For the Time Being

by Annie Dillard

  Isaac Luria’s acute sense of exile darkens his notion of holy sparks: Since dense shells imprison the divine, God’s presence languishes everywhere lost. The Baal Shem Tov, who often startled people by turning cartwheels, flipped this dark idea on its shining head: If shells imprison the divine, then all we see holds holiness. Luria despaired of the husk, the shard without: the Baal Shem Tov delighted in the spark, the God within. This is not pantheism but pan-entheism: The one transcendent God made the universe, and his presence kindles inside every speck of it. Each clot of clay conceals a coal. A bird flies the house. A live spark heats a clay pot.

  “When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.” One of the Baal Shem Tov’s spiritual heirs put it this way.

  The Baal Shem Tov’s teaching combined Isaac Luria’s Kabbalah with traditional Hasidic devotion. The Baal Shem Tov dropped Luria’s asceticism, saying, “Do not deny your flesh, God forbid”—although he himself fasted one week a month. He skipped lightly over Luria’s wild-eyed Messianism. He shunned Kabbalah’s stiff and esoteric elitism. He preached service, and openly returned the fruits of his prayer to the people around him. To traditional teaching he added fervor, joy (“joy in performing the commandments”), and an urgent belief that every Jew, learned or not, could pray in the presence of God. The Baal Shem Tov prized prayer even more highly than Torah study. By praying with devotion, by holding themselves fast to God, he said, people could mark, shift, and ultimately unify heaven.

  The Baal Shem Tov’s grandson was Dov Baer, the Great Maggid, the wandering teacher. His passion was cleaving to God. People stay in God’s presence by the effort of Devekut, devotion. The Great Maggid wrote the Tract on Ecstasy. Ecstasy, I think, is a soul’s response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.

  E V I L One night in a Quito hotel room, I read the Gideon Bible, an edition with facing columns in English and Spanish. I read for twenty minutes before a double-edged razor blade fell from its pages. One day in the Judean desert, in the cliffside monastery of Wadi Qilt, an American tourist lay supine on a balcony ledge. He was a thin young Vermonter with cropped hair and a pleading expression. Reaching down, he caught a wandering yellow kitten, carried it to his face, and settled the kitten there, over his shut eyes. Like many visitors to Jerusalem, he had, for the nonce, gone crazy; soon doctors sent him home.

  What is that at the bottom of the hole? Is it alive? Healthy? Dead? Does a crab have it?

  Killing people by scraping their flesh from their bones was an idea that lived. In the fifth century, Christians killed the wellborn lady Hypatia, according to Gibbon, in a church; they stripped her flesh with oyster shells, and threw the shellfuls of flesh, “quivering,” in a fire. Her problem was Neoplatonism, says writer Hal Crowther; also she studied mathematics. “‘After this,’ comments Bertrand Russell, ‘Alexandria was no longer troubled by philosophers.’”

  “How can evil exist in a world created by God, the Beneficent One? It can exist, because entrapped deep inside the force of evil there is a spark of goodness. This spark is the source of life of the evil tendency…. Now, it is the specific mission of the Jew to free the entrapped holy sparks from the grip of the forces of evil by means of Torah study and prayer. Once the holy sparks are released, evil, having lost its life-giving core, will cease to exist.” So wrote Rabbi Yehuda Aryeh Leib Alter of Ger, in nineteenth-century Poland. It was the Baal Shem Tov who taught this vital idea.

  God is spirit, spirit expressed infinitely in the universe, who does not give as the world gives. His home is absence, and there he finds us. In the coils of absence we meet him by seeking him. God lifts our souls to their roots in his silence. Natural materials clash and replicate, shaping our fates. We lose the people we love, we lose our vigor, and we lose our lives. Perhaps, and at best, God knows nothing of these temporal accidents, but knows souls only. This God does not direct the universe, he underlies it. Or he “prolongs himself” into it, in Teilhard’s terms. Or in dear nutcase Joel Goldsmith’s terms, God is the universe’s consciousness. The consciousness of divinity is divinity itself. The more we wake to holiness, the more of it we give birth to, the more we introduce, expand, and multiply it on earth, the more God is “on the field.”

