The Slaughterman's Daughter

by Yaniv Iczkovits

  I, for my part, left no book unopened. Against all odds, I was destined to attend Volozhin. If the Chosen People are a light unto the nations, Volozhin is their beacon: the hall of wisdom, temple of learning and font of immaculate argumentation. This academy, I was told, nurtures deep reflection, edifying debate, and even pursuit of the seven sciences: mathematics, geometry, music, astronomy, the natural sciences, theology and philosophy. It was unfathomable: Jewish scholars studying astronomy, proving theorems and hunting butterflies! This dream became reality at Volozhin, towering above all other yeshivas in the Pale of Settlement. Its reputation, beloved friends, extended far and wide to every town and village.

  The tutor went to speak to my parents about my astonishing prospects at the famed academy. My mother, Rochaleh Speismann, promptly fainted. My stone-deaf father shrieked, “What happened?”, and my mother recovered enough to scold and inform him: “Volozhin, Eliyahu, Volozhin!”

  My teachers and masters whose virtue sustains the world: imagine my excitement when my father left me on the train and waved with his handkerchief from the platform. “Do not come back!” he yelled as the train pulled away. I was left to my own devices on Mount Moriah, but unlike Isaac the Patriarch I wasn’t bound as a sacrificial offering; I felt I had been blessed by the Angel of God. Now, I knew, my tedious Motal days were over. I wouldn’t have to endure slothful classmates intent on hunting insects and shooting craps. I was travelling to enter the house of the wisest among the Jews, who are the wisest of men.

  Beloved friends, or should I call you my executioners? Asked by the police and army chiefs who is Zvi-Meir Speismann, you surely described me as haughty and impudent, a menace to the Jews of the Pale of Settlement, spread-ing lies, inciting rebellion, manipulating the meek and corrupting tender souls. My fellow tramps have been warning me: “Zvi-Meir, beware! Believe it or not, you are pursued by army generals! You have outraged the highest levels in the police! But I know perfectly well the men whom I have infuriated. They raised me and taught me what I took to be pure wisdom but now know is a daydream, a castle in the sky, a leafless tree.

  I came to Volozhin at seventeen, and I still remember my first days at the yeshiva as a nightmare. There I was, sitting shoulder to shoulder with great scholars, witnessing their disputes over every jot and tittle, hardly able to tell the difference between one letter and the next. When I would cite a verse they would retort with a quote from the Chayei Adam of Avraham Danzig, a line from Eleazar of Worms, and a counter-argument from Rabbi Shmuel Eidels. Then they would pick faults with the Guide for the Perplexed, dismiss Abravanel, and land a winning argument from Rabbi Yehudah Shmuel of Regensburg. And there I was, staring incredulously at a page of Talmud, overwhelmed with shame. What had I been doing in Motal? Back then I was a head to foxes and now I was a tail to lions. I had basked in the warmth of the praise of my tutor, who would have been the joke of the yeshiva if he ever got there. As I learned too late, the promise I held in Motal was only in the eyes of fools.

  My teachers and masters, for four months, one hundred and twenty sunsets, I sat and said nothing. When spoken to I solemnly nodded and at all other times I was engrossed with holy teachings. “Lift your head up from the page and refute your debater. The Prophets of Israel were not scholars,” I was told. Yet, I felt that my faculty of reasoning was still a babe in arms, crawling on its stomach, bleating at night and fumbling for a foothold. Before finishing one tome, I was already on to the next one, and then I reread the former at night. I studied and read under the lantern’s light, torturing my eyes. I could not wait for the first term to end on the fifteenth of Av, so I could use the holiday to prepare for the second term. While my colleagues returned to their families, earned a little money, ate chicken thighs and slept in comfortable beds, I stayed behind, lived abstemiously and devoured books.

  Reflecting on the commentators’ discussions of the Tree of Knowledge, whether it yielded citron, fig, vine or wheat, an idea haunted me relentlessly. I approached Rabbi Scheinfeld, the first member of your troika, hands atremble and legs weak, and feebly asked the venerated master: “How could it be that the injunction against eating from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was issued to Adam and Eve before they had tasted it, that is, before they could tell right from wrong?”

