Burning Twilight (11 page)

Kassy nodded, but Rabbi Loew was more philosophical: “I doubt that we will ever know the full answer. The human heart is capable of atrocities that lie well beyond our comprehension. Even modern science has its limits. Hasn’t the great Copernicus himself admitted that his theories do not explain everything? ‘Teach thy tongue to say I do not know, and thou shalt progress,’ as Rambam put it.”

Kassy’s brow furrowed as she asked for further explanation. So I told her that unlike the monolithic and intolerant textual practices of the Church hierarchy, the Talmud teaches us that there are many ways of interpreting a text, even a sacred one. We will never agree on the full meaning of a difficult passage of Scripture, since “the Torah has seventy faces,” as Rabbi Akiva taught, which does not mean that there are literally seventy ways of interpreting those passages, but rather that there are as many interpretations as there are Jews.

This discussion continued until we returned to Jew Street, where a sizable welcoming committee had turned out to greet us. The Jews of Poznan had heard about our heroic efforts to clear an innocent woman’s name and bring the true murderer of one of their own, the honorable Reb Schildsberg, to justice. And I became conscious of a number of matronly women appraising me with their hungry eyes and nodding with approval.

Kassy said, “I’m going back to my room to continue my examination of these powders. Want to come and watch?”

A group of chattering women blocked my path and besieged me with promises of lucrative love matches with their daughters.

Kassy was still waiting for my answer, and the way she stood there, so headstrong and defiant, her emerald green eyes fixed on me, transformed her into the living embodiment of the biblical heroine whom we celebrate on this day, the righteous foreign woman who leaves her pagan ways behind and braves all manner of hardships to join the man whom God alone has chosen for her.

“You do me much honor, dear ladies, for which I am grateful,” I told the excited group of women. “But for the moment, I am committed solely to the pursuit of mystical exploration.”

And even as I spoke those words, a half-forgotten passage from the Zohar flashed through my mind, a profoundly mystical passage plumbing the depths of our souls and the riddle of our frailties, which suggests that our feelings shape our perception of the world around us, and that all human sensory experience is relative. And in that moment I knew that it was true.

Because I offered Kassy my arm, and we marched off together, neither one leading the other, into the gray and foggy night. And as we drew near her street, which reeked from one end to the other of the foul odor of the tanneries, I swear that it smelled like the finest perfume.

פוס

(The End)

GLOSSARY

Four Lands:
Greater Poland, Little Poland, Red Russia, and Wolynia

ganef:
Thief

Gehenem:
Hell

keynehore:
No evil eye

Maharal:
Moreynu ha-Rav [Our Teacher and Master] Yehudah Loew (ca. 1525-1609), famous for the Golem legend surrounding him

Maharil:
Moreynu ha-Rav Jacob ha-Levi (ca. 1360-1427), foremost Talmudist of his generation

malekhamoves:
Angel of Death

mayrev:
Evening prayer services

Midrash:
Lit. “interpretation”; extensive body of exegesis and commentary on biblical sources

minkhe:
Afternoon prayer services

minyen:
Group of ten men required for a full community service

Mishnah:
Book of post-biblical oral law written down in the second century C.E.

Omer:
The forty-nine days from Pesach to Shvues

pan:
(Polish) lord

paskudnyak:
(Slavic) scoundrel

poyerisher kop:
Peasant head

pripetshik:
Stove, hearth

Rambam:
Acronym for Rabbi Moyshe (Moses) Ben Maimon (1135-1204), known for his rationalist approach to Scripture

shul:
Synagogue

Shvues:
Holiday that occurs seven weeks after Passover, celebrating the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai

Zohar:
One of the major works of Jewish mysticism, written and compiled by Moses de Leon (Spain, late thirteenth century), and first published in Mantua (1558-60) and Cremona (1559-60)

Read on for more from Kenneth Wishnia.

The Fifth Servant

CHAPTER 1

A
distant cry woke me.

I sat up and looked out the attic window over the sloping rooftops on the north side of Broad Street, which the German-speaking Jews called the Breitgasse. It was too early to see the horizon. The city and sky were an inseparable mass of darkness, and the scream’s dying echoes evaporated into the air, like the breath I could see coming out of my mouth.

I was in bed with two strange men—the
mikveh
attendant and the street cleaner—and the room was damn near freezing. It was spring by the calendar, but it was still winter at heart, and I could feel in my bones that it was going to rain, like it did every year on the Christian holiday of Good Friday. I’d have bet five gold pieces on it, but there weren’t any takers, and I didn’t have five gold pieces. If you turned out my pockets, all you’d get for your troubles would be a few lonely coppers and some mighty fine lint imported all the way from the Kingdom of Poland.

But something had jarred me awake. Like it says in the
Megillas Esther
, the king found no rest, so I listened intently, the fog of sleep still swirling around in my head.

Muffled and ghostly, a distant cry floated over the narrow streets of the Jewish Town:

“Gertaaaaaah—!”

Goose bumps rose on my arms, as if the spirit of God had blown right past me and withdrawn from the room. If a Christian child was missing from its bed we were sure to be accused, and all of a sudden I was reduced to being just another Jew in a city that tolerated us, surrounded by an empire full of people who hated us.

Did I come all the way from the quiet town of Slonim just to get butchered by a bunch of latter-day Crusaders? And if the Jews got scattered, or worse, I might never see my wife Reyzl again.

