1. After the hanging of a child, Elie hears someone say, “‘For God’s sake, where is God?’ And from within me, I heard a voice answer: ‘Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows…’ That night, the soup tasted of corpses” (Wiesel 65). Though optimistic at first, Elie Wiesel, along with many others at the concentration camps, began to lose faith in God.
Elie Wiesel first started losing his faith in god when he first arrived in Auschwitz. He saw innocent women and children being showed into crematories. According to Elie," The Almighty, the eternal and terrible master of the Universe, chose to be silent." (Wiesel 33) Elie had wondered why god had to make
Elie Wiesel saw no sense at being and keeping faithfulness to God. A book of life and death does not rests in the hands of God, but in the hands of the executioner. Author expressed himself from leaving his ancestral faith, showed hatred referring to the Creator, whom he loved and worshiped before finding himself in the camp. He (God) became a stranger; sometimes considered him an enemy. Meanwhile, religious life in Auschwitz was very intense, despite the enormity of humiliation, slave labor and fear for survival during selection to the gas chambers.
Wiesel's loss of faith was brought on by the absence of God. This resulted in him questioning why it was God's will to allow Jews to suffer and die the way they had. Another portrayal of religious confliction within Wiesel was the statement of his faith being consumed by the flames along with the corpses of children (Wiesel 34). Therefore, he no longer believed God was the almighty savior everyone had set Him out to be or even present before them. To conclude, his experiences within Nazi confinement changed what he believed in and caused him to change how he thought and began questioning God because of the actions He allowed to take
Religion. A strong word for some and an everyday term for others. To Eliezer Wiesel religion meant everything, at least that’s how it was prior to the holocaust. While Wiesel was at the appalling concentration camp his faith for God began to dwindle with every reprehensible event Eliezer was included in. While dwelling upon the relationship that Wiesel had with God throughout the novel Night I have come to the conclusion that Wiesel's experience at Auschwitz has stripped him of his faith for the lord.
No one has anything to hold onto, therefore making them lost in society. In the beginning of the book, before travelling to Auschwitz, he had a tight relationship with god saying “I believed profoundly”. But towards the end, he lost all belief in God. This leads to the question, what happened? This also leads to the question, when/what is the point where one realizes that God is only a spirit?
Theme Analysis Essay: Having and Losing Faith In God Freedom of religion is a fundamental human right that protects all people. Religions faith can be tested under certain circumstances, which can falter the relationship one can have with their God. In the memoir Night, by Elie Wiesel, the author creates the universal theme that religious faith is questioned and challenged during traumatic events. Throughout the story, we see many relationships with God scarcely survive, and some completely fail entirely. For the duration of the memoir, Wiesel uses plenty of narrative elements to help convey this theme.
Elie Wiesel loses faith in God and his family through the events that he undergoes in the Nazi concentration camps. To begin, Elie is deprived of his religion in the camps. He struggles physically and mentally, therefore, he no longer believes that there is a higher power: "Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust..." (34). Imprisoned in a factory of death, Elie does not believe that his God will give him the strength to keep him going.
Steele analysis Night as being focused on how the Holocaust affected many people’s faith with God. He states that Night’s purpose was , “to focus on the Holocaust’s significance for altering the human understanding of man’s relationship to God” (Steele 1). He then begins to explain that ever since 1945, due to the Holocaust, many theological revisions have taken place in both Jewish and Christian beliefs. However, he distinctly points out that, “Night is not an example of the “death of God theology””(Steele 1). He makes it perfectly clear that Wiesel did not lose complete faith in God, however his views of God were significantly alter after his survival.
When he no longer accepted god, he had no other thing besides his father to live for. “Man is a creature of faith as much as reason” (Economist 77). It is faith that gives man reason and a will to live. Though the way one might accept his fate may appear involuntary, Victor Frankl claims that man has a choice to hold on to his faith. Elie Wiesel’s relative, Stein, for example, chose to give up on faith and his life when he realized his wife and children were dead.
Earlier, a man had asked that question while a young boy was hanged alongside the adults, murdered at the hands of the Nazis. “Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ‘Where is God now?’” (Wiesel, 72). At this moment, Elie and many others began to question their faith.
A common questioning of a higher power beyond the physical realm lingers in society: Who and what is God?. However, many of these theological questions cannot be answered until we, of course, die. Due to human’s innate curiosity to understand the forces beyond their own, especially in terms of religion, humans find their own reasons to believe in God in the process of discovery. Religion is a sense of belief and worship to praise a higher power (God), and it provides a guide for human beings to have the opportunity to come together and live as one image of God’s children. “Imagine There’s No Heaven” is an article in which Salman Rushdie, the author, presents an atheistic view where religion is pointless, and a higher being is non-existent.
In the memoir Night, the narrator Elie Wiesel recounts a moment when he questioned God, ¨Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless him? Every fiber in me rebelled, he caused thousands of children to burn his Mass graves?¨(Wiesel 68). Overall, Wiesel does not follow the words of God and is not believing in him anymore because he thinks God is the one thatś letting all the inhumanity occur. One theme in Night is that inhumanity can cause disbelief or incredulity.
He does not believe in a God, stating that the church exists to “devalue nature and natural values” and claiming that these religious systems steal power, creating weakness in mankind (Nietzsche 34). He creates a primitive and selfish lifestyle as a model to compliment this new concept of inverted values. This lifestyle is based on the Hyperboreans, a mythical race that lives North of the Arctic Circle and exemplifies strength and vigor. Nietzsche believed in training people from a young age to maximize power to assert dominance and exude toughness because goodness was associated with everything that creates a feeling of power and, therefore, happiness. Straying away from this is the reason for man’s weakness, which he claims is equivalent to unhappiness and all that is considered bad.
"If a temple is to be erected, a temple must be destroyed!" Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is one of humanity's most influential and amaranthine thinkers. He was a German philosopher, political critic, philologist, writer, and poet. Some of his most famous works include Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), The Gay Science (1882), The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Twilight of the Idols (1889), The Will to Power (1901), etc. His impact isn't just on recently found scholarly insight, but additionally on the way numerous contemporary Western philosophers approach "life".
