The Books of Jacob Read online

  But the mind of the sage is unfathomable. Throughout our journey I was completely dependent upon him; he always knew when to set out and what road to take so that we would be transported in comfort and by good people, fed by some pilgrims or others. His ideas, at first glance, would appear preposterous, but when we gave in to them, it always turned out well for us.

  We studied together by night, and by day I would work. Often enough, dawn would catch me at my books, and my eyes started to suppurate from the constant effort. The things Mordechai gave me to read were so incredible that my practical young Podolian mind bucked like an old workhorse someone suddenly decided to turn into a courser.

  “My son, why do you reject that which you have not yet tried?” Mordechai asked, just when I had decided to go back to Busk to take care of my family.

  So I said to myself then, very reasonably: He is right. Here I can only gain, not lose. So I will wait patiently until I find something good for myself in all this.

  I gave in to him, renting out a little room behind a wooden partition, living modestly, spending my mornings working in trade and dedicating my evenings and my nights to my studies.

  He taught me the permutations and combinations of letters, and also the mysticism of numbers and other “roads of the Sefer Yetzirah.” I traveled down each of these roads for two weeks, until the form of each had been etched into my heart. In this way, he guided me through four whole months, at the end of which, suddenly, he told me to “erase” it all.

  That evening, he packed my pipe with abundant herbs and gave me a very old prayer, the author of which cannot now be known, and which soon became the expression of my own voice. It went like this:

  My soul

  will not let itself be locked in any prison,

  iron cage or cage made out of air.

  My soul wants to be like a ship in the sky,

  and the body’s boundaries cannot hold it back.

  And no walls will ever imprison it:

  not those that have been built by human hands,

  nor the walls of politeness,

  nor the walls of civility

  or good manners.

  It will not be entrapped by pompous speeches,

  by kingdoms’ borders,

  good breeding—anything.

  My soul flies over all of that

  with the greatest ease,

  it is above what is contained in words,

  and beyond what cannot even be contained in words.

  It is beyond pleasure and beyond fear.

  It exceeds what is lovely and lofty

  just as it does what is terrible and vile.

  Help me, merciful God, and keep life from wounding me.

  Give me the ability to speak, give me language and words,

  so that I might speak the truth

  of You.

  My return to Podolia, and a strange vision

  Some time later I returned to Podolia, where, after my father’s sudden death, I took up the position of rabbi of Busk. Leah was willing to receive me, and I felt a great deal of tenderness toward her for this. She knew how to orchestrate a plentiful and peaceful life. My little son grew and matured. Busy with my work and tending to my family, I put some distance between myself and the chaos of my journey, along with any notion of Kabbalah. The community was sizable and divided into “ours” and “those,” and as a young and inexperienced rabbi, I had many activities and duties.

  One winter night, however, I could not fall asleep and suddenly felt very strange. I had the overwhelming impression that everything around me was false, that it was artificial, as if the world had been painted by some skilled artist on canvases hung up all around. Or, to put it another way: as if everything around me had been made up, and by some miracle had taken the shape of reality.

  Several times already, when I was working with Reb Mordke, I had had this impression—tormenting, fear-inspiring—but this time it was so acute that I began to be as afraid as I had been when I was a child. Suddenly I felt imprisoned, like someone cast into a dungeon where the air was just on the verge of running out.

  I got up trembling, added fuel to the stove, and went to the table, where I laid out the books given to me by Reb Mordke. Harking back to what he had been teaching me, I undertook to link the letters I beheld and to meditate upon them in the philosophical method of my master. I thought this might occupy my mind, and that in this way, the fear would pass. And I spent the time thus until morning, when I set about performing my usual tasks. The next night I did the same thing, until three in the morning. Leah, worried about my strange behavior, got up with me, carefully freeing herself from the little hands of our slumbering son and coming to look over my shoulder to see what I was doing. I could see the disapproval in her face, but it did not dissuade me. As a very pious woman, she did not recognize any Kabbalist teachings, and was suspicious, too, about our righteous Sabbatian rituals.

