The book begins with Elie Wiesel recalling the early days of his training in the Hebrew Talmud as well as that in the Kaballah under the tutelage of a Hasidic Jew named Moshe the Beadle. Born in Sighet, Transylvania, the son of well-respected, civic-minded Jews, one day Wiesel and his family were deported from their home and sent to a ghetto with other Jews. Despite the substandard living conditions imposed upon them, the Jews continued life as normal, with little protest. After several deportations to smaller ghettos, the Jews of Wiesel’s community were finally herded into overloaded cattle cars and sent to the concentration camps. At the first stop, after being separated from mother and sisters, who were promptly burned in the crematorium, Wiesel and his father learned to combine efforts as a means of survival. Possessing the courage to live despite the unprecedented suffering that surrounded them, Wiesel and his father labored gruelingly to prove themselves useful in order to escape the dreaded selection by the Nazi doctors for the crematorium. Wiesel witnessed many appalling scenes-- such as innocent children burning alive in a pit, and a young boy horrifically living for half an hour while hanging by his neck from a rope-- that colored his view of God for the remainder of his life. His father died. But Wiesel, weak from dysentery, starvation and abuse, preternaturally survived to be released from Auschwitz by the Allied Forces, living to tell the story of the untold millions who died at the hands of Nazi brutality. Through these events, Wiesel’s knowledge of the traditional God of the Hebrews was called into question. God is faithful and loving towards His people, keeping His promises throughout the ages, yet exacting strict justice and revenge on the enemies of His people--the Jews. He revealed His nature through His word. Among numerous other denotations, Deuteronomy 32:4 proclaims that, “[God] is the Rock, His works are perfect, and all His ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is He.” He also promises to keep His covenant with His people if they keep His commands (Deuteronomy 7:9). Throughout the Psalms, God’s faithfulness and enduring love are affirmed.
Wiesel first disputes the faithfulness of God. Wiesel was well aware of the traditional view of the God of Israel as faithful, just, merciful, and loving; however, as he and his family were subjected to the dehumanization of the Nazi concentration camps, not surprisingly, Wiesel doubted whether his God was truly faithful. Despite the pleas of the innocent victims surrounding him, God appeared to ignore their cries for mercy (Wiesel 20). Regardless, the Jewish prisoners continued to petition God, saying, “God is testing us. He wants to see whether we are capable of overcoming our base instincts, of killing the Satan within ourselves. We have no right to despair. And if He punishes us mercilessly, it is a sign that He loves us that much more” (45). When God still did not show Himself faithful by liberating His people, they persisted in their praises, as they said, “We needed to show God that even here, locked in hell, we are capable of singing His praises” (69). Such a response was common among Jews in the Nazi death camps, as they believed that, by silently facing death without fear, they were accepting the sentence God had justly and lovingly prepared for them, ardently hoping for redemption and rewards in heaven for their obedience to His will (Cohn-Sherbok 125). Although initially Wiesel joined in this traditional worship, he soon began to question why he should bless God in light of all the terrible things He had allowed (67). “What are you, my God?” Wiesel angrily inquired of his Creator, “How do You compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to You their faith, their anger, their defiance? What does your grandeur mean, Master of the Universe, in the face of all this cowardice, this decay, and this misery? Why do you go on troubling these poor people’s wounded minds, their ailing bodies?” (66). Wiesel inculpated God as weaker than man because, despite incredible suffering, His people still praised Him, while God destroyed them simply for causing Him displeasure. Wiesel so discredited the faithfulness of God as to pen the horrific words: “I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people” (Wiesel 81).
While this statement might seem rash and insensible, in light of the acts of inhumanity Wiesel witnessed coupled with the destruction of the faith of even the most faithful Jews, his statement is justifiable. Wiesel reminisces an anecdote of how an unfortunate Polish rabbi lost his faith. After daily examining his personal knowledge of God and the Talmud, he finally gave up, telling Wiesel,
It’s over. God is no longer with us…I know. No one has the right to say things like that…Man is too insignificant, too limited, to even try to comprehend God’s mysterious ways. But what can someone like myself do? I’m neither a sage nor just a man. I am not a saint. I’m a simple creature of flesh and bone. I suffer hell in my soul and my flesh. I also have eyes and I see what is being done here. Where is God’s mercy? Where’s God? How can I believe, how can anyone believe in this God of Mercy? (Wiesel 76-77).
