Decay Of Faith In Night By Elie Wiesel

Improved Essays
It has been 71 years since the end of the Holocaust, the event which ended up with six million Jews exterminated; the word “Genocide” was born, and the faith in God for the many of those who survived is challenged. Elie Wiesel, through his book, Night, narrated his experience in Auschwitz. It was where most of his family was not survive, where he had to see the scene of death, and where his God “were killed”. Throughout the story, the author showed that a person’s faith in God can be tested when he or she had to suffer from starvation, struggling, and witnessing people who were massively killed under the order of the Nazis. At the beginning, the faith of Elie Wiesel was questioned by himself as he saw the adults, children, men, and women who …show more content…
Starving, exhausted, Elie Wiesel, criticized and started his revolt against his belief. “What does Your greatness mean, Lord of the universe, in the face of all this weakness, this decomposition, and this decay? Why do You still trouble their sick minds, their crippled bodies?” (Wiesel 63). During the New Year’s Eve, it is the time for the Jews to fast, to pray to, and to bless their God, but in Elie, among many prisoners did not want to do that. Instead, he questioned what was good that these people had to pray to God while they were starving to death and God did not care about them; why he still troubled these crippled and did nothing despite how great he was. At the same night, the revolt in Elie reached its peak. “Why, but why should I bless Him? In every fiber I rebelled” (Wiesel 64). Thousands of children were burned, with six crematories working day by day, along with the existence of Auschwitz, Buna, factories of death, all in all, in the author’s words, were caused by God and his great might. During this angry moment, Elie became an accuser, accuse God for pinning all of these suffers on the Jews; everything he learned about his religion, his God faded; his hunger could not be stopped through time, making his mind blurred and turn against his …show more content…
Angrily, Elie considered that God betrayed his people, silence when they were between life and death. “But look at these men whom You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gasses, and burned, what do they do? They pray before You! They praise Your name!”(Wiesel 64). Throughout the Genesis stories with Adam and Eve were chased from the Paradise, to Noah’s generation was drowned in the flood, God punished with His wrath; Elie’s God did not listen to who prayed for Him, but indeed, felt no pity for their kindness and innocence. With the empty stomach and the sufferings from laboring, made the author assumed God was who allowed his people to be exterminated. However, the conflict between Elie with God as well as the test of faith was going to the end when Elie was about to let himself changed and cut off the mind of a student of Talmud, who he used to be. “But I no longer accepted God’s silence.”(Wiesel 66). Still, Elie believed in God; his faith was not really loss, but the person in him was lost. He could not accept God’s silence to his people, his faith was no longer strong as when he was a boy before. Certainly, the internal storm had gone, but the rebellion to God was continuing; Elie Wiesel had changed and his innocence, the studies of God of the 15 - year - old boy had been killed in

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