INTRODUCTION

WHENEVER I AM asked to conjure up an image of the classic East European Jew in America I think instantly of my father’s father, my Zayde. It was he who set me on the path of Yiddishkeit ( Jewish living and learning). It was he who rooted me in the tradition that shapes the person I have become. And yet he intended none of this. As far back as I can recall he was simply an old man struggling to make sense of his life in the context of his faith and tradition.

Zayde dressed in black. Black pants, dark suspenders, white shirt with bow tie, black jacket. My most cogent image is of him seated on a hard wood bench built into a corner of his whitewashed apartment reading from a worn and cracked black leather notebook. The pages of the book were yellow and tattered. Pieces of brittle paper often flaked off as he turned pages. Zayde would carefully gather these up and stuff them into the book close to the binding. Along with these flakes a host of other paper scraps stuck out from the book at odd angles.

Zayde kept the book in his jacket pocket. I imagine it never left his side, and while he read it often, he shared it with no one. I had always assumed it was an old book of Psalms.

When Zayde died at the age of ninety-nine I was studying at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. I did not fly home to attend the funeral, and was not around when my father disposed of his father’s things. The black notebook disappeared.

Two decades later, while rummaging through some family stuff in my parents’ basement, I came across a shoebox filled with some of Zayde’s things. In it was the black notebook. I recognized it instantly and was flooded with the images of Zayde poring over its tightly inked pages. I took it upstairs, sat in the living room by the bay window, and opened the book. It was not a book of Psalms.

Zayde’s notebook contained a series of letters from his father’s rebbe, Yerachmiel ben Yisrael. My great-grandfather, Aaron Hershel, had been a hasid of Reb Yerachmiel somewhere in Russia. I know very little about my family’s history. I know nothing about Reb Yerachmiel, nor could I find him listed in any study of Hasidism. All I know of him is these letters and the many sayings of his that my great-grandfather had scribbled on bits of paper and stuffed into this book.

The letters are addressed to Aaron Hershel. Reb Yerachmiel appears to have been responding to questions my great-grandfather posed to him in writing. The issues raised are perennial: the nature of God, the purpose of Creation, the reason for evil, suffering, and death. But the answers!

Reb Yerachmiel was a thinker outside the boundaries of normative Judaism. His Judaism must have been exceedingly radical for its day, yet today it speaks powerfully to those of us seeking a new understanding of Torah for a postmodern time. It is because of this that I have taken the time to translate these letters into English and present them in book form.

I present Reb Yerachmiel’s letters without notes or comment, and without my great-grandfather’s initial queries that, sadly, were never preserved. My aim is to reproduce the letters in a manner that allows the reader to encounter them just as my Zayde did. While I admit that this is a contemporary translation, I believe I have remained faithful to the original. All I have added are “chapter and verse” to Reb Yerachmiel’s biblical and talmudic references.

Zayde was forever reading and rereading these short letters from Reb Yerachmiel. I find myself doing the same. The more I read them, the more I find the gentle wisdom for which I and so many others hunger.

I ask that you read these letters at least twice. Once to become familiar with Reb Yerachmiel’s style and vocabulary, and a second time to allow his wisdom to permeate your own efforts to make sense of what is often a spiritually confused and confusing world.