Although their disputatious tones had aroused his curiosity, he wasn’t sure what was the topic of contention. From remarks about “giving the child bread,” he realized that the Yom Kippur fast had ended. He also surmised that the superior voice wanted to give some of their food to a boy, whereas the inferior voice challenged this, since they lacked sufficient food themselves. He quickly understood that these were “rabbinic phantoms.”
“He’s just a child,” the superior responded. “Just a child,” the voice repeated with pity.
“What difference does that make?” the junior questioned. He seemed frustrated at the display of feeling for the child.
“So young,” the senior voice sighed in melancholy regret, as if he had not heard the question.
“So?” his interrogator persisted. “Doesn’t one’s own life come first?”
“Yes, but we—shall not survive,” the senior voice uttered wearily.
With his mouth pressed against one of the boards of the cattle car, he could not have joined the conversation had he wanted to. But he was offended by the lethargic resignation of the senior voice. Never mind that he himself had lost the will to live. Never mind that he had surrendered to despair some time ago; he was offended that rabbinic phantoms had done so, and especially the more senior rabbi. What kind of faith was that? What kind of leadership? In outrage, he seemed to be grinding the wooden beam into sawdust and choking on the fine, dry particles. The indigestible wood tasted so similar to the dessicated bread crumbs they were discussing! But that was the point, wasn’t it? One was an obscene cattle car, and the other was—why, the other was the staff of life, and the senior rabbi didn’t seem able to distinguish between them! Had the Nazis turned both of them into termites? He wanted to spit the wooden board out of his mouth, but the accumulated pressure of his fellow passengers seemed too great to overcome. So he bit down upon the wood like a vengeful termite and waited for the phantom to continue.
The first voice was that of the younger, junior phantom. “Then why didn’t you permit her to switch the child?”
When no immediate response followed, the loyal termite feared that the senior phantom had simply faded away, drifting back into the sickly sweet poisonous cloud that hovered above them.
“She would have had to provide them with another child, and you know the law: one may not surrender one soul of Israel.”
“Yes,” the junior voice conceded. “That’s the Mishnah, but in the Gomorrah’s discussion aren’t there mitigating circumstances?”
The senior voice didn’t respond at once, and the junior pressed his argument. “Doesn’t the Gomorrah quote a case in which a group of Jews are traveling along, and they meet a band of goyim who demand that they surrender one Jew to be killed, or if they refuse, then the goyim will kill them all? In that case, all must be killed. But if the goyim specify their victim, then one teacher says that only if the intended victim has rebelled against the legitimate kingship of David may his fellows surrender him to the goyim and certain death. The other teacher, Rabbi Yochanan, however, decrees that even if the selected victim is not guilty of any crime, they are still permitted to surrender him to their enemies; for if they don’t, they will all be killed, including the one singled out, whereas if he is surrendered, then the others may live. In either case, the one singled out has only the most momentary life expectancy. So indeed if the goyim single out a victim, then his fellow Jews may surrender him. And hasn’t Hitler singled us all out?”
The junior voice fell silent, awaiting the expected reply. The termite’s anger dissipated, however, into careful consideration of what he had heard. Indeed, the termite casually chewed on his generous helping of wood with a certain dedication as he ruminated on the phantom’s charge. Although he wasn’t familiar with the particular talmudic citations, the termite had no trouble with their frame of reference; he knew that the Mishnah, the part of the Talmud that had been written earlier, was the basic codification of the oral law, and that the Gomorrah contained the later accumulated commentaries on the Mishnah. The debate sounded vaguely familiar, which came as no surprise, since he himself as a young man had once been part of the talmudic world. As for their discussion itself, the junior phantom’s suggestion sounded quite plausible. In either event, the intended victim who had been singled out was as good as dead, so why shouldn’t he be surrendered to the enemy? As for Hitler singling out every Jew, that, too, could not be disputed. And if it were, one could rely upon Rabbi Yochanan’s position. By surrendering the one Jew, who would die in any eventuality, all the others could be saved. That certainly made sense. So why hadn’t the senior rabbi permitted the children to be switched? How could anyone or any rabbi know where any child would be safer?