Shortly thereafter, Akiba Drumer, one of the most zealot Jews who had come with Wiesel from Sighet to the concentration camps, gave up his faith and died. Wiesel begins to surmise that life and faith are interconnected as he writes,
If only he could have kept his faith in God, if only he could have considered this suffering a divine test, he would not have been swept away by the selection. But as soon as he felt the first chinks in his faith, he lost all incentive to fight and opened the door to death (77).
What kind of God allows even His most ardent followers to lose their faith and die atrocious deaths? How can a faithful God even allow those faithful to Him to experience suffering at the hands of arguably the world’s worst evil?
As he considers God’s faithfulness, Wiesel takes two stances: 1) that God is both indifferent to the plight of His people and in complete contradiction to the compassionate and gracious God of the Old Testament, and 2) a Job-like perspective that indignantly censures God and sees a void in His silence (Cohn-Sherbok 101-102). For Wiesel, God cannot be placed in both of these categories—He must be either a ruthless despot or a benevolent patriarch (102-103). As Robert McAfee Brown notes, “Every religion that affirms a God either omnipotent or omniscient, or both, is perilously close to proclaiming a God who is ultimately executioner… If God is truly in control, all that happens, not only for good but also for ill, is finally traceable back to God” (156). If the events of the Holocaust are traceable back to God, it is no wonder that Wiesel had trouble considering God faithful. Were Wiesel a Christian, perhaps he would agree that in “[a] world like the present one, with a Messiah…[it appears] that the redemption efforts failed, and that rather than God conquering evil, evil appears to have conquered God” (186). The faithful God of the Old Testament is impugned in the very occurrence of the Holocaust, calling into question the efficacy of His promises. However, despite Wiesel’s apparent denial of God, he cannot altogether dismiss the existence of God, and he even intones quiet prayers to the God whom he has forsaken (38,91). Viewing the entirety of the world, the existence of God is undeniable; nevertheless, “The dilemma is created by belief, not disbelief. It would be hard to live in a world without God…but it is even harder to live in the world with God” (142). Furthermore, “man can live with a cruel God, who creates men to murder them, who chooses a people to have them slain on a sacrificial altar, but he cannot live in a world without God. Better to search for the hidden God, the eclipsed God, than to be without Him” (Greenberg 126-127). Wiesel knows that God exists, but it is his childhood knowledge of this God that creates such despair for him and for other Jews as they realize they have been forsaken by the One who claims to be faithful.
Secondly, Wiesel challenges the justice of God, virtually putting Him on trial, indicting Him for His injustice towards humanity. “Some men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sin of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come,” he writes. “As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice” (45). In the scene vaguely mentioned above, Wiesel witnesses the brutally barbaric hanging of an innocent, angelic, and beloved child who is too lightweight, due to his age and the emaciating effect of hunger, to die instantly. In a graphic yet moving scene, the prisoners of the camp are required to look the dying child in the eye to learn their lesson in the consequences of disobedience while they march to a dinner of soup that tastes like corpses (Wiesel 63-65). Many men cry out in anguish at this scene, “Where is merciful God, where is He?... For God’s sake, where is God?” (64-65). Agonizingly, Wiesel inwardly responds to these inquiries, “Where He is? There is where- hanging from this gallows…” (65). For the onlookers in the camp, the cruel death of this innocent young boy symbolized the death of the just God whom they believed should be preventing such injustices from occurring.
