The congregants opened the ark. The rabbi began the Ne’ilah service, with its beautiful melodies and touching psalms. The Elders of Chelm prayed as they never had before. They begged Hashem to forgive them their foolishness (no matter how much more they might commit the following day), and they prayed that Hashem would protect all the people of Chelm and not let them suffer for the Elders’ mistakes.
Just outside the synagogue, a heavy sack tied to a very tall tree drooped a tiny bit. High winds pushed the bundle up, twisting the branch that held it. Each time the sack swung up and then down, it drooped lower and lower.
“May we be inscribed in the Book of Life,” the rabbi said. He lifted the shofar and blew a long, piercing note: Tekiah Gedolah! The people gasped. The walls shook. And overhead, a single branch broke. Down tumbled the sack of food, through the open skylight, to land right in front of the ark!
“Hashem provides,” the rabbi murmured as the hungry congregants stared at the sack. He pointed up through the open skylight to the glorious, windy heavens. Night had fallen, with three stars dotting the sky. “Next year in Jerusalem! May Hashem inscribe us all in the Books of Life, Prosperity, and Peace. Now, go and—”
Before the rabbi could say another word, the ravenous people of Chelm tore open the sack. Boiled eggs, gefilte fish, kugel, lox, and dozens of bagels came spilling out. And the people ate until everyone was full, even Farfel the Fat.
The Very Best Guest
A Sukkot Story
“Wait! Wait!” called Yosef the Butcher.
With difficulty, Farfel the Fat halted his ponderous steps. Folks in Chelm said you could never tell whether Farfel was passing by or if Poland had finally built a railroad past Chelm; the rumbling was much the same. Farfel looked over his shoulder, careful not to lean so far that he’d topple onto his ample behind.
“What is it, Yosef?”
Yosef the Butcher ran up, panting like a carp out of water. “Please, come visit my sukkah tomorrow!”
“Your sukkah?”
“Yes. It’s a sort of tent, with cloth walls and a roof of branches so you can see the stars. I’m spending the week in it to thank Hashem for the harvest.”
“What! That’s just like my sukkah! Did you copy mine?” Farfel’s face flushed florid with frenzied fury.
Yosef shook his head quickly. “Oh, no, Farfel. Did you perhaps copy mine? I just wanted to ask if you would be our guest for dinner in the sukkah. My wife’s been baking apple kugels all week.”
Farfel’s eyebrows rose. No matter who had stolen whose idea, apple kugel changed the subject entirely. “Thank you, I’d be pleased to come. But why are you asking me? I thought Frumpel was your best friend.”
Yosef’s face colored. “That was before he said my sukkah had so many holes in the roof that birds would fly in and eat my supper. Now Frumpel and I are having a contest to see who can invite the more distinguished guest.”
“How many holes are there in your sukkah roof?” Farfel asked with some alarm. Battling a flock of birds for the kugel lessened the appeal of the invitation.
“Well, you see, the commandment for building a sukkah orders us to be able to look up through the canopy and see three stars. But my old bubbe is blind. So I kept clearing away branches, hoping she’d be able to see, until there was, well, no roof left.”
“Ah,” Farfel said. “So you want me to eat in your sukkah with no roof, hoping the birds don’t gobble the meal first? No, thank you. Besides, then I won’t have any guests of my own. I’m not about to let you invite a better guest than I do.” And with that, Farfel wobbled down the road to invite Simon the Simpleminded to his sukkah for dinner.
Simon was prepared to accept the invitation, until he heard there was a contest to invite the best guest. Then he snorted at Farfel’s invitation (a little reluctantly, since Farfel always served an enormous supper) and decided to enter the contest himself. He went to invite Leib the Lackwit.
He pounded on Leib’s door. “Leib, Leib, you must come to my sukkah for dinner!”
Leib blinked slowly. He had been calculating how many sneezes there were in the world on any particular day, since that seemed a most important thing to know. “What’s the matter, Simon? Is your sukkah about to explode?” He thought it out. “If it is, I won’t come.”
Simon shook his shaggy head. “Oh, no, nothing like that. You see, we’re having a contest to invite the best guest. And that’s you.”
