Night

“And Moché the Beadle, the poor barefoot of Sighet, talked to me for long hours of the revelations and mysteries of the cabbala. It was with him that my initiation began […] And throughout those evenings a conviction grew in me that Moché the Beadle would draw me with him into eternity, into that time where question and answer would become one.” 

At the start of Night, 12-year old Eliezer is deeply engaged in studying Jewish religious texts. Though his father tries to dissuade him, Eliezer wants to study the Cabbala, an important esoteric doctrine of the faith. He finds a mentor in Moché, the humble custodian of a local Hasidic synagogue. Moché represents for Eliezer the enticing possibility of acquiring transcendent, mystical knowledge, of knowing God and/or the mysteries of His creation beyond the dualities of ordinary human experience. This hope is shattered for both the teacher and the student by the horrific experience of the Holocaust. 

“Afterward, life returned to normal. The London radio, which we listened to every evening, gave us heartening news: the daily bombardment of Germany; Stalingrad; preparation for the second front. And we, the Jews of Sighet, were waiting for better days, which would not be long in coming now.”

A major theme in Wiesel’s memoir is the Jews’ reluctance to recognize the danger of Nazi persecution growing ever closer around them. Eliezer’s father lacks the courage and will to emigrate to Palestine earlier in the war, while it is still possible to do so. In this quotation, Eliezer describes the complacency of the Jewish community after foreign Jews are summarily rounded up and deported from Sighet.

Until they experience the horrors of deportation and internment at Auschwitz and Birkenau first-hand, the Jews of Eliezer’s town assume that they will escape the worst, even as the Nazis storm into Budapest and impose sanctions on its Jewish community.