LIVING PALM TREE

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 THE MATHESON MONOGRAPHS

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THE LIVING PALM TREE
 nin? WAND pty
The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree.
Psalms, 92:12 — "3° "a¥ O9AN
 jijaas
LIVING PALM TREE

Parables, Stories

and ‘Teachings

from the Kabbalah

Mario Satz
Translated from Spanish
by Juan Acevedo

Toe MATHESON TRUST

For the Study of Comparative Religion
 First published as
La palmera transparente
by Editorial EDAF, Madrid 2000
This translation © The Matheson Trust 2010

This first English edition published 2010 by

The Matheson Trust
PO Box 336
56 Gloucester Road
London SW7 4UB, UK
http://themathesontrust.org

ISBN 978 1 908092 00 7

All rights reserved. No part of this publication

may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library

Cover: Ilumination from the Cervera Bible, c.1300

(Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, 11. 72)
referring to the vision in Zechariah 4
For Leonardo Senkman,

with affection
 Contents

Preface to the English Pransiation <5 <n. = <n we Aske

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AC Sneek i ye ret Pe Nye ec ee oe eae ee eat,
1. The Aerialist, His Balancing Pole and the Blade of Grass. . .
2. Lae Bive Secretror Tlappimess. a.-8 « 6 Goes works 4 eb
one Rock-ang the Creanwe. 2. 6s awbe oe A: oe SB
MeO IB EATICES ot aq enEe 2p kg Gn seh ee a ce en ee ey eee
BMI EY wee rigid Ge ennai set ae gee aaa. a ee rae ary ea ee
Gene IRD LaUQNel a6 ea BS ae wks oe ee as
Te LAO ANNO OEE. Gg aoa arti Oe Bh oY, 54 OE oes tS

SC nanging Fear into: a Mirror 2. Ae ee 3 Se

iO. chic Keverseroiiataee nn 52 eo ae en OA in eee
The Pde LAW aM CARAS So. ak es a ce Se ae Rees
a2. The Rabbrand the General. . 3. ge ks SO ew ES
13. The Stork, the Old man and the Infinite Night. . .... .
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ic..ip Touch With tite. Wieeror Lites. 6 a ee ROS he we
zm. the Three Kinds of Puman Demgs.. a 6 a ce ws
dealer Pramments Of Beauty. c's. hen ee oh ey he vpn
Ire atte Marae ce bye (3 Sek gas Moe & uke ie Bs Sees
Shcmie Mileiy DIeCUCr 3. ki bx me hha ck See i) Ge dg
bie Valle Or Lites ng bee ood ten Seen me a @ ey
Oo EC NOMIS YOUTSCIR Fem 6M, phen as eas we seek be es
gy Pe BOOK Onto CIC an vice alee eee ee Se A ee ng
4; Tlie exact sIde-Or Keality, “p ae y Bes yt a a 6) vgs

1X
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

. Learning from the Ignorants .

. All the Names of the Earth.
27. The Deaf-Mute Singer .
. The Intermittent Goodbye .
9. The Folds of the Heart.
. In the Cemetery.
. The Two Kinds of Master
2. The Sheet of Silence:
. The Creator and His Creatures .
34. The Eager Student
35. Enlightenment and Return.
36. The Tear Phial
. The Mandrake, the Saint and the Retarded Son
..Noah’s Fate.
. Beneath Every Human Being.
0. The Desert and the Verb .
. The Cartographer and the Orange Blossom .
. [he Dot and the Line.
Light from the Air.
. Perfect Ear and Imperfect I
. The Carob Tree Water Carrier
. When Facing Doubt, Trust the Work of the Universe .
. Divine Presence. : . 100
. The Onion and the Value off symbols 102

. The Ear of Cereal . 104

. His Soul Blossomed. 106
. Blessing of the Moon eee: 108
. Yoshka the Hunchback, Thief of Twitters . lo
. Death and the Thistle . 113
. The Times of the Cherry Tree. 5
. The Best Way . ioe 117
3. On the Reverse of the Word 1 Sleep 119
. The Son of the Sea of Air 121
 Mario Satz

. Panting or Inspiring. . . . ae
. Ehezer Ben Yehudah Surrounded byWords. .
. Black Fire, White Fire . ae
. Ecstasy under the Vault of Shade . .
. Sulphur and Musk Rg Neg e
. The Root of the Past and the Cup of the Future . . .
. Light for the Nations
. The Master and the Essence .
. The Spiral Music of the Olive Tree .
. In Every Scroll of the Law .
. The Heart of Solitude .
. Blood and Image .
. The Baker and the Angels .
. The Sweetness of Wisdom . .
. Breathing In Infinity
. The Lightning of Paradise .
. Lhe Power of the Listener . . ‘bee
. To See the Light, to Be the Light . .
5. Punishment and the Hands
. The Blessing of the Food.
. The Reader of Clouds .
. Putting Heart In
80. The Living Palm Tree .
General Index .

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 Preface to the English Translation

‘The joy I feel upon seeing the English version ofthis modest work,
whose aim is to actualise the ancient and quintessential lore of
the Kabbalah, is not alien to my interest in the life and work of
William Blake, to whom I am so much indebted, and from whom
I have learnt that the Bible is, above all, poetry, in the highest and
most sublime sense of the word. Blake was a mystic and a man of
light, whose language is still cryptic and complex for many. He
tinged the English language with wisdom and paradox, but he
also brought it closer, even more than it already is by nature and
inclination, to the Holy Scripture. It may not be by chance, then,
that this volume is being published in London, home to such
a loving scholar of Blake as Kathleen Raine. She rediscovered,
along the path of symbols and comparative studies, that poetry
is in the origin of them both. May she receive, wherever she is,
my gratitude for all the fields of knowledge to which she has
contributed and handed on. “Words,” says the Zohar or Book of
Splendour, “do not fall into the void.” There is always, somewhere
or other, someone who embodies the best of words, and who will
succeed, like the masters and students of The Living Palm Tree, in
breathing into our hearts a more lucid and richer life.

M. 5.
Valldoreix, 2010

X11
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 Preface

According to the vast ocean of Biblical wisdom, the righteous

man or the initiate is under the patronage of the most upright of
botanical exemplars we can imagine, for, as described in Psalm
92:12, he “shall flourish like the palm tree”, tsadig ke-tamar yifrah
m9’ 7nd PTX, a passage in which tamar, the said tree, can also
be read as an acrostic of the Hebrew phrase teshubah mayim rabim
pan o'7) Aawn, whose meaning is “answer or gathering of many
waters”. Between this archaic metaphor, whose origin lies hidden
in the night of the Neolithic, and the palm grove that sways in
the oasis—a fertile place if ever there was any—a paradisal locus is
echoing; the place where, either actually or figuratively, we always
long to return; for mankind thirsts not only after water as such,
but also marvels, even if such prodigies occur, sparse and rare, in
the midst of a desert full of mirages, whether ancient or new.
Difficulties never dishearten the true seekers, and the vocation
for a higher and nobler life remains constant. As the Sufis have
said: “Wherever there are clear waters, men and birds gather to
drink.” This may be the reason why the keepers of the secret
oasis, those among the righteous and initiates, work alone or in
community in the pattern of the straight palm tree to comfort
those who have been oppressed and contorted by fate. In Egypt,
at the margins of the Nile, renpet ({), the palm branch, used to
refer to cyclic time, to generations succeeding one another; but
it was also the emblem of the god Heh, the personification of
eternity, image of an endless period renewing itself over and over.
Later on, this idea would be adopted by the Greeks, especially
in relation to the mythical image of the phoenix, and this is
evident from the very name of the “date-bearing” palm (Phoenix
dactylifera). In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, it is recounted that this bird,
the phoenix (potvig), upon realising that the five hundred years of

XV
 THE LIVING PALM ERE

its life span are about to end, makes its nest among the branches
of apalm tree, and bringing therein aromatic plants such as cassia,
nard, cinammon and myrrh, sets them alight and dies consumed
among them, only to be reborn on the third day in the shape
of a small worm. The location where this takes place is called
Heliopolis, City of the Sun.
Conceived among dunes, sands, oases and blue minarets,
Sufism would bring that heritage under the semantic wing of
the Arabic term tarigah, which designates not only a green palm,
but also a certain rule of life, a way of conscious existence.
Dictionaries give us a number of related words: a) atraga, to keep
silent; b) tatarraga, to open the way towards; c) tarq, the sound
of a musical instrument. Regarding that path followed by the
righteous—the same one intimated by the architectural palms as
they spread their optical fan at Cordova’s Great Mosque—the
Sufis say that its track oscillates between two complementary
opposites: shari‘ah and haqiqah, the external forms or rituals and
the inner illuminations. To enter and belong to a brotherhood, or
tarigah—just as when entering a mosque or other temple—implies,
according to Shaykh ‘Abd al-Qadir ad-Darqawi,

“a coming out from the safe place of ordinary ex-

istence into the alien existence of search. It means
abandoning the private project as a meaning to life,
that is, the family, since Allah, glory be to Him, has
warned that it is a trap for you. It means abandoning
the public project which is society and its promise of
future rewards, for the future reward of the seeker is
now in the Unseen and after death. It means abandon-
ing the autobiographical project of fame and fulfil-
ment, for the self has become for the seeker an enemy,
and remains so until it is transformed into its lumin-
ous reality, which is pure spirit, ruh.”

We find the origin of the word tarigah in the Accadian darageu,

meaning to follow a path—to find traces, signs, and follow them.
In a figurative sense, leaving aside its simplest meaning, the Bible
would refer to human life as a dereh or path, thus enlarging

XVI
 Mario Satz

the scope of the very same phonetic combination to a linguistic

domain of ever-recurring affinities. Such is the universality of
this symbol, and the importance of its uprightness—of the ninety
degrees angle represented by the palm trunk—that we even find
it in places where the tree itself is patently absent. Indeed, in
China the supreme idea of ¢ao or straight path is formed by two
characters: cho, representing a stepping foot, and shou, a head,
both of which together indicate a clear and virtuous advance.
Now, where palms are actually to be found they are called
tsung, and clearly apparent within this word is the ideogram
that conveys the meaning of taking a master as a model (of
uprightness). Accordingly, he who follows the cosmic law, he who
advances lucidly, does so not only with his feet, but also with his
head.
Palm Sunday branches prefigure, within Christian tradition,
and following the myth of the phoenix, Jesus’ resurrection after
the Calvary drama. It all points in any case to a triumph over
the nothingness of death, dust and ashes. Gubernatis says of
the palm tree that it is a solar and victorious tree, propitiator
of regeneraticn and spiritual riches; and the Desert Fathers, in
the first centuries of Christianity, would willingly abandon the
splendour of Byzantium in order to sit by the oases and palm
groves of the Thebaid to hear—from the mouths of those who
preceded them-—what was then, more than a blind belief, a
philosophy of life. Not one of the many varieties of existing
palms is not of benefit and use to the domestic economy of
the peoples who cultivate and tend them. Similarly, no act or
teaching of the righteous and initiates—be they Arab Sufis or
Hebrew Kabbalists—is ever lost in the void, since they constitute,
for those who understand them, promptings to rectification, or
mystic landmarks.
The fruitful date palm, symbolising for Arabs spiritual work
and that sought-after sweetness which we long to find and
share, requires loving care, crossed fertilisations, delicate moonlit
pollinations. As Carlos Mendoza reminds us in his Leyenda de las
plantas, this tree needs to have its feet in the water and its head
in the fire, for the second element being an emblem of ruah or

XVil
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

ruh, a sign of the burning activity of the Spirit, and the first an
intimation of the nefesh or nafs, the vegetative soul, it is upon the
exchange and synthesis between the two poles that the initiate
or the virtuous will depend to reach the goal along his path to
righteousness. “You know well,” says Rabbi Rehumai in the Sefer
Ha-Bahir or Book of Brightness, a text from 12th century Provencal
Kabbalah, “you know well that tamar, the palm tree, embodies
at times the masculine principle and at times the feminine, for
its main branch, the /u/ab, is masculine, as masculine is its fruit
from the external point of view, even though in the inside it
be feminine.” Surprised at such a wonder, the master then asks
himself: “Is that possible?” and answers: “Dates are, by their
seed, similar to woman, since she is in tune with the power of
the moon. But the Holy One has created the palm tree male
and female, just as it is said in Genesis 1:27: ‘Male and female
created He them.’” We have here, without a doubt, a model of
spiritual androgyny oftentimes displayed by the righteous and
initiates who operate between rigour and compassion, imparting
as they go equal measures ofjustice and clemency, abstraction
and sensibility.
The palm tree has a long and eventful life within the heart
of Jewish culture. Employed as a symbol of therapeutic work
by the physicians of the intertestamental period, the Romans
would strike it on the coin celebrating their conquest of Jerusalem
along with the motto Judaea capta. There, bent over the ground,
a woman’s figure laments the sorrowful fate of her people; a
fate that would become, in our tragic century, a living hell
of crematoria in which millions of innocent souls would burn,
scribes and teachers, Talmudists and exegetes, but also child
prodigies and musicians, erudites and mothers, grandmothers
and teenagers, thus culminating almost two thousand years of
persecution, contempt and vexation, without this ever prompting
the people of Israel, even for a moment, to abandon their love of
the Bible, or their fidelity to an ancestral land in which, coinciding
with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the tall palms of
resurrection would grow again, in Israel and in the Ein Gedi of
the Essenes. Netsah Israel lo’ yishaker 1DW 8D DRAW Ni: the eternity

XVIII
 Mario Satz

of this people, their profound errancy, their dispersion and their

genius, the use they give to the Torah as a multiplying abacus
of miracles and truths, psychic mirror and floating plank amid
the centuries-long shipwreck; all these, says the proverb, shall
not be forsaken. When, in the year 70 of our age, Jerusalem was
on the verge of collapse under Vespasian’s armies, upon seeing
that heavy clouds ofgrim slavery and theological storm lay before
the political and social fate of his people, master Rabbi Yohanan
ben Zacai left the besieged city in a coffin, pretending to be
dead and carried by the hands of his younger disciples; as this
was happening, one of the most amazing events ever to take
place in the fields of knowledge was about to unfold, something
comparable only to the survival of the Gnostic Gospels by the
hand of Theodore the monk, who hid them in an asphalt-sealed
urn eight kilometres away from Pachomius’ monastery, at the
foot of that same hillock where they would be unearthed fifteen
centuries later in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, thus preserving for
posterity what has been nowadays called “the other Christianity”.
This arnazing fact is none other than ¢he survival
of knowledge above
the scorn ofpower. Such was achieved by the Chinese people when
they preserved their wonderful / Ching amidst the book-burning
ordered by Emperor Huang Ti; it was achieved by hundreds of
Buddhist monks when they kept their sutras from the invading
Muslim armies who destroyed the University of Nalanda; and it
was also achieved by the Toltec wise men, the ¢tdamatini, when,
before the twilight of their culture, the Aztecs came to take their
place. And it was thus that wisdom proved stronger than war.
Brought by his carriers before the Roman general who was
responsible for Jerusalem’s siege, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zacai
emerged from the coffin as if by a miracle in front of abewildered
Vespasian, and asked him for permission to found an academy,
a small school where the Torah could be studied and taught. Its
name, Yavneh Yam, will remain in the annals of Hebrew culture as
that meeting-point where the temple rite and the priestly offices,
bound to space, yield their turn to research and study, both
tasks performed within time. It is Yavneh, near the Mediterranean
coast, from where rabbis and scribes would come to take charge

