The righteous men

by Sam Bourne

  The streets were desolate. No cars travelled because the Yom Kippur restrictions prohibited all driving. A few knots of young men walked together, wearing their prayer shawls. Even though the evening was warm and people were out together, the atmosphere was not festive. Instead Crown Heights seemed to be under a blanket of contemplation and silent thought; it was as if the whole neighbourhood was a single, roofless synagogue. Will felt grateful for his costume, so that he could move through this extraordinary atmosphere without breaking the spell.

  They were, Will now understood, moving towards the synagogue. Once again, he wondered if he and TO were walking voluntarily into the wolf's lair — with the wolf as their guide.

  But they did not go inside the main entrance. Instead they entered a building next door, one that seemed entirely out of place in this neighbourhood. It looked like a redbrick annexe to an Oxford college, ancient by New York standards. Outside were crowds of men, spilling out from the lobby. They did not have to wade through the throng: people stepped out of the way the moment they recognized the rabbi. Will could see some raised eyebrows. He assumed they were directed at him, a face they did not know. But when he saw TO looking down at her feet, he understood: they were shocked to see a woman in this usually male terrain.

  TO managed to whisper an explanation. They were entering the Rebbe's house. This was the home the late leader had lived in and which had doubled as his office.

  Will stared. He had been here before, forty-eight hours earlier.

  Soon they had reached a staircase. The crowds were thinning now. They moved up another flight, to a corridor empty of people. Straight into his trap, thought Will.

  Rabbi Freilich led them through one door, which revealed another. But he did not go in. Instead he turned around, to offer an explanation to TO.

  'I want you to know that what you are about to see is a mark of our desperation. It is a violation of Yom Kippur that has never before occurred in this building and, please God, will never happen again. We are doing it for-'

  'Pikuach nefesh.' TO had interrupted him. 'I know. It is a matter of saving lives.'

  The rabbi nodded, grateful to TO for her understanding.

  Then he turned around, breathing in sharply through his nostrils as if bracing himself for the secret he was about to reveal. Only then did Rabbi Freilich dare open the door.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Sunday, 11.01pm, Crown Heights, Brooklyn

  This place, Will realized, would normally be still on such a holy evening: no lights on, no machines in use, no phones answered, no eating, no drinking. Even Will could tell that the scene before him was an act of mass sacrilege.

  It looked like the control room of a police station. Perhaps a dozen people at computers, surrounded by in-trays spilling over with paper and, on a back wall, a large wipe-board, covered with names, phone numbers, addresses. Down one side, Will could see a list of names. In a quick scan, he spotted Howard Macrae and Gavin Curtis — a line through each of them.

  'No one knows about this room apart from the men working in it — and now you. We have been working in here day and night for a week. And today we lost the man who knew it best, the man who set it up.'

  'Yosef Yitzhok,' said Will, noticing a pile of maps — one of them for Montana — and a stack of guide books, for London, for Copenhagen, for Algiers.

  'All of this was his work. And today he was murdered.'

  'Rabbi Freilich?' It was TO. 'Do you think you could start at the beginning?'

  The rabbi led them to the front of the room, where a desk had been set out as if for a teacher to invigilate an exam.

  The three of them sat around it.

  'As you know, the Rebbe in his later years spoke often about Moshiach, about the Messiah. He gave long talks at our weekly farbrengen touching on this theme. Tova Chaya will also know how we preserved those talks for posterity.'

  TO took her cue. 'Because he spoke on the sabbath, the Rebbe could not be tape-recorded or filmed. That's not allowed. So we relied on an ancient system. In the synagogue would be three or four people chosen for their amazing memories.

  They would stand just a few yards away from the Rebbe, usually with their eyes closed, listening to every word, memorizing what he said. Then, the minute the sabbath was over they would gather together and kind of spew out their memories, while one of them would scribble it all down. They would get it out of their heads as quickly as they could. While they were doing it, they would check what they remembered against each other, adding a word here, correcting a word there. I can still picture it: these guys were incredible. They could listen to a three-hour speech by the Rebbe and recite it off by heart. They were called choyzers, literally "returners".

