Zach Goldman

Mrs. Crowell

English 11

21 May 2019

Elie Wiesel’s Religious Loss

Throughout Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, he describes the horrifying details of his

remembrance of the Holocaust inside multiple concentration camps. When the Nazis take Elie

from his hometown of Sighet, he strongly believes in God, and prays for hours on a daily basis.

As his time goes on throughout the Holocaust, everything begins to change. Elie starts off as a

faithful young boy, but as he is exposed to the horrifying events inside concentration camps, he

loses his religious faith and changes into a hollowed body without his basic human qualities,

affecting him for life.

In Elie’s early years in Sighet, he devotes a large portion of his time to Judaism showing

how much he cares about his religion. One evening, Elie talked with his new friend Moishe

about how he felt “unhappy [he] was not to be able to find in Sighet a master to teach [him] the

Zohar…[and] the secrets of Jewish mysticism” (5). Moishe agrees to be Elie’s mentor and starts

seeing him often in the Synagogue. Elie becomes close friends with him and Elie spends hours in

the Synagogue with him learning, and pondering deep questions such as why they pray. Elie

responds to the question, “Why did I pray? Strange question. Why did I live? Why did I

breathe?” (4). Praying seemed like such a normal and vital everyday thing to Elie that he could

not live without, like breathing. Elie said, “we spoke… almost every evening, remaining in the

Synagogue long after all the faithful had gone, sitting in the semi-darkness” (5). Praying in the

Synagogue with Moishe the Beadle becomes a part of his daily routine and is something that he
really enjoys and does not just do it because he feels obligated to do so. Moishe th eB

eadle wa s somethi ng that h e really enjoyed an d d id not just do it becau se he felt oblig ated to do so

When the Nazis take Elie and the other Jews of Sighet and put them into concentration

camps, horrifying images are scarred into Elie’s brain, which makes him start to question God.

Elie thinks that if God exists, then he would not let something as tragic as the Holocaust take

place. When other people in the concentration camp pray, Elie “ceased to pray” (45). He does

not pray because the moments in the camp “murdered [his] God and [his] soul and turned [his]

dreams to ashes” (34). He no longer cares any more about God because he figures that if God

allows the massacre of millions of Jews, praying serves no benefit to his survival. When Yom

Kippur comes, Elie decides he is not going to fast. He says “there was no longer any reason for

me to fast. I no longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that

into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him” (69). Elie did not fast for multiple reasons.

Firstly, his father told him not to fast, next off, they already had very minimal food in the

concentration camps given to them, so he had to eat anything he could whenever he could. The

final, and most significant reason, is that he is not accepting God and Judaism and wanted to

show God his anger. Fasting on Yom Kippur serves many different meanings, but the most

common reason Jews fast is to accept their sins. Elie feels as if he is already being punished in a

much harsher manner for his sins and fasting is not necessary. At this point in Elie’s story, he

focuses on surviving, staying with his father, and he has no reason to pray anymore causing him

to start to change into a new person.

As the time comes closer to Elie’s liberation, not only does he lose his faith in God, but

he also loses many of the qualities that make him human. He cares less about other people and

more about himself, and when the time comes that his father passes away, Elie “did not weep,

and it pained [him] that [he] could not weep. But [he] was out of tears” (112). He is out of tears,
but also he does not care as much about anything. Elie is also scared because for the first time in

the camps, he is without his father. When the Jews had to evacuate Buna, they were forced to run

miles on end out in the freezing weather. One man ended up dropping to the ground during the

run and Elie said, “He must have died, trampled under the feet of the thousands of men who

followed us. I soon forgot him” (86). Back in Sighet, Elie would have never forgotten if a man

was trampled by a fellow Jew. This shows how much Elie is desensitized from being in the

camps. After the liberation, Elie got food poisoning and is hospitalized, and in the hospital he

looks in the mirror for the first time since he left Sighet. He saw in “the depths of the mirror, a

corpse was contemplating [him]” (115). The Nazis beat Elie down to just a corpse mentally and

physically, and from that, he lost his faith in God, along with his previous self.

Before the Nazis take the Jews from Sighet, Elie practiced Judaism frequently and

passionately, and prayer was one of the most meaningful things in his life. He goes through time

in the concentration camps with his father and is beaten intellectually and physically by the

Nazis. As his time goes on in Auschwitz, he slowly starts to lose his faith in God, along with the

attributes that made him human.

 Work Cited

Wiesel, Elie,Wiesel, Marion.Night. New York: Hill And Wang, 2006. Print.