Jewish Wisdom stories retold by Rabbi Allen S. Maller

The Seer of Lublin was one of the most famous and formidable of the Hassidic Rabbis at the end of the 18th century. His greatest disciple (who had exactly the same name as his master) was called the Yehudi in Lublin, and the Holy Yehudi everywhere else. The two Rabbis loved each other very much, although they suffered many heartaches due to rivalries among their own disciples, especially those in Lublin. The Seer, as his appellation indicates, was a visionary who was interested in large movements and long term developments. The Holy Yehudi was a humble saint, famous for the power of his worship of God, who developed a reputation (which he always denied) as a healer of souls.

The Seer’s wife Beile, often overheard the gossip and slanders of the Seer’s disciples and began to believe what she had heard. When her young child fell ill she feared it was an evil eye from the Yehudi. Beile begged her husband to pray for the child’s recovery. He replied, “You know to whom you must turn.” meaning God. But perhaps because she felt guilty about the slanders she overheard and, like her husband, had failed to rebuke, Beile decided to go to Pshysha, where the Holy Yehudi held his court.

She begged him to forgive her sins against him and to pray for her son’s recovery. The Holy Yehudi was struck dumb that the Seer’s wife could think he would wish her or her child ill; and he sobbed for a few minuets. Finally he told her, “I will pray without ceasing.” Being generally naive, he neglected to tell her that he forgave her. When Beile returned home her son was dying.

What the Seer and his wife concluded from all this no one knows. But some weeks later, the Yehudi’s son, who was almost 12, now fell ill. At first, it did not seem serious, but then it got worse. His mother Schoendel, cried hysterically for days. Once the told her husband, “This is their vengeance!” The Yehudi replied, “Don’t go to pieces!” She gave all that she had to charity, but the boy only got worse. Then something extraordinary happened.
Rabbi Yissachar Baer come to visit. The Yehudi took him by the hand to the bed where Asher his son lay moaning.

The Holy Yehudi said, “I am at the end of my strength. I can pray no more. Take him upon yourself and you will surely give him back to me healed.” With that he took his sobbing wife and left the room.

Rabbi Yissachar Baer was dismayed. He had never practiced healing; and he was sure he was not a holy man. But Rabbi Baer was a man of peace; and he knew that one of his teachers, the Maggid of Kosnitz, had on several occasions tried, with some success, to reduce the Seer’s suspicions and tensions with the Yehudi. He thought Asher would be old enough to understand the nature of his illness.

“I am just an ordinary Rabbi; I am not a holy man like your father, or a great mystic like the Seer, or even a wise sage like the Maggid of Kosnitz. Every year I visit each of them for a few weeks, to learn and be inspired. Each of them is different, and their disciples are different. Their Torah is one Torah, but they teach it differently. Their Shabbat is on the same day, but they celebrate it in different ways. Each congregation says the Sh’ma but they sing it with different melodies. They do not even eat the same food.

Some of the Seer’s disciples like Rabbi Meir, who is a leader of those who oppose everything your father does, are narrow minded and resistant to change. Other disciples are fearful of competition, and resent those who have come to your father instead of their own Rabbi, the Seer. But I tell you that I learn from each one of them, and each of them speak the words of the living God. No one anywhere wishes you ill. A Jew, no matter how pious, learned or Kosher he is, who slanders another Jew, is a Jew hater and not a real Jew. ”

Asher harkened to the words of Rabbi Baer and he began to feel better. Neither of them ever spoke about what had happened that day in that room. Rabbi Baer suggested to the Yehudi that Asher should live for a few months with the Maggid of Kosnitz until he fully recovered; and he did. Rabbi Baer also talked to the Seer and the Seer instructed Rabbi Meir to say a prayer every day for the long life of the Yehudi.

And Rabbi Baer, much to his surprise, found that the story of his miracle cure spread, and many people with wounded souls came to him. Thank God he was able to help many of them. Every year when he visited the three great Rabbis, he always told the disciples of the Seer, the Maggid and the Holy Yehudi, that self-righteousness, gossip, and slander cause an illness of the soul that can lead to death.

Every committed relationship always involves both joy and sorrow; risk and reward, love and loss. This wisdom tale says it well: One day a young man stood in a town square proclaiming that he had the most beautiful heart in the whole country. A large crowd gathered around him, and all admired his heart, for it was perfect. There was not a mark or a flaw in it. Yes, they agreed it truly was the most beautiful heart they had ever seen.