  By the third weird night, I was so tired that at around midnight I dozed off a little, pen and paper in my lap. When I came to, I saw that the candle was spluttering out, so I got up to take another. But I saw that the light did not dim even when the candle was extinguished! In astonishment, I realized that it was me shining, that the glow that filled the room was coming from within me. I said out loud to myself: “Is this possible?” But of course I heard no response. I slapped my own face, pinched my cheek, but it altered nothing. So I sat like that until morning, my hands down, my head empty—and I was shining! Until at dawn the light waned, then finally disappeared.

  That night I saw the world in a completely different way than I had ever seen it before, illuminated by a pale gray sun, small, miserable, and crippled. Darkness was emerging out of every nook and cranny. Wars and plagues were raging the whole world over, rivers overflowing their banks as the earth quaked. Each and every human seemed like such a brittle being, like the merest eyelash or speck of pollen. I understood then that human life is made of suffering, that suffering is the true substance of the world. Every single thing was screaming in pain. And then I saw further into the future, when the world had changed, the forests had vanished and in their places cities grew, and all sorts of other things were happening I could not understand, could not even conceive of, for they exceeded my capacity. This overwhelmed me to such a degree that I fell with a great clatter to the ground, and—at least so it seemed to me—I glimpsed then the essence of salvation. Here my wife came in and cried for help.

  On an expedition with Mordechai to Smyrna, due to a dream of goat droppings

  It was as if my master Mordechai already knew about everything. A few days later he appeared out of the blue in Busk because he had had a strange dream. He had dreamed that in front of the synagogue in Lwów he saw the Jacob of the Bible handing out goat droppings to passersby. Most of those who received these gifts were offended or burst into raucous laughter, but those who accepted the gift and swallowed it respectfully began to shine from within like lanterns. Thus in this vision, Mordechai, too, held out his hand to receive the gift.

  When, delighted by his arrival, I told him about my own incredible experience with the light, he listened to me attentively, and in his eyes I detected pride and tenderness. “You are just at the beginning of the road now. If you were to travel farther down it, you would see the world around us now is already ending, and that is why you see it as if it were untrue, and you detect not the light from the outside, which is false and illusory, but rather the light that is internal, that comes from God’s own scattered sparks, which the Messiah is to regather.”

  Mordechai decided I had been chosen for his mission.

  “The Messiah is coming now,” he said to me, leaning in to my ear until his lips touched my auricle. “He is in Smyrna.”

  At the time, I didn’t understand what he meant, but I knew that Sabbatai (of blessed memory) was born in Smyrna, so it was of him that I thought, even though he had long since passed. Mordechai suggested we go south together, uniting business an
d our search for the truth.

  In Lwów, Grzegorz Nikorowicz, an Armenian, operated a Turkish trade—he mostly imported belts from Turkey, but he also dealt in carpets and rugs, Turkish balsam and weaponry. He had settled in Stamboul, to keep an eye on his business from there, and every so often his caravans with their valuable goods would set out for the north, then head back to the south. Anybody could join in with them, not only Christians—anyone who demonstrated goodwill and had enough money to chip in to pay the caravan’s leader and the armed guards. You could carry goods from Poland—wax, tallow, honey, sometimes amber, although that did not sell as well as it once did—and you had to have in addition enough to sustain you on the road, and once you got there, to invest in goods to take back with you, in order to earn something off the whole expedition.

  I borrowed a modest sum, to which Mordechai added some of his savings. We had, therefore, a little capital, and we set out gladly on our journey. That was the spring of 1749.

