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The “Night” by Elie Wiesel Faith/loss of faith
Morality vs. religion
The “Night” by Elie Wiesel Faith/loss of faith
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Recommended: The “Night” by Elie Wiesel Faith/loss of faith
Feeling lost when one doesn’t even know them self or when one doesn’t know what to stand for or believe in anymore is exactly how Elie Wiesel felt in his book “Night”. During the time of the Holocaust, Elie was one of the victims taken into a concentration camp and forced to work to brutal extents. As a kid, Elie was determined to learn and study his religion, but that changed, along with his priorities. Devastating events changed Elie’s idea on religion, battling conflicts between himself and those around him, even the test that God seemed to implicate on Elie. To his own disbelief, Elie had given up on God and had lost his faith due to his immense struggle throughout the year he spent in the camp, carrying the burden that he does not care about the one he had always looked up too and been there for him, which is God.
Once Elie was in the concentration camp, Auschwitz, he felt as if his life was a dream because he claimed it was too surreal to be reality. Elie held strong to his religion, looking towards God when trouble neared him. God had always been Elie’s escape, and according to Elie, that wasn’t going to change. Yet, the time came when the sturdy structure where Elie’s faith stood was starting to erode. Elie had also been battling himself, creating mental conflicts. When men spoke of God, Elie argued with himself about how he felt about Him. Elie said, “As for me, I ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice (45).” He did not know how to feel about religion because he still wanted God to protect him, but he wasn’t sure if He was going to be just in protecting him. On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Elie had fought his last battle with himself about his fait...
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... Elie gives up his faith completely. Elie conflicted himself numerous times, trying to hold onto the last bit of his life before it took a turn for the worse—his connection to God.
Elie is an ever-changing character: his struggle for his faith and conflicting himself about it, his struggle between his faith and the other inmates, and his struggle between God and his relation to Job; even though the underlying conflicts are between Elie and God solely. Elie had once believed that God was the almighty and contained all of the higher power. But, as the concentration camps changed multiple people mentally and physically, the camps had changed Elie too. No matter how strong Elie had once believed in God, that strong belief had dimmed down to a dull minimum, a slim-to-nothing belief left behind. They say change is for the better, but that always isn’t the case.
After being forced into concentration camps, Elie was rudely awakened into reality. Traumatizing incidents such as Nazi persecution or even the mistreatment among fellow prisoners pushed Elie to realize the cruelty around him; Or even the wickedness Elie himself is capable of doing. This resulted in the loss of faith, innocence, and the close bonds with others. Throughout his recollections, it is clear that Elie has a constant struggle with his belief in God. Prior to Auschwitz, Elie was motivated, even eager, to learn about Jewish mysticism.
Most people have never experienced anything near as awful as what Wiesel experienced. He was one of the only people who found a way to hold onto their faith. Many made excuses not to perform rituals and eventually lost all faith. Wiesel was weakened, but remained faithful. Akiba Drumer, a friend of Wiesel, tried to convince himself that it was a test by God. However, Akiba also lost faith. “Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.” (Wiesel 34) This quote was from a small portion of Wiesel’s “Never Shall I Forget Poem.” It showed how Elie lost faith in God when he saw what the Nazis were doing to families and children. This quote shows how the religious part of Elie was “murdered.” Elie seemed to become foreign and isolated from his people. He seemed to be just going through the motions during his time in the camps. “In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger.” (Mauriac XXI) This quote shows how Wiesel felt like he was a stranger to the religion, community, and faith. Elie Wiesel couldn’t understand why God would hurt people, and most of all why he was spared. “And question of questions: Where was God in all this? It seemed as impossible to conceive of Auschwitz with God as to conceive of Auschwitz without God.” (Hope, Despair and Memory) This shows how Wiesel couldn’t grasp the reasoning behind God. He wanted
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie starts losing faith in his Jewish beliefs. Multiple times in the book, Elie says quotes that show his anger and disappointment with what he sees every day in the concentration camps. In this essay I will be showing many examples from different quotes on why Elie begins losing his faith. “Blessed be Gods name”? Why do you need to be a member?
Due to the atrocities of the concentration camps, Elie lost his faith in God. Early on in the story, Elie used to leap over ancient temples and study the Kabbalah. In his old town, he used to complain to Moishe the Beadle “ I told him how unhappy I was not to able to find in Sighet a master to teach me the Zohar.”(Wiesel,5) This shows him complaining about not having a teacher. But as he started to go through the camps, he saw what was going on and started to
In order to have meaning or a purpose for existence, one must construct a sense of hope found on one’s perception of truth or value. Elie constructs his hope around his religion, faith, and family: three things grounded with a firm foundation that will never shake, at least it seems. After years of studying Jewish law and religion, Elie becomes firmly grounded in his beliefs and faith. Once uncertainty begins to settle in, Elie and others cling to their family and their prayers as they wait to hear the news Elie’s father will bring them: “To the last moment, people clung to hope” (Wie...
However, there were warnings by some people that Jewish people were being deported and killed. Although no one believes these warnings, Elie and his family are taken to a ghetto where they have no food. After being in the ghetto, Elie and his father were separated from Elie’s mother and sister because of selection and were placed in cattle cars where they had no room. They are taken to Auschwitz where they suffer from hunger, beatings, and humiliation from the guards which causes Elie’s father to become weak. By now Elie has lost his faith in God because of all he has been through.