“But then I won’t have a guest,” Leib protested. “I can’t possibly come. Say, do you think one sneeze per ten people per day is an exaggerated figure?” But Simon had already left.
“I suppose I should join the contest and find my own guest,” said Leib. He slowly stood up, since he hated standing if he had any choice in the matter. Leib smiled to himself. “I’ll invite Avram, the richest man in this village,” he muttered. “He will be the most important guest by far.”
In his book-filled study, Avram thought about the invitation. “You want me to come because I’m important?”
“Precisely.” Leib was glad Avram had caught on so quickly. It would give him more time to sort sneezes.
“But I’m always the host,” said Avram. “My wife will be disappointed if we don’t invite guests. She already baked the rugelach. If anyone gets to be sukkah hosts, it should be us.”
“Look,” Leib suggested. “We can swap. I’ll be your guest, and you be mine.”
“Will we eat in your sukkah?”
“Well, yes, but my wife and I will be honored to be your guests.”
“At your house.”
Leib shrugged.
“No,” Avram said. “I’m sure I can find someone to eat at my house.” And he strode off, determined to ask the Chief Elder himself to be his guest.
Gimpel the Great Fool was flattered to be asked but had to decline when he heard a competition was happening. He couldn’t be left out of such a contest! Leaving Avram standing at his door, he stopped suddenly in the street. “Who in this town is greater than I, the greatest Elder of all? Whom can I possibly invite to my sukkah?” And he simply stood there, frozen like a statue next to the main square.
In the main square, the students had just finished decorating their own sukkah with paper chains and popcorn strings. Painted gourds and red apples dangled from green and yellow yarn. Holiday cards blanketed each of the wooden walls in a frenzy of color. And over the door hung a page of handwritten blessings.
Gimpel studied an odd pile of flags and banners moving across the floor. Surely, such piles didn’t usually walk around on stockinged legs. “Is someone under there?” he asked hesitantly.
“Of course,” a girl’s voice said. “It’s me, Chava.”
“Ah. I knew flags could wave by themselves, but walking seemed rather ambitious. What’s that you’ve written in Hebrew?”
“It’s an invitation for Hashem to enter the sukkah and celebrate with us,” Chava said. “With Hashem should come all the matriarchs and patriarchs who started the Jewish nation. Are you coming too?”
Gimpel raised his eyebrows. “It seems that you children have invited better guests than any of us could dream of. Yes, of course I’ll celebrate with you. Better yet, each of you run home and tell your fathers and mothers to bring all their holiday foods and join us here. That way, Hashem will be guest to us all, and we can all enjoy Hashem’s bounty together.”
And so they did.
The Oiliest Miracle
A Hanukkah Story
Every Hanukkah, the people of Chelm lit a giant menorah in the center of town. Everyone would sing in its flickering light and dance around the square in a giant hora. Then the children would collect their Hanukkah gelt and go home to play dreidel until their parents shooed them off to bed. This year, however, there was a problem.
“Where’s the oil for the menorah?” Gimpel the Great Fool asked. All the Elders sat around their great table, where they debated puzzles every day. “It ought to be in the synagogue where it always is, but th
ere’s no sign of it. The oil jar is empty.”
“Tonight is the eighth night,” Fishel the Foolish said. “We should’ve had enough oil for all eight nights. Did someone count wrong?”
“Well, the first night, there’s one light,” Leib the Lackwit said, counting on his fingers. “Then two, then three, then four, then five . . . I’m out of fingers on this hand. Quick, someone pull my shoes off.”
“Wait, wait,” Simon the Simpleminded protested. “Every night there’s also a shamash.”
Everyone suddenly realized the mistake. They had forgotten the helper light that kindled the others, and so they had run short of oil.
Gimpel the Great Fool groaned. “Where can we get oil on the eighth night of Hanukkah? Everyone is using the last of their own supply as we speak. There can’t be any left for the town menorah.”
The Elders had many ideas. “Fill the menorah with water. Perhaps in the dark, it won’t know the difference,” said one Elder.
“If olives, which are small and oval, produce oil, why not grapes? Let’s burn grape juice instead,” said another.
