Elie Wiesel Faith In God

When Elie and his camp were liberated he maintains his faith but it is extremely weak. Elie still wonders if God cares and feels like the Germans murdered his faith. “Behind me, I heard the same man asking: For God’s, where is God? And from within me, I heard a voice answer: Where he is? This is where— hanging here from the gallows” (65). Elie is experiencing the hanging of a child and Elie feels the Germans killed his faith just like the young child.

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

Eliezer was taught that God is supposed to be filled with good, yet as he goes through the Holocaust, he thinks that maybe God doesn't exist at all . As he and his father are walking through Auschwitz, he sees the Nazi's burning babies in a large pit. While his father began whispering to himself the prayer for the dead, reciting "may his name be blessed and magnified...," Eliezer asks himself, thinking that he would be burned as well, "Why should I bless his name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe...was silent. What had I to thank him for?"(Page 31) This is the beginning of his lack of faith in god. As Eliezer and his father were together in Buna, an occasional public hanging would take place. Hangings were executed not only for those that committed a crime, but also for the prisoners of the camp, in order to learn a lesson from the accused. In Buna, one of three prisoners who were hung was a little boy, who was a servant of a member of the resistance group in the camp. Once the boy was publicly hung, the boy was still alive, just hanging there on the noose for about half an hour. As the prisoners in the camp were forced to watch the hanging, they began to cry. Eliezer said that even though there were so many hangings, this was the first time everyone was crying. At that moment, a prisoner asked out loud "Where is God now?"(Page 62) and Eliezer answered to himself "Where is he?

Elie Wiesel’s renowned autobiography, Night, describes the numerous atrocities faced by concentration camp inmates during the holocaust. He explains that prisoners whom were not immediately murdered were subject to severe physical and psychological brutalities, all of which left lasting trauma. Like many others in these circumstances, Wiesel found it difficult to hold onto his Jewish faith when such cruelty surrounded him, going as far to question God’s very existence. These ideas are found in the excerpt: “Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ‘Where is God now?’And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows,’” (Night, pg. 65). This is Wiesel’s account of one of his most horrifying experiences

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 first recalls Dr. Mengele’s “eight short, simple words” (Wiesel 27) when he enters the camps: “Men to the left! Women to the right!” (Wiesel 27) In this part of the book, Elie and his father are separated by his mother and sisters. This metaphorically kills Elie because he is very attached to his family as are they to him. A piece of Elie has been taken away from him forever. Later in his memoir, he mentions the cruel hanging of the Pipel. Previous hangings that day did not phase Elie, but when the young, angelic Pipel was hanged, Elie said his once flavorful soup “tasted of corpses.” A man near Elie was saying “Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: “Where is He? Here He is- He is hanging here on this gallows…”(Wiesel 62) This is a powerful quote that shows how Elie has also began to question his faith. This brings about the mindset of the death of God in Elie. Elie begins to show distrust and rebellion in his God. This is a sharp contrast to Elie’s former beliefs. When Elie’s father dies, Elie emotionally shuts his mind off. He says “After my father’s death, nothing could touch me anymore.” He had finally given up. His father was his rock tied to the balloon, his reason to keep going. Without his father, Elie gave up and became zombified like the rest of the broken souls. Elie fully turned into the emotionless man that he was set to become as a result of surviving

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

Sometimes in the worst conditions we turn from God, losing faith in him and give into the present events. This happened to Elie Wiesel author of Night which accounts the events of him surging the Holocaust and losing faith in God. Weisel previously was a Jewish bible scholar but after going to through the horrific events the holocaust held, he started to not believe and lost hope. If he had remembered some of the many verses he had learned he could have kept his faith.

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

When Elie Wiesel was a kid, he had extreme faith in his religion. Moshe the Beadle is the first person to question Wiesel’s faith. Moshe the Beadle asks Elie Wiesel why he prays; after pondering the thought, Wiesel replies, “I don’t know why” (p. 2). Elie Wiesel does not know the reason why he prays to God when he doesn’t receive anything back. His faith now seems weaker, despite the hours he devotes to God. God gives him Moshe the Beadle when he wants to study the cabala, and his father won’t help him, but once Wiesel arrives at the concentration camp, God shows no such help as he did at that time. Although God may have left Wiesel, his father stepped up to take care of him and show him that all

Eliezer wanted to be very religious. He was anxious to learn more about the many different things of his religion towards the beginning of the book. When Eliezer and his family were brought to the death camps, he began to doubt about his faith. For instance, Eliezer watched with the rest, the hanging of a young child from the gallows."He remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes"(Wiesel 65). Eliezer says this because once they hung them, two men died instantly and the little boy was still breathing. A man behind Eliezer was asking where God was and Eliezer was thinking the same thing. This quote relates to Eliezer’s faith fading away because he saw the death of the boy as the death of his God, because if God let this happen to a child, with everyone there to see it, then the God that Eliezer once believed in probably doesn’t exist anymore. This act shows how innocent people died without help or a second

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.

From the start of the story, Elieser was a sincere Jew who studied Jewish tradition faithfully and believed faithfully in God. Even as the Jews were being deported, they expressed their faith in God to save them from the Nazis. To understand the Holocaust through the eyes of Eliezer, one must follow his path of lost faith in God. At Auschwitz, when he first spotted the furnace pits in which the babies burned, he began to doubt God. Eliezer asked himself, "Why should I bless His name? What had I to thank him for?" Eliezer at this point felt that God betrayed him because God was not there to stop the horrible events. With the lasting impact of that night, Eliezer went on to state, "Never shall I forget that night…which has turned my life into one long night…Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever…that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget this moments which murdered my God…Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself." That night was the turning point of Eliezer's faith in God. Eliezer told a story where two prisoners were suspected of being involved with a resistance along with a young boy, who was a servant of a resistance member. As the prisoners watched the child strangle on the end of the noose, they began to tear. One man even starts to wonder how God could be present in a world with

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,

What Hardship Can Reveal About An Individual Josiah (English 30-1) Elie Wiesel, a man renowned throughout the world as a great humanitarian, social justice warrior, and known by most as author of the novel Night. Throughout his book the Idea is explored by the author, that when an individual faces hardships, many things can be revealed about a person's character as a result. The devotion of an individual to their belief system and their faith in it, whether or not they become more selfish or selfless, as well as how this hardship affects their ability to feel humanity during the event, and after the fact, are all things which the author delves into in his novel; as well as what consequences these actions taken by victims of hardship have on