BONTSCHE SHVEIG
CREATED BY:
Yitzok L. Peretz
PORTRAYED BY:
Jack Gilford
AS SEEN IN:
'Play Of The Week'
("The World Of Sholom Aleichem")
TV LOCATION:
Earth Prime-Time & the After-Life
From The Ohr Torah Stone website:
Isaac L. Peretz, one of the most profound and beloved of Yiddish - Hebrew
writers of the last century, authored a magnificent tale called Bontche Schweig,
or Bontche the Silent, which illuminates the significance of these words.
The story recounts a heavenly tribunal which judges Bonche, a newly arrived
soul who had lived a poverty-stricken pogrom-tortured life with never having
uttered a word against G-d or a word against any human being. The
defense-attorney angel catalogued his life of super-human piety with great
pathos, and even the prosecuting-attorney angel could not express a negative
note against this suffering, saintly soul. The Almighty Himself then summons
Bontche, expressing His inability (as it were) to properly reward such an
exemplary life and offering to grant whatever reward Bontche will choose.
"Really?, asks Bontche, 'takeh?' 'Really, takeh!,' responds G-d. 'Then every
morning please give me a fresh, hot roll and butter,' requests Bontche.
The last lines of the tale are the most poignant and instructive. "The
defense-attorney angel hid his face in shame. The prosecuting-attorney angel
smiled a bitterly mordant smile of triumph. And the Almighty G-d wept..."
Obviously Peretz's message is that the greatest tragedy of suffering, the worst
fall-out of an unjust world, is that it robs its victims of the ability to
dream, it makes it impossible for them to have the breadth of vision to even
contemplate the possibility of redemption. Poor Bontche. The evil world had so
constricted his imagination that the best he could conjure up for himself and
for humanity was a hot roll and butter each morning!
BCnU!
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