A Seeker’s Scrapbook of Quotations

Compilation and Commentary by Michael Ritzen

Foremost among well-known holocaust survivors, as spokesperson, lecturer, professor, witness, world figure….stands Elie Wiesel. Author of fifty books. Nobel Peace Laureate. As an observant Jew, a most predictable question arises following his public lectures: “In the face of your God’s failure to save six million Holocaust victims, how can you still embrace belief?” God’s Inner Circle gathers, organizes, discusses and honors a selection of his multiple responses, his theodicy as developed over seventy years.

Wiesel’s specific words are known to provoke anger, inspire, puzzle and for some, enrapture listeners and readers of all religions and those of no religion at all. Central to this endeavor remains the classic memoir, NIGHT. In it, as a teen-age camp prisoner Wiesel experienced his God, once believed to be omnipotent, now dying on the Auschwitz gallows. God’s Inner Circle provides the precise words able to help formulate and to illuminate religious insights and the hard-won wisdom.