  The Rebbe would say it, they would play it back. They were human tape recorders.'

  'And, Tova Chaya, do you remember who was the most brilliant choyzer of them all?'

  TO's eyes suddenly widened, as a long-buried memory came back. 'But he was just a boy.'

  'It's true. But he became a choyzer soon after he had reached the age of Bar Mitzvah. He was just thirteen when he began relaying the words of the Rebbe. He had a special gift.' Freilich faced Will. 'We are speaking about Yosef Yitzhok.'

  'He could memorize whole speeches, just like that?'

  'He always said he could not memorize whole speeches.

  Only the words of the Rebbe. When the Rebbe spoke, he would make himself, his own thoughts, disappear. He would try to insert himself into the mind of the Rebbe, to become an extension of him. That was his technique. No one else could do it the way he could. The Rebbe had a special affection for him.' Rabbi Freilich rolled back into his seat, his eyes closed. Will could only guess, but this grief looked genuine.

  'As I said, in the last few years, the Rebbe began to speak more and more about Moshiach. Telling us to prepare for the coming of Messiah, reminding us that Messiah was a central belief in Judaism. That it was not some abstract, remote point of theology but that it was real. He wanted us to believe it, that Moshiach could be with us in the here and now.

  'No one knew this teaching of the Rebbe's better than Yosef Yitzhok. He heard it week after week. But it was more than hearing. It was absorbing. He was ingesting this material, taking it into himself. And then, in the last days of the Rebbe, Yosef Yitzhok — who was a brilliant scholar in his own right noticed something.

  'He thought back to all the talks the Rebbe had given on the theme of the Messianic age and he discerned a pattern.

  Very often the Rebbe would quote a pasuk-'

  'A verse.'

  'Thank you, Tova Chaya. Yes, the Rebbe would quote a verse from Deuteronomy. Tzedek, tzedek tirdof.'

  'Justice, justice shall you pursue,' TO murmured.

  'The English translation the books give is, "Follow justice and justice alone, so that you may live and possess the land the Lord your God is giving you". But it was that word, tzedek, that caught Yosef Yitzhok's attention. To use it so often, and always in the same context. It was as if the Rebbe was reminding us of something.'

  'He wanted you to remember the tzaddikim. The righteous men.'

  'That's what Yosef Yitzhok thought. So he went back through the texts, examining them intensely. And that's how he saw something else, something even more intriguing.'

  Will leaned forward, his eyes boring into the rabbi's.

  In close proximity to the quotation — tzedek, tzedek tirdofhe would offer another quotation. Not the same one every time, but from the same two sources. Either he would cite the Book of Proverbs-'

  'Chapter ten?'

  'Yes, Mr Monroe. Chapter ten. That's right. You knew all this already?'

  'Think of it as an informed guess. Don't let me interrupt you; please, continue.'

  'Well, as you say, the Rebbe would either quote a verse from Proverbs, Chapter 10, or he would quote from the prophets. Specifically, Isaiah, Chapter 30. Now that got Yosef Yitzhok very excited. Because kabbalists know one important thing about Isa
iah, Chapter 30, Verse 18. It ends with the word lo, the Hebrew for "for him". The full phrase is "blessed are all they who wait for Him". But the real significance of the word-'

  '-is the way it is spelled.'

  'Tova Chaya has beaten me to it. The word lo is made up of two characters, Mr Monroe. Lamad and vav. It spells thirty six. Now the Rebbe was a careful speaker. He did not say things by accident. He did not pull quotations out of the air.

  Yosef Yitzhok was convinced there was a deliberate intent.

  'So he went through every transcript. And, sure enough, the Rebbe spoke of tzedek, followed immediately by a verse from one of those two chapters, thirty-five times. By that method, he left us with thirty-five different verses.'

  'But-'

  'I know what you're thinking, Mr Monroe, and you are right. There are thirty-six righteous men. We'll come to that.

  For the moment, Yosef Yitzhok has thirty-five verses, staring at him from the page. He wonders what they could mean.

  And then he remembers the stories that children like him and like you, Tova Chaya, were raised on. Stories of the founder of Hassidism, the Baal Shem Tov; stories of Rabbi Leib Sorres.'

