from the Book of Job, offering hospitality to all newcomers: No stranger ever passed the night in the street, my door was always open to any guest. The text was in Hebrew only, however. Rabbi Aaron may have been openly welcoming strangers, but he wasn’t crazy. Any strangers who wanted a bed for the night had better know how to read Biblical Hebrew.
All that mystical talk with Langweil must have gotten inside my skull, because as I crossed the threshold, I felt a prickling under my skin as if I were leaping over a chasm, sensing for the briefest moment what the Kabbalists call the presence of God’s absolute Being between the gaps in our experience of the world.
I was breathing hard, but somehow I made it up to the second floor without upsetting the balance of the universe. I listened outside the door while waiting for my heart to slow down. They must have been discussing the tractate Niddah, because they were talking about how a new bride who notices some spotting after performing her marital duty may be declared ritually clean, because the blood did not issue from “the source,” a polite term for the uterus. One of the students raised a difficult question about a married woman who still bleeds from “that place” during intercourse.
Rabbi Aaron answered in classic Talmudic fashion, by posing another question. “Rabbi Simeon ben Gamaliel ruled that the blood of a wound that issues from the source is unclean. On the other hand, Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Nasi and our Masters declared that such blood is clean. Why the discrepancy?”
Before today I would have nodded in approval, but now the high-level debate of such a fine legal point seemed almost alien to me. We needed to act, and swiftly, or else I could practically guarantee that pretty soon we’d all be seeing plenty of blood, and that nobody would have the time to debate whether it was clean or unclean.
Rabbi Aaron wasn’t pleased with the interruption, but if I learned anything in the old school it was how to kiss up to people I can’t stand, so I bowed humbly and wished him a gutn Shabbes and did my best to avoid the charges of “working” on the Sabbath by confessing that I was here because I was lacking a crucial bit of knowledge that only he and his students could provide for me.
An intellectual problem to solve? Nothing could interest them more. They rose from their benches and formed a loose semicircle around me, asking for details. They all had the same closely cropped hair, like some splinter sect of reverse-Nazirites, as if every applicant had to chop off his hair to join their little study group.
I told them I needed to know if anyone had seen a butcher’s cart pass by that morning, just before sunrise, heading south toward Federn’s shop, or if they remembered seeing anything else out of the ordinary, no matter how insignificant it might seem. I reminded them that the Holy One, Blessed is He, did not create a single thing that is useless (Tractate Shabbes), and that even a snake, a scorpion, a frog, or a gnat may carry out His mission (Breyshis Raboh).
They nodded vigorously and told me that they had seen a number of omens that day, bombarding me with stories of how this one felt his foot or his palm itch, or that one saw a pot of milk boil over and spill on the fire, or broke a shoelace, or heard the maid singing before breakfast. All bad signs, apparently.
A young student named Bloch, with short blond hair and bright blue eyes, told me in all seriousness that he had heard thunder, and that thunder on a Friday means the Angel of Death is walking the streets of the ghetto searching for victims.
Then a skinny fellow with big ears and deep-set eyes named Schmerz claimed to have seen it all unfolding, from the swarm of bloody rats to the mob of angry Christians torching Federn’s shop. He described the men in the cart that nearly ran me down as a big man with a wrestler’s body and a driver whose face was half-hidden by a black mustache and beard. He said he had seen them before. But as I pressed him for details, he got that possessed look that I’ve seen in newly minted converts as he explained that these events were harbingers of the final split between the Chosen People and the goyim,