Examples Of Faith In Night By Elie Wiesel

Elie becomes bitter and claims God created the camps, allowing many people to die. Moreover, around the same time as Elie hears the man speaking about being blessed, he further demonstrates his anger towards God when he claims God chose them to be tortured at night. In these instances, Elie begins to resent God for his actions and lose his faith in him, thus beginning to blame him for some of the things happening to the

The act of losing faith is difficult to avoid in stressful situations. Elie and his fellow victims experienced various degrees of their loss of faith, as seen in Night. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night is about his personal experiences in Auschwitz. He records what he personally went through when he was in the Nazi concentration camp for a year. In the novel Night, Ellie Wiesel and the other Jews struggle to learn that it's difficult to maintain a person's faith during tough times.

Elie endured so much mental damage at his young age that it made their mental state irreversible. Elie’s story is truly inspiring, having survived one of history’s most heartbreaking, detrimental, and antisemitic events in World History. Before he was imprisoned by the Nazis, Elie lived a very religious life. God was whom he would turn to in need, and the Holocaust altered that. The division between men and women forced Elie to stay by his father’s side for the next two years in brutal, unhumane conditions.

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.

Restatement of thesis- Because of the cruel and violent actions that were taken by guards, prisoners, and Elie himself, Elie’s faith weakened throughout his experience in the camps.

“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” -Mahatma Gandhi Humankind is restored through the prayers of one through agonizing times, but it is difficult to keep a grip on faith when the ocean is constantly becoming a darkening, crashing sea of horror. In Elie Wiesel’s ordeal Night, the narrator portrays the struggles of maintaining faith through vivid details from his excruciating experience as a teenager being separated from his family and marched hopelessly to concentration camps around Europe.

The holocaust unleashed unparalleled cruelty and suffering to a great number of people; Elie Wiesel survived these hardships, but his innocence was shattered. For this reason, he wrote Night to share his personal memories of his time spent in the concentration camps and details the transformation of his faith and understanding of God. Each person Elie writes about attempts to reconcile their agony with their faith, albeit many fail or have their faith transformed. In this paper, I will describe how Wiesel’s understanding of God transforms as he experiences tragedy and how the various prisoners come to terms with their faith.

Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, Romania was he grew up to spend his childhood studying Jewish holy books. In 1944 his family was forced to live in one of two ghettos in Sighet. On May 16th, 1944 Elie and his family were taken to Auschwitz-Birkeua concentration camp. In the book Night, Elie writes about his experiences in the Holocaust when he was just 16 years old. Eliezer's faith in God and practice of his Jewish traditions are shattered by the experiences he had Auschwitz. His journey to the Camp's becomes a journey of faith that takes him from being orthodox and traditional, to being unsure about God and the faith that he has practiced since he was born.

Drastic events may change the way we view the world. It may cause us to lose our belief in God, family, and humanity. Loss of faith is displayed in Elie Wiesel’s “Night”. “Night” follows Elie’s teenage life in a Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Initially Elie has a great faith in family, humanity, and God. As days gone by inside the camp, he witnessed and experienced countless cruel acts by humans against humans. This acts have made Elie question his beliefs. In the memoir people have questioned their faith in humanity, family, and lastly God.

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.

Though faithful as they enter the horrific camps of Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Buna, Birknau, Dachau, and Buchenwald, the Jews become capricious. They start losing grip and begin falling down the slippery slope of death the Germans set up for them as more horrors of the camps become unveiled. Soon after arriving in the camp and being told about the crematoria, he felt “anger rising with me [Elie]. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent” (33). This is the first time that his faith is challenged. After a few days in Auschwitz he “had ceased to pray. I [Elie] was not denying His existence, but doubted His absolute justice” (45). As seen, Elie is beginning to have doubts about God and therefore his belief and faith in him. Finally, when Elie is looking for God to come though he doesn’t and he asks,

When Elie arrived at the first concentration camp, he was a child, but when left he was no longer human. Elie’s character changed through his encounter of the Holocaust. Elie idolized his religion, Judaism, one relevant identification for him. Elie spent hours praying and learning about Judaism, but it was the reason he and his family were tormented for. Elie was so intrigued by Judaism, that he wanted someone a “master” to guide in his studies of Kabbalah, an ancient spiritual wisdom that teaches how to improve the lives (Wiesel 8). Furthermore, he loses hope in God and in life. Elie only had a few items when he arrived in the camp, one being his family, but that would soon be taken from him. When Elie and his family arrived at the camp in Auschwitz, he was kept by his father. He always gazed after his father, caring for him until his death.

When one experiences that he cannot tolerate, he doubts his religion and his God's existence. Elie Wiesel's Night, a memoir of the author's experience of the Holocaust, shows that this hypothesis was true. In contrast to the beginning where Elie Wiesel considered praying as an unquestionable action, throughout his memoir, his faith in God gradually vanished as he experienced the "Hell". Elie Wiesel confided his change of the faith in God by the usage of dialogue, repetition, and irony.

Elie’s father loses his strength quickly, “his eyes [grew] dim” (46) almost immediately after arriving. The horrors which he had seen were easily enough to crush the spirit of a former community leader. His disbelief of the horrors he saw questioned the very basis of his soul, and he began to despair. His father’s eyes soon become, “veiled with despair” (81), as he loses hope for survival. The despair of camp life shrouds the human within, showing only another cowed prisoner. Elie’s father no longer can see hope, having his vision clouded by cruelty and hate. Elie’s father is eventually overwhelmed by despair; he, “would not get up. He knew that it was useless” (113). The Nazis crushed his soul, killed his family, stole his home, and eventually took his life; this treatment destroyed the person inside the body. He could no longer summon the strength to stay alive, so he gave up, and collapsed.

In the novel Night, by Elie Wiesal presents the readers with many theme’s throughout the long journey of Elie, and his miraculous survival of one of the toughest experiences known to man. The major theme throughout the whole story is Elie’s struggle to maintain any sort of faith in god or a god like figure. As we meet Elie in the beginning, we see that God is a constant in this young boys life. He even stated “Why did I pray? . . . Why did I live? Why did I breathe?” (Wiesal) Here we see that there is no second guessing his faith in god and how strong it was. But after few experiences during the Holocaust it becomes apparent that his “faith” in god seems to be lessoning day after day. After his first days in the camps, Elie wonders how