One afternoon a gigantic, broad-shouldered man with a ruddy face, blond beard, and wild eyes entered the shtibl, the small Hasidic prayer room, for the Mincha service. His garb was neither long nor short. He wore a fur cape and a hooded caftan that looked as though it had been made in the Middle Ages. His boots had broad uppers into which he had tucked his baggy trousers. He removed a tiny siddur from his pocket and began reciting the Order of Sacrifices.
He prayed with great devotion, but the words he uttered were hard and heavy as stones. People watched him and shrugged. “Who is that?” they asked.
After prayers the worshippers greeted him with “Sholom aleichem” and asked where he was from.
“Oh, from far away.”
“From where?”
“Russia.”
“Which town?”
He named one the Warsaw Hasidim had never heard of.
“And what’s your name?”
“Avraham.”
The way he pronounced “Avraham” made them realize he wasn’t a Jew like other Jews. After several exchanges they discovered that Avraham was a convert. He was a peasant from a remote Russian province who had come to live on this Jewish street in Warsaw, where he was now a tinsmith.
When asked why he had become a Jew, he cried out, “Because the Jews have the truth!”
The Jews were amazed. They were even more amazed that he had come to pray in a Hasidic shtibl rather than a regular shul, but everyone was welcoming and friendly to him. When he was called to the Torah for an aliyah—summoned as “Reb Avraham ben Avraham”—the convert touched the Torah with the tzitzis of his tallis, kissed it, and recited the blessing in a deep bass voice that seemed to come from a barrel or a tomb. The younger boys giggled and pinched one another. The Torah reader just managed to contain his laughter by swaying and frowning. Yes, here before us was a Jew, a pious Jew—in the shape and form of a goy.
Before long the convert began causing trouble. Hasidim habitually talk during prayers, but when the convert heard someone chatting, he turned red and then pale with anger and yelled: “Nu—shh!”
And put a finger to his lips.
During the Silent Devotion he stood immersed in prayer for a long time. The prayer leader hadn’t the patience to wait for him to conclude and began the repetition of the Silent Devotion. This caused the convert to miss the Kedusha, which angered him.
“You’re rushing through the prayers,” he complained. “You’re forgetting that you’re speaking to God.”
The convert had apparently studied the holy texts and knew the laws, for he asked, “Do you count money so quickly, too? One has to pray like one counts money.”
The Hasidim conceded that the convert was right, but Hasidim are still not Misnagdim. They would apologize to the convert and admit that he was right, but the next day the scene repeated itself. The convert yelled, pounded the table with his heavy fist, and shouted that the Messiah wasn’t coming because the Jews were sinning.
But the boys had even more problems with him. They all talked during prayers, ran around, pinched one another, and snickered. The convert raised the roof. What annoyed him most was that the youngsters did not say “Blessed be He and blessed be His name” and “Amen” at the proper places. His own resonant “Blessed be He and blessed be His name” and “Amen” shook the walls. His goyish piety awakened in the boys and even in the grownups an irresistible desire to laugh. Even the chazan himself had to laugh into his fist in the middle of his prayers.
On Yom Kippur the convert did something wild: instead of wearing socks, he stood barefoot. His feet were gigantic and his unusually wide big toes were topped by misshapen toenails. A mere glance at those feet and one couldn’t help laughing. On Yom Kippur night, during the cantor’s Kol Nidrei, the entire congregation was in a paroxysm of laughter. They beat their
chests during the “For our sins” prayer and chuckled into their High Holiday prayer books.
The convert stood with a tallis wrapped over his white linen robe. When he pounded his chest, it echoed throughout the sanctuary, as did his pitiful weeping. His form stood out from all the other tallises and linen robes. He wore a gilded yarmulke that made him look not like a Jew but like one of the saints the gentiles paint on church walls. The Hasidim concluded that they would have to rid themselves of this Ivan—but how? Can Jews drive away a goy who has taken upon himself the yoke of Yiddishkeit? Wasn’t he a tzaddik, a saintly man?
After the Evening Service the convert did not go home. Instead, he spent the night in the shtibl. All night long he recited psalms. The next morning, before the Torah was taken out of the Ark, the convert made a scene. The trustee began auctioning off the aliyahs to the Torah. Hasidim outbid one another. The trustee chanted, “Six gulden going once, six gulden going twice, six gulden … going … going … six gulden and ten …” As soon as the trustee had called out the last words, the convert screamed at the top of his lungs, “What’s going on here? Money, money, money!”
He stamped his bare feet, waved his fists, and shouted, “Gulden, gulden, gulden … It’s Yom Kippur! You boors! … You’re sinning! It’s a desecration of God’s name!”
“Peasant!” someone screeched.
“A goy remains a goy,” a youngster called out.
