Light Fell Read Online Free PDF Page B

there.”
    The two men spoke for hours. Joseph privately rejoiced at this new and rare friendship with a man in whose company he could feel completely at ease and yet challenged intellectually, free to speak Hebrew or English or both in one sentence and free to speak his mind about the rigors and joys of Orthodox Judaism in the same breath as the glories of Western culture. Free to admit that a houseful of small children was daunting and free to hint that being a husband was not quite the joyful experience he had hoped for. Each of Rabbi Yoel’s questions nudged him toward truths lying dormant in his soul, while his own queries slowly unknotted the rabbi’s reluctant tongue.
    After they had drained a second pot of tea, the rabbi fetched two crystal shot glasses and a bottle of schnapps. He filled both glasses to the rim. “Here’s to true friendship,” he said, then whispered the appropriate prayer and downed the contents of his glass.
    Joseph did likewise, then leveled his gaze at the rabbi. “And what exactly,” he said, his eyes watering from the schnapps, “ is true friendship to you?”
    Rabbi Yoel—large, gentle, troubled—frowned. “First let me tell you what it is not. It is not students who wish to gnaw at your brains, not colleagues who talk sweetly but shoot malicious glances at you. It is not sycophants who worship you or doubters who wish to trip you up. It is not even one’s children, not one’s wife, not one’s siblings. It is not schoolmates gathered across long years of poring over texts together.”
    Joseph’s brain felt as though it were bobbing on a stormy sea. Each time it surfaced, some new face appeared: a bearded rabbi, a small boy with side locks, a wigged woman. He fought hard to quell the effects of the alcohol and pay attention.
    “True friendship,” Rabbi Yoel continued, almost oblivious to Joseph, “should be a near-perfect pairing. Of minds and interests. Of caring and willingness to do for the other. A physical ease, too.” He seemed to notice Joseph again and assessed him. “I haven’t experienced the beauty of true friendship. Have you, Joseph?”
    Joseph closed his eyes for a moment. His brain was no longer bobbing and the images had disappeared. It was only Rabbi Yoel’s face he saw now, kind and handsome and inquisitive, and when he opened his eyes the man’s expression matched what he saw in his mind’s eye and was awaiting an answer.
    “Never,” he said.
    Neither man spoke for several moments. Rabbi Yoel filled their glasses. He smiled broadly. “So, friend, why don’t you tell me about that book you’re writing?”
    Joseph and Rabbi Yoel discussed Poet and Prophet in great detail and the rabbi was only too happy to offer suggestions. And then the rabbi told Joseph about his latest project, a study of the Talmudic expression nafal nehora .
    “It’s Aramaic, literally means ‘light fell’ or ‘light was sown.’ It’s used in several strange and wonderful stories in the Babylonian Talmud.” He lifted his glass of schnapps, saluted Joseph with it, and downed it in one go. After inhaling deeply and refilling his glass, he continued. “In one story, Rabbi Amram the Righteous, a judge and rabbinical decision maker at the court of the Babylonian Exilarch in Nehardea, is asked to house, in his attic, some Jewish women who had fallen into the hands of gentiles and whose status had not yet been decided—whether, under certain circumstances, they should be permitted to return to their husbands after being freed from captivity. The ladderlike stairs to the attic were removed so that no man could ascend and take advantage of their precarious situation before their fate had been determined. But there was an opening that led to the attic, and when one of the women walked near it, nafal nehora —light fell—and Rabbi Amram could see that light from below. With the power of sudden arousal he took the stairs, which normally required ten or more men to move, lifted