I raise my hand in cheder and ask the teacher: “Why are jews good at running?”
“Because we are excellent prey and what good is prey if it does not give the hunter a good chase for his money?”
“Rabbi, people tell me I am a good student. Why have we been chosen to be such good runners when all the world and all the countries have people who can run as well as we?”
“I could sit down on the steps of this very school and explain to you for hours all the whys for your question. You know, you are one of my best students. I will go into this little bit more, just for you.”
I listen to him as part of me is running about the maze of streets in this shtetl, in terror, and what is terror? Terror is undefined, as ineffable as Jehovah. It is Moses aghast and in awe at the burning bush.
The rabbi, his piercing hazel eyes looking at me, his beart salt and pepper, a slightly mottled complexion, prepares to give me an answer as if he is unfurling his tallis for the prayer and to cast it about his shoulders.
“Schmuel, I will think aloud in riddles, I will speak unclearly clearly, I will be indirect, for what I have to say must be learned in the shadows, in corners, where insects gather. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Well, let me recast the question you pose so that we may apply reason to examine ints joints, the mortises and tenons of the arguments you place forth to your teacher, who is not a wise man but a stupid one either. I am like you, Schmuel, half smart, the half composed of quarters and eighths of human knowledge and learnings. I am both emotional and ignorant, wise and not a little slow. I am you, Schmuel, and you are like me. I am like your parents and they are like me. We are Jews, and we share a common learning, do you understand, Schmuel?”
Before I could answer in my harried mind now filled with Talmudic stories, apparently, I brush against an abandoned fish cart and fall again upon the cobble stones.Rising, I look about and see a huge hole which is just a street and caftan flurrying I run like a wily two-legged Jew crow.
“So, to your question which has many parts to it, but given that we are living among Nazis I must be quick, intense and replete with razor-edge thought, for none of us has time. And that is in your question. Our time is used up.”
I felt urgency in all that, and his anxiety crept out of his body like a slinking cat crossing a corner late at night.
“You must understand that thought and actions have levels, like buildings. Even the Nazis give us reasons which are on the higher stories of a building but what they are really expressing lies in the sub basement. I ti shere they don’t even go, but like heat that rises from the furnace it drives all their actions.”
Here the rabbi paused. “I have caught myself, Schmuel, talking to you as if I have all the time in the world. We both don’t, my son. We have no time left. And I must get to the answer you required although you and others have learned well from me that all questions give birth only to more questions. Answers are dead chickens in the barnyard. The question is the butcher’s knife.”
“So, rabbi, you have an answer.”
“Giggling gently, the good man saidm “No, Schmuel, I only have observations. Will that do?”
I nodded.
“Well, then, let me gather my thoughtss and give them to you, a kind of Decalogue, if you will. It need not be 10 observations, does it, Schmuel?”
I smiled. I always enjoyed his ability to self-amused as a teacher, charming.
All this craziness, all this linear dialogue went through my mind, and as I fled it did serve a purpose. It served to lower my anxiety somewhat, so that a part of my emotional self could decide rationally what direction to take in a flight that had no compass, only urgency and propulsion as a human being.
The rabbi returned to mind.
“The Jew, Schmuel, is all of us, even the Nazis. Fortunately symbols rarely take human shape, but we have been so used as a symbol throughtout the Christian centuries that we have become realized.Do you understand?”
“Rabbi, I understand too well. I am being chased right now.”
“And what do you realize?”
“That I am no longer a symbol of something else, nor am I a metaphor. I am a human being being hunted down by other human beings which is innate in human beings since time on this planet began.”
“Keep that to yourself, it is your north star, I will go on. When human beings run amok, which you feel in your anguished and anxious self as you flee through the streets, reason has died, expired in the soul of society. Nothing will work. Ask for charity. It will be denied you. Ask for assistance or a helping hand. Denied you. Ask for succor. No, never. Ask for touch, a kind word, the shadow of another human being to hide beneath and that too will be denied you.”
I Understand, I say out loud.
What a fool, I counter, as I realize I might give myself away. Finding an access street that I think, believe, feel may lead outside of the village and into the woods, I run here, hoping that the rabbi might return to mind.
“All reason is gone, all social contracts are burned away. Human beings, like you, running amok through the street, cannot expect trust. Touch is disallowed. People avert their gazes at your presence. You are demonized, turned into a thing. You are an object now, a ball bouncing across a street.”
“I know all that, rabbi. I have sensed that. I am a victim of this right now. What other of your observations will you give me?”
“So, I need not work hard on coming up with ten?”
“I’ll accept just a handful to get me through this awful day, these awful moments.”
“You cannot escape terror or being terrorized. It is an unusual state, one that Jews have experienced throughout the Diaspora. All the words in the Tasmud cannot help here. For the Talmud is dead and you are burningly alive, are you not, Schmuel?”
“I am living terror.”
“Mark me, well, my son, all my thinking, all my years as a rabbi and as a human being, will come down to these few words.”
“I am listening.”
“When they capture you and most likely they will as you run as a haunted and crazed Jew in our shtetl, when they torture you or beat you alive, the only thing you have as a human being, which far surpasses being a Jew, but something we adore as a people, is your mind. Unfortunately I must tell you not to trust solely in your feelings or emotions, but only that lame tool we call intelligence. I know that it is hard to grasp when I have told you that intelligemnce had fled the world like a madman in his nightgown fleeing his nurses.”
“Rabbi, tell me quickly, for I feel, like Samson, the Philistones may be upon me.”
“Use your mind as a compass. I have no more to say.”
“What good is a compass, rabbi, if I don’t know what direction to take. Look at me now. I am running hither and thither, trying to escape. What good is a compass to me now? Are you so constipated with the Talmud that you don’t see reality?”
Well, that was unkind, but I felt it.
“Dear, dear Schmuel, I will leave you now as you run like a rabbit through our village with a Talmudic twist on what we have spoken about. You don’t need a compass to find direction. You don’t need a chicken to have chicken dinner. So what am I telling you?”
“I am the compass.”
The rabbi disappeared from mind, his advice Talmudic, insightful and clever, and absolutely useless.
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