In the sand strewn over the table that served as our slate, Isohar drew triangles and marked their corners according to what was in the Zohar, and then according to the teachings of Sabbatai Tzvi, blessed be his name. Someone stopping by might have thought that we were children playing at drawing.
There is the God of truth in the spiritual world and the Shekhinah imprisoned in matter, and as if “underneath them,” in the lower corner of the triangle, there is God the Creator, the cause of Divine sparks. When the Messiah comes, he eliminates the First Reason, and then the triangle stands on its head, now the God of Truth is on top, and beneath him is the Shekhinah and the Shekhinah’s vessel, the Messiah.
Much of this I did not understand.
“Yes, yes, yes,” was all Isohar would say, time and again. He had aged a great deal of late, as though he were traveling faster than the rest of us, alone out in front. He would also show us two lines crossing each other, giving rise to the cross, the quadruplicity that is the world’s stamp. He drew two intersecting lines and skewed them slightly.
“What does this remind you of?” he asked.
And Jacob instantly glimpsed the mystery of the cross.
“That’s the alef. The cross is the alef.”
In secret, once I remained alone, I raised my hand to my forehead and touched my skin, saying, “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” for I was only beginning to grow accustomed to this thought.
One Smyrna night, stuffy from the fragrance of the orange blossoms, for it was already spring, Isohar revealed to us the following secret:
There is one God in three figures, and the fourth is the holy Mother.
Some time later, urged on by my letters, there came to Smyrna a merchant’s caravan from Podolia, and with it, Elisha Shorr and his sons, Nathan and Solomon. With Jacob, Isohar, and Reb Mordke, I maintained that it was divine will guiding us, placing us in front of people and having us meet with precisely the ones we most needed to see, but the truth was otherwise. I had been writing to Reb Shorr even from Salonika, describing to him Jacob’s ruah haKodesh, and other details of what had happened with us there. However, truth be told, I had not believed that this would cause that older man to saddle his horses, take out the carts, and head off on such far-flung travels. But the Shorrs were always able to unite matters of the spirit with business dealings of various kinds, and so while the brothers took up the sale and purchase of goods, Old Man Shorr conversed with us, and slowly out of those evenings emerged a vision of the days that were supposed to come and that we were supposed to be guided by. He found great support in the person of Reb Mordke, who had long been muttering about this subject, citing his own strange dreams. But the Shorrs cared not for dreams.
Did Jacob know what we had in store for him? He got very sick then and almost died, but when he awoke from his fever, he said he’d had a dream. That he had dreamed of a man with a white beard, who had said to him: “You will go north, and many are the persons you will draw there to the new faith.”
Wise Jacob objected: “How am I to go to Poland, when I don’t understand the Polish language and have all of my affairs here, in the Turkish country. And I have a very young wife, with a newborn daughter—she won’t want to go with me.” So Jacob defended himself before us and before his own dream as we sat there, a ceremonial committee of four: Isohar, Elisha Shorr, Reb Mordke, and myself.
“That man with the beard, whom you saw in your sleep, that is Elijah—didn’t you realize?” said Reb Mordke to him. “When things are hard for you, he will go ahead of you. You will go first, and then Hana will come to you. In Poland you will be the king and the savior.”
“I will be with you,” added I, Nahman of Busk.
Scraps: Of meeting Jacob’s father in Roman, and also of the starosta and the thief
At the start of October 1755, we headed north in two wagons pulled by several horses. We certainly did not resemble what we were—messengers of some significant matter—but had rather the appearance of ordinary merchants circling around and around like ants. On the road to Czernowitz we went to Roman to visit Jacob’s father, who after his wife’s death lived there on his own. We paused at the city’s tollhouse so that Jacob could put on his best costume, for what purpose I know not.
Yehuda Leyb Buchbinder lived in a very little house with just one room, cramped and smoky. There was no place even for the horses, so they stood outside all night. There were just the three of us, Jacob, Nussen, and I, as the Shorrs’ caravan had set forth for Poland long before.
Yehuda Leyb was of tall stature, but skinny and wrinkled. His face at the sight of us took on an expression of dissatisfaction and disappointment. His thick, bushy eyebrows almost concealed his eyes, particularly since he had a habit of tilting his head forward and glowering. Jacob had been very excited at the prospect of seeing his father, but they greeted each other almost indifferently. His father seemed happier about the arrival of Nussen, whom he knew well, than about seeing his own son. We brought good food: a wealth of cheese, carboys of wine, a full pot of olives, all of the finest quality, purchased along the way. Jacob had spent most of what he had on these treats. But the sight of them did not cheer Yehuda in the slightest. The old man’s eyes remained sad and avoided meeting other people’s.
Jacob, too, who had previously so rejoiced, now slumped and was silent. So it is: our parents remind us of what we like least about ourselves, and in their growing old we see our many sins, I thought, but perhaps this was something more—sometimes it happens that the souls of parents and children are fundamentally hostile to one another, and they meet in life in order to remedy this hostility. But it doesn’t always work.
“Everyone around here has the same dream,” said Yehuda Leyb at the very start. “Everyone has dreams about the Messiah already being in some town, somewhere nearby, except that no one ever remembers the name of that town or the name of that Messiah. I had the same dream, and I sort of recognized the name of the town. Others say the same and always fast for days on end to try and have a second dream that will tell them what the city’s name might be.”
We drank wine and snacked on olives, and finding myself the most garrulous, I told of everything that had happened with us. I told it in the same way I am telling it here, but it was evident that old Buchbinder was not listening. He was silent and kept looking around his own room where there wasn’t anything that might have drawn his gaze. At last Nussen spoke up.
“I don’t understand you at all, Leyb. We came here from the world and are telling you all these things, and getting nothing back from you. You listen with one ear and ask no questions. Are you well?”
“But what do I get out of your telling me stories about some heavenly fair?” Leyb responded. “What do I care for this wisdom of yours, when I’m just curious how it’s supposed to be benefiting me? How much longer will I have to live like this, alone, in pain, in sorrow? What is God prepared to do for us, tell me of that.”