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Relationship with Eliezer and his father
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Relationship with Eliezer and his father
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The Jews looked up at God very passionately because he was their idol and guide through life. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, hardships that Jews faced during the Holocaust are portrayed. Throughout the book, the author develops motifs that depict Eliezer’s relationship with his father and his questioning of faith. On the other hand, Elie’s bond with his father is jeopardized due to the challenges they are being put through. Eliezer’s relationship with his father is greatly emphasized as a motif within the book. Elie emphasizes the central idea of his relationship with his father. For instance, he asserts, “I wanted to see where they were sending my father. If he went to the right, I would go after him...”(29) In other words, he is willing to go to the right, with his father, to be executed and not face the future alone. His main priority is to care of his father, in a time of cruelty. An example occurs late in the novel when his father is weak: “...don't give your ration of bread and soup to your old father. There's nothing you can do for him...” (105) For the sake of himself, Elie is willing to give up his meals to keep his father alive, to …show more content…
motivate him to stay strong, and to not give up. His father is what is making him not give up on life and not give up to death. His faith is also what keeps him going but it is put to the test when trouble arises. Eliezer’s faith is shaken when he experiences the cruelty that he sees in the holocaust. He wonders why his God would permit such brutality to take place and why to cause mass disruption. For example he wrathfully declares: “Blessed be the Name of Eternal! Why? Why should I bless him? He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many factories of death?...”(105) Elie begins to question if God really existed and protects all, he wouldn’t be doing this to the Jews. The time that was once spent in praising God, has now turned into accusing and wanting an explanation in why this is happening. To demonstrate, Eliezer thinks: “ … People have ever recited the prayer for the dead...For the first time, i felt revolt ride up in me. Why bless his name? The eternal, Lord of the Universe...”(31) Due to all the exposure of executions in the concentration camps, he then believes that God must either not exist or is cruel. Eventually he overcomes all the confusions with the differences between life and humanity. In similarity, the loss of faith has an impact on the father-son relationship.
The son, at first, wants to explore what faith was and the “almighty God” but the father didn’t agree with what he was thinking. He thinks Eliezer is too young. Now that they’re suffering the father maintains his faith, however Eliezer doesn't understand and no longer believes. To illustrate, he mentions: “I did not fast mainly to please my father who had forbidden me to do so...there was no longer any reason why i should fast. I no longer accepted God’s. As I swallowed my bowl of soup, i saw in the gesture an act of rebellion and protest against Him.” He no longer has faith and his only purpose in fastening, is for his father. Overall Eliezer’s attitude seems to shift as he realizes the importance of his father's life to his own
survival. In conclusion, Elie Wiesel fights for his survival to be with his father, and because of him, this is what motivates Eliezer to keep trying to get through problems that come across at the camp. His faith was once devoted in praising his God but it is soon abandoned when he starts to question why all these events are happening. He refuses to accept that God doesn’t deserve to be praised and lives the horrors of the Holocaust.
Eliezer’s response was that he was scared that he would do what others did to their father. He prayed to God “Master of the Universe, give me the strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou’s son has done” (91). Eliezer cares and protects his father more than ever.
with his father being a burden on his shoulder. Something that was holding him back but even though his father slack sometimes almost caused their demise and caused him to slowdown. In certain situations he kept moving forward and not giving up on his father and on himself. Also trying the best he could to survive and help his father survive.Elie even though he was a young boy took on an adult role and push through his situation handling it as an adult. It seemed to be that his father became a distraction towards the end of Night. Even though it hurt him to see his father in his last days or moments before his death even though we don’t know if he died we
In his memoir, Night, author Elie Wiesel describes the horrors he experienced during the Holocaust. One prominent theme throughout the work is the evolution of human relationships within the camp, specifically between fathers and sons. While they are marching between camps, Elie speaks briefly with Rabbi Eliahu, who lost sight of his son on the long journey. Elie says he has not seen the rabbi’s son, but after Rabbi Eliahu leaves, he remembers seeing the son. He realizes that the rabbi’s son did not lose track of his father but instead purposefully ran ahead thinking it would increase his chances of survival. Elie, who has abandoned nearly all of his faith in God, cannot help but pray, saying, “ ‘ Oh God, Master of the Universe, give me the strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahu’s son has done’ ” (Wiesel 91). In this moment, his most fervent hope is that he will remain loyal to his father and not let his selfishness overcome his dedication to his father. However, he is soon no longer able to maintain this hope.
Eliezer was a strict Jew who practiced religion and observed all Jewish holidays. As a child he was very devoted and focused all his energy to study Judaism. He grew up loving God with the belief that God is more powerful than anything else in this universe. He believed that with all the power God has, he is capable to put an end to all this awful suffering. Living and witnessing all this misery and have God not do anything about it makes him questions God.
Elie and his father both experience change throughout the course of the book. Elie mentions early on that his father is rather unsentimental and never displays emotion, even at home. It is not until Elie's father returns home from a meeting with news of the Germans planning to deport the Jews living in Sighet, that emotion was present in ...
Instead of brushing this feeling off, he decided to face this feeling and wanted to help his father more by finding him some soup. This action shows that Elie is not a brute because he is still capable of feeling empathy and compassion towards his father.
