The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  “What happened?” called out the rabbi’s wife. “How is my husband? Can you help him?”

  “He needs nothing now but the grace of God,” Pereira told them.

  SCARCELY AN HOUR after the sudden death of Abraham Orabuena, swarms of people filled the streets around the rabbi’s house. The men’s earlocks bobbed in the wind. Knots of women stood there, keening. The rabbi’s closest friends did the best they could to keep the people away from the residence, but the pressing of the curious almost knocked the doors off their hinges.

  His dead body was laid out in the bedroom, wrapped in a black cloth, with two candles burning at the head of the bed. The rabbi’s wife wandered about, sobbing. She had taken off the wig of a married woman and had covered her head with a shawl. The male guests from the Seder meal sat together on low stools and chanted psalms and prayers.

  MOISHE HAD HIDDEN himself away in his bedroom and lay curled up on the bed. Anger and grief seized him in turn but they soon gave way to a feeling of oppressive gloom. He closed his eyes. The spirit of his mother came to him, kissed him tenderly on the forehead, and wrapped him in her comforting arms.

  “Explain to me, dearest Mama,” Moishe said, “what is the meaning of the word ‘makbenak’?”

  “You know the legend of Adoniram, of course? He was the man who built King Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem, on Mount Moria where Abraham had offered to sacrifice his son Isaac. Adoniram employed more than a hundred thousand workers and Solomon’s temple was the most splendid edifice ever constructed. That tireless architect gathered force, inspiration, and knowledge from that secret source in which are collected all seven of the wisdoms of the world. Only a handful of the chosen have ever had access to the secret source. Adoniram was one of them. Through it he learned of the Prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the temple, as well as the precise dimensions of the room of the Holiest of the Holies. That space was to be constructed as a square, twenty ells by twenty ells, and since the ceiling was at a height of twenty ells, the room was built as a cube.”

  “A cube?” Moishe repeated.

  “Yes. Even the sacrificial altar in the space before the eastern gate of the temple was in the shape of a cube. The altar platform was twelve times twelve ells in the vision of the Prophet Ezekiel. But Adoniram built the sacrificial altar on the very top of the Qubbet es-Sachra, the Dome of the Rock, to the dimensions of twenty ells by twenty ells.”

  “So you’re saying that Adoniram did not comply with the vision of the prophet?”

  “He was not acting of his own volition. Adoniram did nothing but follow the instructions of the secret source, but he wound up paying a high price for it. Three jealous stonemasons coveted his secret knowledge. They threatened him, but he refused to give them the password that granted access to the secret source. In reprisal they murdered Adoniram and buried his body at the foot of a hill. They marked the site with an acacia branch. Eventually the grave was discovered by the nine master builders. They dug up the body, and when they saw that it had begun to decay, they cried out ‘Makbenak!’ It means, ‘The flesh is coming loose from the bones.’ They placed the body in the earth once more, planted an acacia tree over it, and returned to tell King Solomon of their discovery. The king ordered them to dig up the body. They did so, and with the help of the secret source they managed bit by bit to piece Adoniram’s body together again. With each gesture the nine master builders chanted ‘Makbenak!’ Then Adoniram was born again and a thousand lights blazed around the acacia tree. The ten men swore never to reveal the secret. Because of this, makbenak became the new secret password to the secret source.”

  “Darling Mother, tell me, may I gain access to that source?”

  “The password alone is not sufficient; you must also know how to pronounce makbenak correctly. Only the righteous are able to do so. A quest to find the secret source is pointless. No one ever achieves wisdom by discovering a source of pure water. Wisdom comes from within.”

  “What must I do to become righteous?”

  “Treat others as you wish to be treated. Observe the world with serene understanding, and remain ever attentive to other persons and their characters. You must communicate the knowledge you glean in simple words that many persons can understand.”

  “I don’t see how all of these things are connected: makbenak, the secret source, Grandfather’s death. Explain to me, I beg you, why Grandfather had to die.”

  “He did not die. He was liberated from the burdens of the flesh. His soul is now with the holy source, in that place where all wisdom is gathered and the Book of Life is held. That extraordinary book has its origins in the far distant past. In it are inscribed every event and every single detail of all our lives. Grandfather is now there regarding all that is invisible to human eyes. Makbenak was the password that admitted him to Paradise. One day you will be reunited with Grandfather. But you have a long road to travel and you must do so alone, without Grandfather and me. My time is almost up. Before I disappear, you will receive the key that will open every door to you. Listen carefully, my son: The password I give you is the same as the moves on the chessboard that the angels provided to me when I defeated Muhammed. Translate the numbers to words and the words to numbers, balance emotion and reason, know what you seek, and everything hidden will reveal itself; life will become an open book for you.”

  Quietly she described the movements of the chess pieces. Then she kissed Moishe’s forehead. For a moment he could see his mother’s face distinctly, just before his eyes. But the vision quickly faded into the darkness. Moishe experienced the bittersweet pang of feeling his mother’s presence and recognizing the unbridgeable distance that separated them.

