The street was crowded with people, and our balcony swarmed with living creatures. Here came a butterfly and there a big fly with a green-gold belly; here landed a sparrow and suddenly a pigeon came swooping in from somewhere. An insect lighted on the lapel of my gabardine. In cheder we called it Moses’ little cow. Actually it was a ladybug. It was odd to consider that all these creatures had had fathers, mothers, grand-fathers, and grandmothers just like me. Each of them lived out his or her time and died. I had read somewhere that a fly had thousands of eyes. Well, but despite all these eyes boys caught flies, tore off their wings, and tortured them in every manner only man could conceive while the Almighty sat on His Throne of Glory in seventh heaven and the angels sang His praises.
There were cabala books in my father’s bookcase which intrigued me immensely. I was forbidden to study them. Father constantly reminded me that you couldn’t take to the cabala before you reached thirty. He said that for those younger, the cabala posed a danger. One could drift into heresy and even lose one’s mind, God forbid. When Father wasn’t at home or was talking his Sabbath nap, I browsed through these books. They listed names of angels, seraphim. God’s name was printed in large letters and in many variations. There were descriptions of heavenly mansions, transmigrated souls, spiritual copulations. The writers of these books were apparently well versed in the ways of heaven. They knew of combinations of letters through which you could tap wine from a wall, create pigeons, even destroy the world. Besides God Himself (there were no words or satisfactory terms to describe what He is), the one who had the main say above was Metatron, who ranked just a notch below God. A second mighty and awesome angel was Sandalphon. All the angels, seraphim, cherubim, had one desire—to praise God, to revere Him, to extol Him, to enhance His name. Their wings spread over many worlds. They spoke Hebrew. I had learned in the Gemara that God understands all languages and that you could pray to Him in your own tongue, but the angels resorted only to Hebrew. Well, but this wasn’t the same ordinary Hebrew that I knew. Holy names spurted from their fiery mouths, secrets of the Torah, mysteries upon mysteries. So vast were these heavens that three hundred and ten worlds were reserved for every saint. Every soul, big or small, the moment it passed the process of being cleansed in fires of hell, found a place in Paradise—each according to its origin and its deeds. All the heavens, all the upper worlds, all the spheres, all the angels and souls, were concerned with one thing—to learn the secrets of the Torah, since God and the Torah and those who believed in the Torah, the Jews, were one and the same … Every word, every letter, every curlicue, contained hints of Divine wisdom which no matter how often it was studied could never be learned, since, like God, the Torah was infinite. God Himself studied the Torah; that is to say, He studied His own depths. All the heavens, the entire eternity, were one great yeshivah. God even found time to study with the souls of little children who had left the world early. In my imagination I pictured the Almighty sitting at a heavenly table surrounded by little souls in skullcaps and earlocks, all of them anxious to hear the word of Him who was beyond words of praise and beyond human knowledge, and of Whom the best thing that could be said was silence.
Leafing through the cabala books, I discovered that even as they studied the Torah in the heavens, so did they indulge in fiery loves. In fact, in heaven Torah and love were two sides of the same entity. God copulated with the Divine Presence, which was actually God’s wife, and the people of Israel were their children. When the Jews transgressed and God grew angry at them and wanted to punish them, the Divine Presence interceded for them like any Jewish mother when the father is angry. The authors of the cabala books constantly warned against taking their writings literally. They were always afraid of anthropomorphism. Still, they did present a human concept. Not only God and the Divine Presence but all the male and female saints in the heavens loved one another and coupled both face to face and front to back.
