by Ezra Glinter
“I’m a widow, always busy with trying to make a living and my ‘Kaddish’ 146 is growing up without a father’s supervision. So he’s doing what his little friends are doing out on the street. They’ve stopped going to the Old Shul, so he stopped too. And besides, I need him to deliver a bundle of wood or half a bucket of coal for my women customers who don’t want to carry the merchandise by themselves.”
The woman did not stop thanking the free tutor for the good deed of teaching her “Kaddish” a page of Hebrew. But she concluded exactly the same way as Itsikl’s mother:
“Meirke will not grow up to be a rabbi. A poor widow like me can’t afford that.”
No longer dressed in their winter furs and woolen shawls, the fruit peddlers looked younger; their reanimated faces had a rosy bloom. They sold a pre-spring item—oversized soured apples soaking in full buckets of water.
“Kvass apples, kvass apples,” they called out sprightly, and around them gathered a crush of customers, mostly men. They savored the delicious winey flavor even before they bit into the soured apples. Their tongues cleaved to the roofs of their mouths; they relished the taste, sucked in their lips and pointed a finger, as though at a washtub full of live fish:
“No, no. Not this apple. That’s the one I want.”
The peddlers quickly pulled the kvass apples out of the bucket and at the same time spoke to the graybeards from the Old Shul, who humbly waited for an answer, like poor people waiting for a handout.
“We thank you grandfathers for letting our boys come in to the shul during the winter to warm up. But now that spring is coming and the weather is mild, we can’t tell our kids not to run around and have fun. Poor children don’t have any other bit of joy, so let them play as long as they’re young.
“And furthermore,” the fruit peddlers concluded, “you grandfathers have your own grandsons and children too who are also rich and well provided for, as folks here on the street say. So why don’t you study Torah with your own grandsons and then you’ll earn as much World to Come as you want?”
What do you say to that? That’s precisely what the prophet complained about—that our grandsons don’t want to study Torah, the grandfathers thought, and just nodded pleasantly and absentmindedly without saying a word. When they returned to the Old Shul, they no longer sat around the stove and no longer spoke to one another as they did during that wonderful period when little students had sat next to them. Every one of the old men crept back to his little corner by the cold wall where he would sit during the summer. They sat silently behind their big oaken prayer stands, looked out the windows, and tried hard to focus on something else—like, for instance, that barely three weeks remained until Passover. In that case, it was high time to think about a bakery to bake shmura matzo 147 and about ordering wine from the Hasid for the Seder.
VI
THE ELDERS OF the Old Shul were destined to have another kind of experience with students—this time grown-up Torah scholars, young masters of Talmud. One morning, around the time the little boys stopped coming in the evening, a seventeen-year-old youth stormed into the synagogue. He had a pair of healthy ruddy cheeks and a wrinkled, scholarly forehead under a little hat that was pushed back on his head.
“Do you have Kreysee Ufleysee 148 in your study house?” he asked one of the men with an impetuous tone in his voice.
The old man either hadn’t heard or hadn’t understood. So the preoccupied young scholar spoke even more impatiently.
“I mean the book Kreysee Ufleysee by Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz, the Rabbi of Prague. 149 Do you have that text? I have to look something up.”
One graybeard found a bundle of keys and opened the bookcase cabinet. The other old men also drew near and looked up at the young scholar, who stood on the little ladder and rummaged through one shelf of books after another.
“You have a great collection of sacred texts here by the early and later rabbinical authorities, but you don’t have Kreysee Ufleysee,” he said, jumping down, and ordered the men to open another cabinet. There stood a large edition of the Vilna Talmud, bound in black leather and green linen, a complete set of the Code of Jewish Law with covers hard as stone, and a four-volume set of Maimonides’ works with gilt spines. The young Talmud scholar did find something, but not the book he sought. The books he chose he handed down to one of the grandfathers, who stretched his hands up to the scholar just like Moses our Teacher when he received the Torah at Mount Sinai. At the third cabinet the young scholar remained up on the little ladder, deeply immersed in a text with torn covers and yellowed pages. He swallowed page after page with his eyes and nodded enthusiastically. “Amazing,” he said to himself, and the elders around the little ladder looked up at him as if at an angel of God who stands between heaven and earth.
