The Theme Of Faith In Night By Elie Wiesel

Wiesel’s novel Night explores the theme of struggling to maintain faith in a benevolent God. In chapters four through six, Eliezer really stops believing in the God that he loved and studied as a child before the Holocaust. The gruesome scene of the child’s hanging is when Eliezer comes to believe that a just God must not exist in a world where an innocent child can be hanged on the gallows. “Where is He?” Eliezer asks to himself, and then answers, “He is hanging here on this gallows.” Witnessing the hanging of the child, Eliezer reaches the low point of his faith in God. (Wiesel 63) At this point, Eliezer has become someone different from the child he was at the beginning of the Holocaust. He has lost his faith, and he is beginning to lose his sense of morals and values as well. In a world in which survival is nearly impossible, survival has become Eliezer’s dominant goal. He admits that he lives only to feed himself. (Wiesel 113) …show more content…
According to Jewish belief Jews pass before God on Rosh Hashanah like sheep before the shepherd, and God determines who will live and who will die in the coming year, almost as prophecy, soon after Rosh Hashanah, the Nazi’s hold a selection at Buna. All the prisoners pass before Dr. Mengele, the notoriously cruel Nazi doctor, and he determines who is condemned to death and who can go on living. This parallel is clear and so is the message, the Nazis have placed themselves in God’s role. Eliezer has decided that the Nazis’ actions mean that God is not present in the concentration camps, and thus praying to him is foolish. (Wiesel