Hadn’t he, the termite, once learned something or other like that? It seemed familiar, but different, too. The Talmud that he had learned—What was it? When was it?—had never seemed so reasonable. He was trying to recall, without much confidence. After all, what kind of memory did a termite need? If you can’t chew it, you don’t eat it. It must have been from his days as a young talmudist in Krimsk. Hadn’t the Krimsker Rebbe called the termite a bug? vermin? And where else had he learned Talmud? While he was puzzling over these questions, the senior phantom began to speak.
“You do not remember all of the Gomorrah’s discussion. Although in theory Rabbi Yochanan was correct, the law in this case is not decided on the basis of his logical inference. The Gomorrah relates an actual historical case. A Jewish fugitive fled to the city of Lod, where he sought refuge with Rabbi Yehoshua Ben-Levi. The governor’s soldiers arrived in pursuit and surrounded the town. They announced that if the fugitive were not surrendered to them, then they would destroy the entire town and everyone in it. Rabbi Yehoshua Ben-Levi went to the fugitive and successfully convinced the man to surrender himself in order to save everyone else. The man agreed and surrendered himself to the soldiers for execution, and the entire town of Lod was saved.
“But the story doesn’t end there. There are dreams, too. The prophet Elijah, may he be remembered for good, used to reveal himself to the great Rabbi Yehoshua Ben-Levi in his dreams. Suddenly the Prophet ceased to appear. The great rabbi fasted many fasts. At long last, the prophet Elijah reappeared. When Rabbi Yehoshua Ben-Levi asked him why he had disappeared, the prophet Elijah retorted, ‘Shall I reveal myself to those who surrender souls?’ The great rabbi strenuously defended himself: ‘And didn’t I act in accordance with the Mishnah that explicitly teaches that if the intended victim is singled out, he may be surrendered?’ Elijah answered him, ‘But is this the Mishnah of the pious?’”
There was quiet, and when the junior phantom spoke again, his voice was no longer challenging. Reflective and chastened, he asked, “And that is the halacha, the law?”
“Yes, that is how Moses Ben-Maimon decides the law, and after him, the Shulchan Aruch, the definitive code. No less than the great Genius of Vilna maintains that the lawmakers follow this Gomorrah in which the logical inference is overruled by the prophet Elijah’s declaration in Rabbi Yehoshua Ben-Levi’s dream. ‘But is this the Mishnah of the pious?‘”
There was silence in the carriage, almost as if out of respect for the nocturnal appearance of the prophet Elijah. The senior phantom added, “So even according to the Gomorrah, there are no mitigating circumstances; one may not surrender a soul of Israel.”
“Let me give the child some of my bread first,” the junior rabbi responded, and then he announced to the boy’s mother, “Madame, I am giving your son some bread.”
The mother did not answer, although the termite thought he heard the sounds of the starving child ravenously swallowing. He wasn’t certain about that, because he was no longer paying careful attention to the voices. He was thinking about the Gomorrah’s discussion of the Mishnah, and in particular about the prophet’s appearance in the rabbi’s dream, and he was marveling at the way visionary prophecy—or was it prophetic vision—had overruled the human intellect when it came to c
hoosing between lives. Having lived in the ghetto, the termite knew what an awesome and horrifying task it had been for well-intentioned good men who had been forced to make such decisions. Alas, the prophet Elijah had not appeared in their dreams, but would it have helped, since all of them had been singled out by Hitler?
The termite, the wet, saliva-soaked wood still in his teeth, had to admit that the old-phantom-senior voice was not that of a termite. No, the prophet Elijah had revealed himself through the Talmud to the old rabbi, too. Certainly the prophet Elijah would not reveal himself to a termite or to a phantom. The Germans had tried to turn the Jews into termites and phantoms, but with some they could not succeed, because even though all had been singled out, some refused to surrender even one soul of Israel.