“So it’s true what everyone says, that great scholars used to sit and study here in the Old Shul. There’s a treasure here,” the young scholar said, and finally leaped down with several holy books—responsa from leading rabbinic authorities of former times. His words delighted the old men immensely, as if he had brought news that this was the year that the Jews would finally be redeemed from exile.
But when the youth posed a difficult question—how come the Jews here are totally unaware of the precious rare volumes in their own study house?—the old men’s joy dissipated and they began sighing: “Ah, woe unto us, the heirs of the Old Shul. We can still manage to study a chapter of Mishna and peruse a bit of Eyn Yaakov, but our heirs don’t even know that and want no part of a holy text. Only God in heaven knows what will happen to the treasures of the Old Shul.”
“And whose son are you, young tree?” one of the oldsters asked, and then realized that one shouldn’t use the familiar form when addressing a scholar. “Would you mind if I asked what family you come from?”
The men in the synagogue learned that the young man’s name was Shloymele and he was a grandson of the old rabbinic judge, Reb 150 Shloymele Cohen. He studied at the Kletsk yeshiva and had come home for Passover earlier than the other Torah scholars because his mother missed him so much. The old men now ceased to be amazed: since the youth was a grandson of the late Reb Shloymele Cohen, Vilna’s rabbinic legal authority, it’s no wonder that he was so ripe with knowledge. Even though the graybeards weren’t scholars, they did know the Talmudic aphorism: the Torah returns to its old abode. And they had heard that the great sage, the Chofetz Chaim, 151 long life to him, had said that indeed the Torah does come back to its old home, but when it is denied entry, it departs humiliated. That’s why it can happen that nowadays children of rabbis don’t take after their fathers and grandfathers.
While the men stood huddled together, murmuring like Jews who gather in a knot outside the synagogue to recite the blessing on the new moon 152 and speak to their own shadows, Shloymele lay half stretched out on the table amid the books he had dragged down. He was turning pages, skimming, looking here and there, perfectly at home and with such confidence, like the old men looking for a prayer in worn-out yellow prayer books. When he stood up he noticed that the men were still standing around him.
“Would it be possible for you to do your studying here at the Old Shul while you’re home for Passover?” the elders asked him humbly. “We don’t want to encroach on the Gaon’s Shul, God forbid, where you probably do your studying. But the Gaon’s Shul has a minyan of recluses, thank God, while in the Old Shul we don’t have a single scholar who sits and studies here.”
“I don’t study in the Gaon’s Shul. I study at home, but I’m lacking holy books,” Shloymele replied and wrinkled his scholarly brow. “With pleasure! It’ll be much more convenient for me to sit and study in a study house where there’s no lack of sacred texts. I’ll also talk it over with my friend from the yeshiva to have our regular study sessions here. My friend Hirshel is the grandson of Vilna’s town preacher, Reb Hirshele, and he also came home before the end of the term at the yeshiva because his mother is sick.”
Hearing who Shloymele’s friend was, the old men
swayed and rocked back and forth like a group of white birches in a field.
“Of course we knew the old Vilna town preacher, Reb Hirshele! What a speaker he was, the Vilna town preacher! He was a master scholar, a saintly man, and the words he spoke were sweet as honey. And the rabbinic judge, Reb Shloymele.” The elders stopped. Perhaps they hadn’t sufficiently showered praise on the grandfather in the presence of his grandson. “Oh, what a man Reb Shloymele was! It’s no wonder that grandfathers like that have such extraordinary grandsons.”
“My grandfather wrote annotations on the Talmud and called his book Kheyshek Shloyme. 153 But I dispute my grandfather’s novellae. His opinions are nothing special and rather simplistic. He doesn’t penetrate the heart of the matter. I also dispute the Maharam, 154 he sounds like a grandma,” Shloymele said, narrowing his wise eyes and then storming out of the study house in the same fashion he had come in.