Jacob again mated with Rachel, Leah, Bilhah, and Zilpah. The Patriarchs, King David, King Solomon, all the great people of the Scriptures and the Gemara, had wives and concubines in heaven. These couplings were unions performed for the glory of God. I already knew from reading the Book of the Covenant and maybe from glancing into my older brother’s books that there were male trees and female trees. Winds and bees carried the pollen from one tree to another and fructified them. But I realized now that even in heaven the principle of male and female prevailed. I myself began to long for the mysteries of the girls in our street and courtyard. They seemed to eat, drink, and sleep just like men, but they looked different, spoke differently, smiled differently, dressed differently. Their lips, breasts, hips, throats, expressed something I didn’t understand but was drawn to. The girls laughed at things that evoked no laughter in me. They thrilled over doodads that left me cold. They said words that struck me as silly and childish, yet their voices appealed to me. Not only God but also objects down here on earth had a language that defied interpretation. Hands, feet, eyes, noses—all had their own speech. They said something, but what? I had read somewhere that King Solomon understood the language of animals and birds. I had heard of people who could read faces and palms, and I yearned to know all this.
Three
Some of the cabala books were chiefly concerned with sacred matters, but others, such as the Book of Raziel and the Book of the Devout, devoted much space to the powers of evil—demons, devils, imps, hobgoblins—as well as to magic. God had His kingdom, and Satan, or Asmodeus, had his own. The devil had secrets, too—dark secrets. The powers of goodness nourished themselves on the Torah and good deeds. They sought only to attain the truth, whereas the powers of darkness fed on lie, blasphemy, hate, envy, madness, cruelty. There were synagogues, houses of prayer, and Chassidic study houses on our street where Jews prayed, studied the Torah, and served God, but the street also contained taverns, brothels, and a den for thieves, pimps, and whores. There was a woman on the street of whom it was said that if she even glanced at a child she promptly gave it the evil eye. I knew her. A raging fire burned in her black eyes. It was said that three of her husbands had died and two had divorced her. She was capable of hitting a child she didn’t know, tearing off his cap, or spitting at him. Every third word she uttered was a curse. She wore her own hair instead of a wig, but this wasn’t hair but a kind of tangle of tufts, elflocks, and thorns. The crooked eyes and wide nostrils brought to mind a bulldog. Her lips were thick, her teeth long, black, and as pointed as nails. My mother said that Satan gazed out of her eyes. She was allegedly a supplier of domestic help, but it was said that she induced country girls into prostitution and sold some of them into white slavery in a city far across the sea—Buenos Aires.
Because my brother Joshua had left the path of righteousness and denied both God and the devil, my parents often spoke of both these forces in order to overcome his arguments. If there were demons, there had to be a God. I heard countless stories of dybbuks, corpses that left their graves at night and wandered off to visit miracle workers or to attend distant fairs. Some of them forgot that they were dead and launched all kinds of business ventures or even got married. In Bilgorai, my mother’s home town, there was a ritual slaughterer, Avromele, on whose window an evil spirit had been beating for weeks on end. Every evening the whole population of the town gathered in the house to listen to the invisible force knock on the pane. One could discourse with it. One asked it questions and it tapped out the answers—mostly “yes” or “no” but occasionally entire words according to an agreed-upon code. The town nachalnik, a Russian, was apparently an enlightened man who didn’t believe in evil spirits. He sent the police and soldiers to search the house—the attic, the cellar, every nook and cranny—to discover the source of the noises, but they found nothing. Well, and what about the girl in Krasnik who was possessed by the soul of a sinful man which in a male voice recounted the sins and abominations he had committed during his lifetime? The girl was of common stock and didn’t even know the alphabet, yet the dybbuk
spouted passages and quotations from the Gemara, the Midrash, and other holy books. Often, wag that he was, he transposed the sacred words so that they emerged obscene but in a way apparent only to those who were learned. I read about such demons in storybooks. They were even mentioned in the Gemara, which spoke of Jewish demons and of Gentile demons.
I lived in dread fear of these invisible beings. Our stairs were dark at night, and going up and down them became for me a terrible burden. I often counted the fringes on my ritual garment to see that none were missing. I mumbled incantations from the Gemara and from other sacred books. My brother Joshua laughed at me. He argued that there was no such thing as evil spirits. It was all fantasy, fanaticism. Well, but had a whole world conspired to make up the same lie? An anthology of German poetry had somehow found its way into our house. Since German is similar to Yiddish and because my eagerness to read was so great, I had learned to read German and I read Goethe’s “Der Erlkönig,” Heine’s poem about the Lorelei, and many other mystical poems. The whole world believed in ghosts. If it could be shown that a piece of mud in the gutter housed millions of unseen microbes, why couldn’t hordes of invisible ghosts be flying around in the air? Even my astute brother couldn’t come up with an answer to this question.
