I’ve had the computer screen open for 30 minutes now.  Nothing.  And yet my head and heart are so full of the things…all the things, in modern phraseology.  Finally, I decided to take my own advice, the advice that I give to my writing students — just write.  You can always change it later; after all, this is a digital world.

I want to tell you all about something and I am struggling.  I suppose that is the nature of the topic.  No, it is not some earth-shattering, life-altering personal news…or is it?  Hmm…but my topic for today, the one that I cannot put down, is this: witness.  Being a witness, the act of witnessing.

Perhaps that is the nature of this topic…witness.  It is hard to be a witness, particularly a reliable one.  And, there is a difference between being a witness and giving witness.  And at first, as I let this idea ramble around in my head, I totally focused on the latter. I mean, giving witness often means talking about something that is very close to your heart and soul, but, that may in fact, not be just your story at all. Or maybe the witness you are called to give is so deeply your story that to give it voice is…hard, frightening, risky.  Maybe what you are called to witness to didn’t even happen to you; maybe it is not really about you at all but yours is the voice to speak the story aloud.  And yet, here you are, taking it all in, and then, trying to tell others about it.

Being a witness, however…oh, wow…that is even harder isn’t it?  Being is always harder than giving, at least for me. Being a witness means silence, listening, loving…and maybe, maybe never ever sharing a word.  Never speaking of the experience, just taking in another’s experience, another’s heart, another’s words…and letting that act of witnessing change you.

Funny that those are the ideas that came out first. I thought that I wanted to tell you about this book that I’ve been reading, well, this book that I’ve finished.  Normally, I would write about a book elsewhere, but somehow this book seemed so much more important than just a book. This book just seemed more about life than about books (not that books are not a huge portion of my life).

Reading it was an act of witnessing, of being a witness, so much so that I feel compelled to bear witness to the way reading it has changed me.

In these words, in these digital pages, this book brought to me a great understanding of what drives me forward and what stops me in my tracks and what brings me pain and what brings me joy. In my reading of it I experienced so many things that I thought were gone and past and done and over, and so many things that are possible and yet to come.  This book brought me so much that I cannot write about it, and yet I must write about it because I cannot pick up another book for fear that the new book will drive all of this wonder from my consciousness.

From this book, from these words, these words spoken and lived by a witness to history, and shared by someone who was his witness, I learned more about teaching than I could have learned in any university program or in a life of 50 years in the classroom.

I cannot begin to tell you about this book.  I’ve said that before.  But I can share with you just a few of the words that have upended my soul. Here is just a little of the wisdom that I witnessed in my reading:

“Listening to a witness makes you a witness.” (LOC 106).

“Forgetfulness leads to exile, memory to redemption.” (LOC 328).

“Whatever you learn, remember:  the learning must make you more, not less, human.” (LOC 381).

“How can you sing?  How can you not?”  (LOC 2212).

These are all words of Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize recipient, author, activist, and most of all, teacher, as shared with us by his long-time friend and student, Ariel Burger, who wrote them down in his own book about their relationship, Witness. And it is this last quote that has rumbled around in my soul these past days.  “How can you sing?  How can you not?”

Burger tells the story of the day that, for no obvious reason, Professor Wiesel sang to his students in class.  It was a wordless song, a form called a nigun, a Hasidic song without words, but despite the topic on that day, which was language,  only music would teach.  After the music and the silence it created cleared, Wiesel said this:  “Part of our task, is to liberate language, to name things as they really are.  Don’t say income equality when you can say hungry child….We cannot liberate reality if we distort language. (2296).”  And Burger, our witness to this moment, understands that the Professor sang because nothing else would do in the moment:  “Perhaps a song will succeed where words alone could not.” (2296).

It is the change that witnessing this moment brought to Burger’s life that stuns me.  Burger, you see, had set aside his artistic practice to pursue his studies, first in the yeshiva in Jerusalem and then with Professor Wiesel in Boston. Through a series of synchronicities beginning with this very class meeting he describes, Burger picked up his art again and it became fully integrated into his being.  In Burger’s own words, study and the demands of life had burned his colors away.  And in this moment,  when only art could serve as witness, those colors started to return again:  “Now, steeped in language and literature in graduate school, I was ferociously thirsty for art and music…images exploded out of me, as if my freedom depended on coloring in every surface around me. (2333).”  Burger began to give witness through his own personal statement of love, his art.

Now, don’t worry, I am not about to run out and buy charcoals and canvas.  I know my limits.  But all of this does make me think again about the witness of artistic expression.  And it makes me think about what I have put down, even before the pandemic.  It makes me think about the witnessing power of music.

As I write this, in many parts of the Christian world we bear witness to the remembrance of Holy Week, to the end of Jesus’s life as a man on earth.  It is a day meant to make us all ask questions.  It is also a day when those of us who gather in remembrance singing perhaps the most wrenching song of witness that ever came into being:  Were You There?

If you’ve spent any time in church at all, you know this hymn.  It appears in almost every hymnal of every denomination.  Howard Thurman tells the story of how, on a trip to India, Mahatma Gandhi requested, at the end of a long evening, that Thurman and his wife, Sue,

sing this hymn for him, saying, “I feel that this song gets to the root of the experience of the entire human race under the spread of the healing wings of suffering.”

Perhaps a song will succeed where words cannot.  Perhaps, a song that witnesses both to the gravest inhumanity of people and to the greatest hope and love that is possible, perhaps listening to the witness of that song makes us all witnesses…witnesses to the saving power of this day, and witnesses to the hatred and fear that brought us to this place, this place where we must see not economic differences, but the result of the inhuman denial of the humanity of an entire race, the inhuman denial of anyone who is not just like us.  Music did that.  Music does that.  And in the singing, we answer the question, who’ll be a witness.

I have more to say about that, but not right now, not here.  There is much to ponder, much to sit with.  In closing, I want to end with another quote from Witness, a story told by Professor Wiesel in his class as they discussed the importance of music in the Jewish tradition:

Rebbe Pinchas of Koretz said, ‘Ah, if only I could sing–I would force the Almighty to join us here on earth.  But alas,I don’t know how to sing.’  And the first Rebbe of Lubavitch said, ‘When I cannot answer a question, I sing a song.’  Music is a miracle.  For my generation, it is a miracle that we can sing. (2440).

It is a miracle that we can sing.  It is a miracle that we can make art.  It is a miracle that we can string together words and share our experiences and our thoughts.  It is a miracle that we can take a picture, bake a cake — it is the miracle of creation that lives through enslavement and Holocausts and wars and pandemics and all of the ways that humanity tries to stop it.

Goodbye for now.  There is a tomb, and darkness, and I have miracles to ponder…and to create, because if a soul that lived under the oppression and terror that this soul lived under could create this song, then, what am I doing wasting my time.  I have witnessing to do.