For the Time Being (3 page)

There is at least this one extraordinary distinction of our generation: For it is in our lifetimes alone that people can
witness the unearthing of the deep-dwelling army of Emperor Qin—the seven thousand or the ten thousand soldiers, their real crossbows and swords, their horses and chariots. (The golden smithies of the emperor!) Seeing the open pits in the open air, among farms, is the wonder, and seeing the bodies twist free from the soil. The sight of a cleaned clay soldier upright in a museum case is unremarkable, and this is all that future generations will see. No one will display those men crushed beyond repair; no one will display their loose parts; no one will display them crawling from the walls. Future generations will miss the crucial sight of ourselves as rammed earth.

We alone can watch workers comb soil from bodies and wash their rigid faces, clean their fingernails. We can witness live workers digging bodies from soil and baring them to the light for the first time in 2,200 years. We can see a half-dug horse, whose lower jaw dips into the ground as if the planet were a feed bag. We can talk to the commune members who, in 1973, were digging a well here—by hand—when shovels rang against something hard in this soft land without stones. The well diggers scraped away the dirt, then looked down the well hole at an unblinking human face. The area now under excavation is larger than most American counties.

The average height of a clay infantryman is five feet nine inches, while the average height of a member of the honor
guards is six feet two inches. One infantry general is six feet four inches. A translation of the words of the Buddha refers to man as a fathom high: “In truth I say to you that within this fathom-high body … lies the world and the rising of the world and the ceasing of the world.”

“In the pictures of the old masters,” Max Picard wrote in
The World of Silence
, “people seem as though they had just come out of the opening in a wall; as if they had wriggled their way out with difficulty. They seem unsafe and hesitant because they have come out too far and still belong more to silence than themselves.”

There is now, living in New York City, a church-sanctioned hermit, Theresa Mancuso, who wrote recently, “The thing we desperately need is to face the way it is.”

When a person arrives in the world as a baby, says one Midrash, “his hands are clenched as though to say, ‘Everything is mine. I will inherit it all.’ When he departs from the world, his hands are open, as though to say, ‘I have acquired nothing from the world.’”

Confucius wept. Confucius, when he understood that he would soon die, wept.

C L O U D S
      
       We people possess records, like gravestones, of individual clouds and the dates on which they flourished.

In 1824, John Constable took his beloved and tubercular wife, Maria, to Brighton beach. They hoped the sea air would cure her. On June 12 he sketched, in oils, squally clouds over Brighton beach. The gray clouds lowered over the water in failing light. They swirled from a central black snarl.

In 1828, as Maria Constable lay dying in Putney, John Constable went to Brighton to gather some of their children. On May 22 he recorded one oblique bluish cloud riding high and messy over a wan sun. Two thin red clouds streaked below. Below the clouds he painted disconnected people splashed and dotted over an open, wide coast.

Maria Constable died that November. We still have these dated clouds.

The Mahabharata says, “Of all the world’s wonders, which is the most wonderful?

“That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die.”

N U M B E R S
      
       I find the following three approaches to the mystery of human numbers hilarious. Ted Bundy, the serial killer, after his arrest, could not comprehend the fuss. What was the big deal? David von Drehle quotes an exasperated Bundy in
Among the Lowest of the Dead:
“I mean, there are so many people.”

One R. Houwink, of Amsterdam, discovered this unnerving fact: The human population of earth, arranged perfectly tidily, would just fit into Lake Windermere, in England’s Lake District.

Recently, in the Peruvian Amazon region, a man asked the writer Alex Shoumatoff, “Isn’t it true that the whole population of the United States can be fitted into their cars?”

I S R A E L
      
       In Upper Galilee lies the mountainside town of Safad. In the sixteenth century, Torah scholars, poets, mystical philosophers, ethicists, and saints lived there. Chief among these was Rabbi Isaac Luria, whose thinking on God and the human soul altered Jewish thought forever. Luria’s views molded those of the eighteenth-century
Ukrainian peasant called the Baal Shem Tov, who founded modern Hasidism. For twenty-five years, with increasing admiration, I have studied these people: gloomy Luria because he influenced the exuberant Baal Shem Tov, and the Baal Shem Tov because he and his followers knew God, and a thing or two besides.

Now here I was in Safad, Luria’s place: a bit of an artists’ summer colony now, where secular sabras share the cool cobblestone lanes with black-hatted Orthodox Jews and Hasids. I saw in the heights beside me Mount Meron. There, legend has it, the text of the Kabbalist classic the Zohar (or Book of Splendor) “came down” to a holy man who lived in a cave.

