Experiences that Change Us
Elie Wiesel grew up in the Transylvanian town of Sighet. Everyday Elie would study Talmud, as Elie’s father, who was highly respected in the Jewish Community in Sighet, told him to, but Elie yearned to study Kabbalah. To Elie’s dismay, his father would not approve and said, “There are not Kabbalists in Sighet”. This led to Elie asking the town beggar, Moishe the Beadle, to teach him Kabbalah. Moishe represents an earnest commitment to Judaism, as Elie goes on to lose faith in God. In Moishe’s statement “I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions,” Moishe tells Elie that the idea that God is everywhere, even within every individual, and the idea that faith is based on questions, not answers. Eliezer’s struggle with faith is, for the most part, a struggle of questions. He continually asks where God has gone and questions how such evil could exist in the world. Moishe’s statement tells us that
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Then, the Germans force the Jew to form small ghettos within the town. Soon they are herded onto cattle cars, and a nightmarish journey ensues. After days and nights crammed into the car, exhausted and near starvation, the passengers arrive at Birkenau, the gateway to Auschwitz. Upon his arrival in Birkenau, Eliezer and his father are separated from his mother and sisters, whom they never see again. At Birkenau, the Germans perform “selections” to determine who should be killed immediately or put to work. Only those who were able-bodied would be allowed to live and be fed. Elie and his father pass the first selection and before they go to the prisoner barracks, they stumble upon the open-pit furnaces where the Nazis are burning babies by the truckload. In camp, Elie and his father, work hard to get almost no food and shelter. Slowly, Elie loses his faith in God and