I got up trembling, added fuel to the stove, and went to the table, where I laid out the books given to me by Reb Mordke. Harking back to what he had been teaching me, I undertook to link the letters I beheld and to meditate upon them in the philosophical method of my master. I thought this might occupy my mind, and that in this way, the fear would pass. And I spent the time thus until morning, when I set about performing my usual tasks. The next night I did the same thing, until three in the morning. Leah, worried about my strange behavior, got up with me, carefully freeing herself from the little hands of our slumbering son and coming to look over my shoulder to see what I was doing. I could see the disapproval in her face, but it did not dissuade me. As a very pious woman, she did not recognize any Kabbalist teachings, and was suspicious, too, about our righteous Sabbatian rituals.
By the third weird night, I was so tired that at around midnight I dozed off a little, pen and paper in my lap. When I came to, I saw that the candle was spluttering out, so I got up to take another. But I saw that the light did not dim even when the candle was extinguished! In astonishment, I realized that it was me shining, that the glow that filled the room was coming from within me. I said out loud to myself: “Is this possible?” But of course I heard no response. I slapped my own face, pinched my cheek, but it altered nothing. So I sat like that until morning, my hands down, my head empty—and I was shining! Until at dawn the light waned, then finally disappeared.
That night I saw the world in a completely different way than I had ever seen it before, illuminated by a pale gray sun, small, miserable, and crippled. Darkness was emerging out of every nook and cranny. Wars and plagues were raging the whole world over, rivers overflowing their banks as the earth quaked. Each and every human seemed like such a brittle being, like the merest eyelash or speck of pollen. I understood then that human life is made of suffering, that suffering is the true substance of the world. Every single thing was screaming in pain. And then I saw further into the future, when the world had changed, the forests had vanished and in their places cities grew, and all sorts of other things were happening I could not understand, could not even conceive of, for they exceeded my capacity. This overwhelmed me to such a degree that I fell with a great clatter to the ground, and—at least so it seemed to me—I glimpsed then the essence of salvation. Here my wife came in and cried for help.
On an expedition with Mordechai to Smyrna, due to a dream of goat droppings
It was as if my master Mordechai already knew about everything. A few days later he appeared out of the blue in Busk because he had had a strange dream. He had dreamed that in front of the synagogue in Lwów he saw the Jacob of the Bible handing out goat droppings to passersby. Most of those who received these gifts were offended or burst into raucous laughter, but those who accepted the gift and swallowed it respectfully began to shine from within like lanterns. Thus in this vision, Mordechai, too, held out his hand to receive the gift.
When, delighted by his arrival, I told him about my own incredible experience with the light, he listened to me attentively, and in his eyes I detected pride and tenderness. “You are just at the beginning of the road now. If you were to travel farther down it, you would see the world around us now is already ending, and that is why you see it as if it were untrue, and you detect not the light from the outside, which is false and illusory, but rather the light that is internal, that comes from God’s own scattered sparks, which the Messiah is to regather.”
Mordechai decided I had been chosen for his mission.
“The Messiah is coming now,” he said to me, leaning in to my ear until his lips touched my auricle. “He is in Smyrna.”
At the time, I didn’t understand what he meant, but I knew that Sabbatai (of blessed memory) was born in Smyrna, so it was of him that I thought, even though he had long since passed. Mordechai suggested we go south together, uniting business and our search for the truth.
In Lwów, Grzegorz Nikorowicz, an Armenian, operated a Turkish trade—he mostly imported belts from Turkey, but he also dealt in carpets and rugs, Turkish balsam and weaponry. He had settled in Stamboul, to keep an eye on his business from there, and every so often his caravans with their valuable goods would set out for the north, then head back to the south. Anybody could join in with them, not only Christians—anyone who demonstrated goodwill and had enough money to chip in to pay the caravan’s leader and the armed guards. You could carry goods from Poland—wax, tallow, honey, sometimes amber, although that did not sell as well as it once did—and you had to have in addition enough to sustain you on the road, and once you got there, to invest in goods to take back with you, in order to earn something off the whole expedition.
I borrowed a modest sum, to which Mordechai added some of his savings. We had, therefore, a little capital, and we set out gladly on our journey. That was the spring of 1749.
Mordechai ben Elias Margalit, Reb Mordke, was already a mature man by then. Infinitely patient, he was never in a hurry, and I had never met anyone with as much kindness and understanding toward the world. I often served as a pair of eyes for him for reading, since he could no longer see the smaller letters. He listened to everything attentively, and his memory was so good that he could repeat it all without error. He was still a very able man and quite strong, and I grumbled from fatigue on the road far more frequently than he. Our caravan was joined by all and sundry, anybody at all who wanted to make it to Turkey and back in one piece—Armenians and Poles, Wallachians and Turks going home from Poland, often even Jews from Germany. All of them would eventually scatter along the way, to be replaced by others.
The trail led from Lwów to Czernowitz, then to Jassy along the Prut and finally to Bucharest, where we made a longer stop. We determined to break off from the caravan, and from there we unhurriedly went where God would lead us.