Though Elisha grew up religiously observant, the Holocaust destroys his youthfully naïve beliefs about God. Yet when Gad recruits Elisha into an organization called the Movement, Elisha’s religious beliefs are rekindled in a different form—one that urges survivors to take the future into their own hands instead of continuing to be victimized. These beliefs undercut some of the very tenets of Elisha’s upbringing, like the belief that killing is wrong, by calling upon people to take on the role of God in creating their future—even if that means causing the deaths of others. Though Elisha remains committed to these beliefs in the abstract, taking Dawson’s life forces him to rethink them. In the aftermath, he doubts that he has been right to try to occupy God’s place, and he questions whether God has been with him at all. Through Elisha’s struggle to force his religious beliefs to align with his actions, Wiesel suggests that attributing one’s actions to God is arrogant at best and, at worst, will lead to the destruction of the world one is trying to create.
Elisha’s sufferings during the Holocaust alter his belief in God, making him believe that human beings must take the initiative to act where, in their view, God has failed to act. The experience of living in the concentration camps has altered Elisha’s once-fervent belief in God. “In the concentration camp I had cried out in sorrow and anger against God and also against man, who seemed to have inherited only the cruelty of his creator.” In other words, Elisha’s suffering makes him doubt that either God or man is as good as he had once believed.
After he survives the camps, Elisha is left with pressing questions about God: “Where is God to be found? In suffering or in rebellion?” Though he intends to pursue these questions through the study of philosophy, he ends up seeking it through what the freedom fighters call simply “the Movement”: a terroristic group that is fighting the British for control of Palestine, where the fighters hope to create a Jewish homeland. By attributing religious meaning to the Movement’s efforts, Elisha assumes an answer to his question—that God is to be found in rebellion, not in the sufferings he’s just survived.
Not only does Elisha assume where God can be found, he also assumes that human beings must effectively take God’s work into their own hands. As a child, Elisha had been taught that murder was wrong because, in committing it, a person assumes one of God’s prerogatives. Now, Elisha reasons that it’s necessary for the Jewish people to “become God” in order to change the course of their history. Ironically, Elisha comes closer to answering his questions when he’s called upon to become an executioner. In Palestine, Elisha’s belief in the need to “become God” is soon put to the test: “I wanted to understand the pure, unadulterated essence of human nature […] I had sought after the truth, and here I was about to become a killer, a participant in the work of […] God.” Elisha’s abstract questions about God and humanity become extremely real when he’s ordered to kill, and he acts in the belief that, because God is found in rebellion, his participation in “God’s work” of killing is necessary.
Before the execution, when Elisha sees the ghost of his father, he argues that his actions should be blamed upon God: “Father […] don't judge me. Judge God. He created the universe and made justice stem from injustices. He brought it about that a people should attain happiness through tears, that the freedom of a nation, like that of a man, should be a monument built upon a pile, a foundation of dead bodies[.]” Because Elisha has been persuaded of the holiness of his cause, he justifies his actions in religious terms, claiming that it is God’s fault that the war for Palestine is happening in this way. But his anxiety suggests that, underneath it all, he’s beginning to doubt this himself.
In the end, Elisha questions whether God is really with him. Though God is present at Dawson’s execution, it isn’t clear where: “We were the first—or the last—men of creation […] And God? He was present, somewhere. Perhaps He was incarnate in the liking with which John Dawson inspired me. The lack of hate between executioner and victim, perhaps this is God.” Where once Elisha had identified himself with God in the act of killing, his unexpected liking for his victim unsettles this belief. Elisha is left doubting that he’s acted in God’s stead, or even that God is with him at all. In a sort of vision or imagination, Elisha sees that when David ben Moshe is executed by the British, the rabbi who accompanies him to the scaffold assures him moments before his death that “God is with you.” But after he pulls the trigger on John Dawson, Elisha receives no such assurance. There is nothing besides himself and Dawson’s crumpled body.
