Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, comes a magical book that introduces us to the wisdom of Rashi, the great biblical and Talmudic commentator of the Middle Ages.

This deeply personal book looks at the life and work of Rashi-Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki-whose phrase-by-phrase explication of the oral law has been included in every printing of the Talmud since the fifteenth century. Both beginners and advanced students of the Bible rely on Rashi's groundbreaking commentary for simple text explanations and midrashic interpretations. His perspective, encompassing both the mundane and the profound, is timeless, and Wiesel, a descendant of Rashi, proves an incomparable guide who enables us to appreciate both the lucidity of Rashi's writings and the milieu in which they were formed.

Wiesel brilliantly evokes the world of medieval European Jewry-a world of towering scholars and closed communities ravaged by outbursts of anti-Semitism and decimated by the Crusades. The incomparable scholar who set the standard for all subsequent biblical and Talmudic commentary was also a spiritual and religious leader: Wiesel's Rashi is a heartbroken witness to the suffering of his people, and through his responses to great religious questions of the day we see still another side of this greatest of all interpreters of the sacred writings.