When he was seated in his usual place, I went over to him to ask him who should lead the morning service. In his day no one ever approached the lectern to lead unless our Master himself gave him permission to do so. He asked whether there was anyone present who had an obligation to lead, such as a man observing yahrzeit. Before I could answer he told me to go up.
I put on my talit and tefillin and went up to the Ark. I am an old man and I do not like to exaggerate, but I can tell you that I felt as if my feet were standing on the roof of Gehinnom and that this was the very last prayer that I would be allowed to utter. Miracle of miracles, I was still alive when the service ended.
That day I went to a scribe to have him check my tefillin to see if perhaps some letter on the parchment inside had faded. The fear and anxiety I had felt during the trip made me perspire so profusely that it was possible that the parchment had been affected. Praise be the One who crowns Israel in glory, not a single letter was spoiled.
When the service was over I brought the talmudic tractate Yevamot to our Master. He looked at me and said, “Sukkot is approaching. In honor of this festival of our joy, let us delight ourselves with tractate Sukkah.” I went and got it for him and remained standing there. If he needed me he would see that I was at his disposal. He acknowledged this with a nod and told me to return home.
On the way I began to have doubts about whether the things I had seen were real or a dream. If I were to go by our Master’s behavior, it may very well have been a dream, because normally he would have the talmudic tractate Yevamot on his desk, and here he was looking at tractate Sukkah. Furthermore, if that was truly Gehinnom that I saw, there were no flames. And even if you say that the judgment of wicked in Gehinnom lasts for twelve months, it is known that the fires of Gehinnom never go out. I also saw nothing of the snow in which the wicked are frozen. The pain is supposed to be worse than the heat of the sun.
At home I found no rest. I was worried that my wife would ask me where I had been all night. But she did not, presuming I had been in bed the whole night. Her illness had gotten worse, and she had lost the power of speech. If it had not been for the power of intuition, I would not have known when to feed her and take care of her.
14
My doubts intensified about whether I was awake when I saw those visions. When I returned to the beit midrash, I had the distinct impression that I had seen a number of the bluebloods of the congregation the previous night in all three compartments of Gehinnom. I knew it was not them I had seen but their fathers and grandfathers. Sons usually resemble their fathers or their grandfathers, and I had known all of them. My confusion distracted me from my prayers, and I knew it was my punishment for presuming that such decent people could be in Gehinnom.
I tried to stop thinking about those visions, but I could not. If I had not been distracted by my wife’s worsening condition, I do not know what would have been with me.
One could not have guessed that our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, was about to do something momentous, namely, free a young agunah from the chains of her condition by dint of the fact that we saw her dead husband in Gehinnom. I had often thought to myself, he has to do that or all the arduous efforts he put himself through to make the journey there would have been for naught.
The righteous do what they do and God does what He does. One day just before Ḥanukah, a man from a distant country appeared. He was strangely dressed, his round beard neatly trimmed, and his brownish hair had no sidecurls. He asked, in Hebrew, where the house of the Ḥakham could be found. At first no one realized that he was speaking Hebrew because of his strange accent. When they finally realized it was Hebrew, they did not understand that it was our Master he was looking for. In the lands from which he came a rabbi is called Ḥakham.
The essence of the matter is that this man had with him a bill of divorce for Zlateh that Aaron had sent. I will not go into details because I want to get to the end of the story. So I pass over the fact that these details contradict what Aaron had explicitly told our Master, namely, that he was dead and had died in such and such a way. Still, the details bear repeating. The man who brought the bill of divorce was a great scholar. In addition to his mastery of Torah in all its aspects, he knew Greek and Arabic. If I remember correctly, our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, asked him the meaning of certain terms he had come across in his studies whose meanings were not clear to him. He declared at one point, “If I had the strength, I would compile those words into a lexicon as an aid to students and especially to those who write halakhic opinions.” These last words, “to those who write halakhic opinions,” I never heard directly from our Master but only from reputable people who can be relied upon never to make statements they have not heard.
The long and the short of it is that the three compartments of Gehinnom that I have noted I saw while completely awake and not in a dream. The same goes for the judgments visited upon all who talk during the prayers and the Torah reading. How do we account for the severity of the punishment? From the following parable that I once heard from our Master. The time and place when he told it to us are worth noting.
15
On the twentieth of Sivan, about an hour and a half after the morning service, the whole town went to the cemetery — old men and children, young men and women, even nursing mothers with their infants. Some went to visit their relatives’ graves, some to entreat the dead to pray for the living.
That year the local citizenry did not harass us. Even those who had stolen our houses and then occupied them did not try to humiliate us as in former years, when they would stand in front of our houses and mock us with tenderhearted words. “Are you all hungry from the fast? Here, have some pork. Are you thirsty? Here, have some warm blood. Come, dear neighbors, take your fill.” That year the opposite happened. Many of them brought out water for us to wash our hands when we left the cemetery. We washed with that water, and when we got back to town everyone washed again. Some of us suggested that the world was changing for the better; others conjectured that the Gentiles were leaving us alone because they were getting tired of murdering us. Then there were others who opined that we Jews had fallen so much that we were no longer worthy of Esau’s efforts to victimize us.
In years past our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, eulogized the victims of the abominable Khmelnitski, may his name be blotted out, and all others martyred by the Gentiles, in the cemetery. But when the cemetery was completely filled with graves and people were so crammed together all around that a kohen was once jostled into an area forbidden to kohanim, our Master moved the site of his eulogy to the Great Synagogue and delivered it there after the afternoon service. In his last years, our Master stopped going to the cemetery altogether. He is reported to have said, “Why do I need to go to the dead when they are coming toward me?” What he probably meant was that Buczacz had become one big Jewish cemetery; wherever you started to dig you would find Jewish bodies. He had already begun wondering whether a kohen could even live in Buczacz. I myself never heard him actually say that, but I believe those who say that he did, and I have no reason to doubt them. Whenever our Master was uncertain about a halakhic matter, he did not rest until he clarified it.
When we returned from the cemetery we all went to the Great Synagogue for the afternoon service. As on all public fasts, we read from the Torah the passage beginning And Moses implored the Lord, and then the haftarah from the prophets. Our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, was called up to recite the haftarah and he chanted it beautifully. When he finished with the words Thus declares the Lord God who gathers the dispersed of Israel; I will gather still more to those already gathered, I was quite certain that Isaiah’s prophecy was about to be realized, and I had the idea that our Master thought so too.