by Eric Flint
So began an argument that would relieve the boredom of many long hours in the days to come. On one side were the pietist innovations of the Kaballah, while on the other was the traditional Jewish emphasis on obeying the commandments.
To Yossie, who had grown up since the time that kabalist thought had swept through the urban centers of Jewish Europe, the debate was an eye opener. For him, the Kaballos Shabbos psalms and the hymn welcoming the Sabbath bride were simply the way the Sabbath evening service had always begun, not a statement of a new radical theology.
The next morning, Yitzach's brother and nephews arrived with a disturbing story that drove all thought of theological controversy aside.
"We were on our way home last night after dinner," his nephew Ari said, while they waited for the rest of their small congregation to arrive. "As we passed the crossroads tavern, a farmer came out and called out to us. He sounded like he'd had too much to drink. 'Hey Jews,' he said, 'have you heard the news from Magdeburg? The siege is over. They set fire to the town.' He said he'd heard the story from a post rider."
To the travelers this was an alarming rumor, although the fact that it had come from a drunkard added an element of doubt. They had been relying on the siege to keep the armies tied up in the north, out of their proposed path. It was the Sabbath, though, so until sunset, their first order of business was prayer and study. As soon as they had ten assembled, they began the Sabbath morning service.
Their makeshift synagogue centered on the table where they had eaten dinner the night before. Now, it was covered with a clean cloth to serve as the reading table. The case holding Yankel's Torah scroll was set on end on a sideboard against the eastern wall, marking the direction they were to face while praying.
For an hour, they read the Psalms, blessings and prayers of the morning service. They wore their fringed prayer shawls as hoods over their heads as they swayed with the rhythm of prayer. Yitzach's voice was very good. As he had the evening before, he made room in the service for the younger men to help lead parts of the service.
The Torah portion was Parshas Bechukosai, the end of the book of Leviticus. There had not been a full Sabbath service in Kissingen for many months, and the blessings and curses of chapter twenty-six had not been chanted in Kissingen for many years.
As Yossie listened to Yankel chant the ancient curses that were promised if Israel failed to obey the commandments, he wondered about Magdeburg. What must that town have done to bring on the horrors that were rumored to have come? He'd been very young when Wallenstein's army had come through the lower Main valley. The army had ensured the restoration of the Jewish community of Frankfurt, but they had created hardship for the entire region. His parents had died that winter, and his only memories from that time were of overwhelming loss and hunger.
Sunday was another day of hard work for everyone. Yitzach and his family were busy at work packing their own belongings for the trip. Moische and Yitzach had purchased quite a bit of wine with their earnings from the market, and all of the bottles needed to be very carefully packed into baskets with straw.
While the others packed, Yossie was put back to work maintaining the fires to smoke and dry their newly made sausages. When he found that they were low on firewood, he was surprised that Yitzach simply handed him a wood collecting basket and pointed him up the hill at the woodlands above.
"But Reb Yitzach," he asked, "is it safe working in public on the Christian Sabbath?" He had never before been outside of the walled Jewish quarter of a town on a Sunday.
"Close to home, yes," Yitzach answered. "My family has lived in this house since the Jews were expelled from Kissingen long before my time. Since I am a cottager here, so long as I pay my Shutzgeld, I have the right to gather wood up there. My neighbors all know you are with me, so go, before the fires burn too low. But do not cut wood, my rights extend only to dead wood that is on the ground or that you can break from trees with your hands."
So, on a beautiful May Sunday, Yossie found himself up in the hills to the northwest of Yitzach's house gathering firewood. The view to the east out over Kissingen was quite beautiful, and even the sound was beautiful. He could hear the faint sounds of Christian hymns from the nearest village church, and later, the sounds of church bells from the big church in Kissingen itself. It seemed impossible that the such a day could be contained in the same world that contained the horrors that were rumored to have occurred in Magdeburg.