  “Without a doubt, time is an accident,” Maimonides said, “one of the created accidents, such as blackness and whiteness.”

  God is—for the most part—out of the physical loop of the fallen world he created, let us say. Or God is the loop, or pervades the loop, or the loop runs in God like a hole in his side he never fingers. Certainly God is not a member of the loop like the rest of us, passing the water bucket to splash the fire, kicking the bucket, passing the buck. After all, the semipotent God has one hand tied behind his back. (I cannot prove that with the other hand he wipes and stirs our souls from time to time, or that he spins like a fireball through our skulls, and knocks open our eyes so we see flaming skies and fall to the ground and say, “Abba! Father!”)

  N O W A man who struggles long to pray and study Torah will be able to discover the sparks of divine light in all of creation, in each solitary bush and grain and woman and man. And when he cleaves strenuously to God for many years, he will be able to release the sparks, to unwrap and lift these particular shreds of holiness, and return them to God. This is the human task: to direct and channel the sparks’ return. This task is tikkun, restoration.

  Yours is a holy work on earth right now, they say, whatever that work is, if you tie your love and desire to God. You do not deny or flee the world, but redeem it, all of it—just as it is.

  Buber on Hasidism: “We are sent into the world of contradiction; when we soar away from it into spheres where it appears fathomable to us, then we evade our task.” Buber explains the thinking of the Baal Shem Tov. Some thinkers argue that Buber, professing to clarify the Baal Shem Tov, voiced his own thoughts.

  A Hasid was traveling to Miedzyboz to spend the Day of Atonement with the Baal Shem Tov in the prayer house. Nightfall caught him in an open field, and forced him, to his distress, to pray alone. After the holiday “the Baal Shem received him with particular happiness and cordiality. ‘Your praying,’ he said, ‘lifted up all the prayers which were lying stored in that field.’”

  Psalm 93: The waters have lifted up their voice;

  the waters have lifted up their pounding waves.

  CHAPTER SIX

  B I R T H In tropical South America live the Kogi Indians. They say, as Michael Parfit tells it, that when an infant begins life, it knows three things: mother, night, and water.

  Some Hasids, in a lost age, used to say that all our deeds give birth to angels—good angels and bad angels. “From half-hearted and confused deeds which are without meaning or power,” Martin Buber notes, “angels are born with twisted limbs or without a head or hands or feet.”

  Today, according to Lis Harris, after a mohel circumcises a Hasidic infant, he swaddles him, places him on a pillow, sings to him, and rocks him. Then he dances him, whirling and bouncing, around the room.

  The Baal Shem Tov danced and leaped as he prayed, and his congregation danced too. Hasids today dance and leap. Dancing is no mere expression; it is an achievement. Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav noticed that if the dancers could persuade a melancholy person to join them, his sadness would lift. And if you are that melancholy person, he taught, persuade yourself to dance, for it is “an achievement to struggle and pursue that sadness, bringing it into the joy.” In 1903, this same Rabbi Nachman said, “I have danced a lot this year.” During the preceding twelve months, in fact, Russia had passed a series of laws hobbling Jews. A disciple explained his master’s words: “By means of dance one can transform the evil forces and nullify decrees.”

  Theologian Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s Reform congregation in Sudbury, Massachusetts, naturally holds a celebration on Simchat To
rah, when the synagogue completes the whole year’s reading of the Torah. (Do not confuse him with bestseller Rabbi Harold Kushner.)

  “It is a thrilling sight,” he wrote. “People come from far and wide. The dancing goes on for hours.

  “I once asked a newly-arrived Soviet Jewish refusenik what he thought of our Simchat Torah celebration.” The man said it was fine, but better in Leningrad. Rabbi Kushner, who admitted to being “curious and a little insulted,” asked how it was better.

  “‘In Leningrad,’ he explained, ‘if you dance in front of the synagogue on Simchat Torah, you must assume that the secret police will photograph everyone. This means that you will be identified and sooner or later your employer will be notified. And since such a dance is considered anti-Soviet, you must be prepared to lose your job! And so you see,’ he went on, ‘to dance on such an occasion, this is a different kind of dance.’”

