Alter's Divorce, viii

              

             The next week, after the conclusion of Purim, Sarai had her horses hitched to the wagon and she and Alter drove to Podloz to get a divorce.   

              In twenty years the forest surrounding the road had been felled.  Fields of wheat, corn, barley and oats spread to the horizon.  Every now and again, they rode past a paddock of cows.  At every crossroad was a small village with an inn, a cluster of houses, and a shul or church.   

              When they arrived at Podloz the entire town was there to great them.  Word of Atler’s return had spread through the country like a brush fire.  Everyone told the story of his disappearance, his captivity, his sojourn in the Holy Land, his mastery of Kabbalah, and his return to Poland.  Some saw his tale as a birth pang of the coming of the Messiah. 

            Podloz had grown.  The rabbi’s house had two stories, and the synagogue was no longer made of wood, but stone.  When Sarai and Alter entered the rabbi’s house, several of the townspeople tried to enter with them, but the beadle begged them off.  

             The rabbi was waiting for them.  He was a new rabbi who wore a short, modern gabardine, and who trimmed his side locks.  He knew the story of Alter and Sarai, as everyone in the region did, but he had to ask the details for the court.  Altered answered the rabbi’s questions, and reiterated that he wished to divorce Sarai to free her to marry again.

            “For she is still a woman who can bear children, if the Lord wishes it,” Alter concluded.  “But I am an old man.  My time is passed.  I wish to return to Safed and my books.”

            “Have you tried to fulfill your obligations as a husband since your return?” the rabbi asked.

            “No, Rabbi,” Alter answered.

            “Then how do you know you are too old?  Is your wife clean?”

            “I don’t know Rabbi,” Alter answered.

            “Sarai daughter of Gershom,” the rabbi addressed Sarai for the first time.  “Are you clean?  Have you visited the ritual bath?”

            “Yes, Rabbi,” she answered.

            “Do you still get your time?” he asked.

            “Yes, Rabbi.”

            “Do you want to divorce your husband?” the rabbi pressed.  “Speak up, daughter, now is the time!”

            “Yes,” Sarai answered, “I do.”

            On hearing this, the rabbi, who had been leaning forward in his seat, as if he was hearing a tale whose outcome he could not tell, sat back dejectedly. 

            “Impossible,” he muttered, and then again: “Impossible.  This marriage was crafted in Heaven.  You are back after all these years.  Back from the grave even!  I will not be the man who undoes the work of the Almighty, Blessed be His Name.   

             "Marriages are made by God for our sanctity.  Once there was a pious man who married a pious woman, and they had no children.  So they said 'We are no profit to God,' and were divorced.  The pious woman went and married a bad man, and became bad herself.  It did not matter how many children she had.  The pious man married a bad woman, and he too became bad.   It did not matter how many children he had.  Without each other, they turned away from God.  This is more grave a sin than not begetting children.

            “God has tried you Reb Alter,” the rabbi concluded, “and Sara daughter of Gershom.  You have suffered.  Years have passed.  Now God will bless you.  Go harvest the fruit which God has sown. If God wills it, He will give you what you have longed for.” 

Alter's Divorce, vii

            

           When the stranger from the Levant entered the village, several young boys rushed out to him.  He wore a long, black gown, a silk skullcap, and black pointed boots.  His beard was long and gray.    

           Often visitors from the east collected charity for yeshivas in the Holy Land; they gathered a few coins here and there in broken Yiddish and then moved on.  But this one spoke fluent Yiddish.  He asked the eldest boy where the shop of Sarai daughter of Gershom was, and was told:  It was the same location as his old shop.

            The town had grown in twenty years.  Alter did not recognize the faces or the buildings.  People came to the thresholds of their houses to watch the exotic Jew walk down the street.   

            His old shop had expanded.  There was an extension, a second floor, and several out buildings.  When he entered, five apprentices and a master turned to look at him.  The master approached Alter and asked if he could help him.

            “May I see Sarai,” Alter answered.  “Sarai the daughter of Gershom?”

            “Yes,” the man answered.  “Who shall I say is here?”  There was a pause. All eyes were fixed on Alter.

            “Her husband, Alter Ashkenaz.”

            The man left and in a moment he returned with a hefty matron whose straw colored hair poked out from beneath her kerchief.  If Alter did not know this was Sarai in front of him he would not have believed it.  He could not even see the bare outlines of the young girl he had married two decades ago.

            “Alter,” she said, and then again. “Alter?”

            “Yes, its me…” he was going to continue but Sarai’s knees buckled from beneath her.  She would have fallen if not for the apprentices surrounding her, who caught her and led her to the house.  Alter did not know what to do so he simply followed.

Alter's Divorce, vi

              

             Acre and Jerusalem were flooded with refugees.  Alter only had a few coppers in his pockets.  There were so many cobblers about, that he could not find work.  So he began to wander the land.    

          He visited the other sacred cities in the land of Israel, Hebron, Tiberias, and finally in Safed he found a cobbler who had lost an apprentice and was willing to take Alter.  The man was a Jew who spoke Arabic.  So he and Alter had to communicate in a mix of Hebrew and Aramaic.

            Quickly, the cobbler revealed himself as a mystic, a student of Kabbalah.  Safed was the town of Isaac Luria and his followers, and the cobbler studied the holy Luria’s poems and The Zohar late into the night.  Soon, Alter was reading along with him, two men leaning over a book by the light of the stub of a candle.  Outside the small window snow was dusting the hills around Safed; in the distance, Mount Hermon was smothered in white.

