faith in night essay

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Elie Wiesel

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One of the main themes of Night is Eliezer's loss of religious faith. Throughout the book, Eliezer witnesses and experiences things that he cannot reconcile with the idea of a just and all-knowing God.

At the beginning of the narrative, Eliezer declares, "I believed profoundly." He is twelve years old and his life is centered around Judaism—studying the Talmud during the day, praying at the synagogue at night until he weeps with religious feeling. He wants to study the cabbala (Jewish mysticism), but his father says he's too young. Despite this, Eliezer finds a teacher in town, a poor man named Moché the Beadle , and the two of them pore over cabbalistic questions. Eliezer's faith in God is shared by many of his fellow Jews in the town of Sighet. On the trains to the concentration camps, people discuss the banishment from their homes as trial sent from God to be endured—a test of faith.

But Eliezer's belief in God begins to falter at the concentration camps of Birkenau-Aushwitz. Here the furnaces are busy night and day burning people. Here he watches German soldiers throw truckloads of babies and small children into the flames. The longer he stays in the concentration camps, the more he sees and experiences cruelty and suffering. People treat others worse than they would livestock. He can no longer believe that a God who would permit such nightmare places to exist could be just. The fact that many Jews do continue to pray, to recite the Talmud, and to look for comfort in their faith while in the concentration camp amazes and confounds Eliezer. That people would still pray to a God who allows their families to be gassed and incinerated suggests to Eliezer that people are stronger and more forgiving than the God they pray to. Later, as more people die, and others around him lose hope, starve, and succumb, Eliezer ceases to believe that God could exist at all. He is not alone in his disillusionment. Akiba Drumer (whose faith helps Eliezer endure for a while) as well as a rabbi whom Eliezer talks to, also eventually come to believe that God's existence is impossible in a world that contains such a large-scale, willful horror as the Holocaust. The final nail in the coffin, for Eliezer's faith, comes at Buna, where the prisoners are gathered to watch the hanging of a young boy. A man in the crowd asks, "Where is God now?" Eliezer's internal response is that God is that boy on the gallows. The boy dies slowly as the prisoners are forced to watch.

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Themes and Analysis

By elie wiesel.

'Night' is a short and incredibly impactful novel that uses direct language and avoids metaphors and other figures of speech to tell its story.

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

Wiesel depicts his experiences in the Holocaust through the eyes of Eliezer who conveys the terrors of what he endured and saw. Readers will likely note reoccurring themes of faith, silence, and inhumanity, as well as symbols that include corpses, fire, and night. 

Night Themes 

Faith .

Throughout the novel, Elie is forced to question his faith in God. When God does not step in and stop the horrors around him, Elie has to consider that his faith may have been wrong all along. He learned that God demands sacrifice but is, in the end, compassionate and loving, that’s far from what he learned firsthand during his experiences in the novel, Night . Despite the fact that Eliezer says he’s lost his faith several times, Wiesel includes religious allusions and figurative language that suggest that that’s not completely true. By the end of the novel, while his understanding of the world and religion has shifted, he’s not completely without faith. 

Silence/Indifference 

This is one of the primary themes in the novel, and one that can be found in Wiesel’s other works as well as lectures. Elie is constantly bothered by the silence of God and the silence of other men and women in Europe throughout the novel.

There are numerous examples of indifference throughout the novel. Elie notes the village’s indifferent reaction when Moishe returns with news of what he’s seen, the German people’s ability to ignore what’s going on right in front of their faces, and of course, the Nazi soldier’s indifference to the lives they were destroying. One of the most telling scenes comes towards the end of the novel when the prisoners are running toward Gleiwitz and are being shot down by guards if they paused for even a moment. 

Inhumanity 

Indifference and silence go hand in hand with inhumanity in Night. It’s impossible to read this novel and not walk away feeling horrified by the inhuman practices promoted and carried out by the Nazi regime. Eliezer has trouble making sense of the world after seeing some of the terrible things that happened inside and outside the camps. One such scene comes after he’s arrived with his father and they walk past a pit in which S.S. soldiers are burning the bodies of children.

Additionally, the prisoner on prisoner violence and hate is another aspect of the inhuman environment Eliezer had to endure. The men in his camps were so desperate they turned on one another, even sons on fathers. This is seen quite clearly at the end of the novel when the prisoners beat Eliezer’s father and effectively end his life. 

Analysis of Key Moments in Night

• Elie studies with Moishe the Beadle. Moishe is expelled from Sighet. 
• Moishe returns and tells everyone what he saw and experienced. 
• German soldiers come to Sighet and place restrictions of Jews living there. 
• Eliezer and his family are moved into a ghetto
• Eliezer and his family are transported to Birkenau on cattle cars. 
• Elie is separated from his mother and sisters . 
• The men are taken to Auschwitz. 
• Elie is given number r A-7713. 
• Everyone goes to Buna. 
• Elie is beaten and has his gold crown removed. 
• Elie watches a young boy executed. 
• Elie’s father barely passes inspection. 
• The death march begins from Buna to an abandoned village and then Gleiwitz. 
• Everyone gets on a train to Buchenwald and very few survive the journey. 
• Elie’s father dies of dysentery and a beating from the other men. 
• Elie is liberated from the camp. 

Style, Tone, and Figurative Language in Night

Throughout Night, Wiesel writes about Elie’s experiences in a detached tone. He uses short sentences and clear words to report on what Elie saw and what he felt. Wiesel was trying to put his experiences into words, in a way that accurately represented them but allowed him to keep some distance from the character of Eliezer. The text is sparse, with very few complex passages or examples of figurative language. Elie Wiesel chose to speak directly to the reader in a way that could not be misunderstood.

Often, Wiesel does take a step back from a terrible scene, talking around it rather than directly describing it. For example, when he speaks about an S.S. guard shooting a prisoner. 

