A Favor

Few are the tales that escaped the flames of the camps.  That is because the remnants of once-vast Jewish community were so few.  It is also because the survivors that emerged tried desperately to forget.  Those that attempted to relegate it to he distant past were haunted by unrelenting demons of the night.  Remembering was too difficult; forgetting too painful.

            One of the handful of stories that came to us was of Rabbi Kalonimus Kalman, who became rebbe of the Warsaw ghetto.  Many are the legends that surround the man...but they are the stuff of myth.  The Rebbe took children under his gentle arms and taught them while the unspeakable erupted all about them.  Daily he took the little ones and taught them Holy Torah while outside the walls the Torah was desecrated; menschlichkeit where there was inhumanity;  holiness in the depths of depravity.  An angelic grace hovered over the study hall, or so they said.

            After years of sifting through the ashes, one lone deformed survivor was found.  Reluctant to confront the ghosts of the past, he finally rested his old, frail body and began to tell a fragment of a Shabbes tale with the Rebbe: 

“We danced, hundreds and maybe thousands of children, and the Master was singing a song to greet the holy angel, and at the mean he would teach between every course. ‘Kinderlach, der grosser zach in de velt iz tuen emetzen a favor.  The greatest thing in the world in simply to do someone a favor’.”

            The Rebbe --along with all his holy students -- were murdered at Treblinka.  Five years in Auschwitz this lone, poor man saw what no human being should see, what no creation of G-d should endure.  And, still, throughout all the torments, despite all the depravity, when he wanted nothing else than to just die, the words of the Rebbe came back to him- precisely when he wanted give up, “The greatest thing in the world in simply to do someone a favor.” 

            From his perch resting his battered, crippled body, his eyes lifted to heaven with a radiance and he said, “Do you know how many favors you can do in Auschwitz?

            Perhaps we should all become disciples of Rabbi Kalonimus Kalman.  Maybe on the edge of this year we could bring the heaven of the Rebbe into our own lives.  - from the tales of Shlomo Carlebach