3
THE JEWISH CHRONICLE
The Master of Dreams
By E. C. Ehrlich
Upon the wall of the office, where
the little, nervous man sits at his
desk from early morning until after
the slowest stenographer has put
away her notebook, hang the map
of Palestine and a framed card
done in old English lettering. The
card bears a set of verses very
popular a few years ago—"If" by
Rudyard Kipling. You know how
they run—
"If you can keep your head when
all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on
you—"
and all the rest of it. Someone has
scored one line with a heavy blue
pencil—"If you can dream and not
make dreams your master—" and
WC, who know the little man behind
the desk, nod to each other when
we read it, for we realize that he
has made himself the master of his
dreams.
Once he told a few of us how the
vision had come to him. It was
Friday night and the Chief, as we
love to call him, ready to relax after
the back-breaking grind of the
week, leaned back in his chair and
began to talk. He speaks slowly—
almost with a drawl—and looks at
you beneath his lazy, half-closed
lids. He told us of his boyhood on
the other side of the water, of the
long, weary days at the Chedar, of
returning home by lantern light,
stumbling sleepily as he went.
"And when I was afraid, I would
look up at the moon, for I knew
she looks after orphans, and my
father was dead." He spoke of the
dreams that came to him in those
days, when he heard for the first
time the tales of the old heroes of
his people—of his boyish desire to
he a second Moses that he might
lead the exiled children of Israel
back to their promised land.
"Dreams—just dreams," mused
the Chief. "If dreams could build
a city, we could drop from our
prayer books the petition to see
Zion restored—for it would have
been built long ago through our vis-
ions. We are great dreamers, we
Jews! We're born in dreams, for
don't our mothers dream that their
sons may be the Messiah? I know
my mother dreamed great things
for me—not only in silence, as I
think all mothers do—but she told
me often of her hopes for me ; how
I would wear the crown of learn-
ing, and be a great teacher of Tal-
mud, like my father, and be a light
to our people. Dreams — all of
them—dreams !"
He was silent for a little while,
then told us of his early days in the
Yeshibah, how .he became a Mat-
mid, a student who devoted his
days and nights to study ; how,
when he 'threw' himself upon his
bed late at night, too nervously ex-
hausted to sleep, he would he
haunted by the old dreams that
once flocked"before his eyes during
his childhood. Then came the death
of his mother, and he realized that
her tired eyes had never seen the
glory- which she 'had dreamed for
her son. For days he could not
touch his books; 'he could think of
nothing but her faith in him, of his
fruitless years of study and empty
dreaming.
"Until then," lie went on, "my
dreams had been my master. Now
I mastered them. Once, at mid-
night, I got out of bed and said the
words of lamentation over the de-
struction of Jerusalem, and sudden-
ly I thought : 'I lament that Jeru-
salem was destroyed centuries ago.
But what am I doing for the Jews
of today ? If we do not work hard
to keep the ,) remnant together,
when the Mesiah conies, there will
be no Jews left for him to lead
back to Zion.' If any man can be
said to feel the 'call' to service, I
think my 'call' came that night.
"I had heard of America from
my childhood—the land of oppor-
tunity. I knew that the Jew was
free there—that he was not a dog,
as in Russia, but a man. And
know from the history of our
people that freedom is always more
dangerous to our faith than perse-
cution. I felt that in America lay
our greatest hope—and our greatest
danger. Would we be so drunk
with our new freedom that we
would cast off the fetters of the
faith of our fathers and cease to be
Jews?"
The dreamer became the man of
action. He arrived in America
with little money and less influ-
ence. He spoke lightly of the
struggles of those first bitter years.
"I worked in a shop, making pants,
and I taught Hebrew at night. For
a long while I lived on bread and
herring—no, I didn't get tired of
herring, for often there was only
bread. I had no one to support but
myself, but I had to buy books."
At last he secured a better position
as a Hebrew teacher, and was able
to give tip his work at the shop. He
prepared himself for that Mecca of
the immigrant Jew, City College—
"yes, it was hard, but I had had my
wits sharpened in my old Yeshibah
—and then, when one follows a vis-
ion, everything is made easy."
Through with college, he secured a
position in a more modern Talmud
Torah.* "It was better than the
basement Cheders where I had
taught before — at least it was
cleaner. But I was not satisfied. I
kept asking myself why we Jews
should not try to teach our history,
our language, our religion, to our
children just as intelligently as the
public schools teach arithmetic and
writing. I began to wonder what
was wrong with our methods ; why
the second generation of American
Jews knew so little about things
Jewish and care less. So I began
to plan plans and dream dreams."
For fifteen years the quiet, unas-
suming Hebrew teacher taught and
studied, thought and dreamed. He
became superintendent of the Tal-
mud Torah and introduced new
methods, which the conservative di-
rectors declared would bring cer-
tain failure. He succeeded, and
when they praised him, asked no
reward but permission to discard
the methods he had introduced and
(Continued on page's)
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