  Then of such greatness, they were privileged to know the whereabouts of the righteous men.' Will looked at Tova Chaya as she spoke: she had, he was sure, worked it all out.

  'Exactly. Few men knew the mind of the Rebbe as intimately as Yosef Yitzhok, and he also knew the Rebbe's worth.

  He knew that he was one of the great men of Hassidic history.

  Some of the very greatest had been let in on this divine secret.

  It was not absurd to imagine the Rebbe would be one of them.'

  'So Yosef Yitzhok reckoned the Rebbe knew who the thirty six were. And he goes further: he thinks these thirty-five verses he quoted are clues to their identity?'

  'Exactly, Will. Yosef Yitzhok has this thought in the very closing days of the Rebbe's life, when the Rebbe is too ill to answer any questions. He can barely speak.'

  'So what does he do?'

  'He stares at the thirty-five verses for days on end. He is sure the Rebbe wants them to be understood, that he is passing this information on for a reason. So he is determined to break them open, so to speak, to find out what is inside. He looks at them from every angle. He translates the letters into numeric values; he adds; he multiplies. He reproduces them as anagrams. But of course there is a logical problem.

  'How could the identities of the righteous men be contained in those verses? The identities change in every generation.

  Yet the verses stay stubbornly the same. Even if, say, verse twenty included the name of tzaddik number twenty for this year, where would we find the name of tzaddik number twenty for the year 2020 or 2050 or, in the past, 1950 and 1850? How could the names of men who are alive today be concealed in a text that remains static? 'And that's when Yosef Yitzhok's remarkable powers truly shone through. He remembered the answer.'

  'You mean the Rebbe had already told him?'

  'Not directly, of course. But the Rebbe had given him the answer. Yosef Yitzhok had heard it. All he needed to do was to remember it. And do you know what it was? It was the last line of the last talk at the last farbrengen the Rebbe ever addressed. "Space depends on time. Time reveals space". Those were his last words in public'

  There was a pause.

  'Incredible,' said TO.

  'You've lost me, I'm afraid,' said Will, suddenly the dunce of the class.

  'Don't worry. Yosef Yitzhok was baffled too. These were beautiful sentences. But they were an enigma. Space depends on time. Time reveals space. What does that mean? That's when Yosef Yitzhok came to me, letting me in on his theory. The Rebbe often spoke in riddles, in elliptical sentences that might take many hours — many years even — to study and interpret.

  Yosef Yitzhok spent a long night working away at these sentences. And then he had what you would call a brainwave and what I would call a helping hand from HaShem.

  'You may know that the Rebbe was a very close follower of science and technology. He read Scientific American and Nature and a whole variety of journals. He was always up to date on the latest developments, in neuroscience, in biochemistry. But he had a special interest in technology. He loved gadgets! He never owned them: he was the least materialistic man you could ever know. But he liked to know about them.

  'Yosef Yitzhok knew that about the Rebbe. And that's what gave him his idea. Here, I'll show you.'

  Rabbi Freilich reached for a worn, leather-bound book and thumbed rapidly through the pages. He found the page and then the verse he was looking for.

  'Now what is the year?'

  Will was about to answer when TO got there first. 'Five thousand seven hundred and sixty-eight.'

  Will frowned. 'What?'

  'It's the Hebrew calendar,' TO explained. 'It dates back to creation. Jews believe the world has been in existence for less than six thousand years.'

  'OK,' said the rabbi. 'The year is 5768. And here is a verse from Chapter 10 of the Book of Proverbs. In fact this is a crucial verse. Verse 18. This is what Yosef Yitzhok tried out.

  We count along the line and mark the fifth letter.' The rabbi's finger stopped at the selected character. 'Then the seventh from there.' It stopped again. 'Then the sixth from there. And then the eighth. You see: 5-7-6-8. And we keep doing that till we get to the end of the line. So in this case, the fifth letter is a yud. The seventh letter after that is a hay. The sixth is a mem. And the eighth is also a mem. You keep on like that until you have a string of letters.'

  'Which then convert into numbers.' Will was guessing.

