Theme Of Religion In Night By Elie Wiesel

1335 Words6 Pages
"Religion is not man 's relationship to God, it is man 's relationship to man" (Elie Wiesel). Elie Wiesel was a twelve-year-old Jewish child when his world was turned upside-down after the German army invaded Hungary in the Spring of 1944. In his memoir Night, published in 1960, Elie writes about the time his father and him spent in Auschwitz-Buchenwald along with his struggle to understand and be faithful to God. This underlying theme reoccurs throughout the book, as Elie questions not only God but himself and his ability to stay faithful through the atrocities he witnesses. Growing up in a religious Jewish household, where his father devoted his life to the study of the Torah while his mother and sister worked in their family store, Elie 's "place was in the house of study" (Wiesel 4). Religion was very important to Elie as that is all that he knew, he goes as far as to ask his father "to find me a master who can guide me in the studies of Kabbalah", to which his father responds "you are too young for that… one must be thirty before venturing into the world of mysticism" (Wiesel 4). Elie Wiesel 's faith and understanding of the Jewish religion was not only tested throughout the book, but also strengthened through the use of repetition and varied sentence style, in which he stops his narrative flow in order to question himself and his faith in God. Through the use of these themes Wiesel learns to never give up hope so that one day he would be able to forgive those who had