While facing struggle and adversity, a spiritually connected person may battle with his or her faith. In chapter 5, the Jewish prisoners are all gathered together and are a little anxious on whether or not this will be their last day on earth. They have been tormented because of their beliefs and now there are many questioning their quarrels with God. Elie is struggling to understand why God himself is rejecting and punishing those who serve him and give him his grace but yet are rewarding those who permits others to be gassed and killed.
An estimated 1/3 of all Jewish people who were alive were grotesquely tortured and murdered during the Holocaust. Those who were not murdered went through changes mentally, physically, and spiritually. This changed many people’s identities to where they seemed like a completely different person. Elie was one of the many people whose identity had changed throughout their time at the death camps.
After a brief stay at Auschwitz, they are moved to a new camp, Buna. At Buna, Elie goes through the dehumanizing process of the concentration camps. Both he and his father experience severe beatings at the hand of the kapos. All the prisoners are overworked and undernourished. Many lose faith in God, including Elie. He witnesses several hangings, one of a boy with an angelic face, and sees him struggle for over thirty minutes fighting for his life. To a stranger's cry of "Where is God now?", Elie answers: "He is hanging here on this gallows...." (p. 62). As Elie witnesses the hanging of the young pipel, he feels that it is his God who is hanging on the gallows. Elie i...
Eliezer’s horrible experiences at Auschwitz left him caught up in his sorrows and anger toward God. His loss of faith in God arises at Auschwitz. He doubts arise when he first sees the furnace pits in which the Nazis are burning babies. This horrifying experience ...
In the final moments of Night, Elie has been broken down to only the most basic ideas of humanity; survival in it of itself has become the only thing left for him to cling to. After the chain of unfortunate events that led to his newfound solitude after his father’s abrupt death, Elie “thought only to eat. [He] thought not of [his] father, or [his] mother” (113). He was consumed with the ideas of survival, so he repeatedly only expressed his ideas of gluttony rather than taking the time to consider what happened to his family. The stress of survival allocated all of Elie’s energy to that cause alone. Other humanistic feelings like remorse, love, and faith were outcast when they seemed completely unimportant to his now sole goal of survival. The fading of his emotions was not sudden mishap though; he had been worn away with time. Faith was one of the most prominent key elements in Elie’s will to continue, but it faded through constant. During the hanging of a young boy Elie heard a man call to the crowd pleading, “Where is merciful God, where is He?” (64). It snapped Elie’s resolve. From this point on, he brought up and questioned his faith on a regular basis. Afterwards, most other traits disappeared like steam after a fire is extinguished. Alone in the wet embers the will to survive kept burning throughout the heart ache. When all else is lost, humans try to survive for no reason other than to survive, and Wiesel did survive. He survived with mental scars that persisted the ten long years of his silence. Even now after his suffering has, Elie continues to constantly repeat the word never throughout his writing. To write his memoir he was forced to reopen the lacerations the strains of survival left inside his brain. He strongly proclaims, “Never shall I forget that night...Never shall I forget the smoke...Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the
A simple act of kindness and support can possibly be the savior to someone else’s misery. In the novel, Night, written by Eliezer Wiesel, Elie portrays the daily lifestyle of the Jews during the Holocaust, and shares his personal experiences. He goes through hardships as he travels from the ghettos to the concentration camps with his one and only family member remaining, his father. The S.S. soldiers take the author’s mother and his two sisters away from him as they arrive at the ghetto because they separating women from men. Throughout the novel, Elie experiences personality adaptations and loses his faith in God all due to the loss of humanity in his world. With this in mind, he bases his survival on his determination and not his luck. Eliezer survives the Holocaust as a result to the hope he provides for his father and the support he receives from others throughout his journey.
Eliezer Wiesel loses his faith in god, family and humanity through the experiences he has from the Nazi concentration camp.
In the beginning of the memoir, Elie is an extremely passionate and devout Jew, but as the story progresses, Elie sees horrendous things in the concentration camps, and as a result, he slowly loses his faith. Elie displays his extreme devotion in the beginning stages of the memoir when he states, “By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple. I cried because something inside me felt the need to cry” (Wiesel 4). Elie is clearly very fond of learning more about his religion and connecting to God in a spiritual way. Furthermore, Elie is only thirteen years old, so when he says he cries because he feels the need to cry, he is exhibiting incredible passion. Elie reveals signs of change and begins to lose his faith in God just a few moments after arriving at the concentration camp when he says, “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes” (Wiesel 34). Elie exclaims that he cannot worship God anymore due to the awful things he has seen at Auschwitz. He does not want to believe in the being that could have allowed these awful events to happen. This is a completely different Elie from the loving and caring Elie in the ghetto. Elie also uses rep...
Night is a dramatic book that tells the horror and evil of the concentration camps that many were imprisoned in during World War II. Throughout the book the author Elie Wiesel, as well as many prisoners, lost their faith in God. There are many examples in the beginning of Night where people are trying to keep and strengthen their faith but there are many more examples of people rebelling against God and forgetting their religion.