X1X
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

of formalising the Biblical anthology, some forty years after the

destruction of the Jerusalem Temple; it is in Yavneh where they
discussed whether the Song of Songs, such an important text for
later Jewish nuptial mysticism, would be included in the canon;
it is in Yavneh where they collected, formulated and coined the
Pharisaic proverb that goes: “If there is no flour, there is no study;
and if there is no study, there is no flour,” thus instilling in the
Jewish mind the notion that it is necessary to accompany every
heavenly endeavour and meditative process with physical work
or a craft, so that the soul never trespasses the limits imposed by
the needs of the body in which it is incarnated.
This collection of parables, stories and teachings brought to
light by The Living Palm Tree would like to pay fervent homage
to all those people—bakers, blacksmiths and coppersmiths, car-
penters, tailors, merchants, butchers, dyers, clockmakers since
the invention of clocks, and papermakers when the East yielded
its secret to the West. And this is why this book seeks to recon-
struct with clear syllables the voices of those who—from Baghdad
to Warsaw, from Pumbedita to Florence, from mediaeval Granada
to 19th century Paris, from Istanbul to Calcutta and from Fez to
Livorno—no longer have a voice.
It is not easy to act as a verbal magnet for those flaming
particles of wisdom which failed to fall under the wheels of
terror and hatred; and even less to evoke the sounds of ancient
conversations by the light of the Torah, while stones or bullets
are pouring outside. It is not easy to be such a magnet without a
trace of both grief and pride. No one has, however, a monopoly
of suffering, and by no means the Jewish people, but it must
be acknowledged that they have, thanks to their passion for
study and psychic exploration, an exquisite inclination towards
inner adventure, a certain “art of reading” which, in more
than one way anticipates, from within Kabbalistic speculation
and through the mysterious code of Biblical Hebrew, many of
the most recent scientific discoveries: holograms, fractal theory,
Sheldrake’s morphic resonance or the concept of superstrings
in physics, which seems to give coherence to the four universal
forces, from gravity to strong and weak subatomic forces. Is it by

XX
 Mario Satz

chance that we find in the Hebrew term for string, hebel 5an, the
sap of the heart, leah leb 19 n9, and that as by alliteration we make
it into baleh nba, a pulsation, a flicker, we ourselves start to pulsate,
to sparkle and shine, realising that we are not alone and that we
are still, somehow, microcosms within a purposeful macrocosm?
“No matter how many knots it has,” so the Sufis say, “the string is
one,” and “Whoever does not learn,” the Talmudist wise men add,
pointing to the negentropic character of meditation and study,
“becomes subject to death.” They refer to a study and a meditation
whose informative value lies well above ritual and observance.
There is currently a significant body of evidence allowing us
to think that the Zohar, the highest summit of Hebrew and 13th
century Castillian mysticism, was an invention of Rabbi Moses
de Leon. Invention or reconstruction, it is all the same, since on
the one hand, we are sure that the master did not work in a void,
but surrounded by manuscripts inherited through the centuries,
and on the other hand, we are also certain that the Zohar is right
now nourishing hundreds, perhaps thousands of human beings
who study its pages and plunge into its secrets. Rabbi Jesus of
Nazareth said that “Nothing has power above the Spirit,” for, like
the wind, it blows and goes where it wants; it thrives on liberty,
return and chance, the freedom of its flight and the dance of
its whirls. Just so—between plasma and electron clouds—do the
characters and actors ofThe Living Palm Tree exist, giving here and
there testimony to their enlightenment or received graces, both
themselves surprised and surprising us. Bewildered too, that we
may remember them, and that we have the patience to listen to
them as they recall their findings, free in the heaven of collective
memory, alive beyond meaningful words and silences. “When you
quote a master,” the rabbis hold, “he turns over with pleasure in
his grave.”
I am not sure now I ever called them to the dark teak of my
desktop, nor could I say if I invited them haphazardly into my
nights and my days, for if there really exists what our sages
call gilgul neshamot and Plato metempsychosis, if there is anything
similar to reincarnation, they themselves may have chosen to
visit my tongue and make my hands move to talk of what they

XXl1
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

loved: the Torah, its poetry and mysticism, its hidden keys and
revealed truths. If this was the case, and it is they who have put me
to writing, I give them thanks for having taught me to look at my
surroundings with different eyes, for referring me to the sands
of Yemen, to the rose gardens of Iran and the snows of Russia;
for bringing me towards the sources of the great European rivers:
the Volga and the Danube; for guiding me into the dense forests
where they wandered in their meditations, and for teaching me,
through parables, and even from the darkest ghettos of the world,
that every corner of the earth can be a centre where beauty
appears naked, uplifting your mind and enamouring it with her
breathing. I give them thanks for the ears of corn and the versets,
the rugs and the dunes, the telescopes and the ancient texts, the
fruits and the star names, the mountain paths and the beaches, the
study houses and the brass lamps, for the display of their sorrows
and the emphasis on their happinesses. Thanks, from heart to
heart.
Those interested in the secret world of the Kabbalah can refer
to G. Scholem’s Kabbalah (Meridian, New York, 1974); Ellen
Frankel’s The Encyclopedia ofJewish Symbols (Aronson, New Jersey,
1992); and, what is now a classic by Moshe Idel, L’experience
mystique dAbraham Aboulafia. As regards Jewish demography in
general, from the ist to the 20th centuries, see the Aé/as de historia
judia (La Semana, Tel Aviv, 1974) and the eight volumes of
Historia socialy religiosa del pueblo judio by Salo W. Baron (Paidos,
Buenos Aires, 1968), without forgetting the extraordinary The
Thirteenth Gate: Travels Among the Lost Tribes of Israel by Tudor
Parfitt (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1987). The reader shall
find in The Living Palm Tree echoes of Hasidic thought, but also
of the Midrash and the Talmud, as well as similarities with the
Sufi tradition and Zen Buddhism. These similarities are neither
deliberate nor casual: they follow the archetypal recurrences
found in any authentic and living spiritual experience.

M.S:
Valldoreix, December 1999

XX
 The Aerialist, His Balancing Pole
and the Blade of Grass
A Romanian-born gypsy called Dimitri Orlin, who used to
earn his living as a highwire walker between Moldavia and
Transylvania, stretching his wire from tree to tree and whistling
lullabies sixty feet above the ground, would often take his long
balancing birch pole to Rabbi Eli Shoshani of Turda, a cooper
by profession, who knew how to balance the weights by cleverly
inserting tiny lead pellets near the pole ends. These were happy
moments for Dimitri, as he could share with the Jew the sweet
sacramental wines and the pickled cucumbers, honey cakes in the
winter and cherries in the summer. But they were also happy for
Rabbi Eh Shoshani, who would leave whatever he was doing in
his dark workshop, with one of his apprentices in charge of the
forge, and come out to the courtyard to speak to Dimitri.
The Jew would invariably be nibbling a blade of grass, a stick
of liquorice root or a twig from a rosebush, or any other woody
plant he had at hand. He would even keep it in his mouth as he
spoke, to the disgust of his wife and his many acquaintances. One
spring day, the Jew offered the gypsy a twig of fennel, but this one
declined:
“Thank you, I would rather have my old pipe.”
“You don’t know what you are missing,” said the Jew. “God has
more flavours than names, and He hides a scent 1n each herb, and
a teaching in each scent.”
“When I am up there,” replied the gypsy pointing to the sky
where he performed his acrobatic feats, the void space of his
hoverings, “I neither smoke nor think, nor can I do anything but
hum lullabies. I know that my mother’s airy hands are near to
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

hold me if I fall, and I recall her smiling and loving as she was in
an age where I did not even know she was blond.”
“Have here,” said Rabbi Eli Shoshani, holding out to hima stalk
of grass. “You never know when a good flavour will protect you
from a bitterness.”
Years later, ninety feet high in Ploiesti, Dimitri the gypsy’s
counterbalance pole slipped from his hands, and he was left
to his foot skills on a crosswinds afternoon, before the eyes
of a thousand persons, unprotected, frightened, and with half
a lullaby stuck at the root of his tongue. Remembering he
still carried Shoshani the Jew’s blade of grass in his corduroy
waistcoat’s pocket, he took it out and put it in his mouth. Its
taste was like a peaceful morning in a mountain pasture, like a
dark certitude, and like bright protection.
Upon reaching the end of the wire safe and sound, Dimitri
let out a deep grateful sigh. A few months later, back at the
workshop of Rabbi Eli Shoshani of Turda, after telling him what
had happened, he heard the old cooper say:
“The secret of our support is a recurring point, an instant out
of time—the light which between two breaths unveils its purposes
within our lungs.”

Some Kabbalists hold that our life is always pending from a thread,
a strand or nimah 791 so subtle that it could only be compared on
earth to the finest, flimsiest blade of grass. Whoever is able, like the
stalks and the stems, to bend without breaking, whoever sways without
thus forsaking the clinging law of the soil, has his or her breath, hei 7,
fully preserved by fate or good fortune, called in Hebrew minei 71.
Moreover, long before the Zoharic period—the 13th century—masters
would consider the letter yod *, present in nimah 71, or blade of
grass, to be the smallest dot of the greatest mystery. In all certainty it is
around this dot that we also find the delicious manah 73 or heavenly
food.
 The Five Secrets of Happiness

Rabbi Yosif Barionai of Belgrade used to say to his disciples:

“Happiness has five secrets in correspondence with the five
senses.
“The first one is that, as happens to the fire of light within and
from the eye, it is bestowed upon itself in the same measure it
is given to others. The second, that it makes the surrounding air
more breathable. The third, that when it manifests, no matter how
brief its outbreak, it reconciles our feet to the ground they tread.
The fourth, that at the peak of its intensity it weeps tears ofjoy;
and the fifth, that when it listens to itself it discovers in its own
expression the true lightness of life.”
After some time, and meaning to endorse his master on this
assertion, Rabbi Isaac of Sarajevo quoted the following passage
of Isaiah 55:12: “Ye shall go out with happiness, and be led forth
with peace, thereby making Rabbi Yosif smile with irony.
“Going out with happiness is harder than you would think,” he
commented.
“Why would you say that?” Rabbi Isaac inquired.
The study house was then wrapped in the darkest winter cold,
and a pitiable electric bulb was shedding light on the shabby
Talmud volumes, trying hard to outline its edges with flickering
efforts.
“Because it requires being content a priori, before there is any
cause for the emotion.”
“Do you know of any method to achieve that?”
Rabbi Yosif Barionai rose to his feet, drew a small mirror from
his pocket, placed it in front of his face, broad and entangled with
a beard, and sticking his tongue out at himself he added:
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

“Every morning I wonder how is it possible that such an organ,

the tongue, contains so many wonders, yet it dwells so lonely in its
cave of teeth. But since there is no possible answer to this riddle,
I start laughing so heartily that I forget where I come from and
where I am going. Believe me, my friend, the Creator tied the
tongue with the frenulum one instant before it drew our father
Adam down to Hell, and He also planted happiness in his heart,
so that overawed as he would be, he could still climb out from
his depressions through the ascending steps of his senses wide
opened.”

It has become a proverbial Hasidic idea that when happiness, simhah

nnnw, appears, it cleanses the five, hamesh wnn, senses in which
it 1s actually enveloped. For Rabbi Yosif Barionai, the gematric
equivalence between the words tongue, lashon pw (386), and void,
solitary, shomem DMW (386), is a source of laughter, but for some
people who lack the sense ofhumour it is a source of great anguish.
 The Rock and the Creature

Intent on sharpening the minds of his best disciples, Rabbi

Yisrael Yabani of Alexandropol gathered them on the eve of the
Feast of the Tabernacles and questioned them:
“What do you think is the meaning of “The Creator is my rock’
in Psalms, 18:3?”
The first one to answer was the impulsive Rabbi Yochanan of
Abdera:
“The substance of each passage of the Torah is inseparably
linked to the numbers of its versets. Therefore, since 18:3 can be
read as hagai, meaning ‘my feast’, ‘my celebration’, I understand
that the delight of the Creator is His own permanence, the joyous
constancy with which He is always present.”
“Not bad,” observed Rabbi Yisrael Yabani.
“In my opinion,” quoted Chaim Joffe of Salonica, dubbed “the
student” by everyone, “the rock of God is the firmness on which
we rely, the pivot of all our actions.”
“Why not think,” began Rabbi Yosef Yabani, himself a cousin
of Rabbi Yisrael, “that He is the rock against which we crash, the
siege that presses our mind, the unflinching solid interrogation
upon which is sharpened the edge of all our questions?”
“That is also true,” approved Rabbi Yisrael.
Twice again consecutively did the master listen to his disciples
opinions. Then, as he poured with his own hands for them a thick
coffee, he continued:
“Initially the Creator is for us sheer remoteness, insuperable
distance, hardness, and muteness; but when we take the rock in
our hands, when we polish its edges, we discover its veins, and
we partially intuit the way in which its crystals belong together;
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

then it becomes our creature, a child of our own understanding;

and at that moment—without losing its firmness—it acquires the
elasticity we just bestowed on it ourselves.”

The psalm in question literally says: eli tsuri 8 °K, “Godismy rock,”
translated in numerous versions as “God is my fortress,” since this is
also one of the meanings of tsur NW¥. However, availing himself of a
curious permutation, the master seems to have transposed the letter
yod within “my rock’, placing it in the first place and thus changing
tsuri 0 into yitsur WW, which means creature.
 Distances

Gathered at the house of Rabbi Yosef

of Grodno, four of his most
advanced disciples were awaiting the question posed to them
every spring by the master. They belonged to the haburah, or
brotherhood, called Pri Rimon, The Pomegranate Fruits, and none
of them was above thirty years old.
“Listen to me well,” said the master, frowning, while in his eyes
glittered that mischievous spark of someone about to set a subtle
trap. “This year’s question is as follows: What was, in Paradise,
the distance between the Tree of Good and Evil, and the Tree of
Life?”
The whispers died out, dispersing through the study hail. Birds
were chirping outdoors, and the drops of recent rain were still
dripping from the eaves.
One answer occurred to the boldest of them, Rabbi Naphtali:
“Four walking days and one entire night. Thickets grew
between them both, and carnivorous flowers would blossom.
All was danger and ambush.”
“Ten parasangs,’ added Rabbi Ishmael the Tall, exhibiting
his wide Zoharic knowledge and his vast Talmudic skills. The
parasang is an old Persian unit of distance, and it was very likely
no one else in the room had the slightest idea about it. It was
mentioned in the Talmud, though, and this is why he brought it
up. “Ten, like the ten plagues of Egypt.”
“The blink of an eye,” Rabbi Moshe ben Chaim of Almaty let
drop with a triumphant smile, “since they ate with closed eyes,
and only upon opening them did they discover the evil they had
done.”
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

“Even though there is no mention about this distance in the

Book of Genesis,” said Rabbi Ezekiel of Riga, “I imagine it
must not have been long, since Rabbi Nachman ibn Nejmad
of Damascus, in his opuscule Shbilei Pardes, The Paths of Pardes,
said that there is room for the entire Paradise in the heart of the
believer. Perhaps one heartbeat comes from the Tree of Good and
Evil and the next one from the Tree of Life. After all, they have
not ceased beating in our chests since the days of Adam.”
Unlike previous occasions, the master did not wait to hear any
other answers. He rose, and stretching the forefinger of his left
hand, he placed it horizontally between his nostrils and his upper
lip.
“The distance between the Tree of Good and Evil, and the Tree
of Life is the distance between the nose and the mouth. Some
travel it every day, but they ignore its beauties and mysteries, until
the moment before their deaths; some others think they know
it as they know their faces in the mirrors, but as they recall it
they mistake it, and mistaking it they think there is no distance
between the trees. Finally, the few know that the Tree of Good and
Evil feeds upon the roots of the Tree of Life, but they are unable to
calculate the space between both, because in the sweetest moment
of their ecstasy they close their eyes to worldly distinctions. To
these last, one can apply the teaching of Rabbi Mordecahi of
Minsk, who upon his enlightenment sang:

The musical tear asked to be heard

by the hand playing the eyelid,
but the caressing stroke forgot its name.”

