Oftentimes, the effects of traumatic experiences can transcend the importance or the gravity of original beliefs. With every passing day, Elie is seeing more and more innocent infants, children, men, and women dying all around him, simultaneously. However, as the survivors around him congregate and continue to pray to God on their own volition he is thoroughly confused. With the amount of deaths around him, he questions everything, and thinks aloud. What are You, my God? I thought angrily. How do You compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to You their faith, their anger, their defiance? What does Your grandeur mean, Master of the Universe, in the face of all this cowardice, this decay, and this misery? Why do you go on troubling these poor people's wounded minds, …show more content…
He bitterly thinks that God is showing cowardice by not aiding His people in their troubled times. Although religion is one of the most important components in Elie’s life, this is quickly stripped away when the traumatic events around Elie occur. By the way he angrily thinks about God’s absence during the difficult times, it can be inferred that his faith in God is decreasing with each passing moment. Wiesel shows that the deaths around him causes trauma in which his emotions and his mind are implicated. The trauma that he experiences pushes him to the extent of questioning the one constant component in his life, which is God. However, when the humanity around him completely deteriorates, as in the deaths of his friends, neighbors, and acquaintances, he becomes dispirited, decreasing his faith in God. In addition to this, Elie sees at least ten thousand men come to participate in a service for God. He hears another inmate fully exclaiming his devotion with an imperturbable loyalty, and Elie once again
Identity, God and Religion In Elie Wiesel’s novella, Night, the themes of identity, God, and religion become present due to the association Wiesel has with Judaism. Both themes intertwine, and are displayed ascribable to the oscillation Wiesel experiences, the statements he makes regarding God’s death, and his loss of interest for cabalistic mysticism. Eliezer undergoes change, he was passionate about his religion, but there were instances where he felt the need to pull away due to the circumstances he found himself in. When, “[Elie] … was thirteen, [during the day he] studied Talmud, and by night [he] would run to the synagogue to weep,” (Wiesel 3). Eliezer’s strong connection with his religion is shown, because he chooses the synagogue
Throughout Night Elie Wiesel makes a lot of connections relating to god like in the start of the book what he was trying to figure out his religion. Then he found Moshe the beadle. Finding him would help Elie with his journey to god. Although Elies finds Moshe the beadle he comes across different ways to find god.
Rufina Kucher Ms.Beach Advanced English 1 period 14 March 2018 A Night of the Holocaust The faith of God, humanity, and unity were all destryoed by the Nazi’s during the holocoust, a time of slaughter of European civilians, especially Jews during World War II. Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor, and an author who explains his experience of life in a concentration camp in the book, Night. Elie Wiesel was one of the many Jews who were forced to go to a concentration camp. Although they've went through hard times and kept their hopes up for a long time, they lost their faith and humanity was destroyed.
Elie keep his faith God by being surrounded by death and suffering that seemingly God is
(Wiesel 31). Elie tried to hold onto his faith, but as his freedom are deliberately stolen, his faith in God seems to be lessen day after day. Because he used to be a religious, losing his faith changes his indentity. In fact, before Elie's father die, he witnessed the Nazis abuse his father, though he did not react, he felt angry and had desire to defend his father. Rabbi Eliahou, a kind old man, who got abandoned by his own son because it seemed like he would not survive.
This existential conflict of Elie losing his faith in God and overall losing his identity can be seen from his behavior with Jewish rituals, his change in moral code, and
Religion was very important to Elie as that is all that he knew, he goes as far as to ask his father "to find me a master who can guide me in the studies of Kabbalah", to which his father responds "you are too young for that… one must be thirty before venturing into the world of mysticism" (Wiesel 4). Elie Wiesel 's faith and understanding of the Jewish religion was not only tested throughout the book, but also strengthened through the use of repetition and varied sentence style, in which he stops his narrative flow in order to question himself and his faith in God. Through the use of these themes Wiesel learns to never give up hope so that one day he would be able to forgive those who had
Elie Wiesel suspects that God is letting him go through such a situation. Wiesel begins losing faith in God. For example, Wiesel stated,”What are you, my God? I thought angrily. How do you compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to you their faith, their anger, their defiance?....
“ Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ‘Where is God now?’”
Just like other Jews, Eliezer's faith begins to falter by watching others be harshly treated, like himself, and viewing the horrific death of innumerable innocent lives. In the beginning, the 12 year old Eliezer starts out immensely religious, he's determined to learn more about the Torah and his own religion overall. However, when Eliezer and his family get taken to death camps, he begins to question his faith. As the days pass by, Elie Wiesel's faith
Elie, once so faithful, is one of the first to lose faith in God due to the horrific sights he sees. After witnessing the bodies of Jewish children being burned, Wiesel writes, “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever” (34). He quite understandably has begun to doubt that his God is with him following the sight of the supposedly chosen people’s bodies being unceremoniously burned. Elie, though, was perhaps not a member of the masses with this belief; in fact, some men were able to hold on to their beliefs despite these horrendous sights. Also near the middle of the book, Wiesel reflects on the faith of other Jews in the face of these events, saying that “some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come.
To find a man who has not experienced suffering is impossible; to have man without hardship is equally unfeasible. Such trials are a part of life and assert that one is alive by shaping one’s character. In the autobiographical memoir Night by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, this molding is depicted through Elie’s transformation concerning his identity, faith, and perspective. As a young boy, Elie and his fellow neighbors of Sighet, Romania were sent to Auschwitz, a macabre concentration camp with the sole motive of torturing and killing Jews like himself. There, Elie experiences unimaginable suffering, and upon liberation a year later, leaves as a transformed person.
Eliezer still believes in God, but his whole perception of reality has changed. He recognizes that this is not the same God he used to worship. However, even in his darkest moments, his faith in God could not escape him. Through his haunting tale, Elie Wiesel unveils his tumultuous relationship with God.
Continuing on, people judge God 's power to let people die even though they pray to Him. Elie yells at God for his bad judgment for killing innocent people. “...you cause the heavens torain down fire and damnation. But look at these men whom you have betrayed, allowing them tobe tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? They pray before you!
This, however, is not true. This is shown throughout the story with loss of faith and self identity. Wiesel loses faith a lot in this book along with other jewish members of the camps. Faith and religion is one thing that makes Elie who he truly is, making him more than just a “number”. Elie shows his loss of faith in God and in humanity through the “moments that murdered [his] God and [his] soul and turned [his] dreams to ashes.