  'Precisely so. A string of numbers. Here, I'll show you one of the very earliest ones Yosef Yitzhok worked out.'

  The rabbi stood up, leading Will and TO over to a second wipe-board. There, neatly written in a black marker pen, was a long series of digits: 699331, 5709718, 30.

  'Don't tell me that's a phone number.'

  'No, it is not. We wondered about that, too. We even tried a few. No, this is where the Rebbe's eye for the latest advances in technology was so important.'

  TO was staring at the figure, as if the sheer penetration of her gaze would crack it open.

  'It is-' and at this the rabbi could not deny himself a little smile of amused pride, as if he had still not got over the brilliance of it all '-a GPS number. Or rather, contained in this number are the co-ordinates of longitude and latitude that give you a GPS number, co-ordinates for the Global Positioning System.'

  'I don't believe it,' said Will. 'You mean that whole satellite navigation thing?' It sounded preposterous.

  'That's it. A system that maps the entire globe, watched from space, and which gives precise co-ordinates for any spot on earth. The Rebbe must have read about it. Or maybe he just knew.'

  'You're telling me that contained in those thirty-five biblical verses are the co-ordinates for thirty-five righteous men?'

  'We did not believe it either, Mr Monroe. One verse gave us a number for a remote hillside in Montana: according to the map, nobody lived there. But we sent the man who runs our centre in Seattle to take a closer look and he saw a log cabin. With a man inside, living alone. Like something from our folk tales, Tova Chaya: a simple man in the forest.'

  Pat Baxter, thought Will. The very cabin he had gazed at just a few days ago.

  'Another number was an empty space in the middle of the Sudan. Again, no one was meant to live there. But then we saw from satellite pictures that a refugee camp had sprung up on that spot during the last few months, saving people who were fleeing for their lives. It was maintained by one man: the international agencies were not even sure who he was. So we began to realize that we were right. That the Rebbe was right.'

  'What about this number?' asked Will, pointing at the wipe-board. 'What did this come out as?'

  'I'll show you.' The rabbi walked the few paces to where one of the young men was working away at a computer. TO and Will caught up, watching the technician ov
er his shoulder.

  The rabbi pointed at the number on the wipe-board and murmured an instruction.

  The young man punched in the digits, waited a few seconds and then watched as the computer came back with an answer. 10 Downing Street, London, SW1 2AB, UK.

  'So this was the verse for Gavin Curtis?'

  The rabbi nodded.

  Will needed to sit down and, ideally, drink something.

  Though nothing was around. These men would use computers and work hard, even though it was Yom Kippur, because lives were at stake. Pikuach nefesh. But they would break no rules they did not have to.

  Now TO was speaking. 'So that was what the Rebbe was trying to say. Space depends on time. Time reveals space. The location depends on time. If you know the time, the year — if you use the number 5678 — then you will know the space.

  You'll work out the location.' She was shaking her head in wonder at the ingenuity of it. 'And I suppose if you try the same verses with different years, you get different places.

  Different people.'

  'Well, our texts are good at guarding their secrets, Tova Chaya. Yosef Yitzhok wanted to do as you say. He worked with people here to devise a computer programme, to do what we just did with that one verse: stopping at every fifth or seventh character. He did it for different years. And then he ran it through the GPS system and, sure enough, he started getting place names. But what use is a place name, Kabul or Mainz, for 1735? How are we to know who lived there then? Besides, Yosef Yitzhok always wondered if that was too easy.'

  'If what was too easy?'

  'He wasn't sure it would necessarily be the same verses for all time. Those were the verses the Rebbe had mentioned for his generation. But maybe the other great sages who had somehow been let in on this secret in the past — the Baal Shem Tov or Rabbi Leib Sorres — maybe they knew of the righteous men of their time in a different way. They didn't have this GPS, did they? This method wouldn't have made much sense to them, would it? They would have had their own ways — different verses, or maybe a different method entirely.

  This, I now realize, is what lay behind the Rebbe's interest in technology. I think he understood that even the most enduring, ancient truths could outwardly change very fast, that they would find new forms. Hassidim had to know about the modern world, because this too is HaShem's creation. He is found here, too.'