“ONE DAY, WITH GOD’S HELP”

Rabbi Juzint was crazy.

This was common knowledge to a generation of students who tolerated a year in his Talmud class at the Chicago Jewish Academy. Pudgy. Balding. Vaguely effeminate. We mocked his swishy walk and his unmanly affectations. We mimicked his high-pitched lilt and the perennial confusion of "s" and "sh" that pervaded his thick Lithuanian Yiddish accent.

We felt ourselves well justified. He would teach us the Talmudic text in an undertone, barely audible, chanting the Aramaic in the singsong of the Eastern European shtetl. There would be an interminable moment of silence. Then, uncontrollable frenetic laughter. Or worse, he would fix his stare, clench his teeth and explode in a burst of unfocused rage. And then, with neither acknowledgment nor apology, he would return to interpreting the intricacies of the day's sacred text.

Rabbi Juzint was crazy.

His students regularly fell in and out of his grace, first engulfed by his love, then accused of betrayal or some imagined affront, then with similar caprice, restored to his favor. Talk was that he regularly co-opted the younger, more impressionable students to squeal on the older boys for infractions of religious behavior or getting too chummy with the girls. And we all knew that if he patted you on the back, the act of endearment was a ruse to check if you were wearing your arba kanfos, the fringed ritual undergarment mandated by Numbers 15.

Rabbi Juzint was crazy.

We recognized the numbers that the Nazis had tattooed on his arm. We heard hush-hush murmuring about how they had somehow diabolically maimed him for life. On rare occasions, perhaps too rare, he would speak to us of the tender years of adolescence that he spent in hell: of concentration camps, and forced labor, and starvation, and disease, and beatings, and the stench of death that was an ever-present, all-pervasive daily reality. How the great rabbinical masters of the yeshiva of Slobodka had been murdered at the final utterance of their plaintive Shema. How mother and father and God-knows-how-many brothers and sisters met their end in gas chambers and crematoria.

And of them all, either as a fortuitous gift or the most cruel and haunting injustice, only one, young Meir Juzint, survived. A witness. A tormented soul. Orphaned. Alone. Struggling forever, not so much to make sense of it all, but simply to find a moment's respite between outbursts of giddy laughter and unbridled rage. And we, his rambunctious, over-indulged sophomoric charges, were all too quick to see lunacy, but only too slow to hear the immeasurable pain.

How ironic, as I look back 40 years later with an understanding that accompanies what Wordsworth calls the "years that bring the philosophic mind." I read afresh the brokenhearted lament of poems he inscribed in a thin Hebrew treatise and nod my head wistfully at the title he chose, "The Consolation of Meir." I close my eyes and hear again his plaintive Old World chant as, burdened with grief, he prayed the penitential prayers for our infantile souls and for the souls of so many babies thrown alive into satanic fires:

Account not to us the sin,
Which we committed in our folly.
We beseech you, speedily heal the afflicted babes,
The blessing of your fruitful vineyard.

And then I think, for the first time in years, about the words he wrote to my parents on my ninth grade report card, "One day, with God's help, he will become a great scholar."

And we mocked and we mimicked him, the way that teenagers typically mock and mimic. And we thought he was crazy. And the remorse that I feel 40 years later is surmounted only by the bittersweet knowledge that only years and tears can bring, that somehow his encounter with us had not been entirely in vain.

For, if we have learned to have more than a modicum of compassion, it must in some way be bound up in the ability we have cultivated to listen to the cry of the tortured soul and the sound of the breaking heart. It is to know that we have heard more than the empty nattering of one whom we would otherwise cast aside as just another crazy.

And I hear, I pray not too late, pain, power and pathos that I had never heard before. And I think to myself that maybe one day, with God's help, even I might grow up to be a great scholar.