The tone in the novel is serious throughout . There are no light or happy moments. Even when the novel concludes and the camp has been liberated, Elie concludes the novel with a striking scene of loss and sorrow with Eliezer standing in front of a mirror. 

Analysis of Symbols in Night

Night .

One of the most obvious and important symbols in the novel is night. By naming the novel “night” and pushing themes of religious doubt, it’s important to consider Genesis and the passages regarding God’s creation of the earth. First, the Bile says, there was “darkness upon the face of the deep.” It’s this darkness, with the absence of God, that Eliezer lives through. Light is absent from some of the most important scenes in the novel, such as when Eliezer’s father is talking to him about the deportation of the Jews and when they arrive at Birkenau/Auschwitz. 

Fire is a symbol of death and destruction in Night. It is used by the Nazis to destroy evidence of their genocide. It first appears in a horrifying passage when Madame Schächter cries out “ Fire! Look at the flames! Flames everywhere ,” when the train arrives in Birkenau. When the train pulls in, Eliezer can smell burning flesh immediately. This is something that haunts the rest of the novel. The fire is an ever-present reminder of the deaths waiting for those able to escape the initial threat of the crematorium. 

Corpses 

Corpses appear throughout the novel, bringing into the light the true extent of the horrors the Nazi regime perpetrated on the Jewish people. Eliezer is forced to witness deaths and sees piles of bodies. The image of a corpse also appears at the end of the novel when Eliezer looks at himself in the mirror and thinks that he looks more than a corpse than he does a living person. It’s a symbol for the death of who he was, the strength of his faith, and the loss of the 11 million who did in the Holocaust . 

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About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Elie Wiesel — The Loss Of Faith In God In The Book Night By Elie Wiesel

The Loss of Faith in God in The Book Night by Elie Wiesel

• Categories: Book Review Elie Wiesel

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Words: 552 |

Published: Mar 18, 2021

Words: 552 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited:

• Edgar Allan Poe. (1843). The tell-tale heart. The Pioneer, 1(5), 287-292.
• Miller, A. (1953). The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts. Viking Press.
• Murfin, R. (2003). A student's guide to Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Heinemann.
• Poe, E. A. (2010). The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings. Simon and Schuster.
• Pritchard, W. H. (1954). The Crucible of History: Arthur Miller's John Proctor. The New England Quarterly, 27(4), 461-472.
• Rollyson, C. G. (2006). The Life of William Faulkner : A Critical Biography. John Wiley & Sons.
• Sweeney, S. (1996). Arthur Miller's The Crucible : Background and sources. Routledge.
• Toker, L. (1991). Arthur Miller's the Crucible. Routledge.
• Ward, B. (2003). The crucible: An overview. In Arthur Miller's The Crucible (pp. 1-16). Routledge.

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Loss of Faith in Night by Elie Wiesel

One of the main themes of Wiesel’s ‘Night’ is faith in God. Throughout the book the faith of the narrator, Eliezer, undergoes many assaults. In the beginning we see his ‘totalistic and zealous commitment to God’, as Downing describes his state of faith (62). Eliezer grew up believing, that everything in this world is emanation of God, who possesses both goodness and omnipotence, and there is a spark of God’s light in every human’s soul. So, he lived in a good world, ruled by good God. He did… till one day his habitual life ceased to exist. He faces the Holocaust, and it turns all his life and his beliefs upside down.

That is when he begins first to ask God different questions, then to question the very existence of God. Facing sufferings often becomes a crucial point, at which a person decides, whether to continue believing in God or not. This was also true with Eliezer. This was always true – even the Bible, filled with the stories of various men and women of faith, depicts their doubt, their spiritual struggles, and sometimes their indignation with God. So did Job, so did this little boy, Eliezer.

Probably, the turning point for Eliezer was, when he saw a boy, dying slowly, hanging on gallows. Wiesel, in this scene, shows discouragement and loss of believe of many people: ‘Behind me, I heard the same man asking: Where is God now? And I heard a voice within me answer him:… Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows’ (Wiesel 72).

Eliezer called those moments as moments, that murdered his God, his soul and turned his dreams to dust (Wiesel 43). He could not bless God’s name, he could not plead God for anything anymore. Every fiber in him rebelled, when hearing anything about God or watching somebody worshiping God (Wiesel 74). He became the accuser, God the accused (Wiesel 10).

But in spite of that, in the following chapters we see constant emersion of his faith: ‘And, in spite of myself, a prayer rose in my heart, to that God in whom I no longer believed. My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou’s son has done’ (Wiesel 97). He claims, that his God is dead, but at the same time he adds: ‘Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself’, assuming that God exists (Wiesel 43).

As Job, a character from the Bible, he thought, that God had put him into darkness, but, as notices Bloom, ‘questions remain concerning … whether the leading into darkness is indeed the end’ (60). For Job it became a new starting point, a thrust to a better understanding of God. Night seems to be the end of something. The author himself says the following about his book: ‘In Night … I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end – man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night’ (qtd. in Bloom 66).

‘Night’ is the first book of a trilogy by Wiesel, called ‘Night, Dawn and Day’, so we can see a little hint, that light will return again, that there is some hope left. All spiritual wonderings and warfare of the main character will end up with Eliezer’s better comprehension of God, as someone, who is not easy to grasp, and he never will be.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. Elie Wiesel’s Night , New York City, NY: Infobase Publishing, 2009. Print.

Downing, Frederick L.. Elie Wiesel: A Religious Biography , Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008. Print.

Wiesel, Elie. Night ; Dawn ; Day , Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Aronson, 1985. Print.

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by Elie Wiesel

Night essay questions.

Using examples from the text, what does Wiesel convey about human nature in the concentration camps? Where does he (if at all) draw the line between humanity and barbarism?

