The lamed vav is how a tradition with no canonised saints keeps a place for hidden holiness. The Talmud says the world is never without thirty-six righteous people who receive the divine presence daily; later folklore made them anonymous, unaware of their own status, and unremarkable — a water carrier, a cobbler, someone nobody would look at twice. If one is identified, the story goes, he disappears. Yiddish literature turned it into a genre and I. L. Peretz wrote its best-known versions. Nothing about the belief is petitionary: nobody prays to a lamed-vavnik, because nobody knows who they are, which is precisely how the idea survives inside a religion that forbids intercession. The working effect is a levelling one. A tradition that spends most of its energy on learning keeps a story insisting that the person holding the world together is probably illiterate.