The rebbe turned to his sexton and motioned him to right the table. Reb Yechezkal and the hasidim quickly turned the table to its more conventional position. The rebbe took Itzik’s hand and, stepping onto his chair on the eastern wall, led him onto the table.
“Let us pray together,” he said simply.
The rebbe began to jump, and Itzik jumped, too. The rebbe jumped in spasmodic, graceless, propelling leg thrusts that kicked his rigid body into the air from its squat stance. Itzik’s jump, however, in no way resembled a frog’s. With his mouth hanging open, his face radiated pure delight and his leaps were so fluid and graceful that he seemed almost to float in an upright position. The rebbe’s stocking feet pounded the table at irregular intervals; Itzik’s softly tapped a smooth, even rhythm. The two devotants were so out of phase that the rebbe dropped Itzik’s hand. After eight or nine jumps, the rebbe stopped. Itzik Dribble continued until the rebbe again took his arm and guided him to rest. He turned Itzik so they were facing one another. “Itzik, now you must pay attention,” the rebbe said. “Far away in the land of Israel, the Holy Land, lived a very rich and very religious man. The man knew all the Torah by heart. He had a son named Rabbi Chanina. When the man sensed that death was near, he called in his son, Rabbi Chanina, and told him to study Torah day and night, to do all the commandments, and to be a good friend to the poor. The father announced that he and the mother would die on the same day and that Rabbi Chanina would get up from sitting shivah on the eve of Pesach, Passover. He told his son that he should not mourn too much—and that he should go straight to the marketplace and buy the first item that he saw, no matter how expensive. If it was food, he was to prepare it for the Pesach seder. His father told Rabbi Chanina not to worry, for he would surely be rewarded for all his expense and effort.
“Everything happened just as the father said. The father and mother died on the very same day, and Rabbi Chanina arose from his mourning on the eve of Passover. And Rabbi Chanina did just what his father told him to do. He went straight to the marketplace, and an old man offered him a silver dish. Although the price was much too high, Rabbi Chanina quickly bought it. When he put the silver dish on the seder table it began to sparkle with great beauty. Rabbi Chanina opened it, and inside he found another silver dish. He opened this dish, too, and inside he found a frog jumping joyously about. He gave food and water to the happy frog. He treated the frog very, very well, and by the end of the Passover holiday the frog had grown so large that Rabbi Chanina had to build a special roomy cage for him. In the comfortable cage the frog grew and grew. After a few more weeks the cage was too small, and Rabbi Chanina built a special room for him. The frog’s appetite grew with him, and Rabbi Chanina gave him enormous amounts of food because he wanted to do just as his father commanded. The frog grew and grew, and it ate and ate. It ate Rabbi Chanina out of house and home; Rabbi Chanina and his wife sold everything to feed the frog, and finally they had nothing but the bare walls. And when there was nothing left to eat, the frog opened his mouth and began to talk. ‘Good Rabbi Chanina,’ it said. ‘Do not worry. You have been so very good and kind to me that you may ask me for whatever you want and your wish will be granted.’ Rabbi Chanina said, ‘The only thing I want is for you to teach me all the Torah.’ And the frog taught him all the Torah and the seventy languages of the world by writing a few special words upon scraps of paper that Rabbi Chanina then swallowed. By this method, Rabbi Chanina learned even the language of the animals and birds. Then the frog turned to Rabbi Chanina’s wife and said, ‘You have been so very kind to me, too, and I shall reward you, also, before I leave. The two of you must accompany me to the woods.’
“They went with him to the edge of the forest, and there the frog began to croak majestically in great loud cries. All manner of birds and beasts came running. He spoke to them and they swiftly departed, only to return moments later with the forest’s most wonderful treasures: diamonds, rubies, emeralds—and special medicinal roots and herbs. He taught the wife their use, and with them she could cure all diseases. As Rabbi Chanina and his wife were turning toward home with all their gifts, the frog said to them, ‘May the Holy One have mercy on you and reward you for the trouble you went to because of me without even asking me who I was. Now I shall tell you who I am. I am one of the sons Adam fathered during the one hundred and thirty years he was without Eve. God has given me the special power of assuming any identity I wish.’ Rabbi Chanina and his wife returned home and lived in great wealth and happiness. The king himself respected Rabbi Chanina and visited him often.”
