"Night" by Elie Wiesel: Dialectic Journals

Post three dialectic journal entries as you read the text.

Tuesday: Post 1
Wednesday: Post 2
Thursday: Post 3

1)"We stayed motionless, petrified. Surely it was all a nightmare? An unimaginable nightmare?" (pg. 28)

In these short sentences, Elie Wiesel describes how all of this seemed like a nightmare. A nightmare that you cannot wake up from. He makes the horrors of the Holocaust more understandable to us by relating it to a nightmare. We can imagine our worst nightmare, and imagine if it really was true? If it wasn't a nightmare, but real life? It's unbelievable. Elie Wiesel was standing in a line in a concentration camp, a boy of fifteen. The line led to death, to his grave. He was in line for the cremotoria. The smell of human flesh in the air. How could such a sight be imagined by us? It can't. The only thing that can be is perhaps our worst nightmare.

2)" Why should I bless His name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank Him for?." (pg. 31)

In this quote, Elie Wiesel is questioning his religion, his beliefs. For him, it felt as though people were all alone, abandoned at the time by G-d. That He is the One who chose to be silent. He felt that he had nothing to thank Him for.



3)"Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I do not know if it ever happened before, in the long history of the Jews, that people have ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves." (pg. 31)

I only hear the recital of the Kaddish and recited the Kaddish at funerals or at synagouge when someone has died. People don't recite Kaddish for themselves in Jewish law, even when they know they're about to die. They know that their family friends, and the rabbi will recite it for them. But in the Holocaust, the people knew that they were going to die. And who will recite Kaddish for them? There was no one. Everyone were awaiting the same fate. When in the history of the Jewish people did people have to recite Kaddish for themselves? Reciting the Kaddish was the last thing that they could do, it made them feel better. Who will know of their deaths? Who will care enough to recite Kaddish for them? Their family were dying too. They couldn't recite Kaddish. Many died and many had no one else to recite Kaddish for them, the prayer of the dead. It is the last prayer.