In the summer of 1756, Nahman, Jacob, and Shlomo Shorr show up in Kamieniec as ordinary Jews from just outside Smotrycz who came to sell garlic. Nahman has a carrying pole over his shoulders with baskets of garlic attached on either end. Although Jacob is now wearing a shabby kapota, he would not agree to bast shoes and is instead wearing good leather boots that stick out from beneath his wide-leg trousers. Dressed in an outfit that is half Turkish, half Armenian, he resembles a vagabond who doesn’t belong anywhere, the kind the borderlands are full of, the kind no one pays any special mind. Shlomo Shorr, tall and thin, has such dignity in his face that he’s harder to make look like a vagabond. In his long dark coat and peasant’s shoes, he looks more like a cleric of some undetermined religion, and he arouses people’s automatic respect.
The three of them now stand before Kamieniec’s Peter and Paul Cathedral among a sizable crowd that is observing with great excitement the placement of a statue atop a tall column. This event has attracted all those from the little neighboring villages and the nearby alleyways, and customers from the stalls at the market. Even the priests have come out to watch the wooden crane raise this gold figure. A moment earlier they had been talking in an animated, noisy way, but now, looking at the sculpture, which has suddenly begun to sway, threatening to snap the cords and send everything careening onto the onlookers, they have quieted down. The crowd moves back a bit. Some of the workers are foreign; people are whispering they’re from Gdańsk, that the whole statue was even cast in Gdańsk, completely covered in thick gold, and that it took a full month for it to be brought here in carts the authorities commissioned that made their way from post house to post house. The column itself, meanwhile, was built by the Turks, and for years that crescent of theirs was atop it, those heathens having made it part of a minaret. But now the Holy Virgin has returned and will tower over the town and the heads of its inhabitants.
At last, the statue is in place. The crowd sighs, and someone starts singing. Now the whole figure can be seen. The Holy Mother, the Mother of Mercy, the Virgin Mary, Queen of the World, is portrayed here as a young woman, running with the carefree grace of a dancer, her arms outspread and raised as though in greeting. As though she were about to pick you up and squeeze you tight. Nahman raises his head and covers his eyes as the white sky blinds him, and it seems to him that she is saying, “Come, dance with me,” or “Play with me,” or “Give me your hand.” Jacob raises his hand into the sky and points at the statue, unnecessarily, since it is what everyone has come to see. Nahman knows, though, what Jacob is trying to indicate—that this Virgin is the holy Shekhinah, God’s presence in the dark world. Then the sun jolts out from behind the clouds, completely unexpectedly, since the sky has been cloudy since morning, and one of its rays hits the statue, and all that Gdańsk gold starts to gleam like a kind of second sun, and suddenly the square in front of the cathedral in Kamieniec shines with a fresh and joyful light, and the Virgin, who is running in the sky, is pure goodness, like someone who alights among people to give them hope—that everything will be good. Everyone sighs ecstatically at this powerful show of pure light. The Holy Virgin. People squint and kneel before this obvious evidence of her miracle. It’s a sign, it’s a sign, they all repeat, and the crowd is kneeling, and they are, too. Nahman’s eyes fill with tears, and his feelings are shared by the others. A miracle is a miracle, regardless of the creed.
To them, it seems that the Shekhinah is descending into this statue gilded in Gdańsk, and that in this glimmering guise she will guide them to the bishop’s residence like a mother, like a sister, like the most tender lover who would give up everything just to gaze upon her beloved for even a moment, even if he’s dressed in the shabbiest kapota. But before they go in for their secret audience with Bishop Dembowski, Jacob, being Jacob, unable to endure any solemnity, breaks away from the crowd and, in a fit of childish mischief, starts to wail along the city wall like an old Jewish beggar, hunched and lame.
“Insolent Jewry,” hisses some heavy townswoman about him. “No respect for what’s sacred.”
That same day, late in the evening, they present the bishop with a manifesto of nine theses they plan to defend at the disputation. They also request some protection, since the Talmudists are still persecuting them. And then there’s the curse. That’s what angers the bishop the most. Curse! What is this Jewish curse of theirs?
He has them sit while he reads:
“One: We believe in everything the God of the Old Testament commanded mankind to believe in. We believe in everything He taught.
“Two: The Scriptures cannot be effectively comprehended by human reason without God’s Grace.
“Three: The Talmud, filled with unprecedented blasphemies toward God, ought and needs to be rejected.
“Four: God is One, and He is the creator of all things.
“Five: This very God is in three Persons, indivisible in nature.
“Six: God may take the form of human flesh upon Himself and be subject to every passion apart from sin.
“Seven: In accordance with the prophecy, the city of Jerusalem will not be rebuilt.
“Eight: The Messiah promised in the Scriptures will not come again.
“Nine: God Himself will bear within Himself the curse of the first parents and of the whole nation, and the one who is the true Messiah is God Incarnate.”