Fruma Esther leaned back, breathing heavily. It was all true, all true, she thought. But no one in their community spoke that way, thought that way. It was foreign and strange, this way of thinking, of looking at things. The community had a way of doing things, laws that were outside what was written in the Torah. And overarching all was the respect for the old rabbis, the leaders, whose words were not to be questioned, whose great wealth of knowledge of the holy books granted them almost prophetic wisdom far beyond the ordinary Jew’s. You didn’t always understand their decisions, which often made no sense, which even seemed, in fact, contradictory to the laws of the Torah. For example, the way you held your tongue when a man beat his wife or cheated the government out of money with false benefit claims. You couldn’t understand it, just as a person could not understand why a just and compassionate God would create a lion who had to kill in order to eat instead of living on grass; or why an innocent child should be visited with illness that brought horrible pain and suffering. So, too, you could not always understand how the great rabbinic leaders, the Gedolai Hador, ruled.

“I’m just a simple Jew,” she answered. “And so I cannot answer you the way a learned scholar would. But I will tell you this, Leah: if you and Yaakov come out publicly against Grub and the Bobelger Rebbe, no one will be able to help you, not your friends, other rebbes, or the police even.”

“So what exactly are we supposed to do, Bubbee? Let them destroy us?”

“What, you mean already they started in on you?”

With a heavy heart, Yaakov handed her the note.

She put on her glasses and read it, her mouth falling open. Then they told her the rest—the car, the urine …