“Why?”
“Here Jacob made a mistake. Rather than recognize the divinity contained in the teraphim, Jacob would rather throw it out because it exists in idols, which is to say he does not allow holiness that appears in some other, foreign form to be joined with our faith. But Rachel understands that there is divinity even in an idol.”
“Women sometimes have a greater wisdom.”
“They are less attached to words.”
“Hayah Shorr, too?”
“She isn’t entirely a woman,” Nahman answers seriously.
Moliwda starts laughing.
“I wanted her, but Jacob wouldn’t let me,” he says.
Nahman doesn’t say anything. They are traveling along the Dniester, the river meandering along their right side, appearing and disappearing again. They can already see the enormous buildings of Chocim and Okopy, known as the Ramparts of the Holy Trinity, from afar.
“Jacob is a con man,” Moliwda says provocatively, but Nahman acts as though he hasn’t heard. He doesn’t say anything until upon the horizon emerge the powerful shapes of the fortress and the little town lying at its base.
“Did you know that the Baal Shem Tov was born right there, in Okopy?” says Nahman.
“Who is that?”
Nahman, stunned by his ignorance, simply says:
“A great sage.”
They leave the main road as a precaution, even though there is nowhere to hide on the barely undulating plain.
“I respect you very much, Moliwda. Most of all because I know you are a good man. And Jacob loves you. You have been a greater help to us than anyone. I just don’t know why you are doing it. What do you need all this for?”
“For profit.”
“That’s enough for me. But you think differently. You may not even understand us. You say: black and white, good and evil, woman and man. But it isn’t that simple. We no longer believe in the things of which the elder Kabbalists spoke, such that if all the sparks could be collected from the darkness, they would unite into a messianic tikkun and transform the world for the better. We’ve already crossed over. Because divinity and sinfulness are everlastingly interconnected. Sabbatai said that after the Torah of Bria, the Torah of the Created World will come the Torah of Atzilut. But Jacob and all of us know that the two Torahs are interwoven, and the only thing that can be done is to move beyond the both of them. The struggle is about leaving behind that point where we divide everything into evil and good, light and darkness, getting rid of all those foolish divisions and from there starting a new order all over again. We don’t know what’s past that point. It’s like putting all your eggs in one basket and just taking that step into the darkness. We are headed into the darkness.”
When Moliwda looks at Nahman, this small, freckled man who speaks so quickly that he starts to stutter, it surprises him that such a great intelligence would be used for the plumbing of such wholly useless depths. For Nahman knows by heart whole passages of books, perhaps whole books even, and, when necessary, he shuts his eyes and recites, quickly and passionately, so that Moliwda doesn’t even understand. He has spent weeks on paradoxes, on commentaries of commentaries, or on the presence of a single ambiguous word in a text. He is capable of praying for hours, hunched over. Yet he knows nothing of astronomy, nor of geography—only whatever he has happened to overhear on his travels. He knows nothing of political systems, governments, no philosophers other than his own Kabbalists. Descartes could just as soon be a kind of paper cartridge, as far as he’s concerned. And still, Nahman moves Moliwda. Does he know anyone more zealous and more naive than this rabbi of Busk, Nahman Shmulewicz, Nahman ben Samuel?
Of God
“You know, Moliwda, that I can’t tell you everything. I am bound to secrecy,” says Nahman suddenly, as his horse stops and lowers its head, as if this confession had filled it with sadness. “You think we are traveling over to Edom out of poverty and a lust for privileges . . .”
“I think that would be understandable,” says Moliwda, squeezing his horse’s sides to make him stop. “Human. There would be nothing wrong in it . . .”
“It may seem that way to you Christians, and we want you to think that. Because you don’t understand other reasons. You are shallow, surfaces suffice for you—you have your church dogma, your chapel, and you don’t keep looking beyond that.”
“What reasons?”
“That we are whole in God, and that this is tikkun. That it is we who are saving the world.”
Moliwda smiles, his horse has started moving around in a circle. The great space, undulating with little hills, with the Ramparts of the Holy Trinity on the horizon, moves along majestically before his eyes, which sting when they look up at the white, milky sky.
“What do you mean, saving?” he asks.
“Because it’s made poorly. All of our sages, from Nathan of Gaza to Cardoso, have said that the Mosaic God, the Creator of the World, is merely a Small God, a surrogate for the Other, Vast God, to whom our world is altogether foreign and irrelevant. The Creator is gone. That’s what exile is—we have to pray to a God who is not there in the Torah.”
This makes Moliwda feel ill at ease—Nahman’s tone has grown so mournful all of a sudden.
“What’s gotten into you today?” he says, and moves a little forward, but Nahman doesn’t follow, so Moliwda returns.
“That God is one God . . . ,” begins Nahman, but Moliwda urges his horse forward and takes off at a gallop, and all Nahman can hear is:
“Silence!”
Moliwda stops where the road forks—one goes to Kamieniec, the other to Lwów. He looks back. He sees the little figure that is Nahman sitting uncertainly on his horse, lost in thought, his horse moving at a walk, looking like it is treading carefully along the line of the horizon, like a funambulist.
“The miller grinds the flower”
The letter announcing the nomination of Archbishop ?ubieński’s chamberlain catches Moliwda in Kamieniec with Castellan Kossakowski, the sort-of cousin he has traveled from Ivanie to visit, though really he is there for the baths, clean clothes, books, and the latest gossip. He has not found Katarzyna, however—she is, as usual, on the road, and cousin Kossakowski will not really do for deeper conversation, all he does is natter on about dogs and hunting. After a few glasses of Tokay he suggests to Moliwda that they go to some place that supposedly has the best girls. Moliwda declines: after Ivanie, he has had his fill of girls. In the evening, they play cards with the garrison commander, the noisy and attention-seeking Prince Marcin Lubomirski, and that is when Moliwda is called—a messenger has arrived from Lwów with a letter.