It is known among many Kabbalists that the distance actually existing

between the nose, aph 48, and the mouth, peh n5—given that both
words share the letter pe—lies in the one spread between the hei 9 for
the mouth and the alef & for the nose. It is hence commonly quoted
that “the nose is divine and the mouth is human.” The Tree of Life does
often grow beneath the wings of the air we breathe; the Tree of Good
and Evil issues from the foods we eat every day.
 On Energy

On a Warsaw summer's night, two classmates of the study house

called Or Ganuz, Hidden Light, were discussing Ezekiel 1:4, a
verset where the Hebrew word ha-hashmal 5nwnn names the
substance animating the Chariot, a concept translated in some
Bible versions as radiance, in others as energy.
“T suspect,” said the youngest, Rabbi Eliezer, “that for the
prophet this vision must have been like glancing at an erupting
volcano: had he leant excessively towards it, he would not have
lived to tell about it.”
Looming and water-laden, a storm was brewing over the
city, and a light yet pungent ozone smell spoke of imminent
atmospheric feuds.
“What if,” asked himself aloud Rabbi Mordechai as he nibbled
a black cherry, “it referred after all to a joyous epiphany instead
of an ominous spectre of disaster? When you turn the letters
around, ha-hashmal Snwnn is transformed into le-simhah annw»,
for happiness.”
A flash of lightning ratified his words.
“Tn that ease,” RabbioHhezer smiled in bewilderment, “the
main danger incurred by all those who ‘descend in the Chariot’
would lie in the difficulty of turning tragedy into comedy, and
in knowing essentially which of these two expressive possibilities
has more substance, as no prophet or master ever works for
himself.”
“Look at the light bulb,” Rabbi Mordechai began, as he left
aside the cherry pit, relishing the aftertaste of the bitter Juice and
pointing towards the ceiling. It was clear he was following his
own line of thought. “It is thanks to its hermetic transparency, to
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

its fruit-like and crystal shape, that light comes down to us. If you
placed your fingers directly between the electrodes it would give
you some annoyance, and it would not add a whiff of light to your
everyday opacity. The light bulb is the vehicle, that lucidity you
need to reach in order to be visited, wings flapping, by the lion,
the bull, the eagle and the angel.”
“There were no light bulbs then, though,” replied Rabbi Eliezer
with irony.
The broken flashes of a new lightning criss-crossed the window
by which the fellow students were talking.
“And yet the electricity or mysterious energy source was there
from the beginning, like the lightning you just saw.”
“Incidentally,” said Rabbi Eliezer to his friend Mordechai,
“what do you mean by ‘being visited by the lion, the bull, the
eagle and the angel’? Wouldn't that imply there are no differences
between prophet Ezekiel and ourselves?”
“Names precede beings and objects,” replied the cherry-eating
one, “but if besides, as in this case, it is their fortune to outlive
them, we should search them for the hidden message they
originally conveyed. Thus, for instance, the lion was carrying a
mirror, the bull a song, and the eagle a detachment.”
“I don’t follow you,” sighed Rabbi Eliezer as he opened the
window to let the words of the dripping rain enter the room with
greater clarity.
“The lion brings a mirror for you to discern in it, more than
your own strength, the art of doing nothing under the shade of
the trees, for a single precise action is worth more than gushing
and aimless agitation. The bull brings a song for you to dance to
your own clumsiness, and for you to learn how to be an acrobat
over your own abysses. And finally, the eagle teaches you that
detachment from the one you have been is the most elementary
requirement of flying, because traces in the sky do not abide in the
air you traverse, but within the intrepid heart of him who knows
himself a traveller; this is why, if you accept the visits of the lion,
the bull and the eagle, and of that duplicate of yourself who is the
man-angel in the Chariot, there is no way you can be lost. You can
 Mario Satz

never be lost. You will see a comedy in each tragedy, and in each
comedy the shudder of a repressed sorrow.”

Because of its gematria, or numeric value, ha-hashmal 5nwnn (383)

equals indeed ga‘ashi ‘Wy (383), volcanic; and even if it were
only for the mention of fire and burning coals in the text ascribed
to prophet Ezekiel, Rabbi Eliezer’s interpretation should be deemed
correct. Rabbi Mordechai’s observation is however more acute: ha-
hashmal bawnn, electricity or energy, is made, through alliteration,
into le-simhah ANN, towards or for happiness. As regards the lion
or arieh 77» in the Tetramorph, there is no doubt it bears a rei "84,
or mirror, while the bull, shor WW, includes a song, shar W, while
the eagle, nesher WW, is itselfa sign of detachment—elevation, vision,
remoteness.

11
 The Bubble Laugher
Having shown little talent for studies, Itzi Faibl Strubel was sent
by his father, soapmaker Leib Strubel, directly to the fat and
perfume pans where they mixed the substances for the large cakes
later to be sold across the Strasbourg region. Itzi was a calm and
skinny boy whose breath had been shortened and whose chest
had been oppressed by an early asthma. He had a rare skill for
sculpting, and in his free time he would carve out zebras, horses,
birds, monkeys, little trees and geese from the large cakes of soap.
But as these soap shapes were not fashionable in those days in
shops and fairs, it did not amuse Itzi’s father in the least that
he should continue to make them, and even though he did not
openly oppose it, he turned a blind eye to it, considering his son
little more than a dimwit, and only now and then would he chide
him for his artistic hobby.
A rubella epidemic came spreading from Bohemia, a disease
that crossed valleys and mountains, taking the children of Stras-
bourg by surprise in their little wooden beds, as they lay with
the downcast countenance of those who do not understand, and
the glassy eyes of extinction. Mothers would weep, fathers would
come together with the few physicians in the region and, poultice
here, emetic and ointments there, in the end some died of ana-
phylaxis, some went into endless delirium, and most dragged on
sickly, without anyone knowing what to do or who to turn to.
Safe from the illness, since he had already experienced it in his
own body, Itzi Faibl heard the news, and he asked his father per-
mission to visit his little cousin Franz Yosef. After the day’s work
was finished, he packed in his bag a soap giraffe and what was
left of his great-grandfather’s gold-framed spectacles, with only

19
 Mario Satz

one of the empty rims left. When he arrived in his uncle’s house,
his aunt was whimpering. Itzi Faibl stepped into the camphor-
smelling room, a crackling noise made him aware he was stepping
on rock salt. There, by the light of a very straight candle, shiver-
ing in his bed, was desolate Franz Yosef. Unafraid of contagion,
the visitor kissed him and then introduced the giraffe’s soap head
in a glass of water on the night table, stirred the liquid and waited
a few seconds.
“What are you doing?” Franz Yosef asked with a broken voice.
“I am preparing bubbles, creating rainbows.”
He drew aside the heavy curtains of his uncle’s room and asked
his consent to open the window ajar. April’s afternoon light
streamed directly into Franz Yosef’s blue eyes. The soap cake
sculptor brought the solitary golden rim ofhis great-grandfather’s
spectacles near his mouth, and he burst loudly into laughter, thus
moving the air and producing big cheerful bubbles that floated
above the sick boy’s bed. Bubbles born from the giraffe, and so
transparent that they appeared to be huge weightless raindrops,
came to hover around this Strasbourg house, where a child, as in
many others, was suffering without knowing why. As he first saw
them floating before his nose, Franz Yosef had a coughing bout,
then an outburst of happiness. Both cousins laughed together,
looking at each other without words. They laughed and laughed
until the sick boy felt well enough to leave his bed, stand up, and
start with ferocious joy chasing the bubble irises. The mess was so
big that aunt Elke, Franz Yosef’s mother, worriedly came by to see
what was happening, wondering what silly business the cousins
were up to.
But she froze in amazement as she spotted in Franz Yosef’s
blushing cheeks the incipient hue of recovery.
“How were you able to do this?” she asked, unaware that a big
soap bubble was soaring behind her head. “What have you given
to your cousin to make him so happy?”
“Soap bubbles with rainbow sparks, Auntie.”
“Impossible,” Franz Yosef’s mother mumbled.
Once the fever had abated, with his high spirits verging on
euphoria, the sick boy added:

S
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

“If you look well, Mama, you will see how in each of these
bubbles is trapped one of my ailments and pains, all the itches
and the annoyances; Itzi traps them and I destroy them.”
“And since the rainbow cannot die,” continued the smiling son
of soapmaker Leib Strubel, “and it is once and again reborn from
the water I stir, your son is feeling like Noah after the Flood:
making a pact with life—coming to life again between giraffe soap
bubbles.”
When the townspeople got to know what had happened at
Elke’s house, fathers and mothers requested the presence of Itzi
Faibl, who in one single week used up one soap camel, two rabbits
and one squirrel he had kept with some bits and pieces in his
father’s workshop. He turned them into coloured air bubbles,
producing with them translucent globes of laughter, spherical
beings which would dissolve in mid-air the despondence of
those attacked by rubella, leaving them cleaner than a linen
handkerchief drying in the sun on a summer’s day.
Years later, when the infamous Bohemian epidemic was but a
bad dream in people’s memory, if anyone insistently asked Itzi
Faibl how he had managed to cure so many children, he used to
answer:
“T really don’t know, but I have the impression that miracles are
as contagious, or even more so, than the illnesses and mishaps
affecting us. It is often enough for just one to take place in order
for everyone to benefit.”

Although young Itzi Faibl from Strasbourg may not have known, a
single alliteration of the Hebrew word for soap, savon }\30, turns
it into be-nes 032, meaning by or through a miracle, and an
additional letter vav 1 representing man. Indeed, oftentimes the latter
is healed more by the good intentions of those who love him than by the
clever purposes of those who study him.”
 To Look and to See

Rabbi Noah Moshe of Antwerp, a diamond polisher, and in his

spare time, like Spinoza, a polisher of optical crystals, used to say:
“To look and to see are converging verbs which by their subtle
difference reveal when something we are observing is or is not
understood.”
“Could you give us an example?” he was asked one after the
other by his disciples, Naphtali of Brussels and Ariel of Bruges.
The master took a small magnifier out of his pocket, rubbed it
against his trousers, and said:
“When I was a child, magnifiers would fascinate me even more
than my adult job does, the polishing of optical lenses. It is simply
because when you see an object, an insect or a flower larger
than it really is, when a sudden sharpness reveals the beauty of
proximity, the tenderness of intimacy, then as you move from
looking into seeing, your sense of delicacy is increased, and your
appreciation of complexity grows. To look is an obvious fact; to
see 18 a profound truth. Looking tends by nature to indolently
slip into the homogeneous; seeing, instead, being heterogeneous,
compromises the eye in the care of your own steps, and in the
attention to your own gestures. The yellow lines in the violet’s
petal, or the number of scales in a butterfly’s wing are, under the
magnifier, when the intensity of looking becomes seeing, the best
guarantee we can have ofwhat variety and detail have to offer us.’
?

“A guarantee?” asked Naphtali of Brussels, ironically.

“Which guarantee?” smiled Ariel of Bruges.
“The guarantee that we will not take advantage of the common-
place or the tired phrase to turn a blind eye to the novelty of the
exceptional; the guarantee that—as Hillel the Sage put it—we will

2)
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

not say ‘something is known until it has been known through

and through,’ and we do know that such thoroughness always
demands one further look: seeing the one who looks from the re-
lativity of his observation. Believe me: to look is an obvious fact;
to see is a profound truth. Looking is an action that will not start
without the involvement of the eye; seeing is beyond the eyelid
and the eyelashes.”

Looking is in Hebrew histakel Danon, and seeing ra’ah 7N7, both

verbs which, although usually given as synonyms, will still let us
discern each one’s specific trait: in the first one, histakel 92n0n, the
root kol 92 indicates both the part and the whole, but in a general
way. Ra’ah 7X4, in contrast, can change into arah MX, to pluck off,
to gather, thus showing that seeing implies becoming part of what is
seen and bearing fruits with it.

16
 The Three Years and the Root

“When I was a young man,” rose the voice of Rabbi Reuben of

Bucharest, “and I knew nothing about nature, I read in the study
house that phrase from Leviticus 19:23 which says: ‘And when ye
shall enter the land, and shall have planted all manner of trees for
food, then ye shall count the fruit thereofas uncircumcised: three
years shall it be as uncircumcised unto you: it shall not be eaten
of.’ A sentence,” went on before his disciples he who was dubbed
Big Heart in a Little Body, since he was short and of frail limbs,
“a sentence which, in my opinion, displays much wisdom.”
The master and his disciples were on board a train bound for
Tirana. The landscape they were crossing was under snow, and
the mass of dark trees was awaiting better signs from the sky.
“Those three years relate to the root, to the real affirmation
of the tree in the ground fostering its development,” said Rabbi
Reuben of Bucharest.
“But why three and not two, three and not four?” observed
Pinchas, the eldest disciple. “I often find all that numerology
tiresome and arbitrary.”
The master smiled as he looked through the train window, then
pensively rolled his afternoon cigarette and replied:
“Every living thing has its pulse, its cycle, its rhythm of
expansion and contraction. It thus happens that during those first
three years all the tree’s energy is polarised downwards, strongly
throbbing towards the depths, the same as us, when we start
our studies. In this way the root is looking for mineral love,
for salts that will caress its beard until such a time when the
certainty of absorption is greater than the consciousness of its
place. Following a similar process we must wait months, and

7
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

even years, for the fertility of the depth to become the gift of the
surface, for the spontaneous gesture of our best actions to be able
to nourish the spiritual hunger of others. To be sure, sometimes
more than three years come to pass before we are able to eat our
own Torah fruits, instead of gathering the pieces or crumbs of
knowledge handed us by others!”
“Are you suggesting,” asked Simeon, another of the disciples
of him who was dubbed Big Heart in a Little Body, “are you
suggesting that the time consumed in that blind underground
labour is inescapable? A human being is not a tree, but moves, is
never fixed, travels as we do now. Shall we perhaps, in the manner
of cherry trees or rowans, stay for three years in the same place in
order for something edible to come out from us?”
Letting out a whiff of smoke, Reuben of Bucharest explained:
“IT only know that on my thirtieth birthday I went to spend
a summer at my uncle Samuel’s farm. I had not seen him since
my childhood, and it was he who taught me, recalling the Bible
quotation, that the ‘Ye shall enter the land’ of the Leviticus
passage has a double meaning: first, to observe what is below the
earth, meaning the working of the root, the humble task usually
neglected by most people; and then there is the application ofthis
same idea to the page we study, for the written signs amount to
vegetable seeds, since these too are writing in their lumpy furrows
the tasty alphabet of pears and apples. We must time and again
go from knowing how to eat to eating what we know; many times,
so that for us entering the earth shall be like entering the most
beautiful and profound paths of the Torah. What fruit and flower
synthesise in the drinking cup has already been humbly analysed
by the root, which needs three years to impel towards heaven the
power it has been granted by the earth.”

‘The Ye shall enter from Leviticus 19:23 is but an unhappy and bad
translation of the Hebrew tabou xan, ye shall come, ye shall arrive,
since this expression—which can moreover be read as be-ot NXA, in
the letter, in the sign—echoes and confirms the Zoharic idea regarding
the parallelism between farming rhythms and the reading methods
propounded by the Kabbalah.

18
 Changing Fear into a Mirror

Every time Lo-Yadua, the Unknown Rabbi, remembered the

sentence in Proverbs 1:7: “The fear of the Creator is the beginning
of knowledge,” he would recall a walk with his master, the Ancient
of Days, over the wall of Jerusalem’s Old City, a walk in which the
latter, outspoken as always, told him:
“It is useless to read in yir’at Adonai 7177 nx our fear of
the Creator; it seems to me instead that it is His fear. Observe
carefully: the text speaks of ‘fear of the Creator’ meaning ‘the
Creator’s fear’, not necessarily implying fearing the Creator.”
The tone in which he spoke was not sarcastic, but it was
pungent, indeed even aggressive. There was no worse enemy
for him than fear, and no advisor more selfish than dread. For
this reason he had since his youth taken pains to examine the
concept of yir’at NX, or fear, finding in it, among the letters
which compose it, a mirror or re’t 87.
“The world is our mirror, and our seeing 1s the frame,” he used to
say, the tau setting false limits to an effectively unlimited reality.”
“What are you proposing?” asked Lo-Yadua, nibbling a thin
branch of lavender. “There are no mirrors without frames or
without sharp edges.”
It was September, the month in which swifts prepare for their
departure, and when figs burst ripe with the sweet pressure of
their flesh.
“Everything we look at is looking at us, for there is no distance
between the light of the world and the one shining in our eyes.
Just as you expose your naked intimacy before the mirror, re-
dressing your face and fearlessly cleaning up your looks, just so
should the universe become the correcting mirror ofyour actions. Isn't

19
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

it true that if you show anger and scorn to the mirror, it will
return it? The same is done by the universe, even if you do not
notice; the same is done by reality, even if you do not perceive,
between beings and things, and immediately, the exact aping of
your gestures and thoughts.”
“It may be so,” replied Lo-Yadua, “but I still do not understand
why our seeing is the frame.”
“Neither do I!” laughed the old and crafty master. “But perhaps
it may be made clearer by the light of this saying from our Sufi
brethren: “The soul is a mirror whose frame is the body. Turn it
around and you will see.’”

