A FATHER IN ISRAEL
Reb. Issac opened the door with his trembling hand and peered long and anxiously down the pitch black recess of the decending stairway. "I thought he was returning", he muttered inarticulately. "What could keep him?" He wrung his hands, raised his head in a wordless prayer to Jehovah and turned back into the gloomy synagogue.
He walked slowly to the Ark of the Law, before which he had prostrated himself so many times in the eternal three hours that he had been waiting for the Rabbi. What had he not said before this Holy Ark? He had dissected for himself and for his maker every figment of his very soul, and every incision of his sharp, prying intellect seemed to strike at his very life. A father's love for his only son was deprecated and assigned to the realms of the selfish. That was decided in his last communion with the Almighty. And yet here he was again before the Holy Scroll. "Oh Father, Father! Almighty, all merciful Father! Give me back my dear son, my only child, my all, my all." He was quite weak. The sixty-seven years of his life lay heavy upon his bent and stooping shoulders. The three hours of prayer and supplication had broken his voice and numbed his faculties. His hoarse cry became somewhat mechanical. Soon it ceased, and his exhausted body sank kneeling on the Bema.
His hand unconsciously clutched one of the legs of a chair near by, and he was transported to the time when brandishing aloft his walking stick, his face purple with rage, his eyes streaming with misery, he shouted to his son. "Out! Out of my house your Transgressor in Israel! Go to your gentile wife and may God blast your life as you have blasted mine. I had a son and he is gone. The Lord
has given and the Lord has taken. May the name of the Lord be blessed!" How vivid that scene was to him! Twenty years of dull aching reflection had given him ample time in which to recall, and to analyze, and to vivify every moment of that ninth day of Adar. And now, for the hundredth time he lived again the warm love he bore to his gifted child, he again experienced his perplexing irritation when he felt his child slipping away from him, and the sudden revulsion of feeling when his son came to him and informed him that he had married a gentile girl.
As he knelt there before the Ark he fancied himself a spectator of his own tragic life. Although the words of his son were like daggers piercing his heart, he retained the affectionate smile with which he was wont to greet any communication of his child. He took the whole matter as a passing fancy and simply remonstrated that such fancies were dangerous. Too many prove too weak to resist the terrible temptation. \Vhen his son insisted on being taken seriously, he still kept his temper.: Somewhat more earnestly, he explained that such a step means the forsaking of the Jewish People, and as he warmed to his subject, he pointed out that while, during his lifetime, he may retain his loyalty, his second or third generation would be lost to Judaism, and in this way his memory as a Jew would be blotted out from the face of the earth. His son presented his views of the matter in a long uninteresting dissertation containıng big words like Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, the import of which he could not gather. But this much he could perceive: that his bov not only loved a gentile woman. but also that he had relinquished his al- leriance to Judaism lone. lonz befcre.