A Jewish Journey. Sheldon Cohen
PART 2
THE PALE
(1843-1904)
CHAPTER 1
Tiktin, Poland (1843)
Seven young boys, aged ten to twelve, sat on a low hill under a large shade tree while Rabbi Shepsel Tepperovitch paced back and forth in front of them. He viewed his students as the future of Judaism, and it was his mission to keep that vision alive. He was a fighter in God’s army, struggling to negate the powerful forces marshaled against his Jewish beliefs. This was the reason for his existence.
He took his class outdoors this beautiful, sunny day. There were only a few clouds in a light blue sky. Today he would teach his boys Jewish mythology.
The rabbi was a short, muscular man whose hair was black with early signs of gray, his mustache was black and his long beard was at least one-half white. The contrasting shades made his dark-complected, oval face appear like an artist’s portrait. His eyes were hazel colored and his pupils stared at you with a force that demanded your complete attention. The rays of the sun and the shadow of the tree outlined his face and prominent nose and caused his long beard to take on a flickering luminescence that seemed to extend around his face. The students took this to be another one of the many signs attesting to the fact that the rabbi was indeed a favored one of God. “Before we talk about Jewish mythology I want to ask a question,” he said.
The students looked at him with anticipation.
As his hands and fingers danced in the air, he sang in a loud tenor voice, “Shema Yisraeil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echod.” He paused, waiting for reaction from the students.
There was none.
“What did I say, boys?”
Several students answered together. “Hear, oh Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is One.”
He nodded his head and smiled one of his rare smiles, “Yes, you’ve all said this prayer before, and by now I hope that it is in your brain forever. Let’s continue with the rest of the Shema. And you shall love the Lord with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them to your children, and you shall talk of them when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise.” He paused and looked at the students, his hands and arms now stilled and brought down at his sides.
“When you lie down and when you rise? What does that mean? How do we follow this commandment?” he asked staring at each of his students in turn.
They did not respond, so he continued. “We recite the Shema in the evening when we lie down to sleep and in the morning when we get up. This means that we must always think of the Shema. Then it says, “You shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. How do we do that?”
The smallest one of the group, a bright-eyed youngster named Yaakov answered. “That’s the phylacteries with the prayers inside that we wrap around our arm and head to remind us to keep the laws.”
“Good, Yaakov.” He then continued with, “And you shall write them on the door posts of your house and on your gates. And what does that…?” A hand shot up before the word was out of the rabbi’s mouth. “The Mezuzah,” interrupted Ze’ev. “That’s what we touch when we go into the house.”
“That’s right, Ze’ev. You see how what we do is connected to these prayers?”
“Yes, rabbi,” said Ze’ev, smiling and nodding.
“And who owns your house?”
“My father,” said Ze’ev.
“What does the Mezuzah mean?”
Silence.
“The answer is that the Mezuzah reminds us that God owns our house. Then we will keep our house a holy place where everybody lives in peace with God and with nature and with each other. That’s why we touch the Mezuzah on the doorpost and kiss our fingers when we come and go. We do that to remember to live with His rules.”
The rabbi looked at his boys in turn. He stopped speaking for a moment of silence to bring them to attention if their thoughts had strayed. He found these pauses to be an effective method of returning the boys to the concentration that, at this age, they were prone to lose.
“Yes, now you’re getting the idea,” he said. “There’s always a reason for those rituals we take for granted. They remind us that we are but children of the One God, and we are the people who brought this truth to the world. If we follow the One God there’ll be hope for all. It’s a blessing to recite the Shema because it means that we accept God’s guidance. The Shema must be the last prayer we say before we die.”
The students nodded yes.
“You know that Moses received the Torah from Sinai.”
“Yes,” they all said as one.
“How many books are there in the Torah?”
“Five,” they said together.
“God gave Moses the Torah, right?”
The students looked at each other wondering why the rabbi asked such an obvious question. Then together they nodded their heads.
“Yes, you know the Torah is God’s laws given to Moses for the Jews.”
Facing one boy the rabbi approached him and said, “And tell me Laban, where did God get the Torah?”
“God wrote it?” answered Laban with more of a question then an answer.
“Ah, good, you remember your lessons. When did he write it, Saul?”
“He wrote it with Moses on the mountain,” answered Saul with confidence.
The rabbi turned to the entire group and asked, “Is Saul right?”
“Yes,” some answered in a quiet, tentative manner, knowing that when the rabbi asked a question in this way there was more to come.
“I want all of you to think for a minute. How do you build a house?”
“With wood and bricks and stones,” said Saul.
“That’s right, but is that what you do? First decide to build a house and then go in the forest and fetch wood and stones and just go ahead and build it?”
“Yes,” they said after a brief pause and unsure of the answer.
“Ah, the brilliance of my young students,” he said nodding his head and waving his short fingers in the air. “First you decide to build a house. Then you get wood, bricks, stones, and put it up. Aren’t you forgetting something?”
The students knew the answer was yes, but no one would volunteer an answer as they all looked at the rabbi.
“Where will you put the wood and bricks and stones? How will you know where they go? What rooms will you have in your house? How big will they be? How many rooms will you have? What about windows?” he said pointing and looking at each boy in turn.
“We can build it any way we want. It depends how we like it,” was the consensus answer.
“Will you take measurements and decide how the house should look and how many rooms there should be and what size to make them and what direction the windows will face in order to get the sun’s rays to help warm the house?” The rabbi paused to watch his students reflect. “Now that you’ve made these decisions, I hope that you’ll draw up a set of plans to tell you what to do.”
“Yes,” they answered, at last understanding the point the rabbi was trying to make. “We’ll first make a set