55 Stories by Singer Isaac Bashevis

Author:Singer, Isaac Bashevis [Singer, Isaac Bashevis]
Language: eng
Format: epub

8

Three weeks had passed, but the rabbi still wandered about in Warsaw. He slept at the coal dealer’s. The coal dealer had taken him to the Yiddish theater after the Sabbath meal. He had also taken the rabbi with him to the races at Vilanov.

Every day except Saturday, the rabbi visited Bresler’s library. He stood at the bookshelves and browsed. Then there was a table where one could sit and read. The rabbi came in the morning and stayed until closing time. In the afternoon he went out and bought a roll, a bagel, or a piece of potato kugel from a market woman. He ate without a benediction. He read books in Hebrew, in Yiddish. He even tried to read German. In the library he found the book that he had first seen in the shop window, How the Universe Came into Being. “Yes, how was it created without a creator?” the rabbi asked himself. He had developed the habit of talking to himself. He tugged at his beard, winced, and shook as he used to in the study house. He muttered, “Yes, a fog, but who made the fog? How did it arise? When did it begin?”

The earth was torn away from the sun, he read — but who formed the sun? Man descended from an ape — but where did the ape come from? And since the author wasn’t present when all this happened, how could he be so sure? Their science explained everything away in distance of time and space. The first cell appeared hundreds of millions of years ago, in the slime at the edge of the ocean. The sun will be extinguished billions of years hence. Millions of stars, planets, comets, move in a space with no beginning and no end, without a plan or purpose. In the future all people will be alike, there will be a Kingdom of Freedom without competition, crises, wars, jealousy, or hatred. As the Talmud says, anyone who wants to lie will tell of things that happen far away. In an old copy of the Hebrew magazine, Haasif, the rabbi read about Spinoza, Kant, Leibnitz, Schopenhauer. They called God substance, monad, hypothesis, blind will, nature.

The rabbi clutched at one of his sidelocks. Who is this nature? Where did it get so much skill and power? It took care of the most distant star, of a rock in the bottom of the ocean, of the slightest speck of dust, of the food in a fly’s stomach. In him, Rabbi Nechemia of Bechev, nature did everything at once. It gave him abdominal cramps, it stuffed his nose, it made his skull tingle, it gnawed at his brain like the gnat that plagued Titus. The rabbi blasphemed God and apologized to Him. One moment he wished death upon himself and the next he feared sickness. He needed to urinate, went to the toilet but couldn’t function. As he read, he saw green and golden spots before his eyes and the lines merged, diverged, bent, and passed over one another.

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