Until the Dawn Has Risen

by Hanoch Albeck, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I. Mishnah

This is how it was told in the house of Paul Spanier in Jerusalem, on Friday nights, after the fish and before the soup, whenever a child came home late and said that it was too late to do the thing that had not been done:

It happened that Gerhard and Paul came home from the wedding of their cousin Hilde, in Berlin, in the winter of 1935. They said to their father: we have not recited the Shema. He said to them: if the dawn has not risen, you are obliged to recite.

Then Paul would say, So., and lift his spoon, and the soup would be served.

The children learned it the way children learn a thing that is said the same way every time. They learned it before they learned where Berlin was. They learned that their grandfather had been a teacher of Greek at a Gymnasium and that he had kept a notebook, and they learned, later and from other people, that he and their grandmother had not come to Jerusalem. That was a separate fact. It was not part of the story, which was about the Shema, and about how it is not too late until it is.

The story had the shape of a ruling. Who came, from where, what they said, what he answered. Nothing else. When Paul's youngest daughter, Tamar, was eleven, she told it at school as a Mishnah, with the case first and the principle after, and the teacher wrote it on the board, and Tamar came home and reported that the teacher had said: Your grandfather was a wise man.

Paul said: "He was a precise man. That is not always the same thing."

II. Tosefta

The wedding was on a Sunday, the fifteenth of December, in a hall on the Artilleriestraße, behind the Adass Jisroel synagogue. Hilde Lewald married a surveyor from Breslau named Kurt Pinner, who had a certificate for Palestine and a berth on a ship leaving Trieste on the second of February. Everyone at the wedding knew the date of the ship. It was said in the toasts. It was said by the bride's mother, who said it as if it were a second ceremony, and wept at the same place in the sentence both times.

Gerhard was twenty-four and Paul was nineteen. They had walked there in the afternoon from the flat in the Mommsenstraße in Charlottenburg, because the S-Bahn fare for two was forty pfennigs and Gerhard said the walk was an hour and a quarter, which was true in the daylight. They had recited the afternoon prayer in the synagogue courtyard among the coats. They meant to leave at ten. Then there was the dancing, and then the bride's grandfather, who was eighty-three, asked Gerhard to dance with him, and then a man from the Palästina-Amt got Gerhard into a corner by the coat-rack and told him about certificates, the categories, the capitalist category of one thousand pounds, the labour schedule, what had happened to the schedule in October, what might happen to it in April. Paul stood behind them holding two glasses of wine that grew warm. When they came out on the Artilleriestraße it was a quarter past one, and the last train had gone.

It was minus four. Paul knew because there was a thermometer in a chemist's window on the Oranienburger Straße and he stopped to read it while Gerhard kept walking. The pavements were dry. There was no wind, which was the only mercy, and the cold went into the soles of their good shoes and stayed there.

They went along the Linden because it was lit. At the Brandenburg Gate Paul said: "We have not said the Shema."

Gerhard said: "I know."

"It's past midnight."

"I know what time it is."

They went into the Tiergarten on the Charlottenburger Chaussee, which was straight and long and empty, with the lamps far apart. Gerhard walked fast. Paul had always walked a little behind him, since they were small, and did so now.

"The man from the Palästina-Amt," Paul said.

"Herr Feiner."

"He said the labour schedule was half."

"He said it might be half. He said a great many things. He said Father should apply."

"Father won't apply."

"Father is dismissed on the thirty-first of December," Gerhard said, "by the decree of the fourteenth of November, as a non-Aryan official, notwithstanding service at the front. He has the letter. He has had it since Thursday. It is in the Zuckermandel."

Paul did not ask how Gerhard knew it was in the Zuckermandel. Their father kept every letter that mattered in the book he was working in, at the page he was working on, so that he would have to look at it each time he opened the book and could not pretend he had not been sent it. The Zuckermandel was the Tosefta, the Pasewalk edition of 1880, which their father was collating line by line against the Mishnah for no reason that anyone at the Gymnasium could have explained, and for no publication. He did it in the evenings. He used three pencils: black for agreements, red for divergences, blue for places where he thought the Tosefta had the earlier text. There was much more red than blue. He said that this was what honesty looked like on a page.

They came out of the Tiergarten at the Knie and went down the Bismarckstraße. It was two when they passed the Deutsches Opernhaus. Neither of them said the Shema walking. Afterwards Paul could not remember why. Perhaps because they would have had to stop, and it was too cold to stop; perhaps because each was waiting for the other to begin.

