Yitzchak of Potzk was a strange child.
How strange, you ask?
Judge for yourself.
When Yitzchak was four, he overheard his father asking God whether his son could be any stranger.
Yitzchak replied: “I am as strange as life on this planet. Theoretically, there could be life elsewhere, but as far as we know, the God you are speaking to only created one planet in the universe with a creature that could ask such a question. Likewise, there could be a stranger child on this planet, but as far as we know I am the strangest.”
Yitzchak’s father regretted the botched vasectomy that he had years before the birth of his only child.
The secular year of his birth is unclear, but it was sometime in the late 1970s. Yitzchak was born according to the Hebrew calendar on Adar 20, in the small town of Potzk, which, even though you cannot find it on a map, is nestled in the countryside of the former Soviet Union. He took great delight in sharing a birthday with the Golem of Prague, the great robotic superhero created by the Maharal of Prague. Both he and the Golem had amazing superhuman capacities. For example, Yitzchak could pick up any musical instrument and play it as if he had studied it for years under the tutelage of the greatest masters. At age five he taught himself the Hebrew alphabet. By age seven he was going up to strangers and reciting passages that he had memorized from a volume of Jewish wisdom called Pirkei Avot that he found in his mother’s book collection. Needless to say, because his was the only Jewish family in Potzk, this practice was often met with puzzlement. He termed this befuddled reaction Potzklement. Yitzchak derived a strange satisfaction from his ability to systematize his world, and happily carried on in his quirky but unappreciated way.
One day he approached a stranger who appeared to be despondent. He quoted from Pirkei Avot.
“Despair not in man, and don’t be despondent over unfulfilled ideas.”
The stranger’s eyes lit up and he responded, “For there is not a man who has not his hour, and not an idea which has not its place.”
Yitzchak had never seen this version of Potzklement before, as the stranger was both crying and laughing and shaking like a leaf on a windy day.
“ My name is Yehuda and I am here on behalf of the Rebbe of Lubavitch, to help lost Jews reconnect with their heritage. I had heard that there were Jews in this region, but despaired of finding even one until I met you. I am in awe.”
“Allow me to introduce myself. I am Yitzchak and this, being the year of my bar mitzvah, I have proclaimed myself the Potzker Rebbe. Nobody in this town dares to challenge me on this, except for my parents, who refuse to follow my edicts that would allow me to stay up all night studying the wisdom of the world.
“Potzker, shmotzker” they say. “Bedtime is bedtime.”
Yehuda asked to speak to Yitzchak’s parents and was granted the privilege. Over a cup of tea, the deal was secured. The prodigy would be given a yeshiva environment to thrive in, his parents were to be taken care of financially, and the world would move one step closer to achieving the perfection that comes from students reaching their potential.
The plan, however, met with a glitch. Yitzchak refused to fly. More specifically, he refused to get on an airplane. He thought that if he flew artificially, he would never be able to learn to fly like his hero the Golem. Yitzchak insisted on walking across Europe and swimming when needed to get to the yeshiva. Yehuda was able to get Yitzchak to compromise and they ended up traveling by train. During the trip, Yitzchak told tales endlessly. And then the endlessness ended. Close to arriving at their destination, Yitzchak noted that Yehuda had started transcribing the words that he had shared with him on the trip, and he expressed his displeasure.
“In the beginning was the word. When the word hit paper, a chimera was born that changed the course of mankind, just like the day that mitochondria inhabited the nucleated cell, fusing two paths seamlessly to the point where it became impossible to even imagine that they were ever separate entities. I however prefer the days when words were free of paper, pushed through the air by the waste products of man’s breath, banging against eardrums and creating fireworks of electrical signals that jump from one brain to the next. Mark my words in your brain like they did in the days of old; keep them alive, free from a paper prison.”
When Yehuda pointed out that Yitzchak’s depth of Jewish knowledge was the result of the rabbis seeing the wisdom of preserving the ancient oral traditions in writing, Yitzchak sighed a deep sigh and lost the sparkle in his eye.
At that moment, nothing emanated from the mouth of the Potzker except for a sardonic grin that is still etched in Yehuda’s brain to this day.
By trips end, Yitzchak excused himself to go to the bathroom and never returned. In fact, no one knows what happened to the Potzker Rebbe, although reports of people encountering him and his teachings are still recorded to this day.
The journey that began on a train in the early 1990s continues to this day on the tracks leading from these pages to your mind.
Presented for your consideration: tales of the Potzker Rebbe (the pre bar-mitzvah years), courtesy of Yehuda and his pen.
Brachawe
Friday nights were a time of awe and wonder in the Potzker’s household.
No matter what time the sun set that night, there was always last minute rushing about that made the Potzker speculate about the properties of time. How could it be that the family could always accomplish what was necessary to prepare for the holy day in the shortest days of the year, yet be stretched for time in the bright days of summer? Perhaps Einstein’s family did the same, demonstrating the laws of time expansion and contraction to him as a child. The Sabbath was full of lessons about life and the universe, and the Potzker reveled in finding new insights within each ritual of the evening.
The first ritual was the lighting of the candles by his mother. Every Friday night, the Potzker would watch his mother miraculously make time stand still as she lit the Sabbath candles. He would think to himself how lucky he was to be on a revolving planet that provided the illusion of sunset, thereby providing him once every seven days with an opportunity to experience a magical moment that permeated his entire being. With hand motions clearly indicating to him that his mother was in her younger days a martial arts master, she would wave them in such a fashion as to block out all day-to-day concerns from her household. Dressed in white, she ushered in the holy Sabbath, dispatching the dark clad enemies of the mundane back to the other six days of the week.
The odour of a single burned match mingled with the fragrances emanating from the kitchen and acted for the Potzker like a time machine. It transported him to the space directly over the altar in the Jerusalem Temple from which arose the aroma of the incense offered as a sacrifice to please God. The Potzker deeply inhaled and felt his soul elevate a notch.
Ritual number two was receiving the blessing from his father. His father would cross his arms, gently lay his hands on the Potzker’s temples and recite the sacred words. This was the only physical contact that he ever received from his father. Not that he was complaining, because he knew of other kids in Potzk who received physical contact from their fathers on a regular basis and had the bruises to prove it. Physical contact was not something he saw a lot of between his mother and father either, but then again, he could imagine that his father might be hesitant to approach his mother in a way that may startle her and accidentally trigger a deadly reaction from her secretive martial arts past. At least, that is how the Potzker made sense of the situation.
The blessing bestowed on the Potzker was a strange formula:“ May your reputation with God be like that of Ephraim and Menashe.”
He asked his father one day why how he understood the meaning of this ritual. His father sighed and responded.
