For the Time Being Read online

  N U M B E R S What were you doing on April 30, 1991, when a series of waves drowned 138,000 people? Where were you when you first heard the astounding, heartbreaking news? Who told you? What, seriatim, were your sensations? Who did you tell? Did your anguish last days or weeks?

  All my life I have loved this sight: a standing wave in the boat’s wake, shaped like a thorn. I have seen it rise from many oceans, and now I saw it on the Sea of Galilee. It was a peak about a foot high. The standing wave broke at its peak, and foam slid down its glossy hollow. I watched the foaming wave on the port side. At every instant, we were bringing this boat’s motor, this motion, into new water. The stir, as if of life, impelled each patch of water to pinch and form this same crest. Each crest tumbled upon itself and released a slide of white foam. The foam’s individual bubbles popped and dropped into the general sea while they were still sliding down the dark wave. They trailed away always, and always new waters peaked, broke, foamed, and replenished.

  What I saw was the constant intersection of two wave systems. Lord Kelvin first described it. Transverse waves rise astern and move away from the boat parallel to its direction of travel. Diverging waves course out in a V shape behind the boat. Where the waves converge, two lines of standing crests persist at an unchanging angle. We think of these as the boat’s wake. I was studying the highest standing wave, the one nearest the boat. It rose from the trough behind the stern and spilled foam. The curled wave crested over clear water and tumbled down. All its bubbles broke, thousands a second, unendingly. I could watch the present; I could see time and how it works.

  On a shore, eight thousand waves break a day. James Trefil provides these facts. At any one time, the foam from breaking waves covers between 3 and 4 percent of the earth’s surface. This acreage of foam—using the figure 4 percent—is equal to that of the entire continent of North America. By another coincidence, the U.S. population bears nearly the same relation to world population: 4.6 percent. The U.S. population, in other words, although it is the third-largest population among nations, is about as small a portion of the earth’s people as breaking waves’ white foam is to the planet’s surface. And the whole North American continent occupies no more space than waves’ foam.

  “God rises up out of the sea like a treasure in the waves,” wrote Thomas Merton.

  It took only a few typhoon waves to drown 138,000 Bangladeshi on April 30, 1991. We see generations of waves rise from the sea that made them, billions of individuals at a time; we see them dwindle and vanish back. What will move you to pity?

  I S R A E L When the Messiah comes and the world ends, the shofar will sound loud from the site of the Temple, and those people buried at the Mount of Olives—outside the old Jerusalem walls—will be first to awaken and arise in paradise. Those people buried elsewhere on the planet, tradition says, will “roll through the earth” till they come up there. Consequently many people have asked their survivors to bury them at the Mount of Olives, saving themselves an abrasive trip. An Antwerp Hasid explained to appreciative writer Robert Eisenberg recently, “A burial in Israel avoids the shleppernish.”

  Every year, sixty million people die; of these, half are children under five. Every 110 hours a million more humans arrive on the planet than die into the planet. Of every seventy-five babies born today in the United States, one will die in a car crash.

  “For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it.” Ernest Becker said this in The Denial of Death. Ralph Touchett, in The Portrait of a Lady, says, “There’s nothing makes us feel so much alive as to see others die. That’s the sensation of life—the sense that we remain.” So I watch from the stern; I attend the wake.

  Do you notice, here where we are, what Becker calls “the rumble of panic underneath everything”? Do the dead rumble underneath everything, and will we ourselves churn underfoot or pound? I think I notice no such panic, hard as I try, unless by chance for moments at a time I believe I will die.

  E N C O U N T E R S I was walking in a broad and broken landscape. A stream ran between rocks; downstream, green shrubs sprang from its banks. The stream was the river Jordan, and this water flowed from its source, where three part-time streams met as runnels. The last people I passed were speaking Dutch. The skies stretched to low horizons. No cloud passed overhead, nor any bird.

  The baked space looked like the world’s first day, when rainwater dropped on lava. It looked like the width of Being bare, where the raw shoots of abundance first stirred. I took a stony footpath upstream to where no plants grew. By the path flowed one stream of water. Soon the Jordan River narrowed to a sandy filament I could span. Ahead I saw the colorless spot where it arose, its actual source.

