Reflection on Night by Elie Wiesel

Anyone who has taken Psychology 101 is familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, often depicted in a triangle and color-blocked to demonstrate the progression from foundational to spiritual needs. Abraham Maslow first published his diagram in an academic journal in the United States in 1943. Though unassuming, Maslow’s triangle helped him to determine what could give life purpose and meaning. Maslow, a Jew raised in an Orthodox Russian family, now distanced from the religious environment of his youth, saw psychology as the answers to the yearnings and questions he and his peers had previously taken to religious texts and to God in prayer. It was likely this dismissal of religion in favor of an emphatically capitalistic America that prevented Dr. Maslow from recognizing religious faith, particularly Judaism, as proof of the frailty of his theory. The Holocaust, in its terrible oppression and haunting silence, as narrated by Eliezer Wiesel’s Night, dismantles the Hierarchy of Needs.
With his triangle, Dr. Maslow categorized a human’s needs from most essential to most dispensable. The first two foundational rungs distinguish material needs from the spiritual needs. Non-negotiable and utterly necessary are the physiological demands of food, water, warmth, and rest. Without the fulfillment of these things, no greater fulfillment can follow. The next step up is the need for safety including bodily security and protection from threat. Then follow the spiritual (though no mysticism is implied by the word) needs of belongingness and love (friends, lovers, and community), esteem (respect, a job, a title), and self-actualization. Maslow provocatively defines self-actualization as living at one’s fullest potential. According to Maslow, no spiritual need is met without the procurement of all basic material needs though material abundance alone is not enough for survival. The triangular shape of the model proves deft in outlining the ideal human existence: physiological and safety needs provide foundation and structure as the three upper sections promote upward growth and direction, with each bracket supported and lifted by the others. Someone struggling to feed themself will not be concerned with graduate school, lab research, learning an instrument, or reading. Someone entirely consumed by their spirituality or abstract thought will be starved.
Though legendary and logical, Maslow’s theory is easy to disprove, particularly in the context of Judaism. It is the testimony of many great artists and intellectuals that many of their most brilliant productions were contrived not in spite of angst and poverty but because of it. Moreover, many creatives and thinkers create purposefully sparse environments so as not to be clouded by the material. Many rabbis and other religious leaders achieve spiritual actualization in depriving themselves of stimulation and food. Bnei Brak is one of the poorest sectors of Israel but is a hub of Torah learning. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs defies a most central tenet of Judaism: the greatest self-actualization is not about the individual but about achieving closeness to God. And it is taught that the closest way to achieve closeness to God is through the performance of Mitzvahs, the 613 commandments. (There are many stories of Jews taking courageous risks to perform Mitzvahs while in capitivity during the Holocaust.) A Jew needs nothing to perform a Mitzvah. There are no requirements of a roof, a hardwood floor, a table full of food, or some societal standing. If a poor man blesses the bread he breaks and prays to God for it, that bread is sacred and so is the man. If a woman makes very little money but tithes a portion of it away, she honors God’s will and is closer to him. These Godly individuals defy a struggle to secure their material needs by reaching for self-actualization. Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs does not take into account the divine soul that is not predicated on any material satisfaction. Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for Jews, is a time for reflection and transcendence not in spite of but because of 25 hours without food or water.
Eliezer spent much of his life before the Holocaust studying Judaism with his mentor Moishe the Beadle. The pair would study and discuss religious religious texts hours at a time for months on end. His faith was unconditional and thoughtful up until he was ordered out of the train car and on to the death camp. It was impossible to understand, despite the teachings of purposeful but mysterious ways, why a God he had devoted his life to would “cause thousands of children to burn in His mass graves,” or “[keep] six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days.” This is not a critique of Eliezer’s faithfulness, but an acknowledgement of religion as a double-edged sword. On one hand, it is often faith that brings hope, inspiration, and optimism to despair. Alternatively, it could be faith, held onto by abstract understanding, that is the first dismissed in the face of threatening hardship like the starvation and torture of the Holocaust.
There is debate about the extent of Eliezer’s loss of faith throughout Night. Though it is written at one point that a merciful God is hanging dead next to the innocent young boy strung up on a gallows, Elie exhibits contradictory behavior in returning to praise, begging questions and expecting answers, and clinging to hope, a tenet of Judaism that affirms an all-powerful and mysterious God. In moments of disbelief, Eliezer takes his troubles, which he had previously surrendered, back from God and assumes those responsibilities (food, water, warmth, and rest) of himself. Here, without hope, Elie loosens his grip on God as his provider and is slave to his most immediate needs. More confident in his own ability to secure his material needs, Eliezer relinquishes his equation of a closeness to God to self-actualization. In this way, Dr. Maslow’s capitalist triangle and our earthly needs are more pervasive than the short term rewards of a belief in God’s sovereignty and care.
It is an unwieldy argument to make that a stronger, more profound faith in Eliezer would have lifted him out of his horrendous circumstances in Nazi captivity. A religious person, a Jew, a Christian, whomever, is taught that God will provide. How does a human, not a saint, nor a priest, nor an angel, leave his spiritual questions along with his most basic needs to his God. This would require inhabitation of all five blocks in the triangle. In faith, it is not enough to secure food, water, and shelter, and then continue to the synagogue to ask God for clear-mindedness and pure-heartedness, a religious person must lift up all his needs and believe, however vulnerable to starvation or however comfortable in good health. Here, Maslow’s hierarchy is broken down and then rebuilt just as quickly. A religious person without hope loses his faith and is thereby chained to each rung of his ladder, unable to move between or throughout. Each approach, in the Holocaust’s brutish context, falls apart. For those imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, a triangular structure was not sound. Faith and hope were often lost, to the detriment of religion, as were self-hood, autonomy, and motivation, to the detriment of each individual without faith.
Broad and solid foundations propel the Egyptian pyramids upwards and to their peaks, closest to God, as an arrow. There is some mystery around these structures. It is believed by some that they were built by the Israelites. And there are further theories that the Pyramids of Giza were placed by God himself. It is this model that applies to both the religious and material life, sometimes interdependently. Without either foundation, nourishment and hope, as in the Holocaust, religion and human existence cannot progress.