There are eleven children in the beth midrash, almost all of them his grandchildren.
Elisha himself is nearing sixty. He is small, wiry, quick-tempered. The boys, who are already there waiting for their teacher, know their grandfather is coming to check on their progress. Old Shorr does this every day, so long as he is in Rohatyn and not on one of his frequent business trips.
Now he races in, his face slivered by two vertical wrinkles, which makes him look even more severe. But he doesn’t want to scare the children. So he makes sure to smile at them. Elisha looks at each one of them individually first, and he is filled with a tenderness he tries to conceal. He addresses them in a muffled voice, somewhat hoarse, like he’s trying to rein himself in, and he takes several large nuts out of his pocket; they are genuinely enormous, almost the size of peaches. He holds them in his open palms and offers them up to the children. They watch with interest, thinking he will give them these nuts now, not expecting to be tricked. But the old man takes one of them and cracks it open in the iron grip of his bony hand. Then he holds it up to the first boy, Leybko, Nathan’s son.
“What is this?”
“A nut,” Leybko pronounces with satisfaction.
“What’s it made of?” says Shorr, moving on to the next boy, Shlomo. Shlomo is less certain. He looks up at his grandfather and squints:
“A shell and a kernel.”
Elisha Shorr is pleased. Now he has them watch as, slowly and theatrically, he takes out the nut’s kernel and eats it, closing his eyes in rapture, smacking his lips. It’s odd. Little Israel on the last bench starts to laugh at his grandfather—it’s so funny how he rolls his eyes.
“Ah, but that’s too simple,” Elisha says to Shlomo, growing serious all of a sudden. “Look, there’s another kind of little shield here on the inside of the shell, and a coat that covers the kernel.”
He sweeps up the nuts and holds them out for the boys to peer over his hands.
“Come and see,” he says.
All this is to teach the children that the Torah’s structure is the same. The shell is the simplest meaning of the Torah, its description of what happened. Then we start to get down into its depths. Now the boys write four letters on their little tablets, peh, resh, dalet, shin, and when they have managed this, Elisha Shorr asks them to read aloud what they have written—all the letters together and each on its own.
Shlomo recites it like a little poem, but as if he doesn’t understand:
“P, pshat, that’s the literal meaning, R, remez, that’s the figurative meaning, D, drash, that’s what the learned say, and S, sod, that’s the mystical meaning.”
At the word “mystical,” he starts to stammer, just like his mother. He is so similar to Hayah, Elisha thinks, moved by it. This discovery puts him in a good mood. All these children are of his blood, there is a part of him in each of them, as if he were a chopped log sending out splinters.
“What are the names of the four rivers that flow from Eden?” he asks another boy, one with big ears that stick out from his diminutive face. That’s Hillel, his sister’s grandson. He responds at once: Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Phrath.
In walks Berek Smetankes, the teacher, who observes this sweet scene through the eyes of the others. Elisha Shorr is sitting among the children, telling stories. The teacher assumes a blissful expression to please the old man, rolls his eyes in pleasure. He has very light skin and almost white hair, hence his sobriquet, Smetankes, which sounds like the Yiddish word for sour cream. Deep down, he is terrified of this little old man, and he doesn’t know of anyone who isn’t. Maybe only the two Hayahs, the little one and the big one—daughter and daughter-in-law. Both of them behave however they wish with him.
“There were once four great sages, whose names were Ben Asai, Ben Soma, Elisha ben Abuyah, and Rabbi Akiba. One after the other they went to paradise,” begins the old man. “Ben Asai, well, he saw it, and he died.”
Elisha Shorr breaks off, pauses dramatically, and with raised brow tries to gauge the effects of what he has just said. Little Hillel’s jaw drops in astonishment.
“What does that mean?” Shorr asks the boys, but of course no one responds, so he raises a finger to the ceiling and finishes: “Well, it means that he got into the River Pishon, a name that can be translated as: lips that learn the strict sense.”
He straightens out his second finger and says:
“Ben Soma, well, he saw it, and he lost his mind.” He contorts his face into a grimace, and the children laugh. “And what does that mean? That means he got into the River Gihon, a name that tells us that the person is only seeing the allegorical meaning.”
He knows the children won’t understand much of what he’s saying. That’s okay. They don’t need to understand it, all that matters is that they learn it all by heart. That will enable them to come to understand eventually.
“Elisha ben Abuyah,” he goes on, “looked and became a heretic. That means that he got into the River Hiddekel, and he got lost in the great many possible meanings.”
He points three fingers at little Isaac, who starts to squirm.
“Only Rabbi Akiba went into paradise and came back out unscathed, which means that having plunged into the River Phrath, he got the deepest meaning, the mystical one.
“And those are the four paths to reading and understanding.”
The children gaze covetously at the nuts that lie before them on the table. Their grandfather cracks them open in his hands and passes them around. He watches them as they gobble the last crumbs. Then he walks out, his face crinkles up, his smile disappearing, and through the labyrinths of his house, which resembles a beehive, he goes to Yente.
Yente, or: Not a good time to die
Yente was brought from Korolówka by her grandson Israel and his wife, Sobla, who were also invited to the wedding. They are true believers, like everyone here. They live far away, but the family sticks together.
Now they really regret doing what they did, and no one remembers whose idea it was. It doesn’t matter that Grandma wanted to come. They had always been afraid of her, because she had always been the ruler of their home. There was no saying no to her. Now it makes them shake with fear that she is going to die in the Shorrs’ home, and during a wedding at that, which will cast a dark shadow over the lives and futures of the newlyweds. When in Korolówka they got into the carriage, covered in tarpaulin, which they and some other guests had rented out, Yente was in perfect health and even clambered up onto her seat by herself. Then she asked for some snuff, and off they went, singing, until, tired, they tried to go to sleep.