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By Root 1180 0

time his cheeks were a contented pink, but when he was offended they would turn white, and when he was angry they went red, but after a short time they resumed their pink hue that informed the whole world that the thunderstorm had ended, the winter was over, the flowers had appeared on the earth, and Grandpa's habitual cheeriness was beaming and radiating from him again after a short interruption; and in an instant he would have forgotten who or what it was that had angered him, and what all the commotion had been about, like a child who cries for a moment and at once calms down, smiles, and goes back to playing happily.

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RAV ALEXANDER ZISKIND of Horodno (at that time in Russia, but later Poland, Belarus...), who died in 1794, is known in rabbinic tradition as YVShH, after the initials of his best-known work, Yesod Ve-Shoresh Ha-'Avodah ("The Foundation and Root of Worship"). He was a mystic, kabbalist, ascetic, the author of several influential ethical writings. It was said of him that "He spent his life shut away in a small room studying Torah; he never kissed or held his children and never had any conversation with them that was not directed to heavenly things." His wife ran the household and brought up the children on her own. Nevertheless, this outstanding ascetic taught that one should "worship the Creator with great joy and fervor." (Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav said of him that he was a hasid avant la lettre.") But neither joy nor fervor prevented Rabbi Alexander Ziskind from leaving instructions in his will that after his death "the Burial Society shall perform on my corpse the four death penalties entrusted to the Sanhedrin," until all his limbs were crushed. For example: "Let them raise me to the height of the ceiling and throw me violently to the ground with no intervening sheet or straw, and let them repeat this seven times, and I solemnly admonish the Burial Society under pain of excommunication to afflict me with these seven deaths, and not to spare my humiliation, for my humiliation is my honor, that I may be released somewhat from the great Judgment on high." All this in atonement for sins or for purification, "for the spirit or soul of Alexander Ziskind who was born of the woman Rebecca." It is also known about him that he wandered through the German towns collecting money to settle Jews in the Holy Land, and he was even imprisoned for this. His descendants bear the family name Braz, which is an abbreviation for "Born of Rabbi Alexander Ziskind."

His son, Rav Yossele Braz, one of those whom their father never kissed or held, was considered a consummate Righteous Man who studied the Torah all his days and never left the house of study on a weekday even to sleep: he would permit himself to doze off as he sat, with his head on his arms and his arms on the desk, for four hours each night, with a lighted candle held between his fingers so that when it burned down, the flame would wake him. Even his snatched meals were brought to him in the house of study, which he left only at the onset of Sabbath and to which he returned as soon as the Sabbath was over. He was an ascetic like his father. His wife kept a draper's shop, and she kept him and his offspring until the day he died and beyond, as his mother too had done in her day, because Rav Yossele's humility did not allow him to assume the position of a rabbi, but he taught Torah for nothing to the children of the poor. Nor did he leave any books behind him, because he considered himself inadequate to say anything new that his predecessors had not said before him.

Rav Yossele's son, Rav Alexander Ziskind Braz (my grandfather Alexander's grandfather), was a successful businessman who dealt in grain, linen, and even hogs' bristles; he traded as far afield as Königsberg and Leipzig. He was a scrupulously observant Jew, but so far as is known he distanced himself from his father's and grandfather's zealotry: he did not turn his back on the world, did not live by the sweat of his wife's brow, and did not hate the Zeitgeist and the Enlightenment. He allowed his