Early on, Eliezer indicates that it does not take much for a complete breakdown of civility to ensue. Even as the Jews are deported from Sighet, Eliezer reveals, couples began to openly copulate in the train car. As more and more time is spent in the camps, Eliezer describes a situation in which man turns into beast. This is best exemplified in which the guards throw bread into the train car and fighting ensues, to the point at which hunger is more important to the body that relationships are to the mind, and a man kills his own father for the piece of bread. As Eliezer describes: "Men were hurling themselves against each other, trampling, tearing at and mauling each other. Beasts of prey unleashed, animal hate in their eyes. An extraordinary vitality possessed them, sharpening their teeth and nails" (pg. 101). Eliezer does not shy away from describing himself as a beast: "I fought my way to the coffee cauldron like a wild beast" (pg. 106).

Discuss Eliezer’s struggle with faith throughout the book. What is his relationship with God in the beginning, and what is it by the end of his time in the concentration camps?

At the beginning, Eliezer is very devout, and he devotes his studies to mystic teaching and to prayer. While he never fully carries a disbelief in God, throughout this time in the concentration camps he comes to resent God, and to mistrust him. Rather than deny his existence, Eliezer instead turns to interrogating God's motives. He foreshadows this transformation at the start of the book, saying, "In the beginning there was faith—which is childish; trust—which is vain; and illusion—which is dangerous." (Forward). After time spent in the camps, Eliezer questions God: "What are You, my God? I thought angrily. How do You compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to You their faith, their anger, their defiance? What does Your grandeur mean, Master of the Universe, in the face of all this cowardice, this decay, and this misery? Why do you go on troubling these poor people's wounded minds, their ailing bodies?" (pg. 66.)

Throughout the piece, Eliezer sometimes separates his mind and his body. When are some examples of this, and what does he convey by describing himself in these ways?

The strongest example of when Eliezer separates himself from his body is during the death march in the snow, in which he describes his body as something that merely anchors him, acting against his desire to be free of pain and suffering. As he states: "I was putting one foot in front of the other, like a machine. I was dragging this emaciated body that was still such a weight. If only I could have shed it! Though I tried to put it out of my mind, I couldn't help thinking that there were two of us: my body and I. And I hated that body" (pg. 85). Another moment that conveys this separation of mind and body is when both his mind and his body are afraid of a blow to the head similar to the one that a guard had dealt his father: "I didn't move. I was afraid, my body was afraid of another blow, this time to my head" (pg. 111).

Though there are many images of prisoners struggling to live, there are also more unnerving ones of prisoners becoming so apathetic that their will to die is stronger. To what does Eliezer attribute this apathy, and how does he describe prisoner’s “will to live"?

Eliezer frequently attributes death of the prisoners not only to dire circumstances and the struggle for survival, but also to moments of apathy in which prisoners simply give up. More often than not, Eliezer attributes the loss of the will to live to two principal factors: the complete disbelief in God, and the knowledge that one's family has perished. The earliest evidence of this is the incident of Akiba Drumer, in which Eliezer lies to him and tells him that his family is well:

"'The only thing that keeps me alive,' [Drumer] kept saying, 'is to know that Reizel and the little ones are still alive. Were it not for them, I would give up.' One evening, he came to see us, his face radiant. 'A transport just arrived from Antwerp. I shall go to see them tomorrow. Surely they will have news …' He left. We never saw him again. He had been given the news. The real news"(pg. 45). When Eliezer believes that his father, who looks weakened and frozen after the march, may be dead, he says, "Suddenly, the evidence overwhelmed me: there was no longer any reason to live, any reason to fight" (pg. 99).

Discuss Eliezer and his father’s evolving relationship throughout the piece. At one point is there a role reversal—when does this happen, and how does Eliezer cope with it?

Throughout Night, Weisel describes how the trials of the concentration camp effectively switch the roles of father and son over time. The father-and-son relationship is first strained when Eliezer immediately understands the immediacy of the deportation threat and asks his father to "sell everything, liquidate everything, and to leave." Before even being deported, Eliezer's father refuses to get an immigration pass to Palestine, citing his age: "I am too old my son...too old to start a new life...too old to start from scratch in a distant land" (pg. 9). At the beginning of the piece, this is where the age difference between Eliezer and his father appears to be the widest; thereafter, the hardships narrow this chasm until, by the end of the piece, there is almost a complete temporal switch.

While there are indeed some instances in which Weisel's father looks out for his son (including giving him extra rations of bread) by the end, Eliezer begins to take on more and more responsibility for his father, until the pressure of having his father rely on him becomes almost unbearable. After the march through the snow, Eliezer's father develops dysentery and relies completely on his son for survival. The last word on his father's lips is "Eliezer." Eliezer feels numb to his father's death and feels guilty for being somehow grateful for his father's passing:"I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!" (pg. 112.)

Night Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Night is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What did Eliezer mean when he said, "The whole year was Yom Kippur"?

In Elie Wiesel's memoir "Night," the phrase "The whole year was Yom Kippur" refers to the profound spiritual and existential crisis experienced by the Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. Yom Kippur is the Jewish Day...

Night, Chapter 2

From the text:

"There are eighty of you in the car," the German officer added. "If anyone goes missing, you will all be shot, like dogs."

What becomes elies main goal

In chapter three Elizer's main goal was for himself and his father to be selected for work and thus stay alive. They achieve this goal by lying to authorities and looking healthy enough to work.

Study Guide for Night

Night study guide contains a biography of Elie Wiesel, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Night
• Night Summary
• Character List

Essays for Night

Night essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Night by Elie Wiesel.

• Silent Night
• The Motivation in Night
• The Gospel According to Mark and Night: Would St. Mark Call Night a 'Religious Book'?
• NIght and the Problem of Evil
• The Changing Nature of the Relationship Between Elie and His Father in Night

Lesson Plan for Night

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Night
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Night Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Night

• Introduction

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Essay: M. Night Shyamalan Pulls Off the Ultimate Twist

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M. Night Shyamalan Pulls Off the Ultimate Twist

For 25 years, the director has been doing something few else would dare try in wide-release, thrill-ride cinema..

