essay about night elie wiesel

In a symposium published in Judaism (March 26, 1967), Wiesel declared, “In the beginning there was the Holocaust. We must therefore start over again.” Most commentators would agree with Graham Walker’s description, in his book Elie Wiesel: A Challenge to Theology (1987), of the Holocaust as an event of “ontological status which has disrupted both human history and the life story of God.” Night is one of only a few books whose authors attempt to understand the Holocaust. Wiesel’s international status as the winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, as a formidable literary figure, and as one of the leading voices speaking for the Holocaust survivors as well as the victims makes this work all the more compelling. His decision to focus on the Holocaust’s significance for altering the human understanding of man’s relationship to God indicates that Wiesel’s views, as expressed in Night and in virtually every work of his since, reflect the central difficulties involved in the painful theological revisions that have occurred in both Jewish and Christian realms since 1945. It is important to realize, however, that Night is not an example of the “death of God theology.” At the Brandeis-Bardin Institute (January 22, 1978), Wiesel claimed that “the Covenant was broken. I had to tell God of my anger. I still do so.” God is not dead for Wiesel; in fact, it is the recognition of a God that permits the monologue recorded in Night. Wiesel can protest vehemently to God about the state of the creation precisely because God the Creator exists. Paradoxically, Wiesel also employs silence within this monologue. While Wiesel believes that to remain silent about the Holocaust is to betray its victims, he also knows that presuming to talk about the experience of the Holocaust is a betrayal of another kind. His words are thus chosen with extreme care, but also with a great regard for the silence.
From the beginning, Elie Wiesel's work details the threshold of his adult awareness of Judaism, its history, and its significance to the devout. His emotional response to stories of past persecution contributes to his faith, which he values as a belief system rich with tradition and unique in its philosophy. A divisive issue between young Elie and Chlomo is the study of supernatural lore, a subset of Judaic wisdom that lies outside the realm of Chlomo's pragmatism. To Chlomo, the good Jew attends services, prays, rears a family according to biblical dictates, celebrates religious festivals, and reaches out to the needy, whatever their faith. From age twelve onward, Elie deviates from his father's path by remaining in the synagogue after the others leave and conducting with Moshe the Beadle an intense questioning of the truths within a small segment of mystic lore. The emotional gravity of Elie's study unites with the early adolescent penchant for obsession, particularly of a topic as entrancing as the history of the Spanish Inquisition or the Babylonian Captivity. Moshe's mutterings strike a respondent chord in Elie as he ponders prophecy of the Messiah, such snatches as you could hear told of the suffering of the divinity, of the Exile of Providence, who, according to the cabbala, awaits his deliverance in that of man. It comes as no surprise that Elie's personal test jars his youthful faith with demands and temptations to doubt because he lacks experience with evil. When Moshe returns from his own testing in the Galician forest, his story seems incredible to Sighet's Jews, including Elie. Later, the test of faith that undermines Elie's belief in a merciful God is the first night at Birkenau and the immolation of infants in a fiery trench. The internal battlefield of Elie's conscience gives him no peace as atrocities become commonplace, including hangings before.
Simply enter your paper topic to get started! Night by Elie Wiesel - A Personal Account of the Holocaust 8 Pages 2061 Words November 2014 Saved essays Save your essays here so you can locate them quickly! Topics in this paper Popular topics In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie and his family are Jewish and in turn get sent to Birkenau. They were sent to Birkenau because Adolf Hitler had come to power just before World War II. Elie gets separated from his mother and sister who had been sent to the crematory. Elie had been fortunate enough that his father was sent to the same side as him. In Elie Wiesel's memoir, Night, he explores three themes: Mans inhumanity towards man, Elie's struggle to maintain faith, and the importance of a father and son relationship. The first example of theme is man's inhumanity towards others. Throughout the years, mankind has been very inhumane to each other, and It's inconceivable how cruel people can be. In Wiesel's memoir he recalls the train ride to the concentration camp when a woman went crazy because she had a foreshadowing vision about the impending gas chambers. Every now and then she would scream “FIRE! FIRE! JEWS LOOK AT THE FIRE!”. She was beaten for her crying out; Wiesel recalls that they struck her several times on the head--- blows that might have killed her. Her little boy clung to her; he did not cry out; he did not say a word. He was not even weeping now.”(Wiesel 24). It was shocking and horrific that this woman was beaten. This shows how man doesn't really know how to respond to a situation of this magnitude. After arriving at Auschwitz, Wiesel was horrified to witness the inhumane treatment of the prisoners. When Wiesel is separated from his mother and sisters,he and his father are forced to walk towards the fire. Wiesel explains, “ Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were.
The novel Night, by Elie Wiesel is a clear representation of loss of faith from beginning to end. Elie begins the story as a child who cries when he prays and begs to learn more of his religion. I wept because-because of something inside me that felt the need for tears (Wiesel, Night, 2). His faith is stronger than that of most Jews in the area, elderly and young. However, as he moves from camp to camp after his detainment, he starts to wonder what has happened to God, where he is, and how he is letting all this happen. This story represents losing faith in every way, because, over the course of the book, there are clear examples of Elie losing faith in himself, his father, and his religion. Elie's faith in himself, at the beginning of the story, is at the peak of its ascent. He yearns to be educated gain additional knowledge of his religion regardless of the cost to himself. He believes he can sufficiently learn the most complicated of areas of Judaism and he decides to learn all he can possibly take in. Elie's strength, courage, and belief in himself guide him to survive for many years. As Elie stays at each concentration camp, he is torn an additional length from his soul. In the beginning, Elie has two objectives to fulfill. One of these objectives is for survival. As Elie is beaten, underfed, and labored, he begins to see no point in surviving. He wants to die so as to end his torment and stop the pain, but his father, to stay with being his second objective, could not go on without him. The idea of dying, of no longer being, began to fascinate me.my father's presence was the only thing that stopped me (Wiesel, Night, 82). To keep one objective meant to not break the other, that is all that began to make Elie strive for existence. He hates the torture that is brought upon him and has given up all hope, but his father kept Elie struggling to live. Elie's faith in.
Those who did not experience the Holocaust, it is fair to say, cannot begin to understand what it was like; those who did cannot begin to describe it. To speak of the concentration camps is to fail to convey the depth of the evil, and any failure is disrespectful to the memories of those who died in the Holocaust. Speech, therefore, may seem forbidden, because it necessarily fails to express the truth of the Holocaust. Yet, if nobody speaks of the Holocaust, those who died will go forgotten. It has become a commonplace among AIDS activists to use a slogan equating silence with death; similarly, it is the very real fear of many Holocaust survivors that a failure to speak about what happened during the Holocaust could lead to a possible recurrence of the same evil. Silence, it is sometimes said, gives a posthumous victory to Hitler, because it erases the memory of the atrocities that were committed at his command. Night is the expression of an author, and a narrator, caught between silence and speech. Eliezer often maintains something of a clinical detachment when describing the horrors of the camps. He avoids becoming gruesome or ever describing in precise detail the extent of his suffering. He refuses to describe a person in agony, content to mention the fact of agony’s existence. He withdraws from the subject, sensing that approaching it too closely would be sacrilege. Wiesel carefully avoids melodrama and intense scrutiny of the events, relating the facts of his experiences. Night is moving not because of Wiesel’s passionate prose, but because of his reticence. “The secret of truth,” Wiesel writes elsewhere, “lies in silence.” In Night, Eliezer says that the Holocaust “murdered his God,” and he often expresses the belief that God could not exist and permit the existence of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel and Eliezer are not exactly the same, but Eliezer expresses, in.