As often occurs in literature, a speaker may reveal much of self while passing judgment on another character. Significant exposition of the narrator's character evolves from Elie's description of his reliance on Moshe the Beadle, the sole villager who recognizes the impressionable young man's need for guidance. Elie, who is moved by the long history of oppression of the Jews, weeps for the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, a historical event that occurred under Nebuchadnezzar after a Jewish revolt in 586 B.C. and a second time in 70 A.D. after Roman troops, led by Titus, quelled a Judaean uprising that had begun four years earlier. According to the chronicle The Wars of the Jews:
While the holy house was on fire, everything was plundered that came to hand, and ten thousand of those that were caught were slain; nor was there a commiseration of any age, or any reverence of gravity. . . . The flame was also carried a long way, and made an echo, together with the groans of those that were slain; and because this hill was high, and the works at the temple were very great, one would have thought that the whole city had been on fire. (V, 1)
This lengthy, detailed account was composed by Josephus, an eyewitness to his people's war against the Romans, who later adopted him as a historian and friend of the Emperor Vespasian.
Still traversing the no man's land of pre-adulthood, Elie defies his father's insistence that cabbala is a study for mature men. During prayers, the boy weeps but can offer Moshe no reason for his tears. Elie turns to mysticism and the occult as a means of interpreting the bittersweet romanticism of Judaic lore and the Jewish race's fight for survival against waves of anti-Semitism that stain human history from the days of Moses onward. By rereading ten times a single page of the cabbala's medieval interpretation, Elie demonstrates a prodigious drive to come to terms with humanistic concerns. The irony of Elie's immersion in Judaica is his failure to predict another Titus in Adolf Hitler, who retained enough strength in his final days in power to attempt genocide of Europe's Jews.