There are only a few film directors working in Hollywood whose names can be used as shorthand. You say Michael Bay and you know you’re getting chaotic explosions. Christopher Nolan delights in mind-scrambling manipulations of time. And M. Night Shyamalan, perhaps most famously of all, will forever be known as the guy with the twist endings. And while a revelatory “aha!” in the final scene is something that happens in most (but not all) of Shyamalan’s movies, that carny-style move isn’t his only authorial stamp. For 25 years, Shyamalan has been doing something hardly few would dare to try in wide-release, thrill-ride cinema. He’s maintained a philosophy of heart-on-sleeve earnestness, a sincerity surrounding existential issues rarely seen outside a hospital or house of worship. You buy a ticket to a horror movie, you get theology. How’s that for a twist?

To understand Shyamalan—still best known for his three-in-a-row run of The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), and Signs (2002), and in theaters now with the extremely entertaining Trap —it’s good to know his origins, as well as some details about his seldom-seen early work.

The writer-director-producer was born Manoj (that’s what the “M.” stands for) Shyamalan in Pondicherry, India, in 1970. Both parents were physicians, and the family, including an older sister, settled in the Philadelphia suburbs when Manoj was still an infant. He was raised Hindu but attended Catholic school, an outsider’s position that fueled his investigative, questioning nature. As a child he became enamored of Native American history, and, when studying the Lakota language, was drawn to a word that translated to “night”; he added that name to his own. Seeing Star Wars at the age of 7 led to a love of shooting home movies, and eventually attending New York University’s film school—not studying medicine as his father wished.

While a student he completed the feature-length film Praying with Anger , in which the young Shyamalan himself stars as an Indian-American exchange student in the land of his roots, trying to navigate a sense of identity. For a student film, it is impressive, but it’s hard to recommend for reasons other than searching for seeds of the director’s later work. Early on, his character tells a friend that he rejected religion once he realized that no matter how hard he prayed, it wouldn’t affect the scores of his favorite football team. Repeated culture clashes cast something of a jaundiced view on India, but this is balanced by moments of awe during visits to Hindu temples. At the climax, the student summons a strength he didn’t know he had to halt a mob from killing a Muslim.

Not long after Praying with Anger , Shyamalan completed the religious comedy Wide Awake , another semi-autobiographical small film. In it, a wide-eyed, philosophical boy (Joseph Cross) with physician parents and an older sister living in the Philadelphia suburbs attends a Catholic school and can’t stop causing lighthearted grief for the nuns (Rosie O’Donnell and Camryn Manheim!) with his constant questions. Early on, he is thunderstruck to learn that anyone who isn’t baptized will be sent to hell, a moment Shyamalan still recalls from his youth.

Grieving the death of his grandfather, our young protagonist sets out on a mission to somehow meet God and lob him a few basic questions. At only 88 minutes, Wide Awake tries to walk a line between Thomas Mann and Home Alone and is far too corny to really work. At the very end, however, there is a little twist (God was with us all along, you’ll be happy to know), which unlocked the door for Shyamalan’s future success. A dash of fantasy (or the supernatural) will be a hallmark going forward and lead to one of the most impressive careers in Hollywood.

Shyamalan on the set of his 1999 film The Sixth Sense . Buena Vista Entertainment

A year after Wide Awake ’s release (though the movie had been completed for some time), summer audiences sank their teeth into The Sixth Sense , a money-making juggernaut that dominated the cultural conversation and was nominated for six Academy Awards. It, too, is about a young boy in Philadelphia attending Catholic school and working through enormous issues. His is less a case of premature weltschmerz and instead is about the trouble that comes from being able to communicate with the dead. (Specifically, dead people who were killed in rotten ways and are still milling about the Delaware Valley with some sort of task that needs doing.) This would be a problem for anyone, but especially a sensitive young lad who just wants someone, mostly his mother, to believe him.

As you likely know, the child psychologist dispatched to help him (Bruce Willis) turns out to be a ghost himself, which he (and we in the audience) do not realize until the conclusion—which sent many to tell friends “you need to see this movie; you won’t believe how it ends” and also back to the ticket booth for a second viewing, to make sure it all added up. Watching it years later, already aware of the big finish, I was much more taken with the penultimate scene. Before Willis has his final reveal, the young boy (Haley Joel Osment) finally opens up to his mother (Toni Collette) and offers just enough “proof” that he maybe isn’t a head case after all. If you come to this emotional scene in the car with your guard down, you’ll find the exchange to be incredibly powerful. Putting aside plot specifics, it’s a moment in which two people who are terrified of the enormity of existence accept that the only weapon they have against fear is love.

It’s a raw kind of emotion—one reserved for a person’s most private encounters, not the middle of a mainstream suspense thriller—and Shyamalan effectively duplicated it in his alien invasion thriller, Signs .

In Signs , Mel Gibson plays a farmer and former preacher grieving the sudden (and gruesome) death of his wife. When it looks like the world is about to be conquered by asparagus-looking visitors from outer space, Gibson confesses to his younger brother (Joaquin Phoenix) that every drop of his faith has been dried up. The night before he and his family, including Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin, expect to die, he fails as a father when he is unable to offer even a shred of hope. Faced with this ultimate absence, he reaches out for a group embrace, and everyone sobs.

Here’s where I’ll mention that Signs is actually rousing and action-packed and has a great many funny scenes, as well as suspenseful sequences that would make Alfred Hitchcock tense. But its foundation is this: When the time comes, can any of us make sense of the enormity of existence, not just to their family, but to ourselves? People forget that Signs , too, has a twist ending. The final frame shows Gibson putting his collar back on. At the end of the ordeal, he has returned to God.

