13. A Miracle Comes to Holoscheitz
The last time I saw Rabbi Yehoshua, his back was still straight and his eyes were still bright and keen, but his hair had turned very gray, both on his head and in his beard. That was when he told me the story about my father, Asher Wallfisch, and the miracle that came to Holoscheitz, my home shtetl.
I have a deep love and respect for Rabbi Yehoshua, and I know very well why the Jews of Holoscheitz called him the Wise and lived in constant worry that a bigger town will attract him away. But he never went. The Jews of Holoscheitz were plain Jews, not worldly at all, not well educated, and he had a father’s regard for them. And what Jewish father leaves his children? The other way round is more likely. Like me.
I was never a good cheder student, and this burned my father. When I was growing up to the age when the Polish boys could apply to the Gymnasium, I found out that Talmud did not attract me as much as why the blacksmith’s red-hot poker made a hissing sound when it went into the water and produced a vapor and I did not when I dove into the stream outside of town. Things like that. So one day I took enough courage to turn to my father and tell him that I wanted to go to the Polytechnic Gymnasium.
Tateh was quite a rigid man. He was rigid in the way he read and understood the Torah, the way he observed the mitzvas and the customs, and the way he expected me to. Everything in life was measured by his view of Yiddishkeit. So you can imagine his response when he heard from me that I no longer wanted to continue learning in the cheder and then in a yeshiva.
Tateh stormed and raged in the way a cold sleet attacked the earth—cold, steady, penetrating, but not loud. He came very near to calling me an apikoros, an unbeliever, but he didn’t, I’ll give him that. He knew that I put on tfillin every morning and really prayed. I think now, so many years later, that he looked to me to fulfill a dream he had had for himself – to become a rabbi. It’s the same old story: the father fulfilling through the life of his son what he longed to do but couldn’t in his own life. He didn’t talk to me for a long time outside of necessary sentences.
Mama was dead, and only Rena, my sister, and I, and Tateh made up the household, so there was no other son for him to turn to. But I just couldn’t see myself sitting and studying Talmud all day. When my work in the cheder turned bad, Tateh didn’t yell, that wasn’t his way, as I said. . He spoke to me coldly and oh so sadly. But my dream was the Polytechnic Gymnasium and so one day I went to Rabbi Yehoshua and told him everything.
I remember he sat there for a while looking at me, but turning it over in his mind.
“You know, of course, what this means to your father. Otherwise you wouldn’t have come to see me. You want me to help you convince your father to let you go.”
I smile even now how that Talmudic head got right to the point.
“There are many difficult obstacles, Leib,” he said to me. “You know nothing about mathematics or physics or chemistry. You will have to spend a year studying before you apply for the entrance examinations. Then you realize what will be the attitude of the examiners to a Jewish boy. Then there is the question of where you will live. The Polytechnic Gymnasium is in Cracow. You cannot live with the gentile boys, of course.”
He waited for my response, to see whether I would be discouraged. My answer satisfied him, so he said to go home and his assistant will arrange for a three-way meeting. And a few days later, the shammas came to our house to summon us to a meeting with the Rabbi. Tateh, no fool either, quickly surmising that I had been to the Rabbi, just gave me a quizzical look with one eyebrow raised and the next day we went.
Right from the beginning, the Rabbi gently explained the matter in such a way that I saw he was supporting me – how it is useless to force someone to learn Talmud if he doesn’t want to, because it is written that learning is a joy, which is why we don't learn Talmud on Tisha B’Av, so if learning every day makes every day a Tisha B’Av one ought not to do it. Now, he knew a religious man in Trompetz who could teach me mathematics and physics and a bit of chemistry, too – if Reb Asher will pay for it. He asked my father if he remembered Yekl Borenstein, the mischievous boy who went on to become Rabbi Yaakov Borenstein and now was the principal of a cheder in Cracow – he was sure that he would welcome me into his home – if my father would pay for it.
