Do you believe that religion and faith in it can change the outcome of your circumstances? Does the thought of something else ever cross your mind when severely challenged? In the memoir Night, Ellie Wiesel tells a story of his childhood going through World War 2 and specifically the effect on him from the Nazi regime. Night tells how he ventures from his hometown with his family and then is forced into concentration camps like Auschwitz and Birkenau where he is subjected to horrible and dehumanizing conditions. In this writing, we will be supporting the idea that Views and Faith in religion can change drastically when tested in trying situations. At the beginning of Night, we can see that Eliezer has a healthy and stable relationship with …show more content…
An example of Wisel’s eroding relationship with god can be found on page 67, “Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless him?”(67). Wiesel now is at a turning point in the book where he feels that God exists but he shouldn’t praise his name for everything that the Nazi regime has done like beating, starving, dehumanizing, and killing him and his people. It’s also important to note that around this time Wiesel starts to abandon his traditions in his religion including in this the ceremony to mark the new year in Judaism. I judge Wiesel feels that the people around him are also just going through it but still praising God despite all the traumatic events they have accumulated as told in the quote, “Thousands of lips repeated the benediction, bent over like tree’s in a storm”(67). It’s clear by now that his faith in God and Judaism has been a fleeting idea to Eliezer so with him questioning why they should praise him I think it’s also a real idea that Eliezer sees them as blindly following their faith. Here we find another big turning point as Wisel turns from denial to resentment, “I no longer accepted God's silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him”(69). This quote demonstrates that Wiesel has now turned to resentment of God as a cause of what has …show more content…
To demonstrate this Wiesel writes, “A prayer formed inside me, a prayer to this God in whom I no longer believed. "Oh God, Master of the Universe, give me the strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahu's son has done."”(91). This quote continues to demonstrate how the variation in religious views can be a drastic and sometimes emotional roller coaster in terms of what you do or don’t believe in. I believe these types of decisions can especially come out when in very dire and trying circumstances where it really tests what you do or don’t believe in especially if it’s something that will drastically affect your life. Our final example deals with Wiesel and the other Jews getting up to continue running as instructed by the SS guards, they wake to find many of them perished overnight, “The dead remained in the yard, under the snow without even a marker, like fallen guards. No one recited Kaddish over them”(92). This marks an important stage in the book where Weisel and the others are at a point of acceptance but it still can still fluctuate as circumstances change for them however at a certain point Eliezer and the others he’s running with probably don’t have a drastic amount of hope or morale seeing their friends and family being shot and dying overnight. Throughout their time running they’ve seen so many people shot and