Between The Sixth Sense and Signs came another big hit, Unbreakable , a movie that foresaw comic-book-movie mania in its content but not in form. Its twist (apart from an actual character switcheroo at the end) was that it wasn’t a supernatural movie like The Sixth Sense , but a superhero origin story. It stars Bruce Willis as a working-class security guard who is the sole survivor of a deadly train derailment. Turns out he is invincible, but other than that (and a few other subtle tweaks of reality), everything about the world of Unbreakable is as realistic as ours.

Taking that approach—and limiting itself to just one or two pleasurable sequences of vigilante justice—the movie offers itself plenty of time for Willis (and, wouldn’t you know, his young and highly sensitive son) to ask big questions like “why me?” The lasting image of the film is a melancholy Willis finally accepting his unbelievable fate.

At the kitchen table, father and son make tearful eye contact and agree to keep the mixed blessing between them. Yes, yes, in superhero terms this is “maintaining a secret identity,” but within the film it plays out like an open wound. Even though Willis is admitting to great strength, his acceptance, after long wishing it were not true, is more of a weakness. It rattles him and makes for a surprisingly emotional moment—in a movie where Samuel L. Jackson plays a comic book supervillain.

Bryce Dallas Howard in Shyamalan’s 2006 film, Lady in the Water . Warner Bros. Entertainment

With these three hits under Shyamalan’s belt, surely, he, too, felt invincible. Newsweek magazine called him “ The Next Spielberg ” when he was only 31. His next picture, The Village , was promoted with a television “ documentary ” that suggested that Shyamalan himself may be some sort of cursed revenant with extrasensory gifts. The program was a put-on (and the scenes where he takes the crew to Jim’s Steaks in Philly are a blast), but the public was starting to get sick of this guy. The Village , ostensibly set in the 1800s, but actually not, had a zany twist that many felt went beyond believability—though I personally find it no less daffy than Willis discovering he’s akin to Superman. While far from a box office bomb, Shyamalan started to get some negative reviews.

This sent him into a bit of a tailspin. His next picture, The Lady in the Water , ostensibly a family-friendly fantasy, is one of Hollywood’s great boondoggles, and is particularly funny because it features a twerpy film critic (Bob Balaban) getting mauled by a demon as an angelic beauty (Bryce Dallas Howard) tells a misunderstood genius (Shyamalan casting himself) that he will one day write a book so brilliant it will inspire political leaders to change their ways and all of Earth’s problems will be solved. It’s the type of delusionary dream one might play out for oneself while drifting to sleep, but perhaps best not to release into movie theaters.

The Lady in the Water was destroyed by critics and audiences alike, and the sudden shift from hero to zero made Shyamalan something of a punchline to moviegoers. Don’t worry, there’s a twist to all this with his current string of films, but every good third act deserves a difficult second.

Shyamalan’s next outing, The Happening , is one that only a select few will defend—and I guess you can count me among them. Whereas Hitchcock’s The Birds details what would happen if our skyward cohabitants decided one day to kill us, The Happening shows an alliance between trees, grass, and shrubs that want to do damage to those who do damage to them. In this vaguely environmental tale, Mark Wahlberg and others find themselves running from danger before they can even identify where it is coming from.

When the wind blows, you see, anyone caught in its path freezes, then suddenly finds a way to kill themself. Easy when you are a gun-toting cop (or a construction worker atop a building), but more of a conundrum out in the sticks. This leads to the bizarre image of a man turning on an enormous lawn mower, then laying down in front of it to get all chomped up. It’s very silly to watch but … also terrifying?

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Released in 2008, The Happening grappled directly with the powerlessness many felt after the 9/11 terrorism attacks and, eerily, predicted some of the first wave of COVID’s dark vibes. What I love about the movie is that the avenging plants release a toxin that, according to a scientist we see on television for 10 seconds, tamps down whatever enzyme is in our system that promotes self-preservation. The idea, I suppose, is that by removing this one simple domino, every human being defaults to an immediate and irrevocable proclivity toward suicide. Pretty dark!

No one else interprets the movie this way (most just laugh the picture off), but given Shyamalan’s love of asking big fat “why?” questions in all his work, I feel like he’d be fine with this particular take. As with Signs , though, I must reiterate that there are a lot of very funny moments in the movie, too—there’s a whole bit about hot dogs at the end of the world that’s a scream. The movie doesn’t have a twist, however, unless you consider Wahlberg and his wife (Zooey Deschanel) deciding to communicate more in their marriage a big revelation. Not everything is gold here.

After the box office failure of The Happening , Shyamalan hit a true rough patch. He did two “work for hire” gigs. The first was adapting Nickelodeon’s beloved animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender to live action, in the hopes of sparking a trilogy. The result was atrocious, but part of Shyamalan’s decision to take the gig, as he explained in a video interview with me for UGO.com that is no longer online, was that his kids loved the show, and his mother, who watched along with the family, was excited that there was a popular cartoon that had some Hindu themes. (The original series indeed features a mélange of Asian storytelling origins; alas, the Hollywood version swapped in mostly white kids for the leads.)

The dud that was The Last Airbender led to something even further removed from Shyamalan’s usual playbook: a space opera, also intended to kick-start a franchise, based on a story concept by Will Smith. The result, After Earth , which many interpreted as thinly veiled Scientology propaganda, was a disaster for Smith and Shyamalan alike.

Shyamalan, center, and Dave Bautista on set of the 2023 film Knock at the Cabin . Universal Pictures

The two big-budget assignments broke Shyamalan’s mojo not just because they lacked classic twist endings, but because they didn’t come from the man’s soul. Sincerity is what counts with Shyamalan, so in an all-or-nothing move he put his home up as collateral and self-financed his comeback—the gory, tense, and very funny suspense film The Visit . In it, a young brother and sister go to stay with their estranged grandparents on a farm and slowly realize they are serial killers. The twist at the end happened both on screen (they aren’t really the grandparents!) and off. A movie that cost $5 million made close to $100 million.

