Human Writes: Setting the Sky on Fire
Savor every bite | Non-Fiction | Fresh Soup
My father used to tell me a lot of stories, and there was one that he was particularly fond of. It wasn’t a story he’d made up, and not something that had really happened, but a Hassidic fable or old tale that his own parents had read to him when he was a child. In the story, an angel comes to a rabbi in his dream and tells him that the greatest tzaddik (a righteous, saintly Jew) in the land lives in a forest clearing nearby. The rabbi, who was positive he’d met all the tzaddiks in the region, awakes from the dream excitedly, quickly packs a bag, and sets off to meet the elusive tzaddik. When he reaches the clearing, he sees a hut. Outside the hut, at a rough wooden table, sits the fattest person the rabbi has ever seen, gorging himself on meatballs and potatoes. The rabbi sits down at the table and waits patiently for the fat man to finish, but the man keeps eating and eating, and every single bite increases the rabbi’s doubts and confusion. He has come here to meet a renowned tzaddik who might have something to teach him about his faith, but the glutton sitting before him seems to have nothing to teach him except how to chew. The rabbi eventually asks the man to explain why he eats so much, and the fat tzaddik replies that when he was a little boy, his parents were burnt alive by Cossacks. “I eat,” he explained, “so that if they come back to burn me, I’ll be big enough so that the flames will light up the whole sky, and every person in the world who looks up and sees the fire will know that a Jew is being burned alive.”