For the Time Being (6 page)

Later that day I saw cliffside caves of loess where modern people lived. Other humans, I knew, had lived far below them, before the loess blew in. Now the modern people’s laundry dried outside. They drew water and held toddlers’ hands. “Here were the children of the earth—the real Chinese. Mother earth … gave them shelter in her very womb. This strange golden soil—loess—was everywhere around them.” Peter Goullart wrote this when he first entered the terraced, gorged, and caved landscape around Xi’an. He was a Russian aristocrat whom the revolution stranded in China.
“The very color of men was like the soil—pale golden, and the air was filled with golden dust. This was holy ground. Here the whole race of Han—the core of China—had come into being.”

The Chinese empire grew from the loess soil. Loess deposits in China are the deepest soils in the world. The fertile loess plains around Xi’an are thick layers—up to four hundred feet thick—of fine windblown sand and rock flour. The deposits run to fine textures; they absorb water and feed minerals to plants’ roots. All you have to do is irrigate. Irrigation requires that many people cooperate; it requires civilization. The Chinese have been irrigating this region for twenty-three centuries. The first irrigation canal, said an ancient historian, made poor lands into rich ones “without bad years.” Emperor Qin’s farmers were rich, and so was he; he funded his armies by taxing their grain.

Even now China needed this particular land for food so badly that at another underground army site, across the river, farmers had refilled the dug pits and sowed wheat on them; after they harvested the wheat, they would let archaeologists return for a while. Consequently, the digging has gone slowly. In 1989 experts guessed there might be as many as six thousand terra-cotta soldiers here in underground vaults. A few years later, they were guessing seven thousand soldiers. By 1995 they had confirmed seven thousand, and were guessing ten thousand.

There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what this means, simply take yourself—in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love—and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it.

C L O U D S
      
       Digging through layers of books yields dated clouds and near clouds. Why seek dated clouds? Why save a letter, take a snapshot, write a memoir, carve a tombstone?

“One night, on February 27, 1856, a vehement east wind came from the desert and covered the roofs of Jerusalem with a thin blend of salt and sand. Panic reigned.” One may unearth this airy treasure by reading Israeli novelist Meir Shalev’s
Esau
. There, Shalev cites
Ancient Graves of Jerusalem
, from which he drew this record. Its author was Ermette Pierotti, an Italian archaeologist, whom Shalev characterizes only as “poet, architect, and orphan.”

Augustine said to a group of people, “We are talking about God. What wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God.”

In his last will and testament, Rabbi Yehudah Hechasid, a Kabbalist and ethicist of the twelfth century, left numbered precepts for sensible and holy living.

N U M B E R S
      
       We have dated waves, as well as clouds. On April 30, 1991—on that one day—138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh. At dinner I mentioned to our daughter, who was then seven years old, that it was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning.

“No, it’s easy,” she said. “Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.”

How are we doing in numbers, we who have been alive for this most recent verse of human life? How many people have lived and died?

“The dead outnumber the living,” Harvard’s Nathan Keyfitz wrote in a 1991 letter to Justin Kaplan. “Credible estimates of the number of people who have ever lived on earth run from 70 billion to over 100 billion.” Averaging those figures puts the total persons ever born at about 85 billion. By these moderate figures, the dead outnumber us (by now we have swelled to 5.9 billion) by about 14 to 1. None of these figures is certain, and Keyfitz wrote that the ratio “could be as high as 20 to 1.” The dead will always outnumber the living.

Dead Americans, however, if all proceeds, will not outnumber living Americans until the year 2030, because the nation is young. Many of us will be among the dead then. Will we know or care, we who once owned the still bones under the quick ones, we who spin inside the planet with our heels in the air? The living might well seem foolishly self-important to us, and overexcited.

Since there are at least fourteen dead people for every one of us, we who are alive now make up about 6.8 percent of all people who have entered the world to date. This is not a meaningful figure.

Half of all the dead are babies and children. So we could console ourselves with the distinction that once we adults die, we will be among the longest-boned dead, and among the dead who grew the most teeth, too—for what those distinctions might be worth among beings notoriously indifferent to appearance and all else.

In Juan Rulfo’s novel
Pedro Paramo
, a dead woman says to her dead son, “Just think about pleasant things, because we’re going to be buried for a long time.”

