Yom Kippur Essay

Elie's faith was once strong but now it is weak because of the Germans. Once he arrived at camp Elie's faith had already weakened. Once experiencing everything at the camp Elie stopped praying and taking part in Jewish activities. This should encourage others to make up their own minds. You can make your own opinions and have your own

Through this whole time Elie has lost faith in those that he trusted. God wasn’t there for his followers that were suffering. Humanity turned a blind eye to the genocide that was happening. Elie himself was having moments of weakness where he would think about leaving his father behind. With each faith that was destroyed he grew more unfeeling and indifferent to what happened to

One part of Elie that died - very early on in the story - was his devotion to Judaism. Towards the beginning of the book Elie is a jewish boy who is very fervent about

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

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

On page 62 after he witnesses the young child being hung he states “Where is He? Here He is-He is hanging here on this gallows.” At this point the reader can infer that Elie has mostly given up on his faith and has become more aimless and lost. When his father passes away near the end of the book he doesn’t even say a prayer or anything of the sort as stated on page 106 with “There were no prayers at his grave. No candles were lit in his memory.” Elie had finally given up on his faith and had not turned into a beast or a brute, but into a man with nothing to do and nowhere to

“Saliva mixed with blood was trickling from his lips. He had closed his eyes. He was gasping more than breathing.” (108) While Elie was at the concentration camp, he had to watch his father suffer from dysentery. By the time a doctor saw Elie’s father, the disease had progressed too far for treatment or medicine. Elie wondered why God didn’t give Elie’s father a second chance to live. This resulted in a major decrease in Elie’s faith in God and the Jewish religion because he didn’t understand why God couldn’t save his father. “One more stab to the heart, one more reason to hate. One less reason to live.” (109) In this scene, Elie was close to giving up on surviving the Holocaust. His father was at the last stages of his life and was suffering every minute because he had nausea, suffocation, and blood was all over his body. Elie wanted God to either help his father recover from dysentery or for God to end his father’s life quickly so the suffering could come to an end, but God didn’t respond to Elie’s prayers. At this point, Elie was so traumatized by the Holocaust that his faith had almost

: As Elie’s motivation to keep persevering at times began to diminish. Elie would either remind himself that god was watching over him and would eventually free him from the suffering and torture. Other times he would look over at his father and see him struggling yet still fighting with every

As for Elie’s relationship with God, some find it tempting to say that he became an atheist, but this is an oversimplification. Though Eliezer lost faith in God’s mercy, he still believes that there is a God. He still believes that god can still save him from the mess. He feels like god is real enough to help him through the holocaust. He stop relying too much on god, and start asking god questions. Elie sees god as a new path to freedom, and work to regain a new life.

No matter how hard life can be, we can overcome it with God’s help. He is the reason he survived. He is the reason we are here. Elie kept his faith through the whole experience. That is amazing for someone who faced that much persecution and kept on worshiping

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

One night, the leaders of Buna had left a cauldron of soup out, no one had dared to go near it but one man. The man was so hungry and was on the brink of madness and he no longer cared if he was going to die, he just wanted food and this is what led him to being killed. “Then, for no apparent reason, he let out a terrible scream, a death rattle such as I had never heard before and, with open mouth, thrust his head toward the still steaming liquid.”. During the first selection, Elie was terrified of being selected and getting killed. This led to him thinking about all the reason why he should be killed and how he was most likely going to be selected. “ My head was spinning: you are too skinny…yo u are too weak…yo u are too skinny, you are good for the ovens …”. When Elie’s father died, he didn’t cry or show any sadness whatsoever. Elie was so numb with the pain he had gone through that he was no longer capable of feeling. “I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble

In the beginning of the book, Elie believed that he no longer had faith, though he had been a compelling believer before. He also reveals the strong relationship he had with his father, and because his father was the only sense of family he had left, he did everything he could to keep his father healthy and alive. In section three of the novel, Elie shows the first sign of loss of faith, “For the first time, I felt anger rising within me… why should I sanctify his name… what was there to thank him for” (Wiesel 33). He believed that the terrible situation he was in, was to surely be blamed on God, due to the unanswered prayers that Elie received. Elie displays the great relationship he possessed with his father in section three as well, “Men to the left… women to the right… eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion... eight simple, short words… yet that was the moment when I left my mother… we were alone” (Wiesel 29). The quote demonstrates the fact that Elie’s family was literally split in half when his sister and mother went to the right and he and his father stayed left. Elie only has his father, so it makes sense for Elie to sacrifice everything for him.

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.