Folktales of the Jews, Volume 2: Tales from Eastern Europe

38. God Will Help (IFA 18130)

38 God Will Help T O L D B Y H I N D A S H E I N F E R B E R T O H A D A R A H S E L A This is a story for which a person has to believe that things will work out. To think only this. Once there was an inn. The innkeeper leased it from the governor of the town. But he didn’t have the rent money. Whenever the governor came to demand the rent, the innkeeper would say, “God will help me.” It was always, “God will help me.” The poritz* was getting angrier. Several months had passed already. The man kept saying, “You will see that God will help me.” The poritz had already stopped going every day. Passover drew near, and the poritz said that he wanted to see how the man would celebrate Passover when he had so little and kept saying that God would help him. He wanted to see how. In the meantime, the poritz had sold a broad tract of land, a large forest , and had been paid in silver and gold. If you want to know whether coins are counterfeit you put them in your mouth. Now this poritz, the governor, had a clerk. It was the clerk who had to test the money. He sat in a special room. There was a parrot in the room. The parrot watched every time he tested the money. After the clerk left the room, the parrot flew down. It thought that when the man put the money in his mouth he swallowed it. The bird swallowed so many coins that its stomach swelled up, and it fell down dead. The poritz saw this as a way to be nasty to the innkeeper. He would throw him the dead parrot. At the very least, the innkeeper would be frightened. The next day, he threw it through the window. The bird’s belly split open, and all the money spilled out. So the man was able to celebrate Passover like a king, with wine and lots of good food. That night, the poritz went to see the innkeeper’s Passover. There was bright light, and the table was set as for a royal feast. 278 * Polish landlord. One truly must believe in God, he thought. No doubt someone had helped. But he wanted to know what, where from. The next day, the governor went to see the innkeeper. “Why didn’t you pay your debt if you had so much money?” “I haven’t had time yet,” the man replied. “On the eve of the holiday, I still didn’t have any money. When I got up the day before Passover, I found a dead parrot, with a pile of money next to it.” “Now I will start believing that God really does help,” the governor told him. The man was able to pay the rent and live comfortably. 38 / God Will Help  279  COMMENTARY FOR TALE 38 (IFA 18130) Told by Hinda Sheinferber from Poland to Hadara Sela in 1991 in Haifa. Cultural, Historical, and Literary Background The narrator frames the present story with a statement of its message of trust in God and His just reward to His faithful. In a narrative mode, the tale articulates in concrete terms the eleventh of the thirteen principles of Judaism as formulated by Maimonides (1135–1204) in his commentary on the Mishnah Sanhedrin 10. According to this article of faith, “God rewards those who fulfill the commandments of the Torah and punishes those who transgress them.”1 The implicit acceptance of temporary suffering also underscores the fundamental acceptance of the ways of God to His believers, regardless of its unexplainable hardship. This is one aspect of theodicy, a term formulated by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) to articulate the concept of vindication of divine justice in face of adversity. Analyses of the theodicy in Jewish folk traditions and in Judaism in general are available,2 as is a discussion of theodicy in the biblical world.3 A survey of recent scholarship about the issue has been published.4 The present tale features two of the most familiar roles in Jewish society of Eastern Europe: the innkeeper and the landlord (for more on innkeepers, see the commentary to tale IFA 4815 [this vol., no. 56]). The test case for having complete...