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2102410 I was in North Carolina this week when Elisha Wiesel informed me that his father's health had taken an irrevers- ible turn for the worse. Elie, or Reb Eliezer as I always affectionately called him, had been battling illness for more than two years. But each time he fought back. Hearing this was now not the case, I was stunned and numb. I have loved Elie Wiesel my whole life, and I have known him for the past 26 years. He has served as inspiration, mentor, guide and loving friend. Every moment I have spent with him had been an honor and privilege and I visited with him just last week. I decided that though we planned to remain in the South for the Fourth of July weekend, we would begin the long drive back so that I might have the privilege of spending Shabbat with him. For the next hours I lived with the constant dread that we would not make it in time. I arrived minutes before the Sabbath and Elisha greeted me at the door. I offered whatever comfort I could to Marion, Elie's remarkable wife of 47 years and world-renowned translator. Marion and Elisha then invited me into the room with Elie. I will remember those last moments with the man President Obama called "the con- science of the world" as some of the most precious and haunting of my life, and I was consciously aware that I was being granted an unprec- edented privilege to spend the last Sabbath with the Jewish people's greatest living son. Elie was lying down, and I pulled my chair up close to his bed. His family, including his daughter-in- law Lynn and grandson Elijah, were all at his side. I shared with him how much I loved him and what he meant to the Jewish peo- ple and the world. I told him that in the last few hundred years the Jewish nation had rarely produced a personality that had made more of a global impact. I did not know quite what to say. I felt inadequate to the task. But I did not want to choose my words. I wanted them to flow from my heart. I told him he had been the Jewish people's great light to the nations, the man who had lent eternity to the 6 million of the Holocaust. The martyrs of the Holocaust honored him for honor- ing them. I shared with him that without his books, especially Night, the 6 million would not be remembered in the same way. And I sat there, I remembered his hon- esty and integrity, his righteousness and unending truth. I remembered that only a few months ago I asked Elie at his home about the searing honesty he expressed toward the end of Night when he revealed that his father, consumed with fever, asked him in the death camp barracks for water. Elie, emaciated, starving, infirm and famished, had hoped that after spending weeks tak- ing care of his typhoid-ravished father he would finally be liberated from his care. When his father begged him for water in the middle of the night, Elie, freezing and barely holding on to life himself, could not summon the energy to even respond. In the morning the pleas had ceased. Elie's father had expired. Elie was free at last. "How did you write those haunting words?" I asked him those months ago. How could anyone be so painfully honest? "I wrote them," he said, "because if I was not honest in the book there was no point in writing it at all," he said. That commitment to the truth allowed Elie to become the greatest chronicler of the greatest crime in human history. Though I am not a kohen, a priest, I turned to Marion and Elisha, and said I would like to give Elie the priestly bibli- cal blessing. And I kissed him repeatedly on the cheek, telling him each time how much I loved him. * Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is executive director of the World Values Network and is author of 30 books. obituaries » Obituaries from page 49 50 July 7 • 2016 Obituaries Elie Wiesel Goodbye, Dear Friend Rabbi Smuley Boteach Times of Israel