Theme Of Religion In Night By Elie Wiesel

Every one easily forgot about the dead and dying and went on with life because the Jews knew it was inevitable at the camps. The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel recalls Elie’s experiences at the German concentration camps. Elie started as an innocent young boy who went to church every day. After the camp Elie had gone through major changes. As the years go by Elie's faith weakens because of the horrible things that surrounded him.

Every man, woman, or child has his or her breaking point, no matter how hard they try to hold it back. In Night by Elie Wiesel the main theme of the entire book is the human living condition. The quality of human life is overwhelming because humans have the potential to make amazing discoveries that help all humans. Elie Wiesel endures some of the most cruel living conditions known to mankind. This essay explains the themes of chapter one, chapter four, chapter eight in Night by Elie Wiesel.

This shows Elie’s change in his thoughts on God and having faith. At the beginning of the story, Elie strives to be a spiritual kid and is fascinated by learning about God. He goes behind his father's back to learn about God with Moishe the Beadle, and has intense prayers everyday which he cries during. However, he becomes bitter towards God, angry about all the pain he has inflicted on the Jewish race. This change in perspective was brought on by the torture, abuse, and inhumane treatment by the Nazis. It causes Elie to question how God, who is supposed to be helpful and good, could ever allow such horror. This connects to loss, and how the traumatic

Often, the theme of a novel extends into a deeper significance than what is first apparent on the surface. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, the theme of night and darkness is prevalent throughout the story and is used as a primary tool to convey symbolism, foreshadowing, and the hopeless defeat felt by prisoners of Holocaust concentration camps. Religion, the various occurring crucial nights, and the many instances of foreshadowing and symbolism clearly demonstrate how the reoccurring theme of night permeates throughout the novel.

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering” (Nietzsche). This quote, said by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, describes the desire to survive that was inside of Elie Wiesel in his story. The book describes Elie’s late teen years when he was sent to a concentration camp by the German government. In the book, he is separated from his whole family except for his old father, and both are put to work inside of the camp. As Elie suffers through the camp, his faith and his life face many tests and trials. There are many instances throughout the book when people die or when somebody loses their faith. The theme of the book Night, written by Elie Wiesel, is survival, as shown by the death of many Jews during the Holocaust, people willing to do anything to survive, and people’s faith not surviving the traumatic experiences of the concentration camps.

Faith is like a little seed; if you think about the positive aspects of a situation, then it will grow, like a seed grows when you water it. However, if the seed does not receive water anymore, it will die, which serves as a parallel to the horrors and antagonism of the concentration camps that killed Elie’s faith. After the analysis of the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the reader can visualize the horrors and slaughter of millions of innocent people that occurred in concentration camps. Throughout the book, Wiesel explains how his faith in God was tested, as he was forced to leave his home, separated from his family, and observed the death all around him; he even witnessed children being thrown into huge ditches of fire alive. Elie felt abandoned, betrayed, and deceived by the God that he knew who was a loving and giving God. It was then he started to doubt His existence. Elie tried to hold on to his faith, but the childhood innocence had disappeared from within him, and he lost his faith in God completely.

Page 34, “…Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.” From this one quote you can most certainly tell that Elie has been living through some extremely tough times in his life right now. You can also tell that just being a part of the concentration camp and knowing that if you don’t die there is a good chance that one of your family members or friends will, it will always be permanently engraved in Elies’ memories. And this has definitely had a huge impact on his life “He was not alone in having lost faith during those days of selection,” Page 76. Elie is talking about the Rabbi losing his faith when he states that the Rabbi is not alone and Elie himself is also losing faith. The selection was when the Germans and doctors looked at how the prisoner’s were health wise and if they where unhealthy they would kill them and put them in the crematoria’s. This, however, was tough for many of the prisoners because most of them where starving and unhealthy, a lot of the people didn’t pass the selections, but those who did

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.

Everyone experiences emotional and physiological obstacles in their life. However, these obstacles are incomparable to the magnitude of the obstacles the prisoners of the Holocaust faced every day. In his memoir, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, illustrates the horrors of the concentration camps and their mental tool. Over the course of Night, Wiesel demonstrates, that exposure to an uncaring, hostile world leads to destruction of faith and identity.

Elie and his father are taken to Auschwitz where they are separated from the rest of the family and first hear about atrocities such as the incinerators and gas showers. In the beginning Elie believes that everything is a rumor, a lie, that humankind cannot perform such crimes, but he soon is forced to witness the demise in front of his eyes. This is when his outlook on his faith starts to waver. While watching the smoke billow up from a crematory, Elie hears a man standing next to him begging him to pray, and for the first time in his life Wiesel turns away from God. “The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank him for?” (31).

In his memoir, Night, author Elie Wiesel writes of his struggles for survival in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. He devotes a lot of his writing to a discussion of his experience in the loss of faith in God. He does this because he wants readers to realize how fragile one's belief can be. In the book, Elie starts off religious but loses his trust in God at the camp. He loses his trust but still prays to God when he has nothing to rely on. When God does nothing for him, he again stops believing in Him.

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 novel Night by Elie Wiesel the main message is that many people are losing faith in each other and everything. Once someone lose their faith, they lose their faith in God and they start to just give up on what their main focus was. People can start losing their faith once they see things that should be seen. It starts to scare them and their faith is lost. Elie started to slowly lose his faith once he was separated with his mother because he was brought to a place where inhumane things were happening. Once people start to lose their faith, they start doing things that leads to the loss of humanity.

What is religion? The dictionary states that religion is: “Possessing beliefs concerning the nature and purpose of the universe and the supernatural” (A student’s Dictionary 268). Different cultures have different definitions for the word religion. However, they all have one characteristic in common, faith. The Jewish, for instance, believe in God and that the Messiah will come in the future to bring them once again to the land of Israel. They continue to wait for Him to come. Over time, the Jews were shunned by many people. Hitler pushed all the blame for his, and his people’s troubles on the Jewish people, which then started the holocaust. The holocaust annihilated millions of people many of which were Jews. Six million Jews, making up

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