"Night" and Freud's Theory of Religious Illusion
             "I knew that my sins grieved the Eternal; I implored his forgiveness.
             Once, I had believed profoundly , that upon one solitary deed of mine,
             one solitary prayer, depended the fate of the world (Wiesel 65)".
             Elie Wiesel was only a child when he was taken to a Nazi concentration camp where he endured pain made famous by the horrific stories and pictures that still live on today. Wiesel's own book, "Night", is now one of the most famous testimonies to the Holocaust, in which he bears witness to these appalling events. Any faithful person who had to endure or witness the Holocaust would undoubtedly question their faith and beliefs, including young Elie. This was especially difficult because God was viewed as a fatherly protector of his people. These two sentences from Wiesel's "Night" are evidence of young Elie's view of God as an omnipotent father-figure, which support Sigmund Freud's religious illusion theory, which is stemmed from the Oedipal Complex that forces people to live in a "state physical infantilism".
             These two sentences from "Night" were thought by Elie in the context of time when everyone around him was praising God because it was the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. When Wiesel hears these prayers, it causes him to question the belief in a God who is supposed to favor the Jewish because they are his "chosen people". In the Jewish
             faith, God is seen as a father-figure who can be hurt by sins, can reward with answered prayers, can forgive, and can protect. With these two sentences, Wiesel recalls a time when he "implored (God's) forgiveness" after sinning, and believed that by doing good deeds or praying would entice God's cooperation in saving the world (Wiesel 65). Elie remembers those times with contempt because of the lack of God's...