  S A N D Sand plunges. Sandstone plates subduct. They tilt as if stricken and dive under crusts. At abyssal depths earth’s weight presses out their water; heat and weight burst their molecules, and sandstone changes into quartzite. It keeps the form of quartzite—that milky gray mineral—to very great depths, where at last the quartzite melts and mixes in magma. In the fullness of time, magma rises along faults; it surfaces, and makes continents that streams grate back to sand.

  “I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ,” Father Teilhard explained cheerfully at the end of a book in which he tracked his ideas. His evolving universe culminates in Christ symbolically (“Jesus must be loved as a world”) and unpalatably. “As much as anyone, I imagine,” he went on, “I walk in the shadows of faith”—that is, in doubt. Doubt and dedication often go hand in hand. And “faith,” crucially, is not assenting intellectually to a series of doctrinal propositions; it is living in conscious and rededicated relationship to God. Nevertheless, the temptation to profess creeds with uncrossed fingers is strong. Teilhard possessed, like many spiritual thinkers, a sort of anaerobic capacity to batten and thrive on paradox.

  It was in 1928, when Teilhard was forty-seven, that his team discovered Peking man. An archaeologist, Pei Wenchung, found a man’s skull. Teilhard had unearthed the first tools and hearths in the Ordos, but here were the first bones. The skull from the cave near Peking caused a sensation: the first bit of ancient human bone unearthed in all Asia.

  Time had stuffed Peking man, and all his pomps and works, down a red fissure in a blue cave wall at Zhoukoudian. Fossils crammed the red fissure. The team called the skull’s first owner Peking man. His species was Homo erectus.

  The team originally found the Zhoukoudian cave by questioning a big-city pharmacist. Many old folk in China drink suspended fossil-bone powders as elixirs—so-called dragon’s teeth; consequently, paleontologists for two generations have checked Chinese pharmacies and asked, “Where did these bones come from?” Shopping for fossils, a specialist recognized an ancient human tooth. His inquiry led to the caves at Zhoukoudian—Dragon Bone Hill.

  Teilhard hauled his camp cot from Peking, lived with Chinese villagers, and directed the dig. Over the years he sorted and eventually named the fissures’ animal bones. He discovered bones from saber-toothed tigers, ostriches, horses, a large camel, buffalo, wild sheep, rhinos, hyenas, and “a large and a small bear.” Ultimately, and spectacularly, he was able to date Peking man in the Pleistocene. He established the date by many methods, one of which was interesting: Among the bits of debris under, around, and above various layers of Peking man’s bones and tools were skulls, whole or in fragments, of mole rats. He undertook his own study of the mole rats’ evolving skulls, dated them, and so helped confirm Peking man’s dates.

  The team dug further into the immensities of the Zhoukoudian caves; for ten years they excavated, for eight months a year. Teilhard retrieved five more human skulls, twelve lower jaws, and scattered teeth. It was his major life’s work.

  During those ten years, squinting and laughing furrowed his face. His temples dipped as his narrow skull bones emerged. When he could not get Gauloises, he smoked Jobs. Daily he said the Divine Office—the liturgy, mostly psalms, that is the prayer of the Catholic (and Anglican and Episcopal) church. A British historian who knew him described his “kindly and ironic grace,” his “sharp and yet benevolent refinement.”

  In all those years, he found no skeletons. When colleagues worldwide praised him for the discoveries, Teilhard spoke with modesty and exasperation: “Heads,” he said, “practically nothing but heads.” Paleontologists from all over the world are again—seventy years later, after several decades’ chaos halted the work—finding hominid bones, and choppers and stone flakes, in the Zhoukoudian caves.

  Peking man and his people walked upright: with limbs like ours they made fire and stone tools. That land was jungly then. They ate mostly venison and hackberries. They hunted elephants, tigers, and boars. They lived before water filled the Great Lakes and the Florida peninsula lifted from the sea, while camels and mastodons grazed in North America. They lived before two great ages when ice covered Scandinavia and Canada, as well as the British Isles, northern Germany, and the northern United States: they lived before the Atlantic Ocean drowned eastern North America between glaciations. Their human species is extinct, like the Neanderthals’.