And this is the formula that’s stuck: smaller-budget projects set at one location. After The Visit came Split , in which Anya Taylor-Joy is kidnapped and held in a basement by a freaky killer (James McAvoy) with multiple personalities, then Glass , set mostly in an insane asylum, which ties Unbreakable and Split into a trilogy, and then two of the best movies of the current decade, Old and Knock at the Cabin .

Old , loosely based on a preexisting graphic novel, is absolutely idiotic. A group of tourists, including a family of four, goes to a secluded beach near an odd resort and … physically can’t leave. Some kind of force is preventing them. If that weren’t weird enough, something on the beach causes them to age rapidly. They are trapped on a beach that makes you old.

Why? Oh, please, don’t ask such questions. Ask, instead, how would people actually react. There is paranoia, disbelief, violence, anger, sadness, and finally, acceptance. There is also humor and tenderness. Little kids must soon care for their geriatric parents, and also care for children of their own (don’t ask too much about that one!). It’s a preposterous scenario, but it works because its logic, like its setting, is completely sealed. The characters are tormented in ways that make perfect sense when you realize the puppet master is a pesky philosopher who refuses to stop asking the nuns “why?” (And, in Old , Shyamalan casts himself as a sniper on the perimeter of the beach; a nice moment of self-awareness.)

Even more heart-on-its-sleeve is Knock at the Cabin , where a loving family of three is confronted by a group of kind-seeming-strangers-turned-home-invaders with horrible news. Unless someone in the family sacrifices someone else, the entire world will violently end. It’s the classic little kid question to a parent: “If someone said you had to shoot me or [insert someone else in the family’s name here], who would you choose? And no, you can’t say you’d kill yourself!” (One of the stipulations in Knock at the Cabin .)

This film is played absolutely straight-faced, and part of what makes it work is that even the zealot intruders can’t believe what they are being forced to do. Like the toxin-infected suicides of The Happening , they are driven to their task—they will convince this family and kill themselves one by one to prove it—but this time they aren’t zombies. They are terrified, but, for them, it isn’t an act of faith. They know (or so they believe) what will happen if they don’t succeed. It’s a marvelous and shocking film that goes from zero to 60 in moments and sustains itself throughout. And like Signs , it hinges on someone renouncing their atheism. In our current cinematic marketplace, anyone else making “faith-based” films is sent to a very specific marketing ghetto. Shyamalan, by adding some brutal kills and edge-of-your-seat suspense, reaches similar conclusions but maintains a wide audience. It’s a neat trick.

From left, Josh Hartnett, Saleka Shyamalan, and M. Night Shyamalan on set of the 2024 film Trap . Sabrina Lantos/Warner Bros. Entertainment

Shyamalan’s newest film, Trap , is somehow more playful, even though it is about a serial killer. Josh Hartnett is a goofy, dad-joke spewing father taking his teen daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to see the pop act “Lady Raven” (Saleka Shyamalan—yes, the daughter of M. Night Shyamalan). While at the arena, he notices a heavy police presence. He discovers (via ridiculous means) that the authorities know that the “Butcher,” a murderer who has terrorized the area, will attend the concert, and that no one will be allowed to leave without getting inspected. And wouldn’t you know that our polite, well-meaning pop is actually the Butcher (!!), and now he’s got to figure out a scheme to get out of there alive—all without ruining his daughter’s time at the concert.

As with, say, Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder , we in the audience find ourselves transgressing every ethical instinct we have as we root for our hero to accomplish his terrible goal. (We slip out of morality so easily with well-crafted movies, we don’t even realize it sometimes.) But Trap , apart from celebrating father-daughter love both onscreen and in the casting, is imbued with a poptimist attitude. Far be it from me to spoil the specifics of a movie that’s still in theaters, but it’s the purity and adoration of teen fandom that saves the day, rescues a kidnap victim, and ends the Butcher’s rampage. The picture stands in awe of the power of sincerity.

Shyamalan still has his critics, and this newer wave of lower-budget features won’t win over those who refuse to suspend their disbelief for the sake of a good thrill. ( Trap , for example, posits a current concert-going climate in which everyone has paper tickets and receipts, not mobile entry apps.) Clearly, I’m a fan of the man’s work, and not just because no one else exploits the full power of a close-up the way he does these days. Good suspense is rare (and there’s one “oh, get out of there now!” moment in Trap that has audiences screaming), but it’s Shyamalan’s willingness to stick with his initial, very basic questions about life that I continue to find surprising. Even Trap —a film mostly filled with surface pleasures in tune with its pop music setting—finds room to question the irrational nature of human cruelty. At this point in his career, for Shyamalan to produce something that’s simply mindless would be an unexpected twist.

Jordan Hoffman is a film critic and entertainment journalist living in Queens, New York. Twitter:  @jhoffman

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Why are religious teens happier than their secular peers?

Here’s what we can learn from the way faith communities stay rooted in the real world — and diminish the harms of the virtual one..

S eth Kaplan, an author and lecturer, spent more than two decades traveling the world. He lived or worked in 75 countries before settling down in a small Orthodox Jewish community about an hour north of Washington, D.C. Although he was raised Jewish, Kaplan told me the faith wasn’t a central part of his identity while growing up. In fact, it isn’t even the reason he now lives in an Orthodox community. “I moved here for the lifestyle,” he says.

I laughed. I’ve always been resistant to the idea of living a religious life. It feels constraining, with too many rigid and seemingly arbitrary rules. The idea that someone would move to an Orthodox community for the lifestyle sounded, well, crazy. But as Kaplan explained his story in more detail, it began to make more sense — and it resonated with my research.

