A review of Night by Elie Wiesel and my own experiences with anger towards God
To be religious, to search for God in every step you take, in every breath you let out, and in every blink your eyes make, is to one day find yourself devastated, lost, and angry. Elie Wiesel found himself in this position at 15 years old on an overcrowded cattle cart transporting him to the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Wiesel, a Romanian Jew, loved God. Against even his own father’s advice, he centered his entire existence around God and his religion. And he believed without a single doubt that God loved him, saw him, and protected him. However, after the atrocities he witnessed, after the Holocaust he survived, Wiesel was filled with rage towards God. After he witnessed countless infants and toddlers thrown into a blazing fire, his heart looked up and screamed for the powerful God he had believed in for so long. After he watched once gentle men turn into hungry beasts that killed for a crumb of bread, his eyes looked up and he shrieked for that merciful God he had always turned to. After he saw a young man abandon his father and that father be trampled to death, his entire body turned to God for the final time and begged Him to do something. God never answered. God never intervened. And consequently Wiesel condemned God to his eternal anger.
I am a theist. God has been the center of my life since I understood that He was my purpose. However, unlike Wiesel, I have not gone through a Holocaust nor have I first-hand witnessed horrifying atrocities. However, I’ve begun to ask God some questions. Ones that I absolutely need an answer to if I’m to continue worshipping him. However, no matter how many questions I ask, no matter how much I sob to Him on my drives late at night, no matter, even, how much I ignore Him, He ignores me in return.
I have been raised to be angry. Those raising me didn’t know they were doing it. They weren’t aware that when my brother was allowed to play for a basketball team and I wasn’t even allowed to take a walk on my own, they planted seeds of anger in me. They weren’t aware that when my high school principal sweet talked them after just cursing me out, their refusal to believe me watered those seeds. They weren’t aware that when they stood tall and hard like walls as a barrier between me and the car door so I’d be forced to speak to a potential husband, my anger bloomed. They weren’t aware that when I lay on the ground curled up in a fetal position, searching desperately for the way back into my mothers womb as my protector’s kicks kept contacting my body, the anger that had been fostering in my became me. I have become my anger and my anger is me. As of late, it is directed towards God as well.
Sometimes, when God’s name comes out of my father’s mouth, the anger in me festers. Or when my brother reminds me of what He orders, my anger threatens to drip out of my mouth. Or even when my mother tells me that things are as they are because God created them as such, my anger toes the line of explosion. Yet when I ask God questions, this all-mighty returns only silence.
“Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him…Therein lies true dialogue. Man asks and God replies. But we don’t understand His replies. We can’t understand them. Because they dwell in the depths of our souls and remain there until we die. The real answers, Eliezer, you will find only within yourself.” – Night by Elie Wiesel