The rebbe paused and then said, “Now, Itzik, say Amen.”
Itzik fervently said, “Amen!” and then asked, “Rebbe, where is the frog now?”
“Come,” the rebbe said as he led him down from the table. “Let us now pray as men, for we are all many things.”
The rebbe handed Itzik to Reb Beryl and said, “He is a very good boy. I am proud of him.”
Reb Beryl smiled with paternal pride, even though he knew the remark was more to the rebbe’s credit than to his son’s, but he was after all the father, and he loved what God had given him. He offered Itzik the candy, but the boy was still too excited even to notice. Reb Beryl led the boy back to their places. He, too, felt the warm flush of deep happiness. “Such a tzaddik,” he sighed aloud.
“From heaven,” Reb Yechezkal whispered to him, and Reb Beryl nodded his head.
“From the highest heaven,” he agreed.
His praise of the rebbe was interrupted by Reb Muni’s chanting the evening service.
“Bless the Lord who is blessed,” Reb Muni called out in a powerful chant.
“Blessed is the Lord who is eternally blessed,” sang out Reb Beryl and every other Jew. He even heard Itzik’s sweet, thin soprano in the resonating wave of affirmation, for at that moment every hasid there truly felt that blessed is the Lord who is eternally blessed.
Since there was no comfortable place to sit, the congregation stood through the evening prayer. It was a service of the heart that most of those present would recall in later years as the spiritual zenith of their lives: a moment of communal religious ecstasy. In future days they would find that their certainty about it increased, although they could not recall any specific details. It was impossible to explain to others. They could only smile sweetly and somewhat dumbly—not unlike Itzik Dribble—and say that to understand you had to have been there. Even to one another, they could not articulate what they had experienced; it was beyond words. When two or more would refer to “that maariv,” they would roll their shoulders slightly and lift their heads on thrusting necks as if they were mutely recalling some physical sense of exaltation they had once experienced.
When the daily evening service ended, however, and everyone lowered himself carefully onto the improvised mourning stools, they suffered a parallel descent of the soul. As they opened their books to Lamentations, they felt the poking, sloping (always in the wrong direction) boards inflicting their annual aches, and fought to maintain their precarious perches without tumbling onto the floor. They squinted in the half-darkness—half of the kerosene lamps had been extinguished to increase the sense of loss. They realized it was still very hot even though the sun had set. They looked at each other and envied one another’s legroom, more ample light, or wider part of the bench. The Jews of Jerusalem had been sent into exile—uprooted and discomforted in a strange land. In the synagogues the Jews discomfited themselves by sending their own small world into exile. It was as if the hand of God had smacked the beis midrash, and everything was upended but the Jews themselves ; their punishment was to sit without chairs, to read without light, to mourn a distant Temple’s destruction while mourning the loss of elbow room. And no one felt guilty at such petty thoughts; they were present every year. No one even realized at the time or even later that they were remarkably incongruous with the heights of ecstasy that they had reached moments before, because in all fairness they had fallen into dark, disheveled, wretchedly cr
owded discomfort. What was the distance from Jerusalem to Krimsk? In great Jerusalem the Temple burned, the land was desecrated, the Jew flung into exile as Rachel cried by the road near Bethlehem. In tiny Krimsk, the interior withered in dislocating spasms, for the Jew flung his benches, shoes, light, food, drink, into exile—and in Krimsk the rebbe cried.
Yes, the rebbe cried. The Krimsker Rebbe cried on Tisha B’Av, and suddenly every hasid forgot his own pain, no one felt inconvenienced. No one begrudged his neighbor any comfort. Everyone listened to the strange gulping sobs of their rebbe. No one had ever heard the Krimsker Rebbe cry. Never. Not on Tisha B’Av, not in the cemetery, not even when his son died, not in the closing moments of Yom Kippur. Never. Anguish, fear, and affection touched their hearts, for their rebbe was crying, and their rebbe was not a man of tears.
