Silence In Elie Wiesel's Night

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God’s silence as His people suffer in Night leads Elie and the other prisoners to question their faith in the Jewish religion. As Elie is transported from camp to camp, and things get worse and worse, he begins to wonder if there is a God. As he goes through his own spiritual changes, others around him do as well. Elie grew up under a strong religious influence. Hoping to one day become a Kabbalist, Elie prayed and sought guidance from Moishe the Beadle. That was, until all foreign Jews were expelled for Sighet, and Moishe the Beadle taken by the Hungarian police. However, Moishe managed to escape, returning to Sighet to warn the town of what was to come. Nobody listened, and the once respected Moishe was deemed crazy. He was no longer the …show more content…
Introduced as an earnest religious figure, his values resonate throughout the text, even though he himself disappears after the first few pages. This silence represents his renunciation in God and the Jewish religion all together. As Moishe warned, the town of Sighet was soon subdivided into ghettos and ultimately transported to Auschwitz and later Buna. One day in Buna, a young boy, a “pipel”, is hanged along with two other men for sabotage. The Gestapo, accused the three of vandalising the camps power plant. Their death sentence was to be hung in front of the assembled inmates.Before their chairs were tipped, the two men shouted, “ ‘Long live Liberty!’ But the boy was silent. ‘Where is merciful God, where is He?’ someone behind [Elie] was asking” (64). The boy, like Moishe, lost his faith in God and while the two men went defiantly, the young boy had lost all hope. Elie, mourning over the boy’s death, thinks that, as far as he is concerned, God has been murdered on the gallows with the pipel. He and the other prisoners call out to God, and their only response is the boy’s silence. Only days later, Yom Kippur approached, and Elie does not

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