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Night
by Elie Wiesel
They called him Moshe the Beadle, as though he had never had a surname in his life. He was a man of all work at a Hasidic synagogue. The Jews of Sighet-that little town in Transylvania where I spent my childhood-were very fond of him. He was very poor and lived humbly. Generally my fellow townspeople, though they would help the poor, were not particularly fond of them. Moshe the Beadle was the exception. Nobody ever felt embarrassed by him. Nobody ever felt encumbered by his presence. He was a past master in the art of making himself insignificant, o seeming invisible.
Physically he was as awkward as a clown. He mad people smile, with his waiflike timidity. I loved his great dreaming eyes, their gaze lost in the distance. He spoke little. He used to sing, or, rather, to chant. Such snatches a you could hear told of the suffering of the divinity, of the Exile of Providence, who, according to the cabbala, await his deliverance in that of man.
I got to know him toward the end of 1941. I was twelve. I believed profoundly. During the day I studied the Talmud, and at night I ran to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple.
One day I asked my father to find me a master to guide me in my studies of the cabbala.
'You're too young for that. Maimonides said it was only at thirty that one had the right to venture into the perilous world of mysticism. You must first study the basic subjects within your own understanding.'
My father was a cultured, rather unsentimental man. There was never any display of emotion, even at home. He was more concerned with others than with his own family. The Jewish community in Sighet held him in the greatest esteem. They often used to consult him about public matters and even about private ones. There were four of us children: Hilda, the eldest; then Sea; I was the third, and the only son; the baby of the family was Tzipora.
My parents ran a shop. Hilda and Béa helped them with the work. As for me, they said my place was at school.
'There aren't any cabbalists at Sighet,' my father would repeat.
He wanted to drive the notion out of my head. But it was in vain. I found a master for myself, Moshe the Beadle.
He had noticed me one day at dusk, when I was praying.
'Why do you weep when you pray?' he asked me, as though he had known me a long time.
'I don't know why,' I answered, greatly disturbed.
The question had never entered my head. I wept because-because of something inside me that felt the need for tears. That was all I knew.
'Why do you pray?' he asked me, after a moment.
Why did I pray? A strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?
'I don't know why,' I said, even more disturbed and ill at ease. 'I don't know why.'
After that day I saw him often. He explained to me with great insistence that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer.
'Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him,' he was fond of repeating. 'That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself!'
'And why do you pray, Moshe?' I asked him.
'I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.'
We talked like this nearly every evening. We used to stay in the synagogue after all the faithful had left, sifting in the gloom, where a few half-burned candles still gave a flickering light.
One evening I told him how unhappy I was because I could not find a master in Sighet to instruct me in the Zohar, the cabbalistic books, the secrets of Jewish mysticism. He smiled indulgently. After a long silence, he said:
'There are a thousand and one gates leading into the orchard of mystics] truth. Every human being has his own gate. We must never make the mistake of wanting to enter the orchard by any gate but our own. To do this is dangerous for the one who enters and also for those who are already there.'
And Moshe 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. We would read together, ten limes over, the same page of the Zohar. Not to learn it by heart, but to extract the divine essence from it.
And throughout those evenings a conviction grew in me that Moshe the Beadle would draw me with him into eternity, into that time where question and answer would become one.
Then one day they expelled all the foreign Jews from Sighet. And Moshe the Beadle was a foreigner.
Crammed into cattle trains by Hungarian police, they wept bitterly. We stood on the platform and wept too. The train disappeared on the horizon; it left nothing behind but its thick, dirty smoke.
I heard a Jew behind me heave a sigh.
'What can we expect?' he said. 'It's war..."
(Copyright by Elie Wiesel)
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