Yossie walked the woods with his eyes on the ground and tree trunks for the wood that was needed. Only when he stopped to adjust the shoulder straps of the wood basket did he take the time to admire the view. There was no smoke from the salt works because it was Sunday so the view to the east was clearer than it had been all week. The crags of old fortifications on the hilltops east of Kissingen held his gaze. He guessed that some of those ruins dated back to before the first Crusade, back to the time when Jewish life in German lands had been as safe and peaceful as the scene before him.
It was perhaps the third time he stopped that he saw a very strange thing. The eastern sky filled with light, so bright that the whole world seemed dark in its aftermath. Fortunately the flash was too brief to injure his eyes, but it left an afterimage that Yossie could study. A half circle of purple showed against his eyelids every time he blinked during the next minute or so, as if he had stared for too long at sun as it rose over the eastern horizon. Whatever it was, it had been larger looking than the sun. Where the sun wasn't even the width of one finger at arm's length, the half circle Yossie saw after every blink was as wide as three fingers side by side.
By the time Yossie had carried his load of sticks down to the cluster of houses where Yitzach lived, what he had seen seemed unimportant. Once the afterimage had faded from his vision, the day went on as before, just as beautiful and with just as much work remaining to be done. The hills still rose above the valley of the Fränkische Saale, and the old ruins were unchanged.
Monday morning, Yitzach's nephew Ari arrived in time for morning prayers, along with his young wife Rivke. Yitzach's wagon and the two carts were already loaded, so all that remained to be done after breakfast was to give Ari the big iron key to the house and hitch up the horses.
"Before you go," Ari said, "you need to hear what I heard this morning. Rivke and I stopped by the town gate on our way over and asked if there was news. There is, and it might matter to you. Magdeburg has indeed fallen, that was not just drunken babble. Last Tuesday, General Tilly's troops set fire to the town."
"Blessed be the righteous judge," Yakov said.
"Amen," Yossie said, a bit surprised.
Ari continued. "With the town burning, the armies will have to move if they are to eat. Be careful what road you take, Uncle Yitz."
"We will," Yitzach said.
"Don't go to Meningen if there is even a rumor that the armies are turning south," Ari said. "Go via Prague instead of Leipzig."
As they set off on the road north along the Fränkische Saale, Yossie continued to mull over the news of the sack of Magdeburg.
"Rav Yakov," he asked, as he and the old rabbi walked alongside their horse, "Why did you say 'Blessed be the righteous judge' about Magdeburg?"
"Because, Yossie, that is what you should say when you hear that someone has died."
"But we don't know anyone who died."
"If they ended the siege by burning the town, tens, hundreds, perhaps thousands died," the old rabbi said, in a sad voice. "You know they are dead, burned to nothing but smoke, and every one of them a divine self portrait, made in His own image, whether they are Lutheran or Catholic or Jewish."
Yossie listened to the quiet clop of the old horse's hooves on the earth and grass of the roadway while he thought. There was little reason for a Jew to sympathize with Lutherans, particularly in Saxony. The Lutherans there had been particularly harsh ever since Luther had penned his diatribe against the Jews. All of that had been generations ago, but it was still fresh in the memory of the Jewish comm
unity. Even so, Yossie could not see the burning of Magdeburg as just retribution for the evil that Martin Luther had done.
The fact that the sack had occurred on the thirty-third day of the Omer only added to his confusion. By tradition, that day was a day of release from mourning for the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. What good purpose could be served by mass murder on that date? Yossie had listened to the chanting of the Book of Lamentations every summer on the ninth of the month of Av. With his childhood memories of the hardships of the war, he could easily connect the text of Lamentations to the experience of the doomed at Magdeburg.
Twenty-fifth of Iyyar, 5391 (May 27, 1631)
They heard more news of Magdeburg Tuesday morning as they got ready to leave Neustadt. Yitzach knew the innkeeper there, and he came out to say goodbye to them while they were hitching up the horses.
"Isaac," he said. "I will miss doing business with you."
