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5 Awake in the Dark of Night: Pinhas of Koretz, the Silent Sage ONE OF THE GREATEST OF THE BA’AL SHEM Tov’s Hasidim and colleagues was Reb Pinhas of Koretz (1726–1791). Though little is known of his birth or childhood, we do know something about his grandfather, Pinhas Shapira, who lived a lifestyle consistent with that of the tzaddikim nistarim. It is said that the elder Pinhas was “neither a rabbi nor a communal leader, neither the author of books nor the head of a yeshiva” but would travel from town to town, admonishing and exhorting the children of Yisra’el. Yet he differed from other itinerant preachers in one significant way. Whenever he received payment, he would keep for himself only enough for his minimal needs, contributing the rest toward the maintenance of the synagogue.”1 His grandson and namesake, Pinhas ben Avraham, with whom we are concerned here, was a brilliant student of Talmud in his youth who had also mastered a number of secular subjects, including grammar and geometry. However, the great love of his life was the Zohar. It is said that he studied the Zohar continuously and thanked God on numerous occasions that he had not been born before it was written. Later, he would say, “The Zohar helped me to be a Jew.”2 This suggests, as we shall soon see, that Reb Pinhas may have had doubts about the faith. It is possible that before discovering the Kabbalah of the Zohar, which opened up new horizons for him, he may have struggled to find himself in the limited paradigms of the Judaism taught to him in his youth. 127 DOUBTS ABOUT THE FAITH Now, even though Reb Pinhas of Koretz is counted as one of the primary heirs of the Ba’al Shem Tov, he is thought to have visited the Ba’al Shem Tov on only three occasions. Little is known of these meetings—whether long or short—but their effect proved significant and powerful in the life of Reb Pinhas and for the whole history of Hasidism. For Reb Pinhas became one of the great luminaries of the Hasidic movement after the passing of the Ba’al Shem Tov and served as one of the twin beacons (along with the Maggid of Mezritch) of the movement as a whole. Thus it is strange that there is so little in the literature of Hasidism to tell us about why the Ba’al Shem Tov was so important to him, not even a great story of their meeting as we have with the Maggid of Mezritch and Ya’akov Yosef of Polonoye. There are suggestions here and there about when and where they may have met, but little else. Nevertheless, in the early 1960s, I was privileged to hear a story of their first meeting that I have never read in any of the books, one that I believe to be authentic. It was told to me by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), who, at that time, was a professor of ethics and Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Heschel was a mentor whom I admired greatly and who taught me several important stories (and much else that was vital to me at that time). As he was a direct descendent of Reb Pinhas on his mother’s side, and since I have yet to find this same story anywhere else, I believe this story may be a family tradition . I am pleased to give it over now in English as I first heard it from Heschel in Yiddish. THE SON OF Reb Pinhas came to him one day and said, “Rebbe (he was coming to him as a Rebbe at this time), what should I do? I have sefekot en emunah (doubts about the faith), and I don’t know if I really believe in God.” This is likely Reb Pinhas’s eldest son, Yehudah Meir, who later became the Rebbe of Shepetovka and who is also known to have been a Hasid of his father’s friend and close associate of the Ba’al Shem Tov, Hayyim of Krasnoye. Regardless of which son it was, for a sincere seeker, it is very hard to have doubts about the faith and to have to live with that fact. This reminds me of a story of Reb Moshe Polier of Kobrin . . . 128 A HEART AFIRE Once, a man came to Reb Moshe Kobriner and said...

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