Yet no one knew what to do. The rebbe’s whole body convulsed with each sob. The hasidim instinctively wanted to comfort him. These were the cries of a man suffering intense pain, a man altogether inside himself with his suffering. Although they wanted to reach out and hold him, or at the very least touch him and tell him that he was not alone, they just sat dumbly. One just didn’t go over and touch a rebbe, much less cradle him. They feared he would not stop crying.
Reb Yechezkal bent toward the rebbe, paused, then returned to his place. And if he is mourning the Temple, what can I do to console him, the sexton thought. We are taught by the Talmud not to try and console a mourner when his dead lies before him, and if the Temple is burning before him, what can I do? Reb Yechezkal considered crying with his rebbe; after all, a rebbe’s sexton must accompany his rebbe everywhere. Reb Yechezkal realized, however, that he himself was not a man of tears—perhaps that was what once drew the rebbe to choose him as his sexton. The rebbe’s faithful staff—so he liked to term himself—had not served the rebbe for five years. He had thought that the rebbe had no need for a faithful staff because he was sitting in a room. When the rebbetzin had sent him on missions “at the rebbe’s request,” Reb Yechezkal had always doubted if the rebbe knew anything about it. Except for those occasions, he had faithfully guarded the entrance. He realized now that the rebbe, indeed, had been on distant journeys, had learned to travel alone, and had learned to cry. Left so far behind, what could the sexton do? True service was selfless; the once-faithful staff must be a quiet stick in the corner. Reb Yechezkal was the Krimsker’s sexton once again—only the Krimsker no longer needed a sexton. God be thanked, he thought softly, and had he felt a warm tear in his eye, Reb Yechezkal would have known that it was for himself and not for the Temple. He saw the hasidim looking at him for guidance. He did what the day called for; he bent over, placed his arms on his knees, rocked slowly, and mourned—the way the Krimsker Rebbe used to.
The hasidim began to rock slowly, almost cautiously, to and fro.
Itzik finished the last sweet suck of candy and swallowed. He had been enjoying the gentle rocking motion on all sides. It was like cuddling in the thick quilt, with warmth all around him. Now that the candy had dissolved, however, he heard the Krimsker Rebbe’s anguished sobs, and he leaped to his feet with a deep-throated cry that startled everyone. He tripped across the low, swaying congregation until he reached the rebbe, the lowest of them all. Itzik bent over and tapped him on his shoulder.
When the rebbe looked up, Itzik Dribble cried, “What happened to the frog?”
The rebbe looked at him in bewilderment and asked, “What frog?”
“The big talking one. Now I’ll never get to see him.”
Itzik collapsed onto the table next to the rebbe and started sobbing.
The rebbe lifted the boy’s head and hushed him.
“Nothing happened to the frog, Itzik.”
Itzik looked at the rebbe with the deep distrust of someone who has been fooled too often. “Then why are you crying?”
“I am crying because of what happened to the frog’s world.”
“You mean his forest with the jewels?”
“Yes, that, too. When the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed on this day, the Ninth of Av, the world changed. The sky the frog looked up into was no longer so pure as it once was. The rain that fell upon his pond shriveled. The dew that cooled the forest at night was no longer a blessing. The fruits of his forest lost their fullness and taste. Honey was not as sweet as it once was. Each day has a curse, and the curse of the following day is greater. And that’s very sad for everyone in the world, including the frog.”
“Is the frog crying now?”
The rebbe sat and thought. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Then why are you?” Itzik asked, confused.
“The frog prays by jumping, and he can always jump or croak or eat a bug in praise of God, but men have a problem with prayer since the Destruction. From the moment the Temple was destroyed, the gates of prayer closed—but the gates of tears remained open. And I shall tell you a secret, Itzik, today’s tears are special. We know that the Messiah will be born on Tisha B’Av. A woman shrieks and cries in giving birth to the child; thus may our tears be the travail hastening the coming of the Messiah. This room is pregnant with him, and through our tears we must deliver him on the birthstool of our hearts.”
Several of the hasidim started to cry softly. Itzik turned to stare into the semidarkness toward the source of the sounds.