“It is difficult, but let me try to explain, because I want you to understand what I am trying to convey to you every week.
You are tied to thousands of years of Jewish history. This blessing is in a way a historical re-enactment of the blessing that Jacob our forefather gave to his grandchildren, the children of Joseph.
Jacob was trying to make a significant point. He was declaring that the age of entitlement based on birthright was over, as this sense of entitlement only led to arrogance and conflict. So he switched hands, putting his left hand on the firstborn’s head even though tradition said that you bless the first born with your right hand. The beauty of this was that neither Ephraim or Menashe complained. These gentle souls accepted the wisdom of their grandfather and were the first brothers in the Bible to get along. That is why this blessing has been recited in Jewish homes for generation after generation. To God, ones’ name is holy. God’s reputation is linked to the action of every Jew. Every time a Jew does good, it is a reflection on God. And every time a Jew acts shamefully, he shames God. Ephraim and Menashe bore witness to what God expects from Jews by acting with civility to each other. Furthermore, a wise person recognizes that all humans are siblings and should live in harmony with each other. That is my hope for you and the planet every Friday night.”
The Potzker was intrigued. He could have sworn that he saw a tear starting to form in the corners of his father’s eyes, but since his father was not an emotional man he rationalized that his mother may have used too many onions in making the chicken soup that week and that his father was reacting to sulfur lingering in the air.
Now that he understood the meaning of the blessing he started to wonder about the content.
What kind of a name was Ephraim?
What was the meaning of Menashe?
For this research, the Potzker headed to his books so that he could come to his own conclusions.
Ephraim, according to the text in Genesis, was named based on the root word for fruit. Joseph named him to acknowledge God having made Joseph fruitful “in the land of my affliction.”
Menashe’s name was rooted in the Hebrew word nashe, to let go of a memory. “For God allowed me to forget all of my troubles and all of my father’s house.”
In the naming of his children, Joseph came across as one unhappy guy, despite all of his achievements in Egypt.
The Potzker came to understand a different level of meaning to the blessing and those named within it. Each of the names mentioned within the blessing was in his mind a blessing.
He speculated that naming Menashe was not a therapeutic exercise for Joseph, but a gift from Joseph to his son, by being a formula for Menashe’s own mental health. Whenever Menashe lost perspective in his own life, he could just invoke his own name as a prayer, asking God to help him remember that he had the power to let go of disturbing thoughts and feelings about his roots. Nothing could be gained from blaming his forefathers, ordinary vulnerable humans who at times did extraordinary things, for any present-day misery. Furthermore, all he had to do was remember that he had a loving brother whose very name served as a reminder to him that he could move forward in life, living fruitfully despite life’s challenges, fueled by love and support.
He also saw a blessing in Ephraim’s name. Ephraim can be seen as a composite name, combining the Hebrew word aphar, dust, with the Hebrew word yaam, the sea. The name served to remind the Potzker of one of his central principles of the Sabbath day, that man evolved from the sea and ends up as dust. Knowing where he came from and where he was headed, the Potzker tried to spend the Sabbath learning to live in the moment, and to carry that attitude with him into the rest of the week.
His mother then proceeded to bless her son. She embraced him with both arms, and into his right ear whispered the following blessing:
“May you be a blessing to others.”
She then kissed his right cheek and proceeded to whisper into his left ear:
“May you bless others with sincerity.” After kissing his left cheek, she cupped her hands gently over his face, gently rubbing his skin while uttering her final blessing:
“May God and others acknowledge that we raised you properly.”
The next step in the process was receiving the blessing of the angels. Tradition holds that when a Jew returns home from synagogue on Friday night, two angels accompany him. One is the Guardian Angel and one is the Angel of Troubles. Upon arriving at the home, the angels survey the home and, depending on what they see, one expresses in glee the word “again,” forcing the other to respond “amen.” The trick in dealing with these angels is to sit down to a table decorated in a festive way with candlesticks glowing with love, braided bread kneaded in peace, and a cup of wine at least half full with joy, so that there would be no doubt that the Guardian Angel had the right to bestow the blessing of “again.” In the mid 1600’s, Kabalistic rabbis came up with a song to usher these angels into the home. The Potzker’s father made a habit of opening the door for the angels before the recitation of this song, and then closing it. As a very young boy, the Potzker asked his father why he did not complete the courtesy by opening the door for the angels to leave. His father explained that the angels, once they had completed their work for the evening, left by jumping into the flames of the two Sabbath candles. He then showed the Potzker how the dancing flames of the candles were really the two angels dancing a joyous Sabbath dance. The Potzker would spend hours as a young child watching the flames and the angels within, watching their arms rise and fall and their bodies gyrate in an other worldly demonstration of Sabbath glee. One night, the Potzker watched the flames until they extinguished. Unfortunately, that night the flames exited in a cacophony of crackles and sputters that convinced the Potzker that their departure was painful. He was sure he heard the angels screaming that night. In the midst of their screams, he thought he had heard them mutter the words Santa Claus. As a good Jew, the Potzker knew that Santa Claus wasn’t real. The next week there were no dancing angels in the Sabbath candle flames.
The next ritual of the evening was his father blessing his mother. His father would look directly into his mother’s eyes in a way that made the Potzker feel that he had vanished from the room, leaving only the two of them together as in the days prior to his birth.
His father would open with the traditional verse of the poem “A soldierly woman.” The Potzker never heard the rest of the song because he always got lost in his imagination, picturing his mother as a soldier. Yes, the martial arts images were fast and furious as he pictured his mother taking down every oppressor that ever beset the Jewish people with her patented flying drop kicks and chop chops. By the time his father was done, his mothers face was aglow with something that he could not understand. He thought to himself that that was the look of satisfaction coming from someone who had dropkicked Hitler out of history. The concept of romantic love was something that would evade the Potzker for many years.
He once asked his father why the term soldier was used as a form of praise.
His father stiffened up into what seemed to be a military posture that made the Potzker suspect that his father had served in the armed forces.
His father explained.
“A soldier has three priorities in the field: his mission, his buddies and himself. In that order.”
That was all he said.
There would be no further explanation.
Dismissed.
The Potzker resisted the urge to salute.
The next item of ritual was the mumbling of the Kiddush. The Potzker’s father prided himself in completing the recitation of the prayer with just two breaths. The buzzing that emitted from his father’s mouth was hypnotic and built on the out of body experience he was already beginning to experience during his father’s blessing of his mother.
The Potzker wondered what this ritual was about and how could he get any satisfaction in understanding it.
First, he studied it and realized it was composed of three parts.