When both youths sat themselves down in the eastern corner of the synagogue to study together, the old men saw at once that the town preacher Reb Hirshele’s grandson was a totally different creature. Hirshele was one year older than Shloymele. He was eighteen, tall and thin and pale-faced. His decency and sagacity were seen in his tranquil eyes, his calm manner of speaking and the fine way he debated. Shloymele, on the other hand, studied with a loud and angry voice, as though he were constantly refuting his grandfather’s comments on the Talmud. Hirshele swayed slowly and hummed sweetly to himself like his grandfather, the town preacher Reb Hirshele would do years ago while delivering a sermon. If the two friends couldn’t agree on an issue, Shloymele would talk quickly and incessantly, waving both hands and gesticulating with his thumb. During all this Hirshele listened with a smile on his pale face, pulling at a lone blond hair on his chin, or gazing at his long, elegant fingers. Finally, his turn came and he expressed his view softly, calmly, briefly—and then he continued to smile, no matter how much Shloymele gestured, shifted about, seethed and negated the commentators upon whose remarks his friend had based his argument. “He says absolutely nothing. What he says there is of no consequence whatsoever.”
The elders slowly stood up from where they sat and came to watch and listen with delight. It’s a miracle from heaven! Two strong broad-winged young eagles had flown into the Old Shul. One could see at once that Shloymele was sharp, a fiery interpreter of texts. And the fact that he didn’t even spare his own grandfather, Reb Shloymele, and faulted the novellae of this former rabbinic judge, well, may such dishonor befall every grandfather! And Hirshele surely was wise, proficient and levelheaded. Just see how meticulously he wears his little hat and drapes his neatly folded coat on the railing of the bimah; apparently, that’s the way everything he has learned is stored in his brain. And the way he conducts himself with people—he’s velvet and silk. The old men now went back to their seats, hid behind their prayer stands, and sighed:
“Would it have been so bad if we had grandsons like these? Of course it wouldn’t have been so bad, but one has to earn it from God.”
But the delight the Old Shul regulars had with someone else’s grandsons was marred whenever they recalled that after Passover the two young eagles would fly back to the yeshiva. And so among themselves the old men deliberated behind the bimah and devised a plan. The next morning the two brilliant young scholars hadn’t even had a chance to open their Talmuds when before them stood three elders with three beards, looking like a snow white Yom Kippur curtain for the Holy Ark. From both sides of the bimah other old men slowly drew near, as though waiting for the Torah scrolls to be brought down after the reading, whereupon they would touch the mantles with two fingers.
The three old men stammered and sighed at length before these two young scholars, until it became clear that they desperately needed a teacher.
“So why don’t two well-known young scholars like you do a minyan of old Jews a favor and study with us? We’re not asking you to do this for free, God forbid. We will pay you.”
For a while the two youths stood there confused and embarrassed. Graybeards were offering to become their students. Then Shloymele burst out laughing.
“And what will I study with you? Aggadah? 155 I skim over such matter in the Talmud with a glance.”
“Aggadah is just fine for us,” the grandfathers replied. “We’re dying to hear some nice, pious tales from the Talmud. And without a teacher, the Aramaic of Eyn Yaakov is a bit hard for us to penetrate. The truth is that studying the laws of Passover in the Mishna Berura 156 is absolutely crucial for us right now. The holiday is fast approaching and we have to bake shmura matzo and get rid of the chometz. 157 And so we have to know the applicable laws and act accordingly. It’s no small matter, chometz on Passover!”
“And the laws pertaining to the Counting of the Omer? 158 Moreover, the customs of how to conduct oneself up to Lag B’Omer 159 and after Lag B’Omer are very complicated, especially if one is elderly and one’s memory isn’t so good. Then before one turns around it’s already the eve of Shavues. 160 Certainly one can’t be an ignoramus regarding a law about the holy days of the giving of the Torah,” said another old man, listing the most important things he had to know. He wanted to make sure he had secured for himself a teacher in time for the whole summer.
“All right, I’ll study Aggadah with you and Shloymele will study Halacha,” 161 Hirshele concluded with a clever little smile, as though he understood very well that besides studying Torah the old-timers had something else in mind.
