The Trinity is holy, like a wise wife, reconciling contradictions. Two is like a young roe doe, leaping over every contradiction. That’s what makes the Trinity holy, that it can tame evil. But because the Trinity must ceaselessly work on behalf of the equilibrium it disturbs, it is shaky, and it isn’t until you get to Four that you attain the highest holiness and perfection that restores divine proportions. It is not in vain that God’s name in Hebrew is composed of four letters, and that all the elements of the world were established so by Him (Yeruhim once told me that even animals can count to four!), and everything that is important in the world must be quadruple.
Once Moshe went to the kitchen, took some challah dough, brought it back, and started forming some sort of shape from it. We laughed at him, especially Jacob, because nothing went together less than Moshe and kitchen work.
“What is it?” he asked us, and revealed the result of his project.
We saw on the table an alef made of dough, and we answered him accordingly. Then Moshe took the ends of the holy letter made of dough and in a couple of simple movements reshaped it.
“What’s this?” he asked.
Now it was a cross.
For, Moshe argued, the holy letter is the germ of the cross, its original form. If it were a living plant, it would grow into a cross. The cross thus contains a great mystery. For God is one in three forms, and then to the threeness of God we add the Shekhinah.
Such knowledge was not for everyone. People who had gathered with us in Ivanie were of such varying backgrounds and had had such different experiences that we all agreed not to give them this holy knowledge, lest they understand it amiss. When they asked me about the Trinity, I would raise my hand to my forehead and touch the skin there, saying, “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
These were the kinds of conversations we had only with each other, in a small group and in hushed voices—for the walls of the Ivanie huts tended to not be sealed completely—when we finished writing letters, and our fingers were all covered in ink, and our eyes were so tired that all they could do was gaze into the dance of the candle flames. And then Moliwda would tell us tales of the beliefs of those Bogomils, as he called them, and in those beliefs we were surprised to determine that we had much in common with them, as if the path taken by both us and them were in the beginning one but later bifurcated to then converge again into one, just like our two roads in Ivanie.
Is life itself not a stranger to this world? And are we not strangers, and is our God not a stranger? Is this not why we appear so different, so distant, so scary, and incomprehensible to those who really do belong to this world? But this world is equally bizarre and incomprehensible to any stranger to it, and its rules are incomprehensible, as are its customs. For the stranger comes from the farthest distance, from the outside, and he must endure the fate of the foreigner, alone and defenseless, completely misunderstood. We are foreigners’ foreigners, Jews’ Jews. And we will always be homesick.
Since we do not know the roads of this world, we move through it defenseless, blind, knowing only that we are strangers to it.
Moliwda said that as soon as we strangers, living amongst those others, get used to and learn to take pleasure in the charms of this world, we will forget where we came from and what sort of origins were ours. Then our misery will end, but at the price of forgetting our true nature, and this is the most painful moment of our fate, the fate of the stranger. That is why we must remind ourselves of our foreignness and care for this memory as we would our most treasured possession. Recognize the world as the place of our exile, recognize its laws as foreign, as strange . . .
Dawn is beginning to break when Nahman finishes; a moment later, just outside the window, the rooster crows in such dramatic fashion that Nahman trembles like a night demon who fears the light. He slips into the warmth of the bed and lies there for a long time on his back, unable to go to sleep. Polish words crowd into his mind, sticking together into sentences, and not even knowing how, he silently composes his prayer for the soul, but in Polish. And since yesterday he saw Gypsies here, they, too, are jumbled up in his mind, and they jump into his sentences, the whole caravan of them:
Like a sailor visiting the sea’s abyss,
Or, in the vast uncharted wilderness,
Like a Gypsy caravan, my dear soul
Won’t travel toward just any goal.
No shackles of iron can close it in,
Nor the pompousness of their chagrin,
No custom, no tradition will strain it.
Not my own heart’s shelter can contain it.
It alters since it doesn’t alter,
My soul won’t let me down or falter.
My soul rises, good Lord, to Your great dome;
Give it a fit room inside Your home.
Not even Nahman himself knows when he falls asleep.
Of candles put out
In the night of July 14–15, after the date of the next disputation has been set, the women and men gather in the chamber, close the shutters tight, and light some candles. Slowly they undress until they’re naked, some folding and stacking their clothes neatly like they’re going to the mikvah. All kneel on the wooden floor, and Jacob holds a cross. He sets it on the bench, and then he kisses a small figure, the little teraphim that Hayah has brought in, and he lays it by the cross, and then he lights the tall candle and stands up. Now he will walk around in a circle, a naked man, his body hairy, his manhood dangling between his legs. The unsteady candlelight brings out of the darkness the others’ bodies, grayish orange, and their golden heads bowed against their chests.
Bodies are tangible; you can see Moshe’s hernia and Wittel’s stomach that sags from her many children. They glance furtively at one another while Jacob walks around in a circle, murmuring the prayer: “In the name of the Hallowed First . . . in the idea of life from the light of the world . . .” It is hard to focus on what he’s saying when some sort of other world has revealed itself in this indistinct, frail light. One of the women starts to giggle nervously, and then Jacob stops and angrily extinguishes the candle in one blow. From then on, things take place in darkness. For what they are to do next, that darkness is a balm.
A few days later, Jacob has them stand in a circle, which he calls “ringaround,” and stay like that for all of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday until afternoon. They stand day and night, the whole group together, in the circle. Isaac’s wife is released, because she feels sick after just a few hours and has to lie down. The rest remain. They are not allowed to talk. It is hot, and it feels to them like they can hear the drops of sweat sliding down their faces.
A man who does not have a piece of land is not a man