"I admired my father not only for his kindness and intelligen..." — Elie Wiesel quote meaning

I admired my father not only for his kindness and intelligence, but also for his memory. He could quote long passages of the Talmud and Plato, the Zohar and the Upanishads. He could recall in rich detail his visit to the ghetto in Stanislav, his first skirmish as a partisan, his arrival in Palestine. He envied the character of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, who remembered what he had done in his mother's womb and even in his father's desire. Immersed in his own past and the world’s, my father was nevertheless a man of his times, reacting to all its convulsions. Politics stimulated him, and so did the international situation. Famine in Africa, racial persecution in Indonesia, religious conflict in Ireland and India: What men did to other men they did to him. When someone said that as a Jew he was wrong to care about anything but Israel, he answered angrily, “God did not create other people so we could turn our backs on them.” And yet he loved Israel with all his heart and soul. Why didn't he go back there to end his days? He did not know, and admitted that to me. “Maybe it's cowardice on my part. Maybe in Jerusalem every stone and every cloud would remind me of your mother; I'd be too unhappy.” Another time he told me, “I know it's convenient to love Israel from a distance. It's even a contradiction, but I'm not afraid of contradictions. In creating man in his own image, didn't God contradict Himself? Except that God is alone and free while man, still alone, is never free.