There was a book in our house called The Pillar of Service, which explained the cabala in simpler terms. It claimed that God had existed forever. The author, Reb Baruch Kossover, “proved” the existence of God using the same arguments I found years later in Spinoza’s Ethics and in other philosophical works. God’s essence and His existence are identical. When we say that one and one makes two or that the sum of the angles in a triangle equals two right angles, we don’t need a wooden triangle or two groschen to prove us right. One and one would equal two even if there were no objects in the world.
Once Reb Baruch Kossover had reassured the reader that there is a God, he went on to describe Him without any further proofs. Before God had created the world, all His traits or qualities had been completely merged within Him. Wisdom blended with mercy, beauty with strength, perpetuity with understanding and love. But it seemed that the urge to create was one of God’s attributes, too. How could there be a king without a people? How could one be merciful when there wasn’t anyone to receive the mercy? How could God love when there was no one to be loved? So long as God didn’t create the world, all His traits were latent, not realized—potential, not factual. God needed a world, many worlds, to become what He was. Creativeness was God’s most obvious attribute.
But how could He create the world when He Himself and His radiance flooded everything? The answer given by the cabala, especially by Rabbi Isaac Lurie, is that in order to be able to create and to make room for Creation, God had to shrink or reduce Himself. It lay within His power—if He so desired—to dim or even extinguish part of His light. In the midst of the infinity He created a vacuum, where the Creation would come into being. Rabbi Baruch Kossover constantly warned the reader not to take him literally. God wasn’t matter, and the emptiness He created wasn’t one of space but one of quality. When a teacher taught a child just entering cheder, he wouldn’t try to make him grasp the intricacies of the Talmud or the commentaries. The teacher had, in a sense, to compress his thinking in order to adjust it to the capacities of his young pupil. According to the cabala, Creation was a process of diminution and emanation. First God created the World of Emanation. This world was still close to God, as spiritually elevated as can be conceived, but even it already revealed God’s traits or sephiroth: the Crown, Wisdom, Understanding, Mercy, Power, Splendor, Infinity, Magnificence, Fundamentality, Kingdom. This spiritually exalted world then emanated a world that was lower, the World of Creation, which possessed the same ten sephiroth. Later came the World of Form, and only then the World of Deed or the World of Matter, with all the stars, galaxies, comets, planets; and, it seems, at the very end was created our world. Actually, we were all part of God’s light, but through the process of emanation and diminution God’s light grew ever darker, ever more specific and accessible, until it turned into matter—earth, rocks, sea, animals, people. According to the cabala, Creation was a kind of gradual revelation and popularization of divinity. The cabala is pantheistic. My later interest in Spinoza stemmed from trying to study the cabala.
Four
Although I was still young when I began to browse through the cabala books, I realized that their particulars weren’t as important as was their concept that everything is God and God is everything; that the stone in the street, the mouse in its hole, the fly on the wall, and the shoes on my feet were all fashioned from the Divinity. The stone, I told myself, might appear dead, mute, cold, indifferent to good and evil, but somewhere deep within it, it was alive, knowledgeable, on the side of justice, united with God from Whose substance it was kneaded. Matter was a mask over the face of spirit. Behind smallness hid bigness, stupidity was crippled wisdom, evil was perverted mercy. Years later when I read that a stone consisted of trillions of molecules constantly in motion and that these molecules consisted of atoms and that these atoms were in themselves complicated systems, whirls of energy, I said to myself: “That’s the cabala, after all!” Even as a boy I had heard that atoms were not merely dead balls of matter. Certain atoms such as radium emitted rays of light and energy for hundreds of years. I had heard the words “proton” and “electron.” Silvers of scientific knowledge found their way into our pious household through the newspapers and the Yiddish and Hebrew books my brother brought home. Science, just like the cabala, spoke of light that could be seen with human eyes and of invisible light. I had read somewhere about the ether that filled the endless space and whose vibrations allowed eyes to see, trees to grow, creatures to live and love. Later, I read that certain scholars denied the existence of this all-encompassing ether. There were heretics in science, too. There, too, they served an idol one day, and the next they dragged him through the slime ….
