The way Wiesel’s faith in God changes is that he was a firm worshiper but then he starts to lose faith as the story progresses. Wiesel doubted God’s absolute justice as we can see here “As for me, I had ceased to pray…. I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.” (45). Wiesel doubted God’s absolute justice because God had not interfered with the Nazis, letting them commit horrendous acts in the camps. This is where Wiesel starts to rebel against God, as we can see here “Why, would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves.” (66). This shows how Wiesel is rebelling against God and blames Him for the Holocaust and for allowing it to happen in the first
Everyone was in danger, from jews to gypsies to even homosexuals. If you were seen as different, you were likely to die. During this time period, many German people were feeling racially superior to an extreme point where they felt the only thing to do was put an end to everyone else; this was the Holocaust. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie tells his story about his life during the Holocaust, and everything he went through to keep his father and himself alive. Everyone's faith in the goodness of God was being tested during the Nazi era.
Throughout the book Night, the main character Wiesel's opinion of God changed once he experienced something as mortifying as the Holocaust. When his faith was tested, he decided to stop having faith in God, he stopped trusting God, and allowed himself to stop being illuded by God. On page 19 there are a few examples of Wiesel's views and beliefs on God before the Holocaust. “Where, according to Kabbalah ”, this shows that Weisel was interested in his faith enough that he knew the rules and standards/principles that his religion valued. “I succeeded on my own in finding a master for myself in the person of Moishe the Beadle.”
After the life changing experience in the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Wiesel has lost his devotion in his Creator. Having a great deal of faith in God for many years and then losing it in a matter of months is difficult. For Wiesel he questions God multiple times about his ways before he lets his religion go. Even after though he continues to let his
The Holocaust was a genocide by Nazi Germany during World War II, resulting in the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews, as well as millions of others. Night is a novel by Elie Wiesel about his experience in the holocaust. The Holocaust forever changed Elie's life and family. Wiesel's memoir focuses on his experiences during World War II focusing on the themes of faith, survival, and regret.
He stayed in that camp and watched everyone die around him, and his faith began to falter. He began to wonder if there was even a God anymore, and if there was, why was God letting all of this happen to them? The night the soup tasted like corpses, Elie states: “Here He [God] is- He is hanging here in the gallow.... “ That might be one of the reasons that Wiesel told his
Wiesel was very religious and faithful growing up. He couldn't imagine living without being gracious to god. However, during the first night at the camps, Wiesel saw families being killed and thrown into mass graves and couldn't believe his eyes. He was wondering, where was god and how could he be allowing all of this to happen. “Why, but why would I bless him?...
but he questioned his reasoning and purpose. Wiesel couldn’t comprehend how a god, his god, who was so merciful, could be blind to the human suffering that was going on. Wiesel wasn’t the only one suffering from the act of believing in his religion, so were the rest of the Jews. It was very hard for anyone in the concentrations camps to have any faith or hope
To Wiesel, his faith is everything and he describes it with one simple sentence, “I believed profoundly” (1). It may not seem like much, but this one line perfectly explains Wiesel’s faith, strong and seemingly unbreakable. Wiesel was unlike most kids his age. He spent every night in the synagogue with Moshe the Beadle studying the Kabbalah, the ancient Jewish tradition of mystical interpretation of the Bible. To him faith was an everyday part of life, and he couldn't live without it, “Why did I pray?
As Moishe the Beadle said previously, "there is a certain power in a question that is lost in the answer. "Wiesel struggles throughout the novel to keep his faith and trust in a god who is supposed to serve and protect. He had trouble grasping why the god he prayed to and lived for would punish him by allowing him to reside in a replica of hell on earth. When the one remaining strand of faith Wiesel had which was his father died so did his will to believe and carry on. Some choose to follow god without speculation for salvation,others for security of mind,and some without cause.
After seeing Jews continue to pray, Wiesel’s anger at God grows. He says to himself “‘Blessed be God's Name’… Blessed be God's name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled.
However throughout the novel Wiesel explains to how his relationship and beliefs in God were slowly disappearing. Death was eloquent in Wiesels loss with his religion and belief in God, this reason being that seeing all of the deaths happening and the cruel actions that the Jews were put through made Wiesel believe that if God wasnt there stopping all of these horrendous things, then did he even exist? Wasn't God supposed to be his
Wiesel's loss of faith was brought on by the absence of God. This resulted in him questioning why it was God's will to allow Jews to suffer and die the way they had. Another portrayal of religious confliction within Wiesel was the statement of his faith being consumed by the flames along with the corpses of children (Wiesel 34). Therefore, he no longer believed God was the almighty savior everyone had set Him out to be or even present before them. To conclude, his experiences within Nazi confinement changed what he believed in and caused him to change how he thought and began questioning God because of the actions He allowed to take
Wiesel changes vastly throughout the book, whether it is his faith in God, his faith in living, or even the way his mind works. In the beginning of his memoir, Wiesel appeared to be faithful to God and the Jewish religion, but during his time in concentration camps, his faith in God wavered tremendously. Before his life was corrupted, he would praise God even when he was being transferred to Auschwitz, but after living in concentration camps, he began to feel rebellious against his own religion. In the book, Elie
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?....
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.