The first part was a reading from the book of Genesis describing God’s activity on the seventh day. Upon closer examination, the Potzker realized it was a four-stage formula, prescribing how one gets into the Shabbat frame of mind.
First, one must declare “that is all” and pull back from one’s weekday concerns.
Secondly, one must withdraw to the power of neutral.
Thirdly, one must find the blessing within the neutral.
This gives one the ability to achieve the fourth element, which is the ability to decide what is important in life and to sanctify it.
The Potzker’s Shabbat was very Zen, even though the closest he ever got to Lao Tzu was to read the book of Ecclesiastes in a Potzkish way.
The next element was the blessing over the wine. He never understood the necessity for alcohol, as all it ever made him want to do is sleep, so he asked his father about this.
His father explained that the Sabbath is a taste of the world to come.
The Potzker heard of this concept, but couldn’t wrap his mind around it.
His father went on to explain.
“Everybody dies.
When you close up your shop at three in the afternoon on a winter’s day during your business busy season, you are saying that the world will go on without you now, just as it will go on without you after you die.”
The Potzker braced himself for another “the world does not revolve around you” speech.
Instead his father shifted gears.
“Judaism is about celebrating life. Only God knows what happens to our souls after we cease to breathe and He isn’t talking.
So, the quickest way for the common man to lighten up from the realization that he will die is to alter his state of consciousness. Wine is effective. Many other cultures use many different substances to achieve the same effect. We bless God for the gift of altered consciousness and thank him that we have been given the gift of substances that can set us on the journey. However, one glass of wine is all that is permitted. The rest of the journey is up to us. We raise a toast to God and think to ourselves: “To Life –Lechayim.” Then we invoke the gift of music, because, when used appropriately, song and dance is more powerful than any substance in lifting our souls to reach the heights one is capable of reaching on the Shabbat. We sing and hum and sway on Shabbat, our table representing a mini altar, our home becoming our Temple, a refuge from a world that has still not embraced the beauty of the Shabbat.”
The third element of the Kiddush was a prayer written by the men of the Great Assembly. It contains the sentiment that the Jews are “the chosen people.” This concept was difficult to understand until the Potzker’s father explained that God chose us for one purpose, and that purpose was to give us his gift, the Sabbath. The mission of the Jew is to keep the Sabbath, perfect it, and demonstrate it to the world for them to embrace as well. The Potzker liked to think of himself as a man on a mission.
Finally, it was time for some food.
Only two blessings to go.
The first task was to ritually wash his hands.
As a child, the first time the Potzker heard the tune for Amazing Grace he could not get it out of his head for months. One day while saying the blessing for hand washing, he decided to sing the blessing to that tune, and to this day he has not stopped. Since that time, his little secret ritual made him chuckle, for this was as bad as the Potzker would ever act intentionally, using a non-Jewish tune for a holy ritual. The blasphemy of it all! What a baddddd boy he was, he would think to himself. Until that time that his father explained to him that in synagogues people would sing prayers using beer hall tunes and also adapt folk song to the prayers. The Potzker was offended. At least his tune was rooted in freedom. But then again, beer seemed to be a source of freedom to many people in Potzk, except for the few who ended up spending the night in jail for having consumed too much.
After washing his hands he would walk back to the table like a freshly scrubbed surgeon with his hands raised in the air, not allowing them to come in contact with anything. He would then sit at the table with his palms raised and opposing each other without touching, in what looked to his father like a forbidden prayer pose. The Potzker insisted on acting out the literal meaning of the blessing of the hands, which was to elevate, not wash the hands. The Potzker’s father took this as a sign from God that his son would one day be a world famous surgeon and ultimately bring him pride instead of indigestion.
His father dealt with the situation by quickly making the blessing over the bread, at which time his son the yogi broke away from his seated tree pose to devour the beginning of the meal lovingly prepared by his mother.
First came the fish.
The Potzker loved his fish and declared so to all present.
“I love this fish.”
His father snorted, as he thought it an opportune time to teach his son about love.
Quoting a sage from the past, he remarked: “ If you really loved this fish you would not eat it. It is yourself that you love, not the fish.”
The Potzker had no problem loving himself.
“Pass the horseradish,” he asked of his father.
This ritual was repeated every week until the time where they both were able to laugh about it.
The Potzker loved to laugh. He inherited that trait from his father, who as far as he could tell, inherited the trait from his Creator.
The rest of the meal would usually go without incident.
After the meal, the family sang the grace after meals together, thanking God for providing the potential for food for every person on the planet.
Afterwards, the Potzker’s father would review current events so that the Potzker understood why the food was not reaching every person on the planet.
The Sabbath was a day to recite blessings and to count one’s blessings in awe.
Nothing was sweeter than the Shabbat slumber that overtook the Potzker as his head, filled with blessings, hit the pillow at bedtime.
Tefillin Power
On his twelfth birthday, the Potzker could hardly contain his excitement.
The countdown had begun. In one more year he could properly fulfill the commandment to don tefillin as part of his morning prayers.
There was only one pair of tefillin in the house, and somehow it was understood that the set belonged to the Potzker. The tefillin had a history, but nobody was telling it. His father taught him how to put on the tefillin, even though he had never seen his father do it himself.
The Potzker could imagine that once he turned thirteen, the tefillin headset would act as some sort of radio receiver from God, transmitting directly to his frontal lobes all of the answers to all of the questions that he could never get answered by mere humans.
Putting on the arm tefillin seemed more complicated. Wrapping the leather strap around the middle finger of his left hand sometimes was tricky, because if he did not weave it around tightly enough for the three required turns, it would slip into a tangled mess after a few minutes. He had a year to practice and get it right.
The Potzker liked the fact that the arm straps left temporary marks on his arms. He thought of this as his Jewish tattoo. He would walk the streets of Potzk feeling like a tough guy. This feeling excited and embarrassed him at the same time, as he knew that the point of all of his rituals was to teach him humility so that he could be closer to God.
The Potzker decided that he needed an attitude change and turned to the Ethics of the Fathers. The last line of the first chapter jumped out at him.
“The world is sustained by three things: justice, truth and peace.”
He thought that this made for a wonderful mission statement for a superhero. If he was going to walk around town as a tough guy, he could hide behind the morality of his superhero mission statement, bringing truth, justice and peace to the citizens of Potzk in a humble fashion befitting a local savior with alien origins.
Realizing that he was only twelve and could only do so much, he decided to dedicate the year to bringing peace to the town. Truth and justice would have to wait for another day.
The Potzker would get on his bicycle every day and look for conflict.
Conflict was not hard to find.
People seemed to be arguing all the time: politics, sports, the weather, parking spots, love, money, all seemed to raise the heart-rates of the people of Potzk.
The Potzker needed a plan.
