Ellie Wiesel

 Elie Wiesel was born into a Jewish family in Romania. He was only a teenager when he and his family were rounded up by the Nazis and taken to Auschwitz, and then to Buchenwald. In his book, *Night*, he gives a terrifying and intimate account of the increasing horrors he endured – the death of his parents and eight-year-old sister, and the loss of his innocence by barbaric hands. In the foreword to the book, François Mauriac writes of his encounter with Elie Wiesel: ‘On that most horrible day, even among all those other bad days, when the child witnessed the hanging (yes!) of another child who, he tells us, had the face of a sad angel, he heard someone behind him groan: “For God’s sake, *where is God*?” And from within me, I heard a voice answer: “*Where He is*? This is where – hanging here from this gallows.”’ François Mauriac goes on, ‘And I, who believe that God is love, what answer was there to give my young interlocutor... 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... That is what I should have said to the Jewish child. But all I could do was embrace him and weep.’ His words point to the most profound answer to the question, ‘Where is God?’ *God is in Christ*. He was on the cross bearing our sins in his body. Now the crucified is among his people. Not only has he suffered *for* you, but he now suffers *with* you. In the Old Testament, the tabernacle (and later the temple) was the place where people went to meet with God. This was God’s home as we see in our Old Testament passage for today (Ezekiel 43:5).