‘THE RABBI FROM CRACOW 137 found their myths in stories told by other cultures; if we count the Greeks as “ours” (a highly problematic thing to do, as we saw in chapter 3), Herodotus’ story of Scyles is such a story. Then there are stories from other cultures, that is, stories told by peoples that we regard 2s other, which tell (a) how people found their life stories narrated in myths about other people within that culture (not other peoples, in their terms)—the story of Matangi and the buffalo sacrifice is such a story; and (b) how people found their life stories in myths about people that they themselves regarded as other—to the extent that Shiva is “other” to Vedic religion, the myth of Daksha is such a story. The Rabbi from Cracow Let us take as our text for this chapter an example of the second of our four possibilities, a text from one of our own cultures (the Jewish tradition) about the translation of a myth out of the text of another culture into the context of our own lives, a text about a transcutural transformation from myth to life. ‘The great Indologist Heinrich Zimmer retold a well-known Hasidic tale told by Martin Buber, a version of the story of the Jew among Others Itisa brief story, told of the Rabbi Eisik, son of Rabbi Jekel, who lived in the ghetto of Cracow, the capital of Poland. He had remained ‘unbroken in his faith, through years of afliction, and was a pious servant of the Lord his God. ‘One night, as this pious and faithful Rabbi Bisik slept, he had a ‘dream; the dream enjoined him to proceed, afar, to the Bohemian capital, Prague, where he should discover a hidden treasure, buried beneath the principal bridge leading to the castle of the Bohemian kings. The Rabbi was surprised, and put off his going, But the dream recurred twice again, After the third call, he bravely girded his loins and set forth on the quest. Arriving at the city of his destiny, Rabbi Eisik discovered sentries at the bridge, and these guarded it day and night; so that he did not venture to dig. He only returned every morning and loitered around until dusk, looking at the bridge, watching the sentries, studying ‘unostentatiously the masonry and the soil. At length, the captain of the guards, struck by the old man’s persistence, approached, and gently inguired whether he had lost something or perhaps was ‘waiting for someone to arrive. Rabbi Eisik recounted, simply and confidently, the dream that he had had, and the officer stood back and laughed. “Really, you poor fellow!” the captain said; “Have you worn your shoes out wandering all this way only because of a dream? What sensible person would trust a dream? Why look, if I had been one to go trusting dreams, I should this very minute be doing just the ‘opposite. I should have made such a pilgrimage as this silly one of138 OTHER PEOPLES LIVES yours, only in the opposite direction, but no doubt with the same result. Let me tell you my dream.” He was a sympathetic officer, for all of his fierce mustache, and the Rabbi felt his heart warm to him. “I dreamt of a woice,” said the Bohemian, Christian officer of the guard, “and it spoke to me of Cracow, commanding me to go thither and to search there for a great treasure in the house of a Jewish Rabbi whose name would be Eisik son of Jekel. The treasure was to have been discovered buried in the dirty comer behind the stove. Eisik son of Jekel!” the captain Jaughed again, with brilliant eyes. “Fancy going to Cracow and pulling down the walls of every house in the ghetto, where half of the men are called Eisik and the other half Jekel! Eisik son of Jekel, indeed!” ‘And he laughed, and he laughed again at the wondesfl joke. ‘The unostentatious Rabbi listened eagerly, and then, having. bowed deeply and thanked his stranger-friend, he hurried straightway back to his distant home, dug in the neglected comer of his house and discovered the treasure which put an end to all his misery. With 2 portion of the money, he erected a prayer house that bears his ‘name to this day. Both of the people in the story resist the idea that they must go abroad to find their treasure. The Captain laughs, as the man in Laurens van der Post's story laughed when he looked into the basket of his wife's myths. The Captain does not realize that he is actually addressing “Eisik son of Jekel” when he repeats that phrase, three times, in mockery. The Rabbi experiences “surprise” ‘when he has his dream—again, three times—but he does not experience (or, at least, reveal) any surprise at the Captain's words. Instead, he hastens to dig in