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

say that they saw him dead and buried, she remains a married woman plain and simple, and there is no way to declare her eligible to remarry. Can you imagine the compassion that saintly man had for this last surviving member of his family, a girl not yet fifteen who faced the prospect of living out her years as an agunah? No, his heart told him, her husband is dead. But what could he do? Neither a Gentile’s idle talk nor a rabbi’s prophetic powers are sufficient to free an agunah. Our Master conferred with all the illustrious rabbis of Poland and Lithuania, and not a single one of them could champion the cause of freeing this girl from her shackled state.
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    We are now at Monday morning of the week of the Torah portion Behukotai . Our Master is being called up to the Torah and I am helping him step up to the bimah. I looked at him and saw that he was in another world and struggling to get back to this one. I think to myself: he is trying to get his mind off that poor girl’s predicament so he can concentrate on the blessings over the Torah.
    After the reading, as I was helping him go down the steps and return to his place, he indicated that he wanted to tell me something. When he had taken off his tefillin, I went over to him. He looked up and said, “Ah, here you are.” He put his tefillin back in their bag, but he still had his talit on. He looked at me again and said to me these exact words: “I know that people do not frighten you. Go home and have breakfast and then come to me.” Since he had instructed me to go home and eat, I felt no compulsion to stand there and wait for him to summon me.
    I went home. My wife, may she rest in peace, was still alive then. While we were having breakfast she commented that I looked preoccupied. I wanted to tell her all that happened, but not everything one sees in the beit midrash has to be told to one’s wife. I said to her, “I’m in a hurry now. Our Master is waiting for me.”
    “Why?”
    “Maybe he wants me to deliver something for him.”
    She looked at me and said nothing. As I was leaving she said, “Do you remember that incident with the tax collector and the melamed?”
    “Something like that you do not forget.”
    “That must be what is going on now. He wants you to deliver a message for him.”
    “If that is what it is, I would have been the first to know. Besides, a man is not banned by the community unless he has been summoned twice and refused to go both times. That tax collector paid for his sin in this world on top of what awaits him in the world to come. No one defies our Master. When he calls for his shamash, the shamash goes.”
    Now what was the story of the tax collector? There was a wealthy tax collector who hired a melamed to teach his son. The melamed toiled with the boy all winter. When it got to be spring and the month of Nissan was approaching, the melamed got ready to go home to his wife. He went to the tax collector to receive his wages. The tax collector, however, first wanted to examine the son to see what he had learned. He asked him if he knew how to say the kaddish. The boy could not. In fact, the boy had no idea of what the melamed had taught him, never mind what he had not. The tax collector became enraged at the melamed and paid him not a penny. The melamed stated yelling and screaming at him. “You want your payment?” said the tax collector. “Well here it is!” And he slapped him in the face. The melamed took the tax collector to the rabbinical court, but he did not show up. Our Master then instructed me to go and tell the man that if there is no legal accounting here below, there certainly is one up above, and if he would not appear before the local rabbinical court he would absolutely be hauled before the beit din of Gehinnom. So I went to him without the least fear of him or his dogs or his servants. I remarked to my wife that this story shows that if our Master himself fulfills the commandment in the Torah “ Fear no man