Concentration camps led thousands of Jewish people to lose hope in God and question God’s existence, one of them was Elie Wiesel. Elie’s view on God drastically changed from the beginning of the book to the end. Elie’s life before the concentration camp revolved around Judaism. Every passing day in the camp caused his faith for God to falter and by the time he was liberated he had lost all faith in the existence of God. In the beginning of Night, Elie devoted his time to God. He wanted to study Kabbalah but his father felt the study of Kabbalah was too complex for him to understand and should wait until he was thirty, Elie thought otherwise. He did not think you needed to be a specific age to understand the divinity of God and Kabbalah. One day Moshe the Beadle asked Elie why he prayed. Elie thought, “Why did I pray? Strange Question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?”(page 4) Elie didn't know what life without God was, all his life he had been surround by religion. He saw it like breathing, something he needed to do to keep living. Elie response was, “I don't know”,(page 4) because he thought that it was self explanatory, just like living. He did not consider praying as a choice but a way to keep living. …show more content…
On the eve of Rosh Hashanah Elie began to question God. He did not understand how Jews around him could still have faith and have the capacity to bless him. Elie could not understand how the Master of the Universe would cause thousand of children die. He believed that the gas chambers belonged to God and that God had created the concentration camps. He was sure God was the one to blame for letting something so catastrophic like this occur. Elie felt God was not able to love them if all he did was torture them and betray them. He did not feel like he could pray to someone that killed thousands of people every
He lost his belief because he seen children being burnt, people being tortured day and night and God didn't save them. Elie believed strongly in God, he believed the world was good, not only the world but everyone was good because the world and the people belonged to God. Elie kept asking God to save him and everyone in the concentration camp from the misery they were going through. He thought he would save them because he believed so strongly in him. Time after time he prayed to God to save him and his family.
Throughout the book Elie Wiesel’s thoughts on God change. In the time when the book was taking place, Jews were seen as nothing and were treated terribly. For example in this Graphic Memoir Elie uses her knowledge to compare Jews to beaten dogs. With all this happening, Elie turned to one person he trusted to help him and his family get out of this disastrous situation. Elie was sent to constant concentration camps because she was Jewish.
I remember when I was little, I would sometimes start crying because people made fun of me for what I believed in (and I was at a Catholic school for heaven’s sake!), but that is nothing compared to what Elie went through during his time in the “Death Factory”, Camp Auschwitz. In the famous memoir by Elie Wiesel, Night, Elie speaks of his physically and emotionally crushing experience in the most famous concentration camp, Auschwitz. At the beginning of the memoir Night, Elie was deeply religious and God was part of his daily life, but at the end of the memoir, he had lost most of his faith in God because he was destroyed on the inside from the Nazis. Throughout the memoir, Night, Elie is slowly losing his faith in God in whom he loved and
Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and a Holocaust survivor,Has a book he had written called Night. This whole book is about the horrific events that Elie Wiesel experienced during the Holocaust. The Holocaust was an extermination of 11,000,000 people, 6,000,000 of those being non Jewish people. Elie Wiesel's experiences had really changed his perspective on life and his religion. Elie Wiesel, the almost 16 year old boy, had experienced many horrors that made him question what he believed in God.
But Elie is also questioning why he believes. At this point Elie still has a small amount of faith. He has begun to question why God would let something as terrible as the Holocaust happen. “’… May His Name be blessed and magnified… ‘whispered my father. For the first time, I felt revolt rise up in me.
This is illustrated on page 33 when Eliezer states, “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?” Not only does this show that Eliezer is agitated by God’s actions, it shows that he is blaming God rather than the Germans for the malicious and abusive acts in the concentration camp. Elie moved from being deeply devoted to abandoning all belief in God.
But life in Auschwitz grows deadly, and Elie begins to doubt his faith in God. During his first night in Auschwitz, Wiesel describes what he felt as he slept next to the crematorium that claimed the lives of innocent people, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed... Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes,” (Wiesel 34). As Elie watches the ashes of small children escape into the night sky, he feels his faith in God wither. One evening in Auschwitz, Elie doubts God and religion, “Some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come.
Before, when Elie wasn’t in a concentration camp, he went seeking God. He tried to grow in his faith, he prayed, he went to the synagogue, he even went asking where he could find teachers to grow in his faith. Text says, “One day I asked my father to find me a master
Elie wanted to know more about God and the Kabbalah, wanting to find someone to teach him all about it. “One day I asked my father to find me a master who could guide me in my studies of Kabbalah.” (Wiesel 4). This quote shows that Elie wanted to learn more about God. He ends up learning from Moishe the Beadle, one of the poorest in the town of Sighet, Transylvania.
Elie continued to be angry at Him. Thousands of prisoners were repeating the prayer “Blessed be God’s name…” (Page 67). But Elie was concerned why should he bless Him? Everything inside Elie opposed it.
He seems to find any possible way to fight against. “But further, there was no longer any reason why I should fast. I no longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my bowl of soup, I saw in the gesture an act of rebellion and protest against Him,” (Wiesel, 76). As the book progressed, Elie found every possible way to fight against God or his retired religion.
He could not believe that God would put him in such a terrible position, watching dozens of people he used to be friends with get brutally beaten, starved and even watching them walk to the crematorium awaiting their certain death. After a while Elie
Elie Wiesel was a deeply religious person. He believed in god and always looked to him in times of need. He always thought he could rely on god to keep him safe and protect him from anything. After he was sent to concentration camps, he began to lose his faith in god. He once said “But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing…
Elie, once so faithful, is one of the first to lose faith in God due to the horrific sights he sees. After witnessing the bodies of Jewish children being burned, Wiesel writes, “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever” (34). He quite understandably has begun to doubt that his God is with him following the sight of the supposedly chosen people’s bodies being unceremoniously burned. Elie, though, was perhaps not a member of the masses with this belief; in fact, some men were able to hold on to their beliefs despite these horrendous sights. Also near the middle of the book, Wiesel reflects on the faith of other Jews in the face of these events, saying that “some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come.
Religion is something that many people have consistently believed in and turned to in times of need and support. Some of these people rely on their faith more than their own family and friends. Their religion is their entire life and they can’t imagine their lives without it. Imagine a scenario that’s so terrible that God won’t take you out of it. These people will wonder where God is and pray for Him to come.