“A bigger baal kishron than you? I’m sure you’re exaggerating!” she said, but he insisted he wasn’t

Rebbetzin Yehudit Kleiner didn’t know why these old memories were haunting her now. Maybe it was because her neighbor Tilla had brought up the subject during Succos, or because she’d met Esther Poiker on Simchas Torah. Whatever the reason, the memories gave her no rest. One by one, they kept invading her consciousness, vivid as if they’d happened only yesterday.

“I don’t know what to do,” her husband had told her one winter day, 20 years ago. “I have this terrible conflict between my responsibility to the yeshivah and what I feel is best for Yerachmiel himself.”

She knew Yerachmiel. He came to their house every Motzaei Shabbos to learn with her husband. Sometimes as late as 2 a.m. she would hear them in the next room, in lively debate over the Gemara. “He’s a much bigger baal kishron than I am,” Rav Reuven Chaim told her. “I don’t know if I’ve ever enjoyed learning with anyone so much before.”

“A bigger baal kishron than you? I’m sure you’re exaggerating!” she said, but he insisted he wasn’t.

It was hard on Nochumku, a year younger than Yerachmiel. His father learned with him, too, as well as with his other two sons, but Nochumku knew all too well that Yerachmiel was extraordinary. Had there been a girl in their family of the right age, Nochumku was sure Yerachmiel would have become his brother-in-law; he could only be thankful that Chana Miriam was too young. It was hard enough having such a rival for his father’s esteem, without bringing him into the family.

Yerachmiel wasn’t just brilliant, he was also incredibly charismatic. He had an indefinable magnetism that gained him friends and admirers wherever he went. “He can’t grow much further here by us,” Rav Kleiner told Yehudit that winter. “I’d like to send him to Ponevezh. There, he could find a chavrusa on his level.”

“Do you really have such a low opinion of your own yeshivah?” And of your son, who learns there?

“I have a high opinion of our yeshivah, and I think it provides most of our bochurim with a stimulating environment and a challenging learning program. But Yerachmiel is several cuts above the rest, and he needs more.”

“Well, what’s the dilemma, then? Encourage him to go to Ponevezh if that’s what he needs.”

“Here’s where the clash comes in. I hold a position in the yeshivah,” he explained quietly. “They pay me a salary to do all I can for the good of the bochurim. It’s for the good of the bochurim to keep Yerachmiel with us.”

“Maybe you ought to consult with the Rebbe,” she suggested.

“That’s what I’m thinking of doing,” said her husband. “To go in to the Rebbe together with the rosh yeshivah and talk it over. In any case, the final decision will be up to Yerachmiel and his parents; the only question is which path should we encourage him to take. He holds very much by my opinion.”

“That’s what I’m thinking of doing,” said her husband. “To go in to the Rebbe together with the rosh yeshivah and talk it over. In any case, the final decision will be up to Yerachmiel and his parents; the only question is which path should we encourage him to take. He holds very much by my opinion.”

There was another aspect of the situation that Rav Reuven Chaim didn’t mention. It seemed to him that recently Yerachmiel was getting too interested in the world outside the yeshivah. A more challenging learning environment would help keep him anchored, the mashgiach hoped.

But the Rebbe was on a trip abroad just then, and somehow the matter kept getting put off. One Motzaei Shabbos, Yerachmiel and Rav Reuven Chaim sat down to learn again.

“How was the big bechinah this week?” Rav Reuven Chaim asked.

“The other bochurim were all excited about the number of dapim I was tested on,” Yerachmiel said with a little smile.

“Were you excited, too?” Rav Reuven Chaim asked him.

“Honestly? I felt like an eagle trying to fly in a cage full of baby chicks,” Yerachmiel said. “The eagle flaps its wings a bit and does this little flutter across the cage, and all the chicks stand there chirping, ‘Wow, look at him fly!’ And the eagle thinks to himself, ‘I don’t belong here. I’m an eagle. I can soar to amazing heights; I can fly over peaks that you can’t even imagine. You’re all wonderful, and I love you — but I belong somewhere else.’ ”

“Good analogy,” the mashgiach agreed. “Maybe you really would be better off if you found new horizons.”

Yerachmiel was surprised. “The mashgiach really thinks so?”

Rav Kleiner didn’t understand what was so surprising. Didn’t Yerachmiel know how highly he thought of him?

“When I’m on the job, in the yeshivah, I can’t advise you to leave our little nest,” he explained. “But speaking to you now as one man to another, off the record: You are an eagle. And I don’t think you yourself have any idea what heights you’re capable of reaching.”

“I think I do,” Yerachmiel said, and his eyes glittered.

“Don’t forget that there are also risks,” Rav Reuven Chaim cautioned him. “When you’re soaring over mountains, there’s always a danger of crashing.”

“I’d rather crash as an eagle,” said Yerachmiel, “than stay in a cozy nest like a baby chick.”

And on that note, they parted.

Forever.

When Yerachmiel left, Yehudit’s husband was shattered to the depths of his soul. “But we were talking about going to another yeshivah!” he repeated again and again. And again. “That’s what I meant! Who would have thought that he meant… that he meant to…

“And I encouraged him!” he moaned under his breath. “I told him he was right; he didn’t belong with us. I never had the slightest inkling that he would…”

♦♦♦

Raizele’s older brother Tuvia ought to be just about Yerachmiel Poiker’s age. Yanky decided to call him and try to draw out some details of the old story.

“Think back,” said Tuvia. “Think of the bochur with the best memory in your shiur.”

Luzer Breitman. Aloud, Yanky said, “All right, I thought of someone.”