  It was a damp patch of rock in a cleft of a low cliff. Here a spring met the earth’s crust as seep. The seep widened around the rocks and pooled before me. This was the Jordan’s source—a spring in the desert, wetting rocks. Here the crust of things cracked, and life entered and spread. There was room enough for everything. Ralph Harper wrote, “Why should one not try to imagine one’s arms around Being?” A bent cyclone fence prevented my climbing to see the parched lands all around, and to see the many dry mountains to the west toward the Mediterranean.

  In all this sober glory, something surprising appeared. At this desert trickle, beneath this cyclone fence, behind a young rock, I saw motion. Along came a blue crab. It picked its way down some sharp grains between rocks and settled in to work the area. The crab’s shell was five or six inches long from tip to tip. Its blue-and-white legs minced on their points; it squatted to feed. Why are you wandering around in the desert, I thought, instead of swimming in a Chesapeake slough, or in a pot of steam? In fact, freshwater crabs are a delicacy; the Chinese, especially, prize them.

  I looked for someone to show. In all the immense space, under all the dry sky, only one distant man was walking, probably one of the Dutch-speakers.

  And what should I call out to him? “Mynheer!” I shouted. He made his way to me over the bare ground. He wore glasses and carried binoculars. I showed him the crab. He was gratifyingly amazed—a big blue crab in the desert. The crab was easing itself along the chips and sand the water wetted, behind the cyclone fence. Its eyes moved on stalks. The Dutchman, too, looked for someone to show, but saw nobody. We discussed the crab, I think, and the sight of the crab.

  Possibly the magnificent accent with which I’d shouted “Mynheer” impressed him, for he spoke Dutch, none of which I understood. I spoke English, which he doubtless understood. His tanned face showed pale creases where, in the sun, he had laughed. Pleased, he thanked me, and before wandering off, he looked at me significantly. So: his look said, we meet. So: in this queer bare spot, home of nobody under the sky, two humans stand side by side to look at a crab.

  Later, I thought: This fleet meeting was not so deep as, say, a marriage—but it had its moments. Who are we people?

  T H I N K E R The year 1737, district of Podolia, in the Ukraine. Twenty-five years later, the legendary boy Israel ben Eliezer had become the historical Baal Shem Tov. He taught all over the Ukraine, in Yiddish. His disciples’ disciples wrote down his teachings. Every rabbi I cite here—except of course his predecessors—speaks in his name.

  After he worked as a beadle to a poor congregation, he taught school, slaughtered animals, and kept an inn. His first wife died. He and his second wife moved to the Carpathian Mountains, where he dug clay. He lived alone on a steep mountainside and his wife lived in a hut far below. Two or three times a week she climbed the mountain and helped him shovel the clay into a wagon. She hauled it to a town for sale. When he was alone, he climbed the mountains’ peaks; he studied, prayed, and fasted. Hear the tone of legend, and know, still, that it happened something like this.

  After seven years, the two descended to his wife’s city, Miedzyboz, a center of Jewish learning in every generation from the Baal Shem Tov’s time to the Holocaust, since which nothing and no
one Jewish remains. There, in Miedzyboz, the clay-spattered peasant startled everyone when he revealed his learning. There, intimate and radiant, he started to teach, and he taught until he died in 1760.

  The men of Miedzyboz used to see the Baal Shem Tov in peasant clothes striding across the sky and opening heaven’s vaults. This is the sort of vivid tale he inspired. His yellow hair hung long, and like a farmer he wore no cap. His regular dress was a belted sheepskin coat and topboots. He smoked a clay pipe.

  He also flicked through the air in carriages. He interrogated on our behalf both the Messiah and Samael, the evil one. He often appeared, and conversed amiably with friends, in several places at once. One day in a pasture he caused sheep to stand and pray. His world has the exuberant and tumbled beauty of Chagall paintings—and indeed Chagall grew up in the Hasidic village of Vitebsk.

