Appendix A: The Dying of Rabbi Zusya

A tale from the Hasidic oral tradition (late eighteenth century), retold in the author's own words. The tale is in the public domain; only this specific rendering is hers.

Rabbi Zusya of Hanipol — also called Meshulam Zusil, also called, by those who loved him most, simply Reb Zusya — was an unusual teacher even among the Hasidic masters of eighteenth-century Poland, who were, by all accounts, a collection of unusual people. He had been a student of the Maggid of Mezritch, who had been a student of the Baal Shem Tov, who had founded the Hasidic movement with a single insistence: that God is to be served with joy, that the smallest life contains the largest thing, that the heart is not decoration on top of the Torah but the place where the Torah is read. Zusya carried this inheritance in a particular way. He was known for speaking with cattle, for praying in barns, for once stopping a wagon journey to help a peasant woman replace a broken axle, and for keeping such company with the poor that his own disciples sometimes struggled to find him among them.

He grew old. He had, by the time he was old, spent a lifetime inside the discipline his teachers had laid on him. He had studied the Mishnah and the Gemara and the Zohar. He had prayed the morning and afternoon and evening prayers for more decades than he could remember without counting. He had been, by every external measure, a successful rabbi. His disciples loved him. His wisdom was quoted. The community he served was, in his old age, better than it had been in his youth, partly because of his work.

And yet, in the last weeks of his life, he was found weeping.

His disciples came to him, alarmed. They had known Zusya to weep for the suffering of others. They had known him to weep in prayer. They had never, before, seen him weep for himself. Rebbe, they said. Rebbe, what is wrong? Are you in pain? Is it the body? Is it something we can do?

Zusya lifted his face from his hands. His face, by all accounts, was calm. It was only that the tears were continuous and he did not try to stop them.

I am afraid, he said.

Of what, Rebbe? Of death?

No, he said. Not exactly. I am afraid of what will be asked of me when I cross over.

The disciples exchanged glances. They had expected many things, from this teacher whose courage in the face of hardship had been legendary for decades, but they had not expected this. Rebbe, one of them said, gently. You have lived a good life. You have loved God. You have served the people. What could you possibly fear the heavenly court would ask you?

Zusya looked at each of them. When he spoke, his voice was not frightened, though the tears continued. It was precise. He had clearly thought about this for a long time.

When I stand before the heavenly court, he said, I do not fear that they will ask me: Zusya, why were you not Moses? That question I could answer. I would say: Master of the Universe, you did not give me the stature of Moses. You did not give me his strength of voice, his capacity for leading, his place in the history of our people. It was not in my power to be Moses. No one will hold this against me.

And I do not fear, he continued, that they will ask me: Zusya, why were you not Abraham? That question I could also answer. I was not Abraham's time. I was not Abraham's place. I did not have his covenant or his son or his knife. It was not in my power to be Abraham.

And I do not fear, he said, that they will ask me: Zusya, why were you not David? Or Solomon, or Isaiah, or Akiva, or the Baal Shem Tov himself. For each of these, I would have an answer. I was not them. I could not have been them. Of this, I am without shame.

He paused, and now the disciples saw why he had been weeping.

What I fear, he said, is that when I stand before the court, the question that will be asked of me is not: Zusya, why were you not Moses? The question that will be asked of me is: Zusya, why were you not Zusya? And this question — this is the question I may not be able to answer. Because there were days, my children, when I was not Zusya. There were days when I tried to be another man. There were days when I hid from what Zusya was supposed to be doing, in that day, in that hour, in that specific circumstance, and I did something else instead. These days I remember. These days are the ones I will have to answer for.

The disciples were silent for a long time. One of them — the youngest, the one who had just been admitted to Zusya's circle and who did not yet fully understand what he was hearing — began to weep as well. The others began to weep, each in his own way. They wept not because the rabbi was dying — they had known he was dying for some time. They wept because the rabbi had told them the truth about what would be asked of them as well. They, too, would be asked the Zusya question. They, too, had days in their memory when they had not been themselves. They, too, would have to answer.

Zusya smiled through his tears. It was the smile of a man who had, in the admission, already done some of the work of the answer.

I do not tell you this, he said, to frighten you. I tell you because I have been thinking, these last weeks, that this is the most important question, and that none of us, at the usual time, takes it seriously. We spend our lives measuring ourselves against Moses. We fail, of course. We console ourselves that failure against Moses is not shame. We build theologies around this consolation. But the consolation is a dodge. The question we do not want to face is the smaller and harder question — were we who we were given to be. For this question there is no consolation of comparison. For this question each of us stands alone.

He closed his eyes. He did not speak again, that day. He died, according to tradition, a few weeks later, with his disciples around him, quiet.

What he left them with was not a doctrine. It was a question. The question has been asked, in various vocabularies, by every tradition worth anything. Hasidic Jewish, Śaiva Tantric, Sufi Islamic, Zen Buddhist, African ancestral, Indigenous Amerindian. Each tradition has its own version. Zusya's was specific. It was: were you yourself, the specific self you were given to be, in the hours and days you were given to be it.

He was weeping because he was not sure. He was also, probably, at peace — because the asking, done honestly, is already part of the answer. The question is not a test set by a cosmic examiner. The question is the orientation from which the life is finally read. It is the cellular question — are you being the cell you were meant to be — rendered in the language of a man who would have wept if you told him about cells, because he did not know about cells, and would have loved the idea that his question was already the one the body had been asking its own tissues all along.

The author of this book first encountered the Zusya tale through Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak (Jossey-Bass, 2000). Palmer's retelling is shorter than this one and framed around the question of vocation. His book is in print. It is recommended, alongside this one, to any reader who has been asked the Zusya question and has not yet found a way to answer it.

The tale itself belongs to the Hasidic oral tradition. It is reproduced here in the author's words, as it was told to her, as it continues to travel through whoever takes it forward. This is how folk tales have always moved.

CC BY-SA 4.0 (this retelling only — the underlying folktale is public domain).