He would look for people having an argument, approach them and present a standard introduction.
“Hello, I am the Potzker. What is the argument about today?”
People would often rudely dismiss his free arbitration services, leaving him puzzled.
“How am I to bring peace to Potzk if nobody pays me any heed? They just ignore me and continue their bickering.”
One day, the Potzker approached two men arguing in a barbershop. One was getting his hair cut; the other was waiting his turn. The subject of discussion appeared to be soccer, although it was not clear why it needed to be so heated.
“Hello, I am the Potzker. What is the argument about today?” asked he Potzker.
Both men stared at him as if he was from another planet.
The Potzker took this as a good sign, as his question stopped the men from arguing.
He repeated the question and got no verbal response.
The seated gentleman made a strange face and pointed the middle finger of his right hand upwards at him. The Potzker assumed that this was a salute to him and his tefillin related mission to bring peace to Potzk.
With joy in his heart, the Potzker thrust his tefillin finger back at the gentleman as acknowledgement of the salute he had just received.
The gentleman then started chasing the Potzker out of the barbershop.
The Potzker, fearing that the man wanted to embrace him for having brought peace to his life, fled, otherwise the moment of humility would be lost and only half of the mission would have been accomplished.
The next day, the Potzker decided to become proactive.
Instead of waiting for the salute of gratitude, he went around town looking for conflicts.
He would then approach the bickering parties, thrust his tefillin finger in their faces and then ask the question: “Hello, I am the Potzker. What is the argument about today?”
In most cases the argument would stop and one of the grateful parties would try to ruin the Potzker’s spiritual moment by trying to thank him. At least, that is how he saw it.
Not one grateful recipient was ever given the chance to thank the Potzker for the gift of peace that he brought them, because the Potzker took off as if he was being carried on the wings of angels.
A month before his thirteenth birthday, the Potzker won the 100 meter dash at his school’s track and field meet. This surprised his teachers and classmates, who never saw him as the athletic type. Nobody ever saw him practice.
That year, the Potzker had a lot of practice.
That year, the Potzker learned about the power in his tefillin finger.
Greetings
As far back as the Potzker could remember, people greeted each other in a traditional manner. Whenever a citizen of Potzk encountered another, the initiator would open up with a cheery “make my day.” The traditional response would be a joke, a funny story or, for reasons the Potzker never understood, pointing at the other with the index finger and the thumb up, mimicking a gun, winking and making the noise of the gun being cocked.
The Potzker, despite the phrase’s mysterious origins, thought this system made more sense than what he had heard happened in other societies. For example, he heard that in America, people greeted each other with the phrase “How are you?” Nobody in Potzk had the time to listen to the response to such a question, so “make my day” made more sense. He had heard that even the President of the United States at one time was fond of this phrase, yet it never took off as a standard greeting in America. What was the source of this expression?
The Potzker did not enjoy the state of not understanding. Whenever a puzzle presented itself to his brain, he had to know the answer. Otherwise, it would eat away at the puzzle-solving cortex of his brain, taking up valuable space and energy that could otherwise be devoted to higher pursuits.
One day, he asked his mother to explain the mystery to him. To his surprise, she claimed to have invented the tradition by planting the idea seed into the public consciousness.
The Potzker was as proud of his mother as if she had produced a sibling for his amusement.
“My mom created a meme. How cool is that?” he asked himself. Then he asked her how she did it.
It turns out that at one time Potzk had a movie theatre. More intriguing, his parents were the owners! The first and only movie ever presented at the theatre was Sudden Impact. The day after the first showing, which most of the townspeople attended, the theatre burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances. Unshaken by the loss, his mother decided to adopt a positive attitude when people came to console her. She started to greet people with Clint Eastwood’s famous line from that movie, “make my day.” His mother would say it in a sweet voice with a big smile. People had no choice but to respond positively, and so, a tradition was born.
Intrigued, The Potzker decided to see the movie for himself, but, being the character that he was, decided that it had to be studied in context, so he ordered the VHS tape of first of the Harry Callahan series to get a better understanding. And understand he did, not the movie, but life itself. Dirty Harry, the first movie of the series provided the Potzker with the most spiritual moment of his life, as he had never connected with another human being as closely as he had connected to a bank robber on the screen.
The scene: thieves departing from a bank heist, interrupted by police officer Harry Callahan brandishing “the most powerful handgun in the world.” Having discharged his weapon repeatedly, creating mayhem and justice simultaneously, Callahan approaches the last of the robbers whose own weapon is temporarily out of his reach, but close by. With Callahan’s gun in his face, the robber is presented with a dilemma: Callahan admits he has lost count of the shots he has fired. The gun may be empty, the gun may have a single bullet remaining. It is up to the robber to make his move: reach for his weapon, or surrender.
Surrender he does, but not without uttering what the Potzker thought to be the most profound line in cinema history.
“I gots to know.”
Callahan obliges his captured prey, points the gun at him and pulls the trigger. The only sound heard is the sound of a puzzle seeker’s soul being crushed.
The Potzker heard it loud and clear.
If Jews were allowed to get tattoos, the Potzker would have etched the phrase “I gots to know” deep into his skin, for that expression summed up his entire essence. I gots to know science, I gots to know humanities, I gots to know Talmud, I gots to know God.
Solving the puzzles of the universe was the Potzker’s chief pursuit. But it came with a cost, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
It is not as if he was not warned in Ecclesiastes that the pursuit of wisdom was vanity.
The image of the robber stuck in the Potzker’s mind like the stickiest metaphor imaginable.
The Potzker could not be consoled.
In a moment of madness, he went to his room and started discharging his frustration. He kicked his chair, and boy, did that hurt. You would think that he would have learned his lesson, but no; he had to punch the wall to prove that he was an idiot. Proof confirmed. Then he started tossing books off their shelves. A book of famous Jewish quotations flew to the ground, and opened up to a quote from The Talmud, Berachot, page 4a. The phrase jumped out at him.
“Teach your tongue to say I do not know.”
The Potzker’s moment of mayhem made his day.
Good Kop, Bad Kop, Yiddishe Kop
The Potzker was troubled. He turned to prayer.
Actually, his prayer was the source of his troubles.
Every day he recited the 145th Psalm.
Acrostic poetry is supposed to devote one line to every letter in the alphabet.
Psalm 145 was supposed to be an acrostic.
There was no verse for the fourteenth letter, nun.
The gap created a hole in the Potzker’s soul.
The Potzker did not like gaps.
Every day when he got to verse 13, he felt as if something had hit him in the belly.