  The Baal Shem Tov kept no money in his house overnight; if any money came to him, he paid his debts and gave away the rest. One night he felt his prayers blocked. He questioned his wife. In fact, she had held back some coins for the next day’s food. There are hundreds of stories like this. He could read the history of any man’s soul, and all his secrets, from the man’s forehead, they said. He was clairvoyant to animals, too, and birds and trees. He knew all their souls’ histories—for souls have genealogies quite apart from bodies’. (In Aristotle, too, all living things have souls, but those souls stay put and leave no descendants.)

  He used to dance at prayers. Sometimes he danced praying while holding the Torah scroll, as David had danced before the Ark of the Covenant, with all his might. The Baal Shem Tov’s Hasids danced too. Of one dancing Hasid a witness reported, “His foot was as light as that of a four-year-old child. And among all those who saw his holy dancing, there was not one in whom the holy turning [to God] was not accomplished…. He worked both weeping and rapture in one.”

  The Gaon of Vilna, the Hasids’ Orthodox enemy, deplored their dancing and leaping. He was not, however, averse to performing a spot of “practical Kabbalah” himself, and claimed that he could, by the theurgic use of God’s name, “reproduce the solar system on a tabletop.”

  Sometimes the Baal Shem Tov trembled at prayers. Once, a disciple touched his robe at the shoulder and trembled himself. Once, the Baal Shem Tov leaned against the east wall of a house, and by the west wall the grain in open barrels trembled. A water trough in a room where he was praying trembled. When he stood still to pray, the fringes of his prayer robe trembled; the fringes “had their own life and their own soul. They could move even when his body did not move, for, through the holiness of his doing,” he had “drawn into them life and soul.”

  As he aged he used crutches, and dragged his left foot. He smoked his pipe and wore his rough sheepskin coat and top-boots. On Rosh Hashanah, 1749, he took his life in his hands, he said, and prayed, “Let us fall into the hands of the Lord but let us not fall into the hands of man.”

  E V I L The Baal Shem Tov, by his own account, ascended to heaven many times. During these ascents, his friends said, he stood bent for many hours while his soul rose. He himself related in a letter on his return from two such vertical expeditions that he could not, much as he tried, deflect either moral evils or natural calamities. He could, however, report how God explained his actions. At that time Polish Christians were already killing Jews. On Rosh Hashanah (September 15, 1746), during an ascent to heaven, the Baal Shem Tov complained to God about the killings. He knew that some Jews apostasized, and they died along with the devout. Why—why any of it? God’s answer: “So that no son of Israel would convert.” (It would not even save their lives.) Later, an epidemic was scourging Poland. Again on Rosh Hashanah, the Baal Shem Tov’s soul climbed to heaven. Why the epidemic? The epidemic, God gave him to understand, came because he himself, the Baal Shem Tov, had prayed, “Let us fall into the hands of the Lord but let us not fall into the hands of man.” Now God, into whose plaguey hands they had fallen, asked him on the spot, “Why do you want to cancel?”—to cancel, that is, your earlier prayer. Now you want the Christian Poles instead of the epidemic? The best bargain the Baal Shem Tov could strike was to keep the epidemic from his town.

  In other words, the Baal Shem Tov, who was not a theologian, believed that God caused evil events—both moral (the Jew-killing Poles) and natural (the epidemic)—to teach or punish. The Baal Shem Tov learned much about God, but theodicy was not his bailiwick, and he did not shed the old fatal-to-reason belief that we suffer at the hands of God omnipotent.

  In 1976 an earthquake in Tangshan killed 750,000 people. Before it quaked, many survivors reported, the earth shone with an incandescent light.

  The Talmud obliges people to bless evil events, griefs, and catastrophes with a special benediction—“Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, THE TRUE JUDGE”—for God performs all. Isaiah 45:7: “I form the light, and create darkness, I make peace, and create evil. I the LORD do all these things.”

