London, Tevet 5475: a boy newly come from Bragança brings the Haham of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation the Sabbath-candle blessing his grandmother said in a cellar for fifty years, and asks whether it was a blessing; the answer turns on one verb whose subject is not in the text.
by The Haham, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
Written for the Beth Medrash Ets Haim
It was put to me in the month of Tevet, 5475. The English here write 1714, and they write it eleven days behind the rest of Europe, having declined the Pope's calendar on principle; so that the boy who put the question had sailed from Lisbon on one date and landed in London, sixteen days later, on a date five days after it. He told me this himself, as the first thing he said to me, because he had been trying to understand it since he landed and nobody at the docks could explain it to him. I explained it. It took less time than his question, and was easier.
His name had been Diogo Serrão. He was seventeen. He came from Bragança, in Trás-os-Montes, where the hills are poor and the families have been Christians for two hundred years and have kept, some of them, other things for two hundred years in cellars. Since the twenty-second of Kislev his name was Jacob. He walked still with some care, and sat down on the bench of the Medrash the way a man sits who has been told by the mohel to sit down gently, and had believed him.
The question he had written out in Portuguese on a half-sheet, and he read it to me because he did not trust his Spanish, and he did not yet have any Hebrew beyond the four words that everyone brought out of Portugal.
"Senhor Haham. My grandmother, Beatriz Serrão, lit a candle on Friday nights and said a prayer over it. She died at the feast of Saint Michael. Before she died she taught me the prayer, and on the ship I wrote it down. I ask: was it a blessing? Did she do the commandment, or did she only say some words?"
He gave me the paper. I did not read it then. A text is not read in the hand of the one who gave it you, while he watches your face; it is read at a table, with light.
"Come on Thursday," I said. "The question is a proper question. It will have a proper answer."
He looked at me as though he had expected me to say yes or no across the bench, the way the priests in Bragança had answered everything. Then he said, "Thursday," and wrote the word on the back of his hand with his finger, which is what people do who have spent their lives having nothing to write on.
The paper was the back of a ship's biscuit account, from the Nossa Senhora da Boa Viagem, master one Fonseca: forty-two quintals received at Lisbon, the sum struck through. On the clean side, in a boy's hand, brown ink that had gone thin at the bottom of the bottle, were eleven lines of Portuguese.
I copied them before I did anything else. A man who studies a witness studies his own copy and keeps the original out of the candle's reach. Tallow costs sevenpence the pound in Leadenhall this winter; wax, which does not spit, costs more than the Medrash has. I sat with the original at the far end of the table under the window, where the light off the snow in the courtyard was cold and exact, and the copy under the candle.
The first lines were the ones I expected. I have seen perhaps thirty such papers since I came to this congregation, and in Livorno before that I saw more. They say, in Portuguese, what we say in Hebrew: Ouve, Israel, Adonai nosso Deus, Adonai é um. Hear, O Israel. The Name, as always in these papers, stands in its Hebrew form, Adonai, because the Hebrew was the one thing the grandmothers would not translate; it was the stone that the water went round.
Then came the lines for the candle. I set them out in my copy by clauses, as one sets out a verse:
Bendito sejas tu, Adonai, nosso Deus, Rei do mundo, que nos santificaste nos teus mandamentos e nos mandaste acender a candeia do sábado, para que não nos vejam.
And under it, in a smaller hand, as though he had remembered it afterwards: e a Santa Rainha Ester jejuou três dias. And holy Queen Esther fasted three days.
I read it through once for sense, once for grammar, and a third time for the thing that did not belong. That is the order. If you read for the thing that does not belong first, you will find one, whether it is there or not.
On Wednesday I showed the copy to the older men of the Medrash after the lesson on Berakhot, because a variant should be examined by more than one pair of eyes, and because the Medrash is not for the Haham's amusement. Semuel Pardo read it first. He is twenty-six and will be a good hazan, and a better one when he is less certain.
"Santa," he said, and put his finger under it. "Santa Rainha Ester. That is how they speak of their saints. They have made Esther into a saint of the Church. Haham, this is not a Jewish prayer. It is a Catholic prayer that happens to have the Name in it."
"What is santa in Hebrew?"
He saw where I was going and did not like it, which is to his credit; a man who likes being led is not following. "Qedoshah."
"Is the word forbidden to us?"
"The word is not forbidden. The use of it —"
"The use of it is an adjective agreeing with a feminine noun," I said. "It says she was holy. We say that the Sabbath is holy, and the people is holy, and we say it every day. You are not reading the word, Semuel. You are reading the country the word came from. That is derash, and bad derash, because it does not fit the syntax. What does the line say?"
