The Mystics of Mile End Read Online Free PDF Page B

drop of water can make its way into a stone, the Torah can make its way into my heart! The next day, he went to school with his youngest child to learn how to read the alphabet. By the end of his life, he had the most knowledge and the most students of any Torah scholar in the world.
    That night, at dinner, Dad asked again what me and Sammy were learning in school. He wanted to know how Sammy was liking King Lear so far, but she just stared down at her skirt, so instead I told him all about Ms. Davidson and how she went for bike rides in the middle of the night and wore happy colors and really made you think. After a few minutes, he yawned. I could tell he was extremely bored but I kept on talking because that was the only way, because if I kept on talking, word after word, drop after drop, sooner or later a space would open up.
    O n my way home from school in the last week of May, I saw Mr. Katz sitting on his lawn in between the old oak tree and a second tree trunk that seemed to have sprouted up overnight. But when I got closer, I saw that it wasn’t a real trunk at all, it wasthe hundreds of toilet paper rolls that we’d painted brown tied together with dental floss. I went over and said, “Hello, Mr. Katz.”
    â€œHello, Lev.”
    â€œAre you making a tree, by any chance?”
    After a very long time, he said, “Yes.” Then he grabbed my wrist and pulled down hard so I kind of fell onto my knees on the grass. He whispered, “Can you keep a secret?”
    I rubbed my wrist and said, “Yes.”
    â€œYou promise?”
    â€œI promise.”
    â€œThis is not an ordinary tree I am making.”
    I dropped my wrist and said, “What kind of tree is it?”
    â€œThis,” he said, “this is the Tree of Knowledge.”
    T he next day, I decided to ask Mr. Glassman about the Tree of Knowledge, because all I knew was that it was in the Garden of Eden and that eating from it was what got Adam and Eve kicked out. I waited for Torah class to be over, and then I went up to him and said, “Mr. Glassman, I’ve been thinking about how you said it’s never too early to start preparing for your bar mitzvah, and I was wondering if I could study with you some days after school?”
    Smiling, he pinched my cheek and said, “ Geshmack! ” He told me we could start right away, so I followed him home.
    When Mrs. Glassman opened the door, she said, “Two times I get to see Lev in the same month, tu-tu-tu kineahora, but if I knew my Chaim was going to be schlepping you here every day I would prepare for you more things to eat!” She told me to sit at the kitchen table and brought us hot tea even though it was a zillion degrees outside. She said, “Drink!” so I drank.
    Mr. Glassman asked when my Hebrew birthday was so he could calculate when my bar mitzvah would fall during the year. That way he’d know what Torah portion I’d have to read. I said, “I don’tactually know when it is because my dad says that calendar’s based on a backward idea of when the world was created, which scientists are still iffy about but which was definitely more than six thousand years ago.”
    Mr. Glassman raised his eyebrows, then shook his head and sighed.
    Since what I really wanted to learn about was the Tree of Knowledge, I asked Mr. Glassman if we could study Genesis instead. His face lit up. He said, “Begin at the beginning, excellent idea. I see you’re just as thorough as your sister!”
    We started reading the first chapter of Genesis, but after an hour we had only gotten up to the part about the grass being created. Even though I wanted to ask about the Tree right away, Mr. Glassman could see the toilet paper roll version of it right from his window and I didn’t want to make him suspicious that maybe I was trying to help Mr. Katz.
    The reason why was that Mr. Glassman was not the Hasidic kind of Jew that believes in