He remembered the time so many years before when he’d sat across from the cluttered wooden desk as a young bridegroom barely out of his teens, entering kollel for the first time. How he had poured out his grandiose dreams of achievement, as if diligence alone could uncover the wellspring of every sacred mystery of life, allowing him to find the answers that had eluded so many great scholars before him for centuries, men who like pearl divers had held their breath, diving into the bottomless wisdom of God’s sacred words, hoping to come back to the surface without drowning, bearing the rare jewels that would illuminate mysteries of life for all mankind. The rav’s face, he remembered, had been warm, betraying no skepticism or amusement at these naive outpourings. How difficult it must have been for him to hide a smile as he listened! And how kind.

He remembered those days after the birth of his children, when the rav had been with him, rejoiced with him. And then there had been the time when death had come, and he’d sat on a low stool during shiva, his shirt ripped in mourning like the heart beneath it, his eyes wild with incomprehension and despair. The rav had sat beside him, saying almost nothing, and his presence had brought an infusion of strength and faith.

And then there was the time that the rav had forced him to come to him, and he had entered this office a broken man. How the rav had urged him to find new life, new love! And how he had resisted that advice! But now here he was once again, instead of opening a chapter, closing it. Of all the people he knew, only Rav Alter, this man of Torah, could possibly comfort him and give him hope for the future.

But it was a different rav he faced now, he realized, one in the midst of his own heartbreaking tragedy as his elderly wife lay in agony from the merciless disease that did not differentiate between saints and sinners, the very old and the very young. The cold lips of the Angel of Death were already brushing her forehead as the rav helplessly watched, his prayers unanswered.

He’d aged, shockingly, Yaakov saw, startled. Always impeccable, now ill-fitting black pants fell around his ankles in folds, and the fringes of his tzitzis hung outside his white shirt and dark jacket reaching sloppily almost to his knees. His long salt-and-pepper beard, normally meticulously groomed, was untrimmed and almost completely white. The velvet skullcap worn beneath his huge, respectable black hat sat askew on his suddenly fragile skull, exposing the vulnerable pink scalp beneath. His tall, distinguished frame seemed to have shrunk, the shoulders bent in suffering as they made an effort to straighten every now and then as if buckling beneath a familiar weight that had gradually—without his even being aware—grown too heavy to bear.