When Rav Nosson Nota Shapiro (1585 to 1633/5345–5393) — Rav of Krakow and famed author of Megaleh Amukos — let his community know that he no longer wished to be their Rav, he gave them no reason.
They begged. The parnassim came, and the baalei batim came, and the talmidei chachamim came. He heard each of them out, but did not change his mind. So the community did the only thing left to do. They arranged a seudas preidah, a farewell meal, and sat down to say goodbye to their great rabbi.
What they didn’t know was that a few weeks earlier two Jews had come to his door with a quarrel that changed everything.
A Deal Sealed in Heaven
There was a man in Krakow who sold bread and rolls from a stand on the sidewalk. Simple loaves, a few rolls, nothing fancy. He was up before dawn and he stood out in the cold, and the people who bought from him had no idea who he was.
One morning a wealthy townsman stopped at the stand and looked at him twice.
“Reb Yid,” he said, “I know you from years back. You’re a talmid chacham. Why are you selling bread? Your hands should be turning pages of Gemara, not dough. Let me give you what you need every month, and you’ll sit and learn all day.”
The bread seller shook his head. “I manage, baruch Hashem.”
But the man pressed him. “Please give me the zechus. You learn, I’ll earn. Yissachar and Zevulun.”
And so they made a partnership. The stand came down, the talmid chacham took his seat in the beis midrash, and the wealthy man walked home feeling like a partner in something sealed in Heaven.
The Smell of Fresh Bread
Some weeks later the benefactor was walking through the Jewish quarter when he caught the smell of warm bread. He followed it around the corner and stopped where he stood. There was the talmid chacham at his stand, sleeves pushed up, flour to the elbow, selling rolls.
“Reb Yid! What’s this? We have an agreement. You should be in the beis midrash at this hour, not out here.”
The talmid chacham wiped his hands and looked up at him. “I know. I was coming to see you about it this week. I haven’t touched this month’s money, and I’m giving it back. My wife and I talked it over, and we decided to go back to the way we were living before.”
From the First Grain to the Last Loaf
“But why?” the man said. “Isn’t it better to have your parnassah handed to you so you can learn in peace?”
“Let me tell you what our day used to look like,” the talmid chacham said. “My wife and I would open our eyes in the morning and the first thing out of our mouths was a request to Hashem that we should earn something that day. When we ground the wheat, we asked Him that the flour come out white and clean. When we kneaded, we asked that the dough rise. I’d go out for wood and ask Him for dry logs, because green wood smokes and ruins a whole batch. We asked that the bread bake through, and that people should come, and that what they bought should be good enough that they’d come back the next week. And when the day went the way we’d asked, we thanked Him for it.
“From the minute we woke until the minute we lay down, we were talking to Him. We had no one else to talk to about it. The moment your money came in, all of that stopped. I believed everything I had believed the week before. I simply had nothing left to ask Him for. And I found I couldn’t live at that distance from Him.”
The Din Torah
The benefactor wasn’t satisfied. “A deal is a deal,” he said. “A man can’t walk out of an agreement because he’s had a change of heart.”
The two of them brought it to the Rav.
The Megaleh Amukos heard the wealthy man first, and then he turned to the talmid chacham. “Do you have a source for this?”
“Yes. From the Chumash. Noach sends out the dove, and it comes back to him toward evening. ‘V’hinei aleh zayis taraf b’fiha — And behold, a plucked olive leaf was in its mouth’ (Bereishis 8:11). The Midrash reads taraf as food, and reads ‘in its mouth’ as speech. The dove was saying something.
“Rabbi Abbahu asks why an olive leaf of all things. If the dove brought it from Gan Eden, why not cinnamon, why not balsam? Because it was telling Noach, ‘Better something bitter than this, and not sweet from under your hand’” (Bereishis Rabbah 33:6).
“There’s another version,” he went on. “This time the words are said to the Ribono shel Olam. ‘Let my food be bitter as an olive and given into Your hand, and let it not be sweet as honey and given by the hand of flesh and blood’ (Sanhedrin 108b; Pirkei D’Rebbi Eliezer 23).
“That hand belonged to Noach. A tzaddik who had fed every living thing in the teivah for a year, the dove among them, and kept them all alive. And still the dove wanted its food from Hashem. If a bird can want that, why can’t I?”
What the Rav Ruled
The room was quiet. The Megaleh Amukos sat with his eyes closed for a while, and then he opened them and spoke to the wealthy man first.
“Understand what you have. There’s no greater partnership in Klal Yisrael than Yissachar and Zevulun. The talmidei chachamim carry the Torah of this generation, and men like you carry them. In the World to Come, you’ll share in their Torah. Nothing said in this room takes a word of that away from you.”
Then he turned to the talmid chacham. “You looked at what your friend was offering and saw what you were going to lose, and you weren’t willing to lose it. I’m not going to stand between a man and that.”
He looked back at the benefactor. “Release him. Not because the arrangement was wrong. Because this one man wholeheartedly chooses the bitter olive.”
He said it with the understanding that every case was unique, that not everyone should walk away from the support he’s living on, and that each man should bring his case to a Rav first.
Among Such Yidden
Weeks later the city sat down to its farewell meal. The tables were full and the mood was a mixture of happy and sad — happy for their esteemed Rav and sad that they were going to lose him.
Then the Megaleh Amukos rose to speak — and announced that he had decided to stay.
When the noise died down they asked him why he had wanted to leave, and what had changed his mind.
“Why I wanted to leave I’m not going to tell you,” he said. “Why I’m staying I’ll tell you. A din Torah came before me.”
And then he told them the whole thing, the stand and the offer and the dove. “After such a din Torah,” he said, “I decided that I wanted to remain here, in this city, to be among such Yidden!”
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