“And are there children, too, who have reached the River Sambatyon?” asked Raphael. “Didn’t I tell you,” I replied, “the story about the rabbi, author of The Light of Life, who had found one of the Sons of Moses on Sabbath eve at dark and put him in his pocket and forgot him there? On the Sabbath night he went into the synagogue to pray, and he heard a voice coming from his pocket and giving the response, ‘Amen, blessed be His Great Name.’” “That was not what I asked,” said Raphael, “I asked if there is a child who got there.” “Wait a moment, Raphael, and let me remember,” said I. “You’re always saying: Wait and let me remember,” said Raphael. “First,” I replied, “it is not proper to reply at once, because a man should first arrange his thoughts, so that they may be pleasant to his listeners. And second, it is natural for a man to forget, for exile weakens the power of memory. Now, my dear, I have remembered. There was one child in Jerusalem who reached the River Sambatyon and came back. As for how he reached there and what made him return, listen and I will tell you.
“The child’s father had shoes made for his wedding day. The bridegroom asked the shoemaker if his shoes would last a long time and would not tear quickly. ‘You can cross the River Sambatyon in them,’ said the shoemaker. And the young man took these things to heart.
“After the wedding, the bridegroom told the bride what the shoemaker had said. ‘I can see,’ said she, ‘that you want to go to the Ten Tribes, and I know that you will go there, for this shoemaker is one of the Thirty-six Saints, and if he has said a thing it will not prove wrong.’ ‘When you bear a male child,’ said he, ‘call him Hanoch, after this Reb Hanoch the shoemaker, and when you are privileged to see the time come for him to put on the tefillin, have the tefillin prepared for him and send him out on the road, and the Holy One, blessed be He, in His mercy, will see that he reaches me.’ So the bridegroom rose from his bed, took his tallit and tefillin, kissed the mezuza on the doorpost, and set off on his journey. He walked and walked until he reached the River Sambatyon. When he saw the Sambatyon casting up stones to the heart of the heavens, a great terror fell upon him and he said, ‘How shall I cross this awesome river?’ But his feet were lifted up of themselves and he crossed the river safely, and he found himself alongside the Sons of Moses.
“When the Sons of Moses saw this, they realized that he was a great saint, since he had been granted permission to reach their land, which no other man had been privileged to do, except Rabbi Meir, the author of the Akdamut, and the author of The Light of Life, and one or two other saints. They gathered around him and found him full of learning and piety; so they welcomed him and made a feast in his honor. During the feast he analyzed for them a passage from the Torah, and they recognized that his teaching was cogent, so they established a great academy for him, where he taught the Torah and did not interrupt his teaching except for prayer.
“Once, when he knelt during the thanksgiving prayer, his shoestring broke. After the prayer he remembered this, and, remembering this, remembered all that had happened to him, and that it was already thirteen years and more since he had left his wife, and if his wife had borne a son the time had come for him to fulfill the commandments. But for fear of neglecting the Torah he banished these thoughts from his heart and returned to his teaching.
“When the first day of the New Year Festival arrived, and he went out to the river to recite the Tashlich prayer, he saw a Jewish child standing on the other side. ‘Are you my son Hanoch?’ he asked him. ‘Father,’ the child replied, ‘I am your son Hanoch, and I have done as you commanded Mother.’ Immediately the father pulled off his shoes and threw them to his child, so that he should put them on and cross the river. But the father’s hands were weary from study, and the child’s hands were too small, so the shoes fell into the river and did not reach the child. The child could not reach his father, and the father could not reach the child, because his shoes were lost. So they stood, one on this side of the river and one on that. ‘How can I help you, my son?’ said the father. ‘It is a decree of the Holy One, blessed be He. Go back to Jerusalem and study the Torah, and when the time is ripe for the coming of the Messiah, I shall return to you with all our brethren, the Sons of Moses and the Ten Tribes.’ So the child returned to his mother in Jerusalem, studied much Torah, and became a Master of the Law in Israel.”
Chapter eight and fifty. About the Unending Rains
In the past, when I used to finish the treatment of a subject of the Gemara I would go over it again, but I cannot do so today, because I have cut down my stay in the Beit Midrash and extended my walks in the fields and the forest. If it is a fine day I bathe in the river. It is natural for water to stimulate the soul and restore the body to its youth, especially when you bathe in a river in which you bathed when you were little. The water in which I bathed when I was little has already gone down to the Great Sea and been swallowed by the great fishes, but the river is still as it was in the days when I was a boy. However, when I was a boy there were many cabins standing there, and today there is not even one. In the past, when the people of our town were dressed in fine clothes, they needed a clean place to leave them in; now, when the whole town is dressed in ugly clothes, they leave them on the banks of the river.
Since I have mentioned the matter of clothes, I will mention that I had a new suit made and bought new shoes. When I went out in the street, people looked at me. Do you think they were jealous of me? Not at alclass="underline" they were jealous of the people to whom I had given the old ones. Dire poverty had descended on the town. Once, when I threw away a paper cigarette pack, a respectable man fell upon it and picked it up. What for? To use it for the salt on his table.
Not every day is fine; not every day is suitable for walking or bathing in the river. There are days in Szibucz when the rain comes down without a stop, when the whole town swims in mud, and you cannot go out and cannot go in. And since it is impossible to sit all day in the hotel or the Beit Midrash and you want to see a human being, you remember that you have promised someone a visit, so you go to keep your promise.
Whom had I promised? You might ask, whom hadn’t I promised. There is not a man in the town who has not invited me to visit him — not out of love for the visitor but out of sheer boredom. The town is small and its doings are few, so everyone wishes to distract himself with conversation. And since I did not know whom to visit, I visited Schuster: first, because he too was included in that promise, and second, to give some pleasure to his wife, who said that never did she find any time so welcome as the time I spent with her.
Sprintze was sitting in the big chair that Schuster had brought with him from Germany. There were two sticks lying at her feet for her to lean on when she went from bed to chair or chair to bed, for Germany had taken away her strength and dried up her legs, and but for her two sticks she would have lain there motionless as a stone. The outside door was open and on the threshold lay a copper basin, in which withered grasses were drying in the sun; Sprintze takes some for her pipe and others she uses to make a kind of tea. This tea is an elixir for the heart and a medicine for the soul, since the grasses come from the threshold of the house where she was born, and draw vitality from there, just as she herself had done. When you infuse these grasses and drink their essence, the body recovers its strength and reawakens as if it had returned to the house where it was born. “And, my dear, although the house is in ruins and its dwellers have gone into exile,” says Sprintze, “the grasses keep their grip and will not let go, and if you uproot them they sprout again, for it is natural for grasses, my friend, to love the source of their vitality. In this they are like human beings; only human beings abandon the source of their vitality, while grasses do not leave their place, and even if they are plucked out they sprout again and give healing to men.