The Eternal Shoe

I inherited a pair of shoes I have never worn.

They have no leather. No soles. No laces. I cannot place them on my feet, and I have never seen them.

Yet I have been walking in them my entire life.

They belonged to two men.

We will get to them shortly.

First, we need to understand why the Jewish people have always taken shoes so seriously.

A Pair of Shoes

The Gemara makes a statement in Shabbat 129a that sounds almost unreasonable.

Rav Yehuda teaches in the name of Rav:

“A person should always sell the beams of his house and purchase shoes for his feet.”

Imagine the instruction. Take apart part of your house if necessary. But do not walk without shoes.

The statement appears within a larger discussion concerned with physical well-being, and the Gemara's language gives shoes extraordinary practical importance. Elsewhere, in Pesachim 112a, Rabbi Akiva gives his son Rabbi Yehoshua practical instructions for life and includes another remarkably direct statement:

“Do not withhold shoes from your feet.”

Shoes were not merely decoration. They protected a human being as he entered the world. They allowed him to walk with dignity.

The house shelters the person when he remains inside. The shoe shelters him when he moves.

And then the Gemara tells another story about shoes.

This one is considerably more frightening.

Seven Years

In Gittin 68b, during the extraordinary account of Shlomo HaMelech and Ashmedai, Ashmedai observes things human beings cannot see.

At one point, he hears a man speaking to a shoemaker.

The customer has a perfectly reasonable request:

Make me a pair of shoes that will last seven years.

Ashmedai laughs.

Later he is asked why. His answer is devastating.

The man, he explains, is not even assured of seven more days of life.

And he is ordering shoes for seven years?

There is something almost unbearable about that image.

The man is discussing durability. Stitching. Leather. Perhaps price. Perhaps he is telling the shoemaker to make them strong because he does not want to return anytime soon.

Seven years.

Meanwhile, somewhere beyond his field of vision, he is not even assured of seven days.

He is planning what will cover his feet years from now without knowing how much road remains beneath them.

But before we laugh at him with Ashmedai, perhaps we should look down.

We are wearing the same shoes.

The Little Budka

I come from a family that understood shoes differently.

Both of my grandfathers spent much of their lives working with them.

My maternal grandfather was named Cohen. I carry his name. My paternal grandfather was Zion Hai. He was my sandak.

Neither man built a corporation. Neither sat in a glass office overlooking a city.

They worked with their hands.

They were sapozhniks—shoe repairmen, cobblers—in the Soviet world of Central Asia.

Their workplace could be extraordinarily modest: a little budka, a neighborhood booth barely large enough for a man, a stool, a workbench, his tools, and shelves of wounded shoes waiting for another chance.

A customer would arrive with a heel worn down, a sole separating, leather torn, a strap broken. My grandfathers worked with hammers, awls, knives, needles, thread, glue, nails, pieces of leather and rubber. They cut. They stitched. They hammered. They patched. They polished.

And then somebody walked again.

That was the business.

A small shoe entered broken. A small shoe left repaired.

And from those repairs came bread.

Nine Children

Between them, my grandfathers raised nine children—five in one family, four in the other.

Think about that.

A heel repaired. Food. A sole replaced. Clothing. A torn shoe stitched back together. Another day's needs.

Their hands supported Jewish families.

There was no venture capital. No retirement model. No LinkedIn profile explaining their professional accomplishments.

There was work. There was responsibility. There was family.

And somehow, beneath the enormous pressure of Soviet life, there was continuity.

Today their profession has largely disappeared from the world I inhabit. When shoes become badly worn, many of us simply replace them. Manufacturing moved across continents. Machines became faster. Goods became cheaper. Delivery can bring another pair to the door tomorrow morning.

The budka disappeared. The hammer became quiet. The old shoes were eventually thrown away.

And yet something strange happened.

The shoemaker remained.

What They Were Really Repairing

It took me years to understand this.

My grandfathers thought they were repairing shoes.

They were doing something much larger.

Every sole they replaced helped sustain a home. Every heel they repaired helped feed a child. Every hour inside that little booth was being converted into another day of Jewish continuity.

They were not wealthy men trying to leave an estate. They were fathers trying to raise families.

And those families raised families.

And here I am.

Their grandson. A Jew. A husband. A father. Still learning Torah. Still performing mitzvot. Still trying to build a Jewish home.

I carry one grandfather's name. The other held me at my brit milah.

Neither could possibly have seen where all those repaired shoes were going.

But I can.

They were walking toward me.

The Seven-Year Shoe

And now the strange story in Gittin feels different.

A man orders shoes for seven years. He is not assured of seven days.

The Gemara is not telling us not to plan. Judaism demands responsibility. We build homes, raise children, earn livelihoods, save money, and plant for futures we hope to see.

The tragedy is not that the man wanted durable shoes.

The tragedy is the illusion hidden inside the request:

that because we can plan seven years, we possess seven years.

We do not.

None of us knows how much road remains.

That realization is not meant to paralyze life. It is meant to ignite it.

If I knew I had seven days, what would suddenly become ridiculous? Which argument would I stop having? Whom would I call? Whom would I forgive? What Torah would I finally learn? Which mitzvah would I stop postponing? What would I tell my children? What would I say to my wife? What would I do today that I keep assigning to some imaginary version of myself who will apparently have unlimited time tomorrow?

Ashmedai laughed because he could see the man's contradiction.

We cannot.

Perhaps that is the mercy.

We are not told how many days remain. We are simply told what to do with the one in front of us.

The Eternal Shoe

My grandfathers repaired shoes that eventually wore out.

Every single pair.

The finest stitching eventually loosened. The strongest leather eventually cracked. The thickest sole eventually became thin.

Nothing they repaired was permanent.

Or so it seemed.

Because there was another product leaving that budka every evening.

A Jewish home sustained through honest labor. Children fed. Children raised. A family preserved. A generation pushed forward.

And that product turned out to be far more durable than leather.

The world changed. The Soviet Union disappeared. The neighborhoods changed. The budkas disappeared. The profession faded. My grandfathers left this world. Even the shoes are gone.

But I am still here.

So are their children. So are their grandchildren. So are the Torah and mitzvot performed by the generations they struggled to sustain.

Perhaps this is the great irony of the shoemaker.

He spends his life repairing something designed to touch the ground. Yet through the way he lives, he can build something that reaches Heaven.

What Will Last?

I think again about that anonymous man standing before the shoemaker in the Gemara.

“Make me shoes for seven years.”

He was not assured of seven days.

What an extraordinary warning to those of us who continually confuse our calendars with guarantees.

We spend enormous portions of life manufacturing seven-year shoes.

Later. When things settle down. When business improves. When the children are older. When I have more time.

Then I will learn. Then I will change. Then I will apologize. Then I will give. Then I will become the person I know I should be.

But perhaps the question is not whether our shoes will survive another seven years.

Perhaps the question is whether what we do while wearing them will survive us.

My grandfathers answered that question without speeches.

They answered it with hammers. With thread. With glue on their hands. With hours inside a little budka. With children waiting at home.

Their shoes were temporary. Their workbench was temporary. Their profession was temporary. They were temporary.

Their mission was not.

I inherited a pair of shoes I have never worn.

Now I finally understand why they have lasted so long.

They were never made for my feet.

They were made for my soul.