“That’s silly. Let’s pronounce that this is the first day of Hanukkah. We had oil then, so that’ll make sure we have oil now.”
And so it went.
“Let’s ask the people to donate some of their oil,” Fishel the Foolish said. “My wife and all her sisters and cousins and aunts don’t have any left, but someone must.”
Hurriedly, they sent Gimpel the Great Fool to beat on every door and borrow as much oil as possible. However, the people had been frying latkes and doughnuts all week. Now they had only a little cold grease shining on the very bottoms of their pans.
“We will have to borrow oil from the Ner Tamid,” Uri the Unwise said at last. The Eternal Flame hung above the altar and was always burning. If it always burned, what was the harm in borrowing some oil?
So they hurried over to the Ner Tamid and scooped out most of the oil. Immediately, the flame started to burn low.
“Quick, more oil!” Itzik the Silly shouted. “We can’t let the Ner Tamid go out!”
“How about the streetlamps?” called Simon the Simpleminded. In Chelm, a few lamps lined the main street, burning oil each night. But now, reasoned the Elders, oil was more precious than light. So they skimmed most of the oil out of the streetlamps and poured it onto the Ner Tamid.
Then the people of Chelm began complaining. “The street is dark! We can’t see our way through the village to reach the menorah in the main square,” they said. So what was there to do but pour the oil they had taken from the Ner Tamid into the lamps?
“We could dig for oil,” Fishel the Foolish said. “Oil comes from the ground, after all.” So the Elders, with their white beards and greatcoats, gathered in front of the meeting hall and began to dig with shovels. Of course, the earth was frozen as hard as stone and cold as an icicle. No matter how hard the Elders shoved their shovels, they couldn’t budge the frozen ground. But at last, they managed to dig a small hole. In it, they found dirt. And rocks. And gravel. But there was no oil. At last, exhausted and defeated, they returned to their council room.
Utterly disappointed, the Elders regarded the empty menorah through the frost-covered window. It seemed that on the last, most joyous night of Hanukkah, there would be no celebration.
“The holiday dinner’s ready,” called Rivka the Cook. “After all that running around and digging, you’ve surely worked up an appetite.” She brought in a huge platter of doughnuts and an even larger mountain of latkes, crisp and brown, on a tray shiny with grease.
“We’re too miserable to eat,” Gimpel the Great Fool said. “Just forget it.”
“Not so fast,” said Fishel the Foolish, motioning Rivka away from the platter. “We’re hungrily miserable, after all.”
“Yes, we should eat more in a crisis,” Leib the Lackwit suggested, already piling his plate high.
“And we shouldn’t waste the doughnuts,” mumbled Uri the Unwise, his mouth close to his plate as he shoveled the latkes in.
“Why are you all so miserable?” Rivka asked. “It’s the last night of Hanukkah. Soon we’ll light the giant menorah in the town square and see it fully lit at last.”
“Not without oil,” groaned Gimpel the Great Fool. Perhaps eating eight doughnuts in under a minute had been a mistake.
“There’s no oil?” asked Rivka.
“No.” Gimpel straightened at the thoughtful look on Rivka’s face. “Don’t tell me you have some!”
“I used up all the oil frying the latkes and doughnuts for dinner. But I have an idea.” Rivka collected nine big latkes from the greasy platter, slapping the Elders’ hands away long enough to snatch away the latkes. Outside, in the main square, she placed one latke in each menorah cup. She kindled the shamash latke and used it to light all the other latkes. A delicious smell of frying oil spread through the square. Drawn by the marvelous smell and the golden lights, people hurried to the square. Then, by the light of the burning latkes, the villagers danced and sang far into the night and had a happy holiday after all. The Elders continued with their enormous feast until their bellies ached, every single one.
The Day the Birds Flew Down
A Tu B’Shevat Story
Minna was busy planting for Tu B’Shevat, the birthday of the trees. She eyed the potted cherry saplings proudly, fingering a curled leaf. Soon the trees would be ten feet tall.
“Ah, Minna. Busy planting, I see. I broke your ladder this morning. Hope you don’t mind.”