The Potzker thought this might be a sign of some sort, so he researched the significance of the belly in the Talmud. There, he found that the middle letter of the entire Torah could be found in the word belly, and that word happened to end with the letter nun that was supposed to start the 14th line of the Psalm. Could this be a clue?
It certainly seemed to make a difference, because the next day, instead of feeling his usual stomachache, he felt as if the missing verse had created a hole in his brain, and that it was banging around in his head like a stick in a garbage can.
Progress?
Hardly.
The hole needed to be filled. But how was the puzzle to be solved?
He turned to math, since supposedly mathematics is the language of God.
“What is a 14 but a 4 and a 10? Everybody knows that if you add up the numbers by counting backwards from 4, you get 10, so a 4 is a 10. What is a 10, but a 0 and a 1? Add these two and you get a 1.”
Perhaps if he used the atbash code, where the numbers indicate the distance of the hidden letters from the beginning and end of the alphabet, the answer would be revealed?
“The 4 represents the fourth last letter from the end, W and the fourth letter from the beginning: D. The 10 represents the I and the R in such a code. And the 1 from adding 1 plus zero represents the letters Z and A. Presto! The word wizard appears. Is that the message?”
“Or maybe not, maybe it is a message based on the complete number fourteen? There are 14 joints in my fingers. Perhaps the poet is saying that the answers to all mysteries lie in one’s own hands?”
The Potzker used all fourteen joints to scratch his head, hoping that the answer would magically appear. Perhaps magic was the way to go. “Abracadabra,” he intoned.
His Aramaic incantation produced no results, but did not create any discomfort either. In fact, it seemed to relieve it. Something about this solution felt right, so he decided to substitute this phrase for the 14th line of the Psalm. He would say it in such a way as to make his belly vibrate. With hands outstretched, palms upwards, like a man seeking compassion, he exposed the fourteen joints of each hand as if he was ready to receive the missing verse directly from God. Somehow this felt right. A new tradition was born, or so he thought.
One day his mother overheard the Potzker praying and reciting the abracadabra.
She approached him and gave him the look. That is all his mother needed to do.
In her eyes, he saw the ultimate stick a Jewish mother can beat her child with: disappointment.
But somehow, that was not punishment enough. She told his father what the Potzker was up to.
“Past nisht,” was all he said. Two words, summarizing the wisdom of three thousand years of Jewish parenting. Past nisht. Roughly translated, it meant that his actions were beneath his dignity and the dignity of the prayer he was reciting. The two words served their purpose. Somehow they seemed to fill the hole in the text. The word nisht, beginning with the missing letter nun, began rolling around in his head, over and over, until it completely filled the empty space in his brain and closed the gap.
Psalm 145 could now be recited as written in the prayer book.
Years later, Dead Sea Scroll scholars would show that the Potzker was not that far off in his filling of the void in the text.
Geni(us)olgy
The Potzker’s family was the only Jewish family in town.
This limited him in his ability to experience the full flavour of what it meant to be a Jew.
There were no other Jews to argue with.
There were no other Jews to pray with.
There were no other Jews to argue with over how one is to pray properly.
His parents never prayed. Even on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, when there was nothing to do but be hungry, his parents had their own rituals.
They would dress in white, sit, read, stare at each other, yawn, takes breaks by going for walks in the wood, and repeatedly check the clock, like excited kids on a trip wondering, are we there yet?
The Potzker’s father told him that this is how Jews around the world marked the day, except that every year his parents would read a new volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica together, while the Potzker would read the same old Yom Kippur machzor.
As the day ended, the family had a strange ritual. Before sitting down to the meal to break the fast, they would go outside, face the moon and start singing one word over and over: hallelujah. His father would lead a round of hallelujahs, and both him and his mother would respond. Then his mother would lead and both he and his father would respond. The tunes varied from moment to moment and from year to year.
One year, the Potzker decided to lead, and he chose a mournful tune.
“What was that?” asked his father.
“That was a cold and broken hallelujah,” replied an exasperated Potzker.
His mother embraced him.
“What is on your mind, rebbe?’ she asked.
He knew his mother understood him pain, because the only time she called him rebbe was when she felt the piece of her heart that belonged to him aching and in need of comfort.
“Where are we from? Why are we the only Jews in Potzk? Why don’t I have any relatives? Why do you always evade this question?”
The Potzker’s father answered.
“You are the product of thousands of years of history. The only way to understand who you are is to start at the beginning and work your way to the present. You are not ready for an answer to your question until you can answer my questions. For example, do you even understand your namesake, the patriarch Isaac after whom you are named? He did not plague his father with questions of genealogy. When you convince me that you have learned your history, then I will answer your question. If you want a better answer tonight, ask your mother. I am going to help get dinner ready while you two talk if that is your mother’s wish.” And so, his father departed.
The Potzker’s mother smiled at her son and apologized for her life partner.
“Your father is a genius when his belly is full, but when not…” She winked at her son and said no more.
His mother pointed at the moon.
“For thousands of years, humans have looked at the moon, dreamed about traveling there, wondered what it was made of and how it even got there. None of that really matters when it comes to the moon’s power over the earth. It silently exerts its influence day in and day out with dignity, making the tides rise and fall, and tuning the oceans so that they can sing in rhythm.”
So, does it make any difference if you know where it comes from? Even scientists are not sure of its origin.
Do you understand?”
The Potzker thought he did.
He could see it in his mother’s eyes.
Just as the Earth needs the moon, every individual needs a stabilizing force to govern the tides of one’s life, a force that is generated by a body that revolves around you. To the Potzker, that body was his mother. A big solid rock scarred by experience.
The Potzker understood. For all he knew, his parents had arrived from the moon. His heritage was lunar. That was good enough for him
The Potzker declared himself a lunatic.
Genealogy understood.
Hallelujah!
Emoticontamination
One day, the Potzker discovered the emoticon.
Or should I say, the Potzker became possessed by emoticons.
More specifically, the ;) .
Wherever the Potzker turned in his spiritual life, the winking emoticon would pop up in the most inappropriate of places, changing the context and meaning of things and challenging his belief system.
The Potzker had a system. All sacred texts could be interpreted based on translation, and those translations could be changed based on punctuation. The system was coming back to haunt him.
When he woke up in the morning, he recited the traditional morning blessing.
“I gratefully thank you, O living and eternal King, for having returned my soul to my body with compassion. Great is your faith in me.”
Instead, he now began each morning with the following:
“I gratefully thank you, O living and eternal King, for having returned my soul to my body with compassion. Great ;) is your faith in me.”
It was as if his subconscious was leaking into his prayers, for the Potzker did not have much faith in himself and would often wonder what kind of a God would have faith in him.
The Potzker turned to Maimonides. Nothing like some dry and puzzling philosophy to sober him up. He studied the 13 principles.
