Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania.

When he was 15 years old, the Nazis got their hands on his family, murdering his sister and

mother and enslaving his father alongside himself.

He was liberated from Buchanvald by the U.S. Third Army in April of

1945. From there, Wiesel made his way to France, where he studied the humanities and worked

as a writer, and eventually to New York. In time, Elie Wiesel became an activist for human

rights, a professor, and in 1986 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

for speaking out against violence, repression, and racism. Throughout his life, he wrote some

60 books, was a consular to presidents and senators, and kings, and prime ministers.

When he died in Manhattan, in July 2016, President Obama called him one of the great moral

voices of our time, and in many ways the conscience of the world.

So it was with nothing but good intentions, and with a desire to honor him, his family, and to

hold him up as an exemplar, that the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., announced it would permanently install a sculpture

of his likeness on the building. In the moral heart of the nation's capital, a stone bust of

Elie Wiesel would peer out over Americans for as long as the nation might endure. Such acceptance

into the fabric of American society is a great blessing for the Jews,

and when considered against the backdrop of the history of our diaspora, it is astounding. But the

manner of this honoring also introduces some particularly vexing Jewish questions. After all,

it was on a church that Vizel's carving would be mounted.

And that's another thing. It was a carving of his visage, that is, a graven image, specifically

designed for emulation. And on top of it all, Vizel's moral heroism always grew out of his

particular Jewish commitments and his particular Jewish formation.

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