Confession Session
Elie Wiesel is a young, teenage, Jewish boy involuntarily placed in Nazi concentration camps. The concentration camps tested Elie’s sincerity of his faith. All of the inhumane events, destruction, and absent childhood, forced a method of non-belief on Elie and his fellow beings. In Elie Wiesel's Night, faith is seen as a controversial topic, and challenged throughout the beginning, middle, and end of the story.
“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) In the beginning the pure uncertainty of Elie’s faith emerges as questions raise concern over Camp
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The boy struggled due to the non strategically placed rope. This sight caused confusion and fear among the prisoners. After Elie witnessed the awful hanging of his fellow peers, he lost all belief in the god he once worshipped. “And in spite of myself, a prayer formed inside me, a prayer to god in whom I no longer believed.” (Wiesel,67)
At this point in the story, Elie rarely showed the slightest glimpse or belief in a higher power. He started to decline in hope and questioned every move of his father and all of the prisoners he gazed upon. An example of this rare occasion is when they are running in chapter six and seven. Elie witnessed a split of father and son without realizing that the son intentionally left his father in the dust. He later met a Rabbi who lost his son while they were running. Rabbi Eliahou fathered the son that Elie watched disappear into the group. Rabbi Eliahou did not realize that his son gave up on him and continued on without him. Elie vowed that he would never leave his father in the way that Rabbi Eliahou's son left him. “Oh god, Master of the Universe, give me the strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou's son has done” ( Wiesel,87 ). Elie did not realize that with that statement he planted a seed of religion in his garden. It may seem acute but this monumental part caused the reaction of the
While Elie was in the concentration camp he changed the way he acted. This new behavior led him to develop new character traits. While Ellie was in the concentration camp he became angry at many things. For example “I would have dug my nails into the criminals flesh” (Wisel 39). Elie shows extreme anger when the Nazi officials are beating Elie’s father. Elie was angry because the Nazi soldiers were not treating them nicely and keeping them in poor conditions. Elie was usually not a person to display anger, but he shows this when his family members are being hurt. Elie wants to stand up for what is right and for his family members. Despite his studying, Elie wavered in his belief in Kabbalah while he was at the camp. Elie was a religious boy before he went to Auschwitz, but while in the camp, he became angry at God. In the book Elie says, “‘Where are You, my God?’” (66). Elie is wondering why God is not helping the Jews. Elie had complete faith in his religion until he experienced and witnessed such horrible suffering. He had been taught that God will punish evil and save the righteous. However, when Elie saw that God was not helping the Jews situation,
Elie loses complete faith in god in many points where god let him down. He struggles physically and mentally for life and no longer believes there is a god. Elie worked hard to save himself and asks god many times to help him and take him out of the misery he was facing. "Why should I sanctify his name? The Almighty, the eternal, and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent..."(page 33). Elie was confused, because he doesn’t know why the Germans would kill his race amongst many others, and he does not know why god could let such thing happen to innocent people. "I did not deny god's existence, but I doubted his absolute justice..."(page 42). These conditions gave him confidence, and a courage to
“I have not lost faith in God [despite] moments of anger and protest; sometimes I have been closer to him for that reason.” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel explains the struggle of his changing beliefs in God during the Holocaust in his memoir Night. In Night, Elie Wiesel, a religious boy, is taken to several concentration camps along with other Jews, and separated from everyone in his family except for his father. He and his father live dangerous lives in the concentration camps, from being beaten, watching other prisoners die, and being close to death, until eventually Elie’s father dies and the camp is liberated. As Elie Wiesel’s time in the Holocaust lengthens, his devoutness in God begins to diminish.
Analysis 2- When Elie says that God is hanging from this gallows he is saying God is no longer here. He has been killed just as this boy was. This caused Elie’s faith to weaken because God would never let someone this young be tortured
Elie was a holocaust victim who was almost forced, by other jews, into a furnace, by order of the Nazis. “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever” Elie was very religious before the Holocaust and yet on the first night at Auschwitz he lost his faith in God. He regained faith
Things end up changing very slightly and quickly for Elie. At the camp, they were standing, waiting to find out whether he and his father were going to the crematoria to be burned alive along with other people and their children. Everybody was saying Kaddish, a Jewish prayer, for themselves and others, and after Elie heard his father whisper it, Elie tells the reader, “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?” (pg. 33) Elie was starting to lose faith in the God that he had worshipped and cherished so
During his time in the concentration camps, Elie’s outlook on life shifted to a very pessimistic attitude, showing emotions and actions including rebellion, forgetfulness of humane treatment, and selfishness. Elie shows rebellion early in the Holocaust at the Solemn Service, a jewish ceremony, by thinking, “Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled” (Wiesel 67). Elie had already shifted his view on his religion and faith in God. After witnessing some of the traumas of the concentration camps, Elie questioned what he did to deserve such treatment. Therefore, he began to rebel against what he had grown up learning and believing. Not only had Elie’s beliefs changed, his lifestyle changed as well. When Elie’s foot swelled, he was sent to the doctor, where they put him “...in a bed with white sheets. I [he] had forgotten that people slept in sheets” (Wiesel 78). Many of the luxuries that Elie may have taken for granted have been stripped of their lives, leaving Elie and the other victims on a thin line between survival and death. By explaining that he forgot about many of these common luxuries, Elie emphasizes the inhumane treatment the victims of the Holocaust were put through on a daily basis.
