by Tuvia Fogel
It was Rivkah, the youngest daughter of Joseph ibn Sham’un, Rav Moshe’s prize student, who lived in Aleppo but was in Fustat that April, a welcome Pesach guest. She carried a tray with a big pot and two tall glasses. The finely engraved copper of both tray and pot shone like things a woman polishes every day. The pot had an elaborate spout and was full of a spiced apple drink, brewed before the Shabbat and kept hot on the abundant embers prepared for the holy day.
Joseph’s girl was nine. She walked to the low table on one side of the study, keeping her eyes on the floor as she’d been taught. But at the last moment, as if playing a secret game, she raised her eyes and smiled at the two men. It was as if someone shifted one of the heavy curtains and let in the April sun, so strong was the contrast between the atmosphere that the mystery of creation had evoked in the room and Rivkah’s mischievous grin. Maimonides shot her a mock-severe glance. She pretended to be frightened and ran from the room, a hand over her mouth hiding a giggle.
The rabbis, half a century separating their ages, poured themselves some hot cider. After a noisy sip, Yehezkel began pacing the narrow carpet between two rows of open crates brimming with neatly stacked, rolled-up parchments, tall ones in the back and short ones in the front.
Yehezkel admired Rav Moshe’s disdain for luxury, evident in these unadorned quarters. Old carpets, a low table, a raised cot for medical examinations, one prized high-backed chair, a few plain ones, and a writing desk. All other available space—and much that wasn’t really available—was given over to manuscripts. Books and parchments were everywhere, all in such order that Rav Moshe could have found any detail in seconds—in the rare case, that is, that he couldn’t find it in the gigantic archive in his head.
The pause in the lesson over, Maimonides started reciting scriptural proof.
“Genesis Rabba says that God unleashed the Flood on the world by releasing tehom, for its waters push against the firmament; they keep pushing since that second day, striving to cover the whole creation again with a single, gigantic wave—something only God’s love for his creatures prevents them from doing! And what of the splendid brevity of the eighty-ninth Psalm: ‘You dominate the pride of the sea!’”
Scratching his chin through his beard, Yehezkel thought that Rav Moshe sounded like he was trying to prove the sea’s guilt before some exegetical court. His teacher continued, a little less incensed, “But let us speak as philosophers now, as two Jews studying the mystery of the Children of Israel’s exile. What does this ‘curse’ on the sea suggest to you?”
Yehezkel, uncharacteristically at a loss for words, looked at his teacher, bewildered.
“Let’s start from the beginning,” said Rav Moshe. “After its creation and nefarious return in the guise of universal flood, you practically won’t find another mention of the sea in the whole Torah. In fact, the only time the Children of Israel faced it, at the Red Sea, the Lord of the Universe had to intervene himself to solve the problem. And Jonah? What do we learn from the sea’s role in the story of Jonah?”
By now Maimonides was sweating and dabbing at his face with a kerchief sprinkled with an essence whose fragrance reached his pupil’s nostrils. Even from a distance, as he paced the carpet back and forth, hands clasped behind his back, Yehezkel could feel Rav Moshe’s agitation.
Maimonides, head resting on his chest after the outburst, was looking from below bushy eyebrows, breath raspy. In the silence that followed, both men felt the heat seeping in from every slit in the house. The old man was the first to recover.
“Trust me, Hezki, it is no coincidence that Ishmaelites, who recognize the Oneness of God, are as diffident toward the sea as Jews are, while Greeks and Romans founded their empires on control of the seas. The conqueror of Egypt wrote to the second caliph: ‘The sea is a boundless expanse, on which great ships look like tiny specks; nought but heavens above and water beneath. Trust it little, fear it much. Man at sea is but a worm on a bit of wood—dud ‘ala ‘ud, he wrote—now engulfed, now scared to death!’”
Yehezkel couldn’t fathom the intensity of Rav Moshe’s animosity. But Maimonides wasn’t through yet. “Today, too, if one reads the signs, the violent nature of Franks and Venetians is clearly one with their seagoing traditions! Every seafaring people abandoned the ways of the Lord! Aren’t the brutal giants who inhabit the far north considered the best sailors in the world?”
