Why Are The Righteous Hidden?

Job and The Zaddik Each Of Us Nearly Is

Rabbinic tradition has it that the prophet (and messianic herald) Elijah is often disguised as a beggar or a leper. More expansively, Jewish tradition suggests that in every generation there are 36 righteous ones (zaddikim) on whose account the world is preserved. But the kicker is that we can never know who the 36 are. The zaddik is constitutively hidd…