In the introduction to his recording of the above-titled song from Fiddler on the Roof, Herschel Bernardi observed that while we can’t expect a miracle of Biblical proportions, smaller everyday miracles are possible, such as when a poor tailor, Motel Kamzoil, is able to marry the girl of his dreams, Tzeitel, the eldest daughter of Tevye the dairyman. In a similar vein, Barbra Streisand recorded a song “Everyday Miracles.”
But what if it isn’t entirely true that we can’t expect a great miracle? True, I’ve written about miracles in Israel’s wars, such as the sudden burst of rain during the War of Independence that bogged down Syrian tanks attacking an Orthodox kibbutz just as their ammunition was running out, or the rocket during the War in Lebanon that inexplicably rose high in the air just as it was coming directly toward two Israeli soldiers, who reacted to its approach by saying the Shema, such that it passed over them and crashed far enough behind them that while they were knocked off their feet, the explosion didn’t injure them seriously.
Thinking about Biblical miracles, I remember many years ago as a young boy reading in a volume of Strange As It Seems, a publication similar to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, about a man who was swallowed by a whale and survived for several days before being ejected unharmed, except that the whale’s digestive juices bleached his skin white. (An Internet search found about a dozen similar incidents in the last few years.) This incident, however, pales by comparison (pun intended) with the more dramatic miracle that follows.
To begin, as I was reading Rabbi A. L. Scheinbaum’s Peninim on the Torah volume 29 (published by the Hebrew Academy of Cleveland) on Motzo’ei Shabbos Shoftim, I was astonished to find a story about an incident that occurred in Krakow, Poland, in the 16th century which I will paraphrase for brevity. Rabbi Scheinbaum cites as a reference Rabbi Yitzchak Zilberstein in his sefer Nifleotecha Asicha. I haven’t yet been able to verify this independently, as my effort with the assistance of Chana Benjaminson of Chabad.org led me to HebrewBooks.org, where I needed to use Google Translate to go back and forth between Hebrew and English; a search using the title and author names in Hebrew led to 40 seforim, some of them irrelevant, for which I could only obtain the title page. Nevertheless, I emailed Rabbi Scheinbaum, who assured me that the story is well known and appears in a number of sources, and since it occurred in a civilized nation whose recorded history is well documented and involves two real historical figures, the Rema and King Sigismund, I see no reason for doubt.
In any event, here is the story:
A kohen, Shlomo Seligman, was determined to marry a divorced woman in violation of halacha. The case was presented to the Rav of Krakow, none other than the famed Rabbi Moshe Isserles, better known by his acronym, the Rema, who was the Gadol HaDor, the pre-eminent halachic authority of that era. Rabbi Isserles made repeated attempts to talk the chosson out of this gross violation but was rebuffed; in fact, Seligman brazenly announced that the Rema would officiate at the ceremony.
Rabbi Isserles made one final attempt on the day of the wedding. A crowd of hundreds had gathered in the public square to witness what surely would be an extraordinary act of defiance. The Rema stepped up to the podium and again implored the bride and groom to call off the wedding, but they laughed at him. Conceding defeat, the Rema stepped back from the podium and called for the onlookers to step back away from the couple, just as Moshe Rabbeinu did in Sefer Bamidbar when he was challenged by Korach, Dathan, and Abiram. The ground underneath the couple began to rumble and shake, and after a few minutes it opened up and swallowed the bride and groom.
When word of the event came to the Polish king, Sigismund II, who had strongly supported his friend Seligman, he became frightened about what might happen to him. He sent an emissary to contact the Rema to plead for forgiveness, whereupon Rabbi Isserles assured him that it was the Torah, not he, that had been insulted. He advised the King to wall off the area, which he did, so that no other kohen would unwittingly walk upon what was effectively a grave.
There is one footnote to this remarkable story. Years later, workmen who were excavating around the site found the dishes and flatware that had been set out for the kiddush following the chupah. Rabbi Scheinbaum concludes, “One does not deviate from the Torah as interpreted by our rabbinic leadership – regardless of his rationale.”
Let that be a lesson for all of us.
