We know that every generation has thirty-six holy persons, and that it is thanks to them that God is able to maintain the existence of the world. Without a doubt, the Baal Shem Tov was one of them. Although the majority of holy men remain unrecognized, just living their ordinary lives as poor tavern keepers or cobblers, the Besht’s virtues were so great it would have been impossible to keep them secret. He did not suffer from pride, and yet whenever he appeared, everyone somehow felt intimidated, which wearied him greatly. He carried his holiness like so much heavy luggage. He did not in any way resemble my father, who was always sad and angry. The Besht shone one color after the other. One minute he looked like an old sage, and he spoke in a serious tone with his eyes half closed; the next something came over him, and he would throw caution to the wind, let himself be at ease with us, joking and eliciting roars of laughter. He was always ready to do something unexpected, something shocking. In this way, he attracted attention to himself, and there he invariably kept it. To all of us, he was the center of the world.
No one here was drawn to lifeless, empty rabbinism. In that respect we were all alike, and my father would have approved of it. There were daily readings of the Zohar, eagerly anticipated, and many of the older men were Kabbalists with clouded eyes, who were incessantly discussing with one another the divine mysteries in the same way they might have talked about household practicalities such as how much they fed the chickens or how much hay they had left for the winter . . .
Once a Kabbalist asked the Besht if he believed the world to be an emanation of God. “Oh, yes,” he said, “the whole world is God.” Everyone wholeheartedly seconded this enthusiastic response. “And evil?” asked the Kabbalist, tricky and malicious. “Evil, too, is God,” calmly retorted the Besht, and he was placid, but now a murmur passed through all those present, and soon the voices of other learned tzaddikim and various holy and distinguished men piped up. All conversations in this place provoked violent reactions—the overturning of chairs, sobs, cries, men pulling out their hair. Many times did I watch them debate this very question. And my blood boiled then, too, for indeed, how could it be? All this that surrounded us—how to account for it? Under what rubric were we to place hunger and bodily injury, and the slaughter of animals, and children felled by the plague and laid row upon row in the earth? In such instances, I was never able to shake the impression that ultimately, and irrefutably, God must not give a damn about us.
It sufficed for someone to point out that evil was not evil in itself, but rather only in the eyes of man, and a skirmish would break out at table; water would spill out from a broken jug and soak into the sawdust on the floor; one man would run out of the room in anger; another would have to be prevented from dealing a blow. Such was the power of the spoken word.
This was why the Besht always said to us: “The secret of evil is the only one God doesn’t ask us to take on faith, but rather has us consider.” And so I considered this all day and all night, for sometimes my lanky body that ceaselessly demanded food did not let me sleep, out of hunger. I considered that perhaps it was true that God recognized the mistake he had made, expecting the impossible from humankind. For he had wanted a person without sin. Therefore God had to make a choice. He could punish for sins, punish incessantly and become a kind of eternal oeconomist of our world, the manager who whips the peasants when they do not work as they are supposed to in their master’s fields. Yet God might also, in his infinite wisdom, have been ready to bear human sinfulness, to leave a space for the weakness of man. God might have said to himself: I cannot have a person who is simultaneously free and fully subject to me. I cannot have a creature free from sin who would be at the same time a person. Better sinful humanity than a world without men.
Oh, we all agreed with that! We skinny boys in our ripped kapotas with sleeves that had always been too short, sitting on one side of the table, with the teachers on the other.
I spent several months with the Besht’s holy men, and though it was hard and cold, I did feel that it was only now that my soul was catching up with my body, which had not only been growing but was becoming more manly. My legs were covered with black hair just as both my chest and my stomach got harder. And now my soul, too, chased after my body, becoming stronger. In addition to this, I had the impression that I was developing a new sense, the existence of which had stayed a secret to me until now.
Some people have a sense of unearthly things, just as others have an excellent sense of smell or hearing or taste. They can feel the subtle shifts in the great and complicated body of the world. And some of these have so honed that inner sight that they can even tell where a holy spark has fallen, notice its glow in the very place you would least expect it. The worse the place, the more fervently the spark gleams, flickers—and the warmer and purer is its light.
But there are also those who do not have this sense, who must simply trust the remaining five and entrust the world to them. And just as a man born blind knows not what light might be, or a deaf man music, or a man without a sense of smell the plenitude of flowers, so, too, can those without the sixth sense be merely bewildered by mystical souls, take them for madmen, for fanatics, for people who make up such things for reasons unknown.
That year, we disciples of the Besht (of blessed memory) began to be tormented by a strange ailment, as he himself called it with sadness and disquiet, though I did not know what he was thinking of.
Once during prayer one of the older boys burst into tears and could not be calmed. He was taken to see the holy one, and there the miserable wretch, sobbing, admitted that as he was praying the Shema he had pictured Jesus Christ and had thus directed the words of his prayer to him. As soon as that young man uttered those terrible words, everyone covered their ears with their hands and closed their eyes, so as not to give their senses access to such sacrilege. But the Besht merely shook his head sadly, and then he gave a simple explanation that brought us great relief: the boy had to pass near some sort of Christian shrine every day, and there he would see Christ. And when one looks at something a long time, or sees it often, that image gets inside the eyes and the mind, eating into them like lye. A person’s mind needs sanctity, so it seeks it everywhere, like a plant shoot growing in a cave that rises toward any, even the slightest, light. That was a good explanation.
Leybko and I had a hidden passion: we would endeavor to listen to the words that surfaced in the murmur of prayers spoken on the other side of a partition, attuned to how the phrases ran together as the recitations picked up speed, mixing their meanings. The stranger the results of these games, the greater our enjoyment.
In Mi?dzybó? all were as attentive to words as we were; thus the town itself seemed wayward, will I, nill I, insubstantial, as if in that contact with the word, matter hid its tail between its legs and cowered, ashamed. The muddy, cart-trod road appeared to go nowhere, while the little cottages set along it and the house of learning—the only one with a wide wooden porch of rotted, blackened wood, into which we bored holes with our fingers—seemed to belong to a dream.