Elie Wiesel's Struggles Essay

Wiesel’s Struggle with God

Genocide, extermination, impoverishment, starvation, forced labor, killing squads, concentration camps; these are words that describe the horrific events that preceded the beginning of 1933. Infamously known as the Holocaust, is when the leader of the Nazi party, Adolf Hitler, became chancellor of Germany. Hitler used massive propaganda assaults through newspapers and word of mouth, to spread the word that Jewish people were the root causes of their problems and misfortunes. This is when he began to rein terror upon the Jewish people by restricting them with legislation, firing them from professions and removing people from school, confiscating their businesses, placing them in concentration camps and inevitably exterminating

He studied the Talmud, and the Kabbalah, and was also very observant for a 12 year-old. In fact, he was so deeply involved, that he wanted to be guided in his studies of the Kabbalah; an ancient Jewish tradition that teaches its followers how the universe and life works. At the time, for a 12 year-old this was a strange thing for him to study. “You are too young for that. Maimonides tells us that one must be thirty before venturing into the world of mysticism, a world fraught with peril. First you must study the basic subjects, those you are able to comprehend” (4). His father would knock off Wiesel’s idea of studying the Kabbalah, this frustrated Wiesel, and rendered him determined to find someone to teach him the mysticism of the world, and so he met Moishe the Beatle. Moishe questioned Wiesel as he prayed, “Why do you cry when you pray?” (4), provoking questions that will deepen his knowledge about the Jewish religion. Although Wiesel was still in the ghetto, he always had faith and was completely orthodox, “I continued to devote myself to my studies, Talmud during the day and Kabbalah at night” (8). Wiesel deeply believed in God and the religion, making it very difficult to lose it during the