 Strauss maintains that before attempting to answer the question of whether a secret teaching, only hinted at in the text, can be grasped with confidence and precision, it is necessary to consider the moral implications as well as the moral impetus of a writer willing to write about such a secret. In making this claim, Strauss aligns his own dilemma with Maimonides’ dilemma and by so doing he points to the basic motivation that directs his own claims about esotericism. The question is thus twofold: why did Maimonides write the Guide in the first place and why does Strauss write about esoteric writing? In answering the first question, Strauss notes that the literary form of the Guide is a letter to Maimonides’ gifted student Joseph, who, like many Jews of Maimonides’ time, was traveling in far and distant lands: “Joseph’s departure was a consequence of his being a Jew in the Diaspora. Not a private need but only an urgent necessity of nation-wide bearing can have driven Maimonides to transgress an explicit prohibition [to write about esoteric matters]. Only the necessity of saving the law can have caused him to break the law” (PAW, p. 49).