What is a Jew? Sum, synthesis, vessel. Someone who feels every blow that ever struck his ancestors. He is crushed by their mourning and buoyed by their triumphs. For they were living men and women, not symbols. The most pure, the most just among them knew ups and downs, moments of ecstasy and confusion; we know, for they are described to us. Their holiness was defined within human terms of reference. Thus the Jew remembers them and sees them as they were at the crossroads of their own lives: troubled, exalted, marked. They are human beings: people, not gods. Their quest rejoins his own and weighs on his decisions. Jacob’s ladder rends his nights. Israel’s despair burdens his solitude. He knows that to speak of Moses is to follow him to Egypt and out of Egypt. To refuse to speak of him is to refuse to follow him.

This is true for all the ancestors and for all their adventures. If Isaac’s averted sacrifice had involved only Abraham and his son, their ordeal would have been limited to their own suffering. But it involves us. All the legends, all the stories retold by the Bible and commented on by the Midrash—and here the term Midrash is used in the largest sense: interpretation, illustration, creative imagination—involve us. That of the first killer as well as that of the first victim. We have but to reread them to realize that they are surprisingly topical. Job is our contemporary.

Somewhere a father and his son are heading toward an altar in flames; somewhere a dreamy boy knows that his father will die under the veiled gaze of God. Somewhere a teller of tales remembers, and overcome by an ancient and nameless sadness, he feels like weeping. He has seen Abraham and he has seen Isaac walk toward death; the angel, busy singing the Almighty’s praises, did not come to wrest them from the hushed black night.

Everything holds together in Jewish history—the legends as much as the facts. Composed during the centuries that followed the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the Midrash mirrors both the imagined and the lived reality of Israel, and it continues to influence our lives.

In Jewish history, all events are linked. Only today, after the whirlwind of fire and blood that was the Holocaust, do we grasp the full range of implications of the murder of one man by his brother, the deeper meanings of a father’s questions and disconcerting silences. Only as we tell them now, in the light of certain experiences of life and death, do we understand them.

And so, faithful to his promise, the storyteller does nothing but tell the tale: he transmits what he received, he returns what was entrusted to him. His story does not begin with his own; it is fitted into the memory that is the living tradition of his people.

The legends he brings back are the very ones we are living today.