“I believe with complete faith in the coming of the Messiah. Even though he is delayed, I will wait.”
Of course the leakage continued.
“I believe with complete faith in the coming of the Messiah. Even though he is delayed, I will ;) wait.”
Great. Maimonides was now reflecting the Potzker’s own cynical views on the messianic age.
The Potzker turned to the book of Genesis. He had hoped that this holy book would be spared.
“ And God saw the entirety of that which he had created. And it was very good.”
The Potzker took a deep breath. Six days of creation had come and gone, without an appearance of the dreaded emoticon.
The Potzker chuckled.
Life was indeed very good.
Except that, by uttering this idea, the original phrase of text repeated itself, and in the phrase…
“ And God saw the entirety of that which he had created. And it was very ;) good.”
And the Potzker realized that this was true. All that God had created was good, including the emoticon, for the emoticon taught him that God had a sense of humour, and that the first punch line in the Torah taught him the first and possibly most important commandment: Thou shalt laugh with thy God. If thou dost not get it, thou shalt laugh at the Lord. Laughter is its own reward: choose wisely.
;O !!
The Crucifiction of Moses
Life as a Jew in Potzk was at times challenging for the Potzker.
It seemed that everywhere he went, there was a crucifix staring him in the face, taunting him, tempting him to give up the ways of his people and to blend into the masses.
There were crucifixes on walls, crucifixes in stained glass, crucifixes hanging from people’s necks and earlobes, and tattoos of crucifixes on varied body parts of Potzk’s finest and not so fine citizens.
He remembered once seeing car accident involving a hearse that drove through a red light. Sandwiched by cars coming at it from both directions in the intersection, crucifixes dangling from their rear view mirrors, the cars melded into one metallic mess that to him looked like a giant crucifix. Even the intersection looked like a crucifix.
It came to a point that the letter T was enough to make him uncomfortable. It was at this stage that the Potzker decided that he needed a coping strategy.
Rather than shy away from the offending symbols, he decided that he was going to embrace them. The question was, how?
To begin with, he started studying every crucifix he saw, looking for an opening that would bring him some comfort. He saw plain crucifixes, fancy crucifixes, gold ones, silver ones, copper ones, crucifixes made of olive wood from the Holy Land and numerous other materials, but too him these were all devoid of any meaning.
The crucifixes with Jesus on the cross were much more interesting. There was Jesus looking up, Jesus looking down, looking right, looking left, looking every which way, but most often, looking like he was in agony. Eyes open, eyes closed, it did not mater. A Jew nailed to a cross, in spiritual and emotional pain, alone, this was a crucifix the Potzker could relate to. After many days and some sleepless nights pondering crucifixes, the Potzker started to believe that the people of Potzk were displaying the crucifix as acknowledgement of the suffering of the town’s only Jewish child, as if to say, we feel your pain, you lonely and strange little boy: wouldn’t it be better for everyone if you and your family left town?
One day, the Potzker, excited by his revelation, came home and announced to his mother,
“I am Jesus.”
His mother promptly took him to the only doctor in town that was actually able to communicate with her son.
Dr Starsus was known for his diagnostic skills and his bedside manner. Organizationally, his office reflected his creative but messy side. Stacks upon stacks of files here, journals and books there, a pile of crutches and canes in the corner, x-ray films on the view-box, a dizzying scene, symbolized by the determined fruit fly buzzing around yesterday’s left-over lunch.
“Good day master Yitzchak,” exclaimed Dr S with a smile that could have melted the chocolate bar in the Potzker’s pocket that his mother had used to bribe him to visit the doctor.
The Potzker reveled in the fast one he had pulled on his mother, because he did not need to be bribed to see Dr S. He loved meeting with his personal physician, as every great rebbe had a wise counsel steeped in the sciences that oversaw matters of health. He liked that Dr S called him master. To the Potzker, this was an acknowledgment of his mastery of the sacred texts. What other reason could there be?
“So, what can I do for you today,” Dr S inquired as he looked Yitzchak straight in the eyes.
The Potzker liked that his personal physician would ask him directly, as opposed to asking his mother.
Nevertheless his mother interrupted.
“He thinks he is Jesus.”
“Is that true?” asked the doctor.
“Yes and no,” replied the Potzker.
“I know I am not THE Jesus. But I cannot help but feel that, after thoroughly examining the matter, that I am Jesus. I have gotten into Jesus’ head, and can now see the world through his eyes. I cannot get out.”
Dr S paused to ponder his next question.
“How did you get into his head?”
The Potzker promptly replied, “I studied his face, over and over.”
Dr S scratched his head and moved his chair closer.
“Did you really study the eyes? I understand that you now see the world through Jesus eyes, but possibly you went through the wrong portal. I believe you went into his head through his ears. To understand the crucifix you must enter through the eyes. The eyes are the windows to the soul. Do you understand Yitzchak?”
The Potzker’s mother started to squirm in her seat, as she now felt she was in the presence of two madmen, as the Potzker stared to nod his head at the doctor’s words.
“Allow me to demonstrate a principle to you. Hop up on my examining table.”
Dr S explained that he needed to look into the Potzker’s eyes with a very powerful light. He turned off he room lights, asked the Potzker to keep his eyes fixed on one spot and proceeded to shine the light in his eyes. All he asked is that the Potzker pay close attention to everything that he experiences.
The bright light put the Potzker in pain, but he could not move his eyes, otherwise the experiment would fail.
“Did you see something?” asked Dr S as he turned the lights on.
“Yes, squiggly lines that look like railroad tracks,” replied the Potzker.
“ Excellent” remarked Dr S as he pulled a book off the shelf.
“Did it look like this?” he asked, pointing to a picture in an ophthalmology text.
“Yes, very much so,” answered the Potzker.
“What was that?”
Dr S explained.
“ This is a picture of what it looks like when I look into your eye. If I shine a bright enough light into your eye, you can see the shadows in the back of your own eye, even though it appears that the image is coming from somewhere out there. When you are seeing the world through Jesus’ eyes, you are actually seeing it through your own eyes. Do you understand?”
The Potzker paused and scratched his head, mimicking his consultant’s gestures.
“I do, but it is still hard to go out every day and face the crucifixes.”
Dr S pulled a richly detailed crucifix from inside his desk.
“Let us go back and reexamine the portals. What do you see in the eyes, master Yitzchak?”
The Potzker focused all of his energies and could only think of one word.
“Pain.”
“Excellent,” replied Dr S.