Rabbi Luria and the Safad sages were the great Kabbalists, the community of the devout. Often they fasted; they prayed three times in the synagogue by day, and prayed again at one in the morning. To the poor, they gave two-tenths of their income, though most were themselves poor men—farmers, weavers, and tailors—who both studied Torah and supported their large families. Together they transformed the Kabbalistic strand of Judaism into a vigorous theology that explained how the physical world emanated in degrees from a purely spiritual God.

As the evening of Sabbath approached, Luria and the others decked themselves out in white and walked to the open fields to greet and welcome Bride Sabbath. From a high
clearing they watched the sun sink; then they sang “
L’kha dodi”
—“Come, O bride, Come, O bride, O Sabbath Queen.” They found that Bride Sabbath, whose light sanctifies the week, was akin to the Shekinah, that weeping and wandering woman who figures as God’s indwelling presence in the world, exiled here in suffering until redemption brings the world to God.

Their legends have a gilded, antique air. Rabbi Isaac Luria, said his disciple, could understand the language of birds. Birds’ voices contain deep mysteries of the Torah.

Once, while Rabbi Isaac Luria was studying Torah in the fields of Safad, he saw a bunch of souls in a tree. He noticed, he told his disciple, that “all the trees were full of souls beyond number. The same was true of the field.” God had cast them out for failing to repent. They had heard that he, Isaac Luria, had the power “to repair exiled souls.” And so “several souls clad themselves in his prayer to accompany it” to God’s very throne. Souls can aid one another; with combined effort and with their rabbi, they can batter a way through to God.

That I, who have no rights in this matter, could freely enter this same sixteenth-century synagogue in which the masters had prayed astounded me. Here, in the building before me, Isaac Luria prayed the evening prayer, the prayer
of eighteen benedictions. That number, meaning “life” in Hebrew, corresponds to the eighteen vertebrae we bend when we pray.

I was looking at the synagogue when a red-and-yellow hawk moth caught my eye. Keeping it in sight, I followed it across the street and into the synagogue’s stone courtyard, a sort of balcony over the steep mountainside. The red-and-yellow moth, in the usual blinding flurry, was feeding on blossoms—now white mallows, now red oleanders. Moving with the moth, I kept my eyes on it all around the courtyard. It flicked in and out of the blue flower called blood-of-the-Maccabees, in and out of the yellow jasmine of which Israelis say, “Two jasmines can drive a man crazy.”

Then I stepped back on something thick and soft, and turned to look. It was a decapitated snake. It was no small poison adder but a wide and dark thing, mottled, like our corn snake or water snake.

Since there is a Talmudic blessing for everything else—for seeing the first blossoms of spring, for seeing a friend after a year’s absence, for smelling spiced oil—then surely a blessing must exist for seeing or stepping on a decapitated snake. When one sees an animal for the first time in one’s life, one thanks God, “FOR ALL CAME INTO BEING BY HIS WORD.” Of course one blesses God for food. One generous Talmudist
said a man could fulfill the obligation to bless the various foodstuffs individually by saying instead an all-purpose blessing, if he said it with devotion: “Blessed be He who created this object. HOW BEAUTIFUL IT IS.”

The snake’s body extended, curving, over three wide flagstones. Though it had stopped jerking, it did not yet stink. Only one fly had found its red meat. Its severed neck was smooth; a blade had cut it. Not only could I not find the snake head, I also lost the hawk moth, which flew over the wall, I think, and down the slope, toward the Sea of Galilee.

Ezekiel 3:1: Eat this scroll.

E N C O U N T E R S
      
       We encounter people, often tangentially. Leaving for Israel, I met a skycap at the airport. He was a hefty man in his sixties, whose face was bashed in. He imitated Elvis. It was just the two of us, standing at the curb; I was smoking a cigarette. As Elvis, he looked at me sidelong from slitty, puffed eyes, and sang,

Then he slurred, “Thank you very much—Just kidding.”

He began again abruptly: “This is Howard Cosell,
The Wide World of Sports
. Just kidding.”

He told me he used to be a prizefighter. His splayed nose, ears, brow bones, and cheekbones bore him out. He ranked in the top one hundred, he said; his brother, a welterweight, ranked number nine.

“My wife says I’m drain-bamaged,” he said, and looked at me sideways to see if I’d heard it.