  Indeed, Rabbi Scheinfeld, my friend, do you remember the innocent question you were so quick to dismiss? Do you recall how you explained to me that many had tackled this conundrum before me, and the greatest and brightest among them had proposed an answer that was right there before me (how could I fail to understand it?). “Knowledge of good and evil” in this sense has nothing to do with virtue, as it denotes the descent of God’s immutable truths to the realm of human conduct, where good and bad are determined by whims and passions, for which reason First Man and First Woman were clad with fig leaves, and that is all there is to it.

  I nodded in assent, but deep down refused to accept his suggestion. Was he even listening? I did not pose the well-trodden question, which is: why should God deny First Man “knowledge of good and evil”, and how could sin earn man the virtue of knowledge? Honourable master, what I set out to know was how could man grasp this prohibition in the first place? Never having seen death, how could he understand the command, “But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat. For in what day so ever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death”? How could he have fathomed either the prohibition or the punishment it would entail?

  I raised the same question with Rabbi Kahanah the erudite, who, to my great surprise, looked at me and muttered: “The Creator never intended to kill man there and then but to make him finite, in other words, make him destined to die.” Honourable rabbi, can you even concede that I raised an inescapable perplexity? Is it too much for you to accept that a babe in arms can pose a question worthy of reflection?

  I turned to the wise and perfect Rabbi Leibowitz, the first to see the conundrum for what it was and pick at its faults: “Man understood the prohibition full well, as he was told, ‘For in what day so ever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death’, that is, you shall cease working, and man knew what work is, for God had placed him in Paradise to toil and preserve it.”

  My teachers and masters, it took me only a few moments to find the flaws in Rabbi Leibowitz’s reply. But before I could answer, Rabbi Scheinfeld came over to scold me: “Speismann, is it you again, with your ‘knowledge of good and evil’? Read your Talmud!” No! I wanted to cry, this is not the right answer, but I had no-one to fend for me, and therefore walked away hushed and rebuffed.

  I had made up my mind to confront you with this question, three wise men, only once I could formulate it more clearly. I pored over books day and night, not letting the Holy Scripture leave my sight. Time and again I pondered how First Man could understand the prohibition he was under before the “knowledge of good and evil” and before God took him to task. The more I perused those very same verses, and read all commentaries, the hungrier I became for the truth, until it suddenly struck me: “knowledge of good and evil” has nothing to do with the tree and its fruit, be it fig or citron. Knowledge was obtained only once the prohibition was violated. Had he not violated the prohibition, man could not have known what is either good or evil; he could only obey. The tree from which Adam and Eve took the forbidden fruit became the tree of knowledge of good and evil only once they transgressed, not a moment earlier.

  Beloved teachers, I cannot describe to you the feelings that overtook me. I collapsed as soon as I let go of my perturbations. I lay on the ground, stupefied, the happiest man alive, spirit without flesh. The Holy Scripture suddenly made perfect sense. Innumerable quandaries were instantly resolved. I kept thinking what else we might learn from this discovery: only once man violated the divine decree he could see there is faith and unfaith, at which point he could choose for the first time between devoutness and heresy. Violation of divine decree is therefore a neces
sary condition of faith. This is the naked truth. Truth has no need of my knowledge. Two plus two is four with or without Zvi-Meir Speismann.

  To me, this discovery was like grinding mountains into powder: only a sinner can be a true believer. If one does not transgress, one is an obsequious dog.

  Excited, I expected the greatest minds of our generation, my beloved teachers, to continue the conversation with me. But all they did was grimace and drift from fury to scorn. “Only black can be white,” muttered Rabbi Scheinfeld, “and only day can be night,” Rabbi Kahanah chuckled, “and only fools can be wise,” thundered Rabbi Leibowitz. I could not believe my ears. The troika had disarmed and humiliated me; they left me as easy prey for their disciples. I wanted to die of shame.

  Scholars swarmed to throw contradictions at my face: “only a Jew can be a gentile”, “only kartoshkes are turnips”, and so on. At night I pleaded for help from the luminaries of past generations – the Vilna Gaon! Rabbi Yehudah Shmuel of Regensburg! Here I am! – but stalwarts like them, feasting in the afterworld at God’s table, could not care less about the novice from Volozhin. Access to my venerated teachers who had seen me suffer day in, day out was denied. If I so much as opened my mouth I was shushed, mocked and abused like an abominable ignoramus. People called me “Motal riffraff” and “King of the Bogs” to my face.

