“Don’t be such a fool. If a person wants to storm a fortress, he won’t get in by talking. Words come and go. A person’s got to have an army. We, too, must act, and not just speak. Did our forefathers not chatter, not pore over written words enough? What did all that talking do for them? What came of it? It’s better to see with your eyes than write down a bunch of words. What do we want some sage for? If I catch you writing, I’ll have to knock some sense into you with my fist.”
But Nahman knows what he’s doing. His primary task is The Life of His Holiness Sabbatai Tzvi (of blessed memory). But this he’s drawing up for order’s sake, that’s all, just laying out the facts, both the well-known ones and the lesser-known ones; a few he embellishes a bit, but of course that’s not a sin—rather a service, as they’ll be easier to remember this way. Underneath, however, at the very bottom of the case, he also has another little bundle—sheets of paper hand-bound with thick twine. Scraps. These he writes in secret. From time to time he breaks off, burdened by the notion that whoever reads this work will still need to know the identity of the person who wrote it. There is always a hand behind the letters, always a face that emerges from the sentences on the page. After all, even reading the Torah, one immediately feels some other presence, a great presence whose true name cannot be contained in any—even gilded, even weighted—letter. And yet the Torah and the world entire are composed of God’s names. Every word is his name, every thing. The Torah is woven from God’s names like a fabric, like a great arigah, although as is written in the Book of Job: “No mortal knows its order.” No one knows which is the thread and which the warp, nor can anyone discern the pattern on the right or its relation to the pattern on the left.
The sage Kabbalist Rabbi Eleazar realized long ago that parts of the Torah had been given to us out of order. For if they had been in their proper order, everyone would have instantly become immortal, would have been able to revive the dead, work miracles. Which was why—to maintain the order of this world—the pieces had been put in disarray. Do not ask by whom. The time for that has not yet arrived. Only the Holy One will be able to put them in order.
Nahman knows that behind his Life of His Holiness Sabbatai Tzvi, in the bundle of those other pages sewn up with twine, he himself, Nahman Samuel ben Levi of Busk, can be seen. And he pictures his own image: small in stature, ordinary. Always on the road. He documents himself. He calls those notes “scraps,” for they are what remains after other, more important work. Crumbs—such is the stuff of life. His writing on the lid of the case set up on his lap, in the dust and discomfort of travel, is in essence tikkun, the repair of the world, mending the holes in its fabric so filled with overlapping patterns, squiggles, tangles, trails. This is how to view this strange pursuit of Nahman’s. Some people heal others, some build homes, others study books and rearrange the words in them to find the proper meaning. Nahman writes.
Scraps, or: A story born of travel’s exhaustion, by Nahman Samuel ben Levi, Rabbi of Busk. Where I come from
I know I am no prophet, and I know there is no Holy Spirit in me. I hold no sway over voices, nor can I see into the future. My origins are lowly, and there is nothing that elevates me from the dust. I am like so many others, and I belong to those whom the matzevot will crush first. And yet, I also see my own advantages: I am suited to business and to travel, I count quickly and have a gift for languages. I am a born messenger.
When I was a child, my speech was like the patter of rain on the wooden roofs of shoddy sukkoth, a dull drumming in which words became indistinguishable. Furthermore, some force deep down inside me was unable to complete a phrase or sentence started and instead had to repeat it several times, hurriedly, rendering it almost into gibberish. I was a stutterer. In despair, I realized my parents and siblings could not understand me. Then my father boxed my ears and hissed: “Speak slowly!” And so I had to try. I learned how to go outside myself, in a sense, and take myself by the throat, so as to restrain the rattle that would otherwise be found there. I finally managed to break down the words into syllables, to water them down like soup, like my mother would do with our barszcz on the second day, so that there might be enough for everyone. But I was also clever. Out of politeness, I would wait for others to finish speaking, even though I often knew after just a few words what it was they wished to say, and the way they would say it.
My father was the rabbi of Busk, just as I was to become later on, though I would not hold that position for long. He and my mother operated a tavern on the edge of the swamps, not much frequented, which meant we lived in poverty. Our family, both my mother’s and my father’s sides, had come to Podolia from the west, from Lublin, and before that from the Germanic lands, whence they were expelled, narrowly escaping with their lives. Of those times not many stories have survived, perhaps just the one that was the second thing to terrify me as a child, namely the story of the fire that consumed all of the books.
Of my childhood, however, I do not remember much. Mostly just my mother, whose side I never left, always clinging to her skirt, causing my father to be perennially angry with me, predicting I would become a mama’s boy, a feygele, an effeminate weakling. I remember the plague of mosquitoes when I was just a few years old, when all the apertures of our home were stuffed with rags and clay, and our bodies, hands, and faces turned red from all the bites, as if we’d all come down with smallpox. My wounds were salved with fresh sage, but the traveling merchants who made the rounds of the villages also sold a foul-smelling miracle cure they had extracted from the earth somewhere in the vicinity of Drohobycz . . .