The Gates of the Forest

"The Gates of the Forest" is a 1966 book written by Elie Wiesel.

Preface

The preface of the book includes a story often referred to as "God made man because He loves stories". The story imagines that a series of historical Hasidic leaders each followed a tradition, incompletely transmitted from generation to generation, for accomplishing the rescue of his respective community through with a miracle. Rabbi Israel Shem Tov is described as doing this by use of three elements, meditation in a specific area of a forest, a specific prayer, and lighting a fire. Later leaders, namely the Maggid of Mezeritch, Rabbi Moshe-leib of Sasov, and Rabbi Israel of Rizhin supposedly each knew how to fulfill one fewer of these elements, so that the last of them had to say to God "...All I can do is to tell the story...." of the tradition, and found that that was, as he hoped, sufficient for obtaining the needed miracle. Wiesel explains this sufficiency by closing "his" story by the statement "God made man because He loves stories."