While the idea of the death of God presents a dire view of deity which some view as atheistic, the nature of the circumstances only allows for such a conclusion. However, “this death of God does not appear to be an acceptance of atheism on Wiesel’s part….[he] cannot get a living God out of the picture…the part of God that is dying might be designated as that which can be loved…in witnessing the death of a child, Wiesel suggests that to be with God is to be with a presence that leaves us alone” (Greenberg 61-62). Furthering Wiesel’s suit against God, to be left alone by God is in terrible contradiction to the God of the Bible who will “never leave you nor forsake you” (Joshua 1:5). This scene may also present a hopeless and desperate parody of the crucifixion, with “God on the gallows, God subjected to human demonry, God at the mercy of evil, God embodying death and impotence rather than life and death, God whose ‘real presence’ is such that soup transubstantiated into corpses” (Brown 56). By asking where God is and also praying to this absent God to not betray his father, Wiesel contradicts the moral order that had been accepted prior to the Holocaust while also insisting upon its assertion upon this new world of amoral atrocities. This calls for realignment in his relationship with God “in light of the devastating new evidence about the nature of the God he formerly worshipped and the universe created by that God in which there are burning pits of infants…the newly revealed God of silence” (34).
To further the picture of the death of God, Wiesel describes the Nazi selection process, which all prisoners in the death camps underwent at least once. Stripped naked to expose every inch of their wretched, emaciated, and malnourished bodies, men and women alike were quickly herded before SS doctors, who made a list of colorless, lackluster, useless individuals that would later be taken to the gas chambers prior to cremation (71). Wiesel paints a heinous picture of God when, after describing the selection process, he states, “This must be how one stands for the Last Judgment” (Ibid). Although he acknowledges the miraculous manner in which his father twice escaped selection by proving himself useful, Wiesel still indicts a God who could allow innocent people to be entitled to life or death on the basis of their utility (76). According to Dan Cohn-Sherbok, “If God were ultimately responsible for the horrors of the death camps, it seems impossible to reconcile such mass murder with the traditional concept of God’s nature. Surely if God is all-good, he would have wished to rescue innocent Jewish victims from the hands of the Nazis; if he is omnipotent, He would have the power to do so” (25). Arguably, there is evil in the world only because God allowed human beings to have free will. Logically, therefore, He should be able to fabricate a world that contains both freedom of choice and absence of suffering, being an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good God (Cohn-Sherbok 65). Although the events of the Holocaust seem to suggest that God does not fit into the aforementioned categories, Michael R. Steele quotes Wiesel as saying that, “man is not created in order to suffer. If this were so, then God could not be holy. God does not want man to suffer; man suffers against God. [Jews] believe that suffering is not the answer; suffering is only the question” (146). Wiesel struggles to come to terms with the existence of both God, like the one whom he studied in his youth, and Auschwitz, as one seems to negate the possibility for the other, leaving for the human faith and intellect a harrowing struggle with which to grapple (Brown 54). Ultimately, there seems to be a power struggle as the Nazi regime challenges the omnipotence of God, and Wiesel desires to believe in the holiness of God in the face of such evil.
As the celebrations and ceremonies of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, (in which Wiesel refused to participate) began, shortly after the tragic hanging scene and just before the selection process, so commenced Elie Wiesel’s indictment of God. “I was the accuser, God the accused,” he desolately writes.
My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in the world without God, without man…I was nothing but ashes now, but I felt myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger (68).
Brown justifies this indictment of God, stating that in quarreling with God, Wiesel pays Him the “supreme compliment” by acknowledging that He is worthy of anger rather than insouciance (148). Eliezer Berkovits extends Wiesel’s accusations, proclaiming them to be proof of his faith, as “faith, because it is trust in God, demands justice of God. It cannot countenance that God be involved in injustice and cruelty. And yet, for faith God is involved in everything under the sun. What faith is searching for is, if not understanding fully, at least to gain a hint of the nature of God’s involvement” (68). Additionally, if God’s trials of His people are seen as a declaration of His love for them, then their indictment of Him might also serve to express their love for Him, not as an arrogant child, but as one disappointed in the morality of their parent and desirous of an explanation (van Inwagen 126).
