The Parable

On the Shabbat just before the Jewish month of Elul 55571 (August 22, 1797), Rabbi Schneur Zalman told a parable of a king in the field—what we would call today “the countryside.”

The parable rings a little foreign to us today. To the people listening to Rabbi Schneur Zalman at that particular time, however, it was vividly real. Many of them had just experienced it first hand. Only about three months earlier, the newly crowned Czar Paul had passed by playing precisely this role.

Here’s the parable, as the rabbi told it:

Before he arrived at a city, the people of the city came out to greet him. He received them out there in the fields, so that anyone who wished was permitted to greet the king. And he received all of them with a friendly countenance, showing a happy face to all.

Then, as he continued to the city, the people followed after him.

Once he arrived at his royal palace, however, only those with special permission could enter to see him, and even then, only the most important citizens and privileged individuals.2

Many point out that a similar parable had been told by Rabbi Schneur Zalman’s rebbe, Rabbi Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritch. The Magid explained that, counter-intuitively, ruach hakodesh--divine inspiration—is more accessible when we are in exile from our land than it was in the times of the prophets, when the Temple stood in Jerusalem. He compared this to attempting to approach the king when he is in his palace as opposed to finding him when he stays in a tavern on the road.

In this parable of Rabbi Schneur Zalman, everything has changed. It’s not about the time of exile, but about a regular occurrence every Elul. More significantly, it’s not about getting anything from the king—it’s about the encounter itself, greeting the king and being received by him. That’s where all the details of the parable come in—the king’s friendly countenance, the happy face he shows to all, and the escort of the people to the city.

The Baal Shem Tov—whom Rabbi Schneur Zalman called zeideh (“grandpa”)--would often say that “from each thing you see and hear, you must learn something in your relationship with the One Above.” Life, indeed, is a fabulous teacher. When you learn something in a book, it remains abstract. When it’s something you have experienced in life, it is immediate and real.

And indeed, Rabbi Shraga Dovid Homnick has recently pointed out that an historic event occurred just a few months before this parable was told, one that very much brings it to life.

Let’s start with some background:

In the 18th century, most of the world’s Jewry lived within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the largest state in Europe (excluding Russia, which lies mostly in Asia). For centuries it was run as a republic of sorts, in which every landed citizen had a vote. That worked well for a few hundred years, but by 1772, only 10% of the population was landed, the peasants had been reduced to chattel of their landlords, and the privilege of “liberum veto” meant that any single noble could block the vote on any issue.

This left the commonwealth both economically bankrupt and militarily crippled. All that was needed was to bribe a single landlord and Poland could not muster an army to fight a defensive war.

The surrounding empires took advantage of this situation. Representatives of the Kingdom of Prussia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Russian Empire sat down over a map and neatly carved up Poland between them, leaving a small portion to be divided later. Jews came to the synagogue one morning to find a sign on the door informing them that they were now subjects of the Kaiser, the Emperor, or the Czar.

A second partition was made in 1792, and a third, after an unsuccessful Polish uprising, in 1795. By this point, Poland ceased to exist.

Czarina Katerina was quite content to sit in her palace and receive reports from her servants concerning the happenings in her new territories. Not so her son and heir, Paul I. He had witnessed how Joseph II of Austria had gone out to the countryside of his territories, met face to face with the peasantry, heard their accounts, received their petitions, and even put his hand to the plow in a farmer’s field.

On April 16 of 1797, Paul was officially crowned. On May 14 of that year, he set forth on a journey to the territories.

Anecdotes From the Field

Before leaving on this trip, Paul sent messages to all the relevant authorities. He commanded that nothing be changed or repaired before his arrival. He desired to see things as they were.

In one locality, local authorities built a temporary pavilion for the emperor. Paul went instead into a peasant house to eat, and rewarded the owner with 100 rubles. It seems from reports that this happened more than once.

Key to our subject here, Paul forbade elaborate ceremonial receptions. No fanfare, no platform for dignitaries, no fancy pavilions. Paul was well known to love parades and pageantry. But this way, when the people came out to greet the Czar as he approached their town, there would be little between them and their king.

Between this trip and a succeeding, similar one the next year, we have a wealth of anecdotes of how this strategy fared.

One account describes how the inhabitants of all the surrounding towns came out to greet him as he approached the city and physically lifted his carriage up the hill with their hands, while women wiped the dust from it with their kerchiefs. One local merchant actually clung to the carriage as it moved. Instead of having him removed, Paul questioned him about the community’s occupations and condition.

When he arrived in the town, Paul appeared at the window of his lodging and began observing and questioning people. He called over a merchant and asked where the town’s grain was shipped and what trades sustained the inhabitants. The two spoke at length.

When a man fell in front of Paul’s window crying, Paul asked what he wanted. He said he wanted nothing—he was crying because neither his father nor grandfather had ever seen a czar, and now he had. Paul told him to go home and tell them that he had seen one.

An eighty-year-old townsman once approached and knelt. Paul started asking him questions. He noticed the veils worn by the women and wanted to know whether they were manufactured locally. He then looked out at the river and questioned the old man about the different kinds of vessels and why some had white sails while others had yellow ones.

Then there was the time that a child in the crowd began crying. Paul told the woman carrying him, “Take him home; the child wants to sleep—you can see me again tomorrow.”

It’s difficult for us to conceive today, but the people came because they saw Paul as their king. His pride was their pride, his dignity their dignity. Although they had only recently been inducted under his rule, he was nevertheless the embodiment of the great and powerful empire in which they proudly lived.

That is what compelled them to come and see him—not any command, not any pomp and splendour. It was a matter of identity: This is my king. I must be there.

And by being there, what had they gained? An intimate connection with an absolute monarch. A visitor to the palace could claim that he had seen the king in all his glory, but only the peasant or the merchant who the king had engaged in conversation could say that he knew the king as a person.

And or anyone in whose humble home the king had come to dine—the pride and celebration was unbounded for years after.

The Rabbi and the King

“It is a mitzvah to make an effort to see a king, even a king over the other nations of the world.”3

So writes Rabbi Schneur Zalman in his Seder Birkat Hanehenin, a guide to common blessings that he included in his arrangement of the prayer book. It’s a ruling straight out of the Talmud, cited by earlier poskim, as well.

Does this mean Rabbi Schneur Zalman was among those who greeted the Czar in the field as he approached the city? At the time, he was “the Magid of Lyozna.” Lyozna is a day’s journey from Orsha, one of the principal centers on Paul’s 1797 itinerary. Paul arrived there on Friday, May 19—23 Iyar on the Jewish calendar.

I’ve searched and have yet to find any record of such.4 It’s extremely likely, however, that among his audience when he told this parable there would be those who had been there on that day. Three out of four of Orsha’s inhabitants at the time were Jews. Certainly, only three months later, Lyozna would still be buzzing with news of the event, and the memory was fresh and exciting in people’s minds.

These people were among the first in their generation, in their part of the world, to experience this first hand. And they were among the last—Paul was assassinated by agents of a spiteful aristocracy only four years later.

As for us, we can at least read the anecdotes, imagine the scene, and get some sense of the pride, the joy, and the sense of privilege to stand before your king—in this case, the King of all kings who calls the entire universe into being each moment. A king who can never be assassinated and whose covenant with us will never change.

Rambam describes the king as the heart of the people. That being so, G‑d must be found within your heart. Don’t wait until He enters the palace of the Days of Awe—the days from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur. Now is the time to go out and search for Him in your soul, and in the fields and gardens of your life. Then, when you approach him in his palace of the Days of Awe, it will be an intimate experience with a lasting effect.