“God and I have our problems,” he siad. “In Night I said some harsh things, but I never divorced God. I was ready to be an orphan...but not a divorce.”
Wiesel also said that he tried to include at least one element of hope in all his writings.
When asked how the lessons of the Holocaust would be maintained in the face of time, Wiesel said that he believed his role was “to be a witness, not a judge, and he who listens to a witness becomes a witness.”
After the almost 90-minute talk, Bernard Steinberg, the executive director of Harvard Hillel, which sponsored the event, called Weisel “one of the great moral voices of his generation.”
“He is...a man profoundly grounded in the Jewish tradition who is interested in the well-being of the world as a whole,” he said.
President of Hillel Anna M. Solomon-Schwartz ’06 said she had been inspired by the author’s remarks.
“I think his message of passion and political action is the most important lesson we can learn from him,” she said.