During the evening, Hirshel, the town preacher’s grandson, studied Eyn Yaakov with his students. When a stranger happened to come into the Old Shul for an evening service, he must have been transfixed with amazement. Sitting around a table was a group of Jews with beards and earlocks of finest silver, and the lamp above the table cast added beams of pure silver. The graybeards sat huddled together like schoolboys and teaching them was a pale youth. Besides doing the old men a kindness and having the good deed of spreading Torah learning, Hirshele also wanted to test his ability to explain texts well, as if he was already thinking of becoming the head of a yeshiva or assuming a rabbinic post. He took a statement of the sages and interpreted it according to the views of the various commentators; then he added his own comment which, even though it wasn’t apparent in the remarks of the sages, nevertheless lay deep in their words, like a pearl in the sea. The old students were delighted with their young teacher and mused that he had inherited his way of speaking and the sweetness of his words from his grandfather the town preacher. If only he wouldn’t rush back to his yeshiva. Recalling this, the old men’s beaming faces clouded over, and behind their hunched backs the shadows stretched out as long as the years of their lives.
With these same men Shloymele studied Mishna Berura at twelve noon; in no way did he indulge in casuistic arguments, nor did he shout as he had done while studying with his friend. First he quoted the law as stated in the Code of Jewish Law in Hebrew and followed it with an explanation in Yiddish. Then he stopped and waited patiently for the students to slog their way through the just-reviewed passage. And while they were inching along, Shloymele quickly scanned the commentaries, just like a grandson would give a quick glance up at a flying bird while waiting for his grandfather. Finally, the oldsters finished and Shloymele clearly and crisply summarized the law. Only occasionally did the keen scholar in him burst forth and he would mutter to himself, “What in heaven’s name is he babbling about?” Or he would shrug his strong young shoulders and say, “He deserves to be put into a baby carriage along with his new interpretations.”
The Old Shul regulars would overhear this and take delight in this too. Their young teacher had no qualms about disputing the commentators and not even the Mishna Berura itself. “Ay, ay, ay, what a grandson the old rabbinic judge, Reb Shloymele, has left us!” And once again the graybeards fell into rapture and the four gigantic stone pillars around the bimah also joined in their delight. “What a grandson! He’s helping us keep the Old Shul alive.”
J
ust as the two young Torah scholars differed in their interpretations, they also differed in manners and civility. Their elderly students rose in respect each time Shloymele and Hirshele passed them. Both youths knew that a person must stand up even for a young Torah scholar, tender in years but wise, especially since they were teaching the old-timers Halacha and Aggadah. But between themselves there was a constant dispute as to how a scholar must comport himself. Shloymele’s view was that a great scholar shouldn’t even turn around. It didn’t matter if people stood up or not, if they praised or rebuked him—he had to make his way to his place by the synagogue’s eastern wall. And he acted accordingly. Apparently, Shloymele had already rehearsed how he would behave when he became a great rabbi. Whenever he entered or left the study house, if he had to consult a sacred text in the bookcase by the western wall or if he simply wanted to walk back and forth in the Old Shul to stretch his young limbs, he did not even look at the graybeards who rose in respect for him. But Hirshele’s attitude was different, totally different. When he entered or left the study house, he twisted his way through the benches where no one was sitting to avoid having anyone stand up for him. His view was that a truly great scholar scrupulously avoids troubling another person, especially the elderly.
One day before Passover the students gave their teachers their wages. The old men made an honest assessment: they had studied with them for almost two weeks. They would continue to study with them during the intermediary days of Passover, 162 and right after the holiday they would again resume their studies. So they wanted to pay the scholars in time, for older people should not be debtors. Neither of the two yeshiva students had in mind to accept tuition money, but each one reacted in his own fashion. Shloymele burst out with a cheerful laugh and stuck out his hand. Holding a handful of bills and coins—he didn’t even glance at the sum—he at once strode over to the charity boxes by the door and put the money into all the boxes. Shloyme, the teacher of Halacha, acted according to the law. Instead of discovering astounding new insights in the Talmud, he had torn himself away from his own studies and taught Jews the Code of Law, from which he would not derive any new interpretations. So he was due compensation for loss of time from learning. But what he did with that money was nobody’s business. But when Hirshele, the teacher of Aggadah, was offered money for tuition, a shudder ran through him. God forbid! He was not a synagogue trustee, nor would he be anyone’s gabbai for distributing charity money. If a Jew wants to give to charity he has to do it himself.