“Now, think of the sharpest bochur in your shiur.”

Myself. “I thought of someone.”

“And now, think, who was the most popular boy?”

“All right. Nu?”

“Now put them all together into one bochur with all those mailehs, and that’s what Yerachmiel Poiker was. Your father learned with him regularly. He called him his talmid muvhak and he loved him like a son; we all felt sorry for Nochumku.”

“I’m lucky I was just a little kid then. I was too young to see that and be jealous,” Yanky mused aloud. “What about my brother Meir? What did he say about Poiker?”

“Meir was younger, he was in yeshivah ketanah, so he wasn’t really affected by the whole business. But Nochumku… we really pitied him. Not that your father neglected him, chas v’shalom. He learned with him and did all he could to build him up, and of course he loved Nochumku. But everybody knew that Yerachmiel was the apple of his eye. Next to him, Nochumku didn’t stand a chance.”

“And then?”

“You mean, that day? Ugh, it was a regular Sunday, late in the winter. After the fact, some of the bochurim claimed they’d noticed signs of what was coming, and some of them said Yerachmiel had been hinting to your father that he was planning to leave, but your father didn’t get the hints, or didn’t want to.”

“Nu, so what happened that day?”

“It was the morning after an ‘off’ Shabbos, and we were back in yeshivah. We’d just finished Shacharis. One of Yerachmiel’s roommates found a letter he’d left for us, saying he’d flown to Los Angeles, and he wanted to go to university there. Later on we found out that he’d been learning English from a set of tapes over bein hazmanim. He said it was no use trying to get in touch with him. By the time we read his letter, he would already be in America. It was a done deal. He thanked us all and said he appreciated what he’d gotten from his years in yeshivah, but he couldn’t stay any longer.

“We were in shock. So shocked, we couldn’t move or speak. Somebody tried calling his house from the public phone, and his family said it was true, he was gone. He’d left a letter for them, too, and no, he wasn’t coming back. He was already thousands of miles away.

“The next image that comes to me is the mashgiach, Rav Reuven Chaim, your father, sinking onto a chair. His face was gray. He looked like he’d just heard that someone died. Rav Kitovitz — he was a maggid shiur at the time — came in, we told him quickly what happened, and he went and brought him a glass of water. Your father took the glass and started making a brachah… Baruch Atah Hashem… but his hands started shaking so badly that all the water spilled. In that dead silence, we heard him continue, Elokeinu, Melech haolam, and I remember wondering why he was still saying the brachah. What was he going to do, drink the water from the floor? And then he finished with the words, Dayan haEmes.

“Rav Kitovitz and your brother Nochumku helped him get up from the chair, supporting him on both sides, and took him home. He didn’t come to yeshivah for a week.”

Yanky let out a deep breath. “And how,” he asked, “did the watchmaker come into all this?”

“The watchmaker? From Rechov Ridbaz? Who said he had anything to do with it?”

“Well… somebody mentioned that he was part of the story.”

“I don’t think he was involved,” Tuvia said slowly. “But it’s true that for about a month before he left, Yerachmiel was going to the watchmaker’s shiurim twice a week.”

♦♦♦

Yehudit Kleiner’s memories carried her back to that Motzaei Shabbos, a week after Yerachmiel left. Her husband was sitting at the dining room table, with the Gemara in front of him opened to the same place where he and Yerachmiel had stopped two weeks earlier, and tears were flowing from his eyes.

Then someone knocked at the door. Nine-year-old Yanky had gone to open the door, and she heard him mumbling something, sounding surprised and confused.

“Who is it, Yanky?” she called from the kitchen.

“The Rebbe!” he whispered to her. She went to the door, thinking she hadn’t heard him correctly, and there stood the radiant figure of the Rebbe. Feeling no less awkward than the young boy, she invited the Rebbe in with downcast eyes and retreated.

“Reb Reuven Chaim, the bochurim are waiting for you,” the Rebbe said the moment he stepped inside.

“Let them wait,” her husband said, lifting his eyes from the Gemara. “I failed as a mashgiach. I don’t know if there’s any point in my returning to the yeshivah.”

The Rebbe asked Yanky to close the sliding door. He spoke with her husband for a long time. To this day, she still didn’t know what was said that night, but finally her husband had accompanied the Rebbe out to the street where his gabbai was waiting, and in the morning he’d gotten up and gone to the yeshivah as usual. Since then, he’d never spoken about that stinging failure, about his lost talmid. She knew that they didn’t talk about it in the yeshivah, either. There was nothing to say.

A few years later, when Meir was in yeshivah gedolah, he came home one day with a story about “that meshugener, Yerachmiel Poiker.”

“What makes you think Yerachmiel was crazy?” Yehudit asked him.

“That’s what everyone says. He was one of those crazy geniuses, so brilliant he was almost insane. If not, then why did he leave?”

Her husband heard what Meir said and didn’t rebuke or correct him. Yehudit realized that the yeshivah staff must have decided not to fight these rumors.

For years, her husband learned by himself every Motzaei Shabbos. He couldn’t bring himself to take on any other chavrusa. Eventually, when Chana Miriam got engaged to the Rebbe’s son Feivele, the chassan asked to learn with the shver on Motzaei Shabbos, and Rav Reuven Chaim had agreed.

But until then, he sat alone for long years every Motzaei Shabbos, with the Gemara and a cup of tea. She didn’t know what he was learning, or what he had learned with Yerachmiel. But on rare occasions, when he thought no one could hear, he would moan, “Where are you, Bar Lakisha?”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 777)