"It says Esther fasted three days."
"Is that true?"
He opened his mouth and shut it. Isaac Bueno, who had been leaning on the book-press and not intending to speak, said, "The fourth chapter. Fast for me, and neither eat nor drink three days, night or day."
"The fourth chapter, the sixteenth verse," I said. "In Bragança they fast three days for Queen Esther, night and day, and do not eat. In London we fast one day, from dawn, and we call it the Fast of Esther, and we eat at night. Which of us is nearer the plain sense of the verse?"
There was some laughter. Pardo did not laugh, but he did not argue either; he put the paper back on the table very squarely, as though its edges mattered. I told them that our custom has its reasons and its sources and we would keep it, and that we would also know what we were doing when we kept it. Then I sent them home, because the coal was nearly done and the Parnassim do not buy more before the first of the month.
The question the boy asked was two questions, and they must be taken apart before either can be answered: first, whether what his grandmother said was a blessing; second, whether what she did was the commandment.
The second is the easier and the sadder. The kindling of the Sabbath light is a commandment of the Sages, not of the Torah, and its purpose is the peace of the house, that no one should stumble in the dark on the night of rest. She kindled a light on Friday before the Sabbath came in, and there was a house, and it was lit. Whether she kindled it in the proper place I do not know; the boy told me afterwards she kept it in a clay jar in the corner of the kitchen, with the mouth of the jar turned to the wall. A light in a jar still lights. The commandment does not say a light that is seen from the street. That is our custom here, where we can afford it.
The first question is the one that required the Thursday.
The Mishnah in Sotah lists what may be said in any language, and among them are the Shema and the Prayer and the Grace after Meals. The Gemara extends it to the blessings. So the Portuguese is not an obstacle. A blessing said in a language one understands is a blessing; indeed there are authorities who hold it better than a Hebrew one said by a man who does not know what he has said, and the boy's grandmother, whatever else, knew exactly what she was saying.
Then the formula. The Sages fixed the forms of the blessings, and the Gemara says that whoever alters the form which the Sages coined has not fulfilled his obligation. That is the rule, and it is strict, and it is right: a text that every man may alter is no text. But the Rambam, in the first chapter of the Laws of Blessings, rules what the rule means in practice: if a man altered the wording, so long as he mentioned the Name and the Kingship and the matter of the blessing, even in a foreign tongue, he has fulfilled his obligation.
I laid her lines beside that ruling as one lays a copy beside a codex.
The Name: Adonai. Present, and in its own letters, which is more than the ruling requires.
The Kingship: Rei do mundo. King of the world. Present; mundo is not quite olam, which is also age, but it is what every Spanish and Portuguese translation has used for three hundred years, including ours.
The matter: que nos santificaste nos teus mandamentos e nos mandaste acender a candeia do sábado. Who sanctified us with thy commandments and commanded us to kindle the light of the Sabbath. It is our blessing, word for word, clause for clause, in the order of the Hebrew. Whoever first put it into Portuguese, and it was not Beatriz Serrão, nor her mother, nor probably hers, did not know much, but he knew the order of a sentence.
So far she had fulfilled. By the ruling of the Rambam, whom we follow, the blessing was a blessing. I could have written that on Wednesday night and gone to bed.
The fifth line kept me up.
Para que não nos vejam. So that they may not see us.
It is not in any blessing. It is not a scribal slip; I looked at the boy's hand for that and the letters are clean, and a slip does not produce a whole clause with a proper subjunctive in it. Vejam is the present subjunctive, third person plural, governed correctly by para que. The grammar is perfect. Whoever composed that line knew Portuguese better than the man who translated the rest.
The question for the grammarian is the subject of vejam. Who are they?
In a text, a pronoun has an antecedent. That is the first thing one looks for, and one looks backwards. I looked. Before vejam there are: God, the world, the commandments, the light, the Sabbath, and us. None of these is plural and third person. None of them is looking at anyone. The pronoun has no antecedent in the text.
I have spent forty years insisting to students that a word means what the text makes it mean, and that the meaning must be found in the grammar and the context and not brought in from outside by cleverness. Ibn Ezra calls the other way the path of darkness. I still hold it. But here was a clause which the grammar itself declared incomplete, a verb whose subject stood outside every line of the paper, and the only honest reading of it was the plain one: the subject of vejam is not in the text because it was in the street.
