Mysticism In Night By Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel published Night in 1955. This book is his testimony to the awful situations he and millions others had to encounter. Eliezer is a devout Jew at a young age. His conviction is flipped upside down when the Nazis enter his life, and he believes God walked out. In Night, Wiesel uses Eliezer to depict how his once unconditional faith is shaken down to nonexistence during the Holocaust. Before Eliezer’s living nightmare reigns down, he is dedicated to his religion. At twelve years old, he spends his time strengthening his beliefs: “By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple” (Wiesel 3). Unlike most children his age, his priorities are his studies. Eliezer even wants to find himself a master to teach him Kabbalah, and according to his father, “one must be thirty before venturing into the world of mysticism” (Wiesel 4). He is wise beyond his …show more content…
His devotion finds its kryptonite in the Holocaust. That misfortune forever changes Wiesel’s beliefs. In “Elie Wiesel, Hasidism and the Hiddenness of God,” Jonathan Gorsky reveals, “Wiesel continues to affirm his faith, but is no longer the faith of this early life” (136). While the Holocaust is damaging in more than one area, Wiesel does not let it win. It takes away his childhood and family, and even though he says his God was murdered, God is the only person he has left. After much time to heal, he realizes God was always there. As Elie exhibits in Frunza’s article, “God is one; He is everywhere. And if He is everywhere, then He is in evil and injustice too, and also in the supreme evil: death. It is the man task to free God of this evil” (qtd. In Frunza 102). Instead of seeing God as missing, Wiesel can now see that He is everywhere one looks, and that silence does not always mean absence. What might be silence to one can be a revelation to