A rabbi had
become famous in the small village he served.
Every Sabbath, as he taught the scriptures to his people, he seemed to
have a message directly from God. The
word he brought always seemed perfect for the moment. His people began to talk among themselves,
asking how he stayed so in touch with the heart of the Almighty. They noticed that one day a week, the rabbi
would rise early, leave the village, and not return until dark. He never said a word about where he
went. This led to all kinds of
speculation, including the idea that the rabbi made a weekly trip to heaven to
speak to God about what his people needed to hear. One man couldn’t stand the mystery of the
rabbi’s day off, so he decided to follow him one day to see where he went. At a safe distance, ducking behind trees and
around the sides of buildings, he followed his rabbi out of the village and
down the road. At one point, the rabbi
stopped, took off his clerical robes and put on the clothes of a beggar. Out of the same bag that held his shabby work
clothes, the rabbi drew an ax. The
suspense was building. The rabbi, now
disguised as a beggar, ax in hand, traveled on to the outskirts of a
neighboring village. He stopped when he
found some felled trees and spent the morning chopping up the trees into
smaller pieces of wood. He gathered up
as much of the wood as he could carry in his arms and walked on to a lowly home
where he knocked on the door. An elderly
woman opened the door, greeted him with a big smile, and welcomed him in. In he went, wood and all. The man spying on his rabbi waited a distance
away, watching to see what might happen next, when he saw smoke begin to rise
from the chimney of the woman’s home. The
rabbi had spent his day chopping wood and bringing it to this woman so she
could be warm. But he did it in a way
that she would never know who he really was.
The spy returned to his village and everyone clamored to learn where their
rabbi went each week. “Tell us,”
someone demanded, “does he go up to heaven each week?” “No,” the man replied, “he goes
even higher.”