I’ve spent much of the last few years as the lead researcher for Jonathan Haidt’s recently published book “The Anxious Generation,” which explains how we’ve inadvertently deprived Gen Z (those born after 1995) of real-world community, independence, and free play, and replaced those things with smartphones and social media, contributing to a precipitous decline in their mental health. Kaplan isn’t part of the generation we’re most concerned about, but as sociologist Robert Putnam observed in his 2001 book “Bowling Alone,” the disintegration of communal life in the United States began in the 1960s as fewer adults attended religious services and civic engagement fell. The introduction of the smartphone and digital life has only exacerbated these existing problems: loneliness, lack of civic engagement, and the erosion of local communities.

But this disintegration of community did not happen as significantly for one subset of Americans: Religious conservatives continued attending faith services, and those adults and teens continued to engage in civic activities like volunteering and youth groups at higher rates than others. It seems that kids from conservative religious communities may have been less likely to lose their community- and free-play-based childhoods. This is the kind of childhood Kaplan wanted for his kids.

Kemp Mill, Md., where Kaplan lives, is not exclusively religious or Jewish, but its 1,200 Orthodox Jewish families (which are politically diverse) are especially focused on community building. The community is small enough for everyone to know one another but big enough to make sure all the amenities are there: schools, restaurants, supermarkets, synagogues, and community centers. “People are constantly doing things for each other: delivering groceries to the elderly, mentoring youth, joining park cleanups,” he says. “I wouldn’t call it volunteering. . . . It’s just what’s expected.”

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His three kids live near their classmates, and there’s no shortage of neighborhood-based camps and after-school activities. He says because the neighbors trust one another, the kids go freely between houses, to the parks, or to the pizza parlor without adult supervision. The children are also expected to be contributing members of the community from an early age, from babysitting to tutoring and becoming camp counselors. “Everyone has a role.”

Kaplan’s description of his kids’ lives in their religious community strongly reflected what Haidt and I found likely to help solve the nation’s youth mental health crisis: real-world community.

Kaplan believes, more than anyone I have ever met, in the power of strong, tight-knit communities to solve our personal and social ills. In fact, Kaplan has become one of the world’s leading experts on what makes some societies and communities thrive and others not. He has come to believe that many of the crises we face today — the youth mental health crisis, the loneliness epidemic, the drug overdose crisis, and political polarization — can be traced back to the deterioration of local communities.

The more I have talked with him and members of other religious communities, and the more I have dug into the research, the more I think he might be onto something.

Religion protects young people’s mental health

That today’s youths are experiencing a mental health crisis is now common knowledge. Young people are struggling with higher rates of mental illness than any previous generation on record. Concerned parents, educators, politicians, and others are desperately seeking explanations and solutions.

Teens without a religious affiliation across the political spectrum started reporting that they felt lonely, worthless, anxious, and depressed at much higher rates starting in the early 2010s. However, religious teens, especially those who report being more conservative, did not.

How did this one group of young people manage to mostly buck the trend?

At first, I thought the differences could be a result of self-reporting. Perhaps religious conservatives were as distressed as others but less likely to admit it. However, the data consistently show that this is unlikely to be the explanation. Social scientists have shown — for as long as we have been collecting data — that conservatives have better mental health than liberals, and religious people have better mental health than their secular peers. People who are religious have lower rates of depression, anxiety, drug addiction , and suicide (for both men and women ). We see this around the world: Nations where a larger percentage of people identify as religious tend to have lower suicide rates. This protective effect appears to be even stronger for those who are both conservative and religious.

Haidt and I took a look at how these trends apply to Gen Z. We used data from Monitoring the Future , a yearly survey conducted among thousands of American high school students since 1977. The survey asks students how much they agree with these statements: “I feel I do not have much to be proud of”; “Sometimes I think I am no good at all”; “I feel that I can’t do anything right”; and “I feel that my life is not very useful.”

Before 2010, teens agreed with those statements at similar rates across political and religious divides, with religious conservatives slightly less likely to agree. But after 2010, the gap between religious conservatives and everyone else grew rapidly. By 2019, it became clear that secular liberals were the most likely to agree with these self-disparaging statements.

In “ The Anxious Generation ” and our related posts on our Substack newsletter, After Babel, Haidt and I argue that much of the decline in mental health among adolescents since 2010 can be tied to the rapid transformation of childhood between 2010 and 2015. Adolescents traded their flip phones for smartphones loaded with social media apps, and their play-based childhoods became disembodied and placeless phone-based childhoods. The new phone-based childhood pushes out most of teens’ real-world play and social interaction and brings young people a variety of harms , from loneliness and anxiety to attention fragmentation and sleep deprivation. The transformation of childhood has made many kids more anxious, more depressed, and more likely to self-harm, especially adolescent girls .

So, what are religious conservative teens doing differently?

What religious communities are getting right

The secret is likely not any particular belief system itself but the way organized religion and shared beliefs bind communities together.

As Haidt describes in his 2012 book “The Righteous Mind,” conservatives typically value loyalty, authority, and sanctity, which tend to foster openness to religion and its traditions and structure. In contrast, liberals generally prioritize individual rights and freedoms, which can lead to a rejection of organized religion.

We see this in the data: The percentage of liberal teens who report that religion is important in their lives and who regularly attend religious services has dropped from 40 percent in 1979 to 14 percent in 2019. In comparison, those numbers have changed much less for conservative teens, from 50 percent in 1979 to 42 percent in 2019.

These value differences often play out in the home. I’m making some broad generalizations here, but research shows that conservative (and religious) families tend to emphasize structure and duty, providing children with clear boundaries and roles to play in the home and community. Liberal (and secular) families, however, tend to emphasize personal expression and exploration, encouraging children to discover diverse aspects of their identities. Each approach has strengths — secular liberals foster more self-expression, while religious conservatives offer more structure . Of course, either approach can go too far, leading to challenges like rigid and authoritarian parenting in conservative families or boundary-less parenting in liberal families.

These dynamics can play out with technology, too. Liberal and secular parents tend to be less restrictive about technology use than conservative and religious parents, and liberal and secular teens report spending more time on social media. At the same time, conservative teens report spending more time engaging in their local community — attending religious services, working, spending more time with trusted adults, and spending more time with their friends in person.

