I could also say that we bored holes into words, glimpsing thus their cavernous interiors. My first revelation concerned the similarity between two words.
Now, to create the world, God had to withdraw from Himself, leave within His body a blank space in which the world could take up residence. God vanished from this space. The word disappear comes from the root word elem, and the site of that disappearance is known as olam: world. Thus even the name for the world contains within it the story of God’s departure. The world was able to arise solely because God was not in it. First there was something, and then that something was gone. That is the world. The world then, in its entirety, is lack.
Of the caravan, and how I met Reb Mordke
When I returned home, in order to retain me, my family married me to sixteen-year-old Leah, an intelligent, trusting, sympathetic girl who would give me support until the day she died. Yet the marriage did not serve its purpose, for, having found a pretext in the form of a job working for Elisha Shorr, I set off on a business trip to Prague and Brünn.
It was on this journey that I met Mordechai ben Elias Margalit, known to everyone as Reb Mordke, may the memory of this righteous one be a blessing. He was another Besht to me, but he was also the only one, for I had him all to myself, while he, evidently feeling the same thing that I did, took me on as his student. I do not know what so attracted me to him—those who say that certain souls recognize each other instantly and cling to one another inexplicably are right. The truth is that I disconnected from the Shorrs and decided to remain with him, forgetting the family I had left in Podolia.
He was a disciple of the famous rabbi Jonatan Eibeschütz, who was in turn heir to the oldest teachings.
At first, Reb Mordke’s theories seemed muddled to me. I had the impression that he was in a state of perpetual elation, which caused him to breathe shallowly, as if he feared taking in too much earthly air; only once filtered through a pipe did it allow him to live.
But the mind of the sage is unfathomable. Throughout our journey I was completely dependent upon him; he always knew when to set out and what road to take so that we would be transported in comfort and by good people, fed by some pilgrims or others. His ideas, at first glance, would appear preposterous, but when we gave in to them, it always turned out well for us.
We studied together by night, and by day I would work. Often enough, dawn would catch me at my books, and my eyes started to suppurate from the constant effort. The things Mordechai gave me to read were so incredible that my practical young Podolian mind bucked like an old workhorse someone suddenly decided to turn into a courser.
“My son, why do you reject that which you have not yet tried?” Mordechai asked, just when I had decided to go back to Busk to take care of my family.
So I said to myself then, very reasonably: He is right. Here I can only gain, not lose. So I will wait patiently until I find something good for myself in all this.
I gave in to him, renting out a little room behind a wooden partition, living modestly, spending my mornings working in trade and dedicating my evenings and my nights to my studies.
He taught me the permutations and combinations of letters, and also the mysticism of numbers and other “roads of the Sefer Yetzirah.” I traveled down each of these roads for two weeks, until the form of each had been etched into my heart. In this way, he guided me through four whole months, at the end of which, suddenly, he told me to “erase” it all.
That evening, he packed my pipe with abundant herbs and gave me a very old prayer, the author of which cannot now be known, and which soon became the expression of my own voice. It went like this:
My soul
will not let itself be locked in any prison,
iron cage or cage made out of air.
My soul wants to be like a ship in the sky,
and the body’s boundaries cannot hold it back.
And no walls will ever imprison it:
not those that have been built by human hands,
nor the walls of politeness,
nor the walls of civility
or good manners.
It will not be entrapped by pompous speeches,
by kingdoms’ borders,
good breeding—anything.
My soul flies over all of that
with the greatest ease,
it is above what is contained in words,
and beyond what cannot even be contained in words.
It is beyond pleasure and beyond fear.
It exceeds what is lovely and lofty
just as it does what is terrible and vile.
Help me, merciful God, and keep life from wounding me.
Give me the ability to speak, give me language and words,
so that I might speak the truth
of You.
My return to Podolia, and a strange vision
Some time later I returned to Podolia, where, after my father’s sudden death, I took up the position of rabbi of Busk. Leah was willing to receive me, and I felt a great deal of tenderness toward her for this. She knew how to orchestrate a plentiful and peaceful life. My little son grew and matured. Busy with my work and tending to my family, I put some distance between myself and the chaos of my journey, along with any notion of Kabbalah. The community was sizable and divided into “ours” and “those,” and as a young and inexperienced rabbi, I had many activities and duties.
One winter night, however, I could not fall asleep and suddenly felt very strange. I had the overwhelming impression that everything around me was false, that it was artificial, as if the world had been painted by some skilled artist on canvases hung up all around. Or, to put it another way: as if everything around me had been made up, and by some miracle had taken the shape of reality.
Several times already, when I was working with Reb Mordke, I had had this impression—tormenting, fear-inspiring—but this time it was so acute that I began to be as afraid as I had been when I was a child. Suddenly I felt imprisoned, like someone cast into a dungeon where the air was just on the verge of running out.