the community. He was one of Rabbi Benish's brilliant students--tall, overgrown, nearsighted, with a long, pale face and a chin sprouting with yellow hair. His coat was always unfastened, his vest open, showing a thin, hairy chest. Now he stood there, bent over his study stand, his near-blind eyes blinking, waiting with a silly smile for someone to come and argue with him, so that he could show how learned he was. Mordecai Joseph, who bore Chanina a grudge on account of the many folios of the Talmud he knew by heart and because he was always mixing in where he had no right, suddenly sprang at Chanina with that agility the lame display when they flare up and forget their defect. "You, too!" he screamed. "Take him, men!" Several young men ran over to Chanina, grabbed hold of his shirt and began to drag him off. Chanina opened his mouth, shouted, tried to tear himself loose from their grip, twisted his long neck back and forth, and flailed about him with his arms, like a drowning man. His coat was torn, his skull cap fell off. Two long, tousled earlocks dangled from his shaven scalp. He tried to defend himself, but the charity students were quick to hold his head, punching him with their weak hands as they helped carry him, as though they were kneading dough. Mordecai Joseph himself proudly helped carry Chanina by the legs, spitting into his face and pinching him viciously. Soon Chanina was lying on the table. They lifted his coat tail. Mordecai Joseph was the first to do the honors. "Let this be in place of me!" he cried, in the words of the Yom Kippur scapegoat ritual. He rolled up his sleeves, and gave Chanina so hard a blow that the unlucky youth burst all at once into tears, like a school boy, and whimpered. "Let this be instead of me!" Mordecai Joseph ex-claimed with a sigh and again struck Chanina. "Let this fowl go to his death!" someone cried responsively, and a hail of blows fell on the idle scholar. Chanina gave a hoarse cry and began to gasp. When they took him from the table, his face was blue and his mouth clenched. A boy immediately fetched a vessel of water and poured it over Chanina, drenching him from head to foot. The young man jerked spasmodically and remained full length on the ground. There was a terrified silence in the study house. The one woman who happened to be in the women's gallery pulled at the grate and sobbed. Mordecai Joseph limped back, beating the floor with his crutch, and his face behind the thicket of his beard was chalk-white. "Thus rotteth the name of the wicked!" he said. "Now he shall know that there is a God who rules the world!"
7
Reb Eleazar Babad and His Daughter, Rechele Reb Eleazar Babad was seldom at home. It was his practice to move about from village to village. He would put on his heavy coat, stuff straw in his shoes, and, with a sack in one hand, a stick in the other, take to the paths and byways. Like a beggar he would drive off the hounds with his stick and sleep nights in the haylofts of peasant barns. Some said that Reb Eleazar went to collect old debts due him from before 1648; others were certain that he wandered this way as a penance for the sins that were wearying his spirit. Rechele, his only daughter, remained at home all alone. For days on end she sat on a foot bench facing the hearth, reading the volumes she had brought from distant cities, and it was rumored that she was versed in the holy tongue. Some even went so far as to declare that she had learned Latin from a physician in Lublin. Goray housewives had sought to be friendly with Rechele and had paid her courtesy visits, but her response had not been the usual "God bid ye welcome." She had not urged them to be seated but had hid something from them in the bosom of her dress. Young matrons in silk bonnets, usually with aprons bulging over their pregnant bellies, came to amuse Rechele, to play at bones with her, and to chat about prospective matches, as young women will. Some of them brought their jewels along in caskets in order to preen themselves; others had balls of wool and knitting needles, to show