During our stops, Mordechai would add to the tobacco we smoked in our pipes a tiny lump of resin, and this made our thoughts rise high and reach far, made everything appear filled with some hidden sense, with deep meanings. I would become motionless, my hand slightly raised, and remain like that for hours in ecstasy. Even the most minimal movement of my head revealed great mysteries. Every blade of grass belonged to this deep system of meanings, an indispensable aspect of the vastness of this world, built intelligently and perfectly, the tiniest thing connected with the greatest.
By day we went around the little streets of the towns we passed through, going up and down steps, viewing the goods on display. We looked closely at young girls and boys—not for our own pleasure, but rather because we also worked as matchmakers for such youths. In Nikopol, for example, we would say that in Ruse there was a young man, kind and well-educated, by the name of—let’s say—Shlomo, whose parents were seeking for him a nice wife with a dowry. In Craiova we would say that in Bucharest there was a nice girl, a good girl, without much of a dowry, but so pretty you had to squint to even look at her, and that girl was Sara, daughter of the cattle merchant Abraham. We carried such information as ants transport their bits of leaves and sticks until an anthill arises from the earth. If it came to a wedding, we would be invited, and for our matchmaking we would earn a grosz or two as well as being able to eat and drink our fill. We would always immerse ourselves in the mikvah seventy-two times, as many as there are letters in God’s name. Afterward we could afford the juice of pomegranates squeezed before our very eyes, lamb shashliks and good wine. We had bigger business planned that would ensure the comfort of our families and allow us to dedicate ourselves to studying our books.
We slept with the horses in stables, on the ground, in the straw, but once the warm and fragrant air of the south had enveloped us, we slept on riverbanks, beneath the trees, in the pleasant company of pack animals, holding on tightly to the sides of our coats, for we kept what was most valuable to us stitched inside. The odor of dirty water, silt, and rotting fish would somehow become enjoyable after a while as Mordechai discoursed upon it in ever greater depth, hoping to convince me that that mixture was the true smell of the world. In the evenings, we would talk in hushed voices, so in tune with one another that no sooner had either of us started than the other already grasped his point. While he would tell me about Sabbatai and the complex pathways along which salvation makes its way to us, I would tell him about the Besht, trusting that it would be possible to unite the wisdom of those two good men, though this did not turn out to be the case. Again and again we argued the merits of each. I said that the Besht felt that Sabbatai had the spark of holiness, but that Samael had quickly captured it, and in so doing, had taken Sabbatai as well. Reb Mordke would wave his hands then, as if he wanted to drive those terrible words away. I also told him what I had heard at the Besht’s from someone’s lips—that apparently Sabbatai had gone once to the Besht and asked if he would repair him, for he felt himself to be a deeply unworthy sinner. Such a rectification, or tikkun, consisted in the holy man joining with the sinner’s soul, step by step, passing through all three of the soul’s different forms. First the nefesh of the holy one—his animal spirit—connected with the sinner’s nefesh, and then, when it became possible, ruah—the feelings and will of the holy one—joined with the sinner’s ruah, so that in the end, the holy one’s neshama—that divine aspect we all carry within ourselves—could join with the sinner’s neshama. And when this happened, the Besht could feel how much sin and darkness was in this man called Sabbatai, and he pushed him of necessity away from himself, so that Sabbatai fell down all the way to the bottom of She’ol.
Reb Mordke didn’t like that story. “This Besht of yours understood nothing. The key is in Isaiah,” he said, and I nodded, for I, too, knew that famous verse from the Book of Isaiah, 53:9, that the Messiah’s grave was placed amongst the wicked. That the Messiah must come from the lowest spheres, that he must be sinful and mortal. And one more definition soon came to Reb Mordke’s mind, and that was the sixtieth tikkun in the Tikkunei haZohar: “The Messiah will be internally good, but he will be clothed in evil.” He explained that these words applied to Sabbatai Tzvi, who, under pressure from the sultan, gave up the Jewish faith and converted to Islam. And so, smoking, observing the people we met and having conversations, we made it all the way to Smyrna, and there, during the hot Smyrna nights, I took in that strange knowledge, kept in secret, that prayer and meditation alone cannot save the world, much though it may have been attempted. The Messiah’s task is terrible—the Messiah is a sheep for the slaughter. He must enter into the very heart of the kingdom of shells, into darkness, and he must carry out the liberation of the holy sparks from that darkness. The Messiah must descend into the abyss of every type of evil and destroy it from within. And he must go in as if he belonged, a sinner among others who will not arouse the suspicions of the forces of evil around him, so as to become the powder that will blow up the fortress from inside.
I was young then, and although I had an awareness of suffering and pain from what I had already glimpsed of life, I still trusted the world to be good and humane. I enjoyed the cool, fresh early mornings and all the things I had to do. I enjoyed the bright colors of the bazaars where we sold our silly wares. I relished the beauty of women, their cavernous black eyes and their lids lined in black, and the delicacy of boys, their nimble, slender bodies—yes, that could make my head spin. I enjoyed dates laid out to dry, their sweetness, and the veins in turquoise, which I found touching, and all the colors of the rainbow in the spices at the bazaar.
“Do not be fooled by all that gilding. Scratch it with your fingernail, and you will see what’s underneath,” said Reb Mordke, and he dragged me into filthy courtyards, where he began to show me a completely different world. Ulcerous, ill women begging outside the bazaar, male prostitutes dressed as women, ruined by hashish and sick and poor, crumbling mud huts on the city’s edges, packs of mangy dogs scrounging through the trash, in between the bodies of their companions, starved to death. It was a world of unthinkable cruelty and evil, in which everything raced toward its own destruction, toward death and decay.