The Bescht isn't the only time Wiesel brings Jewish teaching up in his speech. In fact, he peppers this text with citations from the Torah and the Talmud. You don't just learn about hope, despair, and memory: you actually get a pretty solid overview of Judaism 101 when you read this doc.

Check out just a few of the mentions:

Mankind, jewel of his creation, had succeeded in building an inverted Tower of Babel, reaching not toward heaven but toward an anti-heaven, there to create a parallel society, a new "creation" with its own princes and gods, laws and principles, jailers and prisoners. (6, 3)

After all, God created the Torah to do away with iniquity, to do away with war. (13, 2)

The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. (12, 2-3)

While Wiesel himself identified as agnostic, his use of religious allusions grounds his speech in his own and other survivors' religious and cultural traditions. This has a lot to do with the philosophy of Simon Dubnov, the historian he references in the speech. Dubnov's philosophy was that faith wasn't the only thing that united the Jewish people: they were also bound by a long cultural history.

So Wiesel isn't just talking about hope, despair, memory, and Jewish religion. He's also talking about Jewish culture. Yeah: this speech is so layered it's like a dang onion.