Download Free Zalmen Or The Madness Of God Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Zalmen Or The Madness Of God and write the review.

On Yom Kippur eve in 1965, Elie Wiesel found himself in Russia, “in a synagogue crowded with people. The air was stifling. The cantor was chanting . . . Suddenly a mad thought crossed my mind: Something is about to happen; any moment now the Rabbi will wake up, shake himself, pound the pulpit and cry out, shout his pain, his rage, his truth. I felt the tension building up inside me; the wait became unbearable. But nothing happened . . . It was too late. The Rabbi no longer had the strength to imagine himself free.” In Zalmen, or The Madness of God, Wiesel gives his Rabbi that strength, the courage to voice his oppression and isolation, and the result is a passionate cry. This play illuminates not only the plight of the Soviet Jew, but the anguish of individuals everywhere who must survive—and yet long for something more than mere survival. (Adapted for the stage by Marion Wiesel.)
The Trial of God (as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod) A Play by Elie Wiesel Translated by Marion Wiesel Introduction by Robert McAfee Brown Afterword by Matthew Fox Where is God when innocent human beings suffer? This drama lays bare the most vexing questions confronting the moral imagination. Set in a Ukranian village in the year 1649, this haunting play takes place in the aftermath of a pogrom. Only two Jews, Berish the innkeeper and his daughter Hannah, have survived the brutal Cossack raids. When three itinerant actors arrive in town to perform a Purim play, Berish demands that they stage a mock trial of God instead, indicting Him for His silence in the face of evil. Berish, a latter-day Job, is ready to take on the role of prosecutor. But who will defend God? A mysterious stranger named Sam, who seems oddly familiar to everyone present, shows up just in time to volunteer. The idea for this play came from an event that Elie Wiesel witnessed as a boy in Auschwitz: “Three rabbis—all erudite and pious men—decided one evening to indict God for allowing His children to be massacred. I remember: I was there, and I felt like crying. But there nobody cried.” Inspired and challenged by this play, Christian theologians Robert McAfee Brown and Matthew Fox, in a new Introduction and Afterword, join Elie Wiesel in the search for faith in a world where God is silent.
"Chmiel also critically engages Wiesel's long-standing defense of the State of Israel as well as his confrontations and collaborations with the U.S. government, including the birth of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the 1985 Bitburg affair with President Reagan, and U.S. intervention in the Balkans."--BOOK JACKET.
As an old proverb puts it, "Two Jews, three opinions." In the long, rich, tumultuous history of the Jewish people, this characteristic contentiousness has often been extended even unto Heaven. Arguing with God is a highly original and utterly absorbing study that skates along the edge of this theological thin ice--at times verging dangerously close to blasphemy--yet also a source of some of the most poignant and deeply soulful expressions of human anguish and yearning. The name Israel literally denotes one who "wrestles with God." And, from Jacob's battle with the angel to Elie Wiesel's haunting questions about the Holocaust that hang in the air like still smoke over our own age, Rabbi Laytner admirably details Judaism's rich and pervasive tradition of calling God to task over human suffering and experienced injustice. It is a tradition that originated in the biblical period itself. Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and others all petitioned for divine intervention in their lives, or appealed forcefully to God to alter His proposed decree. Other biblical arguments focused on personal or communal suffering and anger: Jeremiah, Job, and certain Psalms and Lamentations. Rabbi Laytner delves beneath the surface of these "blasphemies" and reveals how they implicitly helped to refute the claims of opponent religions and advance Jewish doctrines and teachings.
In Wise Men and Their Tales, a master teacher gives us his fascinating insights into the lives of a wide range of biblical figures, Talmudic scholars, and Hasidic rabbis. The matriarch Sarah, fiercely guarding her son, Isaac, against the negative influence of his half-brother Ishmael; Samson, the solitary hero and protector of his people, whose singular weakness brought about his tragic end; Isaiah, caught in the middle of the struggle between God and man, his messages of anger and sorrow counterbalanced by his timeless, eloquent vision of a world at peace; the saintly Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, who by virtue of a lifetime of good deeds was permitted to enter heaven while still alive and who tried to ensure a similar fate for all humanity by stealing the sword of the Angel of Death. Elie Wiesel tells the stories of these and other men and women who have been sent by God to help us find the godliness within our own lives. And what interests him most about these people is their humanity, in all its glorious complexity. They get angry—at God for demanding so much, and at people, for doing so little. They make mistakes. They get frustrated. But through it all one constant remains—their love for the people they have been charged to teach and their devotion to the Supreme Being who has sent them. In these tales of battles won and lost, of exile and redemption, of despair and renewal, we learn not only by listening to what they have come to tell us, but by watching as they live lives that are both grounded in earthly reality and that soar upward to the heavens.
When a Christian boy disappears in a fictional Eastern European town in the 1920s, the local Jews are quickly accused of ritual murder. There is tension in the air and a pogrom threatens to erupt. Suddenly, an extraordinary man—Moshe the dreamer, a madman and mystic—steps forward and confesses to a crime he did not commit, in a vain attempt to save his people from certain death. The community gathers to hear his last words—a plea for silence—and everyone present takes an oath: whoever survives the impending tragedy must never speak of the town’s last days and nights of terror. For fifty years the sole survivor keeps his oath—until he meets a man whose life depends on hearing the story, and one man’s loyalty to the dead confronts head-on another’s reason to go on living. One of Wiesel’s strongest early novels, this timeless parable about the Jews and their enemies, about hate, family, friendship, and silence, is as powerful, haunting, and significant as it was when first published in 1973.
Distinguished psychotherapist and survivor Elhanan Rosenbaum is losing his memory to an incurable disease. Never having spoken of the war years before, he resolves to tell his son about his past—the heroic parts as well as the parts that fill him with shame—before it is too late. Elhanan's story compels his son to go to the Romanian village where the crime that continues to haunt his father was committed. There he encounters the improbable wisdom of a gravedigger who leads him to the grave of his grandfather and to the truths that bind one generation to another.
A powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, letters, and diary entries that weave together all the periods of the author's life from his childhood in Transylvania to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Paris, and New York. • "One of the great writers of our generation addresses himself to the question of what it means to be a Jew." —The New Republic Elie Wiesel, acclaimed as one of the most gifted and sensitive writers of our time, probes, from the particular point of view of his Jewishness, such central moral and political issues as Zionism and the Middle East conflict, Solzhenitsyn and Soviet anti-Semitism, the obligations of American Jews toward Israel, the Holocaust and its cheapening in the media. "Rich in autobiographical, philosophical, moral and historical implications." —Chicago Tribune
A profoundly and unexpectedly intimate, deeply affecting summing up of life so far, from one of the most cherished moral voices of our time. Eighty-two years old, facing emergency heart surgery and his own mortality, Elie Wiesel reflects back on his life. Emotions, images, faces, and questions flash through his mind. His family before and during the unspeakable Event. The gifts of marriage, children, and grandchildren that followed. In his writing, in his teaching, in his public life, has he done enough for memory and for the survivors? His ongoing questioning of God—where has it led? Is there hope for mankind? The world’s tireless ambassador of tolerance and justice gives us a luminous account of hope and despair, an exploration of the love, regrets, and abiding faith of a remarkable man. Translated from the French by Marion Wiesel