“I rose about midnight, took a large earthenware vessel, crept with it under my mother-in-law’s bed, and began to speak aloud in the following fashion:
“O Rissia, Rissia, you ungodly woman, why do you treat my beloved son so ill? If you do not mend your ways, your end is near, and you will be damned for all eternity.”
Then I crept out again, and began to pinch her cruelly and after a while I slipped silently back to bed.
The following morning she got up in consternation and told my wife that my mother appeared to her in a dream and had threatened and pinched her on my account. In confirmation she showed the blue marks of her arm.
When I came from the synagogue I did not find my mother-in-law at home, but my wife in tears. I asked her the reason, but he would tell me nothing.
My mother-in-law returned, with a dejected look and eyes red with weeping. She had gone, as I afterward learned, to the Jewish place of burial, thrown herself on my mother’s grave, and begged for forgiveness of her fault…. She also fasted the whole day, and towards me showed herself extremely amiable.” –Solomon Maimon, 1753-1800 from autobiography.
It seems like a fictional story out of Sholom Aleichem’s imagination but this really happened. We can always learn from the past. Moral? Treat each person as you want to be treated, with dignity, respect and forethought.
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