“The world doesn’t come from a kind or caring God,” Reb Mordke told me, when he decided I had seen enough. “God created all of this by accident, and then he was gone. That is the great mystery. The Messiah will come quietly when the world is submerged in the greatest darkness and the greatest misery, in evil and in suffering. He will be treated like a criminal. So the prophets have foretold.”
That evening, at the edge of the enormous trash heap just outside the town, Reb Mordke took out of his bag a tome covered in thick broadcloth to conceal its true identity, to make it inconspicuous so that no one would covet and steal it. I knew what book it was, but Mordechai had never offered to let me read it with him, and I hadn’t had the courage to ask, although I was dying of curiosity. I figured the time would come when he would offer it to me of his own accord. And that is what happened. I felt the weight of that moment, a chill ran through me, and my hair stood on end as I took the book and stepped inside the circle of light. Overwhelmed, I began to read out loud.
It was the treatise VaAvo haYom el haAyin, or And I Came this Day unto the Fountain, written by Eibeschütz, my Reb Mordke’s master. And I felt then that I had become the next link in a long chain of the initiated that extends across the generations, that begins further back even than Sabbatai, than Abulafia, than Simon bar Yochai, than, than . . . and on, all the way to the dawn of time, and that this chain, though it sometimes gets lost in the mire, though it gets grown over with grass and covered up in the rubble strewn by wars, nonetheless persists and grows into the future.
6.
Of a strange wedding guest in white stockings and sandals
The stranger who enters the room must bow his head to do so, so that the first thing everyone notices about him isn’t his face but his clothing. He is wearing a light-colored coat of a sort that isn’t common in Poland, sullied, and on his feet are muddy white stockings and sandals. A bag made of colorful leather strips hangs from his arm. At the sight of him, the conversation dies down; only when he raises his head and the lamplight creeps over his face does the general cry come:
“Nahman! It’s our Nahman!”
Not everyone knows him, so there are whispers:
“What Nahman, who’s Nahman? From where? The rabbi of Busk?”
They immediately lead him to Elisha, to where the elders are sitting—Rabbi Hirsh from Lanckoroń, Rabbi Moshe from Podhajce, the great Kabbalist, as well as Solomon Dobrushka from Prossnitz, and there the door shuts behind them.
The women spring into action. Hayah and her assistants prepare vodka, hot barszcz, and bread with goose lard. Hayah’s younger sister readies a bowl of water for the traveler to be able to wash up. Only Hayah is permitted to enter the room where the men are. Now she watches Nahman as he carefully cleanses his hands. She sees a small, slender man accustomed to being hunched over, his face affable, the corners of his eyes tilting downward, as though he were eternally sad. He has long, silky chestnut hair and a flaxen-russet beard. His elongated face is still young, though wrinkles have settled in around the eyes—Nahman is always squinting. The lamplight turns his cheeks orange and red. Once he has sat down at the table, Nahman takes off his sandals, completely inadequate at this time of year with these Podolian spurts of foul weather, and now Hayah studies his big, bony feet in their light-colored, dirty socks. It strikes Hayah that these feet have traveled all the way from Salonika, Smyrna, and Stamboul, still in their coating of Macedonian and Wallachian dust, in order for good news to reach this place. Or perhaps it is bad news? It is not yet clear what to make of Nahman’s arrival.
She glances furtively at her father, Elisha Shorr, curious as to what he might be about to say. But he has turned away, toward the wall, and is swaying slightly back and forth. Whatever news Nahman has brought to them is of such great weight that the elders have determined together that he must share it with everyone.
Hayah watches her father. She feels acutely the absence of her mother, who died last year. Old Shorr had wanted to remarry, but Hayah wouldn’t allow it, and she never will. She doesn’t want a stepmother. She holds her little daughter in her lap. She has crossed her legs, creating something like a little pony for the child. From under her ruffled skirts, beautiful red lace-up boots reach halfway up her calves. Their polished toes, neither pointed nor round, are eye-catching.
First Nahman hands Shorr the letter from Reb Mordke and from Isohar of Podhajce, which Shorr takes a long time to read in silence. They wait until he’s done. The air gets thick, as if it’s taking on a burden.
“And everything tells you that this is really the one?” Elisha Shorr asks Nahman, after what feels like an eternity.
Nahman assents. His head is spinning from exhaustion, and from the vodka he has drunk. He feels Hayah’s gaze on him, sticky, wet—like a dog’s tongue, you could say.
“Let him rest, all of you,” says Old Shorr. He stands and gives Nahman a friendly pat on the shoulder.
Others come up, too, and touch the newcomer’s shoulder, or his back. A circle is formed as they place their hands on their companions’ shoulders on either side. For a moment this circle closes, and in the middle of it, something seems to appear, a kind of presence—something odd. They stand this way, leaning in to the circle’s center, their heads lowered, almost touching. Then someone takes the first step back. It is Elisha, and soon the rest of them move aside, exhilarated, with flushed faces; finally, someone gives Nahman tall boots with sheepskin uppers to warm his legs.
Nahman’s Tale: Jacob’s first mention