Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Then one day in 1547 he came puffing home with the titillating news that a new rabbi had come to Safed. “A tall man, very handsome. His name is Abulafia and he has been wandering through Africa and Egypt. He has no wife.”

Rachel jumped. “Speak to him right away, Zaki! It’s your fault your daughter has no husband.”

Zaki agreed to this remarkable thesis. These days he agreed to almost everything, so Rachel continued, “It’s a father’s duty to find men for his daughters, and it reflects sorely on you, Zaki, that your oldest daughter is unmarried. Look at her—a splendid woman.”

Zaki looked at her and thought: I could name six things that girl could do which would help her more than any of my efforts. Nevertheless, he looked forward to an intimate talk with the newcomer, for no rabbi should be without a wife.

Dr. Abulafia created excitement in more than the Zaki family. His years of wandering had made him thinner; his beard was gray; he wore a turban; and his constant search for the mysterious meanings of man’s relationship to God had caused his features to assume a remote beauty that was disturbing to men and women alike. There was a sensuousness about him, manifest in all he did, a mixture of Spanish grace and Hebrew insight; and before he had been in Safed a month it was clear that the Kabbalist group had found a new teacher and possibly their leader.

To the public and to the large number of students who crowded to hear him lecture on the essence of God, Abulafia was impressive, for he taught that even the humblest Jew, by strict concentration and a longing for the infinity of God, could lift himself to levels of comprehension much higher and more complex than those which now engaged him; but it was with the select group of experts who met with him each dawn that Abulafia was radically effective, for to these trained philosophers the Spanish doctor expounded the inner mysteries of the Kabbala itself.

Abulafia’s introductory beliefs, which he expressed in words of almost flowing purity, were twofold: “To live in harmony with himself a man must labor to unite the knots which bind his soul, and this is a personal matter between man and himself; then he must seek through contemplation an understanding of the Name of God, which is the timeless relationship between man and God.”

Abulafia’s teaching on the apprehension of God was easy to understand: “You must sit in a quiet room with a sheet of clean white paper and a brush, and you must begin to write at random the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which is the language in which God wrote the Torah; and without associating these flowing, moving letters with specific words, you must permit them to come and go of their own will, nor must your mind direct your arm to direct your fingers to direct the brush to form this letter or that or to put it either here or there. And after several hours of this march of letters, if your concentration is of sufficient intensity, the pen will fall away and the paper will move from you, and you will be in the presence of endless thought in which the letters move of themselves, free and in space, and after a while your whole body will be seized by a trembling and your breath will come in short gasps and perhaps not at all, and there will be a bursting of your chest and you will feel that you are about to die—and then an enormous peace will come, for your soul will have untied the knots that bind it and the veil will have passed from your eyes; and after some time in this state of light you will see new letters of a radiance unknown before, and from them will appear the ineffable four, and you will see them, not on the paper nor on the wall nor in the room, but in the endless fathoms of your soul, the sacred Name of God, Y H W H.”

That was the primary level of Abulafia’s teaching, available to any scholar who took the trouble to study one of the handwritten copies of the Zohar circulating in Safed. This was a book as mystical as its teachings, for great contention had arisen as to its authorship. Perhaps because of local pride, the men of Safed believed that it had been written by the immortal Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, who for thirteen years in the second century had hidden from the Roman soldiers of Emperor Hadrian. He had lived in a cave in the nearby village of Peqiin, where Elijah had visited him, bearing the secrets of the Kabbala, which Yohai had written down in the Zohar, the Splendor.

But as Abulafia knew, the book, which consisted of a commentary on the Torah, had been composed around 1280 by an adventurous Spaniard who had written it in ancient Aramaic to lend it credence: it was a mélange of mystical formulae, probably gathered from many original sources, plus a compelling explanation of the way a poetic mind can sometimes hypnotize itself into an apprehension of the reality of God. In secrecy, in well-thumbed copies which passed at night, the Zohar had traveled from Granada in Spain to all parts of Europe, treasured as much by mystical Christians as by Jews.

It was in the mountain village of Safed, however, that its power was to be most clearly demonstrated, for here had gathered, almost by accident, the half-dozen men who were to give the book its philosophical vitality, after which it would enjoy long life in Germany, Poland and Russia, forming the basis of a radical new interpretation of Judaism. It was a book which influenced all who touched it, and Dr. Abulafia, as the leader of the Safed group, expounded its first levels in lucid and seductive prose, but when he progressed to the second and third levels he became incoherent so far as logical exposition was concerned, but burning in his brilliance of metaphor and suggestion. Once, when a flood of incomprehensible words had tumbled from him like a stream issuing from the hills of Safed, he apologized, “To utter one word from the world of ultimate mystery is to break down the keystone of an arch so that no one knows from which side the next stone will fall.” He was asked by his pupils to put his words down in an orderly system, but he countered, “Where would a man start in a field that has no beginning, no end and no definition? But if you listen to me long enough you will gain a sense of what I am trying to say, and that is all that I know myself.” At other times he spoke with a clarity that was almost agonizing, and with an insight gained partly through rejection and personal tragedy, partly through an all-absorbing contemplation of God: “If seventy of us in this room study the Torah we find that it has seventy different faces to present to us, for each of us will see his own creation of beauty shining through the words of God. But I say to you that the Torah has not one face, nor seventy faces, but six hundred thousand faces, one for every Jew who was present when God gave Moses our Teacher the law; and if the cords that bind your soul are untied, you are free to find your own Torah among the six hundred thousand.”

In the group of listeners influenced by Dr. Abulafia’s teaching was Rabbi Zaki, but he was affected in a different way. When the more abstruse explanations were reached he was apt to fall asleep, and occasionally he snored, for Kabbalistic flights of thought were quite beyond him; and one morning when the students were inclined to laugh at the dozing shoemaker, Rabbi Abulafia rebuked them, saying, “I think our sleeping fat man describes better than my words what I am trying to say. Rabbi Zaki has seen not the face of the Torah but through to the heart of the Torah itself, and there he found the one commandment of God upon which Torah and Talmud and Judaism rest: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ I happen to know that Rabbi Zaki spent last night sitting with the sick wife of Rabbi Paltiel and he requires to sleep, and there is no man in this room worthy to waken him.”