by Nathan Erez
The first line contained an academic quote in English, from an article entitled “Movement with Words”, which had been published in an American journal named The Struggle for the Future. The article was written by one Odell Weiss. Elijah had never heard of such a journal, but the unusual name Odel Weiss caused him to smile. The rest of the page was in Hebrew.
The second line began with “Visit Gardi in the hospital” while the third was the address of a company named Texas-Com. The CEO was listed as Dr. Shalomo Nehorai, whom Elijah knew personally.
The fourth line dealt with the Kim Foundation, which offered grants.
Elijah looked at the page. He was not interested in the to-do list, but what did interest him was that it was written in the Hebrew known as Rashi script, a script that has not been used in handwriting for hundreds of years.
What fool would use that script today? he thought to himself. The writing was clear and precise, and showed that whoever had written the note felt totally comfortable in using that particular script.
He was startled by a noise from behind the door and wanted to leave the room as fast as he could, before anyone knew he had been there, but he was unable to do so. Someone had locked the door from the outside! He began sweating profusely and didn’t know what to do, as he stood helpless in the locked room. He decided to call for help. At first he called out quietly, but as the minutes passed and there was no response, he began shouting louder and louder. He was panic-stricken. Finally, after several minutes of mental agony, he heard footsteps. Someone jangled a bunch of keys, and the door eventually opened. In the doorway stood the young Chinese or Korean man.
“What are you doing in here?” the man asked.
“I was looking for some material,” stammered Elijah.
“Did you find anything?” The tone was again metallic, robot-like.
“No, no, I...”
“Everything you need is on your desk. You have no cause to search here.” The man was distinctly unfriendly.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Elijah mumbled contritely.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about. Just do what Mr. Norman expects you to do.”
Elijah returned to his desk and placed the paper he had found in the drawer on the corner of the table.
He did consider tossing it into the wastebasket, but decided in the end to follow a dictum he had learned from his father: there is always time later to throw something away; he accepted the logic of that saying.
Elijah began working, concentrating on the photocopy in front of him. An hour later he went to the bathroom, and when he returned the slip of paper was no longer there. It had been removed from his desk. This really bothered him. He asked himself what else there was at the Institute, how many people worked there, and why he had not met a single one of them during all the hours he had been there. In fact, the Asian man only appeared after he had been obliged to yell for help. He tried to reassure himself with the idea that the paper had nothing to do with his work in any case, and made a determined effort to again concentrate on the task at hand.
However, one thought kept running through his mind: if someone had taken the trouble of removing the paper, it must be of more importance than he had imagined. Moreover, the unusual use of the Rashi script must be somehow significant. Fortunately for him, he had the gift of total recall and, in a short while, he managed to reconstruct the entire note, complete with an exact duplication of the script involved. He forced himself to ignore the note and continue with his work. To assist him, he examined each letter of the photocopy individually with the help of a large magnifying glass, which he had spotted – and coveted – the previous day. The work, which exhausted his eyes, was uplifting to his soul.
Again he read the text:
“The stone was very precious, the very essence of all beauty and treasure. It was known as Even Shetiyah. In this world, the stone was located beneath the place of the Holy of Holies, and from it, it spread along all types of tracks and paths to all of creation. For this stone stands at the heart of the entire world, and at that point all are joined and gathered together... “
The letters were totally consistent with the era in question. What is the “Even Shetiyah”? Where is it now? Was Norman’s interest in it due to its great value? Elijah had no idea. In any event, as far as he was concerned, these questions were irrelevant. Pleased with the day’s progress, he sent the results of his work by email, and turned to the no-less-pleasant task of recording the time he had arrived at the Institute and when he would be leaving, which he sent off by fax. He noted that he had no idea which country was represented by the country code in the fax number given him by Norman. He would have checked this out, but there was no telephone book at hand and he soon forgot all about it.
The night was dark and gloomy, and a thick fog enveloped the city as he trudged wearily toward his home. As he walked an idea occurred to him, as sharp as a knife: the missing paper must be the clue to the entire riddle, and deciphering it would lead to a hidden treasure. Even if it did not lead to a treasure, it would at the very least enable him to understand the strange things that had occurred since the previous morning.
In his mind’s eye, he visualized again the photocopy of the scroll on the desk in front of him, and wondered if anyone was capable of understanding what was meant by “tracks and paths in all directions”. He agreed with those mystics who felt that language simply does not have the ability to convey supreme truths, and all the more so when attempts are made to put these down in writing. All his profound thoughts came to an abrupt halt when he opened the door to his home. Here he was met by a jubilant welcome from his daughters who fell upon him like two small, love-starved animals.
“You owe us a story from yesterday,” Michali and Efrat squealed. Michali was feeling a lot better and her temperature had dropped.
