Kushner Three Main Ideas Essay

If we continue to respond to these early victims with hate and violence, we will raise a new generation of perpetrators and the cycle of abuse will continue. As Moltmann adds, this task to end violence through active, loving reconstruction of relationships cannot simply be a “best of intentions” scenario, but “it must be intelligent as well” (location

1. After the hanging of a child, Elie hears someone say, “‘For God’s sake, where is God?’ And from within me, I heard a voice answer: ‘Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows…’ That night, the soup tasted of corpses” (Wiesel 65). Though optimistic at first, Elie Wiesel, along with many others at the concentration camps, began to lose faith in God.

(8.92-96).” Later in the concentration camp, fellow prisoners including Elie, starts thinking the God he knew when he was innocent. but this God has a different persona, possibly one indifferent to suffering, “Some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come. As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job!

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed” (Wiesel 34). Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, thinks these words after the first night in Birkenau concentration camp. After being separated from his mother and little sister forever, Wiesel then witnessed children being burned and innocent people being shot. Before these tragic events, he used to study the Talmud and Kabbalah every day. However, after one day in the camps, he no longer felt God’s presence.

This harsh reality helped put into perspective how the Nazi officers saw the Jewish prisoners not as people but as a number. While in a concentration camp, Eliezer witnessed a small child being hanged. This event for Eliezer put his faith and understanding of God on the line. “For God's sake, where is God?" ...

“Blessed be God’s 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 chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces?

For almost a year, Wiesel stood spectator to atrocities beyond what is imaginable, and his God was nowhere to be found. The hanging of a young child was a spiritual breaking point for many people in the camp. No one in the camp, Wiesel included, could understand how a merciful God would allow something like that to happen. Wiesel, while being forced to watch the execution alongside his fellow prisoners said “Being me, I heard the same man asking: ‘Where is God now?; And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He?

God is gracious in the eyes of those who are ignorant. Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, is the accounts of his experiences being taken to the Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Eliezer begins as a faithful Jew, proud to a long heritage and willing to show his devotion by studying Kabbalah, or a branch of Jewish mysticism. However, his studies are put to a halt when the Germans arrive in his village. The experiences Elie has as a Jew in the Nazi concentration camps develops his view on faith and God, through these events his look on God becomes less idealistic.

When the other prisoners discuss prayer and the Kaddish, Wiesel questions “Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?” (Wiesel 33). Even in the concentration camp, Wiesel never doubts G-d’s existence.

Israeli Supreme Court Justice Haim Cohen proclaimed about the Holocaust, “If there is Auschwitz, there is no God”. It was hard for many Jewish victims to believe that any God could exist if the absurdly horrific events of the Holocaust could

Each day, people all across the globe pray to the God they believe in and they rely on Him to ensure the safety and of themselves, their loved ones and others they know. But when their prayers fail, people start to wonder if they were even considered by God Himself. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie encounters these questions first hand while experiencing being a prisoner during the Holocaust. As he is sent through the processes of concentration camps, he experiences so many unwanted sights that one would automatically be astonished by.

The Book of Job provides an example of how people should praise God by illustrating a blameless, responsible, and fearing man who will always turn away from evil. Therefore, this book presents the same man tortured by outside forces lacking the possibility to acquire help from family and friends. Throughout the reading in particular (14:11) demonstrates how there was a moment of weakness in which Job fails and ask for his death, but after all, he did not commit sin and endured waiting for his torment to banish. In addition, the book reveals how men turned against a man in need and instead judged him without understanding the sources causing his disgrace. However, the book provides a comparison in how humans behave by providing vivid examples of characters who showed behaviors illustrating how humanity functions.

From Lou Ann’s point of view, child abuse is another problem that you can’t blame anyone for. According to the tone of Lou Ann, “Listen at this: ‘Liberty, Kansas. The parents and doctor of severely deformed Siamese twins joined at the frontal lobe of the brain have been accused of attempting to murder the infants by withholding medical care…can you blame them?...’”(Kingsolver 206). From this evidence, individuals can assume that this problem is sad but because of the other social justice issues, they have an excuse, even though, these events are spiteful in many ways. According to the article Abuse in America, “An estimated 3.3 to 10 million children a year are at risk of witnessing domestic violence, which can produce a range of emotional, psychological or behavioral problems,”(“Abuse in America”).

Earlier, a man had asked that question while a young boy was hanged alongside the adults, murdered at the hands of the Nazis. “Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ‘Where is God now?’” (Wiesel, 72). At this moment, Elie and many others began to question their faith.

I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice” (45). Before his struggle, he was emotionally and spiritually connected to God and spent so much of his time studying the Jewish faith. In contrast, after he experienced living in a concentration camp he questioned God’s motives and no longer believed in absolute justice. He doesn’t believe in the same God he once did; before, he believed in a benevolent and kind father of humankind, he now can only believe in an apathetic and cold observer of the Jew’s