But Epstein was only half listening, feeling instead the urge to tell the rabbi that he had nearly drowned that day. That he had been pulled back from drowning in the nick of time. His stomach was still uneasy; he couldn’t eat. He’d tried to tell Moti about it, if only to explain his lack of appetite, but though his cousin had raised his voice in alarm and waved his hands, presently he’d gone back to studying the wine list.
The following day was busy with phone calls to Schloss, who was executing further changes to his will now that Epstein had less to bequeath, and another meeting about what his benefaction might achieve, this one with the Israeli Philharmonic. Zubin Mehta met with him personally. The maestro, wearing an Italian coat and silk scarf, strolled with him around Bronfman’s concert hall. He may have been a smaller fish, but his $2 million could nevertheless endow the Edith and Solomon Epstein Chair for the first violinist. His parents had loved music. His father had played the violin until the age of thirteen, when the money for lessons ran out. At home, they’d played records at night, Epstein told the conductor, and he would listen from his bed through the open door. When he was six his mother had taken him to hear—but suddenly, to his embarrassment, he could not remember the name of the great pianist who had stepped onto the stage and approached the piano as an undertaker approaches a coffin.
Mehta’s assistant glossed over the moment of forgetfulness, and took everything else down on a yellow legal pad. Afterward they sat drinking coffee in the blazing white light of Habima Square. Still trying to remember the name, Epstein recalled instead something that had happened to him around the time he was taken to see the pianist. He had been lying in his bed with his eyes closed after a nap on a very hot afternoon when a vision of a spider came to him. He saw vividly the orange hourglass on its abdomen and the tan legs with dark striations at the joints. And then, very slowly, he opened his eyes, and there the spider was on the wall in front of him, exactly as he had seen it in his mind. Only when his mother came into the room and began to scream did he learn that it was a brown widow. Epstein would have liked for the assistant to take this down on her pad, too, for it seemed to him of great significance.
But the maestro was talking, his attention leaping restlessly from his buzzing phone to the purple flowers growing in braids up the side of the wall to the mud pit of Israeli politics (he was no prophet, Mehta reported, but things didn’t look good). Then he switched to an upcoming concert in Bombay where he would conduct Wagner, as he could not in Tel Aviv. He’d had five children by four women, Epstein had heard; the maestro found no need to finish one story before starting another.
When they got up to shake hands, Epstein touched his coat. He’d had one just like that, he told Mehta, who only smiled vaguely, his mind already on other things. Later Epstein discovered that the orchestra had not a single Palestinian musician, and knowing the earful he would get from his daughters if he made his donation there, he turned his attention to the Israel Museum.
In all of this, he had forgotten about Klausner’s invitation and did not remember it until Friday at noon, when he tried to make a dinner reservation and was reminded by the concierge that the restaurant he wanted would be closed. An hour later, at 1:00 p.m. sharp, the front desk rang his room to say that the rabbi was waiting downstairs. Epstein weighed the matter. He could still cancel. Did he really want to spend the next two hours stuck in a car with Klausner and then at his mercy all evening? On the plane, when he’d first raised the idea of a visit, Klausner had insisted that he stay at the Gilgul guesthouse. It wasn’t four stars, he’d said, but they would give him the nicest room. But Epstein had no intention of staying overnight. He could call a driver to come for him the moment he began to tire of the rabbi’s hospitality. He’d been to Safed thirty years ago but could only recall some roadside stands selling silver jewelry, and the countless stone steps hairy with lichen. A beautiful place, Klausner had said of the town in the mountains of the Upper Galilee that had drawn mystics for five hundred years. A place of bracing air and incomparable light. Perhaps Epstein was even interested in learning with them at Gilgul? “And what would you have me learn?” Epstein asked with an arched brow. To which Klausner quoted a Hasidic tale about a student who goes to visit his teacher, a great rabbi, and when he is asked on his return what he learned, he answers that he learned how the great rabbi ties his shoes. Gesturing down at Klausner’s black loafers, worn at the heel, Epstein quoted the words of his father: “And this is how you make a living?”
He had always prided himself on his ability to read people, to see what was behind the surface. But he could not yet put his finger on Klausner. A grand facilitator, he had transported the still-searching to his magic mountain by the hundreds, all the way from JFK and LAX; it was nothing for him to sweep Epstein up from Tel Aviv. And yet there was something in the rabbi’s gaze—not its attentiveness, for the world had always been attentive to Epstein, but rather its depth, the suggestion of capaciousness within—which seemed to hold the promise of understanding. The events of the day before—the lost coat, the mugging, the hearse with the ebony casket shining long and dark in the hold, which that evening had come back to Epstein with a chill as he entered the dark town car waiting for him in its place—had left Epstein feeling out of sorts. Perhaps it was just an overreceptivity born of emotion, but he found himself wishing to confide in Klausner. In broad strokes, he told him about the last year, beginning with the deaths of his parents, and how he had brought his long, mostly stable marriage to an end, to the shock of his family and friends, and retired from his law firm, and finally he told him about the irresistible desire for lightening that had swelled under all of this and led him to give so much away.
The rabbi ran his long, thin fingers through his beard, and at last pronounced a word Epstein did understand. Tzimtzum, Klausner had repeated, and explained the term that was central in Kabbalah. How does the infinite—the Ein Sof, the being without end, as God is called—create something finite within what is already infinite? And furthermore, how can we explain the paradox of God’s simultaneous presence and absence in the world? It was a sixteenth-century mystic, Isaac Luria, who articulated the answer in Safed five hundred years before: When it arose in God’s will to create the world, He first withdrew Himself, and in the void that was left, He created the world. Tzimtzum was the word Luria gave to this divine contraction, Klausner explained, which was the necessary precursor of creation. This primordial event was seen as ongoing, constantly echoed not just in the Torah but in our own lives.
“For example?”