Faith is a word to some and an entire meaning of life to others. For Elie it was his entire life. He was cruising along through his journey, becoming closer and closer with God until the Holocaust abruptly intervened. A boy who once devoted himself to his faith will begin to question God, become angry with God, and loose all faith in God.
At the beginning of the book, Elie 's spiritual bond with God was unbreakable. He practiced and studied the religion of Judaism routinely. In the quote "by day I would study Talmud, and by night I would run to the synagogue and weep over the destruction of the temple," shows the day to day devotion Elie had to God. At the young age of thirteen Elie wanted to further push his knowledge of Judaism by hiring
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Growing up so religiously has permanently forced Elie to look at life through a Jewish perspective. God has never truly left his consciousness. He says the prayer "Oh God, Master of the Universe, give me the strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahu’s son has done" even though he says "God in whom I no longer believed." Elie is constantly contradicting himself whens he claims he doesn 't believe but he still says prayers and thinks about God.
By the end of the book Elie 's faith in God or in anything for that matter is dead. The metaphor "from the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me" used in the last few sentences of the book supports the claim that Elie 's faith has ceased to exist. The corpse that Elie is seeing is himself because he was so severely starved, but it also can symbolically represent his faith. The holocaust did not physically kill Elie but it took with it his reasons to live.
Elie 's spiritual journey is a terribly great example of how nothing is permanent not even our devotion to our own religions. People live and die for their religions. Religion has built kingdoms and empires. Considered one of the strongest things on Earth and the holocaust took it by it 's throat and threw it to the ground. Crushing millions of peoples faiths and beliefs. Elie just happened to be one of the unlucky millions that got caught in the