  FOR A COUPLE OF MONTHS Moishe was regarded as our great hero. Children need heroes, and Sasha and I wanted to know everything there was to know about the Cabalist. While my great-uncle was confined to a hospital bed for treatment of minor chest pains, we combed through all the reference works and history books in his library in search of more information about Moishe. But we found nothing. Not because we lacked zeal or patience but simply because his name wasn’t mentioned anywhere.

  After he got out of the hospital, my great-uncle offered us an explanation, but first he required a vow of silence from us. We had to pledge that never, under any circumstances, would we speak of it outside our home.

  He told us that in 1952 the Communist Party in Eastern Europe had charged a handful of prominent leaders with treason and hanged them. Executing the scapegoats was intended to distract the people from their discontent with the regime. The propaganda department immediately erased those communists’ names from history and of course from all the libraries, too. Many were of Jewish ancestry. The bureaucrats were extremely thorough in their pursuit of traitors; in fact, they went too far. Wherever Moishe de Espinosa’s name had stood, only white space remains.

  I’VE ALWAYS BEEN DISSATISFIED with conclusions, summaries, and neatly packaged accounts of lives. I’m attracted by the random and the inexplicable. I have an odd interest in superfluous detail. Maybe that’s why I so often remember the trivial things more vividly than the point of a story.

  My great-uncle told us the following things about Moishe de Espinosa:

  I.

  For the first three months after his grandfather’s death he slept lightly and never dreamed. He was in deep mourning and thought of nothing but Rabbi Orabuena.

  II.

  Muhammed II was generally despised, for he led Granada into economic and political disaster. With every passing day the number of his enemies grew. Despite this, he was apparently pleased with himself, more so than any man with common sense would have a right to be.

  “Muhammed’s arrogant bearing and firm convictions are evidence of his stupidity,” his brother, Nasir, used to say. At other times he would assert, “There’s not an ass from here to Baghdad as self-confident and determined as he is.”

  For seven years of sorrow and misery Nasir waited for the right moment. He then assembled a troo
p of faithful followers, all united by the desire to overthrow the tyrant. Muhammed fled as far as the city of Almuñécar. In the following year, 1310, driven by the passion for revenge, he attempted to retake the throne. His armed revolt was put down. After the defeat, Nasir showed Muhammed no mercy. He handed the task of dealing with his brother to an official who prided himself on having carried out as many as four hundred executions with his own hands. The man had lost a wife and two daughters to Muhammed’s depredations. The executioner wasted no time. With great satisfaction he put out the eyes of the defeated sultan and drowned him in one of the fountains of the Alhambra.

  A new page was turned in the history of Granada once Nasir became ruler. He studied astronomy and devoted more time to the natural sciences than to the arts of war. When he learned that Rabbi Orabuena had died, followed six months later by his wife, Nasir invited Moishe to live in the Alhambra and to study with the court philosopher, Yussuf al-Rahman.

  III.

  The people of Granada had much to discuss in the summer of 1325. Ismail I was killed by his cousin, who took the throne as Muhammed IV and became the sixth sultan of the Nasrid line. Yussuf al-Rahman, the city’s great intellectual, had suddenly fallen ill and died, shortly after his youngest daughter, Hasna, married his favorite pupil, Moishe de Espinosa. A woman condemned for adultery was sentenced to be drowned in a sack thrown into the Beiro River, but the next day when the sack was retrieved she was found undrowned. The fact that she was still alive proved that she had been innocent. She was brought back to the city in triumph. One midsummer night a powerful fireball appeared over the western horizon, shining like an evil eye. Ahmed Husseini, the most highly regarded astrologer of Granada, asserted that it was a comet of evil aspect and made the grim prediction that the comet would bring a plague from the underworld.

  IV.

  Moishe calculated the trajectory of the comet. To make doubly sure of the result, he used the key—the sequence of chess moves—that he had received from his mother. He determined that the comet was not on a collision course with earth and estimated that it would be visible again in 315 years. He delivered the results of his calculations to the new sultan and assured him that the universe was not out of balance. Muhammed IV was both relieved and impressed. He suggested that Moishe should convert to Islam and take his mentor’s now-vacant position as Granada’s court philosopher. Moishe expressed his thanks but humbly declined the offer; he asked to be allowed to remain a Jew and to devote himself to the studies of his choice. Without a second thought the sultan granted him that privilege and provided him all the financial support he needed.

  V.

  Moishe and Hasna had five children, every one of them a boy. Four died before they had reached the age of ten. In contrast, Salman, the firstborn, survived a very long time, living to be more than three hundred and fifty years old.

  VI.

  Moishe and Hasna regularly worked together. They sought to identify common themes in centuries-old religious writings, with the aim of reconciling the teachings of the Jewish and Arab mystics. Moishe held that it was necessary to coax new truths from the ancient texts. His principal interest lay with the Torah and the Talmud, but he extended his study even to the Koran. For as he was wont to say, “The Holy Scripture contains many hidden truths that can be extracted only with the help of commentaries of each historical era.” They were agreed that only by interpreting the fundamental texts anew could the mystical tradition be simultaneously preserved and transformed.

  VII.

  All of Moishe’s extant texts are couched in powerfully poetic language.