"You will see plenty of my nephew Leow," Yitzach said, as he checked the attachment of the harnesses to the whiffletree of his wagon. "I put my house and business in his hands. He will come to the Neustadt cattle market as often as I did. Call him Ari and he will know that I trust you."
"Is Ari his secret Jew name?" the innkeeper asked.
"Not a secret," Yitzach said, with a chuckle. "But it means the same as Leow in the language of Israel. Come, we must be off."
"Before you go," the innkeeper said. "Did you hear about Magdeburg?"
"Terrible," Yitzach said. "Blessed be the righteous judge, but I cannot see any justice in the news I have heard."
The innkeeper shook his head sadly. "Indeed. But had you heard that General Pappenheim has pulled his troops south, and that General Tilly's army is spreading south over Saxony to feed itself. Be careful which way you go on the way east!"
"And I hope the armies stay far from this valley," Yitzach said, in parting. "May he who blessed Abraham, Isaac and Jacob bless all those who care for the wayfarers of the world."
Despite the news, none of the travelers suggested turning back. They had little choice but to continue north out of Neustadt. It was possible that Yitzach might have been able to resume his old place in Kissingen, but the others had no home to return to. None of the Jewish communities they knew of to the south or west were prosperous enough to provide more than temporary refuge. Yossie knew that if he and his sister were to return to Hanau, they would be welcome only until they had spent the last of their silver. They were better off as homeless peddlers, but only so long as they could stay away from the war.
Two miles north out of Neustadt, there was a fork in the road. To the north was the road they had intended to follow, the road to Meiningen, Suhl, Erfurt, Weimar and Leipzig. This was the road Moische had been on before, but with the news from the north, it no longer seemed a prudent path.
"We should turn east here," Yitzach said, after the two carts had pulled up to his wagon at the fork.
"Reb Yitzach," Moische said. "I have never been that way."
"Which is safer?" Basya asked. "Would you rather follow a familiar road toward armies locked in battle or a new road that may miss them?"
"It is not entirely a new road," Yitzach said. "I was as far as Hildburghausen once. The road follows the Saale to Königshofen then goes overland. Hildburghausen is a town of tailors and there is one last Jew there."
"How far?" Yossie asked.
"A day's ride on a good horse," Yitzach answered. "At the rate we are going, stopping at every village to buy and sell, we will be there by the Sabbath."
Basya gave a nervous chuckle.
"What's the joke?" Moische asked.
"It will be Shabbos Parshas Bemidbar. The Torah portion begins 'In the wilderness,' and that is where we will be going once we leave the last Jewish house in the land."
Yitzach chuckled. "We aren't already in the wilderness? In any case, we won't have a minyan there unless there is a miracle. You'll have to wait a year to hear the start of the Book of Numbers chanted properly. Rav Yankel, what do you think?"
The old rabbi had listened without comment up to that point. Now he sighed. "God seems to have offered us little choice in this matter. Let us visit this town of tailors."
"Reb Yitzach," Moische asked, after they started on the road east. "What should we buy, what should we sell?"
For the next few miles, that topic consumed the men while they left the women to lead the horses. Yitzach explained that the lands they were passing into were croplands, but that after they reached Hildburghausen, the land would change. The Thüringerwald began there, a region like the Spessart where the economy was dominated by woodsmen, charcoal burners, miners and smiths.
"There is another thing," Yitzach said. "We will leave Catholic Franconia when the hills of the Thüringerwald come in view. You'll be able to sell those Protestant books of yours again."
With each little farm village they visited, Yossie noticed something else. Despite their Jew badges, despite the clear proclamation of status in the women's blue striped scarves and the rectangular combs that supported them, more and more of the people they met did not recognize them as Jews.
They were just strangers to many of the farmers, just refugees like so many others who the war had uprooted. Their Judische Deutsch accents no longer marked them as Jews, but only as being from far away.
