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Example research essay topic: Faith In God Elie Wiesel - 1,089 words

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... il in the universe, and about whether God exists, but the very fact that he asks the questions reflects his commitment to God and to religious belief. Discussing his own experience, Elie Wiesel once wrote, "My anger rises up within faith and not outside it, " and Eliezer's struggle reflects such a sentiment. Only in the lowest moments of his faith does he turn his back on God, but even when he says that he has given up on God completely, Wiesel's constant use of religious metaphors belies Eliezer's true beliefs. He even refers to Biblical passages when he denies his faith (see "Important Quotations Explained"). When he fears that he will abandon his father, he prays to God, and after his father's death, he expresses regret that there was no religious memorial.

At the end of the story, Eliezer has retained his faith, though it has forever been changed by his Holocaust experience. In Night's most famous passage, Eliezer states, "Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. " It is God's silence that he finds most troubling, as his relation of an event at Buna reveals. As the Gestapo hangs a young boy, a man asks, "Where is God?" ; the only response is "[t]otal silence throughout the camp. " How, Eliezer and other victims wonder, can an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God allow such horror and cruelty to occur, especially to such devout worshippers? The presence of such horror, and the lack of a divine response, forever shakes Eliezer's faith in God. It is worth noting that God's silence during the hanging of the young boy recalls the story of the Akedah The Binding of Isaac found in the Hebrew Scriptures (Genesis twenty-two). In this story, God decides to test the faith of Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his only son, Isaac.

Abraham does not doubt his God, and ties Isaac to a sacrificial altar. He raises a knife to kill the boy, but at the last minute, God sends an angel to save Isaac. The angel explains that God merely wanted to test Abraham's faith, and, of course, would never permit him to shed innocent blood. Unlike the God of the Holocaust, God in the Akedah is not silent; he interrupts Abraham and prevents an atrocity. Night can be read as a reversal of the Akedah story.

It is a story about a horrible sacrifice that God does not interrupt at the last minute. There is no angel swooping down as masses burn in the crematorium, or as Eliezer's father lies beaten and bloodied. In the Akedah, when God is looking for Abraham, He calls out for him, and Abraham replies with the direct and forceful statement, "Here I am. " In another reversal, in Night Eliezer and the other prisoners call out for God, and their only response is silence; during his first night at Birkenau, Eliezer says, "The Eternal was silent. What had I to thank Him for?" And finally, the lesson Eliezer learns is the opposite of the lesson taught in the Bible. The moral of the Akedah is that God demands sacrifice, but is ultimately compassionate; during the Holocaust, Eliezer feels that God's silence demonstrates the absence of Divine compassion and as a result, he ultimately questions the very existence of God. There is also a second type of silence operating throughout Night: the silence of the victims, and the lack of resistance to the Nazi threat.

When his father is beaten at the end of his life, Eliezer remembers, "I did not move. I was afraid, " and he feels guilty about his inaction. It is implied throughout the text that silence and passivity are what allowed the Holocaust to continue. Elie Wiesel's writing of the book itself is an attempt to break a silence, to loudly and boldly tell of the atrocities of the Holocaust and, in this way, to try to prevent it from ever happening again.

As discussed above, Night focuses extensively on Eliezer's struggle with his faith. Eliezer discusses this struggle in terms of his loss of faith in God, but really it is a loss of faith in everything around him. After experiencing such horror and cruelty in the world, the world no longer makes sense to Eliezer. This disillusionment is the result of his painful experience with Nazi persecution, but it is also the result of the cruelty he sees fellow prisoners inflict upon each other.

Eliezer even becomes aware of the cruelty of which he himself is capable. His entire experience in the war shows him how profanely horribly people can treat one another revelation that troubles him deeply. The first insensible cruelty Eliezer experiences is the cruelty of the Nazis. Yet when the Nazis first appear, they do not seem monstrous in any way.

Eliezer recounts, "[O]ur first impressions of the Germans were most reassuring. Their attitude toward their hosts was distant, but polite. " So many aspects of the Holocaust are incomprehensible, but perhaps the most difficult to understand is how human beings could so callously slaughter millions of innocent victims. Wiesel highlights this insensible tragedy by pulling the Nazis into focus first as human beings, and then, as the memoir shifts to the concentration camps, showing the atrocities they committed. Furthermore, Night demonstrates that cruelty breeds cruelty. Instead of comforting each other in their times of difficulty, the prisoners respond to their circumstances by turning against one another.

Towards the end of the book, a Kapos says to Eliezer, "Here, every man has to fight for himself and not think of anyone else. Here, there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends. Everyone lives and dies for himself alone. " It is significant that a Kapos says this to the narrator, because Kapo's were themselves prisoners placed in charge of other prisoners. They enjoyed a relatively better (though still horrendous) quality of life in the camp, but abetted the Nazi mission and often behaved cruelly to the prisoners in their charge. At the beginning of the fifth section, Eliezer refers to them as "functionaries of death. " The Kapo's' position symbolizes the way the Holocaust's cruelty bred cruelty in its victims, turning people against each other, as self-preservation became the highest virtue.

When Eliezer's father dies, Eliezer is deeply troubled at the sense of relief he feels. Cruelty is everywhere in Night, and Eliezer's experience of that cruelty profoundly shakes his faith in mankind and the world around him.


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