As the termite thought about that, the wood in his mouth began to taste foul. The termite of course in his wooden dreams had never seen Elijah, but as the discussion progressed, some of the terms seemed more and more familiar. Hadn’t he heard it all before? But wasn’t it different then? Where was it? When was it?
And suddenly he knew. Suddenly he remembered. Yes, it had been back in Krimsk, when he was substituting for his old primary instructor Reb Gedaliah and teaching the Mishnah to the young boys on the eve of the very fateful Tisha B’Av in Krimsk when the rebbe had returned to the world with such disastrous effects. So he did know about not surrendering a soul of Israel. He himself had taught it to those boys on one of his very last days in Krimsk. That night he had met the rebbe and confessed his doubts, and the interview had become so very bitter. The rebbe had called him a heretic who would never escape Krimsk because there was always enough space for vermin. But his doubts that the rebbe rejected were not based on the Gomorrah; hadn’t his doubts somehow focused on the Mishnah? Weren’t there two rabbis arguing about what you could do and couldn’t do to save property? Something about preventive destruction. Yes, that was it, and he was teaching those young boys on the eve of Tisha B’Av about the terumah, the priestly tithe on produce in the days when the Temple still stood in Jerusalem. The Mishnah was discussing cases in which, to save something pure, one could purposely make it impure; now he remembered that, in the final case, everyone agreed that the Jewish women could not surrender one of their number even if the goyim threatened to “make them all impure.” Yes, that was the Mishnah he had heard quoted at the beginning of the discussion about not surrendering one soul of Israel, and it was that Mishnah that had irritated him so in his youth, because there was no way of saving the Jews.
Now, having experienced the Nazis’ hell and having heard the discussion of the Gomorrah, he wasn’t so very irritated at all. On the contrary, having heard the developmental discussion, he found the Gomorrah’s conclusion satisfying, intellectually and emotionally. That such a cerebral, analytic document as the Gomorrah should recognize that there are some cases that man cannot judge was delightfully surprising. Deciding the law by a prophet’s chastising appearance in a rabbi’s dream seemed esthetically pleasing. It was the warm, personal relationship with the heavenly that he had always assumed should be appropriate for a Jew with his God. If he no longer believed in God, he thought ironically, might he still believe in His prophets? He supposed so; he certainly accepted the Gomorrah’s teaching that you could not believe in rabbis—or at least, that you could not rely on their intellect alone. He rather enjoyed the idea that such a supremely rabbinic—and caviling—document as the Gomorrah openly admitted the limits, even the failing, of the rabbinic intellect. That might not affect his beliefs, or the lack of them, but it must affect his attitudes. The older rabbi was certainly no phantom, and he certainly was no termite! The Gomorrah was very impressive indeed.
Suddenly it dawned on him that he had been teaching those boys only the Mishnaic tractate about the priestly tithe; there was no Gomorrah on the Mishnah! That particular order of the Mishnah, almost one-sixth of the entire Mishnaic compilation, was almost completely devoid of the Gomorrah, the later commentaries! The Gomorrah on it had either never been written down or had been lost. So what were those rabbis talking about? They couldn’t have made it up! They weren’t phantoms, were they? Feeling absolutely unlike a termite, he spat the wooden bar out of his mouth and, bracing both his hands on the board and his body against the carriage wall, he thrust with all his might, first arching his back against the bodies piled upon him, and then, when he had inched them back, pushing against the wooden bar with all his strength until his face barely cleared the wooden slats. To his surprise, the crushing weight behind him seemed to lessen, as if the bodies were made of earth and, once shifted, they simply collapsed with all their primordial dirt into that new position.
Although his face was only an inch from the wall, with all the impetuous passion of his distant youth he managed to shout, “But there is no Gomorrah!”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them. He received no response. He sensed that the rabbis stood in shocked silence. His pronouncement must have sounded as scandalous to them as if he had shouted, “There is no God!”