“Yitzchak, you are a Jew. The crucifix is not a symbol of your people, but in this town you cannot avoid seeing it, and I can appreciate how that can make you feel uncomfortable. Deal with it by focusing on the eyes on the crucifix, the eyes of a suffering human. Let any crucifix you see serve as a reminder of your task as a Jew to help those that have that look in their eyes. Is that in keeping with your religion?”
The Potzker paused and looked at his mother’s eyes. He was disturbed to see the look of pain in his own mother’s face. At that moment, without blinking, he replied that he understood, and saw his mother’s face transform with relief. That made the Potzker feel good and begin to appreciate the powers that he had just begun to master.
“I have seen the light,” answered the Potzker with a wink to his consultant.
That night, the Potzker opened up his Bible to for his regular bedtime study. The chapter before him happened to be the one in the book of Exodus that describes the battle between the Israelites and Amalek.
Prior to that battle, Moses was filled with despair because of the whining and complaining that emanated from the people he had recently led to freedom from slavery. Suddenly, they are attacked from the rear by the forces of Amalek, and an already despondent Moses has to lead his troops in a counterattack for survival.
Sending Joshua to lead the troops, he stood on a mountaintop observing the battle below, weakened and fatigued by the toll that the process of leadership was taking on his mind and body. Moses directed all of the negative energy in his body outward. When his arms were raised high enough, the negative energy hit the enemy and the Israelites prevailed. When he could no longer sustain the strength required to aim high and far, the negative energy hit his own troops and the enemy prevailed.
The weakened Moses was forced to sit on a hard rock to conserve his energy, while Aaron and Hur each grabbed an arm to direct the energy at the enemy so that Joshua’s troops could beat back the predatory enemy
The Potzker had read this story many time before, but usually got lost in his imagination picturing the battlefield scene. Suddenly, he saw the eyes of Moses. The image of Moses weakened, and yet generating a power reminded him of many of the crucifixes he had seen. At that moment, revelation! The Potzker never saw Jesus on another crucifix. All he would ever see were the eyes of Moses during the battle of Amalek.
The eyes of a leader inspiring his troops.
The eyes of a great rebbe.
Dreidel Boy
The Potzker did not understand Chanukah.
He took comfort in the fact that neither did the rabbis of the Talmud.
In fact, very little is written in the Talmud about Chanukah.
The rabbis seem to be taken by surprise by the people embracing a holiday that was of little significance. Perhaps they were even threatened by the bottom up phenomenon that was emerging as opposed to the usual top down pattern that they were used to.
“Mahee Chanukah?”
“What is this phenomenon called Chanukah,” they asked?
The Potzker asked himself the same question.
Was it because of the great military victory? Hardly, there were greater victories in Jewish history that did not get recognized with a holiday.
Was it hero worship? Unlikely, for the great Judah the Maccabee was dead only a few short years after his great accomplishment.
The miracle of the oil? The Potzker distrusted miracles that lasted eight days, for as far as he could recall, the last thing that lasted eight days in his life was his foreskin.
He was not a big fan of the lights.
He did not like the greasy foods that characterized the holiday.
He had nobody to play dreidel with competitively.
So, as is normal for the Potzker, he spent the holiday thinking about the holiday.
Clearly there was nothing to celebrate about the purification of the Temple, for it would soon rot with priestly corruption and in less than 250 years be reduced to a pile of rubble.
And then it hit him.
Chanukah is about the beginning of the end.
Throughout Jewish history, the voice of doom would repeatedly be raised.
This crisis is the beginning of the end of the Jews. That crisis almost finished us off.
And yet, here it was thousands of years later.
Still there are Jews. There is no end.
Temple Jews replaced by two thousand years of Talmudic Jews. Talmudic Jews to be replaced by God knows what.
The Jews will survive.
But in what form?
The Potzker’s head began to spin like a dreidel, Hebrew letters dancing through his head, some spelling Jerusalem, some spelling Yavneh. The place names were replaced by the four-lettered name of God.
The Potzker answered the question of “what is Chanukah?”
It is not about a place or a time. It was about the beginning of departure of the Divine flame from the Temple, to find a new home as a spark in every Jew.
And with that realization, the Potzker enthusiastically lit his candles.
Silent Night, Holy Night
The evening started off as usual.
Mother lit the candles to usher in the holiest night of the year.
The family then gathered around the record player in the Potzker’s room and listened intently to a cello recital of Bloch’s Kol Nidre. When the music concluded, each family member proceeded to the next phase of the annual ritual.
The Potzker stayed in his room on the second floor. His parents descended to the main floor, each to a different room so as to minimize distractions on this night that called for serious and deep contemplation.
His mother sought refuge in the kitchen, his father found sanctuary in the living room.
The sound of the silence was as thick as the stew that preceded the beginning of the fast.
It reminded the Potzker of the silence that one hears after the tekia gedolah, the final shofar blast of Rosh Hashanah. In a good year one could hear the silence of one’s soul being stilled and moved simultaneously.
Only twenty-five hours to go before the Potzker would be able to eat again. The thought made him hungry.
This was the Potzker’s first Yom Kippur since becoming bar mitzvah almost six months earlier. It was the first time that he was obligated to fast the entire period required of adult Jews. He managed to do it the year before despite his mother’s protests that he would have plenty of opportunity to fast in the future. Perhaps he was able to do it because his mother said that he shouldn’t. The Potzker had a stubborn, rebellious side. Tell him that something is forbidden, and the wheels and cogs in his brain would immediately start churning, seeking a response to protect his freedom.
It was eighteen minutes into the fast. The Potzker had been counting every one of them. He checked to see if the stew from supper had moved in his belly. Was that a space in his stomach opening up, screaming “fill me or you might not make it to tomorrow morning?”
The Potzker was not sure. In the nineteenth minute of delirious hunger, the wheels and cogs of freedom started in motion.
“Why does God want me to suffer?” he thought to himself.
“I don’t recall God ordering a day of fasting in my reading of the Torah, Who came up with such an idea? I better check the sources,” he mused.
As far as the Potzker understood, the Day of Atonement did just that: it atoned for the sin of the Jews not properly accepting the Ten Commandments the first time around. Yom Kippur was a celebration of God having given the Jews a second chance, with Moses having successfully delivered the Decalogue to a repentant and forgiven nation.
The Potzker carefully checked the wording of the Ten Commandments. Despite minor variations between the version in Exodus as compared to the version in Deuteronomy, there was nothing there to indicate that the Potzker needed to be deprived of food for any reason
The Potzker decided to study the text more carefully. Ve’eeneetem et nafshoteychem. You shall afflict your souls on the Day of Atonement, according to the text. No details. Not even a rationale. It was up to the Potzker to figure it out by himself. So he went back to the incident that triggered it all. Moses descended the mountain with the tablets of God in hand, one day later than the collective soul expected. As he arrived closer, he heard kol anot, the people singing in a call and response pattern, a joyous chorus not in honour of Moses and his holy message, but in honour of a golden idol shining in the hot sun, reflecting a solar beam that struck Moses in the eyes and ignited a moment of rage that led to the destruction of the tablets upon which were inscribed the holy words.
