He greeted me quietly, but did not offer me his hand. I had the feeling that a handshake was a physical effort he wanted to avoid.
Danny and I sat in the chairs by his desk, Danny to his right, I to his left. Danny's face was expressionless, dosed. He tugged nervously at an earlock.
Reb Saunders moved forward slightly in the chair and put his hands on the desk. Slowly, he closed the Talmud from which he and Danny had been studying. Then he sighed, a deep, trembling sigh that filled the silence of the room like a wind.
'Nu, Reuven,' he said quietly, 'finally, finally you come to see me.' He spoke in Yiddish, his voice quavering a little as the words came out.
'I apologize,' I said hesitantly, in English.
He nodded his head, and his right hand went up and stroked his gray beard. 'You have become a man,' he said quietly. 'The first day you sat here, you were only a boy. Now you are a man.' Danny seemed suddenly to become conscious of the way he was twisting his earlock. He put his hand on his lap, clasped both hands tightly together and sat very still, staring at his father.
Reb Saunders looked at me and smiled feebly, nodding his head. 'My son, my Daniel, has also become a man. It is a great joy for a father to see his son suddenly a man.'
Danny stirred faintly in his chair, then was still.
'What will you do after your graduation?' Reb Saunders asked quietly.
'I have another year to study for smicha.'
'And then what?'
'I'm going into the rabbinate.'
He looked at me and blinked his eyes. I thought I saw him stiffen for a moment, as though in sudden pain. 'You are going to become a rabbi,' he murmured, speaking more to himself than to me. He was silent for a moment. 'Yes. I remember… " yes… ' He sighed again and shook his head slowly, the gray beard moving back and forth. 'My Daniel will receive his smicha in June,' he said quietly. Then he added, 'In June… Yes… His smicha… Yes…' The words trailed off, aimless, disconnected, and hung in the air for a long moment of tight silence.'
Then, slowly, he moved his right hand across the closed Talmud, and his fingers caressed the Hebrew title of the tractate that was stamped into the spine of the binding. Then he clasped both hands together and rested them on top of the Talmud. His body followed the movements of his hands, and his gray earlocks moved along the sides of his aged face.
'Nu,' he said, speaking softly, so softly I could barely hear him, in June my Daniel and his good friend begin to go different ways. They are men, not children, and men go different ways. You will go one way, Reuven. And my son, my Daniel, he will – he will go another way.'
I saw Danny's mouth fall open. His body gave a single convulsive shudder. Different ways, I thought. Different ways. Then he – 'I know,' Reb Saunders murmured, as if he were reading my mind. 'I have known it for a long time.'
Danny let out a soft, half-choked, trembling moan. Reb Saunders did not look at him. He had not once looked at him. He was talking to Danny through me.
'Reuven, I want you to listen carefully to what I tell you now.' He had said: Reuven. His eyes had said: Danny. 'You will not understand it. You may never understand it. And you may never stop hating me for what I have done. I know how you feel. I do not see it in your eyes? But I want you to listen.
'A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks, it must dominate the shell. Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark.
'Reuven, the Master of the Universe blessed me with a brilliant son. And he cursed me with all the problems of raising him. Ah, what it is to have a brilliant son! Not a smart son, Reuven, but a brilliant son, a Daniel, a boy with a mind like a jewel. Ah, what a curse it is, what an anguish it is to have a Daniel, whose mind is like a pearl, like a sun. Reuven, when my Daniel was four years old, I saw him reading a story from a book. And I was frightened. He did not read the story, he swallowed it, as one swallows food or water. There was no soul in my four-year-old Daniel, there was only his mind. He was a mind in a body without a soul. It was a story in a Yiddish book about a poor Jew and his struggles to get to Eretz Yisroel before he died. Ah, how that man suffered! And my Daniel enjoyed the story, he enjoyed the last terrible page, because when he finished it he realized for the first time what a memory he had. He looked at me proudly and told me back the story from memory, and I cried inside my heart. I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, "What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my SON. not a mind without a soul!"
Reb Saunders paused and took a deep, trembling breath. I tried to swallow; my mouth was sand-dry. Danny sat with his right hand over his eyes, his glasses pushed up on his forehead. He was crying silently, his shoulders quivering. Reb Saunders did not look at him.
'My brother was like my Daniel,' he went on quietly. 'What a mind he had. What a mind. But he was also not like my Daniel. My Daniel, thank God, is healthy. But for many, many years my brother was ill. His mind burned with hunger for knowledge. But for many years his body was wasted with disease. And so my father did not raise him as he raised me. When he was well enough to go off to a yeshiva to study, it was too late.
'I was only a child when he left to study in Odessa, but I stilI remember what he was able to do with his mind. But it was a cold mind, Reuven, almost cruel, untouched by his soul. It was proud, haughty, impatient with less brilliant minds, grasping in its search for knowledge the way a conqueror grasps for power. It could not understand pain, it was indifferent to and impatient with suffering. It was even impatient with the illness of its own body. I never saw my brother again after he left for the yeshiva.
He came under the influence of a Maskil in Odessa and went away to France where he became a great mathematician and taught in a university. He died in a gas chamber in AUSCHWITZ: I learned of it four years ago. He was a Jew when he died, not an observer of the Commandments, but not a convert, thank God. I would like to believe that before he died he learned how much suffering there is in this world. I hope so. It will have redeemed his soul.
'Reuven, listen to what I am going to tell you now and remember it. You are a man, but it will be years before you understand my words. Perhaps you will never understand them. But hear me out, and have patience.
'When I was very young, my father, may he rest in peace, began to wake me in the middle of the night, just so I would cry. I was a child, but he would wake me and tell me stories of the destruction of Jerusalem and the sufferings of the people of Israel, and I would cry. For years he did this. Once he took me to visit a hospital – ah, what an experience that was! – and often he took me to visit the poor, the beggars, to listen to them talk. My father himself never talked to me, except when we studied together. He taught me with silence. He taught me to look into myself, to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my soul. When his people would ask him why he was so silent with his son, he would say to them that he did not like to talk, words are cruel, words play tricks, they distort what is in the heart, they conceal the heart, the heart speaks through silence. One learns of the pain of others by suffering one's own pain, he would say, by turning inside oneself, by finding one's own soul. And it is important to know of pain, he said. It destroys our selfpride, our arrogance, our indifference toward others. It makes us aware of how frail and tiny we are and of how much we must depend upon the Master of the Universe. Only slowly, very slowly, did I begin to understand what he was saying. For years his silence bewildered and frightened me, though I always trusted him, I never hated him. And when I was old enough to understand, he told me that of all people a tzaddik especially must know of pain. A tzaddik must know how to suffer for his people, he said. He must take their pain from them and carry it on his own shoulders. He must carry it always. He must grow old before his years. He must cry, in his heart he must always cry. Even when he dances and sings, he must cry for the sufferings of his people.