The difference in how teens spend their time matters. Experts have extensively documented the mental health and social benefits of strong real-world communities and the unique contribution of religion in binding such communities together (partly due to the collective rituals that are key components of religious life). As Kaplan explained to me, based on his own research, real-world communities help foster social trust, social capital, and social support. Any developmental psychology textbook will tell you that healthy child development requires these features.

Although most of us understand that community is beneficial, many have not experienced the kinds of tight-knit local communities that Kaplan describes. We often mistake social networks for communities. As he noted in an email to me, “An understanding of what community is has been lost to . . . people who have never experienced it. . . . Until very recently, human communities were always rooted in specific places — places imbued with meaning, places with history and a shared identity . Such communities may have constrained their members in various ways — limiting, as [author Alan] Ehrenhalt writes in ‘The Lost City,’ ‘privacy, individuality, and choice’ — but they provided ‘some anchors of stability to help us through times of . . . unsettling change.’”

Tight-knit communities provide a stable network of peers and adults (not just parents!) whom children can trust, collaborate with, and learn skills from. They also offer connections with supportive, trusted adults who act as guardians and mentors and can help a child through hard times during adolescence. The community features that help children thrive are much more difficult to build into the virtual world.

This can help us understand — beyond differences in parenting — why most secular teens across the political spectrum raced into the virtual world more quickly and stayed online longer than their religious conservative peers: They were searching for a community many felt was missing from their lives. Religious conservative teens, on the other hand, were more likely to be rooted in their real-world communities and less likely to move their lives so deeply into the virtual world, and thus less likely to have been harmed by a phone-based childhood.

This is the key point: Virtual networks are not sufficient replacements for real-world communities.

What about kids who don’t have a real-world community?

One common objection to the claim that real-world communities are better than virtual networks is that social media platforms offer marginalized youth many social benefits — they can find the like-minded peers they don’t have in their real-world communities.

Of course, that’s a good thing. This is a major advantage of the internet and, sometimes, of social media, too. However, kids from marginalized groups are also far more likely to experience the risks of the phone-based childhood — from cyberbullying and predation from peers and strangers to being fed self-harm content by the platforms’ algorithms. Until some guardrails are put in place, I worry that this solution may, at times, be worse than the problem it is trying to solve. These online networks are often unstable, transient, and full of unknown people — and they are embedded within platforms designed to fuel outrage and keep their users online much longer than they intend. Giving our most vulnerable teens unfettered access to an unregulated world with no guardrails or support does not outweigh the meager social benefits. We can do better than this.

When Kaplan told me he moved into an Orthodox Jewish community “for the lifestyle,” he helped me see that there is more to religious life than faith itself. He showed me that even if we’re lucky enough not to suffer from economic poverty, we often suffer from social poverty, with frail and shallow social ties to friends, family, and the local community.

Now, I personally don’t want to live in a highly religious community, and I don’t expect to move into one “for the lifestyle.” At the same time, I want to give my kids — when I have them — the kind of community that Kaplan is able to provide his children.

This is the challenge of our time: How do we balance the desire to give kids individual freedom and new digital technologies with our desire to give them a stable, tight-knit community? It’s a difficult question to answer, though many organizations , like Outward Bound, Block Party USA, and the Girl Scouts, are creatively trying to do just this . My hope is that we can learn from the communities that have done this best and work together to end phone-based childhood, restore play-based childhood, and give all kids more deeply rooted, tight-knit, and loving communities in the real world.

Zach Rausch is an associate research scientist at New York University, the lead researcher for the book “The Anxious Generation,” and managing editor of the Substack newsletter After Babel.

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‘I Am Proud of My Faith’: Shapiro’s Fiery Speech Ends on a Personal Note

Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania rallied Democrats in his home state behind the Democratic ticket after the conclusion of a vice-presidential search that prompted intense public scrutiny of his views on Israel.

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By Katie Glueck

• Aug. 6, 2024

For years, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania has said that his Jewish faith drives his commitment to public service.

But as he wrapped up a fiery speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday, after the conclusion of a vice-presidential search process that prompted intense public scrutiny of his views on Israel, Mr. Shapiro’s familiar references to his religious background took on a raw new resonance. And he seemed to sound a note of defiance.

“I am proud of my faith,” he said, his voice rising, speaking slowly and deliberately to sustained applause.

Mr. Shapiro’s comments came as part of a well-received speech welcoming Vice President Kamala Harris and her new running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. Throughout, Mr. Shapiro praised the ticket effusively.

But the moment followed an ugly final phase of Ms. Harris’s search.

Mr. Shapiro’s positions on the Middle East , his allies have noted, are well within the Democratic mainstream, and were not markedly different from other vice-presidential candidates under consideration.

Yet Mr. Shapiro — dubbed “Genocide Josh” by some activists — drew outsize attention on the subject, his supporters said, and some saw that focus as driven by antisemitism.

Left-wing and pro-Palestinian activists and other critics vehemently denied that, saying they objected because they saw Mr. Shapiro as too sympathetic to Israel and overly critical of campus Gaza-war protests, not because of his faith.

Some Democrats worried that elevating Mr. Shapiro to the ticket would reignite the battles raging in the party over Israel and the Gaza war — divisions that still exist, but had been more muted after President Biden said he would not seek re-election.

For others — especially for some Jewish Democrats who have struggled with their place in the party against that backdrop — the spotlight on Mr. Shapiro was painful.

In his remarks, Mr. Shapiro emphasized the role his faith — which he did not highlight by name — has played in his public life.

“I lean on my family, and I lean on my faith, which calls me to serve,” Mr. Shapiro said.

Soon after, he was back to stumping for the Democratic ticket.

Katie Glueck covers American politics with a focus on the Democratic Party. More about Katie Glueck