How Does Elie Wiesel Use Faith In Night

“We are never defeated unless we give up on God” (Ronald Reagan).When no faith remains, it makes one a soulless man. Elie Wiesel uses Night to comment on the effects of the unforgettable experiences and grisly events that he has encountered during the Holocaust. Though Elie Wiesel was once a devoted Jew, when he experienced the gruesome treatments and witnessed the undeserved suffering in the concentration camps, he ultimately succumbed to the destruction of his faith and the ruination of his identity. Religion had always been an indispensable part of Elie Wiesel’s life, but the Holocaust prompted the faltering of his faith. Before his days at the concentration camps, Elie Wiesel was a fervently devout child who, unlike most kids , preferred

Elie was called along with the others to the appelplazt to watch the hanging of an innocent boy. When the boy lingered between life and death, Elie’s faith was pulverized seeing that his glorified god had allow inequity to befall, therefore, when one of the inmates asked where God is, Elie answered ” Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows” (65), revealing Elie’s belief that God was dead because hope and righteousness did not exist among them. Elie saw that his inmates were blessing God on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, he became enraged since he blamed God for their unscrupulous sufferings, thus, “Every fiber in [him] rebelled”(67) when he was supposed to express his gratitude to God. Elie has stopped seeking God’s help, instead, he was in charge of his own survival even when he was facing the worst of all things. Elie became independent from God and refused to view him as omnipotent, and therefore, Elie and the other inmates believed that“ [they] were masters of nature, masters of the world” (87). With the daunting experience that Elie had undergone, he felt that the camps had utterly devoured his identity and his soul, but because he suffered blisteringly and managed to abide, even if “ [he] was nothing but ashes now, [he] felt [himself] to be stronger than this Almighty to whom [his] life had been bound for so long” (68). Although Elie was at last, liberated from the concentration camp, the rigorous conditions and brutal treatments from the camps has weakened him physically, mentally, and spiritually. Elie, bereft of his faith and soul, looked into mirror for the first time after his liberation, and “from the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating him” (115). Through tormenting sufferings and witnessing the mortifying decimation in the Holocaust, Elie’s faith is eventually dismantled