The Ancient of Days is directly extracting the word re’i *87, mirror,
from yir’at nN, fear, in order to weave his parable and bring his
disciple to a more intimate and personal understanding of the Bible
passage mentioned. The letter remaining after the extraction is tau n,
alluding to the world, matter; hence, if we can momentarily dispense
with the frame, the entire universe becomes a mirror.

20
 The Reverse of Grace

Orah the Plant, daughter of the Unknown Rabbi, had trouble

understanding what her father meant by the reverse ofgrace is repose;
the obverse of repose is perceiving life.
“But aren't we perceiving it all the time? Isn’t it an obvious fact
for us?”
“I am afraid most of the time,” came Lo-Yadua’s reply, “we
wander through the world not knowing whence we come or
whither we are going. Because of this we must, now and then, do
as the masters of old said: stop praying in order to think of God.
In other words, to see ourselves seeing, to make thoughts stop,
and let our senses entirely open their corollas, without choosing
anything or fixing sight or hearing, breath or touch, on anything.”
“The concept of grace, though, has fallen into disuse, hasn’t it?”
said Ora.
“Only to our disgrace. Nowadays we only have left what is
gracious, which is a comic version of it. A relief at times, but a
poor remedy for the abundance of evils.”
“Perhaps the word is no longer used because it is ineffective,”
Ora insisted.
“Grace ineffective?” the Unknown one smiled. “How can that
be ineffective whereby we have the most radiant certainty of
being, the most beautiful song of light throbbing between our
shoulder blades?”
“Father, ellipsis is your speciality. None of your utterances is
ever straightforward.”
“It may be because the eye is curved, and the ear has its own
labyrinth.”

SH
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

The Kabbalah assigns several meanings to the word hen jn, grace.
The first one, from which the Unknown One draws his observation on
repose, derives from an alliteration: when we reverse the order of its
letters, hen jn can be read noah, repose, rest, quiet, an imperative
condition for receiving from the world its loftiest gifts of meaning
and transcendence. Now, ifwe follow the Talmudic commentary, and
we read hen qn as the acrostic of hochmah nisteret Nand] 731n,
hidden wisdom, we can understand why the prize of grace comes
to whomever knows how, when, and where to make his heart find
repose. The Greeks used to call this quiet ataraxia, and the Japanese
Buddhists find it through zazen, the art of learning how to sit still in
contemplation.

22
 The Law and the Kiss

They say Rabbi Jonah of Cyprus used to proudly hold that: “The
Law is a dead kiss; and each kiss is in turn a living transgressor,
since from the moment it gives itself with eyes closed it does not
know what it is doing.” Rabbi Me’ir Yuval of Peking commented,
to the contrary: “The kiss is a dead statute if it ignores the living
Law which gave it existence.” Then the daughter of Me’ir Yuval
of Peking came up to them and gave a kiss to Jonah of Cyprus.
“Do you see now?” said the advocate of the kiss. “She does not
know yet how to read, and even so, without knowing the Law, she
has kissed me.”
“You are wrong,” the legalist replied. “She has kissed you
because I, her father, have taught her the Law which proposes
love and respect to elders.”

According to Tradition, Moses died through, or because of, a divine

kiss, be-neshiqah npwia—probably a heart attack, a passing con-
sidered by masters to be the noblest of all possible deaths. During the
Italian Renaissance, Bishop Aegidius of Viterbo, at the time under the
influence of the Judeo-Spanish exiles, maintained that such a mystic
kiss was, at the moment of dying or even before, proof that the Cre-
ator was drawing His Spirit with the same swiftness and diligence
with which he had bestowed it at the moment of conception. Further-
more, the root gen jp, contained within the word for kiss, designates a
refuge, a nest. Meanwhile, shibah nXV, also included in the word in
question, speaks of a return, a coming back, as well as suggesting old
age—old age considered as a return, and thus favoured with the possib-
ility that, in the moment of transit towards the future life, divine pity
shall take care of its creature, starting with the lips. We must highlight

23
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

as well the profound significance of the syllable yesh w, present in be-

neshiqah AP waa, a root that signifies Being, the Existing One, thus
justifying the fact that, according to Genesis 2:27, life proceeds from
a breath insufflated by the Creator from His mouth into our nostrils.

24
 The Rabbi and the General

The Roman general Lucius Sextus came to see Rabbi Tzeba the
dyer, and told him he wanted to study with him.
“I am very sorry,’ confessed the Jew while he moved ajar with
his hands all rainbow-stained by his trade. “We do not teach.”
“You should not react this way,” said the general. “After all, we
are the rulers of the earth, including this land of yours we occupy
now, thus forcing you to pay taxes. Teach me the Torah, and I
shall exempt you from it.”
“You will pardon me,’ replied Tzeba, “but we do not teach.”
“But I will pay you well, you will receive a great reward. I need
to know what this wonderful book of yours, the Torah, says.”
“Iam sorry, the dyer said, “but we do not teach.”
“Please!” broke out the general, seeing that he would get
nothing by force. “I am a man who has travelled half the world
searching knowledge, and respecting the sages. Come on, old
man, teach me the Torah.”
“IT am truly sorry, we do not teach,” once again replied Tzeba
the dyer.
“I beg you,” Lucius Sextus then implored, falling to his knees.
“Knowing is for me a matter of life and death.”
And then, finally moved, the old dyer turned to his people’s
oppressor, and with extraordinary abruptness he snapped:
“On a Sabbath day two Jews climb up on a roof and they jump
down the chimney. One comes out white and the other black.
Who is going to wash?”
Astonished, as well as excited by the rabbi’s unexpected gener-
osity, the general hesitantly answered:
“The one covered in black.”
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

“No,” answered the dyer. “The one who came out black looks
at the other and thinks: ‘I am clean too, why should I go and
wash?”
“That’s right,” said General Lucius Sextus.
“No,” said Tzeba. “It is impossible for two men to jump down
a chimney, and one to come out white and the other black.”
“Indeed,” agreed the Roman.
“No,” the dyer said once more. “It is impossible that, being the
Sabbath, two Jews will climb up on a roof and jump down the
chimney.”

26
 The Stork, the Old man and the Infinite Night

Rabbi Elisha of Tiberias had heard people say that if you

manage to find the stork who brought you to the world, and
you somehow manage to talk to it, you would know from
exactly which part of heaven you came, what was your favourite
constellation, and which of the four hayot, the creatures in the
Prophet Ezekiel’s vision, governs your life. Like every other story
heard in childhood, the passing decades ended up diluting and
deforming it, to the point that at his eighty-two years Elisha did
not know whether he had heard that storks are long-lived and
they turn black as they grow old, or whether perchance he had
read that story in the Travels of Benjamin of Tudela far back
in the days of his youth. In his judgment, there was only one
way to make this clear: travel to the Judaean desert, where these
birds stopped to rest as they returned to Africa on their way from
Europe, then, making use of the meditative vehicle called by the
masters dimayon ha-nefesh WDIn Wnt, imagination of the soul, try
to communicate with one of them.
When, near Anatot, he caught sight of the fuzzy green hills,
and the storks over the fields, his heart started racing. They
were walking among unexpected lilies and sparse clovers with
a ceremonial gait, but none of them was entirely black. They
appeared to have emerged from a dream, embodying the very
image of watchfulness and discretion. Elisha took out the apple in
his pocket, his shabby book of Psalms, and started softly singing
the one set apart for the fairest scenes. Anyone seeing him from
afar would have thought a piece of the sky was attached upon his
head, so blue and white was the silk of his prayer shawl. He took
a deep breath, sat down and bit the fruit. A little later, as the sun

a
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

set, he fell asleep. When he woke up, he found a black stork so

near his head that he was frightened.
“What is an old man like you doing so far from home in the
middle of the desert?” the bird asked.
“As I am about to depart this world, I am looking for the stork
that brought me here.”
“You believe in stories then,” clattered the stork.
“It seems to me a genuine believer believes everything,’ smiled
the old man. “Was it you perchance, from whose beak I descended
to the life of men?”
“That, I shall never tell you,” confessed the stork.
)

“But you are black, and you surely are long-lived too,” observed
Rabbi Elisha of Tiberias. “You could help me find her. I am
curious to know from which part of heaven I did proceed.”
“Nothing easier,” answered the stork, spreading its wings. “You
come from the darkest of nights, and you are going to the darkest
of nights, and in between your life has been a colourful party, in
which for every three tears of sorrow there were two ofjoy.”
“Ts that all?” the old man inquired.
“No,” said the stork. “There is something else: I too come from
the night and go towards the night; my share of wonders is smaller
than yours, but this has not made me come to your house asking
for anything. Beauty is neither measured nor captured; fantasy
does not thrive on corroboration, nor fables on their expressive
accuracy. Wake up and return, spread the wings of your eyelids,
and once more give thanks to the Creator for the span of your
flight.”
When Rabbi Elisha opened his eyes, the first star was shining on
a lilac and salmon sky. Over the rolling hills, no stork was entirely
black or white.

Masters consider the night, lailah 19°, to be truly the highest praise,
or halel 997, given by the entire cosmos to the Creator, and this is why
entering its bosom at the moment of death, and with Psalm 19:1, which
shows the glory of His firmament, is a privilege to be requested by those
who love the colourful music of the stars.

28
 Something New for the World

Abu Salim, a well-known Sufi of Almeria, came to visit Rabbi

Yehuda Adalin of Granada, because word had reached him that
in his teachings he used to say “every human being brings along
something new to the world, something totally innovative.”
“Our master Ibn Khaldun,” said the Almerian Sufi, “praise
be to Allah for having nurtured and nourished him, held that
cycles repeat themselves, that history is recurring, and that human
beings make the same mistake over and over. If this is truly so,
what is this novelty you speak about? What can we bring of new
to this old and worn-out universe?”
Rabbi Yehuda Adalin owned a herbal shop in the city market,
where he bought and sold goose feathers for writing; and he
himself had the reputation of being an outstanding calligrapher,
or at least so they said at court. It was the year 1085 of the Hijra,
and the recent spring moon shone in a sky of diluted agates just
before sunset.
“Consider this feather,” confided Yehuda Adalin to his visitor,
showing him the quill he was working on. “Think of it in the body
of the creature it belonged to. It was light and fine as all the others,
and as white as to put to shame the clouds. As you know, geese are
amongst us, over the land of the Creator, from time immemorial,
which makes it likely that this feather has not changed at all since
it first emerged, breaking out from an immaculate dream, from
the mind of its Maker. Nevertheless, the directions of its flight
while still attached to the wing, the colour of the afternoons it
traversed, the sharpness of its barbules, and the flexibility of its
rachis under the rain made it different to all others. It is true that

=,
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

identical forms come to the world time and again, but their story
and movements do differ.”
“T don’t understand,” sighed the Sufi from Almeria.
“Take it,” the Jew told him, “throw it into the air. You do it first,
and then I shall do it.”
Abu Salim threw the white goose feather upwards and watched
as it fell spinning round its axis like a whirl ofsolid light. Seconds
after, the Jew threw it in turn and the feather came down in a
different way, though still similar.
“The novelty is not in the fall, but in the flight,” observed Rabbi
Yehuda Adalin. “Even more, the novelty is in the thrust given to its
passage through the air. Such are also our lives. As to falling, we
all shall fall, but it is in our hands and will to do it with elegance
or din, for the good of the earth or for the ill of the firmament.
Have it,” he added, offering the feather. “It was experiencing the
withering of my hands, and now it has just been reborn for you.”
“T shall write to you with it from Almeria,” said the Sufi with a
smile, “to tell you of the sea you have not seen.”
“And I shall answer you from Granada,” the calligrapher
replied, “to remind you of the perfumes you have smelled.”

Because of its numeric value, the Kabbalah considers the word feather,
notzah 7x1 (751), to be an equivalent of harvest, recollection, asif
VON (151); it holds that to each of our mental flights and movements
corresponds a level of heaven, as also an oasis of inner light, naveh
mij, already contained potentially in the feather. During the Middle
Ages, for making copies of both the Qur'an and the Torah, either a reed
or a quill would be used according to what was available at the time
ofyear and supplies through trade and transactions.

30
 The Best Reading

Rabbi Daniel Ish Tob of Kiev said: “It is better to read the same
book thirteen times than reading thirteen different books.”
His pupils looked at him in amazement, for they were standing
before the house of the famous Maggid of Karlin, whose library
was one of the largest and most comprehensive in the region.
So much so that erudite scholars from all over Europe and the
East would come there to do their research. The Maggid held
one open lesson twice a year, and by way of a system akin
to that of the Mediaeval responsa, some masters and advanced
disciples were invited to take part. After opening the doors of
the house, a young man dressed in black took Rabbi Daniel
Ish Tob and his entourage to the Maggid. They climbed the
dark wooden stairs and reached the loft where the library was
located. The green velvety curtains were half open, behind which
a fabulous panoramic window could be discerned. Books, large
and small, seemed to burgeon, float and overlap in a disorderly
order. ‘The master—who worked as an accountant for Count
Sverdluk—awaited them by his work desk, magnifier in hand.
He was a man of small stature, but a giant in knowledge. His
jacket was unbuttoned, for the library was warmed by a cast-
iron salamander stove which threw a reddish light upon the
sparse furniture, the worn-out leather sofa and the bookshelves.
He asked his guests to take a seat, greeted them following the
manners of the time, and then abruptly put the question:
“How many books are there in the Torah?”
“Five,” one of them answered.
“And in the whole of the Tanakh?”
“Thirty-nine,” replied another of the disciples.

31
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

“Well,” the Maggid smiled, “if the dew of your resurrection, the
light of your awakening, does not exude from those thirty-nine,
then you may as well also read these ones surrounding me, and
many others, and you will still remain asleep.”
“And you, master, have you read all the books in your library?”
ventured one of the less shy amongst the visitors.
“Of course,” replied the Maggid. “Most of them only once, but
the Torah thirteen times thirteen. Of every twenty-four hours I
only sleep five. The remaining time, amidst my usual occupations,
I ask my heart to read on its own what the blood brings and takes
from it.”
The visitors were overcome by a silence provoked both by the
master’s words, and by the dry crack of a log whose burning
embers had collapsed within the salamander. The Maggid had
read the mind of his main visitor, Rabbi Daniel Ish Tob of Kiev,
who was so pale he had to lean on the shoulder of Rabbi Nahum
of Altai to keep from falling. Later, on their way home, one of
them observed:
“The problem, it seems to me, is not about reading a little or
much, but about teaching our soul to read every one of the needs
of our body.”
“A man like the Maggid,” Rabbi Daniel Ish Tob said finally,
“can read with his eyes closed. The matter surrounding him has
become for him so transparent, and the Torah something so alive,
that his mind journeys through the invisible like the sun through
the night of remote distances, without going astray or trepidation
along the extent of its course.”

The number thirty-nine equates the value of the word tal 50, dew, an
agent which, according to Isaiah 26:19, awakens those asleep, since it
proceeds directly from the Creator. “For thy dew is as the dew of herbs,
and the earth shall cast out the dead.” Moreover, thirteen is the number
corresponding to the name of the One, ehad tnx, and also to the value
of love, ahabah AanK. Hence, loving the book of the One, and being
loved by Him, means attaining the number twenty-six, the value of the
Tetragrammaton or Ineffable Name.