I S R A E L
      
       In the beginning, according to Rabbi Isaac Luria, God contracted himself—
zimzum
. The divine essence withdrew into itself to make room for a finite world. Evil became possible: those genetic defects that dog cellular life, those clashing forces that erupt in natural catastrophes, and those sins human minds invent and human hands perform.

Luria’s Kabbalist creation story, however baroque, accounts boldly for both moral evil and natural calamity. The creator meant his light to emanate, ultimately, to man. Grace would flow downward through ten holy vessels, like water cascading. Cataclysm—some say creation itself—disrupted this orderly progression. The holy light burst the vessels. The vessels splintered and scattered. Sparks of holiness fell to the depths, and the opaque shards of the broken vessels
(qelippot)
imprisoned them. This is our bleak world. We see only the demonic shells of things. It is literally sensible to deny that God exists. In fact, God is hidden, exiled, in the sparks of divine light the shells entrap. So evil can exist, can
continue to live: The spark of goodness within things, the Gnostic-like spark that even the most evil tendency encloses, lends evil its being.

“The sparks scatter everywhere,” Martin Buber said. “They cling to material things as in sealed-up wells, they crouch in substances as in caves that have been bricked up, they inhale darkness and breathe out fear; they flutter about in the movements of the world, searching where they can lodge to be set free.”

The Jews in sixteenth-century Palestine were in exile—“a most cruel exile,” Gershom Scholem called it. They had lived in Muslim Spain a thousand years—far longer than any Europeans have lived in the Americas. In 1492, Christians expelled Muslims and Jews. About ten thousand Spanish Jews moved to Palestine. In Safad, they formed the core of the community of the devout. Here, unmolested, they contemplated their exile, which they understood as symbolizing the world’s exile from God. Even the divine is estranged from itself; its essence scatters in sparks. The Shekinah—the divine presence—is in exile from Elohim, the being of God, just as the Jews were in exile in Palestine.

Only redemption—restoration,
tikkun
—can return the sparks of light to their source in the primeval soul; only redemption can restore God’s exiled presence to his being in
eternity. On[y redemption can reunite an exiled soul with its root. The holy person, however, can hasten redemption and help mend heaven and earth.

Luria left no writing. He tolerated foreign religious practices. He repudiated both anger and sorrow, for to him anger, especially, was the proximate source of all evil. At the same time, of course, he fulfilled the material laws of the Torah to the letter. Jewish spiritual life takes place in the thick of, and sanctifies, the multiple world of created things. Devout Jews then and now have big families. He did not despise the body; the body may be “turbid,” but its flesh shares in the joys to come. Luria warned his disciples against living in lonely places, or even visiting them. Like the other Safad rabbis, however, he walked often alone in the grainfields and orchards outside the town. I suppose they had so many children at home they had to.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner quotes the Talmud: Amemar, Mar Zutra and Rab Ashi would say this.
Ribono shel Olam
, Holy One of Being,
Ani shelcha v’halomoti shelcha
, I am yours and my dreams are yours.
Halom halamti
, I have dreamed a dream.
V’ay-nehni yodea mah hu
, and I do not know what it means.

E N C O U N T E R S
      
       Quizzical encounters cumulate over a lifetime. Possibly when our brains fire their dying charges we will remember and see, to our dismay, not any best-loved face but instead some solitary figure, a stranger, whose image the mind retains.

One morning I walked from a kibbutz to the edge of the Sea of Galilee. On the shore beyond me I saw a man splitting wood. He was a distant figure in silhouette across the water. I heard a wrong ring. He raised his maul and it clanged at the top of its rise. He drove it down. I could see the wood divide and drop in silence. The figure bent, straightened, raised the maul with both arms, and again I heard it ring just as its head knocked the sky. Metal banged metal as a clapper bangs its bell. Then the figure brought down the maul in silence. Absorbed on the ground, skilled and sure, the stick figure was clobbering the heavens.

I saw a beached red dory. I could take the red dory, row out to the guy, and say: Sir. You have found a place where the sky dips close. May I borrow your maul? Your maul and your wedge? Because, I thought, I too could hammer the sky—crack it at one blow, split it at the next—and inquire, hollering at God the compassionate, the all-merciful, WHAT’S with the bird-headed dwarfs?