Minna blinked as her neighbor Velvel’s head popped up on the other side of the hedge.
“How did you break my ladder?”
Velvel scratched his head. “It was the strangest thing. I wanted butter without all the work of churning it, and I thought if the cow stood high enough, the falling milk might shake itself into butter. So I borrowed your ladder and tried training my cow to climb it. But can you imagine? She broke through all the rungs and tumbled to the ground.”
“Is the cow all right?”
“Yes, and she was shaken enough to give butter on her own!”
Minna eyed the cherry saplings. Without a ladder, she wouldn’t be able to pick the topmost cherries. Everyone knew the best cherries grew at the top. She thought for a moment. How would she be able to pick the best cherries? Aha! She decided to plant the saplings upside down, with the branches in the ground and roots sticking up high into the sky. “How clever I am,” thought Minna with a satisfied smile. “Now I’ll be able to pick the best cherries. There’s no need for me to reach the roots.”
She glanced over the top of the hedge. There sat Velvel in a garden chair with his eyes closed. “Velvel!” she called. “What are you doing?”
Velvel opened his eyes. “Planting trees, of course.”
“What kind?”
“Matzah ball trees!”
Minna scratched her head. “I’ve never heard of those before.”
“Of course not. I’m the first to have the idea. See, I put a few grains of matzah meal on the ground and next spring I’ll have enough matzah balls for a year’s worth of Shabbat dinners.”
Minna had nearly finished planting her upside-down cherry trees, when she heard a yell. She looked over the fence and had to smile.
“Hey, you! Shoo. Go on, fly away!” called Velvel. As soon as Velvel had closed his eyes on the scattered matzah meal, the sparrows flew down and started gobbling it all up.
Velvel hurled handfuls of matzah meal at the tiny birds, but that only made them happier as they hopped all over his orchard.
“They ate my apple seeds this morning,” Minna said.
“They didn’t eat my seeds,” said her son Aaron, walking through the gate. He was home from school, where he had been digging a new garden with his friends. “Because we were planting nails,” he said proudly.
“Nails?”
“If they sprout, we could get a whole house!”
Later that day, other neighbors came by with thei
r complaints. The birds had nibbled everyone’s new plantings. Clearly, the best strategy was to plant the seeds somewhere the birds couldn’t reach. But where would that be?
Uri the Unwise had planted his corn seeds on his basement floor. “Surely, birds won’t get in here,” he thought.
Feivel had planted his apple seeds in pots of wet cement. “After the cement hardens, not a single beak will break through,” he said. And he was right. All the birds stayed away.
All over Chelm, people piled heavy rocks on their seeds or hid them under floorboards and mattresses. Surely, the birds would leave their new plantings alone now.
A week later, children hurried from house to house to check on the seeds. Not a single one had sprouted, not the matzah ball trees or even the nail bush. Imagine that!
“Now what will we do?” Velvel moaned. “If we plant the seeds in sunlight and dirt, the birds will just gobble them up!”
The children slumped in Minna’s empty garden. Their school garden was equally barren, without a single raisin tree or yarmulke vine. “We need the Elders,” Aaron muttered. His nail bush hadn’t so much as sprouted one metal point, despite all the watering.
“The Elders are baffled,” Simon the Simpleminded said. He looked mournfully at the pot that should have held his meshuggah nut tree. It hadn’t grown a bit, despite being locked in the closet away from the birds. He had come over to Minna’s to borrow some fertilizer.
Little Tzipporah, six and barefoot, giggled. “We should feed the birds other things. Then they won’t want our plantings. It’s Tu B’Shevat for them, too, you know.”
All the villagers stared at one another.
“That’s a wonderful idea,” said one villager.
“We should make her an Elder,” said another.
“Even though she doesn’t have a beard?” asked a third.
“Pshaw, she’ll grow one later,” said a fourth.
“Let’s do as she says,” said Simon the Simpleminded hastily, before they asked him to step down from being an Elder in exchange for someone who still took afternoon naps. “Everyone, scatter crumbs in the town square. Let’s show these birds how the people of Chelm celebrate.”
Chelm for the Holidays Page 2