The Jew in Eastern Europe
Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds. The most precious object that has ever been on earth were the Two Tablets of stone which Moses received upon Mount Sinai: "The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tablets" (Exodus 32:16). But when coming down the mount—the Two Tablets he had just received in his hands—Moses saw the people dance around the Golden Calf, he cast the Tablets out of his hands and broke them before their eyes.
The stone is broken, but the words are alive. The replica Moses had subsequently made is gone too, but the Words did not die. They still knock at our gates as if begging to be engraved "on the Tablets of every heart". While others have carried their piety, fervour, faith into magnificent songs of architecture, our ancestors had neither the skill not the material necessary to produce comparable structures. Phoenicians craftsmen had to be brought to Jerusalem by Solomon the King to assist in erecting the Temple for the Lord. But there were Jews who knew how to lay bricks in the soul, to rear holiness made of simple deeds, of study and prayer, of care, of fear and love. They knew how to pattern and raise a pyramid that no one could see but God.
The Jews of Eastern Europe lived more in time than in space. It was as if their soul was always on the way, as if the secret of their heart had no affinity with things. It is rarely given to an artist to convey their spirit in colour and line. A niggun, a tune flowing in search of its own unattainable end; a story in which the soul surprises the mind; a knaitsh, the subtle shading of a thought, or a fervent gesture, which puts a situation, as it were, in God's quotation marks, is perhaps more suggestive of their essence.
He was a unique type of man, the Jew in Eastern Europe, one whose habits and taste did not conform to classical standards of beauty, but who nevertheless was endowed with a wistful charm; one whose physiognomy was not like a passage in an open book—a static picture of uniform lines with a definite proportion of text and margin—but like a book whose pages are constantly turning.
That charm came from the inner richness of their being—from the polarity of reason and feeling, of joy and sorrow, from the mixture of intellectualism and mysticism which is often bewildering to analytical observers. Their spirit was not like the luster of a sedate pearl, softly shining in patience and tranquillity, but rather scintillating like a tremulous gleam of light, like the twinkle of cut gems.
To be cheerful, carefree, relaxed, was an art few of them ever learned. A Jewish child would be taught that life was too earnest to be wasted on play. Joy, when felt, was always for a serious reason, the trimming for a happy occasion, justified like a logical conclusion.
There were many who did not trust words, and their deepest thoughts would find expression in a sigh. Sorrow was their second soul, and the vocabulary of their heart consisted of one sound: "Oy!" And when there was more than the heart could say, their eyes would silently bear witness. It was, indeed, indicative of their state of mind that, generation after generation, some of their leaders had felt called upon to teach that cheerfulness was not a sin, but, on the contrary, the absence of it was.
There was restrained mourning in their enthusiasm, profound sadness in their joy. Their authentic chants are consistently in the minor key. The melodies which the wedding players intoned before the veiling ceremony would almost rend the soul of the bride. The badhan, the merry-maker, would paint in a wailing voice the suffering and hardship which life holds in store for every human being. Under the hupah—the bridal canopy—bride, mother, and grandmother would sob, and even a man who heard a piece of good news would usually burst into tears. But the Jews all sang: the student over the Talmud, the tailor while sewing a pair of trousers, the cobbler while mending tattered shoes, and the preacher while delivering a sermon.
[...continue reading from the actual book, as noted below...]
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* From THE EARTH IS THE LORD'S (The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe) by Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1949.
See also Heschel's THE SABBATH (1951).
