Night

Compare the reactions of Job and Wiesel to their suffering and to the way their suffering affected their faith.

Both men had absolute trust and faith in God before their journeys began. As they witnessed ever increasing amounts of pain, violence, and suffering they both began to loose their faith. Job was able to stay steadfast in his beliefs even when his family was killed and he lost everything to plagues, invasions, and disastors. It was not until he started to suffer personally that he began to question the justice of God. He knew that he had lived a good life and followed God's orders wthout question so he couldn't understand why he should be made to suffer now. He doesn't really loose his faith in God, but he gets angry with God and demands to plead his case before Him. He argues the rightousness of God, not the existense of God.

Elie Wiesel was a very religious young boy before he went through his terrible ordeal. He was knowlegable in the sacred texts beyond what was expected of someone his age. His faith in God was unbreakable until he saw the horrors of the death camps, and the atrocities the Nazis committed during the Holocaust to the Jews and others that were persecuted. As the days pass by in the camps Wiesel slowly looses his faith and by the time his father dies he has lost all faith in his once benign God. When he asks God for deliverance and God remains silence he feels God has been murdered and their is only violence, destruction, and chaos left in the world. In his book Night the main character, Eliezer, sees a young angelic boy slowly die from a hanging and this symbolizes the turning point in Wiesel when he feels God died with the little boy.

Although Job eventually regains his trust in God and sees God's divinity, Wiesel does not. Job is rewarded with double of everything he once owned while Wiesel looses everything, but his life. The Holocaust cost Wiesel everything and he doesn't consider it a divine miracle that he survived, but instead a stroke of luck that could have easily passed him over.


Photograph of Elie Wiesel Age 15 taken from: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/HOLO/ElieBio.Htm