Elie Weisel - his mysterious mentor

Just want to record this story for future reference - Paris 1947

"Back in France, and still under the care of the O.S.E., Wiesel for two years fell under the spell, the influence, and finally the educational training of one of the most mysterious and extraordinary men he was ever to meet.  He was a Jew, and the name he gave people was simply Shushani, though he had not been named Shushani at birth.  He was a diminutive, shabbily dressed little man with a large head and a tiny hat atop it, and dusty glasses.  He never said anything about who he was or how he had come to be in France, not to mention where he had been brought up.  He had hung around the Shabbat services at the O.S.E. home outside Paris where Wiesel had moved, saying little or nothing, but evidently noticing everything."

"One day, as Wiesel was returning to the home by train from Paris, Shushani was sitting in the same compartment.  Has though he had known Wiesel for years, he began to question him about the book he was reading.  Wiesel shyly revealed that he was preparing a talk on Job for a forthcoming meeting at the home.  Shushani began to talk about Job, and Wiesel began to grasp what a startlingly brilliant and insightful mind he was.  Over the next year and a half, Shushani talked frequently with Wiesel and the other Jewish students at the home."

"His appearance, as if from nowhere, and his equally mysterious origins, at first frightened Wiesel a little.  But as he came to know him and derive immense insights into the entire world of learning, especially Jewish learning, from him, the encounter appears to have had a profound impact on the young man."

"'I am increasingly convinced,' Wiesel has written in his Memoirs, "that he must be considered one of the great, disturbing figures of our tradition.  He saw his role as that of agitator and troublemaker.  He upset the believer by demonstrating the fragility of his faith; he shook the heretic by making him feel the torments of the void.'  The effect of Shushani's genius and teaching on Wiesel seems to have been incalculable.  'What I know is,' Wiesel writes today, 'that I would not be the man I am, the Jew I am, had not an astonishing, disconcerting vagabond accosted me one day to inform me that I understand nothing.'"

"Shushani was a Talmudic scholar, originally from Lithuania, and he spoke Yiddish with a strong Lithuanian lilt.  His name, Wiesel discovered later, was Mordechai Rosenbaum.  He appeared to have memorized the entire Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, knew Sanskrit, the Greek and Latin classics, and innumerable modern languages.  To demonstrate his genius to Wiesel, like a juggler showing off new tricks, he once learned Hungarian in two weeks.  One evening, he lectured to the orphans at the O.S.E. home at Taverny for four hours straight simply on the  very first verse of the book of Isaiah."

"He passed himself off as a rabbi, but no one knew where he had acquired his learning, or even, at the time, where he was from.  He never seemed to be reading a book.  for some reason, though, he imparted to Wiesel huge chunks of his knowledge and understanding, as though gasping intuitively that Wiesel among few others was capable of absorbing it all.  He was absolutely silent about his roots, hi past, even his close relatives, if any of them were alive.  Once, when Wiesel was rash enough to ask him a personal question.  Shushani angrily closed off any further discussion of it.  Only later, piecing together morsels of information from others had bumped into him in different parts of the world, did Wiesel learn his real name or from where he originally came."

"There was something deeply mysterious to Wiesel about Shushani and his sudden appearance.  For a moment the youth wondered if there was something of the infernal supernatural about him.  He wrote indecipherable manuscripts in an unknown script--some of which Wiesel apparently owns--and in 1965 he died in Montevideo, Uruguay.  Why had he gone there?  No one seemed to know.  Where did he get money to live on?  No one was sure about that, though it was rumored that famous professors in France paid huge sums of money to  be instructed by him."

Reference in Aikman is to Elie Wiesel, Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea. (New York, Alfred A. Knopf), p. 130.

If you seriously believe in the existence of translated beings (and I do) the question arises within you of what they have done and are doing behind the scenes of history.  You have a tendency to look for possible instances of their ministry.