Rabbi Thalmann was seated in his great carved chair. His
eyes were closed. The wheezy little organ in the choir loft
at the rear of the temple began the opening bars of
Schumann's Traumerei. And then, above the cracked voice of
the organ, rose the clear, poignant wail of a violin.
Theodore Brandeis had begun to play. You know the playing
of the average boy of fifteen--that nerve-destroying,
uninspired scraping. There was nothing of this in the
sounds that this boy called forth from the little wooden box
and the stick with its taut lines of catgut. Whatever it
was--the length of the thin, sensitive fingers, the turn of
the wrist, the articulation of the forearm, the something in
the brain, or all these combined--Theodore Brandeis
possessed that which makes for greatness. You realized
that as he crouched over his violin to get his cello tones.
As he played to-day the little congregation sat very still,
and each was thinking of his ambitions and his failures; of
the lover lost, of the duty left undone, of the hope
deferred; of the wrong that was never righted; of the lost
one whose memory spells remorse. It felt the salt taste on
its lips. It put up a furtive, shamed hand to dab at its
cheeks, and saw that the one who sat in the pew just ahead
was doing likewise. This is what happened when this boy of
fifteen wedded his bow to his violin. And he who makes us
feel all this has that indefinable, magic, glorious thing
known as Genius.

When it was over, there swept through the room that sigh
following tension relieved. Rabbi Thalmann passed a hand