August 27, 2026

The Answers Within

Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him, he liked to say. Therein lies true dialogue. Man asks and God replies. But we don't understand His replies. We cannot understand them. Because they dwell in the depths of our souls and remain there until we die. The real answers, Eliezer, you will find only within yourself.

Moshe the Beadle was the poorest man in Sighet, a caretaker at the synagogue who spent his days in near silence, teaching young Eliezer Wiesel the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah. This was before the deportations, before the world Wiesel knew was destroyed — Moshe himself would later survive a massacre of foreign Jews only to return and warn the town, unheeded. His teaching came from long hours of solitary study, the kind of stillness that lets a person sit with unanswerable questions rather than rush past them. Decades later, having lived through what no answer could explain, Wiesel still carried this lesson passed to him in quiet.