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As I sit here on New Years Day, I am not filled with wishful expectations, nor am I hoping for a better year…and then sitting back to see what happens.  

I have learned that Life is a game where you get what you give….and the more you put into it, the more you get back.  I know that karma works.  I know that the Universe doesn't just randomly give out bumps in the road for no reason, that each hurdle comes with a gift of freedom, IF I face it squarely and be completely honest with myself.

So, there is no point in wishing. However,  I remember Oprah saying she wanted to have a year of Love and Peace….and all she got that year were challenges for her to find peace and love in the worst of situations.  A challege if you will, in loving the unlovable.

With that in mind, be careful what you wish for.

For your wishes are God's command.  

I don't really have wishes, but it does feel like I have just begun to live…or perhaps grasp what living is about.

In Elie Wiesel's book "Open Heart" he writes,

"Yes, I have written much, and yet, at this stage of my life, at the very threshold of the great portal, I feel that I have not yet begun."  

"Too Late?"

"Similarly, I question my many other activities. For example, in my combat against hatred, which I wished to be unrelenting, did I in fact invest enough time, enough energy, in denouncing fanaticism in its various guises? Evidently not, since all of us who have fought the battle must now admit defeat."

"At the time of the liberation of the camps, I remember, we were convinced that after Auschwitz there would be no more wars, no more racism, no more hatred, no more anti-Semitism. We were wrong. This produced a feeling close to despair.  For if Auschwitz could not cure mankind of racism, was there a chance of success ever? The fact is, the world has learned nothing.  Otherwise, how is one to comprehend the atrocities committed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia…?"

"I have initiated many actions, in countless locations, with many companions. And fought so many battles. Was it all in vain?"

"What shall I say to God?  That I was also counting on His help?  Shall I have the nerve to reproach Him for His incomprehensible silence while Satan was winning his victories? While my father, Shlomo son of Eliezer and Nissel, lay dying on his cot?"

Later on he writes,

"A credo that defines my path: "I belong to the generation that has often felt abandoned by God and betrayed by mankind. And yet, I believe we must not give up on either."

"Was it yesterday – or long ago- that we learned how human beings have been able to attain perfection in cruelty?  That for the killers, the torturers, it is normal, thus human, to act inhumanely?  Should one therefore turn away from humanity?"

"The answer, of course, is up to each of us.  We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves.  Or not."

"I know – I speak from experience – that even in darkness it is possible to create light and encourage compassion.  That it is possible to feel free inside a prision. That even in exile, friendship exists and can become an anchor.  That one instant before dying, man is still immortal."

" There it is: I still believe in man in spite of man.  I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed and preverted by the enemies of mankind.  And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console."  

"As a Jew, I believe in the coming of the Messiah. But of course this does not mean that the world will become Jewish; just that it will become more welcoming, more human.  I belong, after all, to a generation that has learned that whatever the question, indifference and resignation are not the answer."

"Illness may diminish me, but it will not destroy me. The body is not eternal, but the idea of the soul is. The brain will be buried, but the memory will survive it."

"Such is the miracle: The tale about despair becomes the tale against despair."  

He also writes in chapter 15,

"Such are the thoughts that the patient, a prisoner of his condemned body, confronting his fate, is experiencing the ferocious intensity. As I face the gravity of this moment, I feel the need to search my soul."

"I am eighty-two years old.  As it has often before, and now more so than ever, the fact that I am who I am leads me to look back: What have I done, and what have I toiled to do, during this long journey filled with dreams and challenges."

"Strange, I suddenly remember Baudelaire's outcry in his Mon coeur mis a nu  (My Heart Laid Bare): There exists in every man, at every hour, two simultaneous impulses; one leading toward God, the other toward Satan."  Have I distinquished the path to Good from the one leading to Evil?"

"My life unfolds before me like a film: landscapes from my childhood; adventures in faraway, sometimes exotic places; my first masters, followed by my first moments of adolescent religious ecstasy as I and my friends at the yeshiva recieved from our old masters the keys that open the secret doors of mystical truths."

"Have I performed my duty as a survivor? Have I transmitted all I was able to? Too much, perhaps? Were some of the mystics not punished for having penetrated the secret of forbidden knowledge?"

"To begin, I attempted to describe the time of darkness. Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald.  A slight volume; Night.  First in Yiddish, "and the world remained silent," in which every sentence, every word, reflects an experience that defies all comprehension.  Even had every single survivor consecrated a year of his life to testifying, the results would probably still have been unsatisfactory.  I rarely reread myself, but when I do, I come away with a bitter taste in my mouth:  I feel the words are not right and that I could have said it better.  In my writings about the Event, did I commita sin by saying too much, while fully knowing that no person who did not experience the proximity of death there can ever understand what we, the survivors, were subjected to from moring till night, under a silent sky."'

"I have written some fifty works – most dealing with topics far removed from the one I continue to consider essential: the victims' memory.  I believe that I have done all I could to prevent it from being cheapened or altogether stifled, but was it enough? And if I often publish works – articles, novels on other themes, I did so in order not to remain its prisoner.  My battle against the trivialization and banalization of Auschwitz in film and on television resulted in my gaining not a few enemies.  To my thinking, it was my duty to show that the sum of all suffering and deaths is an integral part of the texts we revere."  Elie Wiezel

He continues to ask great questions of himself at 82 years of age….and his reflection will be ours someday.

I wonder if we ask his questions of ourselves today, will we at 82 still be living with questions…and perhaps the questions are how we move into a deeper life…to fully live, aware.

I do understand how knowing the evil of mankind, he yet believes in mankind.

How the silence of God doesn't have him no longer believing there is a God.

And, when or can you write enough about the subject of victims?

He and I are not on the same scale on the specturm, but even at my lower end, it matters.

Have I too, distinquished the path to evil?  

I still am a faithful believer in mankind…that is the energy I bring into the New Year.