A Jewish Elijah Story

I collect incidents of possible translated beings.  Sorry, it's just who I am.


"A third of a century ago, on the day I was ordained a Rabbi, I went on a journey to save Jews from an oppressive government.  I traveled to the city of Bukhara...then part of the USSR.  We had the name of a family there....My mission was to bring them blue jeans to trade on the black market so they could put food on their table, let them know they were not forgotten....

"We set out on foot from our six story hotel...looking for Ulitsa Zagorodnaya 8....We got profoundly lost, wandering through the warren of winding lanes for an hour or more....I gave up finding the address I was sent to visit and approached any and every passerby, asking in broken Russian where the hotel was.  No reply....No luck....

"And then I saw a wizened old man dressed in a long, dusty black caftan, carrying what looked to be a shepherd's crook.  Gray beard down to his chest, he seemed as old as Bukhara itself.  I approached him with the hotel card in my hand, but as I drew near to him found myself saying Ulitsa Zagorodnaya?"  I didn't say the house number....With a brief nod, the old man signaled that we should follow him  In and out of the maze we went....

"The old man stopped and with his staff, rapped on an arched wooden door.  There, outlined faintly in chalk was the number eight.  Was this the house we were looking for?  Using mime, we gestured for the old man to stay put while we knocked on the door and stuck our heads in....We asked for 'Goldberg' and were immediately informed....We had found the right place.  The entire conversation took no more than twenty seconds.  We popped back out into the street to thank our elderly guide, but he had vanished into the shimmering hot air!  We looked down the street the way we had come.  Not there.  We looked the other way.  Not there either.  But we notices that the street took a short dog's-leg bend, so we scurried down the road to see if our nice old man was yet there, just out of our sight lines.  But he was gone, gone."

Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky
Sage Tales: Wisdom and Wonder from the Rabbis of the Talmud