32
 In Touch With the Tree of Life

On their way to a wedding in a small town neighbouring Odessa,

the very slim Rabbi Haim Leib Raze and his disciples came
across a band of Cossacks, most of whom were so tall and strong
they looked like moustached ogres. Upon seeing the small party,
and without a second thought, they blocked the road with their
horses and stopped Haim Leib Raze and his people, who were
frightened and knew neither what to do, nor if they would emerge
alive from this plight.
“Strong Arm Igor challenges the toughest among you to an arm-
wrestling match,” said the Cossack who appeared to be the leader.
“If you win, you can go on your way; but if you lose, you will
have to make the rest of your journey naked, wherever you are
heading.”
Meaning to protect their master, the disciples looked at each
other with bewildered faces. Pinchas was strong, but he was
too short compared to Strong Arm Igor; Mendel had broad
hands, but weak muscles; and Saul, who had good sinews, fine-
looking elbows and a courageous character, had had his fingers
covered with chilblains precisely that month of the harsh Nordic
spring. The Cossacks’ horses seemed restless, and they snorted
nervously amongst the smoke and broken light of the torches. An
improvised tent was soon set up where the wrestling skills would
be put to the test. Rabbi Haim Leib asked to touch the Torah
scrolls they were carrying as a gift to the community where the
wedding was to be celebrated, and he bent over to kiss the holy
book. Then, with eyes half closed, he placed his right forefinger
on top of one of the wooden trees of life around which the letters
slept.

OO1S)
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

He decided he would be the one to confront Strong Arm Igor,

who looked even bigger as he approached the Jews inside the tent.
After silence had fallen before a folding table, and Rabbi Haim
Leib Raze and Igor had taken seats facing each other, the slim
master said:
“Bring in more light; the occasion asks for brighter colours.”
The Cossacks were amused by his joke and they laughed
heartily. Igor put forth an arm, white and sinewy, but Rabbi Haim
Leib offered only the finger with which he had touched the Torah.
“Take it,” he told Strong Arm Igor, and once again laughter
roared.
The disciples were shivering. The night itself shrank in the cold.
The thaw was already starting outside the tent. When, trusting his
strength, Igor clenched with all his soul the Rabbi’s forefinger, the
tent was suddenly filled with colours. Fuchsias, greens, indigos,
oranges, reds and yellows were floating above the heads of the
Jews and the skin caps of the Cossacks. The fabric itself of
the tent became translucent, to the point that they could make
out, sharp and high, the stars, which—as those gathered realised
soon enough—also seemed to irradiate colours: magenta, violet,
heavenly lilac. Then, superstitious and frightened at what they
considered to be a wizard’s feat, the Cossacks ran to their horses,
only to find that the eyes of their beasts had changed their usual
black for light green and vermilion, pale ochre and deep blue.
“May Saint Sergius’ iconostasis protect us!” cried the chief of
the Cossacks. “Let’s run away from this madness, far from these
Jews!”
When the danger had abated, engulfed by the night and the
colours, the disciples effusively hugged and kissed their master.
“How? How did you do such a thing?” Mendel asked him.
Doing up the jacket he was offered, Rabbi Haim Leib Raze
observed:
“Rabbi Asher of Alexandria has written: ‘If you are near the
Tree of Life, soak one of your fingers in its colours, and spread
its grace between power and weakness.’ Terror is never beautiful,
but beauty can, upon occasion, be terrible.”

34
 Mario Satz

The wooden cylinders holding and supporting the Torah rolls are
popularly called ‘atsei haim 0”N oxy, trees of life. Moreover, since
finger is in Hebrew etsba‘ yaxx, a word containing both the word
colour, tseba‘ pax, and tree, ‘ets py, we can suppose the master had
appealed to a word play or mitshag milim 0°" pnyn, among the
many known to tradition, in order to perform his illusionist’s trick.

35
 The Three Kinds of Human Beings

Rabbi Salomon Levi of Viareggio gathered his most beloved

disciples and told them:
“People are not divided into white, Jew, gentile, ancient or
modern, but into those who work for wellbeing, those who work
for having, and those who devote their time to being.”
They were strolling by the Tuscan Sea, since it was Shabbat.
The air was crystalline. Rabbi Naphtali of Siena had just been
to visit Cardinal Egidius of Viterbo. They had commented upon
Recanati’s ideas about the neshigah or divine kiss. ‘The eldest of
all, Rabbi Haim Orbetello, an author and a composer, inquired:
“If such a division is moral, the classification is unclear; if it is
ethical, then still not clear. Could you further explain for us what
you mean?”
“Those who work for wellbeing measure the lands, they dig
furrows, they open wells, they raise animals they will later force
to return to stables. They do not go far, and they love safe
frontiers, the limits of their orchards. Those who give themselves
to having buy and collect, they measure and weigh objects. When
they observe someone, they consider his anatomy and clothing,
the space occupied by the person. They are experts in colours
and volumes. If they travel, it is for exchange. Their houses are
comfortable but cold, as objects themselves. There are at last those
who work for being. Everything in them is remoteness, and a
longing for remoteness. They are ready to accept that the stars
are the countless eyes of a Deity whose limits they ignore, and
their highest task is to console those of wellbeing and those of
having, who are oppressed by the excess of work or the weight
of possession, and they do so by enrobing their breath in sighs

36
 Mario Satz

of wisdom. They believe neither in frontiers nor in objects; their

best abode is a serene breathing, but their true home is the whole
universe.”
The disciples looked at each other trying to figure out to which
of the groups they belonged. Not far from them waves were
steadily lickingthe dark sand. The flight of a seagull attracted the
blue eyes of Rabbi Salomon Levi. A moment after he remarked:
“Do all your deeds for the sake of heaven.”
It was a Talmudic quotation known to all, but Haim Orbetello
had the impression that it was exactly what the white sea bird was
doing in its flight.

From the Mediterranean shores of the Yaune-Yam academy, established

in the 2nd century AD around the personality ofRabbi Yochanan Ben
Kacai, his disciples would watch the fluttering seagulls, shahaf 4nvw,
of dialogue, sah NW, whose mere presence refined, shaf \W, words and
polished meanings.

i)
 Ten Fragments of Beauty

Rabbi Eliezer of Salonica sent his disciples to the sea, charging

them:
“Bring me one fragment of beauty, some jewel created by the
One without hands or any visible craft. Bring to me some natural
work which after all shows how supernatural is this world.”
The ten disciples went their way towards the shore on that
summer’s afternoon whose sky was so full of swifts that the very
air was shrieking with joy between their wings. There were few
people beyond the harbour, other than two or three fishermen
who repaired their nets. The surface of the water was still, as if in
a trance.
Rabbi Alexis Moshe came back with a piece of a sponge, Rabbi
Naphtali Pidion with a branch of red coral. Abraham Herrera
Sofer, the blind one, who had gone in the company of his friend
Rabbi Aniel of Polygyros, brought with him a seashell, while his
guide was carrying a round roe pouch. Rabbi David of Kilkis,
the albino, had in turn found a ribbon of transparent posidonia
between the sea-washed rocks. Rabbi Yanis Yochanani of Xanthi,
who had very good eyesight, found a tiny violet crab, harmless
and acrid like its nest of algae. As for Rabbi Mordechai, renowned
for his absentmindedness, he chose a bored stone not to have
to search too much, while Rabbi Eliahu of Thasos, a fisherman
by profession, brought along a sphere of pressed sand. Isaiah of
Lemnos, of small build and always with a smile on his face, found
a bristled murex which he kept in his pocket ready to show his
master. Finally, Uriel of Edessa found the backbone of a small
shark; he felt certain that its dry architecture would delight Rabbi
Eliezer.

38
 Mario Satz

They laid down the ten fragments of beauty requested by

the master on the whitewashed terrace of his house, and they
anxiously awaited his judgment.
“Explain to me now,” said the master, “why is it that you have
chosen what you have chosen.”
Stepping ahead ofeveryone, Rabbi Naphtali Pidion held up his
piece of coral saying:
“A minute people lives under the water, and among their
calcium houses and their coloured branches they let others live.
This is how beautiful I would like our destiny to be.”
The master remained impassive, waiting for the second explan-
ation:
“The transparency of this seaweed is the best of virtues,”
advanced Rabbi David of Kilkis, “as there is practically no reverse
to it. It lets you see the same as it sees, and its borders are precise
and parallel. This is how fair I would like our character to be.”
“Whatever is dispersed by the wind,” came in Eliahu of Thasos,
“when it has the will to reunite, makes the sphere the most perfect
of forms. Thus would I like our families to stay together in peace.”
“This murex used to dye royal mantles purple,” observed Isaiah
of Lemnos, “and now, even dead, even empty, it still pricks with
its thorns the space of our admiration. May our beauty be so: real
and piercing, rugged and exact.”
The master was watching them with a mischievous air, as if
waiting for each of them to tell their stories, that he could thereby
measure their talents and skills, their sensibility and expressive
power.
“This bored stone,” said dreamy Mordechai, “can serve both as
a necklace bead or as a weight. It is thus that I wish the beautiful
not to be apart from the beautiful.”
At this point, Rabbi Yanis Yochanani of Xanthi brought out his
little violet crab and said:
“Backwards or forwards, little or big,” he declared, “as this
creature’s shell, so may always shine amongst us the twilight hue
of Genesis.”
Then Alexis Moshe stepped forward, and raising his find said:

39
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

“May time flow through us, as the ocean through this sponge,
and leave in our hearts sparkles of Eternity. Soft is the profound,
and supple.”
Rabbi Aniel of Polygyros raised his roe pouch, said nothing,
and wept silent tears when the blind man he was guiding,
Abraham Herrera Sofer, pointed to the opening in his small
seashell saying:
“This darkness is an inner world. But I know that the outer one
is constantly bathing in the light of the Most High, praised be
His tireless beauty.”
Uriel of Edessa came forward, and holding out his shark’s frame
exclaimed:
“Thorn or bone, ruin or shadow of a ruin, dying is to leave a
cage; living, to store promises and dreams. Thus, even once we
are gone to the next world, a sign of our endurance remains, a
symbol of our continuity.”
Having heard each and every one of his disciples, the master
stepped forward and said:
“Bring now together all the fragments, place them next to each
other, and you will see that the beauty they evoke is greater than
the sum of its forms. As the Sefer Yetsirah puts it: “God is the place
of the world, but the world is not His place.’ Searching for beauty
and coming across its reflections is only a minute part of the
undiscoverable beauty. Just so, what the sea has left for you is that
which its waves no longer have use for; but deep within, most dark
and even more marvellous, pulsates that which brought these
objects forth.”

40
 The Infinite Game

At the Paris National Library, in the room reserved for oriental

manuscripts, Rabbi Marcel Kahan was pointing out to Rabbi
Philippe Schwab the 15th century Persian edition of the Mantiq
ut-Tayr or Speech of the Birds, a donation to the library from its
former owner, Baron de Sacy. Wide open under a glass cover, the
manuscript was blossoming in minute spring flowers. Its writing
was so clear that Marcel Kahan, the linguist, could read the
following passage:
“He has gilded the dice of the stars, that every night the sky may
play its options. He has gifted the mesh of the body with diverse
qualities; He has put dust on the tail of the bird of the soul, and
He has made the ocean liquid as a sign of servanthood...”
Rabbi Philippe Schwab let one ofhis fingernails run against the
glass, admiring his friend’s accurate translation.
“And yet,” he recalled, “Einstein said ‘God does not play dice.’
”

“He may have meant to say there are no coincidences,” re-

marked Marcel Kahan.
“If you believe in the game, you believe in the freedom of the
unknown,” Rabbi Philippe continued, “and chance is for you
what the Creator keeps for Himself until the instant prior to every
revelation. You throw and He chooses.”
“You can also believe in the existence of the die,” smiled Marcel
Kahan, “without necessarily thinking of the good or the ill of the
game. Numbers are not in themselves intentional, though their
combinations attempt to be. Who cares if it is five in the afternoon
of the first day of the week, that you are thirty years old and I am
thirty-three? It is all related, as Attar, the author of Mantig ut-Tayr,
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

would put it, to those ‘diverse qualities of the mesh of the body’,
not to the body itself.”
“The six faces of the cube,” Rabbi Philippe Schwab began
reasoning aloud, “like the six days of the week, relate to an atomic,
structural order. Look at the face opposing six. What do you find
there? One. Maximum and minimum are in the game two faces
of the same. The Creator plays with us; we are His playing board,
the space where He plays His combinations.”
“If this were so, what would be His die?”
“Do you really want to know?”
Nes.
“The bounces and jumps of our heart. The cubic rose garden of
its blood outflow, the revolving miracle of its return from the feet
to the crown.”
Under the glass, the beautiful Attar manuscript seemed to
quiver as water within water. But this effect was due to the sudden
and joyous wetness pouring from the eyes of Rabbi Philippe
Schwab.

The Hebrew word for cube is qubiyah M21p, whose numeric value, 117,
is the same as that of one of the names of the Creator, El Elohim 5x
DDR.
 The Firefly Breeder
As a boy, Rabbi Reuben of Yambol was sent to Botev as an
assistant to a beekeeper who also owned some large rose gardens.
In order to counterbalance his premature intellectual gifts with
some hard physical work, his father, Rabbi Samuel, thought the
high mountains of central Bulgaria would give him both vital
energy and common sense. The beekeeper was called Resnov,
and he had another assistant, a Muslim from Sofia called Rasif,
who in no time had made friends with the young Rabbi Reuben |
of Yambol. By day they would look after the beehives, in the
evenings the roses, and by night, during the summer, they would
spend their time studying the fireflies, which they both found
fascinating.
Rasif would catch them and then let them go, so that his
fingers would be smeared with luciferin, which he would later rub
onto plants, objects and animals with the intention, he said, of
conferring on them the barakah or divine protection.
“Allah wants that His light is everywhere a link between men,
?

he told Reuben one night. “Just imagine then, what a brilliant

builder would be he who could, like the fireflies, build bridges of
light to cross the darkness of night.”
As the years passed they stopped seeing each other. Rasif the
Muslim never returned to Sofia; he married one of the bee-
keeper’s daughters, and eventually became the most renowned
firefly breeder in the Botev region. When they were old, both
grandfathers, they happened to meet at a horse fair near Gab-
rovo. Since that time, and until Rasif’s death, Rabbi Reuben of
Yambol would receive every two months a few perfumed sheets
so full of luciferin that they shone in the darkness like the pages

43
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

of an angelic book. When somebody came to ask for his blessing,

he would touch his forehead with a finger imbued with the shiny
powder as he said:
“When someone sees you tonight and tells you, “You have a
light on your forehead,’ remember that the true light of blessing
is between your thoughts and your acts, and that you wear it on
the outside only to remember that it proceeds from the inside.”
One day, one of his nephews asked Rabbi Reuben where had he
got such a strange teaching from, and he explained it had come
from a childhood friend, Rasif, the firefly breeder, a Muslim from
Sofia.
“Even though its rays differ, the light of God is one. Between
their Allah and our Elohim,” said Rabbi Reuben of Yambol,
thousands of fireflies come and go. What is important is to take
* from them what unites us, not what sets us apart. He who blesses
is not waiting for an answer to his function, since the blessing
itself is the answer he expects to hear.”

Firefly is in Hebrew gahlilit n°9n3, a word in which coexist bliss, gil

3, joy, and the term gahal 9n3, an ember.

