But now this could never be. Now he would end up just like his father: a small-town butcher with more learning than he had use for.

This thought was intolerable.

It did not help that Issur’s father had always been dismissive and skeptical of the Rebbe’s holiness. Now that he had died, Moshe Dovid Frumkin had hardly grown more reverent, and a cluster of sharp little arguments broke out between the butcher and his son in the day following the Rebbe’s passing. It was as much for this reason as out of a desire to bid the Rebbe a proper farewell that Issur once again resolved to sneak out into Zubinsk.

That night, he went to bed fully dressed for the road, his open boots and full pack laid at his bedside. As soon as the sun began to peek out over the trees, he would go. He would make his way to the Rebbe’s shivah, where he would pay his appropriate respects, and then he would return home again and face his father’s wrath.

But that night, lying dressed in bed, he had a dream that changed his plans forever.

In his dream, he was sitting in the Tupik synagogue fervently reading from a prayer book with dry autumn leaves where the pages ought to have been.

Suddenly, a voice spoke to him. It was the Rebbe, seated beside him where a moment ago there had been no one.

Issur had never personally laid eyes on the Rebbe, and so he could not have known, but the image of the old man that appeared in his dream was precisely accurate—every wrinkle and hair in its place.

The Rebbe apologized to Issur that they had never managed to meet—he was sure that he would’ve been enriched to have Issur as a Hasid.

Issur protested furiously, of course: he would’ve been the one to benefit, not the Rebbe.

But here the Rebbe cut him off: it was very important—very important—for Issur to understand that while a Hasid might benefit from the teachings of his Rebbe, it was the Rebbe who received the greater enrichment. For a Hasid entrusts a fragment of his soul to the Rebbe for safekeeping and enlightenment, and it is these shards that give the Rebbe his power. Issur, said the Rebbe, had a worthy and beautiful soul, and the Rebbe he would entrust it to would be very lucky indeed.

This comment surprised Issur. He’d never before considered pledging himself to another Rebbe, but the Rebbe of Zubinsk insisted that he must: it was his duty and his destiny.

A parade of imagined sages began to swim through Issur’s mind, all curling sidelocks, dark black jackets, long gray beards. How was he to know which Rebbe he ought to follow?