“He has left a wound in my heart and it will not heal, rabbi. If this is the kind of doctor he is going to be, he won’t make much headway. ‘I had a vineyard,’ rabbi,” he went on in a lugubrious sing-song, quoting from Isaiah, “‘I fenced it and gathered out the stones thereof and planted it with the choicest vine. What could have been done more to my vineyard that I have not done in it? Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?’”
“Don’t grieve, my son, I forbid you, do you hear?” the Good Jew said, limply. He was deeply touched. “Better give us a song, boys!”
The song burst forth and was taken up by the glad crowd on the lawn, some Gentiles, standing at a respectful distance, listening reverently.
Yossl had uncovered to the rabbi only part of his heart’s wound. Since his son’s compulsory divorce Weinstein had personified the cruelties and injustices of the whole world to him. When a couple applies for a writ of divorcement it is the duty of the rabbi to persuade them from the step. God wants no severance of the marriage bond. “When a man divorces his first wife, the altar weeps,” says the Talmud. Yet Weinstein, who had so brutally extorted such a divorce from Feivish, continued to be looked upon as a pillar of the faith. All this had stirred a novel feeling, a novel trend of thought in Yossl.
The next morning Weinstein’s salon was jammed with people begging for admission to the Good Jew, who was in the next room.
The scribes were busy writing applications, praying the rabbi to “awaken the great mercy of the Master of Mercies.”
“My wife is ill, her name is Sarah, daughter of Tevye,” one man besought. “Do be so kind. If I don’t get in at once it may be too late.”
Another applicant, with a crippled boy in his arms, sought a blessing for the child and himself. One father, whose son had been declared a blockhead by his teachers, wanted the Good Jew to pray that the boy might get “a good head.” A white-haired man was picking a quarrel with two other Pietists who were trying to get in front of him. The old man’s married daughter was childless and her husband did not care for her, so he wanted the rabbi to “give her children and grace in the eyes of her spouse.” Several others wanted dowries for their marriageable daughters. That the Master of Mercies would grant the Good Jew’s prayer in their daughters’ behalf was all the more probable because in cases of this sort either the Good Jew himself or some of his well-to-do followers usually came to the poor man’s assistance.
Yossl sat at the corner of the table watching the scene pensively when Clara entered the room. The blood rushed to his face as he recognised her, and he hastened to take her out into the road.