Rabbi Zalmon Moscowitz had a dilemma. His entire life, he always dreamed of having a Chinese dinner. Now for most people this is not such a problem. If they want a Chinese meal, they pick up the telephone and say, “Please bring me some mushu chicken. Here’s my address. And oh, could you throw in some of those noodles that taste like peanut butter, the children enjoy them very much.”
But Rabbi Moscowitz lived in a small Lithuanian village in the eighteenth century where the closest thing he had tasted to Chinese food was the kiddush wine that would taste a little like soy sauce when the summer heat was strong and his wife Rachel had forgotten to put the bottle away after Shabbes.
Still, every evening after Ma’ariv Rabbi Moscowitz would come home to his dear Rachel and ask for a Chinese dinner. “My dear Rachel,” Rabbi Moscowitz would say, “Your kugel is manna from heaven. Your kreplach melts so fast on my tongue I hardly know it’s in my mouth before I swallow. But would it kill you if just one night you should cook something a little different for your husband, who prays three times everyday that the corns on your toes should disappear in the night?”
Now when the rabbi would speak these words, Rachel’s eyes would fill with tears. All her life she had slaved in the kitchen so that the rabbi should have the strength to carry out God’s commandments, and instead of a “thank you,” he asks for an appetizer of steamed dumplings. The man does not even know what Chinese food tastes like, Rachel thought.
But when she could take the rabbi’s pleading no more, Rachel went to visit her friend Chana whose great grandfather, she knew, had traveled to the Far East to trade his famous pickled herring for silk.
“My husband wants Chinese food,” Rachel said to Chana. “What do the Chinese eat?”
“I don’t know,” Chana replied, “but I know they eat it with sticks.”
Rachel decided that if she couldn’t give her husband a Chinese dinner, she could at least help him to eat like the Chinese. That night she set his place at the table as usual, but where one expects to find a fork and knife, Rachel put two small twigs she had found on the side of the road.
When the rabbi walked through the door that night, Rachel told him she had a special Chinese surprise for him and instructed him to sit down at the table.
The rabbi’s excitement was so great that to describe it would take 10 pages. He hurried to the table while Rachel went to the kitchen to retrieve a potato kugel she had baked. But when Rachel came out of the kitchen, she found the rabbi happily eating the two twigs she had left to the side of his plate.
“The Chinese must have strong teeth to eat like this,” the rabbi said, “but it’s not half bad. I can’t thank you enough, my sweet Rachel.”
From that day on, the rabbi ate two small twigs with every meal. When the students in the village heard about this, they laughed and called him “the rabbi of the trees.” But Rabbi Zalmon Moscowitz had no sense of humor, and he did not like being called “the rabbi of the trees.”
“Take it back,” the rabbi said to a group of students who were teasing him outside of the beit midrash one day.
“Why should we?” asked one student.
“Why?” the rabbi said in an angry voice. “I’ll show you why.” With that the rabbi removed his pants and undergarments and began to dance a furious one-man hora around the petrified students.
“What is the moral of this story?” you ask. Why have I gone to the trouble of telling you the strange story of Rabbi Zalmon Moscowitz? For your own good. For if you should ever build a time machine and travel back to eighteenth-century Lithuania, you should know that if you encounter a rabbi who eats twigs, you should never call him “the rabbi of the trees” unless you want to see his dingle flopping in the cold Lithuanian wind.
