They were telling stories of Motke Chabad, the jester, who many years ago lived, moved and had his joke on everybody in the city of Wilna, where he was well known (but not so well liked) as the troublesome town clown. After nearly everybody in one group at Zarling's had contributed a Chabad yarn to the general entertainment, the question arose as to whether there ever really existed such a personage as the redoubtable Motke. He had said and done so many impossible things that it became a matter of wonder whether he had said and done them at all. So daring were his utterances, so strange his adventures, his queer pranks so preposterous, that he was considered by some to be an imaginary character. He possessed those vices of individuality which art raises to the dignity of virtues. He had become a tradition, and so a matter of doubt and speculation. This last was clear at our discussion. The poet suggested that, whether Motke ever existed or not, he was certainly a great humorist. But even this did not satisfy us. We were bent upon investigation. The medical student made a motion that we ask Zarling, who is a native of Wilna and at least has known some one who knew Chabad; but here Keidansky protested. "Do not ask any one," he said, "who has known, or known of, him closely; his description would be too familiar, intimate, personal, and it would mar and discolor the halo that tradition had cast about him. No, do not ask the Czar, for he knows too much about him and those who were near our hero never understood his significance. You must have perspective to see the picturesque, even as you must be a poet to see that which does not exist. It is only for the blind that an eye-witness can write history. Artistically speaking, the closer you get to life the less you know about it. Realism fails because it takes the existence of reality for granted. Because it becomes systematic and too sure of its subject. Those who have known, those who have touched elbows with Chabad or his brother's grandchildren, will be accurate, but not truthful. To describe a person truly, one must include all its infinite possibilities of failure or success—what he might have been, what he longed to be, what he could not be with his given conditions, what he was not, what he was believed to be, etc., and he who has decided all about the exact measure of a person cannot fathom his possibilities. We are all so sure of the conditions of contemporary life that it will take a succeeding generation to know all about it.

"And I am not trying to hinder the work of this investigation, because it may prove the non-existence of Chabad. That would not matter in the least, for the anecdotes and tales that are being circulated in his name, and his storied misadventures and gloried misdeeds create him in fancy and he exists in imagination—which is all that is necessary for one desiring to point out the benign and malignant work of the scoffer. But he did exist, so we are told by those who have known some one who knew him intimately. He did exist, because, while we have superfluous virtues to attribute to all sorts of saints who did live, we have not a superfluity of humor to ascribe to one who has never been. Some one must have given birth to these things which we can all admire but could not create. Some one must have been witty enough to think these things, and reckless enough to say them. We all have the convictions, but he had the courage, and that was long ago.

"He did exist, this beggar, braggart, buffoon, town-gossip, dealer in wind and old clothes, match-maker, man of all occupations and no means of existence, practical joker and general jester of the Ghetto of Wilna; for such he was and as such he did his good work. He was an outcast, and as such he ministered to the sanity of society that hath cast him out, and kept it from going to the extremes of stupidity. For so it is; the outcast reduces respectability to the ridiculous; the criminal points to the futility of the law; the rascal shows the relativity of right; the infidel reforms and enlarges our religion; the enemy of order advances our progress; the earthly materialist proves the baselessness of all our idealisms; the ascetic demonstrates the stupidity of excess; the prohibitionist drives us to drink; the strongest accusation convicts the accuser; the plaint of the pessimist makes life interesting; the tyrant gives the greatest lesson in freedom; men write books to prove what fools they are, and the jester suggests what a tragic farce it all is. So many efforts in life, life itself defeats its own purpose. It is the undesired that happens. Help comes not from heaven because we expect it from that source. They who break laws to suit their own convenience make larger laws for the welfare of society. I told you before that the outcasts of society are often its saviors.

