The more my father would read and discuss at the beth midrash, the more he, too, would incline toward such views. Within a year of coming to this place, having read all the texts pertaining to the teachings of Sabbatai Tzvi, he became fully convinced by them, his innate sensitivity and feeling for religion conducive to such a shift.
“Because how can it be?” he would say. “Why, if God so cherishes us, is there so much suffering in the world? You have only to go so far as the market square in Busk, and your legs will buckle under the weight of all that pain. If He cherishes us so, then why are we not healthy, why are we not preserved from hunger, and not only us—why not others, as well, so that we don’t have to gaze upon illness and death?” He would hunch over as if wanting to demonstrate the weight of this hardship. And then he would fall back into his usual diatribe against rabbis and their rules, and he would start to lose his temper and gesticulate.
As a child, I would often see him on the little market square, in front of Shila’s shop, standing around with others, boisterously gabbing. His small, plain figure appeared larger as he talked, for he spoke with fervor and conviction.
“From a single rule in the Torah, the Mishnah came up with dozens, and the Gemara many dozens more; meanwhile, in the later commentaries, there are as many rules as there are grains of sand. So tell me: How is it we’re supposed to live?” he would say, so dramatically that passersby would pause.
Shila, who wasn’t too concerned about business, being more interested in the company of gregarious men, would nod his head sadly, offering them his pipe: “Pretty soon nothing will be kosher any longer.”
“It’s hard to follow the requirements when you’re starving,” the others agreed, and sighed. Sighing, too, was a part of conversing. Most of them were simple merchants, but sometimes teachers from the yeshiva would come and add their insights to this daily market square lament. And then there were complaints about the hierarchies of the gentry and the hostility of the peasants, which could truly poison life, not to mention the price of flour, the weather, a bridge destroyed by a flood, fruit rotting on the trees from excess moisture.
And so, from childhood on, I, too, absorbed this eternal grudge against creation. Something is not right; there is some untruth afoot. Something must have been left out from what we learned in our yeshivas. Certain facts have been concealed from us, no doubt, and this is why we cannot assemble the world as we know it into a single whole. There has to be a secret somewhere to explain it all.
Since the time of my father’s youth, everyone in Busk spoke in this way, and the name Sabbatai Tzvi came up often—and not in a whisper, either. It sounded to my child’s ears like the gallop of horses bearing riders who were racing to our defense. These days, it would be wiser not to pronounce that name too loud.
My youth
From the beginning, I wished to study the Scriptures, like many boys my age, but as an only child, I was also much attached to my mother and father. It was only when I turned sixteen that I realized I wanted to be in the service of some good cause and that I was also the kind of person who would never be satisfied with what was, always wanting what was not yet.
Which is why when I first started to hear talk of the great master the Baal Shem Tov, and of the fact that he was accepting students, I decided to join one of those little cohorts, and it was in this way that I left behind my native Busk. To the despair of my mother, I set out on my own for the east, to Mi?dzybóz., a journey of some two hundred miles. On the first day I encountered a boy just a little bit older than myself who was setting out with the same purpose from Glinno and had already been on the road for three days. Leybko, as he was called, had just been married, though he could scarcely even grow a mustache, and he was so terrified of his own marriage that he convinced his wife and parents-in-law that before he began to earn a living, he needed first to commune with true holiness and have his fill of it, so that it might keep him through the years to come. Leybko came from a respected family of Glinno rabbis, and the fact that he wound up falling in with the Hassidim was a great misfortune as far as his family was concerned. Twice his father had come after him and begged him to return home.
Soon he and I were inseparable. We slept under a single tattered blanket and shared every bite of bread. I liked talking with him, he was a very sensitive person and thought differently from everyone else. We continued our conversations into the night under that ragged blanket, dissecting all the greatest mysteries.
And it was he, as a man already married, who introduced me to that other mystery that exists, between a woman and a man, which seemed to me then just as fascinating as all the questions of the tzimtzum.
The house was big and made of wood, with low ceilings. We slept side by side in a bed that was as wide as the whole room, cuddled together, skinny boys under filthy blankets amongst which we often found lice; we would cover our calves in mint leaves after we had been bitten. We ate little—bread, olives, a bit of turnip. Sometimes women brought in special treats for us, like raisins, but there were so many of us boys that we would get only a couple each, just enough that we did not forget the taste. On the other hand, we read voraciously, without pause, which left our eyes always bloodshot—this was how people came to recognize us. We looked like white rabbits. And in the evenings, when the Besht was able to dedicate some of his sacred time to us, we would hear him and his conversations with the other tzaddikim. Then I began to be interested in problems that my father had not been able to resolve for me in a convincing way. Like how could the world exist, since God is everywhere? Since God is everything in everything, then how could there be things other than God? And how could God have created the world out of nothing?