there will be no one left to speak of them, no one left to listen.”  
God bless you, Elie Wiesel, because of you, I feel confident in predicting that those words will never be true.

I saw Elie Wiesel several years ago in a little Orthodox shul in New York City. He was dancing in the center of the bimah, one of a number of older Jewish men who were celebrating the birth of Weisel’s grandson.  Someone else did the sermon, someone else read the Torah, someone else chanted the haftorah. Wiesel was simply present, dancing and celebrating and accepting the many mazel tovs of the other congregants. So, there’s another lesson that this brilliant man has left for us:  we learn from Elie Wiesel that no one can or should remain a victim, or only a victim. We learn that we can find, even when the days seem darkest, reasons to celebrate. ​