I meanwhile took great comfort in my granddaughters, who came to Our Lady, and one of them even married in Offenbach, to a Piotrowski. Our grandchildren cheer us up only until a certain time, when we become more sensitive to the affairs of the world, and we begin to mix up even our grandchildren’s names.
No one wanted to listen to us, everyone was busy with themselves. Eva, Our Lady, with the help of her very dedicated secretaries Zaleski and young Czyn′ski, ran the court as if it were a guesthouse. People would roam around it, but a significant portion of them now lived in town. Concerts were played downstairs, which Yeruhim and I never attended, preferring our exercises in gematria and notarikon. Last year the Wo?owski brothers came here, and Yeruhim and I worked all summer on a letter to all the Jewish kahalim in the world. They wrote out that letter hundreds, maybe thousands of times in red ink, over and over again from scratch. It was a warning to all about the great catastrophe that awaited them should they not convert to the faith of Edom, for the Church will be the only escape from that holocaust. The letter was signed with their Jewish names by Franciszek Wo?owski (Solomon ben Elisha Shorr), Micha? Wo?owski (Nathan ben Elisha Shorr), and J?drzej Dembowski (Yeruhim ben Hananiah Lipman of Czarnokozin′ce). Yet I did not wish to sign this letter. I don’t believe in the disasters that might come. I believe in the ones we have been able to escape.
In the Bamidbar it is said that God told Moses to describe the route of his nation’s wandering, and it seems to me that God told me to do the same. And although I do not believe that I have succeeded, for I was too quick and impatient, or perhaps I simply was too lazy to comprehend it all, I have nonetheless tried to remind them who they are and whence our path has led. For is it not so that our stories are told to us by others? We can know ourselves to the extent that others tell us who we are and what it is we’re struggling to do. What would I remember of my childhood, were it not for my mother? How would I have known myself had I not seen myself reflected in Jacob’s eyes? And so I sat with them and reminded them of what we lived through together, although prophesying future catastrophes had set a fog upon their minds. “Go on, Nahman. Go back to your work. We’ve had enough of you,” they said, and chased me away. But I was stubborn. I reminded them of the streets of Smyrna and Salonika, the meandering of the Danube and the hard Polish winters when in the frost we made our way to Jacob on jingling sleighs. Jacob’s naked body when we witnessed his union with the Spirit. Hayah’s face. The books of Old Shorr. The stern faces of the judges. “Do you even remember those dark times in Cz?stochowa?” I asked them.
They listened to me attentively, as a person forgets with time his steps, and it seems to him that he has been walking on his own, as he pleases, instead of being led by God.
Is it possible to attain that knowledge, the holy Daat, that Jacob promised us?
I told them: There are two varieties of it being impossible to know. The first variety is when someone does not even try to ask or investigate, considering that in any case he cannot learn anything in full. And the second is when a person does investigate and seek, and he comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to know completely. Here I referred to an example, that my brothers might better understand the weight of this difference. So I said that it is as if two men wanted to meet a king. One thinks: Since I cannot meet the king, why would I go into his palace at all and wander its chambers? But the second man thinks differently. He looks around the royal chambers, enjoys the royal treasury, delights in the luxurious carpets, and even when he learns he will not be able to meet the king, at least he is familiar with his rooms.
They listened to me without really knowing what point I was trying to make.
So I wanted to remind them of the very beginning and to say one thing—that in reality we had always been occupied with light. We had admired the light in all that exists, we followed its lead down the narrow highways of Podolia, through the Dniester’s fords, crossing the Danube and the best-guarded borders. The light summoned us when we dove after it into the greatest darkness in Cz?stochowa, and the light guided us from place to place, from home to home.
And I reminded them that in the old language, do not the words light (or) and infinity (Ein Sof) have the same numerical values? Or is after all written: alef-vav-resh:
which is: 1+6+200=207. While Ein Sof—alef-yod-nun-samekh-vav-pe:
which is: 1+10+50+60+6+80=207.
But the word raz, or mystery, is also 207.
Just look, I told them: all the books we have studied have been about light: the Sefer ha-Bahir is the Book of Brightness, Sha’are Ora are the Gates of Light, Meor Einayim the Light of the Eyes, the Orot ha-Kodesh is the Light of Holiness, and finally, the Sefer haZohar is the Book of Splendor. We have done nothing other than waking up at midnight, at the time of the greatest darkness, in our low, dark cubbyholes, in the cold, to study light.
It is the light that has revealed to us that the huge body of matter and its laws is not mechut, or real, and also all its shapes and manifestations, its infinite forms, its laws and habits. The truth of the world is not matter, but the vibration of the sparks of light, that constant flickering that is located in every last thing.
Remember what we were going after, I said unto them. Religions, laws, books, and old customs have all been worn out. He who reads those old books and observes those laws and customs, it is as if he’s always facing backward, and yet he must move forward. That is why he will stumble and ultimately fall. Since everything that has been has come from the side of death. A wise man, meanwhile, will look ahead, through death, as though this were merely a muslin curtain, and he will stand on the side of life.
And here I sign—I, Nahman Samuel ben Levi of Busk, or Piotr Jakubowski.
VII.
The Book of
NAMES
31.
Jakubowski and the books of death