  Similarly, if a pious man sees an amputee, or anyone whom misfortune has harmed since birth, he utters the same blessing, ending with “THE TRUE JUDGE.” These words vivify a view common enough in the first century, and extant and thriving among troubled theists everywhere: that God the puppeteer controls all events and fates, and morally. He rewards us or afflicts us as he judges. He blames the victim.

  If you, Lord, should mark iniquities, Who could stand? Who could stand?

  Certainly not the amputee. For what did God judge him? For getting his leg infected, dummkopf.

  No. It does not wash.

  NOW “Your fathers did eat manna and are dead,” Jesus told people—one of his cruelest remarks. Trafficking directly with the divine, as the manna-eating wilderness generation did, and as Jesus did, confers no immunity to death or hazard. You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with God, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without God. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials.

  Our generations rise and break like foam on shores. Yet death, at least in the West, apparently astonishes and blind-sides every man-bubble of us, every time. “One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war,” says Ernest Becker, is that “each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.”

  People burst like foam. If you walk a graveyard in the heat of summer, I have read, you can sometimes hear—right through coffins—bloated bellies pop. Poor people everywhere still test a fresh corpse for life by holding a flame to its big toe. If the corpse is truly dead, gas fills the toe blister and explodes it. If the body is alive, fluid, not gas, fills the blister; the fluid boils, and also pops the skin.

  We are only about three hundred generations from ten thousand years ago.

  “Although we are here today, tomorrow cannot be guaranteed. Keep this in mind! Keep this in mind!” —Twelfth-century Korean Buddhist master Chinul.

  Are we ready to think of all humanity as a living tree, carrying on splendidly without us? We easily regard a beehive or an ant colony as a single organism, and even a school of fish, a flock of dunlin, a herd of elk. And we easily and correctly regard an aggregate of individuals, a sponge or coral or lichen or slime mold, as one creature—but us? When we people differ, and know our consciousness, and love? Even lovers, even twins, are strangers who will love and die alone. And we like it this way, at least in the West; we prefer to endure any agony of isolation rather than to merge and extinguish our selves in an abstract “humanity” whose fate we should hold dearer than our own. Who could say, I’m in agony because my child died, but that’s all right: Mankind as a whole has abundant children? The religious idea sooner or later challenges the notion of the individual. The Buddha taught each disciple to vanquish his fancy that he possessed an individual self. Huston Smith suggests that our individuality resembles a snowflake’s: The seas evaporate water, clouds build and loose water in snowflakes, which dissolve and go to sea. The simile galls
. What have I to do with the ocean, I with my unique and novel hexagons and spikes? Is my very mind a wave in the ocean, a wave the wind flattens, a flaw the wind draws like a finger?

  We know we must yield, if only intellectually. Okay, we’re a lousy snowflake. Okay, we’re a tree. These dead loved ones we mourn were only those brown lower branches a tree shades and kills as it grows; the tree itself is thriving. But what kind of tree are we growing here, that could be worth such waste and pain? For each of us loses all we love, everyone we love. We grieve and leave. What marvels shall these future whizzes, damn their eyes, accomplish?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  B I R T H Last week on this hospital maternity ward, an obstetrician caught a newborn’s pretty head, and then the rest of him: He had gill slits in his neck, like a shark’s gill slits, and a long tail. The tail was thick at the top, like a kangaroo’s, but naked, of course, possessing human and endearing thin skin. Nurse Pat Eisberg tells me the attending pediatrician had to pry and untuck this tail, which curled between the baby’s legs, to learn its gender. She is whispering to me in a corridor. How is the baby now? How is the family? She looks at me. She raises her thin eyebrows, and turns away; she punches in a computer code that opens a door, and waves goodbye.

  Commenting on just such births in The Denial of Death Ernest Becker says they are “not publicized,” that “a full apprehension of man’s condition would drive him insane.”

  Here is a puzzler from Teilhard: “The souls of men form, in some manner, the incandescent surface of matter plunged in God.” That people, alone of all beings, possess souls is crucial to Teilhard’s thought. Crucial also is the incandescence of matter—its filling the universe to the exclusion of all spirit and spirits, and its blazing from within. Still: What does this sentence mean?