Herbst stood at the head of the table in the dining room. On the table were a pitcher of water, a thick round glass, and a bowl of flowers. On his left sat Zahara, her face beaming with love for the entire world — the world being the kvutza and all its members, plus her mother and father. But all this amounts to nothing compared to Dani, who embodies all love. Henrietta sat to the right of Herbst. She hasn’t heard her husband lecture in years. Now she is here, at his side, while he speaks. Though she knows him so well and is thoroughly familiar with his voice, she looks up to see if that is truly Fred, for his voice has a new ring, a ring of confidence. His voice has something in it of Neu’s tone and of that of all the teachers he is fond of — yet it is his alone, unlike anyone else’s True, she hasn’t heard every voice in the world; still, it is clear to her that his tone is unique and no one in the world can match it. Avraham-and-a-half stood at a distance from the lecturer. He was the tallest person in the room, soaring over everyone, surveying the heads of his friends and trying to determine, by their hair, who they were and how they were at that particular moment. The driver who had brought the Herbsts to Ahinoam stood next to Avraham-and-a-half, surprised at himself for not having noticed right away that his passenger was an interesting man. Before he started speaking, he had seemed like all the others. As soon as he began, he proved he wasn’t one of them. Herbst was an experienced lecturer. When he spoke, his words drew you in. Herbst was confronted with a mass of uninhibited listeners, careless of their manners — in some cases deliberately so, to show their indifference to good manners. After a while, habit notwithstanding, they began to listen, each according to his ability and even beyond. After a vigorous workday, they were tired, and some of them had come to listen a bit and doze a bit. In the end, what they were hearing ruled out sleep.
Herbst’s mode of thought begins with an overview and includes a range of subjects — skimming the surface, touching yet not touching — until, finally, he ends up where he began. In his lectures, he begins with essentials, never straying far from the heart of his subject, patiently clarifying and elucidating it. He is careful not to startle the listener with new interpretations and refrains from emphasizing any particular word. Just as he wouldn’t underline a phrase in one of his books, so, on the same principle, he doesn’t emphasize words when lecturing. It is not his way to begin at a barely audible pitch and work up to a crescendo.
On this night, he changed his tack — not in terms of form, but in terms of the lecture itself, introducing material that was somewhat tangential. He began with the prohibition against keeping corpses overnight that prevailed in the holy cities of ancient Greece. In this context, he formulated the very essence of Greek philosophy and the principles of religion. He looked at the arts, theater, the circus, athletic games, and the marketplace, where citizens dealt with issues of state — the entire range of Greek manners and pastimes before Christianity appeared, obliterating everything. Herbst, a disciple of Neu, who viewed economics as a force but not a primary force, mentioned the economic factor without dwelling on it. Finally, he came to the decline of Greece and of all civilization until the rise of Christianity, which delivered the fatal blow. Having mentioned the holy cities of Greece, he remarked on the Greek cities in the Land of Israel, too — how they were maintained, how they were destroyed. Finally, he told of the destruction of Gaza and the struggles of Porphyry, the bishop of Gaza, who witnessed its destruction. Here, Herbst offered facts not noted by Marcus the Deacon or by any other chronicler.
Chapter twenty-three
The lecture was successful beyond all expectations. I have already described Herbst’s prowess; now let me describe the prowess of his listeners. They listened, not merely with their ears, but with their soul, alerting their ears so their soul could hear. Those who had left school to come to the Land of Israel, abandoning their studies in the middle, remembered things they had been too young to appreciate. Now that Herbst was bringing up these subjects, they recognized what they had lost, and what was lost to the world with the destruction of Greece. When had their loss occurred? The day they left their parents’ home and the town in which they were born. Throughout Herbst’s lecture, some of our friends sat summing up accounts vis-àvis the Land of Israel, comparing themselves to the last of the Greek philosophers, who watched as Christian invaders destroyed all that was good in the world, stamping out life’s joy and beauty. Were it not for the Land of Israel, they would be with their families, tranquil in their homes, serene in their towns, free from fiscal worries, hostile Arabs, and the blistering heat of hamsin winds.
Others, who came from the study houses of Galicia, knew hardly anything about Greek cities beyond what appears in the Gemara and in Josephus. Macedonia, for example they related to Alexander of Macedon, conqueror of Judea in 322 b.c.e.; Athens, to the elders of the Athenian school, and to Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananiah; Corfu, to news items about its citrons on Sukkot. They were astonished by everything Dr. Herbst said, especially about burial customs. Jerusalem was known to be the only place in the ancient world with a prohibition against keeping corpses overnight; now he claimed that idol worshipers lived by the same rule. They were further astonished to hear him refer to worldly scholars as zaddikim. Though they themselves had changed since childhood, their faith in these righteous zaddikim was intact. And who were the zaddikim? They were rabbis whose greatness was on the lips of everyone, the teachers of the Hasidim. When these young people moved away from the Torah and began reading secular books, they found support for much of what they had heard. Herbst, as you know, always responded to young people’s questions as if they were those of a scholar and made every effort to satisfy them. Now he was quiet, reflecting on statements he had heard from Shira. Once, walking together on a Shabbat afternoon, they encountered a group of Hasidim. Shira was annoyed and imputed all sorts of evils to those pious people, Hasidim and zaddikim alike. But his mind didn’t dwell on Shira. The road, the village, the lecture dissolved the image of Shira.
Others, because of poverty or the effects of war on their childhood, had never studied and never read. Still, they considered what Dr. Herbst told them and thought: What Dr. Herbst described may have happened in the past, one or two hundred years ago; in more recent times, such things couldn’t happen.
One by one, several kvutza members slipped away to do chores. Those who were at leisure stayed on with the Herbsts. They brought tea and cake, and presented Herbst with further questions, which they had forgotten but remembered again. A breeze began to blow. Mrs. Herbst said, “Why don’t we go outside. You don’t mind, do you, Fred?” They got up, went outside, and stretched out on the lawn behind the dining room.