  Ostracised, my dears, I knew that my days at the yeshiva were numbered. Indeed, I was not officially expelled, nor was I excommunicated. Nonetheless, we know all too well that denigration and belittlement hurt more than banishment. If I approached colleagues engrossed in debate, before I could open my mouth my debaters would flee. Before long, the single table I could join was the one reserved for the hollow heads who had been admitted to Volozhin thanks only to the donations of their rich fathers.

  At that moment it dawned on me that the Volozhin Yeshiva is a marketplace of ideas where one’s success depends on one’s ability to state the obvious; in other words, it depends on whether one agrees to play by your rules or not. And the three pre-eminent sages that you are, the gedoylim, walked around correcting their utterances – guided not by Truth but by whim and caprice. A Turkish bazaar, gentlemen, is what it was. To my mind, Volozhin was about asking any question whatsoever, provided it had rhyme and reason. As it turned out, you presided at Volozhin as sole arbiters of what rhyme and reason might be. Little wonder that meddling became rife, as a wave of leaks and reports to the authorities ultimately led to the locking of its gates.

  The day I left the yeshiva was the day I fulfilled the purpose of my studies. I approached Rabbi Leibowitz and took my hat off like a Christian, standing bare-headed before God. I, Zvi-Meir Speismann, went over to the other side to experience heresy first hand, in order to decide on my own if I should follow the Almighty. This was when I vowed to walk in God’s path, not the way you understand it, but like an ordinary man; if this means I will be a pedlar then so be it, but I will not bargain with the truth.

  I married Mende Schechter, daughter of Meir-Anschil Schechter, a butcher from Grodno. My parents were pleased with this match and the handsome dowry that came with it. Mende was harmless enough – pleasant demeanour, a graceful dimple adorning her chin, innocent eyes, gentle and well-mannered. And although she did not make my heart sing, she was certainly worthy of a promising scholar like myself.

  To make a living, I pulled a cart laden with a Jewish home’s must-haves: clothes, furniture, kitchen utensils and firewood. But when I offered my wares for sale in the villages, I encountered hesitation and suspicion. Everyone asked, what is a Volozhin student doing with a beggar’s cart? My customers considered me too clever to be peddling, and scholars thought me too much of a pedlar to be clever. I had no other choice but to tell my story, and to elaborate on my discoveries to anyone who would listen. You will not believe their reactions. Ears were pricked, hairs stood on end, and the wares offered for sale were completely forgotten. One after the other they advised me to go back to study. When I tried to share my woes with my pregnant wife, she looked at me blankly and dismissed me by saying her head hurt. The next day her head was still sore, and the day after it was spinning, and when our daughter Mirl was born, Mende was tired most of the day. Whenever I tried to raise the subject, she meekly asked me to save the conversation for another time. God Almighty, with whom should a man speak – a donkey?

  I will tell you, masters, that if it was not for the children, I would have moved to Minsk nine years ago. But how could I leave my fledglings behind? Night after night I held Yankele in my arms and told him about the Talmud and about the yeshiva he will attend when he grows up. Founded by his father, Rabbi Zvi-Meir Speismann, this academy will be the envy of Volozhin. Rabbi Speismann’s yeshiva will teach, first and foremost, intellectual prowess. Anyone memorising verses will be expelled. This is what I told my young son. But the more resplendent and grand my dreams became, the more I found my chores unbearable. There I was, walking the streets, preaching the words of the Torah and cursing the patrons who refused to buy my wares. I took note of the affluence of my brethren who attend synagogue to fulfil commandments taught by rote, without exercising a shred of free thinking. To my eyes they were a horde of insects leaving the wells in search of crumbs.

  But how could I complain? Crumbs were our primary concern at home. Mende prattled about the things she bought, who did what and to whom, what people are saying about so-and-so, when did X visit Y, how much tomatoes cost here, and why no-one buys flax there. Who cares? Roaming the realms of the mind, suddenly I would be asked to offer my opinion on a coat she had bought from a neighbour. And if I ever requested peace and quiet, Mende would cover her face with her hands and scuttle around the house like a plucked hen.