  Mordechai ben Elias Margalit, Reb Mordke, was already a mature man by then. Infinitely patient, he was never in a hurry, and I had never met anyone with as much kindness and understanding toward the world. I often served as a pair of eyes for him for reading, since he could no longer see the smaller letters. He listened to everything attentively, and his memory was so good that he could repeat it all without error. He was still a very able man and quite strong, and I grumbled from fatigue on the road far more frequently than he. Our caravan was joined by all and sundry, anybody at all who wanted to make it to Turkey and back in one piece—Armenians and Poles, Wallachians and Turks going home from Poland, often even Jews from Germany. All of them would eventually scatter along the way, to be replaced by others.

  The trail led from Lwów to Czernowitz, then to Jassy along the Prut and finally to Bucharest, where we made a longer stop. We determined to break off from the caravan, and from there we unhurriedly went where God would lead us.

  During our stops, Mordechai would add to the tobacco we smoked in our pipes a tiny lump of resin, and this made our thoughts rise high and reach far, made everything appear filled with some hidden sense, with deep meanings. I would become motionless, my hand slightly raised, and remain like that for hours in ecstasy. Even the most minimal movement of my head revealed great mysteries. Every blade of grass belonged to this deep system of meanings, an indispensable aspect of the vastness of this world, built intelligently and perfectly, the tiniest thing connected with the greatest.

  By day we went around the little streets of the towns we passed through, going up and down steps, viewing the goods on display. We looked closely at young girls and boys—not for our own pleasure, but rather because we also worked as matchmakers for such youths. In Nikopol, for example, we would say that in Ruse there was a young man, kind and well-educated, by the name of—let’s say—Shlomo, whose parents were seeking for him a nice wife with a dowry. In Craiova we would say that in Bucharest there was a nice girl, a good girl, without much of a dowry, but so pretty you had to squint to even look at her, and that girl was Sara, daughter of the cattle merchant Abraham. We carried such information as ants transport their bits of leaves and sticks until an anthill arises from the earth. If it came to a wedding, we would be invited, and for our matchmaking we would earn a grosz or two as well as being able to eat and drink our fill. We would always immerse ourselves in the mikvah seventy-two times, as many as there are letters in God’s name. Afterward we could afford the juice of pomegranates squeezed before our very eyes, lamb shashliks and good wine. We had bigger business planned that would ensure the comfort of our families and allow us to dedicate ourselves to studying our books.

  We slept with the horses in stables, on the ground, in the straw, but once the warm and fragrant air of the south had enveloped us, we slept on riverbanks, beneath the trees, in the pleasant company of pack animals, holding on tightly to the sides of our coats, for we kept what was most valuable to us stitched inside. The odor of dirty water, silt, and rotting fish would somehow become enjoyable after a while as Mordechai discoursed upon it in ever greater depth, hoping to convince me that that mixture was the true smell of the world. In the evenings, we would talk in hushed voices, so in tune with one another that no sooner had either of us started than the other already grasped his point. While he would tell me about Sabbatai and the complex pathways along which salvation makes its way to us, I would tell him about the Besht, trusting that it would be possible to unite the wisdom of those two good men, though this did not turn out to be the case. Again and again we argued the merits of each. I said that the Besht felt that Sabbatai had the spark of holiness, but that Samael had quickly captured it, and in so doing, had taken Sabbatai as well. Reb Mordke would wave his hands then, as if he wanted to drive those terrible words away. I also told him what I had heard at the Besht’s from someone’s lips—that apparently Sabbatai had gone once to the Besht and asked if he would repair him, for he felt himself to be a deeply unworthy sinner. Such a rectification, or tikkun, consisted in the holy man joining with the sinner’s soul, step by step, passing through all three of the soul’s different forms. First the nefesh of the holy one—his animal spirit—connected with the sinner’s nefesh, and then, when it became possible, ruah—the feelings and will of the holy one—joined with the sinner’s ruah, so that in the end, the holy one’s neshama—that divine aspect we all carry within ourselves—could join with the sinner’s neshama. And when this happened, the Besht could feel how much sin and darkness was in this man called Sabbatai, and he pushed him of necessity away from himself, so that Sabbatai fell down all the way to the bottom of She’ol.

