Free Night Essays: Elie's Loss Of Faith

As stated by Wiesel, at a desperate point Jewish prisoners needed help from God. Elle believed God chose to be silent in a time when people needed him. This drove Elie to thoughts of committing suicide because if God wasn’t helping the prisoners there is no point of living. Elle thought there was no point in thanking God because he believed didn’t do anything to help the prisoners that were praying to him and asking for help. He questioned the reason why people even try to have hope that The Almighty would help them if he wouldn’t even answer their Kaddish to him.(33) Wiesel believed, Elie came close to giving up on hope when a son killed his own father for food on a train to another camp. People gave up on hope and felt no remorse for killing

Mortifying. Earth shattering. Horrific. The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel tells of his experience in the horrific concentration camp Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel was a 15 year old Jewish boy when his entire family was moved to a concentration camp. At the camp, Elie goes through many mortifying and earth shattering trials that test him. One of his trials was his relationship with God. At first, Elie had great faith in God, but later on he starts to doubt God's power, and near the end of the memoir he no longer believes God had any power to help.

When these people were being treated in such malicious ways, they started to believe that God wasn’t really there for them. They felt as if He wasn 't there to protect them. Sometimes, they started to rebel against their own religion and turn to their worst enemies for faith. Throughout Elie’s memoir, Night, Elie shows that many people, including himself, lost faith during their stay at the concentration camps. Many other victims of the concentration camps lived to see such tragedies that they began to lose hope in God, as well as he did. Some of these survivors never believed in their religion after their experiences. However, for others, it took time for them to retrieve the passionate faith that they once had. In the duration of their time spent at the concentration camps, almost all of the victims questioned

Eliezer loses his faith throughout his experience because of all the tragic events he goes through.The other Jews of the camps didn’t see the amount of cruelty that he saw. During the book, Eliezer sees the babies being burned to death and he immediately questions why God would let anything so cruel happen. Later, he went through a violent public lashing. There were many other moments in the book where bad things happened to him, including when he was split from his mother and sister. I can see why Eliezer questioned his faith because so many tragic events happened to him.

Elie Wiesel suspects that God is letting him go through such a situation. Wiesel begins losing faith in God. For example, Wiesel stated,”What are you, my God? I thought angrily. How do you compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to you their faith, their anger, their defiance?....Why do you go on troubling these poor people’s wounded minds, their ailing bodies?”(Wiesel 68) Wiesel clearly is losing faith in God because he has seen babies burned alive, families killed together. Wiesel blames God for what has happened. Additionally, Elie Wiesel is not thankful for God anymore because he is not in Auschwitz helping him and the rest of the Jews. Wiesel feels anger towards God. For instance, Wiesel claimed, “For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?”(Wiesel 33) Wiesel wants God help him. He wants God to speak to him and help escape the Hell he is living. Wiesel isn’t thankful for God being silent and feels nothing but anger towards him. To sum up, loss of faith is another theme in Night that shows

As the time went by inside the camps, many wondered if it would be better to just give up, give up and forget all the misery they have gone through. To just let go and fall in the arms of god. However, for some that was not the case, they fought until they no longer had a sense of what they were doing and if it was the right thing to do. They had hope, hope that made them feel as if this was not real, that it would all pass soon. For example, Elie Wiesel said ”I pinched myself: Was I still alive? Was I awake? How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent? No. All this could not be real. A nightmare, perhaps… Soon I would wake up with a start, my heart pounding, and find that I was back in my room of my childhood with my books…” (pg. 32) This shows that Elie was starting to realize the truth, and is trying to believe that all the horrors happening around him are not true. Elie spent his first months at the camp denying that he was in any danger and that he would be safe, he had hope. After months of coming to a sense that there would be no liberation of the jews Elie became numb to the idea of death. He no longer had hope in God, in others, nor himself. Elie has said in later years ”During, there was nothing--not even a plea to or a bargain with God. God, he feels, had nothing to do with his survival. "If God was

Elie, once so faithful, is one of the first to lose faith in God due to the horrific sights he sees. After witnessing the bodies of Jewish children being burned, Wiesel writes, “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever” (34). He quite understandably has begun to doubt that his God is with him following the sight of the supposedly chosen people’s bodies being unceremoniously burned. Elie, though, was perhaps not a member of the masses with this belief; in fact, some men were able to hold on to their beliefs despite these horrendous sights. Also near the middle of the book, Wiesel reflects on the faith of other Jews in the face of these events, saying that “some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come. As for me, I had ceased to pray...I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice” (45). It is apparent here that the effect of the Holocaust on the Jewish people’s faith was delayed on some level. Elie refuses to pray to the God that apparently abandoned him. This is personified when he says he doubts that God has absolute justice. Others remain faithful and retain the hope that He is on their side, explaining these happenstances as an example of God’s mysterious ways. While this may as well be the case, Elie stops praying, believing that he has been abandoned. He finds no hope of redemption in the Talmud like

