Eliezer's struggle with his faith is a dominant conflict in ‘Night’. At the beginning of the work, his faith in God is absolute. When asked why he prays to God, he answers, “Why did I pray? . . . Why did I live? Why did I breathe?” His belief in an omnipotent, benevolent God is unconditional, and he cannot imagine living without faith in a divine power. But this faith is shaken by his experience during the holocaust.
Initially, Eliezer's faith is a product of his studies in Jewish mysticism, which teach him that God is everywhere in the world, that nothing exists without God, that in fact everything in the physical world is an “emanation” of the divine world. In other words, Eliezer has grown up believing that everything on Earth reflects God's holiness and power. His faith is grounded in the idea that God is everywhere, all the time, that his divinity touches every aspect of his daily life. Since God is good, his studies teach him, and God is everywhere in the world, the world must therefore be good.
Eliezer's faith in the goodness of the world is irreparably shaken by the cruelty and evil he witnesses during the Holocaust. He cannot imagine that the concentration camps' unbelievable, disgusting cruelty could possibly reflect divinity. He wonders how a benevolent God could be part of such depravity and how an omnipotent God could permit such cruelty to take place. His faith is equally shaken by the cruelty and selfishness he sees among the prisoners. His belief that humankind is essentially good is shaken when he sees the selfishness, evil, and cruelty of which everybody—not only the Nazis, but also his fellow prisoners, his fellow Jews, even himself—is capable. If the world is so disgusting and cruel, he feels, then God either must be disgusting and cruel or must not exist at all.
Though this realization seems to annihilate his faith, Eliezer manages to retain some of this faith throughout his experiences. At certain moments—during his first night in the camp and during the hanging of the pipel—Eliezer does grapple with his faith, but his struggle should not be confused with a complete abandonment of his faith. This struggle doesn't diminish his belief in God; rather, it is essential to the existence of that belief. When Moishe the Beadle is asked why he prays, he replies, “I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.” He conveys two concepts key to Eliezer's struggle: the idea that God is everywhere, even within every individual, and the idea that faith is based on questions, not answers. Eliezer's struggle with faith is, for the most part, a struggle of questions. He continually asks where God has gone and questions how such evil could exist in the world. Moishe's statement tells us that these moments do not reflect Elie's loss of faith; instead they demonstrate his ongoing spiritual commitment. But we also see that at the lowest points of Eliezer's faith—particularly when he sees the youth hung in Buna—he is full of answers, not questions. At these moments, he has indeed lost the spirit of faith he learned from Moishe, and is truly faithless. In other words, questioning God is fundamental to the idea of faith in God. The Holocaust forces Eliezer to ask horrible questions about the nature of good and evil and about whether God exists. But the very fact that he asks these questions reflects his commitment to God.
Only rarely does Eliezer interrupt his continuous narrative stream to reminisce about the ways that the Holocaust continued to affect his life after it ended. Here, however, Eliezer looks back on his first night in Birkenau and describes not only what he felt at the time but also the lasting impact of that night: “Never shall I forget that night . . . which has turned my life into one long night . . . . Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God. . . . Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”
It is the idea of God's silence that he finds most troubling, as this description of an event at Buna reveals: as the Gestapo hangs a young boy, a man asks, “Where is God?” yet the only response is “total silence throughout the camp.” Eliezer and his companions are left to wonder how an all-knowing, all--powerful God can allow such horror and cruelty to occur, especially to such devout worshipers.
The existence of this horror, and the lack of a divine response, forever shakes Eliezer's faith in God. Someone who was extremely religious at a very young age and has a deep rooted faith in god will take a very serious event to affect this faith. This is exactly what happened to Eliezer at the hands of the Nazis and the Jewish prisoners.
“ We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything—death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth. ” The prisoners had gone through such physical tests and stress that hunger, cold, fatigue and their natural needs were overpowered. They had no desires. From a happy boy living a normal life, Eliezer, and the others, had been reduced to something inhuman.
“ My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou's son has done.” Imagine a son snatching away the very life from his father, so that he himself can survive. This was what Eliezer feared being reduced to due to the situation. After his father had died Eliezer could not weep for him, and he says that, “ I did not weep…… And deep inside me if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!...” That was the regression which he had gone through due to the horrors he had been subjected to.
“ One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me. ”
This is the final passage of Night, Eliezer's final statement about the effect the Holocaust has had on him. Eliezer implies that even though he has survived the war physically, he is essentially dead, his soul killed by the suffering he witnessed and endured. Yet, when Eliezer says, “the look in his eyes, as he stared into mine,” he implies a separation between himself and the corpse. His language, too, indicates a fundamental separation between his sense of self and his identity as a Holocaust victim—as if he has become two distinct beings. The corpse-image reminds him how much he has suffered and how much of himself—his faith in God, his innocence, his faith in mankind, his father, his mother, his sister—has been killed in the camps. At the same time he manages to separate himself from this empty shell. The image of the corpse will always stay with him, but he has found a sense of identity that will endure beyond the Holocaust. As dark as this passage is, its message is partially hopeful. Eliezer survives beyond the horrible suffering he endured by separating himself from it, casting it aside so he can remember, but not continue to feel, the horror and therefore maybe lead a productive life in the future.
Although we know that Elie Wiesel recovered his faith in man and God and went on to lead a productive life after the Holocaust. Eliezer has been witness to the ultimate evil; he has lost his faith in God, and in the souls of men. Night's final line, in which Eliezer looks at himself in the mirror and sees a “corpse,” suggests that Eliezer's survival is a stroke of luck, a strange coincidence, no cause for rejoicing. It seems from his closing vision that Eliezer believes that without hope and faith, after having seen the unimaginable, he might as well be dead.
After stating that he sees a “corpse” looking back at him, Eliezer adds, “The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.” While it is true that Eliezer, after the Holocaust, thinks of himself as another person, someone utterly changed from the innocent boy who left Sighet, that person, that “corpse,” undergoes a metamorphosis.
Night does not end with optimism and a rosy message, but neither does it end as bleakly as many believe. What we are left with are questions—about God's and man's capacity for evil—but no true answers. Night does not try to answer these questions; perhaps this lack of answers is one of the reasons that the story ends with the liberation of Buchenwald. The moral responsibility for remembering the Holocaust, and for confronting these difficult moral and theological questions, falls directly upon us, the readers.
‘Night’ focuses on one specific story—Eliezer's—to give the reader a detailed, personal account of suffering in the Holocaust. From a more traditional perspective, the ending feels incomplete. A historian or biographer would not be satisfied with this conclusion and would want to know what happened afterward—how Eliezer reunited with his family, what he did after the war, and so on. Night deliberately manipulates narrative conventions, ending where it does because it is meant to offer an intimate portrayal of Eliezer's wartime experiences, particularly of the cruelty and suffering he experiences in the concentration camps. Other material would distract from the intensity of the experience Wiesel is trying to convey.
