Elie Wiesel Rhetorical Speech Analysis Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor and winner of a Nobel peace prize, stood up on April 12, 1999 at the White House to give his speech, “The Perils of Indifference”. In Wiesel’s speech he was addressing to the nation, the audience only consisted of President Clinton, Mrs. Clinton, congress, and other officials. The speech he gave was an eye-opener to the world in his perspective. Wiesel uses a variety of rhetorical strategies and devices to bring lots of emotion and to educate the indifference people have towards the holocaust. “You fight it.
As for me, I had ceased to pray... I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice” (45). It is apparent here that the effect of the Holocaust on the Jewish people’s faith was delayed on some level. Elie refuses to pray to the God that apparently abandoned him. This is personified when he says he doubts that God has absolute justice.
This quote shows how Elie's faith went down the hill, He no longer believed God was with him or that God was looking over him. He was really hurt and sad that the God he believed in for a long time wasn't there for him or his pairs. Another Obstacle in the book was when he couldn't believe
Eliezer has not only lost faith in god but he has begun to feel hatred towards him for letting innocent men and women be slaughtered and burned. Elie now feels strong hatred towards god for not protecting the Jews. Elie’s view of god changed for the worse. He was very religious and close to god in many ways. He slowly began to lose faith and hope in god.
Belief and Faith is a “double-edged sword” to the jews, it cuts both ways. It keeps them alive, and at the same time makes them oblivious, and leads to their suffering. Over time, Elie’s belief in god, diminishes and eventually he questions God’s existence extensively and at point, Elie is infuriated that even though they are being tormented and enslaved, the Jews will still pray to god, and thank him, “If god did exist, why would he let u go through all the pain and suffering (33). This is a major point in the ongoing theme of faith and belief, because for once he is infuriated with the thought of religion in a time of suffering. Throughout the book, with the nazis ultimate goal is to break the jews and make dehumanize them and if anything, their goal is take and diminish their belief.
Strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe? ,” (pg. 5). This contrast makes the reader think a great deal, and maybe challenges their own thoughts on God from how powerful the situation is; these inhumane things are being done so frequently, that it forces people like the Jews to revert to a
The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?” (33). Elie is mad at his dad for celebrating God because God is silent. He thinks that God is letting all of this happen and questions his judgment.
The Master of the Universe had betrayed him and gave him nothing but misery. Elie and his father had suffered year after year and still no sign of God had come about. All Elie saw in the eyes of the hopeless victims was innocence. With everything happening around him, the burning of the children, the beaten and petrified women, the enslaved men that could not defend themselves. With all of that happening and God still was not here.
Elie is losing faith in God because he has been able to create Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Buna, which kills many. He says, “But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament,” (68) demonstrating Elie’s full move-away from God. Elie’s identity is left insecure and he is now alone. Elie was not “terrible alone in a world without God, without men.”
Paradox, parallelism, personification, repetition, rhetorical question, pathos. You may ask yourself: what importance do these words have? These words are rhetorical devices used to develop a claim. A person who used these important devices was Elie Wiesel. In his 1986 Nobel Peace Acceptance Speech, Elie Wiesel develops the claim that remaining silent on human sufferings makes us just as guilty as those who inflicted the suffering and remain guilty for not keeping the memory of those humans alive.
Israeli Supreme Court Justice Haim Cohen proclaimed about the Holocaust, “If there is Auschwitz, there is no God”. It was hard for many Jewish victims to believe that any God could exist if the absurdly horrific events of the Holocaust could
Elie was not able to preserve his faith in God when he struggled to survive in the concentration camps. He started to question his faith by saying, “Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why should I bless him? Every fiber in me rebelled.” In the midst of so much suffering, Elie finds it hard to bless God.
Doubting everything he had done to praise God before Elie asked, “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?” (66). As Elie experiences and witnesses increasing dehumanization, his faith turns into anger, blaming God for all the actions he has allowed the Germans to commit, feeling betrayed and frustrated when all he has ever done is laud him, as he is now being punished in this manner.
Each day, people all across the globe pray to the God they believe in and they rely on Him to ensure the safety and of themselves, their loved ones and others they know. But when their prayers fail, people start to wonder if they were even considered by God Himself. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie encounters these questions first hand while experiencing being a prisoner during the Holocaust. As he is sent through the processes of concentration camps, he experiences so many unwanted sights that one would automatically be astonished by.
He loved learning about God and was also interested in mysticism. “I was almost thirteen and deeply observant. By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple” (3). Elie spends most of his time at the synagogue praying and learning more about his faith. As the memoir continues is questioned by Moishe the Beadle, a “religious crony” of Elie’s, about his prayer.
