The murder of Reb Naftali occurred not long before the pogroms of 1648. When the evil decree fell, the whole family perished, “some by water, some by fire, some by strangling, some by stoning,” as the poet wrote in the piyyut Unetanneh tokef. Those who were spared such gruesome deaths died of hunger or thirst. Through the mercy of God the little girl saved herself from death by hiding in the forest. Like an innocent lamb she lived on grass and very nearly forgot how to talk like a human being. She was found by some survivors who had come out of hiding when the pogroms began to abate. They took her with them as they wandered from town to town and from community to community. Some of them tried to return to their hometowns but could not find them. Most of the communities had been razed in the cataclysm and were unrecognizable. Some of these survivors got used to being on the road and never found a place to stop and settle down. During their wanderings they came to Buczacz and arrived at the house of our Master.
The Rabbi’s wife looked at the little girl but had no idea who she was. The good qualities that she noticed in her endeared the child to her. She took her in and fed her, clothed her, put shoes on her bare feet. The Rabbi’s wife made an arrangement with the people who had brought the girl with them, paying them off so they would leave the child with her. And so they did. The Rabbi’s wife asked the girl about her hometown and where she came from and about her father and her mother. The child told what she remembered.
The Rabbi’s wife listened to all this and related it to our Master. Upon hearing it he declared, “Is she not of our family? Why, she is a descendant of our relative Naftali!” Our Master raised his sacred hands and intoned, “Blessed be the One who is beneficent to the wicked and the good alike. Blessed is the One who has been beneficent to this granddaughter of Naftali, who has found her way to her family. And blessed be the One who has allowed us to raise this orphan girl in our home, the only one of our family left alive.”
Our Master took the girl in and provided for all her needs — food, drink, lodging, clothing. Our Master, who was not particular about his own clothes except for his beautiful talit and tefillin, personally picked out the material for her dresses and personally sent for the cobbler to make her a pair of shoes. On Friday afternoons, before leaving for the bathhouse to get ready for the Sabbath, he would look in on the kitchen and ask, “Has she had her bath? Has her hair been combed?” Sometimes he would stand and make sure they were not hurting her when they combed her hair, which had gotten tangled during the long time in the forest.
As she grew older our Master thought about a match for her. He cast his eye on his favorite student, a clever and knowledgeable young man with some proficiency in several languages. This student was the son of Zevulun the spice merchant. Zevulun, after his death, left a manuscript of a book on the prayer recited upon embarking on a journey. It contained some shocking things about disputations he had with freethinkers in various cities in the Ottoman lands. I heard that he had asked our Master to write an approbation for the book, and our Master declined the invitation. He said that since the questions it dealt with were of no concern to him, he was quite ready to forgo the answers it offered.
So our Master married off Zlateh to Zevulun’s son Aaron. Because he loved the couple so much, our Master himself recited the seven nuptial benedictions at all seven wedding feasts. I remember that at the feast of the seventh day they were sitting around the table and there was no new guest present. The door opened and in came a young man with a volume of the talmudic tractate Kiddushin in hand. And so they recited the seven benedictions. Among the company was a scholar who loved to joke. He said to Aaron, “You see, tractate Kiddushin itself has sent you a new face so that all seven benedictions can be said.”
About the young man who came in with tractate Kiddushin in hand I have nothing to say. But about the tractate itself I do. I once saw in a certain book, Kaftor vaferaḥ, a tale about a scholar who spent his whole life studying the tractate Ḥagigah. When he departed this world no one took any notice, until there appeared a woman who lamented him loudly, the way a bereaved wife keens for her husband. The woman was the tractate Ḥagigah, which took on the form of a woman because of that scholar’s lifelong devotion to it.
Our Master made a place for the couple in his home and arranged with Aaron fixed times to study Torah together, before dawn and at night after the evening service. You had to see our Master sitting and learning with him to know the love of a master for his student. Matters that our Master would usually treat cursorily he expounded to him in minute detail. Our Master saw in Aaron and Zlateh his aspirations for a new generation that would serve God righteously in place of their parents murdered by the enemy.
Suffering is hard, hard when it happens and hard afterward. Because of the many troubles that had befallen the Jews, Aaron began to inquire into what God had done to this people, into the great wrath that caused this people to be handed over to the Gentiles, Heaven forfend, to be destroyed by them.
One inquiry leads to another, like one mouse that squeals out to another until very soon a whole horde of them come and chew up all the clothing and household goods. Because of His love for us, God encumbers us with suffering in order to purge us of the qelipot we have acquired in the lands of the Gentiles and thereby prepare us for the day of His Redemption. But this young man reached the false conclusion that God had withdrawn His love from Israel.
Now when a person opens the door to speculation, if he is worthy he will repent, and God will bring him to inner peace, and nothing will unnerve him. Superior to him is one who never experiences any philosophical doubts. He will not be subverted by them; nor will he even have to expend intellectual energy to refute them. This young man, alas, was not worthy. His doubts were not only not dispelled, they multiplied. He became lax in his attitude to Torah and its observance. When he had the opportunity to perform a commandment, he did so not out of love or fear or religious yearning or because the Torah commanded him to do it. He did so only because the sources he was reading did not disapprove of it. When he studied Torah it was not with any love or holiness or because a Jew is enjoined to meditate upon it day and night. He studied Torah because it sharpens the intellect. How shameful, how disgraceful it is that there are people who think that the words of the living God are in need of human validation. And what is worse, they make the Torah secondary and human wisdom primary.
When a person studies Torah, the Torah protects him. When he does a commandment, the commandment saves him from transgression. But when he studies Torah and takes no joy in it, the Torah will take no joy in him. Torah and mitzvot will bring him only melancholy until perforce he will seek to anchor himself in something else. He will be oblivious to the fact that the qelipot created by his worthless investigations now encase him. Yet God’s mercy is not exhausted, for were he to turn in repentance God would receive him. But contemptible ideas darkened his mind and prevented him from finding the doorway to repentance.
3
One day, an hour or two before dawn, our Master went to the beit midrash and did not find Aaron there. Our Master noticed me and asked me for an explanation. I said I would go and find out but he said, no, he would go himself. When Zlateh heard him coming she got out of bed and ran outside. “Where is Aaron?” our Master asked her. She went back to her room and found his bed just as she had made it the previous evening. Clearly he had not slept there. “Aaron is not here,” she said, and fainted.