  VIII.

  On Friday, February 2, 1342, Moishe completed his magnum opus, Sefer ha-Zohar (Book of Splendor). Not until the nineteenth century did leading rabbis acknowledge its central position within the Jewish tradition of mystic literature and its commentaries.

  IX.

  Moishe felt stiff and chilled to the bone during the Seder meal of 1348. He slept fitfully that night and was awakened by a sensation of burning heat. In the morning he came down with a high fever and had difficulty breathing. He vomited blood and suffered from diarrhea. He looked up at Hasna and whispered, “Who am I—and who are you—in all of this? In the Talmud is written, ‘I am no more than ashes and dust, but the world was created for me!’ ”

  The end was not long in coming.

  THE CABALIST, the man who turned the path of the Espinosas from poisons to philosophy, was one of the forty million European victims of the plague of the Black Death.

  I WAS PLANNING to tell the story of Salman de Espinosa, the eldest son of Moishe the Cabalist. But now I’m feeling terribly tired and I don’t know why. Is it the cancer or the medicine? The pains frighten me; they’re almost unbearable. To escape them I stuff myself full of medicine. It numbs the pain but at the same time it robs me of my strength. My doctor says that I really should just lie still and rest. But I haven’t the slightest desire to do so. My life is ending. I can’t bear this shuttling back and forth between hope and despair. That’s why I laugh out loud sometimes when I’m struck by the humorous notion that I might live for another year or two. I try to take advantage of the short time left to me by setting down the anecdotes about my family that my great-uncle told Sasha and me when we were children.

  I should have taken a greater interest in the lineage of our family once I grew up, since I was supposed to continue our line. But I didn’t care for children and so I had none. A prisoner of my own egotism, I put my hands over my ears whenever my mother and father tried to tell me about their lives. And then, afterward, it was too late.

  Now I sit here in the graveyard of my memory and try to conjure up the past that slipped away from my thoughts so long ago. I find comfort in those stories as I write them down.

  I realized recently that the tales from my childhood are the ones that come most readily to mind. Often my fingers race over the keyboard in the vain attempt to keep up with my recollections. But today every sentence is an agony for me. As my strength ebbs, I can feel myself approaching the limits of the little time remaining. Some strange force, or maybe some lack of force, is sabotaging my efforts. I try to hold my inner enemy at bay but he is steadily outwitting me with his tricks.

  SALMAN DE ESPINOSA. His is a dismal story, but it also offers a lesson. They tortured him without interruption for eight days without overcoming his resistance. His body was no more than a mass of bleeding wounds when the executioner serving Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada burned him at the stake in the plaza before the cathedral of Seville. That was in March 1487. I have no desire to say any more about it for the time being.

  But I can also tell you what he was doing a month after that. He rose from the dead and celebrated the Sabbath with friends in Dubrovnik, then trailed his long dark gown along the highway that followed the Adriatic coast. He wandered through small white towns drowsing away in their unexceptional everyday existence, and he distributed to pious Jews The Seventh Book of Moses, an extremely odd book that he had composed.

  Salman’s history is an important part of the Spinoza family destiny. But it’s a lengthy tale, and right now I don’t have the strength for such a long session at the keyboard. I must conserve my strength today and write about something easier to put down. For example, the things I know about my great-uncle.

  MY GREAT-UNCLE had no blood ties to us. He had simply managed to marry one of my grandmother’s five cousins, a woman who happened to be the least attractive of them, according to Grandmother. But he was determined to stay in contact with us, and he knew everything worth knowing about the Spinoza family. It was my great-uncle who taught me that we had played significant roles in the history of Europe, or at least that we had been part of that history. Sometimes I wasn’t quite sure whether I should be pleased with that or ashamed of it. But as soon as my great-uncle turned up for a visit, all doubt dropped away.

  “Spinoza is a name you should feel proud of,” he used to say. “You come from the salt of the
earth.”

  My brother, Sasha, and I did feel proud. Even if we did not understand exactly what the salt of the earth had to do with our family line.

  WHEN WE WERE CHILDREN, we almost never heard anything about the life of my great-uncle or that of his family. He would happily spend hours telling tales about our forefathers and the distant past, but he resisted saying anything at all about himself. The few times that we asked him about his own background, he fell silent and then quickly changed the subject.

  But one time he smiled at a distant memory and enthusiastically recited something that sounded like a passage from a children’s book: “It is not true that my father is an actor; that is only a disguise. He is really the richest man in the world. He owns many palaces in different lands—a castle overlooking the Mediterranean, a coffee plantation in Brazil, and vast rice fields in China that stretch as far as the eye can see. In addition, he had deep tunnels dug beneath the Black Forest, where the Danube has its source, and he filled them with gold and precious gems.”

  We listened and gaped at him, fascinated, although a bit disappointed when he refused to say anything more.

  Other times he would answer us, after quick deliberation, that we wouldn’t enjoy hearing stories from his life or from his own family history, since their existence had been trivial and uninteresting.

  Sasha and I suspected that he was not being entirely truthful. But we had to resign ourselves to the fact that my great-uncle had his own reasons to keep his past from us.