Discussion Questions For Night By Elie Wiesel

1) As Night begins, Eliezer is so moved by faith that he weeps when he prays. He is also searching for a deeper understanding of the mystical teachings of the Kabbalah. How does Eliezer's relationship with his faith and with God change as the book progresses? At the beginning of the book, Eliezer is very strong in his faith, as shown by his weeping and his yearning for a teacher to teach him the Kabbalah. His strength doesn’t waver when his old teacher comes back and begs him to listen to the horrors he experienced. It still doesn’t waver when the Jews are separated from the citizens of their town in the ghettos. Until the point of the hanging of the pipel, I think he keeps his faith strong. At the end of the year celebration, a few days after the hanging, he questions why the Jews are still praising God after all the horrible things that have happened at the camp. I think that at the end of the book, he

Of course, night is used literally in the book to mean a time of day. It is also used as a motif in the book to symbolize death, the Jews gradual loss of faith, and suffering. As an image, it comes up repeatedly. Many things happen at night in the book. The Jews of Sighet are loaded into the cattle carts; Eliezer arrives at Auschwitz; they are forced to march through the night; they're stacked on top of each other and suffocate each other, and Eliezer’s father dies during the night.

3) Early in the book, after Moche the Beadle escapes his execution, no one, not even Eliezer, believes his tales (p. 7). Even when the Germans arrive in Sighet and move all the Jews into ghettos, the Jewish townspeople seem to ignore or suppress their fears. "Most people thought that we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Afterward everything would be as before" (p. 12). What might be the reasons for the townspeople's widespread denial of the evidence facing