            Alter read of the Heavenly King and His Queen.  They joined together in the Celestial Temple each Friday evening.  The King’s semen, bright as a comet, flowed into the Queen, and from their divine union the souls of men and woman floated to the earth, to inhabit the new born bodies of men.   

            The procreation of men and women mirrored the generation of souls on High.  Alter shed tears during these times of study.  The great weight which had rested on his heart for many years was lifted.  He felt his soul drift to the higher realm, away from this damaged and torn world of matter.  Alter felt wholly transformed.  His old body felt light and ephemeral.

            Alter remained in Safed.  The old cobbler died, and Alter took over the shop.  His reputation as a mystic of repute spread, and young men from all over the land of Israel and abroad came to study with him, and Alter taught them according to their ability.

             One night Alter was studying with just such a young man.  They had been struggling with a difficult word in Aramaic, and when the young man untangled its meaning, he expressed relief in Yiddish.  Alter asked the boy questions in Yiddish and soon realized that the boy had grown up near his village.

            “Do you know of Sarai the daughter of Gershom?” Alter asked, and at first the young man did not answer.

            “You mean Sarai the cobbler?” he answered suddenly.  “The chained woman?”  Here the boy translated the Hebrew word chained into Yiddish; this meant a woman whose husband had gone missing, either because he abandoned her or was believed to be dead with no proof.  Such a woman can’t remarry without evidence that her husband is dead, and so remains ‘chained’ to her husband, dead or alive.   

             The young man told Alter that Sarai ran a prosperous cobbler’s shop.  She acted like the wives of famous scholars: she ran the business while the husband studied.  Yes, Alter thought, except her husband is not in the village study house, but all the way in Safed.   Alter realized he had committed a grave error by not attempting to return to Poland.  For years he had wanted to divorce Sarai, and now, no doubt, she wished to be done with him.  But without evidence of his life or death, she remained chained to him forever.  Tears began to fall down Alter’s face.  Alter had disobeyed a commandment.  He had chained Sarai.  He had sinned.

            “What’s wrong Rabbi?” the boy asked.  Alter did not answer him.  He rushed to pack his belonging.

Alter's Divorce, v

               

              

             Alter was carried to the border and sold to some White Russians.  They, in turn, sold him to a gentile in a small village that bordered the steppes.  He stayed there for a year, working the fields, milking cows, sleeping locked up in the barn at night.   

            When his owner found out that Alter was a cobbler, he sold him for four times his purchase price to a man in Kiev who ran a shoe shop.   Years passed, and Alter could not get a letter out to Sarai to tell her of his fate.  He didn’t even know how to mail a letter in this land.  He hardly spoke a word of the language.  He was kept under close watch.   

            He worked everyday but Sunday, and at night was locked in a room without a window.  During his long years of captivity he ate only bread, fruit and vegetables – so as not to eat anything unclean. 

             After several years as a slave a man with a long beard, ritual fringes dangling from his trousers, and a skull cap on his head entered the shop.  He was a traveling merchant whose boot needed repair.  He spoke to Alter’s owner for a moment in the language of the land, and when the man went in the back room for leather and nails, the merchant spoke to Alter.

            “You are a Jew?” the man asked in Yiddish.

            “Yes,” Alter answered, and told the man where he was from.

            “You are a captive?  A slave?” the man asked, his eyes nervously darting about the premises.  “A slave here?”  

            “Yes,” Alter answered, and stated how many years he had been captive.  On hearing this the man ripped his collar, as if he had just heard of the death of a loved one.

            “And he will redeem you from the House of Slavery, from the hand of Pharoah,” the merchant quoted from the Torah and swayed.  He took out a piece of paper and carefully wrote out Alter’s name.  Then he took out another piece of paper and wrote his own and gave it to Alter.

            “I will approach the elders of our people here in Kiev,” he told Alter in a whisper. “They will, with the Almighty’s help, redeem you.”

            Alter did not see the man again.  He kept the paper with his name in his shirt pocket.  He had not seen Hebrew letters in many years.  He had opened and closed the little scrap so many times its creases were as deep as an old man’s wrinkles.

            A year later, three well dressed Jews entered the shop and spoke to Alter’s owner.  Alter could not understand what was being said, but he could tell they were haggling about his price. Eventually, money changed hands, and Alter’s master indicated that he should leave with the men. 

            Alter left without saying a word.  He climbed into a posh carriage with the three men.  None of them spoke Yiddish, but one addressed Alter in Hebrew and told him that with the Almighty’s help, Blessed be He, he was a free man.  The eldest man gave Alter a prayer shawl, phylacteries, and a ritual undergarment.  Alter kissed them all with trembling hands.

            Altered wanted to travel back to Poland but he did not have money.  It had taken the poor Jewish community of Kiev a year to raise the funds to redeem Alter.  He did not dare ask for more charity.  He tried to send at letter to Sarai, but it was returned to him after nearly six months.  There was a war to the north, he was told, and no letters were getting through.

            Alter stayed in Kiev and worked as a cobbler.   He learned more of the language, enough to carry out business with both gentiles and Jews.  But this life did not last long.  The war to the north came south, and in a few days, everyone was fleeing Kiev.  Alter rushed to the docks with only his cobbler’s tools in a satchel.  He saw a boat loading Jews and asked a man where it was headed.  He was told the Holy Land, so without giving it much thought, Alter climbed on board.