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Updated: May 16, 2025
His children, if he started them right, would not have to bow to the yoke as low as he; his children's children might even be free men. And education was the one means to redemption. Fetchke and I were started with a rebbe, in the orthodox way, but we were taught to translate as well as read Hebrew, and we had a secular teacher besides.
If we stayed at home, we were not without company. Neighbors dropped in for a glass of tea. Uncles and cousins came, and perhaps my brother's rebbe, to examine his pupil in the hearing of the family. And wherever we spent the day, the talk was pleasant, the faces were cheerful, and the joy of Sabbath pervaded everything. The festivals were observed with all due pomp and circumstance in our house.
It was in vogue at the court of the Tzaddik during the rush of pilgrims; it was indulged in after prayers in the hasidic "Shtiblach," or houses of prayer, and was accompanied by dancing and by the ecstatic narration of the miraculous exploits of the "Rebbe."
This pious child could give as good an account of the Creation as any boy of her age. She knew how God made the world. Undeterred by the fate of Eve, she wanted to know more. She asked her wise rebbe how God came to be in His place, and where He found the stuff to make the world of, and what was doing in the universe before God undertook His task.
The rebbe sat at an end of the table, rehearsing two or three of the boys who were studying the same part, pointing out the words with his wooden pointer, so as not to lose the place.
The stranger was not looking. The rebbe's courage rose, he advanced towards the table; he stretched out his hand for the knife. At that instant the door opened, the carriage was announced. The eager traveller, without noticing Reb' Lebe, swept up sausage and knife, just at the moment when the timid rebbe was about to cut himself a delicious slice.
The rebbe regards the pupil in amazement mixed with anxiety. His emotion is beyond speech. He turns and leaves the room. In his perturbation he even forgets to kiss the mezuzah on the doorpost. The pupil feels reproved and yet somehow in the right. Who did make God? But if the rebbe will not tell will not tell? Or, perhaps, he does not know? The rebbe ?
Reb' Lebe knew enough to teach girls Hebrew. Tall and lean was the rebbe, with a lean, pointed face and a thin, pointed beard. The beard became pointed from much stroking and pulling downwards. The hands of Reb' Lebe were large, and his beard was not half a handful. The fingers of the rebbe were long, and the nails, I am afraid, were not very clean.
Finding from his unsatisfying replies that the rebbe was but a barren branch on the tree of knowledge, the good little girl never betrayed to the world, by look or word, her discovery of his limitations, but continued to accord him, outwardly, all the courtesy due to his calling.
If people were disappointed, it was because they had based their expectations on a misconception of his character, for my father had never had any aspirations for extreme piety. Piety was imputed to him by his mother, by his rebbe, by his neighbors, when they saw that he rendered the sacred word more intelligently than his fellow students.
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