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From: R. Kovacs
Subject: Token governance
Date: 19 Adar II 5782
R. Nachmani's faith in central authorities is touching.
In Munkács there was a list of who could be called to the Torah on which occasions. Not a written list. The shammas kept it in his head: Reb Shammas Eleazar, may his memory be blessed, who knew everyone's father and grandfather and which families had quarreled and which had reconciled and which quarrels were real and which were merely formal.
My father said Reb Eleazar could tell you the exact order for any Shabbos service, accounting for yahrzeit priorities, simcha priorities, who had been passed over last time, who was visiting from out of town, who was feuding with whom and therefore could not be called consecutively. He needed no paper. He held it all.
When Reb Eleazar died, the new shammas (a younger man, very organized, my uncle did not care for him) tried to write the list down. It took him three years. He interviewed families. He consulted records. He made a beautiful document with every name and every precedence.
By the time he finished, half of it was wrong: people had moved, died, married, quarreled anew, reconciled. The list was a photograph of a river. By the time you developed the picture, the river had flowed on.
The written list was consulted for another decade. It caused more problems than it solved. People would point to it and say: "See? It says here I come before him." But the list was wrong, and proving it was wrong required knowing what Reb Eleazar had known, and no one knew what Reb Eleazar had known.
A registry is a written list. The moment you write it down, it begins to be wrong.
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