Maimonides almost spat out the word “sailors,” his face congested as he inspired noisily after each heave of invective. “The life the Lord of the Universe wants us to live is founded on the cycles of the Earth! Divine Revelations happen on the tops of mountains! Jerusalem, His City, is not on the sea! Tell me, Yehezkel, can all these be just coincidences?”
Yehezkel finally stopped in front of the old man, arms across his chest, looking sternly at his teacher from the heady height of twenty-one years. He was ready to begin his paean to the sea, but Maimonides raised his right hand to stop him. The rising arm trembled; Yehezkel realized his teacher had overdone it and was paying the price of his loss of composure. The old man made to get up from his chair, and Yehezkel rushed to take his arm and accompany him to his bed. Maimonides whispered, “I apologize, Hezki. I’m afraid I won’t be able to hear your defense of the sea today. I don’t feel well, and if I don’t rest awhile I won’t have the strength to visit an important patient when Shabbat is out.”
As he spoke, Maimonides untied his caftan, removed the turban and stood there, unsteady, in a sleeveless tunic of white linen, over which hung his tzitzith, and a black silk skullcap.
With no warning, as his teacher slowly stretched out on the bed, Yehezkel had a sudden vision of him as a cadaver: the thinness and ashen color of his body, the skull bones visible through transparent skin. A shiver went down his pupil’s back, as if that were his teacher’s ghost, come back to see him from the next world of the just. He silently fetched a glass of water from downstairs, put it on Rav Moshe’s night table, and left quietly, still shaken, walking backward to the foot of the bamboo ladder in a corner of the room, behind one of the many curtains that led to the roof of his teacher’s house.
The moment he shifted the two planks that covered the opening, the Egyptian sun engulfed him in a purifying flame. He jumped out and closed the trapdoor, fleeing the thoughts brought on by the sight of his teacher so close to the revelation of all mysteries. In truth, he was grateful for the chance to spend some time alone on that roof, not three hundred feet from the Nile and the highest in a radius of half a parasang, which, for him, was a hoard of childhood memories. Its three terraces, a few steps leading from one to the other, had been a place of childhood games, and then a refuge from enraged adults, and finally the venue of the astronomy lessons Rav Moshe gave as a still vigorous sixty-year-old.
He was already sweating. He opened his caftan and reached for his turban but, noticing how the bright white plaster covering the roof narrowed his eyes to slits, decided to wait for a drop of sweat first. The sun was still high in the west, and he’d learned to stare at its bright reflection in the river and wait for a drop of sweat to crawl from under his turban and run down his forehead and into his eye. In the exact instant the salty drop fell through his lid and burst in front of his eye, he was treated to a manifestation of the Almighty, a spinning ball of white fire that he called a corner of the Merkavah; that is, a fraction of the chariot the prophet Ezekiel described in the first chapter of his book, though he had never shared the presumptious definition with anyone.
The afternoon grew drowsy. Behind, in the distance, he heard dogs bark and children scream. His mind, lulled by soft sounds and fleeting memories, was prey to a sweet enchantment—like a daydream, but more aware. The calm euphoria that accompanied the apparent somnolence was sought by Sufis as the path to fanaa, the “annulment” of the world’s natural forms.
He peeked at the corner of the chariot again before removing his turban, the experience leaving him languorous and grateful to God for small perfections in creation. H
e walked to the low wall on the side of the roof looking out on the river. Suddenly, he understood that seeing his teacher as a corpse had been an involuntary diagnosis of the incurable nature of Rav Moshe’s illness. He had seen his teacher’s imminent death, as it were, in a brief burst of prophecy. He swallowed, but the lump in his throat wouldn’t melt.
In the year since Naomi took her own life he’d only been on the roof once, when Rav Moshe nodded off during a lesson. Soon he would sail to Provence. He wondered if God would allow him to ever see his Fustat again. He raised his gaze.
Five parasangs to the southwest, across the Nile, the pyramids rose higher than anything else in Egypt. He’d heard Christian merchants, in their abysmal ignorance, call the tombs “Joseph’s granaries,” for in their fantasies they were where Jacob’s son advised Pharaoh to store grain for the coming seven lean years. Maybe his friends who held that going to study in Christian lands was folly were right after all. Shmuel, the baker’s son, told him there were no hammams in Christian cities. Yehezkel retorted they must all be fabulously wealthy to have hammams in their homes. Shmuel laughed and explained that there were no hammams because Christians . . . he could hardly bring himself to say it . . . because Christians never washed!
