Hope, Despair and Memory

In rhetoric, pathos refers to an emotional appeal. Wiesel’s speech employs pathos in several different ways. His use of the first-person plural works to create empathy between the speaker and the audience. Wiesel first uses “we” to refer to the Jewish people, but later to the rest of humanity; Wiesel wants his audience to identify with the fight for human rights.

Wiesel’s descriptions of the Holocaust also seek to elicit an emotional response. Wiesel recalls that “[c]hildren looked like old men, old men whimpered like children” (7). Later, he describes a child asking his mother if he could cry and a young girl telling her grandmother that she was ready to die. These anecdotes emphasize the human suffering that Wiesel hopes to prevent in the future.

Wiesel’s references to children are also a source of pathos; Wiesel’s descriptions of their suffering in both the Holocaust and later conflicts seek to tap into the common perception of children as innocent and in need of protection. Wiesel wants his audience to see the necessity of fighting for human rights.

This speech contains many allusions, or references to outside literature, history, myth, etc. Wiesel especially alludes to the Tanakh; his description of the Holocaust invokes many images from the Book of Genesis, which describes the creation of the universe and later society. From this, Wiesel crafts an inverted creation story. His reference to God “cover[ing] His face” possibly alludes to the story of Adam and Eve hiding from God after disobeying his injunction against eating from the tree of knowledge; in Wiesel’s story, it is God who cannot bear to look on humanity after their “betrayal” (i.e., the Holocaust).

More explicit is the reference to the Tower of Babel—another Genesis story, in which humanity intends to create a tower that can reach heaven. God thwarts them in this effort, and the story is often interpreted as an allegory for human hubris; however, it is also an origin story for the existence of different languages and cultures, as it ends with God sundering humanity’s previously unified speech and scattering them across the world. Both readings are relevant to Wiesel’s version, in which the Tower of Babel aspires toward an “anti-heaven” (6). Here, humanity doesn’t so much seek godlike status as it does turn its back on God entirely. What’s more, it does so not as a unified people but by perverting the ethnic and cultural differences the original tower gave rise to, using these to justify the murder of fellow humans.

Wiesel additionally alludes to more recent figures within the Jewish tradition, such as the Besht and Shimon Dubnov. Each of these allusions serves to remind the audience of the importance of memory in the Jewish tradition. The Besht must remember in order to regain his powers, while the Jewish historian Shimon Dubnov implores his people to record everything to preserve the past.