For the Time Being Read online

  Far in the distance, beyond the dug trenches, and beyond many planted fields, I saw barely visible people cultivating the ground. They looked like twigs. Nearby a blackbird landed beside a pit, settled, and pecked a speck.

  There, down a sunken corridor, I saw a man swimming through the earth. His head and shoulder and one raised arm and hand shot from the dug wall. His mouth was wide open, as if he were swimming the Australian crawl and just catching a breath. His chin blended into the wall. The rest of him was underground. I saw only the tan pit wall, troweled smooth, from which part of this man’s head and shoulder emerged in all strength and detail, and his armored arm and bare hand. He jutted like exposed pipe. His arm and hand cast a shadow down the straight wall and on the trench floor four feet below him. I could see the many clay mustache hairs his open mouth pulled taut, and beside them I could see his lower lip springing from the dirt wall.

  The hot dust smelled like bone, or pie. Overhead, fair-weather cumulus were forming. I had not yet moved.

  There were three acres of dug trenches—each sixteen to twenty feet deep. Below in the trenches were warriors in various stages between swimming out of the dirt and standing on it. Here, halfway along a wall, bent bodies like chrysalids were still emerging. At one end of this trench—fully dug out, reassembled, and patched—a clay platoon stood in ranks. These bareheaded men had halted, upright, on a sunken brick floor; my feet were far above the tops of their heads. Each different, all alert, they gazed forward. Some scowled, and some looked wry. Living people, soldiers from different regions of China, posed for these portraits. The shapes of the heads differed. Behind these stood more whole specimens: six chariots, with a complement of footmen and riders arrayed for war.

  At the far end of the same gallery lay great heaps of broken bodies and limbs. A loose arm swung a bronze sword. A muscular knee and foot pushed off from someone else’s inverted head. A great enemy, it looked like, had chunked these men’s vigorous motion to bits. Each tangled heap resembled a mass grave of people who, buried alive, broke themselves into pieces and suffocated in the act of trying to crawl up through one another.

  I walked beside a corridor on the ground, which now seemed to be the top of an earthen balk erected senselessly. What were we doing, our generation, up so high? In the middle distance, a test pit lay open. I edged over to it. In the sloshed rubble in the hole, a man’s back floated exposed, armor up, as if he had drowned. No one was near. No one was working anywhere on the site. Deep in another trench, horses four abreast drew a wheeled chariot. Tall honor guards accompanied them. One of the horses tossed its head, and I could see red paint in a raised nostril.

  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 themsel
ves 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,

  Love me tender, love me sweet,

  Never let me go.

  You have made my life complete,

  And I love you so.

  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.

  “Just kidding,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

  T H I N K E R In 135 C.E., the Romans killed Rabbi Akiva for teaching Torah. They killed him by flaying his skin and stripping his bones with currycombs. He was eighty-five years old. A Roman currycomb in those days was an iron scraper; its blunt teeth combed mud and burrs from horsehair. To flay someone—an unusual torture—the wielder had to bear down. Perhaps the skin and muscles of an old scholar are comparatively loose.

  “All depends on the preponderance of good deeds,” Rabbi Akiva had said. The weight of good deeds bears down on the balance scales. Paul Tillich also held this view. If the man who stripped Rabbi Akiva’s bones with a currycomb bore down with a weight of, say, two hundred psi, how many pounds of good deeds would it take to tip the balance to the good?

  “Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe?” a twentieth-century novelist asked. “The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already.”

  (Since this book hails thinkers for their lights, and pays scant heed to their stripes, I should acknowledge here that Judaism and Christianity, like other great religions, have irreconcilable doctrinal differences, both within and without. Rabbi Pinhas: “The principal danger of man is religion.”)

  Akiva ben Joseph was born in the Judean lowlands in 50 C.E. He was illiterate and despised scholarship; he worked herding sheep. Then he fell in love with a rich man’s daughter. She agreed to marry him only when he vowed to devote his life to studying Torah. So he did. He learned to read along with their son.

  Rabbi Akiva systematized, codified, explained, analyzed, and amplified the traditional religious laws and practices in his painstaking Mishnah and Midrash. Because of Akiva, Mishnah and Midrash joined Scripture itself in Judaism’s canon. His interpretations separated Judaism from both Christian and Greek influences.

  His contemporaries prized him for his tireless interpretation of each holy detail of Torah. They cherished him for his optimism, his modesty, his universalism (which included tolerance of, and intermarriage with, Samaritans), and his devotion to Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel. He taught that “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” is the key idea in Torah.

  Nelly Sachs wrote,

  Who is like You, O Lord, among the silent,

  remaining silent through the suffering of His children?

  E V I L Emperor Hadrian of Rome had condemned Rabbi Akiva to his henchman and executioner, Rufus. Rufus was present in the prison cell as the currycombs separated the man’s skin and muscles from his bones. Some of Rabbi Akiva’s disciples were there too, likely on the street, watching and listening at the cell window.

  Rabbi Akiva had taught his disciples to say, “Whatever the all-merciful does he does for the good.” During Akiva’s innovative execution he was reciting the Shema, because it was the time of day when one recited the Shema. It was then that his disciples remonstrated with him, saying, “Our master, to such an extent?”

  Spooked that the dwindling rabbi continued to say prayers, Rufus asked him, conversationally, if he was a sorcerer. Rabbi Akiva replied that he was happy to die for God. He said he had worshiped the Lord with all his heart, and with all his mind, and now he could add, “with all my soul.”

  After Rabbi Akiva’s death, Elijah himself entered the Roman prison where his bloody skeleton lay, lifted it up, and, accompanied by many angels, took it to Caesarea in Israel. There Elijah deposited the remains in a comfortable cave, which promptly sealed itself and has never been found.

  When Rabbi Akiva died, Moses was watching from heaven. Moses s
aw the torture and martyrdom, and complained to God about it. Why did God let the Romans flay an eighty-five-year-old Torah scholar? Moses’ question—the tough one about God’s allowing human, moral evil—is reasonable only if we believe that a good God causes, or at any rate allows, everything that happens, and that it’s all for the best. (This is the doctrine Voltaire, and many another thinker before and since, questioned—or in Voltaire’s case, mocked.)

  God told Moses, “Shtok, keep quiet. Kakh ala bemakhshava lefanai, this is how I see things.” In another version of the same story, God replied to Moses, “Silence! This is how it is in the highest thought.”

  Rabbi Akiva taught a curious solution to the ever-galling problem that while many good people and their children suffer enormously, many louses and their children prosper and thrive in the pink of health. God punishes the good, he proposed, in this short life, for their few sins, and rewards them eternally in the world to come. Similarly, God rewards the evil-doers in this short life for their few good deeds, and punishes them eternally in the world to come. I do not know how that sat with people. It is, like every ingenious, Godfearing explanation of natural calamity, harsh all around.

  N O W Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is?—our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? Though perhaps we are the last generation—now there’s a comfort. Take the bomb threat away and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn.