For the Time Being (16 page)

Now people like me peered over a high wall to see it as a great curiosity—the bare planet poking up inside a building. It was a great curiosity, and so were the people, for here was our condition made plain, and we came straining to see it.

E N C O U N T E R S
      
       Only some deeply grounded and fully paradoxical view of God can make sense of the notion that God knows and loves each of 5.9 billion of us.

Later that Greek Orthodox Easter Sunday, holding a dyed red egg in my hand, I was sitting in the lobby of a Jerusalem hotel. Some stout Greek women came and sat in the cluster
of chairs around me. When another joined them, I gave her my chair and sat on the floor. More and more came—big-boned, black-clad, wide women, grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Then they all left, except the very oldest one, the very widest one. She could not rise from her chair. To help her I ditched the egg, held the woman’s black-sleeved upper arms, and pulled. It didn’t work.

“Sorry,” she said. I clasped my hands under her arms and behind her shoulders, pressing her bosom to me, braced my knees on her chair, and used all my strength. Still no dice.

“Sorry,” she said. She struggled and gripped my back; her upper body bore down on my arms, and her feet pushed at the floor.

“Sorry.” We tried again. When at last she rose from the chair, she thanked me: “Sorry.” I think it was her only English word.

Sometimes we touch strangers. Sometimes no one speaks. Like clouds we travelers meet and part with members of our cohort, our fellows in the panting caravans of those who are alive while we are. How many strangers have we occasion to hold in our arms? Once there was a beautiful, wasting young woman in a turnpike restroom; I held her in my arms several times as she got in and out of her wheelchair, in and out of her jeans.

In the country then called North Yemen, on the Arabian
Peninsula, I visited a southern town whose tribal citizens had seen few if any Westerners. Hundreds of pedestrians were crossing an intersection. There, where jammed streets met, I saw a parked motorcycle. On a special seat behind the empty driver’s seat sat a baby, an agreeable-looking, solid baby, whom I greeted. The baby generously extended to me a key ring. I could not help but notice that several hundred Yemenis, the baby’s father or brother doubtless somewhere among them, abruptly stopped moving to watch.

I took the key ring, held it in sight, and thanked the baby, the way one does. The several hundred Yemenis held their breaths. I know they were holding their breaths because when—after stretching the interval until the first instant the baby began, visibly at the eyebrows, to doubt life’s very fundaments—I handed the key ring back, they all exhaled at once; I could hear it.

T H I N K E R
      
       His cantor testified that when the Baal Shem Tov taught Torah, his hearers received it from his mouth “as Israel had once received it at Mount Sinai through the sound of thunder and trumpets, and the voice of God was not yet silenced on earth, but endured and could still be heard.”

Isaac Luria’s acute sense of exile darkens his notion of
holy sparks: Since dense shells imprison the divine, God’s presence languishes everywhere lost. The Baal Shem Tov, who often startled people by turning cartwheels, flipped this dark idea on its shining head: If shells imprison the divine, then all we see holds holiness. Luria despaired of the husk, the shard without: the Baal Shem Tov delighted in the spark, the God within. This is not pantheism but pan-entheism: The one transcendent God made the universe, and his presence kindles inside every speck of it. Each clot of clay conceals a coal. A bird flies the house. A live spark heats a clay pot.

“When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.” One of the Baal Shem Tov’s spiritual heirs put it this way.

The Baal Shem Tov’s teaching combined Isaac Luria’s Kabbalah with traditional Hasidic devotion. The Baal Shem Tov dropped Luria’s asceticism, saying, “Do not deny your flesh, God forbid”—although he himself fasted one week a month. He skipped lightly over Luria’s wild-eyed Messianism. He shunned Kabbalah’s stiff and esoteric elitism. He preached service, and openly returned the fruits of his prayer to the people around him. To traditional teaching he added fervor, joy (“joy in performing the commandments”), and an urgent
belief that every Jew, learned or not, could pray in the presence of God. The Baal Shem Tov prized prayer even more highly than Torah study. By praying with devotion, by holding themselves fast to God, he said, people could mark, shift, and ultimately unify heaven.

The Baal Shem Tov’s grandson was Dov Baer, the Great Maggid, the wandering teacher. His passion was cleaving to God. People stay in God’s presence by the effort of
Devekut
, devotion. The Great Maggid wrote the
Tract on Ecstasy
. Ecstasy, I think, is a soul’s response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.

E V I L
      
       One night in a Quito hotel room, I read the Gideon Bible, an edition with facing columns in English and Spanish. I read for twenty minutes before a double-edged razor blade fell from its pages. One day in the Judean desert, in the cliffside monastery of Wadi Qilt, an American tourist lay supine on a balcony ledge. He was a thin young Vermonter with cropped hair and a pleading expression. Reaching down, he caught a wandering yellow kitten, carried it to his face, and settled the kitten there, over his shut eyes. Like many visitors to Jerusalem, he had, for the nonce, gone crazy; soon doctors sent him home.

What is that at the bottom of the hole? Is it alive? Healthy? Dead? Does a crab have it?

Killing people by scraping their flesh from their bones was an idea that lived. In the fifth century, Christians killed the wellborn lady Hypatia, according to Gibbon, in a church; they stripped her flesh with oyster shells, and threw the shellfuls of flesh, “quivering,” in a fire. Her problem was Neoplatonism, says writer Hal Crowther; also she studied mathematics. “‘After this,’ comments Bertrand Russell, ‘Alexandria was no longer troubled by philosophers.’”

“How can evil exist in a world created by God, the Beneficent One? It can exist, because entrapped deep inside the force of evil there is a spark of goodness. This spark is the source of life of the evil tendency…. Now, it is the specific mission of the Jew to free the entrapped holy sparks from the grip of the forces of evil by means of Torah study and prayer. Once the holy sparks are released, evil, having lost its life-giving core, will cease to exist.” So wrote Rabbi Yehuda Aryeh Leib Alter of Ger, in nineteenth-century Poland. It was the Baal Shem Tov who taught this vital idea.

God is spirit, spirit expressed infinitely in the universe, who does not give as the world gives. His home is absence, and there he finds us. In the coils of absence we meet him by
seeking him. God lifts our souls to their roots in his silence. Natural materials clash and replicate, shaping our fates. We lose the people we love, we lose our vigor, and we lose our lives. Perhaps, and at best, God knows nothing of these temporal accidents, but knows souls only. This God does not direct the universe, he underlies it. Or he “prolongs himself” into it, in Teilhard’s terms. Or in dear nutcase Joel Goldsmith’s terms, God is the universe’s consciousness. The consciousness of divinity is divinity itself. The more we wake to holiness, the more of it we give birth to, the more we introduce, expand, and multiply it on earth, the more God is “on the field.”

“Without a doubt, time is an accident,” Maimonides said, “one of the created accidents, such as blackness and whiteness.”

God is—for the most part—out of the physical loop of the fallen world he created, let us say. Or God is the loop, or pervades the loop, or the loop runs in God like a hole in his side he never fingers. Certainly God is not a member of the loop like the rest of us, passing the water bucket to splash the fire, kicking the bucket, passing the buck. After all, the semipotent God has one hand tied behind his back. (I cannot prove that with the other hand he wipes and stirs our souls from time to time, or that he spins like a fireball through our
skulls, and knocks open our eyes so we see flaming skies and fall to the ground and say, “Abba! Father!”)

N O W
      
       A man who struggles long to pray and study Torah will be able to discover the sparks of divine light in all of creation, in each solitary bush and grain and woman and man. And when he cleaves strenuously to God for many years, he will be able to release the sparks, to unwrap and lift these particular shreds of holiness, and return them to God. This is the human task: to direct and channel the sparks’ return. This task is
tikkun
, restoration.

Yours is a holy work on earth right now, they say, whatever that work is, if you tie your love and desire to God. You do not deny or flee the world, but redeem it, all of it—just as it is.

Buber on Hasidism: “We are sent into the world of contradiction; when we soar away from it into spheres where it appears fathomable to us, then we evade our task.” Buber explains the thinking of the Baal Shem Tov. Some thinkers argue that Buber, professing to clarify the Baal Shem Tov, voiced his own thoughts.