Examples Of Faith In Night By Elie Wiesel

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.

​ Cruelty. Faith. Survival. In the memoir, Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie, his family, and other Jews are tricked into concentration camps and made prisoners. Here they are treated cruelly, and struggle to survive. This marks the beginning of the Holocaust for Elie but the end for a endless amount of others. When life was normal, Eli had a strong belief in god but as the conditions become less bearable he starts to question his faith and ultimately loses it.

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.

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.

People often begin to lose faith in God because of the results they faced from their life experiences. Some face things that seem cruel and unbearable while others are “confronted with the information presented from another viewpoint that rejects God” (Gospel Billboards). Elie was told by his father to never lose his faith in God, it would help him get through tough times and keep him strong. The faith is the only strong force that helped Elie Wiesel get through the Holocaust. Through experiences that involve cruel and unbearable moments, people start questioning whether God has the answers to life’s problems. This results in faith beginning to weaken, people stop communicating with God, which makes it easier for one’s faith to diminish. We encounter Elie questioning and refusing God, but also see his contradictory behavior he exhibits to praise. However, throughout the book, Eliezer witnesses and experiences things that leads him to lose his faith in his religion. The longer he stays in the concentration camps, the more he experiences and sees cruelty and suffering. Eliezer believes that people who pray to a God who allows their families to suffer and die are more stronger and forgiving to God. Elie was angry at God, he thought God didn’t deserve his praises or honors because he expected God to come save him but he never did. He observes people die and others around him slowly lose hope, starve, Elie ceases to believe that God could exist at all now. “Where He is? This

Eliezer begins to lose his faith in God when he first arrives at the concentration camp in Auschwitz. After Eliezer arrives in Auschwitz he catches people praying to God: “ 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 to thank Him for” (33)? Elie and his father have just been separated from the rest of their family, and are quickly losing the little hope they have that they will be able to get out of there alive. EIie sees a truck full of babies being unloaded and thrown into a fire, and he wonders why God is doing absolutely nothing to stop it. Later in the book on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, “What are You, my God? I thought angrily… Why, but why would I bless him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because he caused thousands of children to burn in his mass graves (66-67)? In this quote from the book, Eliezer is questioning God and asking him why he should praise him. Elie has lost his faith in the idea that God will save the Jews from their horrible imprisonment. Elie starts to believe that man is stronger and greater than God, and that he is alone in a world without God.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.