Loss Of Faith In Night By Elie Wiesel

In a time of political and religious turmoil in Europe, a young Jewish boy, Elie Wiesel, was living oblivious to the danger all around him. Choosing to ignore reality, Elie continued his extremely religious lifestyle, until on a spring day in 1944, everything changed. The Nazis had made it to Elie's small village and were rounding up all the Jews to be immediately deported to concentration camps. Once there, they were treated with no pity. Elie was separated form his mother and sisters, he only had his father left. Over time conditions became increasingly poor. Elie was starved, beaten, and made to work in freezing conditions. People were dying all around him, and he even eventually lost his father. Elie Wiesel was one of the few "lucky"

There was a long process in which the horrors that Elie was exposed to continued to hack away at his moral. Eventually, he could no longer withstand the pressure to give up on trying to understand the God he had once believed in. Before Elie lost faith altogether, there was a long period where Elie still believed in God, but he had huge doubts as to whether God cared about the Jews or not. Witnessing so many people pray for help in and then seeing that they received no answer made Elie begin to believe that Gods was indifferent. This belief that God could careless about his people cased a feeling of bitterness to well up within Elie. One of the earliest places that this anger appears is when Elie refused to praise God on Rosh Hashanah, instead, he thinks",Why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days?" (Wiesel 152). This quote expresses that Elie was having an intense internal conflict, on one side he wanted to cary out the traditions that he had been exposed to during his childhood, but on the other hand he was angry with God for what he was allowing to happen to the Jews. Elie became more and more frustrated at the lack of response from God and this eventually caused him to to doubt that

He could no-longer believe in the god of his youth, he could no-longer comprehend why any god would treat a people group so terribly. Elie gave up, he to seised to believe, the faith of his childhood was gone. After losing such a huge part of his life, Elie felt like an empty shell of a person, like something was always missing. Even when Elie was trying to rebel, he felt no satisfaction. Elie firsts denied his faith during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur refused to fast because he no longer excepted that God was being silent, he no longer excepted God at all. This thought was originally one of rebellion, but he couldn't help but feel like there was something off, like he had lost rather than won the fight,"I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him. And I nibbled on my crust of bread. Deep inside me, I felt a great void opening" (Wiesel 147). The message of this passage is expressed in a very metaphorical way, and this allows the reader to understand the extent of Elie's depression. His faith, his passion, his love, had been consumed by the void, by the