“No,” he corrected himself, “I know there is a Gomorrah, but I don’t understand”—this statement struck him as overwhelmingly sincere—“the Mishnah you quoted originally is in the tractate of Terumah, and that Mishnaic tractate has no Gomorrah at all.”
Apparently he had atoned for his unintentional offense, for within moments the younger rabbi answered him.
“Yes, you are right,” the rabbi began cordially, even respectfully. “The Babylonian Talmud has no Gomorrah on the tractate in question, but the Jerusalem Talmud does. That’s the Gomorrah we were discussing, the Jerusalem Talmud.”
“Oh, the Jerusalem Talmud,” he said aloud in respectful amazement.
All his life he had admired knowledge, and tonight he had learned something, something very satisfying. He was particularly impressed that the rabbis knew the Jerusalem Talmud. Although both talmuds commented on the same Mishnah, the entire Orthodox Jewish world studied the Babylonian Talmud, which was codified later under less repressive circumstances and tended to be more complete, somewhat more relevant to life in the diaspora, and less elliptical. Indeed, the legal tradition had developed almost exclusively around the Babylonian Talmud. Anywhere in the Jewish world, if anyone heard the words Talmud or Gomorrah, he could safely assume that the Babylonian Talmud and the Babylonian Gomorrah were under discussion. Only the most accomplished rabbis were conversant with the Jerusalem Talmud. It came as no surprise that the younger rabbi was not so well versed in the Jerusalem Talmud. Indeed, it would have been a surprise if he were. It did explain the younger rabbi’s reverence for the older man. That was not misplaced; the younger man was fortunate to have such a teacher. Well, he was, too, even if he had only overheard their discussion.
He was overwhelmed with amazement as well as respect. In his impetuous youth, he had assumed that he had known all there was to know. So the Jerusalem Talmud commented on the problem with a sensitivity and insight that he could now appreciate. He knew that forty years ago in Krimsk he would not have understood such a discussion. Ironically, the codified law was as stringent as he had thought it was. As a youngster, he probably would have focused on the severity, without appreciating how soft, almost sensual, the discussion was that led to that final decision. No, as a youngster he had been interested only in his own dreams, not in those of some ancient rabbis. Now he identified with old Rabbi Yehoshua Ben-Levi in the city of Lod, who had in all good faith mistakenly surrendered the victim to his tragic fate. It seemed an act he himself was capable of—in some ways something he had been doing to himself throughout his life. The ancient rabbi’s dreams were also satisfying because he no longer had any of his own.
He began wondering whether the Krimsker Rebbe knew the Jerusalem Talmud. He probably did, since as a young man the rebbe was reputed to have been one of the more brilliant talmudists in Poland. His own father came to mind; his mother, too, amidst a wistful feeling of melancholy, but that was suddenly re
placed by the sense of horror that a mother had faced earlier on this Yom Kippur day when she had asked the rabbis if she could surrender a soul in Israel for her son.
“May I ask you something? How did the mother accept your decision?” he asked tentatively, betraying his embarrassment at a curiosity that seemed almost prurient under the circumstances, but which he found irresistible.
Peremptorily, the senior rabbi answered in stern disapproval, “One doesn’t discuss such matters in the presence of the parties concerned.”
“Yes, of course, I’m so sorry,” he stammered. He might have added, “I didn’t know,” but he was too busy thinking in startled awareness: I should have known. Rabbi Yehoshua Ben-Levi’s dream was her own very personal nightmare: she was shrieking because she had accepted the awesome decree of the Jerusalem Talmud. Yes, it was her hysterical screaming that had drowned out the barking of the Nazi dogs. That mother had been shrieking because her son was here. Mother and child were both standing behind him in the car. Perhaps immediately next to him; no, the shrieking had not been that close. But not far away, either. Both silent and hungry. He felt ashamed that he had no crumbs to spare for the boy. Had he fasted on Yom Kippur, he might have. Although it was irrational, he felt bad that he had not fasted; he wanted the rabbis and the mother to know that if he had any crumbs, he would give them to the boy.
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