  My sweet, brilliant children were the apples of my eye. I could, for example, see Yankele sitting in a corner, exploring the contents of a bowl. I would scold him, “Yankele, leave that bowl alone!” and he would return a conspiratorial look and keep at it. The boy, who was not yet three, already understood what took a torturous year at Volozhin for me to realise: transgression is a necessity. Tell me, you who keep the world firm with your virtue, how could you, the wisest of men, fail to understand what is clear as day to an innocent toddler?

  I did everything I could for the children, travelling from one village to the next as a measly pedlar, to put bread on their table. Mende’s dowry ran out and I had no time left for Torah study. People asked, “Zvi-Meir Speismann, a wise man like yourself, why aren’t you at the study hall?” And I would reply with a smile, “There is no Torah without bread. My cart is my study hall.” And yet I was mortified. Above all else, I pitied my children. Yankele was about to start attending the cheder, where his spirit would be crushed. Mirl would grow up to be like her mother. How does Mende define a good day? A good bargain on shoes, juicy gossip and gloating at others’ misfortunes. All our daughter could learn was that idle talk is all there is to life.

  Beloved friends, I could not bear it any longer. My children’s eyes filled with shame. I shared with them words of Torah at Sabbath dinner, and left the following evening after the Melaveh Malka dinner that marked the Sabbath’s departure. Knocking on doors for a living, what could I possibly share with my clients? They wouldn’t buy a single item before slashing my prices to pieces. They’d ask me to come back, the bastards, only once I refused to bargain and turned to leave, as if trade is a muscle-flexing game that only the fittest survive. Looking at them, I realised we were exactly the same: all we cared about was money.

  I wished I could separate my calling from my profession. Unfortunately, one’s profession never relies on the body alone; it always ends up plundering the riches of the mind. Sitting down at sunset at home, hoping to reflect unperturbed, Mende’s prattle would gnaw away at my thoughts. I could not bear the sight of my family dining around me. Greedily chewing on bread, gorging on fat until it dripped down their chins and guzzling soup to the very last drop. I lost my appe
tite altogether. I did not eat for days, and became a walking skeleton among animals of prey.

  My heart skipped a beat every time I saw a bonfire, thinking this might be the burning bush that would summon me to my calling. Yet each time I approached, the people sitting around the fire threw stones to drive me away. In the morning I rose expecting to hear a voice from on high but heard Mende’s snores instead. I intended to wait until Mirl grew up and Yankele could think for him-self before leaving, but after nine years my life became unbearable. I abandoned the cart and vowed not to return to Motal until my wish was fulfilled: to become a better man and, most of all, a father worthy of his children.

  I arrived in Minsk penniless. Good people took me under their wing, letting me spend the night in their home or barn. They refused to let a fellow Jew freeze to death out in the street. When they asked for my story, I told it from beginning to end, at which point they told me that the illustrious yeshiva I had attended had closed down, and told me about Volozhin’s history of quarrels and betrayal. I was ashamed, my masters, but not surprised. I vowed to my hosts that a new, magnificent yeshiva would rise, this time on a solid foundation, and asked for a donation to let me lead the rundown local hall of study for a start. They invited me to their academies to share my discoveries and I accepted. But wherever I went, former Volozhinites acted as gatekeepers and denied me access to any dais or hall.

  Conceding my defeat, I knew my days were numbered, not seeing a glimmer of hope in this valley of death. Returning to Motal was not an option: it would have broken my children’s heart to see their father so defeated and crestfallen. Palestine is a quagmire of hoodlums, and New York, die goldene medina, is a bed of thorns. I intended to burn my prayer shawl, taking after the manner of the Mendelssohns, Germany’s famed Jewish converts, and then kill myself like those possessed by the dybbuk. Knowing this would play into the hands of my detractors was the only reason I didn’t follow through with my plan. I started living on the street and continued spreading my teachings from dawn to dusk. I lost three fingers to frostbite, my lungs almost failed twice, and only the Blessed Holy One sustained me and gave me the strength to continue spreading His word.