Moses that the Christians call Exodus, until my eyes fell on the rabbi’s analysis of two key Biblical phrases. According to the Maharal, the first phrase, “they worked Israel with rigorous labor,” refers only to physical enslavement, but the second, “they embittered their lives,” suggests a different level of meaning entirely—that slavery ate at their souls, until the Israelites ended up internalizing their condition and believing that they deserved to be slaves, a much more insidious form of servility that was passed from one generation to the next like a bad case of smallpox.
The words struck a chord deep within me, as if Rabbi Loew had looked directly into my soul and plucked it like a string. Somehow I had always known the truth of this observation, because the lesson applied to me as well. I, too, had once believed in the inevitability of my place on the bottom rung of the social ladder in this world, but no one had ever explained it so succinctly. And it played a central role in the festival of Pesach—the idea that every Jew in every generation must regard himself as having personally made the exodus out of Egypt. The hardest part was shedding that inbred slave-like mentality.
Right. Then comes the “easy” part: wandering in the wilderness for forty years, looking for a place to call home.
In any case, a rabbi capable of such insight clearly deserved every bit of his storied reputation.
And I sure felt like a fool when it finally dawned on me why no one would tell me where the rabbi was. He was, you should pardon the expression, in the beys ha-kises. The house of thrones.
I wondered how long I’d have to wait for the great rabbi. The sages in the Talmud say, “Who prolongs his stay in a privy lengthens his days and years.” But Rabbi Loew wasn’t the staunchest Talmudist, and I wasn’t sure where the Kabbalists stood on the issue.
I asked the boy, “Can you tell me something? What exactly is a daler?”
“You mean a Reichsthaler? It’s a huge piece of silver. Worth a week’s pay to a skilled craftsman.”
“Or a month’s pay to a shleper like you,” said Isaac Ha-Kohen, without looking up.
The rabbi next to Ha-Kohen shook his head and tsk-tsked his neighbor’s unnecessary comment, and told us that the leading artists and scientists in keyser Rudolf’s court made as much as three thousand dalers a year. I looked into the other man’s face and held on it, until I remembered the face thinner, the beard shorter and darker.
“Rabbi Dovid Gans?”
“You know each other?” said Rabbi Ha-Kohen.
I said, “We studied under Rabbi Moyshe Isserles, may his name be a light unto nations.”
Rabbi Gans laid down his book and squinted at me. Then his eyes brightened. “My God, it is you. I see you’ve gone a little gray since your days with the fraydenkers.”
And you’ve put on about fifty pounds, I thought. “What can I say? We were just kids back then.”
“Like our young prodigy, master Yontef Lipmann here.”
I looked at the thirteen-year-old boy.
“No, I was more like his age,” I said, indicating Yankev ben Khayim, who sat before an open book, absently stroking his wispy teenage beard.
“If you were a student of Isserles, you must have showed promise,” said Isaac Ha-Kohen. “How come I haven’t heard of you?”
“Because the angels who sing my praises do it beyond the range of normal hearing.”
Ha-Kohen sat frozen a moment, as the back door creaked open, and measured footsteps trod the length of the back corridor. Blue-veined fingers drew back the curtain and the great Rabbi Loew entered the room rattling a jar of almonds in his left hand. He was in his late seventies (some say his early eighties), with a full white beard. He wore two layers of heavy black robes under an academic gown with a black rabbit’s fur collar, and a soft octagonal hat with thick silver threads radiating from the center, dividing it into eight slices like a velvet pie. His shaky hands displayed all the frailties of age, but his eagle’s glare declared to all within range that his eyes were still sharp and his mind was still quick. All the Jews in the city knew of his commanding presence, his yikhes, his stature. Even his enemies respected his opinions, feared his tongue, and called him the MaHaRal mi-Prag, Our Teacher and Master Rabbi Loew of Prague. He was said to be descended from King David.