The girls were fully aware that their father’s skills lay in storytelling and certainly not in cooking, washing, dressing, fixing, sewing, etc., and that was why this was their standard request. That night Elijah chose to tell them the tale of the Golem of Prague:
“The Kabbalists of Prague knew how to make themselves a golem, a human-shaped figure, made of earth and water, in other words, mud. Whenever they completed the study of that week’s portion of the Torah, they would gather around a bonfire and spend the whole night fashioning little men out of mud. Then they would write on the forehead of each such ‘creature’ the Hebrew letters, Alef, Mem, and Tav. Would you girls know what that stands for?”
“It stands for the Hebrew word ‘emet’ - truth,” the little girls cried in unison.
“Yes, and these are also the first, middle and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. On the other hand, the word ‘sheker’ - a lie - is composed of three consecutive letters towards the end of the alphabet.
“The whole night, next to the bonfire, the Kabbalists would pray and dance, and would infuse life into these ‘little men’ that they had created out of mud in their own image. From then on, each new creature acted like a robot. Although it could not speak, it had a certain degree of understanding, and was primarily useful for carrying out household chores. It grew and grew without end. It became a mighty giant and could be extremely dangerous. That was why, before a golem became too tall and strong, the Kabbalists would take its spirit away from it, and it would revert to being earth and water.
“The Maharal of Prague, the rabbi of the community, did not want to part from his golem, because it was very helpful and dedicated. He refrained from doing anything, and the golem grew larger and larger, until it was an enormous giant. The rabbi realized that this could not go on, so he waited for an appropriate time. One day, he asked the golem to remove his boots. When the golem bent down to do so, the rabbi was able to reach its forehead. He reached out and deleted the first letter, the Alef. And what was left?”
“Met,” Efrat, the older, answered immediately. In Hebrew, the word met means “dead”.
“That’s right,” said Elijah
, “the golem died. He immediately turned into mud, and the water evaporated, leaving a pile of earth at the rabbi’s feet. The problem was that the golem had been so large, and the pile of earth was so big, that it completely covered the rabbi and he, too, died. From that time on, it has become customary to talk of ‘the golem that arose against its creator’. Now, girls,” he concluded, “Do you understand the power of the single letter Alef?”
Michali couldn’t bear it any longer. “I don’t like stories like that. I want you to tell us the story of Little Red Riding Hood.”
Elijah agreed to tell them the story, but the Jerusalem version of it, a version that had an educational message. The wolf ran after Little Red Riding Hood, not because he wanted to catch her, but because he wanted her grandmother’s freshly baked cookies. He did not devour the grandmother, but the cake she had prepared for the Sabbath. The hunter did not kill the wolf, but captured him and returned him to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo. The wolf was punished by not being allowed to watch television for a full week, and regretted having stolen the cookies. Elijah ended the story on a triumphant note, that the wolf still regrets his actions.
And together, the little girls added: “To this very day!”
The little girls finally fell asleep, and Elijah silently went to his computer. He sent an email to Ziva Elitzur, a renowned librarian, asking her to locate the article by Odel Weiss that was mentioned on the paper he had found. He felt that he had taken the first step toward finding the lost treasure. The original Odel had been the daughter of the saintly Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidic movement, and the grandmother of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. Who, but a hippie, born-again Jew would go about with a first name like that? He was curious.
First thing the next day he went to the library to seek out the article. On the way, he saw Prof. Ashuri about to enter the cafeteria and waved to her. Instead of going straight to the library, he decided to speak to her first. Prof. Ashuri always looked like a rather chubby, old grandmother on her way to babysit her grandchildren. Legends flew on campus about the brown beret Prof. Ashuri always wore. According to some, she wore the same beret each day; others insisted that she had a number of such berets and wore them consecutively. But, notwithstanding her dowdy appearance, Prof. Ashuri was an extremely important, world-renowned scholar of Kabbalah.
“What does the Even Shetiyah mean to you?” he asked her and immediately saw her light up.
“I’d like to tell you a story about Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav,” she began.“There is a mountain, and on that mountain there is a stone, and from that stone a spring flows. The mountain and the stone and the spring all lie at one end of the world, and the heart of the world lies at the other end. The heart lies on the other side of the world from the spring, but is longing to come to that spring; at the same time the spring wants to come to the heart.
“Now, you may ask, ‘If the heart is so desirous of coming to the spring, why doesn’t it simply go to it?’ The problem is that when it tries to approach, the incline of the mountain is very steep, and as it climbs the mountain it can no longer see the spring. And if it does not see the spring it will die, because its life force comes from that spring. Thus, as soon as it comes close to the mountain and can no longer see the spring because of the incline, it is forced to retreat. Should the heart cease to beat, heaven forbid, the world would be destroyed, because the heart is the life essence of every living creature. That is why it cannot go to the spring, but must stand opposite it, pining for it.”
“What, then, is the Even Shetiyah?” asked Elijah. On the tip of his tongue was something else very important that he wanted to ask, but he couldn’t remember what it was. When you want to say something that you know is important, but that you cannot for the life of you remember what, it is almost impossible to concentrate on anything else.
