was located on a bad street and presided over by a strict reformist whose views were unpopular with the rich families. But in the rear of the shul, behind a rope separating them from the rest of the worshipers, a group of women of the night huddled together on a low bench, following along as the zogerke translated the Siddur into Yiddish for them.
I washed my hands again and joined the service just as the first balkoyre was called up to read from the Torah. On the first day of Pesach we always read the part where Moses tells the Israelites to smear the blood of a lamb on their doors to keep the Angel of Death away. You might think that such divine protection allowed them to sleep easily. And yet they remained awake and vigilant all through the night, listening to the howling wind as the Destroyer walked the streets.
I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep through that, either.
The second reading was the passage from Bamidbor that commands us to do no manner of servile work on the fifteenth day of Nisan, just in case I had forgotten what a bad job I was doing of keeping His commandments.
We also read the passage from the prophets where Joshua circumcises all the tribesmen of Israel with razor-sharp bits of flint stone (some of the men cringed involuntarily at those words), then a captain of the Lord’s army appears with a sword in his hand and tells Joshua how to defeat the people of Jericho, who had shut their gates against the children of Israel so that no one could go in or out.
And when the walls fell, the Israelites destroyed everything in the city—men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses—everything except for a harlot named Rakhav and her family, who had been kind enough to harbor our messengers.
It made me wonder if it was really such a great idea building walls around people, what ever the reason. Sure, it offered you short-term protection. But on the other hand, your enemies knew right where to find you, all crammed together like sheep in a pen.
Rabbi Loew finally lifted the silver pointer from the sacred scroll and laid it aside, then he gave his sermon in plain Yiddish.
Oddly enough, he didn’t say much about the current standoff with the Christians, beyond reminding us that no nation has the right to rule over another and that every nation has the right to be free. Instead, he suggested that certain members of the community bore some of the blame for our dismal situation, having sought a false sense of stability by siding with the wealthy burghers who were nothing but a pack of wolves who always wanted more and more of everything.
No wonder the shul was half-empty.
Then he drove the nail in deeper by railing against the leaders of the community for not attending to the needs of the poor.
“Rava said that the righteous could create a world, if they wanted to,” he declared, his words resounding off the cold stone walls. “But what do we find here in the Yidnshtot, where a handful of rich Jews own two-thirds of the property, while the rest of the community owns a little sliver of nothing? I have told you many times over the years that the only legitimate use of property is to provide us with our basic needs, and that any surplus wealth must be used to benefit the whole community. Doesn’t the Lord promise us that there shall be no poor men among you?”
Dvorim.
He finished with the usual prayers for the health and well-being of Emperor Rudolf II and the rest of our Christian rulers. We had just started a Psalm—the one that goes Vatabeyt eyni beshuroy, bakomim olay mereyim tishmanoh oznoy (My eye has seen the downfall of my adversaries, and my ears have heard the torture of the evil ones who rise against me)—when a shopkeeper’s assistant came rushing in and announced that a royal carriage had just pulled up at the South Gate with orders to take Rabbi Loew up the hill to meet with Emperor Rudolf.
Rabbi Loew interrupted the Psalm amid hushed gasps and told me to get Rabbi Gans so that he could include this momentous event in his chronicles, then he directed the congregation back to the verses.
Rabbi Gans lived somewhere near the Pinkas Gate, but I couldn’t bring myself to cut through the cemetery again, so I had to run all the