I was much afraid that Tateh would refuse to pay a single grusch and the whole business would die right there. But, being inexperienced, I underestimated the wisdom of Rabbi Yehoshua and only when I grew older I understood. The Rabbi could have gotten the teacher and the room free, but the Talmud says that what you get for free is worth nothing in the first place. If my father agreed to pay, then it showed that Tateh was encouraging me. He was too rigid to admit it outright, but if he were to pay, he would be saying, “Go do it if you want to, but do it well, since you gave up a life of Torah for it!”
But Tateh made me promise I would spend one hour a day, every day, studying Talmud and on Shabbos I was not to open a secular book under any circumstances whatever. Naturally I agreed.
So one year later, I sat for the examinations, and passed – and was accepted. I found out how at the end of the first quarter. The algebra master was an anti-Semite, but he couldn’t do much about “the Jew from Holoscheitz,” as he always called me. I happened to win the city-wide first-quarter algebra contest for first-year students and that was a feather in the school’s cap.
“You’re lucky that you have a good friend in Stanislaus Rudenski, Jew from Holoscheitz! Otherwise you wouldn’t be here at all,” he snarled, “taking honors away from good Catholic boys!” Now, Stanislaus Rudenski was the Prefect of Police of the district in which Holoscheitz was located, so on one of the Shabbosim I spent at home, I asked my father about it. He was as surprised as I was and he asked Rabbi Yehoshua.
“Well,” the Rabbi said, “when Leib passed the examinations, I felt it was necessary to make things more certain. So I went to Rudenski, and he went to his brother-in-law, the prosecutor of the Cracow district, and prosecutor went to the chief education officer, and the chief education officer went to the principal, and the principal talked to the examiners. I don't know how the teacher found out it was Rudenski that started the chad gadya.”
To make a long story short, when I finished the Cracow Polytechnic, the principal recommended me to the Polytechnic Institute in Berlin (“Shall I tell you a secret, Lech,” he said to me, calling me by a Polish name, “I know you will never reveal it. My great-grandfather was a Jew, which doesn’t make me a Jew, but I don't hate them either.”) The Berlin Polytechnic was only a way station to America. A professor at the Berlin Polytechnic had a brother teaching physical chemistry in Columbia University in New York, and because of his letter, I was admitted to the graduate program. I promised my father and Rena that as soon as I could I would send money to them and they would join me.
“I have heard about America,” said my father in his clipped way. “As you earn bread there for your body, your soul starves. God has decided not to live in America.” And that was the answer I got every time I wrote home about it. Rena married a shoemaker’s helper and Tateh was getting on in years, but the answer was always the same, “God has decided not to live in America.”
I got an MS and somehow dropped into the fledgling plastics industry, and did very well. I married, started raising a nice family. I still studied the Talmud one hour a day, and even before the most important exams in the university or later on, before an important proposal on behalf of the factory, I had never opened a secular book on Shabbos.
When I got the letter from Rena that Tateh was dying, it was June, and I was able to send my wife and two boys to a bungalow in the Catskills, and I took passage to Hamburg and the long reverse journey back to Holoscheitz. I arrived to find Tateh very ill. Yet, he was rigid as ever. He was happy to see me, but you had to know him well to notice his joy. I saw that he observed that I still wore a yarmulke and that among my shirts was my tallis and tfillin, and my Yiddish was still very good.
He had been to a doctor in Cracow, and a hospital in Warsaw, and the medical opinions were the same: a few weeks, a few months, no more. Rena and Shimshon her husband and I took turns staying in the bedroom with Tateh. Their kids were wonderful, and since I had brought things for them from America I was their favorite uncle. Shimshon had his own shoemaker’s stall in the marketplace by this time, and I saw that he had quick, accurate, and intelligent hands. So when we had a chance, I proposed that Rena and Shimshon and the family come to America. Shimshon would get a job in the factory where I was a physical chemist. I assured him that he was a good worker with his hands, and the job was not charity, but an honorable job. They agreed and one day they went to Warsaw to arrange for the necessary documents. Though Tateh probably understood what was going on, he was too weak to say anything about it. He was waiting for his death, and he knew so were we all.
