“You, Moliwda, are a high-minded man tangled up in mundane things.”
“Then we’re alike.”
But Nahman doesn’t seem convinced.
A few days before Nahman sets out for Poland, Moliwda invites them to visit. He comes on horseback and has with him, too, a strange carriage, which is where Nussen, Nahman, and the rest wind up. Jacob and Moliwda ride up ahead. It takes about four hours, because the road is tricky and narrow, and winds uphill.
On the road Jacob is in a good mood and sings in his beautiful, powerful voice. He starts with the holiday songs, in the old language, and he finishes with the Yiddish ditties the badchan performs at weddings to entertain the guests:
What is life, after all,
if not dancing on graves?
When he finishes, he turns to filthy songs of wedding nights. Jacob’s powerful voice echoes off the rocks. Moliwda rides half a step behind him and suddenly realizes why this strange man so easily attracts people to him. In everything he does, Jacob is absolutely authentic. He is like that well from the folktale. No matter what a person shouts into it, it will always answer the same.
Jacob’s story about the ring
They rest along the way, in the shade of some olive trees, with a view of Craiova before them. How small this city seems now—like a little handkerchief. Nahman sits next to Jacob and locks his head in the crook of his arm, seemingly in play, and Jacob gives in to it, and for a moment they tussle like puppies. It strikes Moliwda that they’re just big kids. On such stops, someone always has to tell a story, even if it’s one everybody already knows. Hershel asks, a little grumpily, for the one about the ring. Jacob, who never needs to be asked twice, launches into it right away.
“Once upon a time there was a man,” he opens, “who had an extraordinary ring, passed down from generation to generation. Whoever wore that ring was a happy man, things went well for him. Yet despite his good fortune, he did not lose his sympathy for others and did not shy away from helping them. And so the ring belonged to good people, and whoever wore it would pass it down to his child.
“It so happened that one set of parents gave birth to three sons at once. They grew up healthy and in brotherly love, sharing everything and supporting one another in all pursuits. Their parents thought and thought about what would happen when the boys grew up, and they would have to give one of them the ring. They discussed it well into the night, until at last the children’s mother proposed the following solution: they would take the ring to the best goldsmith and have him make two more exactly like it. The goldsmith would have to make sure the rings were identical, so that no one could tell which was the original. For a long time they searched, and at last they found one, an extraordinarily talented man, whom with great effort and great pains they were able to convince to carry out the task. When the parents came to pick up the rings, the goldsmith mixed up all three in front of them, and they couldn’t tell which was which. Even the goldsmith was astonished to find that he could not tell them apart.
“When the sons reached adulthood, a grand ceremony took place at which the parents handed the boys their rings. The boys weren’t entirely satisfied, although they tried not to betray their emotions in order not to hurt their parents’ feelings. Each of them, in his heart of hearts, believed that it was he who had received the real ring, and so the brothers began to look upon one another in suspicion and mistrust. After the deaths of their parents, they immediately went to a judge so that he might once and for all resolve their doubts. Yet even the wise judge was unable to do this, and instead of issuing a determination, he told them: ‘Apparently, this treasure has the property of making its wearer good to God and to man. As this does not seem to apply to any of you, it may be that the real ring has been lost. Live, then, as if your ring were the real one, and your life will show whether or not you were right.’
“And just like those three rings, there are three religions. And he who was born into one of them ought to take the other two like a pair of pantofles and walk in them toward salvation.” Moliwda knows this story. Most recently he heard it from a Muslim with whom he was doing business. For his part, he has been very much taken with the prayer he heard Nahman recite in lilting Hebrew. He doesn’t know if he’s got the whole thing, but what he did manage to memorize he’s put into Polish, recomposing the whole, so that now, when he says it over in his head, relishing the rhythm, his mouth floods with waves of pleasure, as though he were eating something good and sweet.
Beating its wings, seeking the aether,
But neither crane nor raven,
My soul, which knows no conqueror,
Soars up into the heavens.
It can’t be trapped in sulfur, iron,
Get tangled in the heart,
Will never die of plague in prison,
Be subject to man’s court.
Breaking down walls, it freely flits
Over rumors and smooth words,
For it wants not your narrow streets,
Your alleys, boulevards.
Knowing no limits, it roams free,
Mocks what you all deem wise,
Calls beauty ugly secretly,
Dispels illusions, lies.
It shakes its plumes and sees a light
That can’t be put in words,
It cares not who and what sort might
Hold places in this world.
O Father, help me wield my tongue
So that I voice my pain
And add truth to man’s talk—o let
My soul glimpse the divine.
After a while, this sweetness turns into an almost unbearable longing.
Scraps: What we saw among Moliwda’s Bogomils
Although I would very much like to, I am unable to make a record of everything, for after all, things are so inextricably bound together that should I merely tap the tip of my pen against one, then it nudges another, and soon a great sea has unfurled itself before me. What kind of dam are the edges of my paper, is the trail of ink I leave? How, then, would I be able to express all that my soul has received in this life, and in a single book, at that?
Abulafia, whom I studied with great zeal, says that the human soul is part of the great cosmic stream that flows through all creatures. It is a single force, one motion, but when a person is born into a physical body, when he comes into the world as an individual being, that soul has to separate from the rest, otherwise a person would not be able to live—the soul would drown in the One, and the person would go mad in just a few instants. That is why such a soul gets sealed, that is, seals are stamped upon it that will not let it mix with that unity but will allow it to operate in the finite, bounded world of matter.
We need to be able to keep our balance. If the soul is too voracious or too porous, then too many different forms will get inside it and thereby distance it from the stream of the divine.