It was an ideal heart. As beautiful as a Greek stature of an ideal youth. The young man said that his perfect, beautiful heart, was due to his philosophy of following a path of self realization, reason, calmness and detachment. Then a Rabbi named after Martin Buber, a great Jewish philosopher, who proclaimed that, “the purpose of all great religions and religious movements is to engender a life of elation and fervor which no (later negative) experience can dampen and stifle.” A man at the front of the crowd said, “Your heart is not nearly as beautiful as mine.”

The crowd and the young man looked at the Rabbi’s heart. It was beating strongly, but it was full of scars. It had places where pieces had been removed and other pieces put in; but they didn’t fit in quite right, and there were several jagged edges. In fact, in some places there were deep gouges where whole pieces were missing. The people stared. How could Martin Buber say his heart was more beautiful than the heart of the ideal youth?

The young man looked at the older man’s heart and laughed. “You must be joking,” he said. “Compare your heart with mine; my heart is perfect and yours is a mess of scars and tears.”

“Yes,” said Rabbi Buber, “yours is perfect looking; but I would never trade with you. You see, every scar represents a person to whom I have given my love. I tear out a piece of my heart and give it to people, and often they give me a piece of their heart, which fits into an empty place in my heart. But because the pieces are never exactly equal, I have some rough edges, which I cherish, because they remind me of the love we shared.

“Sometimes I give pieces of my heart away, and the other person doesn’t return a piece of his or her heart to me. Those are the empty gouges… giving love is taking a chance. And then there are places where my heart is broken, reminding me of the love I have had, and lost. I say Kaddish then to praise God for the pains of living a life of loving and caring; for it is better to love and lose than never to love at all.”
The young man stood silently with tears running down his cheeks. He walked up to the older man, reached into his perfect, young and beautiful heart and ripped a piece out. He offered it to the old man with trembling hands.

The Rabbi took the young man’s offering, placed it in his heart and then took a piece from his old scarred heart and placed it in the wound in the young man’s heart. It fit, but not perfectly, as there were some jagged edges. The young man looked at his heart, not perfect anymore but more beautiful than ever, since love from Rabbi Buber’s heart now flowed into his. They embraced and walked away side by side.

The Talmud (Yoma 85a-b) teaches us that if a person has made three separate attempts at reconciliation, and been rebuffed each time, that is sufficient for God to forgive, even if the other person never does forgive. And if God forgives you, you should forgive yourself. Yet many good hearted idealistic people keep trying to fix bad relationships, often exposing themselves, and sometimes others, to new hurts and rejections. We must let them go; and to begin again with new opportunities. This parable teaches this view of Repentance:

Her mother once gave her a box of nails and told her that every time she lost her temper or insulted somebody she must hammer a nail into a large tree in the backyard. The first day the girl hit 9 nails into the tree. Over the next few weeks, as she learned to control her anger, the number of nails hammered daily gradually dwindled. She discovered it was easier to hold her temper than to drive those nails into the tree.

Finally the day came when the girl didn’t lose her temper at all. She told her mother about it and the mother suggested that the girl now pull out one nail for each day that she was able to hold her temper. The days passed. Finally, she told her mother that all the nails were gone.

The mother took her daughter’s hand and led her to the tree saying, “You have done well, my daughter, but look at all the holes in the tree. The tree will never be the same. When you say things in anger, they leave a scar just like these.” You can put a knife in a person and draw it out. It does not matter how many times you say I’m sorry, a wound is still there. A verbal wound is almost as bad as a physical one.

“How can I fix the tree?” asked the girl. “Will it have to remain damaged forever?” “Yes and no” said the mother. “Our Rabbis say that if the tree is still alive, and responds to the way you have changed, it too can change and heal itself. If the tree is dead to the possibility of your repentance it will carry its scars onward. Either way the tree will never be as it was before, but it doesn’t have to become perfect to be a good tree.

If you do your part and change, and the tree does its part in response, God will do something wonderful. God will promote a healing that will make you and the tree better than you were before. This process is called Atonement. Atonement means that the changes that come about from repentance and forgiveness lead people to higher levels of relationship than was the case before; but if a tree remains dead to you even after you have changed, YOU can’t force it to heal.

In that case you should help another tree somewhere else. There are always lots of trees that need care. That is the miracle of Atonement. God always responds to our attempts to change by helping us change; and always responds to our change by giving us new and wonderful opportunities for atonement. This process of atonement and repentance is why we have a Day of Atonement ten days after the beginning of every New Year; so the New Year will be a better one than the last one.

I also add the faith and hope of a 15 year old Jewish girl who wrote in her diary: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness.

I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. In the meantime, I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the day will come when I shall be able to carry them out.” ~Anne Frank”