“Holy cow,” thought the Potzker. “This is all about the song. The rabbis misread the Torah. They put the vowels in the wrong place! God did not want the people to afflict their souls. The text did not say Ve’eeneetem. It said Ve’aaneetem, you shall answer your souls. God was playing with the words. Just as the people sinned by singing in call and response, the people would repent by call and response.”
The Potzker felt violated. Based on his reading, his obligation and the obligation of every Jew on the planet on Yom Kippur was to answer the soul, not starve the body.
The Potzker’s soul was crying out for food.
It was thirty-two minutes into the fast.
The Potzker’s eyes took him to a corner of his room.
There, his gaze rested upon a box, a box of milk chocolate bars that he had brought home from school to sell to his neighbours as part of the school’s fundraising drive.
The box was already open, as he had sold the first bar of Swiss made heaven to himself. Twenty-nine bars to go.
The box drew him closer, the sweet smell of temptation pulling him in like a fish hooked on a line by an excited novice fisherman. It pulled, he pulled back, jerking back and forth.
A bar found its way into the Potzker’s hand and he examined it carefully in the dim light of his room. The Potzker convinced himself that he just wanted to read the ingredients so that he could envision the story behind the numerous ingredients and how they came together to produce the pleasure to be found beyond the wrapper. He started to think of the cows grazing in rolling meadows who would provide the milk portion of the milk chocolate. His mind drifted to the luscious scenery of the equatorial climate from whence the cacao was harvested. He imagined the valiant crew of the ship conquering he high seas to bring the harvest to its next destination. The next thing he knew, he was re-experiencing the first bar he ate from the box, thinking that these chocolates were the best chocolates he had ever tasted, and that it would be a shame to sell them.
“Taste is mostly smell,” thought the Potzker. “It is not a sin to smell food on Yom Kippur. I am not even sure it is a sin to eat food on Yom Kippur.” Then he remembered his mother’s strict warning, that chocolate was not food, and for the first time, he understood this, even if he understood it for his own benefit .
The Potzker raised one bar to his face, imagining that this is what the sweet fragrance of the sacrifices offered in the Temple in Jerusalem must have smelled like to God.
The Potzker then thought that it would be easier to smell the chocolate if he removed the cardboard wrapper. He gently and lovingly slipped it off.
“Mmmm, much better,” he thought.
The Potzker felt he was fulfilling God’s edict to answer his soul on Yom Kippur on a much higher level now. That being the case, the Potzker decided that he would purchase the bar in his hand after the holiday. As the bar now theoretically belonged to him, he had no objection to pulling back the gold foil that restricted the chocolate molecules from the freedom of mixing with the air. The naked bar erupted in a cacophony of chocolate music, tantalizing each cell in his olfactory bulbs until he could no longer resist the call. The Potzker responded by taking a huge bite out of the bar, and sat down as this piece of chocolate sat in his mouth. He was afraid to chew, thinking that he had already gone too far, but the chocolate had other ideas. Slowly it began to melt, as his body temperature began the process of making him one with the piece. Unio mystico. The Potzker was now one with the universe and fully understood the final word of the opening line of the Shema that he uttered every day. Echad. One.
One.
One was good.
Then from somewhere within him a voice sprang up.
“One. One more. It is just one. It is all one. One.”
The Potzker answered the call.
He bit off another piece.
And then another.
And then another.
Before he knew it, the Potzker had finished thirteen bars.
To each bar he attributed a feature of God.
By the end of number thirteen, his heart was racing, his palms were sweaty, his energy was rising and his mind was jumping.
“Call and response, call and response, that is what God wants from the Jewish people. To celebrate Him in call and response.”
The Potzker scanned his record collection for an inspirational song to offer to the Lord.
A Beatles album jumped at him and before he could ask himself what he was doing, Twist and Shout began blaring from the speakers.
The Potzker began responding to the call of the singers, and before long was jumping around the room in a dance that wasn’t seen on the planet since the time of Simchat Beit Hashoeiva.
The Potzker’s father’s deep contemplation, the yeshiva of below as the Potzker liked to call it, was disturbed by a thumping from the Potzker’s yeshiva of above.
His father rose, took one look at his mother who with her eyes said: “he’s your son, you deal with it.”
Racing up the stairs, the Potzker’s father opened to door to a spectacle that he could have never imagined.
There, in mid-air was his son, flying off the bed, his face covered in a beard and moustache of chocolate, rising higher off the bed higher with each rising note that the Beatles sang. Amazed at first by his son’s gravity defying hang-time, his father’s next thought was that the only other people in the world who could appreciate this moment would be Michael Jordan and Ferris Bueller. The Potzker’s mother was not on this short list.
The Potzker landed on the floor with such a crash that the needle jumped off the record.
Silence had once again enveloped the Potzker household.
His father told him he would return in ten minutes to talk about what happened, and left the Potzker to contemplate his future.
He went to the bathroom, washed his face and returned to his room gathering up the shiny golden wrappers that at one time acted as a barrier between him and his father’s wrath. As he sat there on his bed, he began studying the wrapper, and even though the light was dim, he could see his troubled reflection in the golden wrapper. He noted that the wrapper was embossed with a picture of a cow, for after all, this was fine milk chocolate.
The Potzker understood. God had called. The Potzker had responded.
When his father returned, the Potzker started to explain to him his new interpretation of what was required on Yom Kippur and how that had led him to understand the sin of the golden calf.
The Potzker’s father patiently listened, and pointed out that he had missed including the sin of Moses and Aaron in his explanation.
“Aaron sinned by thinking that if he just bought some time by giving in to the people’s demand for an idol to worship, everything would work out in the end. He fooled himself.”
“Moses sinned by thinking that, even though he was late, the call and response songs he was hearing from the people were songs of celebration in his honour. He too, was fooling himself.”
“My dear Potzker, you have just followed in the traditions of our great leaders. May you spend the rest of Yom Kippur thinking about how, over the next year, you can prevent yourself from falling into the trap of fooling yourself.
I am always here for you to give you feedback should you ever need it, because feedback from others is the key to saving oneself from oneself.”
With that, the father burst into a call and response song of his own as he exited.
“Chain chain chain, chain of fools” he sang, laughing with himself.
The Potzker recognized that the apple does not fall far from the tree.
The Potzker now had a craving for apples as he resumed his fast.