Meanwhile, I got to know Holoscheitz again, but from a different perspective. The streets were mainly unpaved. In the summer you walked through clouds of dust. Everything and everybody looked older and shabbier. The synagogue looked like a good wind would blow it away. Though I knew it was foolish to compare Holoscheitz to even the few small towns in America that I had visited, I couldn’t help it. I wanted to get away, to get back. In New York, I had spoken often with other Jews from shtetlach and they expressed a nostalgia for the place that they escaped from. I never felt anything. I expected to feel something when I started back to Holoscheitz to visit my father after a number of years, remembering the swimming hole, a few of my friends at cheder, the Purim games. Now I had to admit that I felt nothing. It would take a miracle to bring Holoscheitz into the 20th century.
Well, Tateh died, of course, and we sat shivah. When the Rabbi visited, I quietly told him about my sister’s plans about going to America. I thought maybe he would object. Maybe he thought the same way that Tateh did – that God decided not to live in America. But he nodded his head thoughtfully and murmured, “’It may be a good idea, Leib. The world is changing. When you come to me to say goodbye, I’ll tell you a story about your father.’”
At the moment I couldn’t make a connection between the two statements. What did my rigid father, tucked far away in a backward shtetl, refusing to move an inch from what he had learned half a century before, have to do with a changing world? What connection was there in Rabbi Yehoshua’s mind?
When I did visit the Rabbi to say goodbye, he told me the story of the miracle that came to Holoscheitz, and how it opened his eyes to a reality that he didn’t realize existed.
Though the story is really about my father, Asher Wallfisch, I have to begin with Reb Mordechai Thaler. Mr. Thaler was Holoscheitz’s rich man, which frankly is not saying much. But he would have been considered rich in Trompetz, even well off in Lemburg. He dealt in lumber. He bought forests and sold off the wood. He owned a couple of mills and some horses and wagons to lug it. He was a big, bluff man who had a sense of self-importance and he didn’t always control showing it. But he was a kind man and generous, too. Why did he stay in Holoscheitz? Why, he was born there. Business insisted that Mr. Thaler travel from forest to forest, mill to mill, government official to government lackey. So his absences did not attract notice or comment. One morning he would be in his accustomed corner of the beis medrash, wrapped in his tallis, entwined in his tfillin. The next morning he would pray at home and hop into Yankel’s wagon and off he would go. Thursday night he would be back as if he hadn’t been away. Of course, this didn’t happen every week. So –
Rabbi Yehoshua noticed that Reb Mordechai Thaler was absent from morning prayers every Tuesday to Thursday for three weeks now. Never one to rush into anything, the Rabbi merely observed. He decided, however, that after the third week, he should say something to Reb Mordechai. So on Shabbos, after they had put away their tallesim, the Rabbi beckoned to Reb Mordechai.
“A guten Shabbos,” began Rabbi Yehoshua.
“A guten Shabbos to you, Rabbi,” answered Reb Mordechai, puzzled, but patient and polite.
“I wish to mention something to you, Reb Mordechai. I have noticed that for three days every week, you are absent from morning services. Now I know that you are a busy businessman, and many times before you have had to travel on behalf of your lumber business, but I do not recall that you have been away so long and so often and so regularly.” He paused expectantly.
Reb Mordechai Thaler beamed as if he had just acquired a new forest at half the price. “You noticed!”
“Of course I noticed!” retorted the Rabbi.
“Well …” said Reb Mordechai, and paused to consider. “Allow me to keep my secret a little while longer, Rabbi. It will be a miracle when it happens. Rabbi, a miracle will come to Holoscheitz!”
