Aim for Yom Kippur, ‘if Not Higher’ A treatment of an old Jewish tale offers a model of faith during the Days of Awe. By Ruth R. Wisse
In the Hebrew calendar, the 10-day period beginning with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and ending with Yom Kippur, the year’s holiest day, are called Yamim Noraim, the “Days of Awe.” During this time—which began this year on Sept. 16—our reckoning before the Supreme Judge is so fearsome that the very fish are said to tremble in the seas.
This intense concentration on one’s regrettable actions can often inspire a resolve for teshuvah, or return, in this case from one’s iniquities. Since modernity seemed to lead Jews inexorably from religious faith to secular humanism, this time presented an opportunity to encourage Jews who had strayed from the path to return to the traditional way of life. The term ba’al teshuvah came to refer to one who had reassumed the historically sanctioned habits of Jewish observance.
But things aren’t always as they seem.
One of the best-known stories about this penitential period, set in a small town in Eastern Europe, features a Hasidic rebbe who is in the strange habit of disappearing every year during these days of judgment when his congregants most require his presence. “Where could the rebbe be?” Where else, they conclude, but in heaven, interceding on their behalf at God’s holy throne.
One year, there arrives in town a skeptic determined to learn the truth. Hiding under the rebbe’s bed, and sensing him rise in the middle of the night, he peeks out. The rebbe dresses in peasant clothing, girds himself with rope and axe, and makes for the forest. There the skeptic watches as the rebbe chops and binds branches for firewood, and then goes to the home of a poor widow at the outskirts of town. Still in disguise, the holy man lights the woman’s fire and assures her that he can wait for payment.
Without revealing what he has witnessed, the skeptic becomes the rebbe’s disciple. Whenever he hears someone praising the rebbe’s annual ascent to heaven, he murmurs, “If not higher.”
Yiddish and Hebrew writers of the Jewish enlightenment, I.L. Peretz (1852-1915) conspicuous among them, often mocked and parodied the hagiographic tales Hasidic Jews told about the miraculous interventions of their leaders. When Peretz published this story in 1900 under the title “If Not Higher,” his readers understood its subversive point.
Yet here in place of satire, Peretz was practicing a mild form of Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of values.” The Peretz-like skeptic who discredits supernatural belief is won over by the act of human kindness performed anonymously and in secret—by Judaism’s humanistic, humanitarian ethic.
As for the author, rather than expose the alleged hypocrisy and failings of religious life, Peretz found a way of praising what he had come to bury. A contemporary of his, religious philosopher Hillel Zeitlin (1872-1942), once shrewdly observed that Peretz had a heaven with no God in it. Peretz would have agreed, but having begun, like Zeitlin, to worry about the speed and spread of assimilation among the Jews of Poland, he hoped such neo-folk and neo-Hasidic tales would show how a religious civilization could be maintained in secular terms. He succeeded to such a degree that nowadays only students of literature are likely to note the heretical component still lurking in this apparently simple story.
I recently taught some of Peretz’s tales to a group of female Jewish educators from what is called the “ultra-Orthodox” community. Seeing no necessary contradiction between the author’s emphasis and their own wholehearted beliefs, they were eager to take them back to their students.
By contrast, a recent posting on a secular platform contends that this story offers the impressive moral lesson that the road to heaven lies in helping and respecting the poor—an echo of the idea, common among Reform Jews, that the essence of Judaism is a call for repairing the world, or tikkun olam. Many Jews and Christians today may be said to practice an ambiguous religion of good works. This story could be their ur-text.
The penitential prayers make no distinction between what we owe to God and to our fellow human beings, leaving congregants to determine their own priorities. Modern skeptics who have been raised traditionally can decide to remain or return at will, while the Jew with no training who adopts a Jewish way of life is also welcomed as a ba’al teshuvah.
The full force of the story lies in its tact. Once our skeptic has become a part of the community and hears others tell of the rebbe’s ascent to heaven, he doesn’t mock their simplemindedness. He softly utters that simple refrain. He doesn’t advertise his disbelief; his doubts stay personal, for him alone, not meant to be overheard. He hasn’t changed or fully “returned,” but he has experienced religion more deeply within his community of belief.
The delicacy Peretz attributes to his skeptic is the model of faith he bequeaths to us. What we do with it is another story.
Ms. Wisse is a senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund and author of the memoir “Free as a Jew.”
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