The flat was on the third floor. The front room had its light on. They saw it from the street, a yellow square behind the curtain, and Gerhard stood on the pavement looking up at it for a while before he went to the door.

Their father was at the table in his waistcoat and an old Litewka from the war, with a rug over his knees. The Zuckermandel was open, and beside it the Mishnah, a Vilna Berakhot, and the black notebook, and the three pencils lined up by colour. There was a glass of tea with no steam on it. He looked at them over his glasses and then at the clock on the sideboard.

"Twenty to three," he said. "Hilde is married?"

"Hilde is married."

"Good. Your mother waited until one. Sit down. You are blue."

Paul said: "We have not recited the Shema."

Their father took his glasses off. He said: "So long as the dawn has not risen, you are obliged to recite."

He did not say it as a quotation, though it very nearly was one. He said it the way he said open the window or the subjunctive here, please, not the indicative. And they stood in their coats in the front room, with the cold still coming out of the wool, and covered their eyes and recited, Gerhard a little ahead and Paul a little behind, while their father looked at the Tosefta and moved his black pencil along a line without marking anything.

That is where the story in Jerusalem ended. It did not end there.

When they had finished, Gerhard did not take off his coat. He said: "And midnight?"

"Midnight is a fence," their father said. "The sages said until midnight in order to keep a man far from transgression. So that he should not say, I have until dawn, and go to sleep, and wake when the sun is up. The obligation runs until dawn. The fence stands at midnight. You know this."

"I know it. Who is the fence for?"

"For young men who come home from weddings at twenty to three."

"And for men who sit up with the Tosefta?"

Their father put the pencil down.

"Herr Feiner," Gerhard said, "says you should apply now. Not in the spring. Now. He says the capitalist category needs a thousand pounds and we have not got a thousand pounds, but there are other categories, and there are people in Jerusalem who would write for you, and it takes months, and the months are the point."

"Herr Feiner is a kind man."

"He said that the ones who wait are the ones who think they know where the dawn is."

His father smiled at that, very slightly. "Herr Feiner did not say that. You said that, on the Charlottenburger Chaussee, to your brother, and you have been improving it since."

Gerhard said nothing. Paul, who had been there, said nothing either.

"Your grandmother," their father said, "is in the back room. She does not get up. Your mother will not leave her and I will not leave your mother. That is not the Tosefta. That is arithmetic." He turned the Zuckermandel round on the table so that it faced them, the letter from the Schulkollegium slipping a centimetre out of the gutter and lying there with its eagle showing. "But since you ask about the Tosefta. Look. From when do they recite the Shema in the evening? From the time that people go in to eat their bread on the eves of Sabbath: the words of Rabbi Meir. And the sages say: from the time the priests are fit to eat their terumah. The sign of the matter is the coming out of the stars. Now look at our Mishnah."

Paul looked. He knew it already. From the time the priests go in to eat their terumah.

"Rabbi Meir is gone," their father said. "Rabbi Judah the Prince had both opinions in front of him, or something very like both, and he kept the priests and dropped Rabbi Meir. Rabbi Meir measured the night by when ordinary people go home to eat. That is a sign anyone can see from the street. The priests are a sign you need a calendar and a sky for. The editor preferred the sign that does not depend on what people are doing. One can see why. People go home late. People go home early. People do not go home." He put his finger on the line. "But the Gemara still knows Rabbi Meir. It quotes him in a baraita, on the second page. He was removed from the Mishnah and he survives anyway, underneath, where anyone who reads carefully will find him. That is the red pencil."

"I don't understand what you are telling me," Gerhard said.

"I am telling you," their father said, "that I know the difference between a fence and the law, and I know where each one stands, and I do not need you to show me in the middle of the night. Go to bed. Gerhard, take your coat off in the house, you are not a cab driver."

Their mother came to the doorway in her dressing gown then. She did not come in. She said that the grandmother had been asking whether the boys were home, and their father said: "Tell her they are home and they have said the Shema," and their mother looked at the three of them, the two in coats and the one under the rug, and went back down the passage.

Gerhard went to bed. Paul stayed to drink the cold tea, because no one else would, and saw his father pick up the black pencil and then put it down and pick up the blue one, and write something small in the margin of the notebook, and close it over the letter.