The Masoretes had a word for a text that must be read otherwise than as it is written. They put the written form in the line and the reading in the margin, and did not change a letter of either. They did not do it to be clever. They did it because the line had been received, and the reading had been received, and they were not willing to lose one to keep the other.
There was the answer to the first question, then, and there was also a second answer that nobody had asked for.
He came on Thursday an hour before he was told, and sat in the courtyard on the stone by the gate until the shamash, who is not a patient man, brought him in out of the snow. I gave him the stool nearer the fire, what fire there was, and heard the cough in his chest; I had heard it on Tuesday and thought it was the ship. It was not only the ship. I told him to take honey in hot water at night and to sleep on his side, and that I would look at him again after Sabbath, and he nodded without listening, because he had not come about his chest.
"First," I said, "the blessing."
I told him about the Mishnah and the languages, and about the Rambam and the Name and the Kingship and the matter. I put my finger on each of the words on his own paper as I named them, Adonai, Rei do mundo, acender a candeia, so that he could see that the answer was not being given to him by me but by the words his grandmother had said, weighed on a scale that was not mine either. When I had done, I said the ruling plainly, in Portuguese, because it was a ruling about a woman who spoke Portuguese.
"It was a blessing. She did the commandment. She did it fifty years, you said, every Friday. Fifty years of blessings is some two thousand six hundred. They are all counted."
He did not cry. I had thought he might and had turned the candle so that it would not be in his face. He asked, "Who counts them?"
"That is not a question for the Medrash," I said. "The Medrash can tell you what they were. It cannot tell you where they are kept." Then, because that was unkind and I had not meant it to be: "Our Sages say that the one who does a commandment is not the one who keeps the account of it. Your grandmother did not keep the account either. She lit the light."
He looked at the paper for a while. Then he put his finger, as I had, on the fifth line.
"And this?"
"This is not part of the blessing."
"She always said it."
"I know. That is why it is not an error. It is a reading." I tried to find the Portuguese for what the Masoretes did and there is none, so I told him in Hebrew and then explained the Hebrew. Ketiv: what is written. Qere: what is read. "In your grandmother's house, the blessing was written as the Sages wrote it, and it was read with this line under it, because in her house the light had to be put in a jar. The line is the jar."
"Must I say it?"
That was the practical question, and it was the only one of his questions that was mine to rule on and not only to explain.
"No. You will say the blessing in Hebrew, as it stands in the Sages' form. I will teach you the Hebrew. It is fourteen words and you will have it by Sabbath." I held up the paper. "This line has a verb whose subject is not in the text. In Bragança its subject was in the street. Look out of the window, Jacob. Tell me who is in Heneage Lane."
He looked. There was nobody in Heneage Lane but a coal-heaver's boy with a sack, and the sack was not for us.
"A blessing is not said in vain," I said. "A petition that they may not see us, said in a city where the only man in the lane is carrying coal to someone else, is said in vain. Here it has nothing to govern. So it is not said. It is not cut out either."
"Then what happens to it?"
"It goes where readings go."
The Medrash owns a Tefilah of an Amsterdam printing, the good one with the Spanish beside the Hebrew, bound in calf that the Parnassim had re-backed at great cost two years ago and complained about at greater length. The blessing for the Sabbath light is on a left-hand page, near the foot, and there is a margin under it of a finger's breadth, which the binder, for once, did not trim.
I took down the book. I cut a new pen, because a note in a book that will be read after me must not be written with a pen that splits. Semuel Pardo had come in by then, and Isaac Bueno behind him, for the Thursday lesson, and they stood on the other side of the table and did not sit, and did not ask what I was doing.
I wrote in the margin, in Hebrew letters, small, the Portuguese of the fifth line, para que não nos vejam. Under it, in Hebrew:
Thus was it read after the blessing in the house of Beatriz Serrão of Bragança, and in the houses of her mothers. It is not said here. Tevet 5475.
Then I asked for the sand, and Pardo, who was nearest, passed it without a word, and I sanded the line and blew it and tipped the grains back into the pot, and turned the book round on the table so that the boy could see the page the right way up.
He could not read a letter of it. He looked at it for a long time all the same, the whole of the page, the blessing he did not yet know in the square type and the Spanish beside it and his grandmother's clause in my hand at the foot. Then he put his own paper, the ship's account, on top of it, fitted the fifth line of his to the note in mine, and held it there with two fingers as though he were checking a copy against its original.
"It is the same," he said.
"It is the same," I said, and took his paper, and put it in the drawer of the press with the other witnesses, and turned the key.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem nōnum Kalendās Octōbrēs (23 September 2026), ab Hachamō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
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