I existed on several levels. I was a cheder boy, yet I probed the eternal questions. I asked a question about the Gemara and tried to explain the mysteries of Zeno. I studied the cabala and I went down to play tag and hide-and-seek with the boys in the courtyard. I was aware of being quite different from all the other boys, and I was deeply ashamed of this fact. Simultaneously I read Dostoevski in Yiddish translation and penny dreadfuls that I bought on Twarda Street for a kopeck. I suffered deep crises, was subject to hallucinations. My dreams were filled with demons, ghosts, devils, corpses. Sometimes before falling asleep I saw shapes. They danced around my bed, hovered in the air. In my fantasies or daydreams I brought the Messiah or was myself the Messiah. By uttering magic words, I built a palace on a mountaintop in the Land of Israel or in the desert region, and I lived there with Shosha. Angels and demons served me. I flew to the farthest stars. I discovered a potion which when drunk revealed all the world’s wisdom and made one immortal. I spoke with God and He disclosed His secrets to me.
My moods varied swiftly. Now I was in ecstasy and soon deep in despair. The cause of my gloom was often the same—un-bearable pity for those who were suffering and who had suffered in all the generations. I had heard about the cruelties perpetrated by Chmielnicki’s Cossacks. I had read about the Inquisition. I knew about the pogroms against Jews in Russia and Rumania. I lived in a world of cruelty. I was tormented not only by the sufferings of men but by the sufferings of beasts, birds, and insects as well. Hungry wolves attacked lambs. Lions, tigers, and leopards had to devour other creatures or die from hunger. Hunters wandered through forests and shot deer, hares, and pheasants for pleasure. I bore resentment not only against man but against God, too. It was He who had provided the savage beasts with claws and fangs. It was He who had made man a bloodthirsty creature ready to do violence at every step. I was a child, but I had the same view of the world that I have today—one huge slaughterhouse, one enormous hell. My brother had brought home a brochure about Darwin which contained a chapter about Malthus. Making sure my father shouldn’t
see me, I read the book in a single day. Malthus proved in a way that couldn’t be clearer that countless creatures were born to die, for otherwise the world would fill with so many creatures that everyone would starve to death or simply become crushed. Wars, plagues, and famines sustained life on this earth. Darwin went even further and maintained that the continuous struggle for food or sex is the origin of all species. The Cossacks who massacred the Jews, the Russians, the Tartars, all the tribes that kept on killing each other, actually implemented the plans of Creation. Kill or be killed was the rule of life and of God. Malthus’ contentions denied all the claims of the Scriptures that God despised bloodshed. Actually He had so constructed the world that blood should spill, that children should starve to death, that beasts should devour each other. I read these truths that I knew no one could deny, yet at the same time I felt as if I were swallowing poison. I closed this terrible book and began to browse through the Scriptures. I had long been aware of the amazing contradictions contained in this holy volume. The same Moses who said, “Thou shalt not kill” also said, “Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.” The wars waged by Joshua bore an uncanny resemblance to the outrages perpetrated by Chmielnicki’s Cossacks. King David, the alleged author of the Psalms, hardly conducted himself like a psalmist should. Before my eyes the vision had long lingered of how he measured prisoners with a rope to indicate which would live and which would die. Since a murderer was a malefactor, how could King David be called a saint? And why must the Messiah descend from King David? And when the Messiah came, how would I be able to call King David, a murderer, “Grandpa”? In the Psalms it said that people of violence and falseness are an abomination to God. Well, but how could God abominate them if they carried out His bidding?
Love and Exile Page 4