At the beginning of the book, Eliezer was in the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This hierarchy starts at the bottom with physiological needs, and progresses upwards with safety needs, belonging and love, esteem, and finally self-actualization. Eliezer was working with his love and belonging needs with respect to his religion. He was obsessed with the Jewish scripture. He wanted to learn. He was an extremely intellectual teenager. He would study the Jewish scripture with Moche the Beadle. "We would read together, ten times over, the same page of the Zohar. Not to learn it by hear, but to extract the divine essence from it." His views on the divinity of God do not endure through the Holocaust and the concentration camps.
Eliezer loses hope, trust, and his beliefs. He begins to rely on himself because he knew that only he can help himself and he could not depend on anyone else. "Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever..."(pg 32). Elie's father was struck, and that was when he realized he was afraid of death, and he felt guilty because he did not help his father.
...bers that he has a father and he forgot about him in the mob. “I knew he was running out of strength, close to death, and yet I had abandoned him” (p.106). Elie feels guilty for leaving his father when he needed Elie the most. After he wakes up he goes looking for his father. He feels as if he is responsible for taking care of his father. Elie replaces his faith with obligation to his father to help keep him going thought out the holocaust.
Eliezer loses his faith because he questions why he should thank God. All of the fellow Jews were praying for the dead but Elie was just utterly confused why God would do that to the children. “Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?” He thought if God was going to be silent and not help these people, then why should he praise this so called “God.” He had lost faith in his family when they were split up at the beginning “Yet that was the moment when I left my mother. There was no time to think, and I already felt my father’s hand press against mine: we were alone.” He believed that he would never see his sister and mother again. Thus,
Firstly, due to the harsh conditions that the Jews experienced they were becoming increasingly feeble. Elie realized that, “every day, [his] father was getting weaker. His eyes were watery, his face the color of dead leaves” (Wiesel 107). Elie’s father, Shlomo, found it harder to keep striving for survival, while undergoing the constant unbelievable acts of dehumanization, which lead Elie to lose faith in his own father's survival. Secondly, The block elder pulled Elie aside to speak to him about his father, he told him, “Stop giving your ration of bread and soup to your old father. You cannot help him anymore…[it is] too late”(Wiesel 110). After thinking about what the block elder had told him for a short time Elie claimed, “He was right, I thought deep down, not daring to admit it to myself”(Wiesel 111). The tables had very much turned, originally Elie was depending on his father, but now Shlomo had become completely dependant on his son for survival in the harsh conditions which they inhabited and tolerated, which pushed Elie to lose his faith in him. André Neher, a Jewish philosopher, views the situation as “An Anti-Akeda: not a father leading his son to be sacrificed, but a son guiding, dragging, carrying to the altar an old man who no longer has the strength to continue”(Fine 102). Each of Neher’s reasons; guiding, dragging and carrying an old man played
In the beginning of the memoir, Elie is an extremely passionate and devout Jew, but as the story progresses, Elie sees horrendous things in the concentration camps, and as a result, he slowly loses his faith. Elie displays his extreme devotion in the beginning stages of the memoir when he states, “By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple. I cried because something inside me felt the need to cry” (Wiesel 4). Elie is clearly very fond of learning more about his religion and connecting to God in a spiritual way. Furthermore, Elie is only thirteen years old, so when he says he cries because he feels the need to cry, he is exhibiting incredible passion. Elie reveals signs of change and begins to lose his faith in God just a few moments after arriving at the concentration camp when he says, “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes” (Wiesel 34). Elie exclaims that he cannot worship God anymore due to the awful things he has seen at Auschwitz. He does not want to believe in the being that could have allowed these awful events to happen. This is a completely different Elie from the loving and caring Elie in the ghetto. Elie also uses rep...
...e has to deal with the death of his family, the death of his innocence, and the death of his God at the very young age of fifteen. He retells the horrors of the concentration camp, of starvation, beatings, torture, illness, and hard labor. He comes to question how God could let this happen and to redefine the existence of God in the concentration camp. This book is also filled with acts of kindness and compassion amid the degradation and violence. It seems that for every act of violence that is committed, Elie counteracts with some act of compassion. Night is a reflection on goodness and evil, on responsibility to family and community, on the struggle to forge identity and to maintain faith. It shows one boy's transformation from spiritual idealism to spiritual death via his journey through the Nazi's failed attempt to conquer and erase a people and their faith.
The Holocaust forces Eliezer to ask horrible questions about the nature of god and evil about whether god exists. But the very fact that he asks these questions reflects his commitment. In the starts of the camps, the prisoners start praying every night. Praying for god to come. This is when which Eliezer starts to struggle with his faith. Eliezer loses faith in his family. He and his mother and sister were parted at the camp and he has no hope to see them ever again. "Men to the left! Women to the right..." 27). Eliezer beliefs in an omnipotent, benevolent god is unconditional, and he cannot imagine living without faith in a divine power. God silence. As the Gestapo hangs a young boy a man asks, “ where is god”
At the beginning, Eliezer’s faith in God was unconditional. Through the narrative he discusses the struggle of grasping onto his religion, which he couldn’t resort to in between all the dismay.