The Rabbi stared at Reb Mordechai. His exuberance was contagious. The Rabbi smiled. “You have contact, maybe, with the Messiah?”
“Hah!” barked Reb Mordechai. “No, not quite that. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I help him to come – and not only through prayers!”
“Now I am curious” smiled Rabbi Yehoshua. “But I shall honor your wish that I maintain patience.”
“Thank you, Rabbi,” grinned Reb Mordechai. “It won’t be long now, maybe two weeks. That’s all. Gut Shabbos.”
The Rabbi thoughtfully watched Reb Mordechai waddle away. “He’s a good, pious man,” he thought, “and I truly wonder what this is all about. I hope he has not fallen into the hands of some charlatan.” Slightly troubled, the Rabbi went to join his Rebbitzin.
“What did you say to Reb Mordechai Thaler, Yehoshua?” she asked. “He came out like floating on a cloud. Even his wife had to smile.”
“’Even his wife had to smile,’” he mimicked jokingly. “How close we are to loshen hara. One word more and you would have wagged an evil tongue.”
“God forbid!” answered the Rebbitzin haughtily. “But I realize you haven’t answered my question, and I know you well enough not to try further.”
Asher Wallfisch was walking just ahead of them, tall, thin, rigid, stately. Alone. They caught up to him.
The Rabbi said, “Gut Shabbos, Reb Asher. All alone?”
Wallfisch just gestured with his hands. Then, fearful that he might offend the Rabbi if he did not speak to him, “Rena and her husband are having kiddush at the Margolins.”
“And Leib is in Berlin,” added the Rabbi. “Have you received a letter from him this week?”
“Yes, every week,” replied Wallfisch, in a surprised prideful tone. “He writes that his studies are going well and that he still learns everyday. He is fulfilling his side of the agreement, I’ll say that for him.”
“You never reconciled yourself to his going to the Polytechnic,” the Rabbi said.
“No, Rabbi. I have not. I was brought up believing that everything you need to know is in the Torah and the Talmud. Anything else is foolishness and temporary. I have seen nothing to disprove what my father and grandfather taught me. I still pray that Leib will see the truth and come home to the beis medrash.” He turned into the path that led to his door. “Gut Shabbos, Rabbi, Rebbitzin.”
After a few paces, the Rebbitzin murmured, “A hard man. I pity him. Leib will not come back.”
“No,” agreed the Rabbi, “I’m afraid he will not. I’m afraid that his father will go down to his grave hoping, dreaming, and being disappointed.”
Well, that Tuesday, Reb Mordechai disappeared again. Now, this called for Talmudic analysis between minchah and maariv – as long as the Rabbi didn’t hear. He didn’t like these dissections of the actions of fellow Jews. It was too close to loshon hara.
“The Rabbi spoke to him after davening on Shabbos,” observed one octogenarian. “He called him over. It wasn’t an accident.”
“What does this imply?” asked another, already falling into the Talmudic sing-song. “Is it possible that he has been going on a mission for the Rabbi?”
“If so, what could that mission be?” queried a third, and all gazed across the beis medrash from under overflowing white eyebrows at the Rabbi who sat at his lectern studying. Having received no intuition from this, they returned to analysis.
“Perhaps Thaler is negotiating on behalf of the Rabbi for a position in a city,” opined the first, “God forbid,” genuinely alarming himself.
“Perhaps Thaler is having money problems,” thought the second.
“No,” muttered the third. “If so, Thaler would have approached the Rabbi, not the other way round.”
“A shidduch,” the first one tried again. “A marriage contract.”
“But who?” asked the second.
This took a few moments of thought. None could think of any special problem with a widow or a widower getting married, so that idea was left hanging. They weren’t especially troubled by coming to no conclusion. These men had seen and experienced a good deal in their combined age of 253 years, and one thing they knew above all: the future will become the present one day, whether you’re here to see or not.
