Heavenletters

Muchas gracias, querido Jochen!

How did you find it?

I know Theophil will really appreciate this, and I'm going to reprint it here:

Elie Wiesel, 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner, as a boy, before the holocaust, avidly wanted to study the Kabbalah, but there was no one in his town to teach him.

There was a poor man in town – he was actually on welfare. He was called Moshe, the Beadle. Wiesel wrote in his book Night:

Elie Wiesel begins:

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 after 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, sitting 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 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 mystical 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…”

And Moshe the Beadle, the poor barefoot of [my town] talked to me for long hours of the revelations and mysteries of the Cabbalah. It was with him that my initiation began. We would read together, ten times over, the same page of the Zohar. Not to learn it by heart, but to extract the divine essence from it.

And through those evenings a conviction grew in me that Moshe the Beadle would draw me with into eternity, into that time where question and answer would become one.

pp. 2 and 3,Bantam Book, 1960 Paperback