In the evening, he tells everyone who wasn’t with him during the day that just as the biblical Jacob wrestled with the angel, so, too, has he now wrestled with the Antichrist.
Nahman, who had so missed Jacob after not seeing him for a while, now accompanies him everywhere he can, which means he neglects both business and study. All matters connected with earning money lie fallow. The goods brought from Poland still have not been sold. Some of Jacob’s adventures really embarrass Nahman, some he genuinely can’t accept. Jacob wanders the city, looking for any opportunity to fight. He finds himself, for example, some learned Jew, asks him some intelligent question, and so arranges things that the other man, feeling obligated to respond, finds himself drawn into Jacob’s disquisitions, and before he knows it, both of them are sitting in a shop drinking Turkish coffee, and Jacob is offering a pipe, and the man dares not refuse, but it’s the Shabbat, after all! And then when it comes time to pay up, the religious Jew obviously doesn’t have any money on him—it being the Shabbat—so Jacob pulls the turban off the poor man’s head and puts it down as a guarantee, which means that the man, made a laughingstock, must now go home with a bare head. He gets up to so many things like this that people start to fear him. Even his own.
It would be difficult for Nahman to bear the humiliation of anyone in this way, even if it were his greatest enemy. Jacob, meanwhile, is extremely pleased with himself.
“Whoever fears, respects. That’s just the way it is.”
Soon everyone in Salonika recognizes Jacob, and Reb Mordke and Isohar decide they should release him from the obligations of trade. And that they, too, ought to dedicate themselves exclusively to study.
“Take care of whatever you have to, but don’t try and make any new contacts,” says Reb Mordke to a shocked Nahman.
“What do you mean?” asks Nahman. “How will we live? How will we eat?”
“Alms,” answers Reb Mordke matter-of-factly.
“But work has never been an impediment to studying before,” says Nahman.
“Now it is.”
The appearance of ruah haKodesh, when the spirit descends into man
In the month of Kislev of the year 5515 (or November 1754), Jacob announces by way of Nahman and Nahman’s writings that he is opening his own beth midrash, his own school, and immediately many students enroll. Especially since—an absolutely extraordinary thing—the first student is Rabbi Mordechai, Reb Mordke. Making a ceremonious entrance, his dignified figure attracts much attention; people trust and admire him a great deal. Since he in turn trusts this Jacob, then Jacob must be someone truly special. Several days later, Jacob brings Nahman and Nussen into his school. Nahman is embarrassed by his new Greek clothing, which he’s bought to replace what was destroyed, using the money from the sale of the wax imported from Podolia.
Some days later, they receive the news that, in Nikopol, Hana, Jacob’s wife, has given birth to a daughter, and that, according to a decision she and Jacob made long ago, this daughter has been named Eva, nicknamed Avacha. They had a portent of this—Nussen’s she-donkey gave birth to twins: gray herself, one of her babies was a female, completely white, while the other was a male, dark, an unusual coffee color. Jacob is delighted, and for several days he acts more serious and tells everyone that a daughter was born to him on the same day he himself gave birth to a school.
Then something strange happens, something that was long awaited, or at least it has been known that it had to happen, that it was inevitable. It is hard to describe, even though it’s one event, in which everything happens in a certain order, even though for every movement, for every image, there exists a corresponding word, but maybe it will be best if told by a witness, especially since he is writing everything down anyway.
Shortly after that, Nussen tore me from my slumber, saying that something strange was going on with Jacob. Nussen tended to sit up and read into the night, and everyone always went to sleep before him. Nussen woke up several of the others who were then with us in the midrash, and they, sleepy and scared, went down into Jacob’s room, where several lamps were burning and where Rabbi Mordechai had already gone. Jacob was standing in the middle of the room amidst overturned furniture, half naked, his breeches barely remaining on his skinny hips, his skin gleaming with sweat, and his face pale, his eyes strange somehow, unseeing, trembling all over, as though seized by fever. This went on for some time, with us standing before him, watching him and waiting to see what would happen; no one had the boldness to lay so much as a finger upon him. Mordechai undertook to say a prayer in a mournful, overwhelmed voice, so that I was shaken, too, and the others also were worried by the sight of what was happening right here before us. For we understood that the Spirit had descended amongst us. The curtains between this and that world had been rent, time had lost its purity, the spirit was forcing its way into us like a battering ram. The small stuffy room became thick with the smell of our sweat and there was also the smell of something like raw meat, like blood. I became nauseated, and then I felt all the hairs on my body rear up; I saw, too, that Jacob’s manhood was bulging against the material of his breeches, until at last, he moaned and fell onto his knees with his head down. A moment later he spoke softly, hoarsely, words not everybody understood: “Mostro Signor abascharo,” which Reb Mordke repeated in our language: “Our Lord descends.”
And so Jacob knelt in that unnatural position, shrunken, sweat beaded on his back and shoulders, his wet hair matted to his face. His body quaked, stopped, quaked again, and again, as though gusts of cold air were shooting through it. Then, after a long while, he collapsed insensate onto the floor.
Such is the ruah haKodesh, when the spirit descends into man. It resembles illness, sticky and incurable, like a sudden weakening. A beholder of it might well feel disappointed. What the majority assume will be a solemn, noble moment turns out to be more like a flogging, or a birth.
When Jacob knelt, shrunken as though in a painful spasm, Nahman saw above him a luminescence and pointed it out to someone—clearer air, as though heated to glowing by cold light, an irregular halo. Only then, at the sight of that light, did the rest of them drop to their knees, and over them, slowly, as though they were submerged in water, circled something that resembled gleaming iron filings.
News of all of this quickly made its way around the city, and people began to camp outside the home where Jacob lived. He also began to have visions.