44
 The Value of Tithes

Abu Shaul of Casablanca, a Torah copyist, a renowned sofer stam,

used to say:
“In the times of our Moses, when he was a prince of Egypt
and he walked among the pyramids and would row on the Nile,
and exercised himself in the bow and the whip, the harp and the
sistrum; when he enjoyed the favour of the Pharaoh and his court,
and he learnt medicine, zoology, botany and astronomy, a shaven-
headed priest took him to the school of calligraphy, to show him
how the animals entered the writing signs, how the geese folded
their wings, how the crocodile opened its mouth, the hawk took
flight, the cobra became angry. When, in a temple garden, they
showed him the ostrich, whose feathers signify the truth, they told
him: ‘Of ali its eggs, there will always be one it breaks in order to
attract the flies and thereby feed its chicks.’ Likewise, among your
ideas and dreams there must be one which feeds the others. This is
the tithe of each living being for the continuation of its being, it 1s
the sacrifice of one part of yourself that the others may flourish.”
As a commemoration of this surely apocryphal event, not
mentioned in the Talmud or the Kabbalah or the Midrash, Abu
Shaul of Casablanca, a visionary and calligrapher, used to gather
writing feathers. Northern goose, the eagle from al-Andalus,
peregrine falcon, and even a swallow’s feather, wherewith on
certain occasions he wrote the holy name of the Creator, so that
it always returned to his life, he said, across the seas of sorrows
and the tormented currents of forsaken love. Even though the
Maghreb Jewish scribes used to prefer reed quills to the writing
feathers, he remained the exception. He lived until his ninety-
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

ninth year, and it is known, since it was recorded, that his last
words were:
“The tongue is the feather of the heart. If it is primary, you shall
know where to go; if secondary, who to follow.”

The ostrich bears in Hebrew the name of ya‘en jy, whose root, with
the course of time, would become ‘anah ny, to answer, reply, but also
to sing, to praise. Among the Egyptians, the fine ostrich (Struthio
camelus) feather was the sign ofTmeh or Maat, goddess of justice,
whose image presided over the psychostasis or weighing of the souls. Its
Biblical equivalent, almost a simple alliteration, and supreme virtue
of the Creator, would be the word emet NX, truth.

46
 Echoing Yourself

They say Rabbi Mordechai Leib of Prague, a friend of the

Maharal, went often alone to the Bohemian mountains to perfect
his ears with the echo of his own voice, which had to cross
waterfalls, rivers, forests and cliffs, graze hills and stroke pebbles
before coming back to him. He trained himself in this way to
prepare for the “Hear, O Israel,” since it seemed to him one could
never be proficient enough thereat. He thought human beings
are distracted by the hundred voices of folly and the thousand of
vanity before really listening to themselves.
“Hear, O Israel’ means above all that we must hear our own
actions, he used to say, “to perceive everything our voice gathers
on its journey through the world’s landscapes.”
If his voice came back to him wrapped in pine scent, he would
know he was at that time climbing the branches of his own mind
towards the cloud-covered sun; should he get a humid and warm
reverberation, he would know he needed to weep over his faults.
But if it happened that the voice came clearly back to him, he
would sing a psalm until, enraptured, he knelt down thinking how
much larger would be the reflection of silent thought, compared
to the ups and downs and the whiffs of the spoken word and its
eventual return in the echo.
One day he was surprised in the forest by a storm so intense
and wild that only the thunders and the groans of wind-bent
timber could be heard. Rabbi Mordechai Leib of Prague took
shelter in a cave, and only came back into the daylight after he
had smoked three pipesful. When he came out, the twilight blood
was spilt everywhere around, releasing the atmospheric pressure
of the summer. So many water canticles and such bird bustle were

47
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

heard that he was overwhelmed, feeling like Noah after the end
of the flood.
“Oh Lord, what an echo there is in your glory, and what an ark
you have drawn in my breast for me to save the beauty of this
moment!”
Saying which, he repeated the famous phrase in Deuteronomy
6:4, where Israel is prompted to hear, and he added:
“IT have heard that change tempers Your purposes, and that
storm placates Your humours.”

The relation between glory, hod 117, and echo, hed 7, shows that the
former leads man, indicated by the letter vav \, to hear himself, until
he realises that the duality, the du 11, in which he lives is no more
than an outcome of the oscillating movement of the Spirit. And this is
pictured here by the letter hei 7, which, as is known, occurs twice in
the Tetragrammaton, the Ineffable Name.

48
 The Book or the Life

Rabbi Guy Elimelech of Narbonne was a prodigy of memorisa-

tion when he was ten years old, a Talmudic genius at fifteen and a
reputable exegete at thirty. But it so happened that when he was
thirty-two, he was afflicted by a mysterious disease which pros-
trated him for one long year in his humble bed, in the back of the
tannery owned by Rabbi Uri Sasson, who served as his compan-
ion and secretary, and at times read aloud for him. They brought
him phosphorus crystals from the Baltic, quail eggs from Saxony,
wine from Oporto and clay from the Atlas, but none of these rem-
edies would give the master back his pleasure in learning, or the
lucidity he had prior to his illness.
One day a traveller came from Tripoli bringing a strange food
he claimed to be just like the manna eaten by the children of
Israel in the desert. Rabbi Guy Elimelech tried it, and it turned
out to be effective. One week later he was able to go out for
a stroll around the city outskirts, and the sky of his memory
blossomed like a periwinkle. He watched the creatures of air and
land, and he smiled. Once recovered, he asked his friends and
companions to find him a way to thank the man from Tripoli
for his cure, and when these finally managed to find him after
a month’s long search, the man told them the medicine had been
simply a piece of rice paper from China—having arrived in Libya
through the hands of Jewish merchants who sailed up and down
the Red Sea—upon which was written the following passage from
Numbers 11:17: “But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing
at all, beside this manna, before our eyes.”
Humbled, and yet grateful for the teaching, Rabbi Guy
Elimelech of Narbonne realised that his overly ambitious heart

49
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

had dried up because it longed for rewards. Ambition was shroud-

ing it, and it was corroded by the pride of prizes, obsessed with
triumph to the point that reality was for it a book and no longer
reality itself. He remembered that the words of the Bible that
he had ingested in that thinnest piece of paper continued with a
mention of coriander, and from that day onwards, whenever he
came across that aromatic herb, he would remember the man in
Tripoli, whose real name he never knew.
“Health without creation is nothing,” Rabbi Guy Elimelech,
now healed, would repeat. “Knowledge without wonderment is
nothing. Beauty with neither light nor herb is nothing. Judgment
without delight is nothing. But even less is the man who, knowing
the perfume of Paradise, forgets that others have noses too.”

Delight, ‘ednah 7Iy, is one of the traits of the true sage, whose smile
must be able to caress all living beings and things. In this very word
“delight”, we find the roots of Eden {1y, Paradise, and, curiously
enough, those of dan }1, judgment, judging.

50
 The Exact Side of Reality

Rabbi Nissim Mitrani of Oujda made hourglasses in his spare

time and repaired clocks for a living. His tiny work table was a
collection of springs, pins, golden needles and worn-out clock
faces. He knew the time in every corner of the world, and this
made him candidly trust divine justice, for he thought every man
has his time and hour.
“Night falls here today, and it falls there tomorrow; there
is no going without coming, nor action without reaction,’ he
murmured, as he turned his favourite hourglass upside down.
“Even this elusive flowing matter, each one of its thousands of
small grains, will eventually know its right position, the sharpest
turn of its tiny fate. And what does the sage do when confronted
with this fact? How does he spend his most precious moments?”
His colleagues would look at him wryly, probably tired of
hearing him always say the same things; but they kept drinking
their mint tea, and were ready to listen to him once again.
“The righteous man takes the side summoned by every moment,
and seeks the counterweight, for he loves balance. He can be
either a ballast or a buoy, as needed, for he knows that reality is an
unfinished sketch, whose definitive version we will never know.”
“That can be true of the sand,” said Rabbi Abimelech Isaac,
looking at Nissim Mitrani’s hourglass, “which is ever profane,
restless, scattered and barren, but it won’t hold for its Creator,
who is a constant oasis of meaning, holy in what we know, and
holy in what we ignore about Him.”
The master who collected hourglasses, the knower of world time
zones, finding his listeners to be somewhat drowsy, jumped up,
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

unusually for him, and brought before the eyes of everyone a

small pile of silica crystals, saying:
“Here is a small parcel of matter sanctified by its use, subject
to solar rhythms, sacralised by numbers. In a like manner, the
righteous man inserts himself among men to balance their despair
with grains of wonder, and however minute his transparent
intervention, however minuscule the excitement he derives, he
always has time for a smile coming from the balance’s fulcrum.
He always has time to say: “This is the instant of awakening.’”

The master keeps in mind that the tsadiq p¥ or righteous, as

“foundation of the world”, yesod ‘olam DY TO, must actually
place himself on the exact, diaq 977, side, tsad 1¥, of reality, not
always a grateful duty, since it oftentimes implies mediating between
irreconcilable extremes, and being afflicted from both sides of the
conflict. The relationship mentioned by Rabbi Abimelech between sand
and the profane comes from thefact that they are both written the same
way, hol din.

52
 Learning from the Ignorants

Shortly before the October Revolution, the immense lands owned

by the Tzar of all the Russias were suffering upheaval and terror.
Fields, prairies, estuaries and rivers were filled with straniks or
pilgrims, with demented eyes and tangled beards. In the forest
huts appearances of the baba yaga, witch-like supernatural beings,
assumed the malevolent forms of lascivious old hags. Hunger
was gnawing at the birches, and poverty became so obvious that
preachers started saying it showed how close the Kingdom of
Heaven had come. Nothing and no one was safe then, but even
so, Rabbi Lulik of Naryan-Mar, a trader in White Sea herring,
would have the singer Isaac of Tura accompany him to every
meeting or political speech he attended. He would listen to the
fiery preaching of the metropolitans and the beggars, he would
be ravished by the sound of the mystical hum of the blind men’s
balalaikas, or he would hang around outside brothels, looking
for an expression of feminine piety; and he would closely follow
market chatter, trying to discern what came from the Creator and
what didn't, for he held that in times such as these, heaven spoke
through countless mouths.
“I don’t understand, Master,’ Isaac of Tura said to him, “I
honestly don’t understand how it is that you can listen to insults
and imprecations, vulgarities and all the silliness spoken in the
markets and the harbours without ever blushing, always retaining
instead that seraphic smile. Is there no difference, perhaps,
between a good and a bad speaker? Can't you tell anger’s rant
from a good-hearted man’s sermon? What is the eloquence you
find in the screams of the whores, or in the weeping of the castrati
for the greater glory of their adorable Jesus?”

a
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

Slowly refilling his pipe, if they were resting, or loosening the

reins of his troika if they were on the road, Rabbi Lulik of Naryan-
Mar replied:
“Our sages say that after the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple,
prophecy was given to the children and the idiots. For this very
reason there are, in all speech we hear, golden nuggets in the
nasal voices of the fools, sublime sparks, hidden messages, great
truths they themselves are unaware of, but such as are discernible
for a good ear. My grandfather, Rabbi Schlomo Ari of Naryan-
Mar, used to say: ‘Be like sparrows and doves, who find their
feast among the crumbs left by others. And be like oil in a
puddle, opening for the children rainbows of wonder. Whet
your tenderness against violence, and deepen your discernment
through the madness of others.’ ”
“T have heard nothing lately but lowly insults and terrible lies,”
sighed Isaac of Tura. “I suppose I might need to listen to a
hundred obtuse lectures in order to get from them one single
correct angle.”
“Of course,’ observed the herring trader, “mountains will
always be larger than the treasures they contain, there will
always be more chaff than wheat, and more feathers than flight.
Remember what the Mishnah says: ‘He who learns is not subject
to death.”

54
 All the Names of the Earth

The daughter of Lo-Yadua, the Unknown Rabbi, who was taught

Hebrew by her father, once told him she did not understand how
the earth could have so many different names, being as it was in
reality only one.
“What's the use of having earth, soil, continent, planet? I think
calling them by one single name would simplify matters.”
“Freedom is in the nuances,” replied Lo-Yadua.
“For instance,’ the girl insisted, “planet includes continent, soil
and earth, doesn’t it?”
“Freedom is in the nuances,” her father repeated. “I am sure
that, if you look at the words properly, you will find a reason for
each name, which sometimes reflects a space, sometimes a time.
Spring soil is not like autumn soil.”
“Outwardly,” she retorted.
“It is true,’ said Lo-Yadua, “outwardly. But that is where we live.
We are neither moles nor rabbits. And even for them it is different
in the winter than in the summer.”
“The more names we have, the more diluted reality becomes, it
seems to me,” the master’s daughter answered drily.
“The more nuances reality has, the more our spirit is consolid-
ated,” replied the Unknown One. “Our body is formed by the
same matter that informs earth. When you discover this, the soil
becomes firmer for you, and your own depth deeper. At the same
time, this lets you realise that the movement, the course and the
constant rotation of our planet are tapped as a beat by the infinite,
and that each continent is in turn contained by the sky encom-
passing it. The same colour has different nuances. It may not be
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

conscious of it, but every single one of its tones knows its place
within the scale of its complements.”

The Hebrew names for the earth are: adamah ANI, garqa’ yprp and
arets PrN. In the latter, naming both the homeland and the country,
coexist in turn two other concepts: rats p71, course, and the alef &, sign
of the infinite.

56
 The Deaf: Mute Singer

At first, Rabbi Yotam of Nehardea used to enthral everyone with

the tone of his voice, the melody with which he infused his
sentences. And his words kept their appeal for as long as his
thoughts were in line with everybody else’s, but one day, when
he decided to enlarge his lexicon, filling it with Babylon angels
and botanic subtleties from India, enriching it with recesses, and
extending his mental domains, on that very day people found
him to be confusing and long-winded; they avoided his company,
and they did not heed his ideas about the ultramarine of lapis
lazuli being a trace of another heaven. They marginalised him,
and they shunned his mere presence. And then, seeing that
no one really would listen to him for more than a couple of
minutes, Rabbi Yotam of Nehardea, a master and scribe, stopped
talking, becoming mute overnight. Those words, verbs, prefixes
and adjectives it had taken him so long to bridle, started by and
by to leave his mind due to lack of use. He did not, however,
lose his speech so quickly. He learnt to talk to himself, and to
tell himselfall sorts of stories about the unavoidable loneliness of
prophets and the accommodating virtue of the Pharisees, about
personal time and time shared with others; but the likeness of an
argumentation, and the dragging monologues themselves ended
up tiring him, to the point that he remained mute forever more.
When others would sit to weep and sing under the willows,
remembering Jerusalem, he took a place near the river to listen to
the oars chattering in the water. Not that this habit lasted much,
for whoever goes mute once and for all, sooner or later realises
that he has stopped hearing properly. And this is how he became
deaf as well, and he got to use his hands to express himself, in his

OW
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

shopping and small errands, as he had seen those born deaf-mute

go about it. His fingers, previously awkward, turned now into
doves, hawks, leaves and cat tails. After some time, his knuckles,
forefingers and thumbs were so fast, so accurately dazzling, that
he himself, Yotam of Nehardea, would find it amazing that these
were his own hands. He learnt how to feel the works of his
own heart, placing his hands on his chest; and he took the
habit, after feeling the heart beating under his palms, to throw
his heartbeats into the air as he smiled, returning them to the
heavenly course they came from, so that the sun and moon would
not entirely waste the treasure of their rhythms. Soon afterwards
he deciphered what his eyelids were telling every time he stroked
them with his fingertips, and later on he was able to discern, as
he blew on his palms, two or three different temperatures in his
breath. As soon as he perceived something new, he would return
it to heaven with prompt gratitude.
Drawn by this subtle and expressive language, those who had
stopped listening to him came back. They were most amazed by
the accuracy and the grace displayed as his fingers turned.
At first they were three, then five, and finally the onlookers
could be counted by the dozen. Some thought his eloquence
sublime, others that he said nothing special, but such was his
elegance and perfection that they were reminded of Moses in the
initiatic desert of his long journeys. By then, Rabbi Yotam of
Nehardea had made for himself a world within the world; he had
no need of anyone, and one single steady thought filled his nights
and days: “He who was unheard when he spoke is now a master
of the silent air. He who makes an art out of the verbal rejection
that secluded him, comes to interpret what the silence wants to
be known.”
Rabbi Yotam of Nehardea died when he was eighty-eight years
old, while sitting at his front door in the saddlers’ quarter. It
happened in the month of Nisan, when the grass is tender, and
the lilies announce clearer weathers. Five swallows drew his
name on the sky, but no one except him, just an instant before
expiring, could decipher the syllabic writing of their flight, and
how extreme remoteness had become his most joyous intimacy.