As Elie gets used to his new life in such a hellish state, he realizes that the trusting and faithful child that he once had been had been taken away along with his family and all else that he had ever known. While so many others around him still implore the God of their past to bring them through their suffering, Wiesel reveals to the reader that although he still believes that there is a God, he no longer sees Him as a just and compassionate leader but a cruel and testing spectator.
Elie is now truly starting to question his faith in what he was tought to be a perfect and able, kind and gracious God. For his whole life up until this point God has been the center of it all. From life to death, the creator of it all, He wonders how God could be the minister of this hell like enviorment. At this point in the book Elie without doubt at the lowest point in his life, fighting with him self and an outside force (the German's) who show a curl and horrible world, and bettew God who preches a perfact and hearted world in which he no longer
Night is a brutally honest memoir of much of Elie Wiesel’s childhood. When Wiesel was young he was very devoted to his Religion, asking questions and reading scripture. When the trains were loaded Wiesel no longer had the words to express his disdain. After setting foot in Auschwitz Wiesel felt abandoned by god and no longer believed God was not righteous. Rightful decision he watched children burn, men get shot, women disappear to never return. Despite all this Wiesel never truly lost his religion explaining “I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.”(45,Wiesel). As time passes faith was restored and like many Holocaust survivors Wiesel is still Jewish and was proud to tell the world about it to the day he died.
Night, by Elie Wiesel, showed the devastation of Eliezer’s childhood and illustrated the loss of innocence through the evil of others. Elie Wiesel expressed to us that one’s own faith and beliefs can be challenged through torture and ongoing suffering. The novel, Night, allowed the reader to witness the change in Eliezer from one of an innocent child who strongly adhered to his faith in God into a person who questioned not only his faith and God but of himself as well. The cruelty is shown to him while in the concentration camp forced him to wonder if there was a God and if so why would he put him and the others through such torture. Through his suffering, Eliezer’s beliefs dramatically and negatively changed his faith in God and compelled him to experience a transformative relationship with his father.
In the memoir, Night, author Elie Wiesel portrays the dehumanization of individuals and its lasting result in a loss of faith in God. Throughout the Holocaust, Jews were doggedly treated with disrespect and inhumanity. As more cruelty was bestowed upon them, the lower their flame of hope and faith became as they began turning on each other and focused on self preservation over family and friends. The flame within them never completely died, but rather stayed kindling throughout the journey until finally it stood flickering and idle at the eventual halt of this seemingly never-ending nightmare. Elie depicts the perpetuation of violence that crops up with the Jews by teaching of the loss in belief of a higher power from devout to doubt they
Throughout Hitler’s reign during the Holocaust, the victims’ faith in God started to disappear. The memoir Night, by Elie Wiesel, is a dramatic account of Elie’s experience in the Holocaust. He is forced to choose between faith, death, self-interest, or interest in others. Elie Wiesel was thirteen when the Hungarian police started to capture people and put them into the hands of the Nazis. Elie was transported to Auschwitz with his whole family, but was forced to separate from his mother and sister.
God sent him to the camp and does not seem to try to help or save him. Showing that events took place to murder his God of going to the concentration camps "Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust..."(Wiesel 32). The whole book shows a struggle of everyone in the book struggling to maintain faith even though it mainly focuses on Elie because he is the author. Elie asks himself many times where his God is and begins to question his presence. For example, Elie says “where is god now?”
Elie Wiesel begins the book as a religiously curious twelve year old boy. He requested to study the cabbala and encountered Moshe the Beadle, Elie’s cabbala master, at the end of 1941. Elie was very eager to learn and prayed every night. However, he began to feel no reason to Through the memoir, Elie inquired why God would have let the Jews be captured, moreover, tortured and burned in crematoriums. In the book Elie states, “I stood amid that praying congregation, observing it like a stranger.” This shows that he no longer believes that he should pray because his faith after being in the camp for so long has been drained. While he questioned God, some of his fellow Jews felt they needed God more than ever. Elie’s tone when he recounts why he will not pray display how frustrated he was with God. He wonders why God allows such