Night by Elie Wiesel
The Loss of Faith
It is very difficult for a young teenager to keep faith in a God during a crisis. This can be very well shown in Elie Wiesel’s novel Night. This novel is a personal, first person account of a young child, named Eliezer, and his time in a concentration camp with his father. It shows how Elie’s faith, once strong and incredibly vibrant, becomes almost nothing. Be it through the loss of faith one of his mentors has, or seeing human bodies burn around you, or seeing a helpless young boy, trying to get air as his body hangs from a noose. All choices and decisions, though have a starting point, and Elie’s starting point was when one he looks up, began to lose faith in the lord God. Elie used to have a very strong faith in God. He had such a strong faith that he wanted to study the Kabbalah as a teenager, but the Kabbalah is meant to be taught at the age of at least thirty. He also prayed to God every day and wanted to be a rabbi when he grew up. This all began to change, when one of his mentors, Moishe the Beatle was expelled from Sighet, the town where he lived for being a foreign Jew. After several months, Moishe returned, but he was not the same man who he used to be. According to Elie, “Moishe was not the same. The joy in his eyes was gone. He no longer sang. He no longer mentioned either God or Kabbalah.” (Weisel, 7) Though this didn’t directly affect Elie, it began to plant a small seed of doubt in God. Two years after this experience, though, Elie see’s something that causes him to lose nearly all faith in God. Ellie arrived at Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 after being kept in a hot, crowded, disease- ridden boxcar. Upon his arrival, he could see ash, which looked like snow, and he could smell burning human flesh. Others who were there were saying that the Nazis were burning the Jews and cremating them alive, Elie could not believe it, until they separated him from his mother and sister whom he never saw again. The Nazis then made
It is very difficult for a young teenager to keep faith in a God during a crisis. This can be very well shown in Elie Wiesel’s novel Night. This novel is a personal, first person account of a young child, named Eliezer, and his time in a concentration camp with his father. It shows how Elie’s faith, once strong and incredibly vibrant, becomes almost nothing. Be it through the loss of faith one of his mentors has, or seeing human bodies burn around you, or seeing a helpless young boy, trying to get air as his body hangs from a noose. All choices and decisions, though have a starting point, and Elie’s starting point was when one he looks up, began to lose faith in the lord God. Elie used to have a very strong faith in God. He had such a strong faith that he wanted to study the Kabbalah as a teenager, but the Kabbalah is meant to be taught at the age of at least thirty. He also prayed to God every day and wanted to be a rabbi when he grew up. This all began to change, when one of his mentors, Moishe the Beatle was expelled from Sighet, the town where he lived for being a foreign Jew. After several months, Moishe returned, but he was not the same man who he used to be. According to Elie, “Moishe was not the same. The joy in his eyes was gone. He no longer sang. He no longer mentioned either God or Kabbalah.” (Weisel, 7) Though this didn’t directly affect Elie, it began to plant a small seed of doubt in God. Two years after this experience, though, Elie see’s something that causes him to lose nearly all faith in God. Ellie arrived at Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 after being kept in a hot, crowded, disease- ridden boxcar. Upon his arrival, he could see ash, which looked like snow, and he could smell burning human flesh. Others who were there were saying that the Nazis were burning the Jews and cremating them alive, Elie could not believe it, until they separated him from his mother and sister whom he never saw again. The Nazis then made