58
 Mano Satz

Kabbalists speak ofa certain “returning light”, or hozer tin, meaning

both the matter which radiates the very light that created it, and the
highest mission of the student. In the Hebrew verb to return, lehahzir
srnnd, we find, incidentally, the root zohar 17, splendour, and also
hel 5n, halo, aura.

59
 The Intermittent Goodbye

“If you pay attention,” Rabbi Mordechai of Lisbon commented to

his sons, “when we meet others, just as when we part from them,
we say in Hebrew shalom. Do you know why?”
“Surely to express our desire for peace, our will for the relation
established with others to be one governed by serenity, not by
tension.”
“I believe, father,” said the eldest son, “that we say shalom nw
so that His Name, shem ow, that of the Creator, /o 15, is always
amongst us.”
“The prophet Isaiah compares peace with a river,” said Rabbi
Mordechai Morteira, pointing to the waters of the Tejo, “and this
because it is always fluent and fertile, nutritious and humble, for
all rivers bow down before the sea.”
“Perhaps we say shalom,” remarked the younger of the sons,
“because life itself is an intermittent goodbye, and we are always
somehow parting from someone or something.”
“It seems to me,” said his next in age, “that it is impossible to
know exactly, when we greet others, whether it is the first or the
last time we meet.”
“Why do you say that?” Rabbi Mordechai was curious to know.
“Because if the prophet is right—and with him also Heraclitus,
the Greek philosopher who said ‘we never drink twice from the
same river —we are different at each of our meetings to what we
were in a previous moment, and thus we choose to welcome and
bid farewell with peace to those unknown aspects of known faces
that we happen to be shown, so that the unexpected will not
disturb the human landscape we were familiar with.”
“Peace, then, be upon us and upon everybody,” said the rabbi.

60
 Mario Satz

“A difficult project facing an all too easy contempt,” added his

eldest son bitterly, remembering that the Jews had been expelled
from Spain, and they would soon be expelled from Portugal as
well.

The sentence in Isaiah 48:18: “Then had thy peace been as a river,’ H

includes the expression ke-nahar 1719, where wefind on the one hand
the affirmative “yes”, ken 12, forfluidity, and on the other hand rakh
Tn, something tender, weak, inconsistent. Hence, human dealings
need to invoke peace again and again, to compensate for each of the
afflictions caused by inevitable conflict and scorn.

61
 The Folds of the Heart

Distressed and red-eyed like someone who has not slept for days,
Zevi Agudo, a tradesman from Milano, made his way to Florence
in order to seek the advice of Rabbi Alessandro Luzzato, who
used to teach in the study house next to the synagogue.
“Master,” he said, “make my journey worth its while; help me
calm down my mind.”
“What is wrong with you, Zevi?” answered Rabbi Alessandro
Luzzato while still browsing through a volume of the Talmud.
Easter was imminent, and the first yellow chrysanthemums were
blossoming near Fiesole.
“T have felt the claws of loneliness upon me, its dull iron nails,
its cork-like shield, its sorrowful emptiness at all times. This is
more than enough to make one deranged.”
“Why?” inquired the master looking into his eyes.
“That is what I ask myself, since I have family, friends, a job,
and I am actually not alone for more than a few minutes a day.”
“Are you familiar with the story of Pinchas Deshe, the wander-
ing companion of Honi the Circle-Maker?”
“No, master.”
“It so happened that when once he felt lonelier than a summer
cloud, lonelier than a deer before the abyss of a starless night,
lonelier than a desert spring, lonelier than an abandoned nest
or an empty snail shell, lonelier than crumbs of bread scattered
under the moon, he went up to his friend Samuel’s vineyard,
where he fell asleep wrapped in the afternoon drowse. It was there,
they say, that he had an illuminating dream. The vine tendrils
cradled him, and he became a tiny grape, then another, and then
yet another, until he felt like an entire bunch. Immediately, faster

62
 Manto Satz

than it takes a sigh to leave the nose, he was crushed by the

winepress, becoming must, then wine, and finally, when he was
about to be drunk, he woke up startled. When he told his friend
Samuel about the dream, he wanted to know what was the face of
the drinker. Poor Pinchas Deshe, still frightened, replied: “That is
exactly the point: he had noface.’ Full of excitement, Samuel asked
where he had reclined, where he had lain down, then went there
and stretched himself out as he exclaimed: ‘How wonderful to
be drunk by the Faceless One, to make Him drunk with our own
dreams! How beautiful that, alone in the middle of the fields, we
can offer ourselves to His thirst!’”
After saying this, Rabbi Alessandro Luzzato took out a bottle
of wine and glasses, and offered his bewildered visitor a drink.
“Lehayim!”, he said raising his voice. “To life!”
“To life,” Zevi answered.
“Remember, added the master after tasting the wine, “that
being alone reveals what is behind the folds of the heart: strands
of light reaching towards heaven, twinkling stars in the aortic
arcs

Alone, in Hebrew lebad 1125, combines two concepts: leb 29, heart,
and bad 1712, a piece of cloth, but also a vein or artery. Numerically,
alone or lebad equals 36, being thus equivalent to Eloah 7x, one
of the names of the Creator, which once alliterated can be read as a
dwelling, tent, ohel Sax. According to Biblical lore, the heart is the
dwelling place and sanctuary ofdivinity par excellence.

63
 In the Cemetery

With a slow, ceremonious pace, four of the disciples of Rabbi

Moshe Isfahani walked the yellow dust of Pir Bakan’s cemetery in
order to lay their memorial stones on his basalt tomb. Far away,
the mountains had a salmon colour.
The sky was so blue it seemed like living lacquer, running
sapphire.
“Do you remember what he told us the last day of his life?”
asked Yoel of Balkh.
“I do,” avowed Haim of Ghazni.
“It was a hot day,” added Shaul of Shiraz.
“Swallows were flying around, and watching them from his
deathbed,” carried on Gad of Hamadan, “watching them fly
beyond the window, he raised his voice, enfeebled by pain: “When
there is no master to guide the way, birds know only a tiny parcel
of heaven and earth. But if they have a guide, even by night they
can read the maps of the stars, and far in the distance they can
catch sight of the eaves under which their fledglings will sleep.
When a master of the flight leaves, it seems as if there is no frame
or direction in our own wings, but soon enough a new swallow
comes to take his place, and once more it is possible to return
again and again to where you have been.’ ”
“That is what he said,” confirmed Yoel of Balkh sadly.
“It was a hot day,” repeated Haim of Ghazni.
“Hotter than today,” said Shaul of Shiraz as he placed a small
stone over the grave of Rabbi Moshe Isfahani.
“It is curious,” observed Gad of Hamadan, whose prodigious
memory they all trusted, “how he also used to say that a good

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 Mario Satz

master embodies what all his different disciples have in common,

while a good disciple discovers what all beings have in common.”
One swallow went by, then another. After a while the first star
shone, and later the moon, the rugged mirror of the sun.

The swallow, dror 1177, was both during the Biblical and post-Biblical
periods a good example of the respect and responsibility existing
between one generation, dor 111, and the next. You can return to the
place from where you once departed ifyou carefully listen to the voice
of your ancestors. In Ancient Egypt, the swallow (Hirundo rustica)
was the ornithological embodiment of Isis, the goddess charged with
“eathering” the dissevered parts of the body of her husband and brother
Osiris.

65
 The Two Kinds of Master

“There are two kinds of wise words,” said the singer of the Bremen
synagogue, Rabbi Baruch Dreiser, a well known Talmud exegete
and a jeweller dealing in semi-precious stones—those resembling
stones that ripple, and those resembling the diamond.
A deep silence followed. Autumn had arrived with its mild white
wines, and with slow and cold rains. That week’s haftarah included
the passage mentioning Moses’ Law of Fire, brought to his people
as mentioned in Deuteronomy 33:2.
“Some come from those masters who Zo to and fro, allowing
themselves to follow the fancy of the time, charming and simple
in their manners,” he continued, “yet slightly raw when first met
personally, fickle and unpredictable in their character. It is not
necessary to come to them, for they are always there where we
happen to be, around every river or stream, by the very gates of
the city. Those who utter diamantine words, instead, who make
use of eloquent and pithy turns of phrase, those are much harder
to find, and it is almost always necessary to set out looking for
them. They yield to no pressure, and in their solitude they endure
terrible trials, unheard of zeal, anonymous and remote darkness.
They strive after a transparency that shall be ours one day if we
are able to find them. Most pour their strength out following very
precise laws: those of their own clarity.”
The surrounding silence became still deeper. A chair creaked.
The lamps were now giving off a delicate paraffin smell.
“The common stone builds up enclosures and fences, it raises
walls and props up platforms,” said Rabbi Baruch Dreiser. “The
diamond gathers light and then radiates it; it is hard yet translu-
cent, and even lying in the deepest pit, it will always be ready,

66
 Mario Satz

even when unseen, to give testimony to the shining star. We are

bound to live between these two teachings, notwithstanding the
difficulty of building a diamantine shelter or transmuting the opa-
city of the water-worn rolling pebble into light. To live is to flow
with the current; yet to be—this is to be born in the lowest and
still give testimony to the highest.”

67
 The Sheet of Silence

Rabbi Abel Azulai of Casablanca had gone to France to study the

most noble and prestigious career of architecture. Intelligent and
studious, in less than twenty years he had secured everything a
Jew can wish for: moral, popular and professional certainty. But
when he was sixty, a wandering blind musician crossed his path,
Baba Yehuda Sagi Nahor, who came from inland Morocco and
played with unusual mastery the vielle, an instrument inherited
from his Spanish ancestors, and which he used to accompany old
Sephardic songs. Being used to his position of authority, to see
all his projects through, Rabbi Azulai of Casablanca renounced
for a while his will, and decided to follow the wandering musician
after hearing from him this song:

The house of the universe

has a starry ceiling;
why cover your head
when rain is pure light?
My blind eyes taught my ears
the stellar song of silence.

“And this is how I became his disciple,” he used to recall.

“During the first year he asked everything about me; during the
second one he had me learn by heart a passage from the Torah
chosen at will; and in the third year he did what no man had ever
been able to do to me: he silenced my mind. When one morning,
as I kept him company on his market round, I asked him how he
did it, he replied:
‘Authentic silence, real silence, draws an invisible sheet between
your feet and the floor, no matter where you stand. When you

68
 Mario Satz

succeed in hearing it, in just a tiny fraction of time your weight

decreases and you know more.’
‘Is that the stellar song of silence?’ I asked, remembering the
song that had made me his disciple, and he said:
‘No. This is letting your feet tread on non-intention, alighting
like the dew, which comes in peace, and in peace evaporates.’ ”

Thanks to a meaningful coincidence, a stroll is in Hebrew tiyul 9V0, a

word containing the name for dew, tal 50, whilst a sheet, riqua‘ yi),
derives from the same root as raqia’ y9p7, meaning sky, firmament.
The sheet alluded to by the blind musician is a sort of heavenly
void made evident by deep silence, and rediscovered by well-directed
attention, between the soles of our feet and the path we stand on.

69
 The Creator and His Creatures

Two Talmud and Torah students from Lodz got caught in a

frightful argument about the limits between the Creator and
His creatures. Rafael and Jacob were deep in the Polish forests
on a meditation retreat, and absorbed as they were in their
argument they failed to notice the arrival of Bronislaw Legnica.
This puppeteer was famous throughout the Nysa region, where
he regularly paid visits to the dead birch trees, looking for the
wood he would use for his princes and princesses, ogres and
blacksmiths, goblins and dragons.
“Hey Jews!” he interrupted upon hearing them argue, “You
fight over trifles, and you can’t hear the nightingale’s call for the
yet unripe cherries, nor do you smell the perfume of fresh sap, nor
do you enjoy the song of the wind-blown leaves.”
“Were you overhearing us?” Rafael asked, worried that he had
been surprised in the middle of his verbal engrossment by such
an extraordinary artist as Bronislaw Legnica.
“Of course I was.”
“What is your opinion, then?” asked Jacob.
“Our sages hold that the Creator fills every place, memaleh
magom dip XN, which implies He is in all His creatures, but
also that He transcends them and exceeds them. What is the limit
then, between Him and us? What is the frontier? How can He at
the same time be and not be in the tongue I speak with and in
these eyes I see you with?”
“Poor me,” replied the puppeteer, “if Ithought too much, ifI
used my head too much, my puppets’ strings would all be tangled;
every one of my characters would like to hang from the other’s
rod, and instead of making people laugh for what they represent,

7O
 Mario Satz

the public would mock their maker as a clumsy victim of his own
doubts.”
“And what do you do then,” Rafael wanted to know, “to prevent
such a thing from happening?”
“I let them be whatever each one of them tries to play: villains
or noblemen, naughty or romantic, murderers or angels.”
“Yes,” insisted Jacob, “but you come here looking for wood to
carve them, you conceive their faces and you design their clothes,
you draw their noses and you round off their shoulders. You are
like a little god for your creatures.”
“That’s what I used to think!” exclaimed Bronislaw Legnica,
as he cut a branch off and smiled ironically. “Until I realised
that each tree, as each button which serves as an eye, or each
piece of cloth that will be part of a costume, they all choose their
inclination, they already bespeak their character! Indeed, we are
like God’s clock cuckoo, but it is as likely He ignores both the
hours of our pleasures and the hours of our sorrows, and He only
knows about us that we are made of a wood too weak to emulate
Him. When we think we are approaching His kingdom, like a
pendulum we swing back, and when we think He goes far from
us, He is actually preparing His return. Do not seek God above
your own heads. Look downwards; remember his pendulum.”
Jacob and Rafael, overwhelmed by the puppeteer’s means of
expression, watched him peel some branches, taking off the bark,
and then light his pipe.
After a few unexpected minutes of silence in the midst of the
spring forest, the man from Legnica carried on:
“Even though the wild cherry is bitter, the nightingale sings;
even though the sap spills, the tree does not drain off. And the
leaves, what are they spending their time on, but on sharpening
their edges between the aahs of the wind and the oohs of my
admiration?”

71
 The Eager Student

Isaac Hacohen ofSoria welcomed in his studio Tobias of Guadala-

jara with the purpose of receiving him, on his own request,
into the Garden of the Walnut, a vaguely-defined society, whose
scattered members devoted themselves to the study and practice
of the secret art of Kabbalah. After his first lessons, the young man
was so eager and happy that he vented the following question:
“Do you think, Rabbi Isaac, that one day I will be able to learn
the beautiful things you teach?”
“Perhaps,” replied laconically the man from Soria while he dug
around the emblematic walnut in his garden, a wide space where
they had both come together for the twilight hour.
“Everything seems to me so huge, so fabulous, so incredible,”
continued Tobias of Guadalajara, “that I doubt my own abilities.”
“You only have to repeat, like King David in his day: ‘Open
Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy
law. ”
“Is that enough? Will I be able? When, how and where to
search?”
“T suppose so many questions must overpower you,” said Isaac
Hacohen.
“They do, by heaven they do.”
Then Isaac Hacohen summoned from a nearby old tree a
blackbird he was used to feeding, and once the bird was near
enough, he asked young Tobias to silently put in the palm of
his right hand all those questions he had. Bewildered at such a
practice, the eager student was slow to react, but when he did,
the master fashioned a garland of qualms with his recent disciple’s

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 Mario Satz

queries, then offered them, together with some bread crumbs, to

the bird, saying:
“Dispel in laughter the anxiety of this young man, and go tell
the Creator that his eyelids are opening after his eyes.”
“Tam sorry, Master,” smiled Tobias of Guadalajara. “That is
impossible; the eyelids are always ahead of the pupils.”
“You have seen the first wonder,” observed Isaac Hacohen.
“Next time you shall be fed by the blackbird’s flight.”

