FAITHLESS

Faithless



Faithless

After the Vienna Award of 1940, the Romanian government Gigurtu gave northwestern Transylvania, Wiesel family lived in the region became part of Hungary. He overhears someone chanting the prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, words of praising, glorifying, and sanctifying the great name of God. He recalls his father whispering to him the words, Yisgadal, veyiskadash, shmey raba which means May his name be celebrated and sanctified. Those words his father whispered to him led Elie to become angry within him. The horror that night took a toll on him and his belief in God.

As for Elie he thought to himself, I cease to pray which means he no longer has that yearning to pray to God. He stopped praying and his faith in God falters. He remembers reading about Job and sympathizes with Job. Job lost all of his possessions, his wife, and his children. Job was afflicted with painful sores all over his body but Job did not deny the existence of God only God's injustice. Elie doesn't deny that God exist, his problem was that God allowed the immoral of the annihilation of the Jews. Elie wanted to know what lessons were they supposed to learn from the destruction of the Jews by the Nazis.

Dam was broken after an interview - continued close friendship - with Francois Mauriac (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature - 1952). At his urging, Wiesel wrote in Yiddish 245 pages of memory overflow crude titled The world was silent was published by an association of Buenos Aires. Elie, in the beginning had strong faith in God. He would go to the temple daily to pray and cry out to God. He had a longing and curiosity to learn more about God. He was curious wanted to study the words of the Kabbalah and Talmud. But when Elie arrived at the concentration camp, his faith in God spiritually decline, he starts to wavers in Him, and lastly eventually lost all confidence in the God he once desired to know.

Elie being angry with God and could not give him praises or thank because he witnessed babies, children, women, and men thrown into the flames. He relates his life to with Job, a just and upright man and God allow Satan to test it, and Job lost his possessions, wife, and children. Elie doesn't refute that God exist but can't understand why the injustice to the Jews and Job. He lost every confidence in God and stop believing in God the night of Rosh Hashanah. He accuses God of forsaking the Jews and delivering them from the Nazis. As a Christian, I've learned that things don't always go the way we plan or perceive. Life may start out good but somewhere down the road it may become bumpy but you can't give up. cgave up in the end but he couldn't see that God had spared his life that he may someday write about ...