One of my great-grandfathers became a maskil in Eastern Europe.
But he never lost his passion for Aggadah and used to entertain his grandchildren with stories from Aggadata.
He typed out a memoir of his life, then destroyed it and typed up another memoir. I've read it and possibly his last experience in a sukkah occurred as a young man when he obtained a pork sausage and wanted to eat treifus for the first time in his life -- without getting caught.
So he decided to hide out in the sukkah his father built.
Just as he was about to chomp down on the revolting treif sausage, a rock suddenly fell through the schach and hit him smack on the head.
This rattled him, but he emphatically stated something like: "I in NO WAY believe this was min haShamayim! It was JUST a COINCIDENCE!"
Of course, it's a very unlikely "coincidence."
Where did the rock come from?
Since sukkahs can't be built under anything, where could the rock have fallen from?
And how did it manage to get through all the schach and land right on Alter Zeide's head at the exact moment he opened his mouth to chomp treifus for the first time?
Anyway, he determinedly continued to eat the sausage in a great demonstration of his commitment to the haskalah.
Then he suffered terrible stomach cramps all night long, which was also supposedly a coincidence and solely due to being unused to pork sausage -- or perhaps the poor quality of this particular sausage.
His rejection of Judaism and embrace of haskalah left him with relatively few descendants.
Of those descendants, nearly all are either assimilated Jews or not Jewish at all (except us).
From reading his memoir, I think I would have liked him had I known him.
But he should have listened to the rock.
But he never lost his passion for Aggadah and used to entertain his grandchildren with stories from Aggadata.
He typed out a memoir of his life, then destroyed it and typed up another memoir. I've read it and possibly his last experience in a sukkah occurred as a young man when he obtained a pork sausage and wanted to eat treifus for the first time in his life -- without getting caught.
So he decided to hide out in the sukkah his father built.
Just as he was about to chomp down on the revolting treif sausage, a rock suddenly fell through the schach and hit him smack on the head.
This rattled him, but he emphatically stated something like: "I in NO WAY believe this was min haShamayim! It was JUST a COINCIDENCE!"
Of course, it's a very unlikely "coincidence."
Where did the rock come from?
Since sukkahs can't be built under anything, where could the rock have fallen from?
And how did it manage to get through all the schach and land right on Alter Zeide's head at the exact moment he opened his mouth to chomp treifus for the first time?
Anyway, he determinedly continued to eat the sausage in a great demonstration of his commitment to the haskalah.
Then he suffered terrible stomach cramps all night long, which was also supposedly a coincidence and solely due to being unused to pork sausage -- or perhaps the poor quality of this particular sausage.
His rejection of Judaism and embrace of haskalah left him with relatively few descendants.
Of those descendants, nearly all are either assimilated Jews or not Jewish at all (except us).
From reading his memoir, I think I would have liked him had I known him.
But he should have listened to the rock.
May we all merit doing true teshuvah from love & not from yissurim.
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