Acosta’s shadow filled the doorway. “Hey, newcomer,
shlof gikher, me darf di betgevant
.” Sleep faster, I need the sheets, said the night watchman, his rough-edged Yiddish softened by the rolling
R
’s and open vowels of his Sephardic accent.

“Did you hear that shouting?” I asked, planting my feet on the cold floor. “Any trouble out there?”

“You just stick to your morning rounds and let the watchmen handle it, all right?”

My knees cracked as I stood up and groped around in the darkness for the pitcher and basin.

Seven people crammed into two beds. Three men in one, a family of peasants in the other, part of the yearly crush of country folk visiting the imperial city for the week from Shabbes Hagodl to Pesach. The country folk had washed their bodies for the Great Sabbath the week before, but their clothes still had the overripe tang of a barnful of animals.

The night watchman took it all in and said, “What, there wasn’t room for the goat?”

I had to cover my mouth to keep from laughing. It wasn’t good to joke around until I chased away the evil spirits that had settled on my hands during the night, and said the first prayers of the new day. Fortunately, the rabbi in Slonim had taught me how to get rid of the invisible demons by washing them off my hands in a basin of standing water.

Every year on Shabbes Hagodl, we listen to the Lord’s words to His servant Malakhi: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the Prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.” Then we watch and wait for a mysterious stranger who appears around this time of year and asks to be seated at the Seder. And woe to the family that turns the stranger away from their door! Because he just might be the herald of the Messiah himself.

Such is the faith that has guided us through so many narrow scrapes. When the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, we rebuilt the temple out of words and called it the Talmud—a temple of ideas that we can carry around with us wherever we go.

And so we outlasted the Roman Empire, and we’ll outlast this empire, too.

The watchman pulled off his boots, grabbed his share of the blanket, and was snoring by the time I faced the eastern wall and said my morning
Sh’ma
. I paid special attention to the part about teaching your children the word of God in order to prolong your days and the days of your children.

Halfway down the crooked stairs to the kitchen, I could hear Perl the rabbi’s wife issuing orders to the servants to scour the house for
khumets
, the last traces of leavened bread. So there were no oats or porridge or kasha to keep my stomach from growling, only a mugful of chicken broth and some stringy dried prunes. Hanneh the cook shouldn’t waste a piece of good meat on the new assistant shammes.

I warmed my fingers on the tin mug, while pots clattered and doors slammed all around me. Despite the noise, I overheard Avrom Khayim the old shammes telling the cook, “What do we need a fifth
shulklaper
for? Like a wagon needs a fifth wheel.”

But—wonder of wonders—Hanneh actually stood up for me and told the old man that the great Rabbi Judah Loew knew what he was doing. She had heard that the new man from Poland was a scholar and a scribe who had only been in Prague a few days, without a right of residency, when the great Rabbi Loew had seen a spark of promise in him and made him the
unter
-shammes at the Klaus Shul, the smallest of the four shuls that served the ghetto’s faithful.

Maybe Hanneh was thinking of her own husband, dead these many years, because she ended up stirring the ladle around the big pot and giving me a boiled chicken neck. I thanked her for this, one of the first signs of kindness anyone in this strange new place had shown me.

I sucked the bones dry, then went to the mirror to clean the
shmaltz
off my beard, and noticed with some resignation a few prematurely gray hairs curling around my temples. But I thought of the disembodied screams that had roused me from my bed, and suddenly a few gray hairs didn’t seem like such a bad thing.

I found the master putting on his short
tallis.

“What should we do, Rabbi? Should we prepare for an assault?”

“Just attend to your duties, Benyamin Ben-Akiva,” he answered. “God will show us the way in due time.”

So I grabbed the big wooden club and went to chase the spirits out of the shul.

T
he Klaus Shul stood in the elbow of a disreputable side street between the Embankment Street and the cemetery. I listened for the sound of spirits rustling about, then I raised the club and pounded three times on the narrow double doors and told the spirits worshipping inside to return to their eternal rest. I dug out the big iron keys, which jingled coldly in my fingers, found the right one, and opened the shul for
shakhres
services.

I traded my thick wool hat for a linen yarmulke, and stood on the platform in the empty shul and chanted a Psalm that was supposed to keep the restless spirits at bay. The melody wavered in the chilly air. I never claimed to be a cantor.

Back outside, I listened to the silence and prayed that it wouldn’t be shattered by the sound of boots and breaking glass. Then I doubled back and headed east along the Schwarzengasse to the far-flung Jewish houses outside the ghetto on Geist and Würfel Streets in the Christian part of Prague.

When the limits of the ghetto were established after the Papal decree of 1555, several Jewish households fell outside the line of demarcation, including what was left of the original Old Shul, and the rebellious Bohemians were content to ignore the shrill voices demanding that every single Jew in the city be relocated within the gates. But none of the Jews were more than a minute’s dash from the main gate, just in case they had to retreat inside the ghetto to seek shelter from the gathering storm.

Maybe it was fine for the Jews of Prague, but I wasn’t used to being cooped up like this, behind a wall.

The watchmen were still changing shifts. The night men looked beaten and tired, but their tightly drawn faces betrayed their agitation. And yet somehow I was still hoping to finish up early and go see Reyzl before she got too busy helping her family prepare for Pesach, which fell on Shabbes eve this year, when all work had to stop a half-hour before sunset.