Gerhard sailed from Trieste in April 1936, on a teacher's certificate that Herr Feiner had found for him in a category Gerhard did not strictly belong to. Paul went in November 1938, after the synagogue in the Fasanenstraße burned, with a student certificate to the Hebrew University and a single suitcase. His father carried it down the three flights for him and on the landing said: "Paul. The tea glass. You never brought it back to the kitchen." That was nearly the last thing. There were letters through the Red Cross, twenty-five words each, until 1942.

III. Gemara

In March 1962, Tamar Spanier, aged eleven, told the story at school, and on the Sunday after, Paul received a letter from Haifa in his brother's square hand.

Gerhard wrote that Tamar's teacher was the niece of a man he played chess with, and that he had heard the story as it was told in her class, and that it was not wrong, but it was not what had happened, or not all of what had happened. He wrote: You have made it into a story about how it is not too late. It was a story about how it was too late. He knew. He said so. You were in the room.

He wrote also that Father had not said if the dawn has not risen. He had said so long as the dawn has not risen. Gerhard was certain. He had heard it every night of his life afterwards for ten years, until he stopped hearing it, and it was so long as.

Paul read the letter at the kitchen table, twice, and then went to the shelf in the other room and took down the black notebook.

It had come in 1947, in a parcel from Charlottenburg addressed to the Hebrew University, from a Frau Kaminski who had lived on the second floor of the Mommsenstraße house. She had been given a box of books in the autumn of 1942, she wrote, to keep until it is over, and it was over, and she was sorry, and the box had been in the cellar and had burned in 1943, but this one she had taken up to her own flat and kept in a drawer, and she did not know Hebrew but she had seen the young man's name written on the inside of the cover with the address in Jerusalem, and she hoped it reached. It had reached. Paul had opened it at that time only far enough to see the handwriting, and had put it on the shelf, and had moved it twice since with his other books, to Rehavia and then to this flat, without opening it further.

He opened it now at Berakhot, at the first page, because that was where they had all been on that night.

The black pencil ran along the left margin, line after line, where the Tosefta and the Mishnah agreed. At the words of Rabbi Meir the pencil was red, with the note om. M. and a reference, b. Ber. 2b, baraita, and under it, in his father's smallest hand, survives in the Gemara. That much Paul could have reconstructed. He had said as much himself, to his own students, more than once.

Below it, in blue, a different hand, or the same hand at a different hour:

15.XII.35. G. u. P. von Hildes Hochzeit, 2.40. Gelesen.

G. and P. from Hilde's wedding, two-forty. Recited.

And under that, still in blue, three words of Hebrew without vowels. The first two were amud ha-shaḥar, the column of the dawn, the Mishnah's own phrase. The third was four letters, nun, resh, aleph, he, which may be pointed two ways. Pointed one way it is nir'ah: the dawn has been seen. Pointed the other it is nir'eh: the dawn — we shall see.

Paul sat with the notebook for some time. He thought about the vowels, as he would have told any student to: which reading the hand favoured, whether there was a mark above the letter, whether the blue pencil had been sharp. There was no mark. The pencil had been sharp. His father had left it unpointed. Whether that was haste or the point of the thing, the page did not say, and Paul had spent twenty years teaching people that one does not make a page say what it does not say.

He did not answer Gerhard that day. He saw, sitting there, what he had done to the sentence. He had corrected his father to the Mishnah, if for so long as, the way a copyist corrects a quotation to the text he knows by heart, and for twenty-four years nobody had noticed, least of all himself. Two weeks later he wrote: You are right that it was so long as. You are right that I left out the rest. I am not going to put it back in for the children. They have the ruling, which is true. You and I have the Tosefta. That is what a Tosefta is for. He copied out the blue line, without vowels, and posted it, and Gerhard did not write back about it, then or afterwards; but at Paul's house the next Passover, when the children went out on the balcony to look for the moon, Gerhard went with them and stood at the rail with his hand on Tamar's head and said nothing at all, which in their family was a form of agreement.

On Friday nights Paul went on telling it as he had always told it, the case and then the answer and then So, and the soup.

But there was a night that summer, a hot one, when he could not sleep and got up and went out onto the balcony with the notebook in his hand, not reading it, only holding it, and stood there while the sky over the Valley of the Cross went from black to ink to the grey before colour. His wife had left the washing on the line overnight: the white sheets, and Tamar's school blouse, which was blue. For a long while he could not tell them apart. He stood and waited for it. Then, without any moment he could have pointed to, he could: the blouse was blue and the sheets were white, and the hour for the morning Shema had begun.

He covered his eyes.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ab Hanōchō Albeckiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Hanoch Albeck, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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