“You’re a goy yourself,” the convert replied. “Yom Kippur is a holy day. The holiest day of the year. God forgives our sins and you’re doing business, business … just like they did in the Holy
Temple long ago … That’s why it was destroyed … That’s why the Messiah isn’t coming!”
And the convert broke into tears—a hoarse, manly weeping that sent a shudder through everyone. The congregants fell silent.
Then the trustee called out, “We must support our shtibl … We need coal for the winter. We have to pay rent.”
“On Yom Kippur one is forbidden to do business in the presence of the Torah,” the convert replied.
“You don’t have to teach us how to be Jews.”
“It’s forbidden,” he said.
After a while the Hasidic shtibl got rid of the convert and he went to pray in a study house. But he still caused problems on the street. He preached morality to the prostitutes who stood by the gates. He went to the square where the thieves hung out and delivered a sermon half in Yiddish, half in Russian, showing them where in the Bible the phrase “Do not steal” appeared in the Ten Commandments. Even at that time there were homes on the street where women cooked on the Sabbath, and the convert went there to rebuke them, predicting catastrophes, epidemics, even pogroms. It wasn’t long before the children were tagging after him and teasing him with “Ivan, Ivan, there you go. Ivan, Ivan, stub your toe!”
But his greatest outrage was reserved for the young girls who wore short-sleeved, low-cut dresses. The convert ran after them, called them wantons and whores; they were sinning, he shouted, and causing others to sin.
On the street there was a teahouse where boys and girls would gather on the Sabbath to crack pumpkin seeds, flirt, and dance. The proprietor went about with her hair uncovered and
would occasionally pour cold water into the urn or surreptitiously push the iron poker into the fire. The convert, seeing what was going on, appointed himself guardian of Sabbath observance. The thieves and hooligans who frequented the place cursed the convert and told him he’d wake up one day with a knife in his back. The girls laughed at him and escorted him out of the teahouse with catcalls.
The convert complained to Father, rebuking him for not tending to the street. Father justified himself before the convert as if he were one of his own, telling him how little attention today’s generation paid to ethical pronouncements. Father hinted to the convert that he should rather pray, learn to be a Jew, and not try to improve others, for it was wasted effort. But the convert pointed out to Father the verse in the Pentateuch where one is commanded to rebuke one’s fellow man.
Father agreed, but showed him a law stating that if one knew for certain that one’s moralizing would not be efficacious, and that the next fellow was sinning wantonly and willfully, then one should no longer preach to him. “Everything has its limit,” Father declared.
“Because of them the Messiah won’t come and we’ll remain in exile forever.”
“Forever? God forbid!”
“They’re inviting a new destruction.”
The convert refused to be consoled. The sinning on the street caused him endless anguish. His pale eyes shone with a non-Jewish bitterness.
One Sabbath people witnessed another bizarre scene: the convert was being led away, flanked by two police officers. Because
it was forbidden in Russia to convert to Judaism, the convert had committed a crime against the regime. Apparently someone had informed on him to the authorities. Or perhaps he had committed another offense. The police closed his workshop, hung a lock on the door, and sealed it.
Some Jews suggested that they should make inquiries and find a lawyer for the convert, but no one had any money or time for such endeavors. After a while the lock on his door was removed and a soda-water shop opened up. The convert seemed to have vanished. Only now did the people on the street begin to understand what had happened. A goy had sacrificed his life for Yiddishkeit and Jews had mocked him. He was locked up somewhere and no one was making any effort to free him. Some said that the convert had been sent to Siberia. The cheder lads concluded that he had been either hanged or burned at the stake and that his soul had expired with the words “Hear O Israel.” People on the street felt guilty.
They thought that they would never see the convert again. But not long after the Germans occupied Warsaw during World War I, a youth named Chaim told the following story:
Walking along Dluga Street one day he felt hungry. He saw a shop with Hebrew lettering. A young man stood in the doorway and asked Chaim, “You’re hungry, eh? Then come in.”
Chaim entered. He was served a bowl of grits and a heel of a bread. Other young men sat at a long table. After the meal a bareheaded Jew with the beard of a teacher and the gold-rimmed glasses of a rich man entered and began preaching: The true Messiah had already come and his name was Jesus of Nazareth. This Jew then talked about the little lamb, the paschal
sacrifice, and Isaiah’s prophecy that a virgin would become pregnant and give birth to a son. He explained the difficult verse in Psalms 2:12 by saying that it meant: kiss God’s son.
Chaim then realized that he had fallen into a den of missionaries but he was afraid to abandon his meal and flee. Suddenly the convert appeared. It seemed that he lived there among them.
Yes, Jews had driven him away and he had gone over to the missionaries. “I’m a Jew. A Jew!” the convert asserted. “But the Messiah is already here. You’re waiting in vain. Jesus is the Messiah … Jesus of Nazareth!”
When this story was repeated back in the shtibl, the Jews there declared, “That’s the problem with goyim. They don’t have the patience to wait.”