"Now be in order, gentlemen. I have the floor this time. This is my chance to get killed. Not to the point? But there are many points to this, and if I have deviated from one I was only getting so much nearer the other. I was trying to show what good this scoffer and sycophant has done, and to point out the value of the jest. God created the world and he saw what he was 'up against,' so he smiled, and thus humor was born. After awhile the divine flashlights from on high began to play hide-and-seek in the unlit chambers of the human brain; men became possessed of the sense of humor, and this was the awakening and dawn of civilization. The lightnings of the mind which suddenly reveal the multitudinous contradictions of life, the mental illuminations which cause the immediate recognition of the incongruous, the flash which makes you see all in a moment, the wide view which makes the universe as small as the lantern in your hand, the whimsicality of thought forever creating unsuspected analogies and unexpected comparisons, the sense of proportion which reduces all things to what they are, or should be, truth seen through the falsehoods, the sureties discovered through the absurdities, the exactness of things measured through their exaggerations, miracles of instantaneous reasoning and feats of ingenious deductions, the intellectual rapid transit between the sublime and the ridiculous, which keeps you from going to either extreme, the magic charm which keeps you above the abysses of the stupid, small and great, the bright footlights to the tragedy of life—such, in brief, is humor. And what else is there that is so powerful to prevent extravagances, to check excesses, to arrest all sorts of frenzies, to curtail abnormal credulity, to sober all kinds of intoxications? In the Ghetto, as everywhere else, humor is the saving presence; it makes existence tolerable, and preserves the sanity of the little journey to the grave. It was dark and dismal and dreary and dingy in the Russian Ghettos, and life had the color of last year's snow, and it all seemed like a funeral procession in a sultry, rainy weather; from without we were harassed by our enemies; from within we were harried by our friends, our guardians of sacred law and traditional superstition; it was sad and sorrowful, and so we jested. God sent us some sunshine in the form of such scoffers and outcasts as Motke Chabad, and we laughed. We laughed and forgot to weep. Humor is essentially pathetic, but the absence of it is tragic. Did we not laugh a little we could not have lived. Humor, my friends, is the redeeming grace. If you have ever been very serious in life, why, you can laugh it down. What shall we do to be saved? Cultivate a sense of humor.

"How could we have lived it through without a Chabad? With a smug, smooth, sullen, soulless respectability that moves along the lines of least daring and most obedience, that cannot do any good because it must fulfil the Taryag Mitzves—the 313 precepts—that commit all sorts of prescribed follies on earth to be admitted into heaven, that divides its time between praying in the synagogue three times a day and preying upon its less fortunate neighbors the rest of the time, with a mob of skull-capped numskulls that did not think because its mind was made up—has been made up for it centuries ago—a crowd that would not move an inch because, as is insisted, 'the hell that was good enough for our fathers, is good enough for us'—with a class of good people like that, how should we have fared if we had not had a Motke to chastise it with his jests and jeers and sneers and arrows of scorn? He laughed with the lowly and for them; he was on the side of reason as against precept; he stood for natural needs as against supernatural suppositions; he was one of the under-dogs, but he barked loudly for their cause, and his service shall not be forgotten as long as we have a sense of humour left—as long as we are human! Crude were his jests, and clownish most of his jokes; did he have the talent of a Heine or BÜrne, he could not be what they were without their possibilities; he was a rough-hewn, Ghetto-enclosed child of darkness, but he did his work in his own way, and the work told the story.

"God has spoiled his chosen people by choosing them. Many of them are stiff-necked, stubborn, reactionary; and they do countless things in the name that would not countenance it. As often as not the powers that be in Jewish communities are haughty, proud, unjustly aggressive, and they prey upon and oppress the humbler children of Israel. It is well that there should ever be some one constantly to criticise, castigate, scold, and Carlyle these powers that be and guard and interpret the law. So, in a sense, every good Jew should be an anti-Semite. He should beware of the abuses of organized bureaucracy by leaders of the community. He should be opposed to the inimical doings of the united many. United action is seldom good action. The individual should look out for the crowd. In organization, every one gives up part of his soul, and so even organized religions are soulless. So let the good Jew keep an eye on what the leaders in Judaism are doing, and to make sure that he is right, let him put his ear to the ground and listen to the voice of the rejected prophet and blasphemous jester.

"Many stories of Chabad have been told, but a few things may be mentioned to help me out of my poor plight, to illustrate my meaning. Thus, once upon a stormy day, when the rain and thunder and lightning became fearful and awesome, Motke was seen running through a street of Wilna, at his greatest possible speed, frantically waving his hands. A few Jews witnessing this, and overtaking him, stopped him, demanding what the trouble was. 'Such terrible thunder and lightning,' said he, all out of breath; 'I fear me that the Almighty is about to give us a new Law!' Here is a blessed bit of blasphemy which strikingly voices the protest of a law-entangled, ritual-ridden, tradition-tied people against the grinding yoke of the Torah. There is a story by another Ghetto jester, driving at the same evil. There came a time once—so the story runs—when the children of Israel became weary of this heavy yoke, when they could no longer live up to the laws forced upon them amid the dramatic effects of Sinai, when they could no longer bear all the sufferings and persecutions that living up to these laws entailed, and they prayed to God that they might be delivered from the Law, that they might be permitted to return to him the Tables of Stone; and the Uppermost consented to take it all back; and so, upon a day, the Jews from all corners of the earth started on a journey toward Mount Sinai, with heavy-laden trains and ships and caravans of scrolls and Biblical Commentaries. They came from all parts of the world—from East and West, North and South, from the Occident and the Orient; there were all manner of Jews, and they came by all means of transportation, but they all labored painfully under their tremendous loads, which they brought to be returned. At Sinai, they were to give up their burdens. Arrived there, they piled up their great packs of 'precept upon precept' around the holy elevation, until their luggage formed a mountain larger than Sinai. When the Uppermost appeared in his invisible, yet blinding glory, he asked for the meaning of this huge mountain of books, and the Jews, with their faces to the ground, cried, 'It is the Law. Take it, O Lord.' The Lord—so runs the story—was astonished at this, and he told the chosen people that only ten simple rules of living had been given to them at Sinai. He knew nothing of all these volumes. These multitudes of laws and endless commentaries were of men's making, not of his giving. They were empty vaporings of idle brains. He refused to take the Law back in its present form. So the Jews journeyed to their respective homes in all parts of the world, wiser, if not relieved of their burdens. I was irresistibly reminded of this story, and could not help telling it. It is the product of a far more subtle brain than Chabad's was. I do not remember the name of the author now, but he and Chabad unwittingly worked for the same cause."