The first clue to the mystery arrived in the person of Yankel the Teamster, actually Mordechai Thaler’s chauffeur of the horse-and-wagon when he went traveling. He slipped in this Thursday night in time for maariv, usually a sure sign that Reb Mordechai had returned. Yankel stopped the Rabbi after services.
“Rabbi, what is the halacha of masig gvul, encroachment on one’s livelihood?”
Surprised, but knowing enough not to inquire why the question was being asked, the Rabbi answered.
The answer didn’t seem to satisfy Yankel. Tired, dusty, plainly worried, Yankel stood there, thinking, eyes directed to the scraped wooden floor. Then he said:
“I don't think the halacha ever thought of this. It’s too modern.”
And before the Rabbi could reply, Yankel wished him good night and went out into the darkness. On his way home, Rabbi Yehoshua rehearsed the little conversation in his mind over and over again, and repeated it word for word to his Rebbitzin.
“What can he mean?” he asked her rhetorically.
The Rebbitzin said, “Whatever it means, it has to do with Mordechai Thaler.”
“How do you know that?” the Rabbi asked.
“Well, he had just come into town with Reb Mordechai after three days away. He just dropped him off at his house and ran to shul to catch maariv. Right after maariv he asks you a question that obviously was troubling him during the prayer. What else could it be except something to do with Mordechai Thaler?”
Rabbi Yehoshua considered. “You know, you’re probably right. What a Talmudic head my wife has. Too bad you were not with me as a student in the yeshiva!”
“Is it?” she asked, “as one of the boys?”, and he saw the shy, knowing smile that captivated him so many years before.
That Shabbos Reb Mordechai approached the Rabbi. In a loud voice heard by other worshippers, who then reported it to still other worshippers, all of whom reported it to their wives, so that in 20 minutes the whole town knew of it, he cried:
“Thursday, Rabbi. Thursday, God willing, the miracle will come to Holoscheitz.” And he walked away before he would have had to refuse to answer the Rabbi’s questions.
Reb Mordechai left in Yankel’s wagon on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the strangest thing happened: Yankel came riding into town alone.
Naturally everyone crowded around asking questions. “Where is Mr. Thaler?”
“In Warsaw.”
“Is he all right?”
“Of course!”
“He didn’t come back with you this time?”
The answer was so obvious that Yankel merely looked at the questioner.
“Why didn’t he?”
“Ask him when you see him!”
“When will that be?”
“When he arrives!” It was clear that Yankel was very much perturbed.
For 24 hours Holoscheitz conjectured what happened and what the miracle would be, and got nowhere. Then, at about three o’clock on Thursday afternoon, when the marketplace was humming with shoppers for Shabbos, when the Rabbi had just awakened from his usual nap, when the artisans of the city, and the porters, and the shopkeepers were involved in their routine desperate attempts to make a living, a faint rumbling was heard from the edge of town. At first, no one paid attention, engrossed as they were. Then the rumbling grew louder, a strange rhythmic grinding interspersed with an irregular cough.
Now their attention was attracted, and the Holoscheitzers on the streets and at the windows looked wonderingly at the thing that was making the noise. It was rolling forward on four thin wheels and something like a big straight-up shiny black coach sat on them. A long protrusion stuck itself out in front and from here the noise was coming. From the back, smoke jumped out every now and again.
Most amazing of all, inside the coach, one could see a big man sitting, wearing a white coat, half of his face covered by goggles, a broad grin split his mustache from his beard. Even so, one could recognize Reb Mordechai Thaler. Alongside sat a young man, also in white coat and goggles.
All of a sudden, the thing gave out a throaty, hoarse high-pitched bark of warning. And it came to a smoky, shuddering stop.
The young man jumped out and turned to Thaler and said to him in Polish, “You’re still very raw at it, Mr. Thaler. You know how to steer all right, but you are not using the clutch properly, and you are going to wear out the motor.”
