As the sun set, the Potzker began meditating on the meaning of the 24 hours that lay before him. As dusk began to solemnly usher in the 22nd day of the month of Shvat and the anniversary of the death of the Kotzker Rebbe, the gray aura of the yahrtzeit stood in sharp contrast to the joy experienced one week earlier, when the Potzker had celebrated the holiday of Tu Beshvat. He had made it a tradition to spend that day outdoors in arboreal awe, on a good day basking in the illumination of a cloudless blue sky, marvelling at the beauty of naked trees in the winter landscape. He was fascinated by the shadows that the winter light etched upon the bark that, beneath its surface, hid a fractal network of capillaries branching off in the direction of their infinite source. Whether the sun shone through on that day or not, the Potzker reminded himself that every day was a sunny day, it just depended on what one thought about clouds. The Kotzker’s yahrtzeit was the only day of the year when the Potzker accepted cloudy days as they were, appreciating the unique beauty created by the diminished light as nature’s tribute to the memory of the Rebbe.
The Potzker thought about the impact that the Kotzker had upon the world. He noted that it had been over 120 years since the passing of the man who did not make it to 120, but only had 4x18 years of life on the planet, the last 20 of those years spent in self-imposed isolation. Tradition teaches that the Kotzker strived to create a new Torah insight, a chidush, every day of his life in order to elevate his consciousness to a higher plane of being. This superhuman goal probably explains why he spent those last years alone, for even God himself could not go longer than six days in a row without requiring a respite from the creative process.
Whether the last twenty years of the Kotzker’s life years were spent engaged in the light of a spiritual high or entangled in the darkness of a depressive low is a matter open to debate. It would have been possible to close that debate if one had access to the Kotzker’s writings, but, as the legend states, whatever the Kotzker wrote in the day, he burned that very night.
It is said that the Kotzker said: "All that is thought should not be said, all that is said should not be written, all that is written should not be published, and all that is published should not be read."
You may stop reading now out of respect for the Kotzker.
Or you may wonder, as the Potzker did, about the meaning of it all, and whether the Kotzker had anything significant to say about that question.
To the Potzker, the nature of last years of the Kotzker’s life, whether they were spent in metaphorical light or darkness, seemed to offer within them a teaching that could help him solve the mystery of his own life. In honour of the Kotzker’s yahrtzeit ,that evening, the Potzker focussed his imagination on the nature of light and the dark, striving for a chidush of his own on the topic, but the light and the dark were not talking. The Potzker thought that maybe they were just whispering, so he decided to put on his coat and his boots and take a walk in the snow in order to be better able to listen. Walking through the nearby woods, the Potzker’s attention was drawn from the sparkling of the diamonds in the snow to the blinking of the stars that filled the night sky, some providing a light that shone at that moment in time, even though, like the Kotzker, the fire from within their bodies had been extinguished long ago. The Potzker wondered whether the answers to his question about the meaning of it all might come from above, and so he listened harder, but all he enjoyed at that moment was the peace of silence intermittently broken by the crunching of the snow beneath his feet.
Suddenly, the light of the moon spoke to the stardust within the snowflakes, and what the Potzker overheard was apparently said in the voice of the Kotzker himself.
"People are accustomed to look at the heavens and to wonder what happens there. It would be better if they would look within themselves, to see what happens there."
The Potzker, finding himself somewhat discombobulated by what he had just experienced, tried to gather his farmisht senses together. He called upon his sense of self to do the job, so his sense of self proceeded to join together his already engaged senses of sight and sound with his senses of time, space, joy, purpose, dignity, propriety and absurdity. Once assembled, this minyan of senses, in unison, spontaneously erupted in a recitation of the Kaddish in honour of the Kotzker Rebbe’s yahrtzeit. Within that moment, the Potzker found some of the peace asked for within that prayer, and with the help of the Kotzker’s message in the snow, the Potzker discovered a significant piece in his quest to solve of the puzzle of his life.
