Faith & Fear

As we continue reading Night, I am starting to notice some themes popping up.  Two of them were faith and fear.  A handful of times I read that Eliezer was losing faith in God.  The passage reads, “For god’s sake, where is God?  And from within me, I heard a voice answer: Where is He? This is where--hanging here from this gallows… That night, the soup tasted of corpses.” (65). Eliezer was trying to say that there is no goodness in killing a child, and how can there be a God when something this terrible and this horrifying happens?
This passage also showed that he is losing his faith: “Blessed be Gods name? Why, but why would I bless him? Every fiber in me rebelled.  Because he caused thousands of children to burn in his mass graves? Because he kept six crematoria working day and night, Including Sabbath and the holy days? Because in his great might, he had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to him: blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who choose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, or brothers end up in the furnaces? Praised be thy holy name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?” (67).  This quote is very powerful to me because it showed that Eliezer was very angry that God was letting these unbelievable events happen to all of these good people that do not deserve it. I also I think that he might have been a little mad at himself  because he didn't at first expect  lose everything including his religion.
For the theme of fear, I think the biggest fear for Eliezer was being separated from his father. When the bombs were going off near the camp, he was very excited, but then realizes that his father could be killed because of them and is soon scared. “They're bombing the Buna factory, someone shouted. I anxiously thought of my father, who was at work" (60).  I thought that the reason why Elie was so anxious besides the fact that it was his father, was because, his father was the only one left that was close with him, he was his friend, loving, caring and the only thing that he could be sure of in these camps was that he had to stick with his father.  If his father was gone and he was alone, he would have nothing to live for.

One moment that surprised me was when a rabbi that Eliezer knew told him that there would be nothing to believe in anymore, I was shocked.  How could this rabbi, whose job it to believe, and I know that all of these bad things were happening yes, but don't they always try to never give up hope, to never lose faith in God? But  we could never fathom what those poor people went through so I guess at times like those it was easy to give up their hope.
“ I knew a rabbi, from a small town in Poland. He was old and fat, his lips constantly trembling. He was always praying, in the block, at work, in the ranks. He recited entire pages from the Talmud, arguing with himself, asking and answering himself and was questions. One day, he said to me: it's over. God is no longer with us.” (76).  And I realized that no one had hope in those camps, not even a rabbi.