  Most paleontologists believe that we—we humans in the form of Homo erectus—left Africa ninety thousand years ago by walking up the Great Rift Valley, generation after generation, to the valley’s end at the Sea of Galilee. Recent, much older erectus finds in Java, China, and the Republic of Georgia seem to show, however, that our generations started leaving Africa about a million years earlier—unless humans arose in Asia. The new ancient dates jolt paleontologists, who one might expect would be accustomed to this sort of thing by now—this repeated knocking out the back wall, this eerie old light on the peopled landscape.

  Whenever we made our move, we did not rush to Corfu like sensible people. Instead we carried our cupped fires into the lands we now call the Levant, and then seriatim into China, Japan, and Indonesia, whence we hopped islands clear to Australia. There, on a rock shelter, we engraved animals twice as long ago as we painted cave walls in France. People—including erectus—plied Asian islands thousands of years before Europe saw any humans who could think of such a thing as a raft.

  “However far back we look into the past,” Teilhard said, “we see the waves of the multiple breaking into foam.”

  During the violence and famine the Japanese invasion of China caused, that first Peking man skull disappeared from the Chinese museum. Scientists suspect starving locals pulverized and drank it. There is a plaster cast of this skull, as there is of every bit of bone and tooth—forty people’s remains—that the team found by working the site for all those years. The plaster casts proved handy, since every single one of the Peking man bones, crate after crate, disappeared in World War II. Scientists cached the crates with a U.S. Marine doctor, who tried to carry them back as luggage. The Japanese caught him. Before he went to prison he was able to entrust the crates to European officials and Chinese friends. He left prison four years later, when the war ended; the crates had disappeared. Recent searches draw blanks.

  The man of the red earths, Teilhard called Peking man. And of Christianity he said, “We have had too much talk of sheep. I want to see the lions come out.”

  C H I N A When Emperor Qin was thirty-one years old, a rival prince sent him an envoy bearing routine regal gifts: a severed head and a map. The envoy also bore a poisoned dagger in his sleeve. The comedy played itself out: When the assassin grabbed the emperor’s sleeve and drew the dagger, the sleeve tore off. The emperor found his dress sword too long to draw. He dashed behind a pillar. His courtiers gaped. The court doctor beaned the assailant with a medicine bag. The emperor ran around and around the pillar. Someone yelled to the emperor that he could draw his sword if he tilted its length behind him. He tried that, and it worked; he slashed the assassin’s thigh. The assassin threw his
dagger; it hit the pillar. The emperor and his courtiers finished him off.

  Seven years later, someone tried to kill the emperor with a lead-filled harp. The next year someone tried to ambush his carriage; the hapless assassin attacked the wrong carriage.

  Emperor Qin was almost forty by then, and getting nervous. Surely power and wealth could secure immortality? At that time, intelligence held that immortality, while elusive like a treasure or a bird, could enter some people’s hands if they sought it mightily and used all means. The emperor sacrificed to mountains and rivers; he walked beaches, looking for immortals. He sent scholars to search for a famous Taoist master who had foiled death by eating a flower. No one could find him.

  Taoist monks, then and now, run medical laboratories. The emperor ordered the monks to brew a batch of immortality elixir, under pain of death. Consequently, they took those pains. Again, it was common knowledge that immortal people lived on three Pacific islands, where they drank a concoction that proofed their bodies against time. The emperor sent a fleet of ships to find the islands and fetch the philter. Many months later, the expedition’s captain returned. He knew he faced death for failing. He told the emperor he had actually met an immortal, who, alas, would not release the philter without the gift of many young people and craftsmen. The emperor complied. Away sailed the same canny captain with many ships bearing three thousand skilled and comely young people. They never returned. A widely known Chinese legend claims they colonized Japan.

  Foiled, the emperor concluded that a court enemy must be jinxing his immortality project. He purged the court and concealed his movements. He owned 270 palaces; now he built secret tunnels, routes, and walkways among them; he crept about under heavy guard. He killed informers and all their families. Once, a meteorite fell in a far-flung area of his empire. A local wag whose sense of occasion was poor wrote on the meteorite the witty taunt, “After Qin Shih-huang-ti’s death the land will be divided.” Emperor Qin easily pounded the stone to powder; it took longer to kill all that region’s inhabitants.