He suddenly remembered the contempt with which his teacher spat the word sailor, and frowned. “But I never told Rav Moshe that I go sailing on the river,” he mumbled.
He admitted to himself he’d been ill at ease all through Rav Moshe’s harangue against the sea. Sailing had become the secret, precious love of his life. He thought grimly that he’d been wise to tell no one of this infatuation for the sea, for if every one of his teacher’s opinions sooner or later became a rabbinical dictate, sailing would likely be declared a pagan practice, and forbidden to all Jews!
That night, God willing, he would go to al-Kahira for another lesson with Rav Pinhas, his new Kabbalah teacher. Rav Moshe found the discipline preposterous, based on legends and superstitions, yet despite his teacher’s scepticism, Rav Pinhas ben Meshullam charmed Yehezkel. The tall French Jew with a long, narrow black beard was at once a mystic and an eccentric. Though his movements were unruffled, his eyes burned with a kind of repressed frenzy. He had taught in many lands, on a self-assigned mission to spread the vision of a circle of rabbis in the towns of Provence, Languedoc, and Cataluña who, in recent decades, had revived esoteric traditions with Babylonian roots. They had a predilection—“a morbid attention,” Rav Moshe called it—for two Bible passages: the creation and the vision of Yehezkel’s delirious namesake, the prophet Ezekiel.
Yehezkel thought of the day he’d studied the first chapter of Genesis with Rav Pinhas. The Lunel rabbi liked to say, “The Torah is a living creature, its life pulsating under the surface of its literal meaning.” His attitude toward the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet was little short of worship, a cult of letters that Yehezkel had never encountered before and that attracted him with the same force of the patterns stars made in the night sky. He thought back to the lesson.
“I realize they are the creation of the universe and the beginning of the Torah, Rav Pinhas, but why are these thirty-one verses considered by kabbalists to be the most important in all of Scripture?”
“Ah. Now listen carefully, Yehezkel,” his charismatic new teacher said. “The path to arrive in the presence of the Creator is the reverse—the reflection—of the one along which we emanated from Him. To know the stages of creation is therefore to know, in reverse, the way one must follow to return to the root of all existence.” His voice, never loud in the first pace, became even softer. “This is why the secret meanings hidden in the words—in their values, their roots, their grammar—are more important in the first chapter of Genesis, and even more so in the first verse, than in the rest of the Torah. My teacher, Rav Yitzhak the Blind—may his light shine for years to come—says the deepest secrets are already present in the first word, Bereshit.”
That was why an hour earlier Yehezkel, enthralled by the idea of hidden wisdom, asked Rav Moshe to linger on the first verse, which they’d already covered the previous Shabbat. But the great philosopher, knowing of his pupil’s infatuation with that nonsense, impatiently denied him.
Turning to the east, his gaze fell on the three cemeteries—Mohammedan, Jewish, and Coptic—which stretched for thousands of shimmering graves between Fustat and the desert. His thoughts again turned to the imminent loss of his teacher. Yehezkel’s grandfather had been the same age as Rav Moshe and his best friend. Their families fled Cordoba together when the Almohad Caliph ordered Jews to embrace Islam, and arrived in Egypt together after some years in Fez and in Eretz Israel.
“Rav Moshe was about thirty when he arrived in Fustat,” he mumbled to himself, “and was known, but not famous. He began writing his Mishneh Torah while living on his brother David’s trade of precious stones with the East . . .”
The moment David ben Maimon’s name left his lips he fell silent, and then slapped his thigh really hard. “But of course! David drowned in a storm on his way to India, thirteen years before I was born! How could I be so stupid . . . Rav Moshe was bedridden for a year; the pain of losing his brother almost killed him! And I didn’t understand he was condemning the sea to cope with that pain! Yehezkel, you’re a simpleton . . . and an insensitive one, to boot!”