But the question had already been asked, and Prof. Ashuri replied, "This goes back to the original sin and the Kabbalistic concept of ‘breaking of the vessels’. The world somehow became messed up and turned into what it is now, but that is not its natural and desirable condition.
“Now, as to Even Shetiyah. It can be translated as the Foundation Stone, in that all of foundation begins from it, or, alternately, as the Watering Stone, which ‘waters’ the whole world with its largesse. If the Even Shetiyah were to cease to exist, the world too would cease to exist. Unfortunately, the Even Shetiyah has become dislodged from its normal place, and the whole world must seek to put it back in its proper position. This is what the story of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav is all about.”
Elijah asked himself why he needed all of this; why had he allowed himself to be involved in the text; a thing he always steered well clear of? But, since Prof. Ashuri was providing him with a full dissertation, he felt that at a certain point he might have to respond; so he listened attentively.
“The Kabbalah is based on a theory about the structure of the world. At the apex is the Creator. In His desire to do good, He produced a perfect creation, which is obviously a spiritual world which is better than the one in which we live. From that world derived other worlds, one from the other, until we come to the coarse world in which we live.”
Elijah sighed, “I am quite confused by all this. One world is derived from another. How do you explain this to your students?”
“What do you know about computers?” Prof. Ashuri asked him, appearing to change the subject.
“Very little,” Elijah answered. “I’ve gotten to the stage where I write my articles by myself. I even took two compulsory courses in programming and actually enjoyed them. I also surf the internet, but how is all this relevant?”
“You’ll soon see. Do you have any idea what happens inside your computer when you use it?”
“Let’s not get carried away,” said Elijah.
“I’ll explain to you about your PC and then we’ll come back to the worlds of the Kabbalah. Did you ever wonder how it is that a computer, which is nothing but a bunch of wires and electronic parts, produces what we want of it? The answer is that it does not do so directly, but via a number of different layers and intermediaries.
“In the final analysis, all the information which is processed is relayed through a series of transistors which can either be in the ON or the OFF mode. The question is whether they are carrying an electrical charge or not. It is this division, into the ON and OFF modes, which is the basis of our computers, which work on a binary system. At the core, computers are run by computer languages known as assembly languages. They only accept zeroes and ones, and their response is also based solely on zeroes and ones.
“The computer manufacturers have written various machine programming languages which are more amenable to people. These languages are called ‘higher-level’ languages, but they too can be very complex. For average people like myself, these, too, are far too complicated. For us, there are computer languages that are of an even higher level. Let us assume, for example, that I have a program on my computer that stores all my telephone numbers. I enter the data into the computer, and my program translates this into a lower-level, more complex language, and then this is translated into an even more complex language, until eventually the translation is into machine assembly language. After a series of such transformations, we end up with a language that translates everything into electrical signals of pure machine language.
“A simple act of entering telephone data is ultimately translated into thousands of actions, which act on many thousands of transistors. When I try to retrieve data from my telephone database, the computer works in the other direction, with thousands of actions taking place before the data is delivered to me.
“Practically speaking, there never has been, and there never will be, a way for us to carry out the most elementary action on a computer without our affecting all these different ‘worlds’ and ‘layers’ which separate our world from the world of the computer.
“For the average user, all of this is totally irrelevant. The average user has
no idea what happens every time he uses the computer. He knows that he performs a certain action and receives a certain result. For the average user, who may at best have a vague idea of how computers work, the different layers involved in operating the computer simply do not exist.”
Elijah remained silent, for he was beginning to understand the basic ideas behind the Kabbalah. Afterwards, to ensure that he had digested the information correctly, he asked, "Does that mean that we can compare the world in our Kabbalistic interpretation to the world of the computer? We have a central Creator, whose influence is felt via many worlds, and through them He reaches our world. These layers of worlds descend from on high, downward through many intermediaries until they reach our world and influence it. Is that what you meant?”
“Would you like to sign up for my course?” Prof. Ashuri asked, laughing.
“You have many students.”
“Many,” sighed Ashuri, “and from various faculties. A considerable number of them are not even registered at the university. They come to register, and I ignore the fact that they are not on the roster. This year, I closed registration after seventy-five students had signed up, but in reality over a hundred attended each lecture. For purely selfish reasons, because of my age, I suppose, I refused to accept any more. I have found lately that Kabbalah has shown signs of a resurgence of interest. As a result, many charlatans earn a fine living from it.”
Elijah remembered that he was really on his way to the library. He parted from Prof. Ashuri in his normal awkward, hesitant and apologetic manner, thanking her profusely no less than three times; he would even have bowed down to her if that was what would have enabled him to expedite his exit. However, Prof. Ashuri had one more important observation to make.
“I hope that your interest in the Kabbalah will not infect you with that dreaded disease...” she smiled.
“What disease do you mean?”