the neglected dirt of his own home, to excavate his own tradition more deeply. As Zimmer comments on this myth, “Now the real treasure... is never far away; it lies buried in the innermost recess of our own home; that 4s to say, our own being . . . but there is the odd and persistent fact... that the one who reveals to us the meaning of our cryptic inner message must be a stranger, of another creed and a foreign race.” ‘The Captain, like the man in van der Post's story, finds the basket of foreign myths, his own dream about a foreign land, empty, the Rabbi looks into the basket of the Captain’s dream and finds it fall—full of his own treasures. Sometimes, indeed, the treasure may not be the secret that the myth reveals but the myth itself, the basket itself. Or, even beyond that, the treasure may be the person who gives us the basket, the Other that we come to recognize first through the myth, ‘The moral of the story of the Rabbi from Cracow according to Rabbi Simha Bunam of Pzhysha (the original author of the story, according to Buber) 4s somewhat different from the moral drawn by Zimmer: "There is something ‘you cannot find anywhere in the world, not even at the zaddik’s, and there is, nevertheless, a place where you can find it.” And yet another moral is pointed in the version “retold” by Woody Allen:‘THE RABBI FROM CRACOW 139 Rabbi Yekel of Zans . . . dreamed three nights running that if he ‘would only journey to Vorki he would find a great treasure there. Bidding his wife and children goodbye, he set out on a trip, saying he ‘would return in ten days. Two years later, he was found wandering the Urals and emotionally involved with a panda. Cold and starving, the Rey was taken back to his house, where he was revived with steaming soup and flanken. ... After telling the story, the Rabbi rose and went into his bedroom to sleep, and behold, under his pillow was the treasure he originally sought. Ecstatic, he got down and thanked God. Three days later, he was back wandering in the Urals again, this time in a rabbit suit, ... The above small masterpiece amply illustrates the absurdity of mysticism Let us pull back again from the inside of the text to the outer frame that we inhabit as readers of the text. Is it possible for us, too, to do what the heroes and heroines of these stories do, to move the myth from the past to the present and the future, to take up myths from within our own culture or from ‘within another culture? I believe that we can, that itis possible to construct (or to discover) a metamyth (or a meta-metamyth) by reflecting not merely upon the classical themes of our own tradition but upon the classical themes of other peoples’ traditions. ‘The first Westerner who made a serious effort to understand other peoples’ myths was Herodotus; and he was the first, too, as we have seen, to ‘note what could happen to people who adopted other peoples’ rituals. When discussing the ideas of reincarnation held by the Egyptians, he remarked, "Let ‘whoever finds them credible [pistof] use them.”> He will not tell us whether he himself found such stories “credible” or “useful,” but we may decide for ourselves how we wish {0 use other peoples’ myths. One can experience other ‘peoples’ lives and myths in several ways, as hunters (living them in our own lives without realizing it) or as sages (taking them into our own heads) or as hunting sages (realizing that we have entered into someone's else's myth). We may regard other peoples’ myths as bizarre stories about other peoples that have nothing to do with us, as stories about how other people ought to be, 25 stories about us, or as stories about how we ought to be. Taking other peoples’ myths seriously ultimately means recognizing that they are our myths, which means not only that they have a general meaning for us but that they narrate the stories of our own lives. If we make this decision, we must still decide what to do about it. Belief comes relatively easy, true acceptance a bit harder, commitment is much rarer, and the decision to act upon the myth, either in ritual or in life, is the most difficult of al ‘There is 2 treasure for us to find in other peoples’ myths. Though the otherness of other people's myths does provide serious obstacles to our understanding of them, it also enables us to do a kind of end-run around some of the obstacles that stand in the way of our understanding of our own ‘myths. Foreign myths tell us things that no one else knows, strange things that are truly strange, things that our own myths never dreamed of. But they