Wise Men and Their Tales: Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Masters » (~)

Since his unprecedented memoir Night woke up the world to the atrocities of the Holocaust in 1958, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel has dedicated his days to turning his survival story from one of horror to one of hope. From several works inspired by his experience to his insightful reflections in After the Darkness, Wiesel s work serves to both admonish and inspire.

In Wise Men and Their Tales, a master teacher gives us his fascinating insights into the lives of a wide range of biblical figures, Talmudic scholars, and Hasidic rabbis.

The matriarch Sarah, fiercely guarding her son, Isaac, against the negative influence of his half-brother Ishmael; Samson, the solitary hero and protector of his people, whose singular weakness brought about his tragic end; Isaiah, caught in the middle of the struggle between God and man, his messages of anger and sorrow counterbalanced by his timeless, eloquent vision of a world at peace; the saintly Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, who by virtue of a lifetime of good deeds was permitted to enter heaven while still alive and who tried to ensure a similar fate for all humanity by stealing the sword of the Angel of Death.

Elie Wiesel tells the stories of these and other men and women who have been sent by God to help us find the godliness within our own lives. And what interests him most about these people is their humanity, in all its glorious complexity. They get angry—at God for demanding so much, and at people, for doing so little. They make mistakes. They get frustrated. But through it all one constant remains—their love for the people they have been charged to teach and their devotion to the Supreme Being who has sent them. In these tales of battles won and lost, of exile and redemption, of despair and renewal, we learn not only by listening to what they have come to tell us, but by watching as they live lives that are both grounded in earthly reality and that soar upward to the heavens.

The New York Times Book Review

Wiesel's strength lies in his utter earnestness. At the end of the day, he is not a hagiographer, but a storyteller turned commentator haunted by the figures that have molded him. ''To comment on a given text means first of all to establish between oneself and the text a relationship of intimacy,'' he writes. Here, as in his earlier books, he embraces canonical Jewish texts and famous Jewish teachers as shapers of his particular past, but fashions them into interlocutors for humanity's future. The inheritor of a tradition emerges again as a creator of traditions.

...Wiesel's storytelling is much more than an act of transmission. It is an act of love and of lesson-giving. — Erin Leib