Abeir Quteibi Martin English 10 22 May 2023 The Changes In Faith In the memoir Night, Ellie Wiesel was just 15 years old when he was sent to concentration camps and lost everything he ever knew. He no longer had a family, purpose, or faith in god. Wiesel used to be a very religious person growing up but after what he experienced during his time in the camps, he no longer believed that god deserved praise. Wiesel was very religious and faithful growing up. He couldn't imagine living without being gracious to god. However, during the first night at the camps, Wiesel saw families being killed and thrown into mass graves and couldn't believe his eyes. He was wondering, where was god and how could he be allowing all of this to happen. “Why, but why would I bless him?... Because he caused thousands of children to burn in his mass graves?” (67) At this point the reader understands how Wiesel is in disbelief of how god is allowing those mass murders. How could Wiesel ever bless and praise a god who is making him witness all these murders? …show more content…
While the rest of the camp started to fast in obedience to god Wiesel did not. “As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him.” (69) This shows how by swallowing the soup instead of fasting with the others Wiesel is no longer the religious little boy he once was. He now has little faith and rebels against gods word. He didn't believe there was a reason for him to fast. He would not accept the fact that god was allowing these poor people to go through such misery. How could people be affirming their faith in a god who was abandoning them? “Why do you go troubling these poor peoples wounded minds, their ailing bodies.” (66) The reader can now understand Wiesels's thought process. He couldn't believe how sick and wounded the people were but still stayed
Yom Kippur, The Day of Atonement, had arrived and Wiesel questioned himself if he should fast or not. He believed that fasting was year-round, but many of the prisoners believed they should because they believed that they needed to show God that even being there they were capable of worshiping Him. Wiesel and his father decided not fast since they were going to need all the food and all the strength they could get to stay alive. By then Wiesel had lost faith in God and could no longer accept the silence of God, Wiesel protested against Him.(Wiesel 87). After a long day of working all the prisoners were sent back into their blocks and many would talk about God, Wiesel questioned why, why were they praying, begging, asking God for help and forgiveness, since God, Himself was making them suffer the worst thing possible to man kind.
Similarly, in the camps during the Holocaust, the Jews there faced so much abuse that they began to lose their sense of identity, especially in what they believed in. Even Wiesel, who was a devout Jew before being encamped, began to lose the worth of his God and religion, as did others in the camps. While imprisoned, Wiesel had to celebrate Rosh Hashanah. This prayer service included praising God, but even Wiesel, who used to spend hours reading Scripture, thought, “Why should I bless Him?”(Wiesel 64) This showed how by seeing all of the abuse around him, Wiesel couldn’t even put faith and hope in the one person he used to be able to.
After being brought to Auschwitz, Elie fought for his survival and later began to question God. Elie ultimately loses faith in God and wonders why God would do this to him. Elie's traumatic experience in concentration camps caused him to lose faith. Night written by Elie Wiesel, reveals that belief can dissipate due to tragic circumstances.
Do you believe that religion and faith in it can change the outcome of your circumstances? Does the thought of something else ever cross your mind when severely challenged? In the memoir Night, Ellie Wiesel tells a story of his childhood going through World War 2 and specifically the effect on him from the Nazi regime. Night tells how he ventures from his hometown with his family and then is forced into concentration camps like Auschwitz and Birkenau where he is subjected to horrible and dehumanizing conditions. In this writing, we will be supporting the idea that Views and Faith in religion can change drastically when tested in trying situations.
If the young boy had gave into all the torture and torment and told the SS officers the information they desired, he would’ve been killed on the spot– once the information was received, the SS officers no longer had a use for him. But his persistence postponed his sealed fate, even if it were only a couple of days. After his execution, the other inmate’s doubts and questions towards their God began to grow. His death also solidified Wiesel’s loss of faith and religion. In order to delay his eventual death, the young persisted with silence even when faced with inhumane
Wiesel reveals at the end of the story that his faith would never be the same after his experiences. Wiesel writes impactful words about the holocaust and his faith when he says “Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to
Wiesel loses his humanity and sense of purpose and finds himself constantly questioning, “Here or elsewhere, what did it matter? Die today or tomorrow, or later?” (98). Considering the dire circumstances that he was in, his loss of faith was inevitable when survival came first. The surrounding men had also lost their humanity while fighting to survive.
The holocaust is among the most gruesome genocides to this day. On the flip side, this makes it a great time period to observe how faithful individuals can stay, in the most troublesome situations imaginable. In Night, by Elie Wiesel, the author details his own experience in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. Throughout the story, it is evident that many individuals in the camps desired that religion and faith would come to their rescue. Despite Elie’s religious background, due to the horrors the holocaust is famous for today, his own relationship with god, and his own Jewish identity became rather foggy.
Going through hard experiences in life can transform a person’s relationship with God. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, he writes about how his faith in God is altered as a result of his experience in the Holocaust. Before the war, Elie’s relationship with God is straightforward: He has absolute, complete faith in God. Over the course of the memoir, he develops a more mature relationship with God, in which Wiesel continues to believe in God but expresses his anger and doubt.
Wiesel tells us of the sights he saw while inside the camps. These things show us what the majority of the people in the camps had to go through on a day to day basis. Wiesel truly is one of the most inspiring figures of his time, his work in literature has inspired and taught millions of students and adults
He had nothing to live for. In the end of the book he leaves the camp and has a new life.
Wiesel reveals the truth that when surrounded by many horrific events, it can lead to one 's loss of religious faith. This is exemplified in Elie’s lack of following religious traditions, many questioning God’s existence, and people believing that they no longer need God to help them survive these brutal conditions.
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
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.
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.