A boisterous group of "dancing-school fellows," as "the intellectuals" called them, entered the place, demanding, at the point of their pay, something to eat. Keidansky's audience became restless. But he persistently kept on, despite all kinds of interruptions.

"Religion, as you all know, is the absence of the sense of humor," he said. "It goes to all sorts of absurd extremes. Its tower commands but one view of life, and that view is marred by emotion. When faith is not blind, it is, at least, short-sighted. The loyal member of the sect is not a seer. Enthusiasts are painfully one-sided. They see, or rather they feel, but one side. All their glances are on one thing. So we need the man with humor, who can see all things in one glance. The jester is the wide-eyed, all-observing fellow. He is the many-sided, much-seeing man. The sense of humor is the true sense of proportion, and it has been rightly urged that only the humorists have perceived and painted life as it is. Only they have presented life in all its largeness. Of course, the humorists, who merely chose to jest and not write great tragedies, did not do such things, but they were ever great reformers. The man who laughs can be deeply religious without being a pietist: he can be deeply religious, yet behave decently; his existence is a sure cure for hysteria. He infuses a little reason into things which prevents the sublime from becoming ridiculous.

"A maggid, or preacher, once announced that he had written a new commentary upon the 'Hagadah.' 'What!' everybody asked, 'are there not enough commentaries already in existence?' 'Yes,' said Chabad, 'but he cannot make a living out of those.' At a wedding of the Jewish aristocracy of Wilna, where wealth was flaunted pompously, Motke was asked to say something funny. 'All the rich men of Wilna ought to be hanged,' he said. The wealthy guests were scandalized. 'Wherein is the joke?' they asked. 'It is no joke,' said Motke.

"In the synagogue students of the Talmud were disputing a point concerning the use or rejection of an egg 'with a blood-drop' in it—a point to which so many pages of the holy books are devoted. 'Why don't you throw the rotten egg out?' said Motke, who stood near. 'What's the use of wasting so much time?'

"Once, it is told, when all his resources were at an end, Chabad went to the burial committee of the town, told the members that his wife had died and asked for the means of performing the last rites and ceremonies. He accordingly secured a few roubles, and when the committee-men and their officials came to take charge of the body, they found Motke, his wife and children, at their table enjoying a bountiful feast of roasted goose and things.

"'Gentlemen,' exclaimed the master of the household, 'you will have her; I swear to you, you will have her. She is yours; it is only a question of time.'

"'Fare thee well,' said Motke one day to a rich merchant. 'I am going away, and all I want of you is a few roubles for expenses.' His request was refused. 'Then I am not going,' he announced, 'and you need not fare well.' Chabad was also a match-maker, and his humor made him the best caricature of the institution. Thus once he came to a young man to speak of a match with a certain young woman. 'Oh, but she is lame,' protested the young man. 'Yes,' Chabad admitted, 'but that will keep her home, and prevent her from going out too much.' 'But she is blind,' the young man argued. 'So much the better,' said the shadchen; 'she will not see you flirting with other women.' 'She is also deaf,' insisted the youth. 'That is certainly fortunate,' was the reply; 'you will be able to say what you please in the house.' 'But she is also dumb,' pleaded the victim. 'Still better,' Motke assured him. 'There will always be quiet and peace in your home.' 'But she is also humpbacked!' the young man cried out in anger. 'Well, well,' said Chabad, 'do you expect her to be without a single fault?' Now I am almost ready for the maledictions," said Keidansky, as he was nearing the close of his argument, but I was suddenly called away.