Thaler replied, in Polish, “Don't you worry, young man. You did your job of teaching me how to drive this auto-mo-bile and now all I need is practice. Here’s the money I promised for coming home with me. Now you can go back to Warsaw.”
With open mouths, the people of Holoscheitz crowded a respectful distance away from this thing. The young man pulled off his goggles and white coat, stained with a smear of oil and dust, stuffed them into a little bag he had with him, accepted some money from Thaler, and started off out of town.
A hundred voices began to ask Reb Mordechai a hundred questions each. He had one answer, which he repeated over and over:
“It’s called an auto-mo-bile. It’s something new. It’s the wave of the future.”
The hubbub quieted down noticeably when Rabbi Yehoshua got to the edge of the crowd. Silently, he walked around the automobile, studying it. He put his hand on a fender and rubbed it a little.
“Steel,” Reb Mordechai told him. “Genuine steel.”
“What makes it go?” the Rabbi asked.
“Under here – “ Mordechai rubbed his hand along the hood – “is what is called the motor. You start up the motor, and you sit inside at the small steering wheel, and you turn the wheel which way you want to go, and you move what is called the clutch with your foot and it goes. I don't really know what makes it go, Rabbi. I only know how I can make it go. Here, I’ll demonstrate.”
Thaler got a long hooked steel rod from the trunk in back of the box, went around to the front, inserted it into a hole, turned it once, twice, the thing coughed once, twice. Then Mordechai ran and jumped into the seat behind the wheel, and mysteriously the thing belched forth smoke and thundered. Again came the raucous warning belch and people shied away from the automobile. Mordechai did some mysterious things with his feet and hands and the monster moved forward slowly. It stopped and then moved backwards and stopped. Mordechai did some other things and the thing got quiet. He stepped down.
“Last year once, when I was in Warsaw,” Mordechai told the Rabbi as everybody strained to hear, “I heard about a German manufacturer of auto-mo-biles planning to open an agency in Warsaw. I looked into it and I saw that it would be of great help to me. It would enable me to travel faster and further. It would even be able to lug shipments of lumber on a wagon. So I looked into it further. I even wrote secretly to Leib Wallfisch in Berlin to look into it for me, seeing as he is at the Polytechnic and should know about these things. Eventually, I bought one. Believe me, you wouldn’t believe what it cost. It’s one of the first ones sold in Warsaw! And to a Jew! It’s a miracle!
“For a month now I’ve been going to Warsaw learning how to drive it. I swore Yankel to secrecy. It takes Yankel seven hours to get to Warsaw. It took me three to get here in the auto-mo-bile. I can make a trip even on Friday morning and get home for Shabbos! A miracle, Rabbi, a miracle!”
Stunned, the Rabbi still gazed awed at the machine. He murmured out of habit, “Mazel tov to you.”
He turned to go to the beis medrash. The crowd began to break up, excitedly discussing the miracle that came to Holoscheitz. Only Asher Wallfisch was left to study the automobile. His face was grave, his eyes clouded, his hands behind his back. One would think that the intensity of his study would lead to some lesson of life. He shook his head slowly, sadly. Then he directed his gaze toward the marketplace, where Yankel’s wagon stood, the horse still shaking from the fright the machine gave him. Wallfisch’s mouth took on a grimness and he turned and walked away.
That evening, after maariv, Mordechai Thaler demonstrated again how the thing started, and this time he turned on the headlamps, expecting to hear sighs of wonder, and he did. The lamps lit up the street, the front of the shul, the alleys to left and right. Then Thaler drove it slowly carefully, but inevitably noisily, down the street to his house and stopped it there. His pride could not have been better fed than it was that afternoon and evening, when he brought his miracle to Holoscheitz and demonstrated it with his own hands.
Unaccountably, when Reb Mordechai Thaler entered the beis medrash for morning prayers, his face was puffed with anger. His eyes were abnormally bright. He slammed the tfillin onto his arm and pulled the strap to wind it around his arm as if he wanted to choke the blood off. It was clear to all that he said the words of the prayers, but he was thinking of something very much else and his anger did not subside. Afterwards, the Rabbi waited for the explosion, though he did not know the cause of it.