Thirdly, Wiesel questions the silence, and therefore seeming absence of God, in the face of the Holocaust. On almost every page of Night, God’s silence is visible. In every unanswered prayer and every apparently ignored complaint against Him, God responds with silence. Finally, Wiesel admits that, “I no longer accepted God’s silence” (69). In the face of the evil he experienced, it is a wonder that, rather than simply rejecting God’s silence, he did not reject God Himself altogether. God’s silence suggests “the collapse of language” in the face of such evil (Greenberg 4-5). When Wiesel and others try to speak about the brutality of the Holocaust, “part of what we hear is the silence—the silence of God in Auschwitz, the silence of the world as it turned deaf ears on atrocity, the silence of the victims as they recognized their awful fate. But the silence does not issue from a void; it surges around the words that conceal it. One hears it because the sounds of language: if we did not speak about the Holocaust, we would not be able to hear its silences” (Greenberg 39). In other words, in studying the silence of God in the Holocaust, one learns much about who God is and how He manifests Himself to His people. A difficult struggle for reason, “God’s presence is most strongly felt through His absence” (57). His silence often is equated with absence, causing great agony for believers who wonder why God is not answering their prayers, their cries for help.
In some ways, Wiesel may be compared with Job of the Bible who endured suffering as a trial of His faith in God. The primary difference between Job and Wiesel, however, is that Job receives an answer of sorts while Wiesel only receives silence. He prays “for God and against God, as well as to Him, wrestling with His silence—a continuing source of anguish” (Greenberg 47). According to Thomas A. Indinopulos, “the sufferer raises his eyes toward Heaven, where God always sits in silence. What [Wiesel] perceive[s] in the pain and humiliation that human beings endure on earth is not the non-existence of God, but the ineffectiveness of divine will…What [he] dramatize[s]…is not the death of God, but the death of God’s creation” (52). Although he receives silence, Wiesel cannot accept the conclusion that there are no supernatural deities, and so he “instead maintains that God exists, and his protest is in essence a longing for the God of the Bible” (Cohn-Sherbok 102)
In conclusion, in Night, Wiesel arraigns God on charges of unfaithfulness, injustice, and silence in response to the evil of the Nazi regime. However, although he indicts God in the face of atrocious evil, he still concludes that there is a God and that He is worthy of worship. Wiesel seems to acknowledge the inherent problem of the fallen human race, and acknowledges that part of separation from God is “being the playthings of chance. It means living in a world in which innocent children die horribly, and it means something worse than that: it means living in a world in which innocent children die horribly for no reason at all” (van Inwagen 72). Although such an occurrence decries God’s omnipotence, perhaps He could not precipitate greater good without permitting the evil seen in the Holocaust (62). Perhaps the allure for the extermination of evil pales in comparison to whatever basis God may have for sanctioning the existence of evil in the world (60-61). Although Wiesel may desire a theodicy, or an explanation for men of God’s ways, part of the answer is the unknown. God’s ways cannot be understood by the finite human intellect, which is so limited in not only its scope of knowledge but in its perspective of the world. Wiesel, and other readers and writers of Holocaust literature, must be content to simply accept the acts of God on a faith-basis, without knowing what purpose evil may serve or how it can support the goodness of God.
Works Cited
Berkovits, Eliezer. Faith after the Holocaust. New York: Ktav House, INC, 1973. Print.
The Bible. New International Version ed. Grand Rapids. BibleGateway.com: A searchable online Bible in over 100 versions and 50 languages. Nick Hengeveld, 1993. Web. 28 Nov. 2009.
Brown, Robert M. Elie Wiesel: Messenger to all Humanity. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1983. Print.
Cohn-Sherbok, Dan. Holocaust Theology. London: Lamp, 1989. Print.
Ininopulos, Thomas A. "The Mystery of Suffering in the Art of Dostoevsky, Camus, Wiesel, and Grunewald." Journal of American Academy of Religtion 43.1 (1975): 51-61. JStor. Web. 30 Oct. 2009.
Rosenfeld, Alvin, and Irving Greenberg, eds. Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel. London: Indiana UP, 1978. Print.
Steele, Michael R. Christianity, Tragedy, and Holocaust Literature. London: Greenwood, 1995. Print.
Van Inwagen, Peter. Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Company, 2004. Print.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. Print.
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