  Reb Mordke didn’t like that story. “This Besht of yours understood nothing. The key is in Isaiah,” he said, and I nodded, for I, too, knew that famous verse from the Book of Isaiah, 53:9, that the Messiah’s grave was placed amongst the wicked. That the Messiah must come from the lowest spheres, that he must be sinful and mortal. And one more definition soon came to Reb Mordke’s mind, and that was the sixtieth tikkun in the Tikkunei haZohar: “The Messiah will be internally good, but he will be clothed in evil.” He explained that these words applied to Sabbatai Tzvi, who, under pressure from the sultan, gave up the Jewish faith and converted to Islam. And so, smoking, observing the people we met and having conversations, we made it all the way to Smyrna, and there, during the hot Smyrna nights, I took in that strange knowledge, kept in secret, that prayer and meditation alone cannot save the world, much though it may have been attempted. The Messiah’s task is terrible—the Messiah is a sheep for the slaughter. He must enter into the very heart of the kingdom of shells, into darkness, and he must carry out the liberation of the holy sparks from that darkness. The Messiah must descend into the abyss of every type of evil and destroy it from within. And he must go in as if he belonged, a sinner among others who will not arouse the suspicions of the forces of evil around him, so as to become the powder that will blow up the fortress from inside.

  I was young then, and although I had an awareness of suffering and pain from what I had already glimpsed of life, I still trusted the world to be good and humane. I enjoyed the cool, fresh early mornings and all the things I had to do. I enjoyed the bright colors of the bazaars where we sold our silly wares. I relished the beauty of women, their cavernous black eyes and their lids lined in black, and the delicacy of boys, their nimble, slender bodies—yes, that could make my head spin. I enjoyed dates laid out to dry, their sweetness, and the veins in turquoise, which I found touching, and all the colors of the rainbow in the spices at the bazaar.

  “Do not be fooled by all that gilding. Scratch it with your fingernail, and you will see what’s underneath,” said Reb Mordke, and he dragged me into filthy courtyards, where he began to show me a completely different world. Ulcerous, ill women begging outside the bazaar, male prostitutes dressed as women, ruined by hashish and sick and poor, crumbling mud huts on the city’s edges, packs of mangy dogs scrounging through the trash, in between the bodies of their com
panions, starved to death. It was a world of unthinkable cruelty and evil, in which everything raced toward its own destruction, toward death and decay.

  “The world doesn’t come from a kind or caring God,” Reb Mordke told me, when he decided I had seen enough. “God created all of this by accident, and then he was gone. That is the great mystery. The Messiah will come quietly when the world is submerged in the greatest darkness and the greatest misery, in evil and in suffering. He will be treated like a criminal. So the prophets have foretold.”

  That evening, at the edge of the enormous trash heap just outside the town, Reb Mordke took out of his bag a tome covered in thick broadcloth to conceal its true identity, to make it inconspicuous so that no one would covet and steal it. I knew what book it was, but Mordechai had never offered to let me read it with him, and I hadn’t had the courage to ask, although I was dying of curiosity. I figured the time would come when he would offer it to me of his own accord. And that is what happened. I felt the weight of that moment, a chill ran through me, and my hair stood on end as I took the book and stepped inside the circle of light. Overwhelmed, I began to read out loud.

  It was the treatise VaAvo haYom el haAyin, or And I Came this Day unto the Fountain, written by Eibeschütz, my Reb Mordke’s master. And I felt then that I had become the next link in a long chain of the initiated that extends across the generations, that begins further back even than Sabbatai, than Abulafia, than Simon bar Yochai, than, than . . . and on, all the way to the dawn of time, and that this chain, though it sometimes gets lost in the mire, though it gets grown over with grass and covered up in the rubble strewn by wars, nonetheless persists and grows into the future.

  6.

  Of a strange wedding guest in white stockings and sandals