He thought back to his teacher’s evident distress as he spoke of the sea’s subsersive role. “Lord of the Universe! I saw his arm tremble as it rose, as if he were drowning, and did nothing to help him! My teacher would suffer less if David was killed by the sinister ‘waters below,’ symbol of evil in the world? Then I should have screamed my hatred for the sea like people on the edge of a battle! And what did I do instead? I blithely prepared to explain to him that God loves the sea as much as the mountains. And I am supposed to become a famous rabbi? I’m just a verbose, arrogant nobody, whose name shouldn’t be mentioned on the same day as that of the great Rav Moshe the Egyptian!”
Later in the study, Yehezkel heard the account of the sack of the Polis, two weeks earlier, by Franks and Venetians led by blind Doge Dandolo. Rav Moshe heard it from a Yemenite trader, Sheik Yoseph ibn Abulman, who had witnessed and, God being merciful, survived, the massacre that followed.
Yoseph had the dark complexion of Jews who’d lived in the Queen of Sheba’s land since before the destruction of the Temple, but not the dry physique and sharp features, vaguely reminiscent of birds of prey, of Yemenis. His role of middleman between India and Europe enriched him, and with wealth his contours had softened and rounded, until he resembled a florid Mediterranean trader. Maimonides asked him about the Sultan’s reaction to his tale that morning. Yoseph, a little jaded by everything he’d seen, answered, “Rabbi, what al-‘Adil most cares about are the Franks’ intentions now they’ve taken the Polis. Will they move on Egypt, as was their original plan, or will they be content to devour a Christian ally and, like wild beasts of the desert, fall asleep until the next meal? I heard they’re so busy tearing their victim’s flesh from each other, fighting over who will be emperor, that no one was even speaking of sailing on eastward!”
Maimonides made a face. “Puah! I never doubted the Latins would stop in the Polis, but then I know things that not many are aware of; things the Almighty advises the Sultan to reveal to me, for the good of our people. God forbid I should boast of it, but ever since their galleys arrived in the Golden Horn a year ago, I knew the Venetians, in exchange for trading rights in Alexandria, Damietta, and Fustat, promised al-‘Adil not to assist any expedition against Egypt.”
The old man grinned as he watched the look of surprise on the merchant’s rotund face. “But those rabid dogs, those of the city inside the sea,” he went on with a sideways glance at Yehezkel, “omitted to tell al-‘Adil that they had just contracted to ship thirty-five thousand cross-wearing knights . . . to Egypt! Still, since their fleet departed, the sultan assured me more than once that the Venetians, crafty and deceitful as they are, would find a way to honor
both commitments!”
“That they did,” whispered Yoseph, disgusted but impressed despite himself, “that they surely did. So the attempt to invade Egypt, thank God, is still in the future, and we should all pray to see them at each other’s throats for many years to come.” The merchant smiled wistfully. “But I shall also pray to be spared the spectacle from as close as I saw it this time. Now forgive me, Rabbi, but there’s a relative of my wife’s in Fustat I absolutely must visit, on pain of a bout of sulking by my sweet Judith!”
Maimonides got up to accompany his guest to the door, but Yoseph stepped in front of him and grabbed his bony hand in both his chubby ones. “Bless me, Rav Moshe, I beg you! Ask the Lord to let me find peace at home! Only you saved Yemen’s Jews from forced conversion by Salah ad-Din’s crazy brother; whom shall we turn to when you . . .” He nearly burst into sobs, so obvious was the gravity of Rav Moshe’s illness. The rabbi took his reddish cheeks in his hands, leaned forward, and whispered some Hebrew words. Then the merchant thanked Maimonides for his hospitality, wished both men a good week, and left the study.
Returning to the Shabbat routine and seeing Rav Moshe back in control did wonders for Yehezkel’s mood. His teacher refreshed himself behind a curtain as the noise from the hall below grew. Yehezkel started downstairs when he felt himself grabbed by the arm.
“Where are you running, young mystic?” asked his teacher with a smile that threatened verbal sparring. “I’d like another word with you before we go down for prayers. Have you nothing to say on the news Yoseph brought? Doesn’t the behavior of those savage Venetian ‘sailors’ confirm my opinion of seafaring civilizations? Or are you so naive that a beautiful sunset at sea is enough to make you defend those barbarians and their connection to the waters below? Because if you’d like to do that, I’m prepared to let my honorable guests wait a little so I can hear your refutation.”