In the end, Wiesel suggests that God is found with those who suffer and not primarily with rebels who take matters into their own hands. Elisha remembers his childhood fervency in trying to summon the Messiah: “No one can force God's hand with impunity. Men older, wiser, and more mature than ourselves had tried in vain to wrest the Messiah from the chains of the future; failing in their purpose they had lost their faith[.]” Wiesel hints that the actions of the rebels, too, are a misguided attempt to “force God’s hand” and bring about the Messiah’s arrival on tragically false grounds.
Related Themes from Other Texts
God and Religion ThemeTracker
God and Religion Quotes in Dawn
In the concentration camp I had cried out in sorrow and anger against God and also against man, who seemed to have inherited only the cruelty of his creator. I was anxious to re-evaluate my revolt in an atmosphere of detachment, to view it in terms of the present.
So many questions obsessed me. Where is God to be found? In suffering or in rebellion? When is a man most truly a man? When he submits or when he refuses? […] Philosophy, I hoped, would give me an answer. It would free me from my memories, my doubts, my feeling of guilt.
"You want my future?" I asked. "What will you do with it?"
He smiled again, but in a cold, distant manner as one who possesses a power over men. "I'll make it into an outcry," he said, and there was a strange light in his dark eyes. "An outcry first of despair and then of hope. And finally a shout of triumph."
Gad's stories were utterly fascinating. I saw in him a prince of Jewish history, a legendary messenger sent by fate to awaken my imagination, to tell the people whose past was now their religion: Come, come; the future is waiting for you with open arms. From now on you will no longer be humiliated, persecuted, or even pitied. You will not be strangers encamped in an age and a place that are not yours. Come, brothers, come!
We don't like to be bearers of death; heretofore we've chosen to be victims rather than executioners. The commandment Thou shalt not kill was given from the summit of one of the mountains here in Palestine, and we were the only ones to obey it. But that's all over; we must be like everybody else. Murder will be not our profession but our duty. In the days and weeks and months to come you will have only one purpose: to kill those who have made us killers. We shall kill in order that once more we may be men[.]
I remembered how the grizzled master had explained the sixth commandment to me. Why has a man no right to commit murder? Because in so doing he takes upon himself the function of God. And this must not be done too easily. Well, I said to myself, if in order to change the course of our history we have to become God, we shall become Him. How easy that is we shall see. No, it was not easy.
When Elisha trains to become a terrorist, he doesn’t just discover new ideas about what it means to live in Zion (the Holy Land). He also discovers new interpretations of the religious teachings on which he was raised. Here he explains how his childhood mentor, a rabbi known as the grizzled master, taught him to understand the sixth of the Ten Commandments, the one which prohibits killing. The grizzled master explains that life and death are in God’s hands, so killing someone means wrongly playing the role of God. As Elisha becomes indoctrinated into the Movement’s ideas, however, he looks at the sixth commandment in a new way—accepting that in order to secure a peaceful future, the Jewish people have a responsibility to “become God,” even if that includes killing. If they don’t do this, he reasons, they will continue to be at the mercy of history and may eventually cease to exist as a people. Dawn as a whole is the story of Elisha learning just how difficult it is to live out such an idea.
Yerachmiel and I decided to try. Of course we were aware of the danger: No one can force God's hand with impunity. Men older wiser, and more mature than ourselves had tried in vain to wrest the Messiah from the chains of the future; failing in their purpose they had lost their faith, their reason, and even their lives. […] We purified our souls and bodies, fasting by day and praying by night. […]
"We too," I said, "my comrades in the Movement and I, are trying to force God's hand. You who are dead should help us, not hinder…”
But Yerachmiel [was] silent. And somewhere in the universe of time the Messiah was silent as well.
Without hate, everything that my comrades and I were doing would be done in vain. Without hate we could not hope to obtain victory. Why do I try to hate you, John Dawson? Because my people have never known how to hate. Their tragedy, throughout the centuries, has stemmed from their inability to hate those who have humiliated and from time to time exterminated them. Now our only chance lies in hating you, in learning the necessity and the art of hate. Otherwise, John Dawson, our future will only be an extension of the past, and the Messiah will wait indefinitely for his deliverance.
