Elie Wiesel Night Analysis

All of humanity is built on the concept of hope. Its stories, its architecture, its travel and its ardent exploration of things larger and more powerful than itself, such as religion, are all based on wanting something more than what is present. Even a person's funeral can be brought back to a certain hopefulness. When someone dies, especially someone who is known to the community, that community will choose to believe that that person is better off and is exploring new opportunities they did not have in their lifetime. Conceptually, hope is integral to humanity. It cannot exist without it. Therefore, for hope to be murdered, it has to be in the face of the most despicable inhumanity, the grossest of negligence and lack of reason: genocide.

In Wiesel’s Night, it was the callous murders the Jews saw happen in the concentration camps that eventually caused them to renounce their God. During a solemn prayer session on Rosh Hashanah, Wiesel observes the worship and bitterly questions why he should be praising God, since “...He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because he kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days?” (Wiesel 66). The righteous and compassionate God that Wiesel had known could not exist while at the same time apparently allowing these things to happen. A supremely powerful God should be able to protect His people, all things considered. However, nothing happened. Their God did not speak to them or try to save them. The Nazis kept working, kept torturing, kept killing. If God could not stop a child from being publicly hanged (Wiesel 90), then what god were they worshipping? If not powerlessness, then their God aided and abetted their murderers, just as the shepherd would help the butcher choose the best sheep for the slaughter. Either way, he deceived his people, who loved him for what Wiesel saw as everything he was not. This same disappointment and anger presents itself in the Rwandan genocide, though for something much more direct. It has been noted that priests, bishops, as well as other clergymen and women actively participated in the murder of Tutsis as well as helped to incite racial division and hatred (Totten). Because of this and, of course, the brutality of what happened, the Tutsis felt as though God may have chosen to ignore them or even abandon them. Immaculee Ilibagiza, a survivor of Rwanda, makes this extremely clear to the readers of her memoir Left to Tell. While hiding from the Hutu militia, Ilibagiza encounters a pastor, who mentions that the Hutus want to “cleanse” Rwanda of the Tutsis. Infuriated, she asks God