Loss Of Faith In Night By Elie Wiesel

The Holocaust was one of the worst things to ever happen in the civilization of mankind. The mass genocide resulted in the deaths of 6 million Jewish people all over Europe. During the Holocaust, the people that were not immediately executed were put into concentration camps. During the peoples’ time in the camps, their faith in Judaism was tested as some had an even deeper faith in their religion, meanwhile others lost all faith in God for allowing such things to happen to human beings. Richard L. Rubenstein wrote about how the people in the world lost faith in God and questioned religion as a whole. Meanwhile, Elie Wiesel wrote an entirely different point of the view, saying that the people took an even deeper faith in God for keeping them

During his time in the camps, Wiesel speaks about the men that believed in God and the men who denied God, both during and after the genocide. He specifically says that those who denied God were not the survivors that were even inside of the concentration camps but rather the outsiders that had been left alone by the Nazi occupation. Wiesel says that “a Jews is incapable of hate,” proving a point that the Jews did not hate God as they don’t hate anyone or anything. (364) Wiesel believed that the Nazi’s goal was to not only exterminate Jews physically by mass killing, but to also exterminate Jews spiritually by dehumanizing them so that they wouldn’t want to pass down their religion to future generations. The Nazi’s wanted the spread of Judaism to cease and Wiesel witnessed this while he was in the camps, however, Rubenstein is actually promoting what the Nazi’s wanted the Jews to feel about

Rubenstein was seen by others to have atheist positions as he truly questioned whether or not God was truly there with them at their time of need. He didn’t even write his book, After Auschwitz, until the Holocaust had been over for 20 years. In his book, Rubenstein said that “we live in the time of the death of God," when he described how he believed people should be feeling. He released his book during the “Death of God” movement and said that whatever had been connecting man to God was broken. I believe that this loss of faith in God, believing that he was dead even, is what the Nazi’s wanted all along. If they weren’t able to get rid of every last Jewish person, they could instill a lack of faith in God, thus ridding the Earth entirely of the Jewish religion and