It came immediately.
“Do you know that someone came and scratched the paint off my automobile,” he shouted to the Rabbi. “In the middle of the night, came a murderer with a knife or something. He scratched it one side and then the other and up and down. Can you imagine? How could someone do such a thing? Why should someone do such a thing?”
Appalled, the Rabbi set aside the book he was about to begin to study, said to Reb Mordechai, “Come,” and strode out of the beis medrash. Mordechai followed and then led the Rabbi and the troop of fellow Jews to the automobile standing impersonally in the street.
The automobile had been attacked during the night. It was scratched from tail to hood, in some places the paint was actually dug out down to the raw steel underneath. The injuries were horizontal, vertical, zig-zag.
“Will this affect the operation of the auto-mo-bile,” the Rabbi asked quietly.
“No,” Reb Mordechai said. “But it destroyed its beauty. It is a sign of hatred, Rabbi. A sign of hatred. How could a Jew do such a thing?”
“I am truly sorry it happened, Reb Mordechai. I can’t imagine who would have done it, or why.”
“I can!” Reb Mordechai cried. “You know, I am a businessman, Rabbi, so the first thing I look for is a motive having to do with money! Who loses because I have purchased an auto-mo-bile and brought it to Holoscheitz? I’ll tell you who. Yankel the Wagoneer! He knows that he has lost a nice fat job with me. He knows that I shall never need him again to take me to Warsaw. He knows – “
The Rabbi shouted angrily. “Stop! Stop! As terrible as this crime is, it is a worse crime to accuse someone without proof! Do you have a witness?”
“In the middle of the night? Witnesses, Rabbi? In the middle of the night, he comes sneaking here with a knife or a – a hatchet and attacks my auto-mo-bile – and you want witnesses!” Reb Mordechai was beside himself. “Come, Rabbi! I shall accuse him to his face! Let the sin be on my head, not on yours! Where is he, the murderer!”
And so, in the still cold dawn, Reb Mordechai ran toward Yankel’s stable, followed by the Rabbi and the other worshippers. In the rear, strode Asher Wallfisch, intently watching everything that was going on.
Yankel was pushing his horse back between the struts for the bridle when the crowd approached his stable. He looked over his shoulder. Only a widening of the eyes betrayed any surprise, but he calmly finished buckling his horse and only then turned to face his townsmen.
“Good morning, Rabbi, friends. Is something wrong?”
Reb Mordechai shook off the Rabbi’s restraining hand.
“’Is something wrong’, he asks!” bellowed Reb Mordechai. “Murderer! Thief! Destroyer in the night!”
“Quiet!” cried Rabbi Yehoshua. “You shall not say another word in accusation, Reb Mordechai Thaler! I forbid it!”
No one ever heard the Rabbi speak so forcefully, and even Mordechai Thaler was stunned. He clamped his mouth shut, but one could almost see the steam still streaming from his eyes.
“During the night,” the Rabbi told Yankel, “a great deal of damage was done to Mr. Thaler’s auto-mo-bile. Do you know anything about it?”
Yankel stood in silent astonishment. He looked from the Rabbi to Thaler, to each of the townsmen. “I see,” he murmured. “Mr. Thaler thinks that I did it because I am about to lose the job of transporting him on his trips. I may be only a wagoneer, but I am not stupid.” He paused. “Pardon me a moment,” he added quietly. “I must feed my horse.”
They watched him fill a bag with oats and place it in front of the horse. With a grateful whinny, the beast bent its head to eat. Only then did Yankel turn to the others.
“Rabbi Yehoshua, I want to tell you,” began Yankel, “that I know nothing about it. I am ready to swear on my parents’ graves, on a sefer Torah….”
