The Parable and Its Lesson: A Novella Read Online Free Page B

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.
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    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.
    The Rabbi’s wife heard about this and went to her, as did several neighbors, and eventually the whole town came. They all began to speculate and spin all kinds of tales, tales which were not so much implausible as improbable. When the speculation stopped, confusion set in. How could it be that the night before, he was seen in the synagogue, and in the morning he is gone? If he had started out for home after the evening service, did he disappear on the way? It was all quite baffling. Our Master seemed removed from the whole thing. Finally he bestirred himself and said, “It is time for the morning service.”
    The passing days brought little hope. All kinds of testimonies were offered, and rumors too. Our Master received the bearers of these rumors respectfully so as to keep people looking for new information. He spent a lot of time talking to the local peasants who, he knew, came to him only for the brandy he would give them. The more outlandish their talk, the more our Master paid attention to it. For example, a Gentile who had too much to drink told him of a Jew who burned a book revered by the Jews. Our Master sat there and hung on every word that came out of that Gentile’s mouth.
    Our Master could see the agony of his little relative who was not yet fifteen and was already an agunah. He put aside all his civic affairs and obligations and even his regular lectures on Maimonides and Alfasi and began to look into the matter of freeing this agunah. He had, apparently, abandoned all hope that Zlateh’s husband would ever return. He searched for some ruling that would permit this woman to be freed from the chains of the marital bond. But no such ruling could he find.
    Our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, possessed prophetic powers that enabled him to divine that Aaron was dead. If he were alive, he reasoned, the law would be clear: it would be an open-and-shut case for all the rabbinical authorities and I would not even look for a way to permit her to marry where there is none. Furthermore, he ruminated, when I ponder the legal status of this poor girl, my heart and my head are divided. My head knows the law on the books while my heart tells me that maybe, or quite possibly, she is no agunah. Yet so long as no one comes forward to