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WHENCE A PROVERB

"Drunk all the year round, sober at Purim," is a Jewish proverb, and people ought to know whence it comes.

In the days of the famous scholar, Reb Chayyim Vital, there lived in Safed, in Palestine, a young man who (not of us be it spoken!) had not been married a year before he became a widower. God's ways are not to be understood. Such things will happen. But the young man was of the opinion that the world, in as far as he was concerned, had come to an end; that, as there is one sun in heaven, so his wife had been the one woman in the world. So he went and sold all the merchandise in his little shop and all the furniture of his room, and gave the proceeds to the head of the Safed Academy, the Rosh ha-Yeshiveh, on condition that he should be taken into the Yeshiveh and fed with the other scholars, and that he should have a room to himself, where he might sit and learn Torah.

The Rosh ha-Yeshiveh took the money for the Academy, and they partitioned off a little room for the young man with some boards, in a corner of the attic of the house-of-study. They carried in a sack with straw, and vessels for washing, and the young man sat himself down to the Talmud. Except on Sabbaths and holidays, when the householders invited him to dinner, he never set eyes on a living creature. Food sufficient for the day, and a clean shirt in honor of Sabbaths and