“I did not ask you to swear,” interrupted the Rabbi, “and I shall permit no oaths! Simply say that you damaged that auto-mo-bile or that you did not.”
Yankel looked into Mordechai Thaler’s eyes and said, “I did no damage to that auto-mo-bile. I don't even know what the damage was.”
Now the Rabbi turned to Thaler, “Reb Mordechai, do you accept Yankel Branover’s statement?”
The color seeped from Thaler’s face and the heat left his eyes. “I accept it.”
Then a calm, cool voice said from the back of the crowd, “I did it, Rabbi. I, Asher Wallfisch, admit that I damaged Mordechai Thaler’s monstrosity.”
Even the horse responded to the sudden silence and wagged its head up and down. Everyone stared at Wallfisch, tall, undisturbed, eyes a bit glittery, that’s all.
The Rabbi asked, “Why, Reb Asher?”
“Last evening,” answered Asher Wallfisch, “after I had seen that machine, I went to my Bible and my Talmud. I searched for any reference, even the smallest remez, to an auto-mo-bile. I found wagons – like the ones Joseph sent to his father Jacob in Canaan. I found chariots – like the ones that Pharaoh and his army rode in when they chased the Children of Israel into the Red Sea. I even found the mercavah – that vision of the prophet Yechezkel of some kind of machine in heaven. No commentary on these passages says anything about an auto-mo-bile on earth. This machine is an abomination, it is the work of the sitre acher, the dark ‘Other Side’. It is an instrument that one day will destroy us all!” And then he simply stopped talking.
“I remember, Leib,” Rabbi Yehoshua said to me, “that my eyes filled with tears for your father – the lost, lonely hero of the ways of his father’s and his grandfather’s Torah. I said, ‘Let us all go home. The damage done is apparently only surface damage. The machine, Reb Mordechai says, will still operate. If there are monetary damages to pay, we’ll organize a beth din and settle the matter. For now, let us go home.’”
“Of course, Leib, I could not let the matter drop there. So the very next day being Shabbos, I gave a sermon. I knew that the entire congregation would be amazed, because I give sermons only on Shabbos haGadol before Passover, and Shabbos Shuvah before Yom Kippur. It was my intention to give the matter the greatest importance.
“I don’t’ remember anymore the exact words, but it went something like this:
“In the name of God and Torah, Reb Asher Wallfisch, a learned and respected, and yes, beloved, member of this town, did something that he thought was right. I rise to tell you that he was wrong. To take many kilograms of inanimate steel and put it together in such a way as to permit a human being to move it when he wants and where he wants is truly a miracle. That God gave it to the mind of man to create this miracle is one of the many mysteries in God’s universe. It seems to me that God has decided to leave creations and miracles of the future to man. It is enough that He endowed him with the mind and gave him the materials to fashion miracles. We dare not insult God by refusing them.
“It may be that the creations of man will not have the wonder and the holiness of God. It may be, as Asher Wallfisch believes, that man’s creations will turn upon him and destroy him. But even that is God’s will and God’s plan. Meanwhile, we have been permitted a glimpse into the grandeur of God’s world – the magnificence outside the mind of man and the potentiality inside the mind of man. Let us therefore pronounce the blessing that we have been permitted to reach the time and season to see them.”
The Rabbi’s study was in darkness when his voice stopped. I could barely make out his face.
He broke the silence once more. “Goodbye, Leib. Go back to America and take Rena and her family with you.” He paused, and I felt his last words were not yet said.
“You know, Leib, I have a premonition that your father was right. That automobile was the sign that the whole world is changing. That we are being given over to machines. And I fear, like your father said, that they will yet destroy us.”
There was nothing to be said to that. I left him. Next day, my sister, my brother-in-law and their two children, and I set out for America. Of course, now it is obvious, that as far as Holoscheitz is concerned, my father was right, and the Rabbi knew it even then as a coming truth. I don't think I have to draw pictures to be understood.
Copyright © Dan Vogel