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Elischa.

A parable by O. Erter.

And the pillar of smoke was seen no more. For days Rabbi Meïr had lain in fervent prayer at the grave of his teacher Elischa ben Abuja, yet the pillar of smoke had risen unceasingly from the grave. Until Rabbi Meïr, stretching both hands towards heaven, stammered in burning despair: "Then let the garden of the blessed be closed to me also, if Elischa, my teacher, is not to enter it." And from that minute onward there had been no more smoke above the grave.

But from that time a deep sadness lay upon the countenance of the pious Rabbi Meïr. By his defiant intercession he had redeemed the sinful soul of his teacher Elischa, whom all had shyly shunned and whom they had called only the "Acher"; now this defiance was to be expiated, and a double burden, that of the dead man and his own, lay upon the pious day's work of Rabbi Meïr. Ah, it had been a heart-rending hour when they cast the "Acher" out of the house of study. In the midst of them he had stood, raged about by their wrath and threatened by a hundred wildly uplifted arms, the slender figure drawn up to its full height, a dark glow in the black eyes and a crying anguish in the pale face with its disordered locks. "Thou art not of ours, thou art an Acher, an Other!" they had shrieked into his ear, and he had staggered out, lonely and turned in upon himself, until a merciful madness took pity on him and enfolded him in the shadow of death before it was granted him to die. Apart from the house of study, with looks full of timid longing and full of scornful bitterness, he had reeled along the walls; out on the highroad he had crouched, murmuring "Hellenic songs" to himself, melodious, intoxicating songs which had been his ruin.

Poor Elischa, poor Acher! A lamp of the house of study he had been, but then his incomparable spirit had strayed into foreign parts, to the Others; he had drunk in a wicked contumacy and had risen up against the Baß Kol, against the Voice from above which out of a lightning-shot cloud had thundered down to him his wrong in the strife of doctrines. Hellenic songs had bewildered him; in his intercourse with strangers he had himself become a stranger to his own. And it needed the intercession of Rabbi Meïr, his pious disciple, who was greater than he, to drive from his grave the pillar of smoke, that terrible memorial pillar of the Acher, of the Other.

But Elischa has become immortal, like the inexhaustible sorrow which went forth from the house of study with us Jews into the dispersion and has never left us. Rabbi Meïr prayed in vain. From Elischa's grave the pillar of smoke vanished, yet in foreign lands the "Others" grew ever more numerous; from their lips there dripped not Hellenic songs alone — no, the songs of all peoples, until they forgot their own. And now they stop their ears against the Baß Kol, against the voice of homesickness that calls to them; they reel along the walls and crouch beside the highroad, clinging to the tinsel of the alien world as Elischa once clung to the Hellenic songs.

And Rabbi Meïr? Is not his quiet, venerable figure, full of unfathomable love for his teacher, better fitted for a model than that of the gloomy doubter who perished of his defiant alien-mindedness? Romanticism has from of old surrounded these doubters and half-apostates with a shimmering radiance, and when in Germany above all the cry for emancipation rang through every district, then the memory of Elischa too was renewed by a noble German poet, as it were as the prototype of all Jewish sceptics, among whom Uriel Acosta and his great nephew Baruch Spinoza also belonged. Thus for a while the "Acher" became the symbolic figure of German Jewish emancipation, which was after all only something fleeting and transitory, like the will-o'-the-wisp gleam about Elischa's head. Hellenic songs have lured many a one out of our ranks: the Alexandrian Philo; the historian Josephus Flavius, who was in the retinue of the Roman emperor while the latter besieged Jerusalem. The figure of the "Acher" has accompanied us through the whole of our terrible history of suffering; he is the true Juif errant who waits for redemption, the personification of that alien-mindedness which overgrew our feeling for home.

Romanticism loves the gloomy doubter who pays for his error with his own downfall, the outcast who wanders about forsaken by all; it loves the sorrowful more than the happy, the helpless more than the strong. Pale and sick must the romantic hero be, pursued by a fate that has burned the mark of Cain upon his brow. Thus Elischa became a romantic figure in the German poem. A deep pity attached