Loss Of Faith In Night By Elie Wiesel

Faith in the face of grave suffering can be something many people seriously suffer with. Elie Weisel’s faith in God is vehemently tested, beaten, broken down, and slowly built back up throughout his memoir, Night. Evident within any situation he went through, being forced into ghettos, witnessing people being gassed and burned, and even the death of his own father, his faith in God and especially belief in just any higher power is pushed to the absolute edge. It’s hard to imagine how someone who experienced the things he did at the level of severity he did never completely lose faith even once; equally important to consider is what allowed him to keep his faith. Even Elie at the end of the story comes to more of an understanding that God often

Elie during the beginning of the text is seeking to push his knowledge of this topic with a teacher that is very proficient in Jewish mysticism, Moishe the Beadle, about many different things in order to venture more into the world of these teachings. Elie was struggling with how to properly hear God’s real answers to the questions he had; he talked to Moishe about it and Elie brought up the question, “and why do you pray?” (5). Moishe replied that he prays to the God within him “for the strength to ask him the real questions” (5) This response almost certainly deepens and further intertwines Elie’s connection with God considering he and Moishe the Beadle used to have conversations like that every

Perhaps with an even more rooted belief in his existence and divinity than in the beginning, sort of like he’s been shaped and steered by the egregious events in his life to a point where he finally gains “the strength to ask him (God) the real questions”(5). Elie’s journey with his faith can be described as not completely losing the belief in God’s existence, but at many times questioning and doubting his goodness. A passage describes Elie as “one of God's chosen;” and “ from the time he began to think, he lived only for God”(Foreword 3). This quote from the foreword possibly answers the question posed in the thesis. The bigger question all readers and even the characters need to ask themselves is, ‘how does one keep his faith and handle the death/resurrection of God in the soul of a child who suddenly faces absolute evil?’ Those are the “real questions” these characters and people should all be