Yossie found that there was an unexpected benefit of traveling with Yitzach and his family, the food. Moische's wife Frumah was not a very good cook, so Yossie's sister Basya had had done most of the cooking on the way to Kissingen. She was a competent camp cook, but she was not very creative. Yitzach's wife Chava had quickly taken charge as they traveled onward, and the result was rewarding.
That night, for example, as they camped in a fallow field with the permission of the local village, Chava made bread. She had mixed up a batch of dough in the morning, so that it was ready for baking by nightfall. Of course, they had no access to a kosher oven, but Chava twisted the dough around green willow twigs so they could toast individual servings of bread over their fire.
While the women bustled about their campsite making dinner, the men took care of the horses and then took out their prayer books for the afternoon and evening prayers. Without the minyan of ten men required for the full service, each prayed at his own pace. To keep the commandment to love the Lord with all their strength as well as with all their heart and all their spirit, they swayed to the rhythm of their words.
All of the men prayed aloud, mostly in an undertone, but whenever one paused in his prayer and heard the other say one of the prescribed blessings, he would respond with an amen. So it was that Yossie, who finished his prayers last, was answered with two loud amens as he counted the forty-first day of the Omer.
After dinner, they sat around the embers of their small fire and talked before going to sleep.
"I keep hoping for more news of Magdeburg," Moische said, "but in these little farming villages, it seems that we are telling people the news as often as we are hearing anything new."
"At least there is no news of troops coming our way," Basya said.
Yossie wasn't sure that the lack of news was reassuring. They were traveling on a minor road through villages that seemed out of touch with the larger world. It seemed quite possible that an army could travel faster than rumors of its presence through such a countryside.
"We should hear news tomorrow," Yitzach said. "Either in the town of Königshofen or at the crossroads village where we cross the high road from Meiningen to Bamberg."
"Reb Yitzach, what should we buy and sell tomorrow?" Moische asked. For the next few minutes, the two of them discussed business. They concluded that disposal of the last of their wrought iron from the Spessart should be a priority, before they got too close to the forges of the Thüringerwald. They had been buying scrap iron since they left Kissingen for the same reason.
"What about the paper we bought at Lohr?" Yossie asked. "And when do we start to sell the wine we bought?"
"I think there is a paper mill east of the Thüringerwald," Moische said, "So we should try to sell the rest of the paper on this side of the hills. The wine we hold until we are over the hills. It was the common wine of farmers' tables around Kissingen, here it is still common in inns and taverns. On the other side of the Thüringerwald, this wine will be reserved for the tables of the highborn."
"But Reb Moische, what if our worst fears come true?" Basya asked. "What if the armies do come south?"
"We can hope they come to go west into the lands we have left," Moische said. "Mainz, Frankfurt, Würzburg, those are tempting targets."
"Blessed be he who protects the innocent," Yitzach said. "Wherever the armies go, they strip the land. Perhaps, to be safe, we should buy food, grain and hard cheese. If the armies go elsewhere, we'll lose little. If they come close, we'll make a profit, and if they come too close, it may save our lives."
"That suggests that we should buy quickly, before everyone hears the news," Moische said. "And it suggests that we should stop telling what news we know. When they hear, people will start hoarding, just in case the armies come here."
"A good idea, Reb Moische, but we can likely make the profit safe," Yitzach said. "There won't be many farms in the Thüringerwald, so if we find that the armies are going west, we can sell in the woods to miners and woodsmen. On the other hand, if we find that luck is against us, we should keep as much food as we can as we move east."
"Listening to you men makes me shiver," Basya said. "You make it sound like we are standing in front of a drunkard with a pistol, not knowing whether the ball will go to the left or right."
Yankel chuckled sadly. "Basya, that's exactly where we stand. Yitzach has just given us advice that is, I think, as precious as the advice Yosef gave to Pharaoh when he interpreted the dream of seven years of plenty followed by seven years of lean." The old Rabbi paused. "There is one thing, though. It would be wrong to let a man sell us his grain without letting him know the news. You must tell a man the value of his wares if he offers too low a price."