Elie’s faith towards God changes a lot as the story goes on. In the beginning of the work, his faith in God is complete. In chapter one when asked why he prays to God, he says, “Why did I pray?... Why did I live? Why did I breathe?” His belief in God is great, and he cannot imagine living without faith in his divine power. But his faith is challenged by what he has to go through during the Holocaust.

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. He uses plot and setting to help depict the situation the characters are in, and how that tests their relationship with God. He also uses

Belief and Faith is a “double-edged sword” to the jews, it cuts both ways. It keeps them alive, and at the same time makes them oblivious, and leads to their suffering. Over time, Elie’s belief in god, diminishes and eventually he questions God’s existence extensively and at point, Elie is infuriated that even though they are being tormented and enslaved, the Jews will still pray to god, and thank him, “If god did exist, why would he let u go through all the pain and suffering (33). This is a major point in the ongoing theme of faith and belief, because for once he is infuriated with the thought of religion in a time of suffering. Throughout the book, with the nazis ultimate goal is to break the jews and make dehumanize them and if anything, their goal is take and diminish their belief. The torturing and suffering caused is what widdles down the belief, and this present throughout the novel. Only the strong and the ones who have most faith would survive, yet at the same time, if they didn’t originally have faith, they could’ve avoided the concentration camps

Imagine believing so strongly in something and then being let down, or thinking that you were wrong to believe. In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie felt as though he had lost his religion and beliefs. “I believed profoundly. During the day I studied the Talmud, and at night I ran to the synagogue to weep of the destruction of the Temple,” (Wiesel, 14). This quote shows how strongly he believed before experiencing the hardships of the Holocaust and it changed him. In the book, Night, the main theme, is religion and belief which is shown when Elie talks about the his strong religion and belief as a boy, his disconnection from religion, and the inhumane actions the Nazi 's caused.

Imagine believing so strongly in something and then being let down, or thinking that you were wrong even to believe. In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie felt as though he had lost his religion and belief in God. We learned how strong his beliefs were when he says,“I believed profoundly. During the day I studied the Talmud, and at night I ran to the synagogue to weep of the destruction of the Temple,” (Wiesel, 14). But then he experiences the hardships of the Holocaust and it abruptly changed him. In the book Night, the main theme is religious belief, shown when Elie talks about the his strong religion and belief as a boy, his disconnection from religion, and the inhumane actions the Nazis caused.

On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jews gathered in silence, worshiping God. Elie is in shock that they still praise Him despite the terrible things they have endeavored. He even goes into lengths to say, “Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?,” (pg. 67) and he even begins to think about how man is truly greater than God, “And I, the former mystic, was thinking: Yes, man is stronger, greater than God. When Adam and Eve deceived You, You chased them from paradise… But look at these men whom You have betrayed, what do they do? They pray before You! They praise Your name!,” (pg.68) because of all the horrors and mistreatment Elie has endured, like witnessing infants being thrown into the trenches, “... Children thrown into the flames,” (pg.32), and watching his father being slapped, “... he slapped my father with such force that he fell down and then crawled back to his place on all fours,” (pg.39), his faith is distinguished. This contrasts to the beginning of the book where Eliezer says he cannot imagine a world without God, “Why do I pray? Strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?,” (pg. 5). This contrast makes the reader think a great deal, and maybe challenges their own thoughts on God from how powerful the situation is; these inhumane things are being done so frequently, that it forces people like the Jews to revert to a

Elie Wiesel was a young boy when he did survived the holocaust.. In his memoir Night, we follow his journey as a Jewish boy in a time where expressing your religion could mean life or death. Between living under the watch of Nazi regimes, trying to keep his father alive, and surviving the inhumanity of others, Elie’s had fought and lived through the genocide unlike any other. However, surviving the holocaust does not come without a price. Wiesel lived at the sacrifice of his faith and identity, which were left in fragments after the existence of evil that left a permanent scar on his life.

World War II ruined the lives of many people all across the world, and each person’s experience affected them in different ways. Both characters lost something, but the loss that Elie experiences is more than anything that a student reading the book could comprehend. The the events in the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel in comparison to Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki are considerably more tragic, but each event had massive effects on the lives of those affected.