“I know all about the Messiah,” the boy said blankly.
“You do?” the rebbe asked curiously.
“The Messiah’s an old joke,” he said triumphantly. “The last time he came they had me licking cow shit and it didn’t taste at all like clotted cream.”
Itzik Dribble let burst a peal of laughter, climbed to his feet, and went back to his father with a half-smile hanging on his half-open mouth.
The Krimsker Rebbe turned to Reb Yechezkal and said, “Lamentations.”
Reb Yechezkal looked toward Reb Muni, but Reb Muni had already begun the smooth, low dirge:How the city sits alone,
she that was once so full of people
has become like a widow ...
She weeps late in the night,
and her tears are on her cheeks.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE KRIMSKER REBBE HAD RETURNED TO HIS STUDY enervated and depressed. He wandered over to a corner and quietly settled onto a small carpet in front of the leather couch. Using the couch for a backrest, he sat cross-legged on the floor and was reaching toward a book on a nearby stool when a low voice called to him, “Rebbe, I must talk to you.”
The rebbe, assuming it to be a voice from the Other Side, didn’t bother to look up.
“Rebbe, I must talk to you,” the voice repeated, but the rebbe dared not look up, for he knew very well that Lilith of a thousand desires engaged him in many guises, only later to reveal herself in her sinfully sensuous splendor. He drew the book toward the light and stared at its title. He was pleased to see that he had picked up the talmudic tractate on divorce, for it contained the most famous passages on the destruction of the Temple. These were among the few talmudic passages one was permitted to study on Tisha B’Av. Strengthened by his reaching for the Torah, he casually opened the volume. To his satisfaction, the thick folio pages fell open to precisely the permitted material.
“Rebbe, I know it’s late.” The voice pleaded for an audience. The rebbe, determined not to listen, closed his eyes tightly to avoid looking in the direction of the bedeviling voice. He wanted to scream—“You are Satan! You are the Evil Inclination! You are the Angel of Death!”—but he knew the folly of such an outburst; once Lilith was addressed, even in furious anger or in hateful condemnation, the dialogue had begun, her entangling web started with such fragile thread. On this day, when the world withered, he hoped to avoid such a web. He glanced down toward the bottom of the page and began reading:Rav Yehudah and Rav said, why is it written “And they oppressed a man and his house, a man and his inheritance?” It happened once that a carpenter’s apprentice set his eyes on his master’s wife. The master was in need
of money and the apprentice said, “I’ll loan you the money, if you send your wife to me for three days.” The master agreed and the apprentice made the loan. Three days later, the master appeared and asked, “Where’s my wife?” The apprentice replied, “I let her go immediately, but I heard that some of the young rowdies sexually abused her on her way home.” The master said, “What shall I do?” The apprentice said, “If you’ll listen to me, you’ll divorce her.” “But her divorce payment is very great.” “I’ll loan you the money for her divorce payment,” the apprentice suggested. So the master divorced his wife and no sooner had he done so, than the apprentice married her. When the date fell due for repayment and the master defaulted, the apprentice said, “Come and work for me to pay off your debt.” The apprentice and the woman sat, ate, drank and carried on while the master stood and served them, refilling their cups as his tears flowed from his eyes and fell into their cups. And it was at that moment that the awful decree of the Temple’s Destruction was sealed. And there were those who said the Destruction was sealed because there were two wicks in one lamp.
The Krimsker Rebbe shuddered and closed the book. He feared that Lilith controlled the pages. It was like Lilith to offer him an escape into purity only to entrap him in sensuality. Although the Torah was not subject to impurity, the Krimsker Rebbe knew that he himself was; his seductive adversary knew him all too well. And as he sat in anxious consternation, the voice said, “Rebbe, I know it is late, but my horse was trying to tell me something today on the road to Krimsk, and I think it’s something very important.” In all the nights Lilith had disported in his study, never had there been any animals present; much less talking horses. The Krimsker Rebbe realized that he was not alone in the room. He looked up to see Boruch Levi sitting cross-legged in the shadows across from him.
“How did you get in here?” the rebbe asked.
“I came in through the door right after you did. It was open,” Boruch Levi answered.
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