‘The passage quoted by Rabbi Isaac Hacohen of Soria comes from

Psalm 119:18, and its original includes the word gal 53for uncovering,
opening, revealing, with the possible meaning of wave. Centuries have
confirmed the existence of electromagnetic waves through which light
shows us, instant after instant, the renewed miracles of the Creation
mentioned by the Torah, a teaching in a language as cryptic as poetic.
Once the eye learns to see, the vision can fearlessly wander off in the
object of contemplation.

ie
 Enlightenment and Return

Yoshiro Tamashi, a disciple of the renowned Japanese Hebraist

Setsuzo Kotsuji, a descendant of Shinto priests and a meditation
master of repute, came to the Alliance with the People of the Book
under the name of Noah, Noah Tamashi, after studying the Sefer
Yetsirah or Book of the Formation, for four years and two months, in
the scented isolation of a Kyoto garden, and after coming to the
conclusion that the universality oflight is no less than the mystical
experience ofthe lightning conveying it. Like an abacus of myriad
combinations, the Torah had enabled him to sail through both
time and the hyperspace of pain and ecstasy. This was a meagre
relief, however, when you consider he came from a family who
had perished under the radioactive ashes in Hiroshima. When
he read in the Yetsirah the passage where it is affirmed that “ten
numbers correspond to ten infinities: their perception is like unto
the lightning, and they decidedly point towards the infinite,” and
when he went again, astonished, over its letters, two, three times,
trembling like a leaf of rice-paper, the verses of Basho the poet
came to his mouth:

How admirable!
To see lightning and not to think
life is fleeting.

For the very same terrifying blaze begets countless suns and
consumes forever an innocent piece of land. The same brightness
precedes death and announces rebirth. Noah Tamashi looked at
his hands, counted his fingers, and in a single wink he saw there
those ten infinities of his enlightenment. It was then that he felt
such a great love, such a huge compassion for all living beings,

74
 Mario Satz

that he went to the frogs of a temple pond to croak to them his

sighs and moans, his monosyllables and sobs of gratitude, since
he had discovered that to be converted means to return to the
point of departure.
When the green amphibians became silent, he understood that
at that moment they had heard him.

The Sefer Yetsirah or Book of Formation does indeed say in its

second chapter that such 1s the character of supreme perception, thus
suggesting to Kabbalah students that lightning is a dance between
magnetic fields, the kiss between two worlds recognising each other,
a crack through which the sky shows its real face of unlimited
energy. Furthermore, given that numerically ha-baraqah 7)737
(312), enlightenment, equals a return, shib YW (312), whoever
attains enlightenment returns thereby to being wherever he is.

1
 The Tear Phial

Due to an inguinal hernia with which he had come to the world,

Lo-Yadua, the Unknown Rabbi, could not stand firmly on the
ground during his early childhood. When a child knows pain
before happiness, the unsteady before the steady, it takes longer
than usual for his salty tears to become sweet. Thoughtful and
loving, his mother had then the blessed idea to collect his tears in
a glass perfume phial she placed under his eyelids every time the
child, by now three years old, would cry, not for the hernia—as
it had ceased to be there after the surgery—but for the memory
of the still recent pain, letting out long-drawn, irrepressible sobs.
Her task was not easy, though, as the little hands would flutter
around trying to fend off what they thought might be some evil
medical device they could never be rid of.
After blending the tears with kohl and powdered coal, the
mother of the Unknown One said to him one day:
“Look how the most wonderful thing has happened: you have
wept out all the darkness in your heart, and there are now almost
no shadows left inside of you. Next time you cry, your tears will
be clearer than the little stream we visit with your father.”
By and by, and since she had stopped adding coal to the
mixture, adding a touch of homemade perfume and some water,
the mother could finally tell the child that something even more
extraordinary was taking place.
“Your soul is starting to smell like a field of chamomile.”
“What is chamomile, Mama?” Lo-Yadua asked.
“Come, I will show you.”

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 Mario Satz

They went out to the fields. They walked for a long while in
silence. The first spring flowers made even more bountiful the
green of the meadows.
“These are the chamomiles,” the mother of the Unknown One
said finally, “buttons of the sun on the robe of the earth.”

More than forty years after this scene took place, the Unknown One was
able to ascertain a surprising symmetry between the word tear, dim‘ah
nynat, and earth, adamah nx, both of which share three letters and
differ in one: the ‘ain y, indeed, refers to the eye from which tears
spring, and the alef & marks the divine trace left on earth. Our human
pupil thinks it suffers on account of a limit that the earth, amused and
untiring, keeps expanding at every new turn.

77
The Mandrake, the Saint and the Retarded Son

There lived, on the outskirts of Baghdad, a cobbler who had a

retarded son called Isaac Ihur, the usual target of spoofs and the
occasional prank, and who every summer would be found chasing
blue butterflies across the fields. Worried about what his son’s
destiny would be after his death, the father was keen to visit every
physician or healer who came to town, trying to find a cure for his
affliction. The mother being dead, with no siblings, it seemed to
the old man that the Creator’s protection would not be enough
to keep Isaac once he left the kingdom of the living.
A saint by the name Abu Niflaot went by the Jewish cobbler’s
shop loudly crying:
“Buy the miraculous plant, the mandrake that cures the love
spell, awakens dormant powers, heals the phthisic and restores
the cripple, strengthens the only eye of the one-eyed and raises to
its highest Aaron’s rod!”
The cobbler came out running over nails and soles from his
shack, spilling a glue jar and tripping over a cord. Followed
closely by his son Isaac, he paid an enormous sum for the
mandrake. That night, after duly grinding it, he boiled it and,
upon the saint’s advice, gave the concoction to his retarded son to
drink on a cloudless morning. Two weeks after, by the dry bed ofa
river, Isaac found a plum branch which had served as a shepherd’s
staff, and he took it home thinking this was the rod meant by Abu
Niflaot, which would rise to its highest.
The following week it was all covered in flowers. Afterwards
came the leaves, and not a full month had passed when the
branch-staff was already flaunting the green roundness of four
beautiful plums for everyone to see. This prodigy came to the ears

78
 Mario Satz

of the saint, who paid an inquisitive visit to the cobbler’s. But in

spite of the green and wondrous fruits, the retarded boy was just
like before; his father did not understand a thing of what was
happening, and Isaac kept being late everywhere, tripping over
his own steps, or falling asleep standing during religious services.
They decided to hang the amazing branch from the ceiling of
the shop so that everybody could see the miracle. The wandering
healer, not wasting a single minute in philosophies or trifles, went
to an orchard where he cut ten, fifteen branches, and lying about
their origin, he claimed to have soaked them in copious amounts
of mandrake water, and promised them to bejust about to display
their gifts. Naturally, after he had made his money he left. One
day after, the entire region was shaken by an earthquake, and the
whole town fell to the ground with the exception of the shoe shop,
propped by the miraculous staff and by the work of Isaac, who
had started singing, while he scraped some leather pieces:

Sooner or later it is the same,

the branch I found made haste,
the ground we tread is so alive
both in the dry as in the wet.
Sooner or later it 1s the same,
man is no tree,
the ground is no tomb,
the breeze speaks without hands.

With the years, the weather, rain and winds, the staff became
a lush tree which outlasted the four walls of the shop and the
cobbler himself. A tree under which Isaac the retarded, who had
learnt to sigh with glee, would teach the youth in search of a
beloved how to measure the intake and release of the breath of
love. And when they asked him why he did that, he would proudly
reply:
“My father used to cover feet; I instead uncover the softest path
for the longest steps.”

Everywhere slowness isfound, say the sages, either wilful or uninten-

tional, such delay in both small and great matters is a good adviser,

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 THE LIVING PALM TREE

for it allows us to ponder the depth of their destiny. Isaac’s nickname,

ihur Winx, delay, contains for us a light, or Wk, a kindred feeling, ah
nx, or the very breath of the Spirit, raah nv.

80
 Noah’s Fate

“Of all possible fates,” Rabbi Nehemiah ofAleppo used to say, “of
all the gifts from the Creator to the sons of His people, if Icould
choose, I would prefer the noble fate of Noah.”
He was a trader in incense and sandalwood oil, rose essence and
balsam. He had ten sons and one daughter, and on summer nights
he would sleep alone on his veranda, rambling about star names,
some of which he had learnt by heart from an Iraqi merchant,
without even knowing their position: Mirah, Al-Amagq, Al-Kanib,
Al-Firaz. He had built for himself a miniature ark he filled with
ladybirds, worms and shiny beetles, thus coming closer to his
favourite Biblical character.
“Abraham our Father,” he observed, “abandoned everything in
order to create everything. Moses traversed the fiery valley of the
Law, and he forged statutes with its sparks. Joshua conquered
Jericho, Ezekiel dreamt the temple’s proportions, Jeremiah saw
an almond branch and he heard the voice of the Maker, but
Noah—oh, Noah was a friend of animals and plants, he preserved
love and the relations between species. He read on the rainbow
the pact with the living, and he knew thejoys and dreams ofwine.”
“But you are unable,” his friends would tease him, “to tell a goat
from an antelope. In the case of a new flood, you wouldn’t have
saved a single hen.”
Rabbi Nehemiah of Aleppo had to wait months before he saw
what he had asked from heaven: a rain so strong it half flooded
the lower ground ofhis house. ‘Then he climbed up to the veranda
with the best of his hens, laughing out heartily while his people
drained the kitchen and the bedrooms, while they cleared the

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 THE LIVING PALM TREE

mud and they swore and complained at the unruly weather. Later
on, when the sun showed again, he shouted at them from upstairs:
“IT have not only saved my hen, but it has even laid an egg
between my hands. Not even Noah was so lucky!
1”

82
 Beneath Every Human Being

Rabbi Ezekiel of Bucharest used to quote the following passage

from Exodus, 25:8: “And let them make me a sanctuary; that I
may dwell among them,” in order to illustrate, in his lessons, the
pre-eminence of the human above the inert, of the living above
all architecture, of the subject above the object.
“After all,” he would insist, “how shall we understand that
tokham 021n, ‘beneath them’, if not as referring to that which we
tread upon any minute of our lives, the place where our shadow
ends and our light begins, or perhaps, under our skin, like that
which throbs between veins and arteries bearing witness to His
Divine Presence amongst us?”
“It could be,” intervened a student named Samuel Gordon,
from Jassy in Moldavia, “it could be that ‘beneath’ did not simply
mean within or inside, but also between, in which case the Creator
would be dwelling between us if we all make a common place for
His silence, a little space for His utmost greatness.”
“Should the master allow me,” cut in Amos of Ploiesti, the
marriage contract scribe, “there was no temple at the time of
Exodus; the Tabernacle would change abode with the children of
Israel, and the dynamic was then more important than the static.
This is why the Torah emphasises personal factors above temple
configuration.”
“On the other hand, the mention of them,” continued Samuel
Gordon, “suggests that every rite is collective, and that its efficacy

"An alternative and more literal translation for the final part of this passage
would be “dwell beneath them”, since the phrasal preposition be-tokham D21In2
is centred on tokh Jin, meaning both under and among.

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 THE LIVING PALM TREE

is void if the celebration does not penetrate each and every

participant.”
It was a September day, and Rabbi Ezekiel of Bucharest was
travelling with his friends and disciples towards Constanza in
order to supervise the arrival of a shipment of citrons for the
Feast of Booths. This shipment, coming from Jaffa, had travelled
thousands of miles, always through Jewish hands, in order to
furnish the small scattered communities with the four sacred
species indispensable for the feast: willow, myrtle, palm and
citron.
Rabbi Ezekiel stopped suddenly, bent to the ground, and
taking a patch of dry moss from between the feet of Amos of
Ploiesti, he said:
“Give me the water jug.”
It did not take long for the dry plant to revive upon exposure
to some liquid, nor to pass from a withered brownish colour to
lemon green within a few minutes of curiosity and expectation.
“Can you see? Beneath all of us,” observed Rabbi Ezekiel,
“there is always some dry moss, some charred bunch of herbs, a
withered branch; but it is enough for a drop, a tear or a shiver
of emotion to move us, precise and fresh, touching us in the
right spot, for us to feel as if we are building the sanctuary, the
sanctuary of the way, the tabernacle of our travels around the
world.”

The fact that a little alliteration can make moss, tahab anv, into
betah nva, meaning trust and certainty, shows to what extent a true
master 1s a decoder of circumstance, someone who establishes harmony
between the outside and the inside for everyone to see and for everyone’s
benefit.

84
 The Desert and the Verb

“Until you are completely by yourselves with the beating of

your heart,’ Rabbi Yosef Kolonimos of Hamburg used to say,
“by yourselves with your sighs, in the middle of your despair’s
wasteland, or at the crossroads of your grief and pain; sunk down
in the cruellest hopelessness, in the dullest indifference; stifled
by the most intense of lamentations; harassed by all your failures,
and surrounded by the corpses of your unfulfilled wishes; until
what is lowest on earth does not equal the abyss of your lowliness,
and until the end presses upon you like just a beginning; forever
far removed from any control, yearning and every opportunity for
mastery; until then no living word, mark my words, shall nourish
and be a remedy to you.”
The desert, real or imaginary, 1s the best of grammarians and
the most unfailing of poets.
If it came to happen that one of his pupils, enraptured by his
master’s fiery eloquence, would let out a tear, thereby indicating
that he was that sad character, Yosef Kolonimos, upon noticing,
would calmly come to him, and placing an almost transparent
hand on his shoulder, would continue:
“And then, when the newly found verb has become yours, as
yours as your skin’s hue, your own and as untransferable as a
rush of oxygen entering your lungs; once you and that word are
made of the same extraordinary substance, a mixture of pollen
and fire, of pure water and thunder, lily and iron, then you shall
have to return to the place where those yet unborn abide, those
who know nothing about themselves, and even less about the
spiritual dimension of stars, in order to gift them with your verb,
as someone who upon the thresholds leaves food for the birds,

85
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

stooping at their closed doors and leaving before they are fully
opened.”
Thus spoke Rabbi Yosef Kolonimos of Hamburg, candlemaker
and occasional baker.

During the Biblical period, prophets and their sons, called bnei
neviim, would go down to the Dead Sea for their solitary medita-
tion practices. Considering that desert is in Hebrew midbar 11271, and
verb, or word, is dabar 137, the fact that the letter mem nN, distinguish-
ing these terms, indicates provenance or origin, explains somehow
those excursions into the dry loneliness of the Judaean desert searching
Jor psychic transmutations. Besides, given that the numeric value of
dabar (206) matches that of the verb ra’ah (206), to see, to watch, to
glimpse, it is no wonder that such spiritual exercises would transform
the prophets into genuine seers.

86
 The Cartographer and the Orange Blossom

Yehuda Cresques of Majorca, the cartographer, went for a walk

by the seaside in order to lighten his mind and relieve his hands.
‘The weather was hot, the sea was warm, and its endless music was
more pleasing to his ears than the contempt of the envious and
the chit-chat of fools. There was an orange grove near his house.
It belonged to Deborah Azadel, a pretty brunette girl he often
used to hear singing:

Swift bird
answer me:
Where have you been today?
All night
my restless eyelids spent
without a taste of sleep.

Were these Halevi verses, Ibn Gabirol’s, or perhaps Umm

Hanna’s, the daughter of Granada’s gadi, Abu Muhammad Abd
al-Haqq ibn ‘Atiya, whose fame and deeds had reached the island?
“Master,” she said, offering upon his approach an orange flower,
“do not strain your eyes on the lines of so many maps. The earth
is abloom; the heavens smile. The sea has forged, for the sun’s
wedding, rings of light in the breaking foam.”
Yehuda Cresques smiled as he received the gift, and for a long
while kept walking imbued in the citrous scent of the garden.
This flower, the orange blossom, symbolising love and devoted
couples, foreteiling with its leaves vague promises or thwarted
destinies, used to intrigue him time after time. No wonder man
can come to think, he said to himself, that when he embraces his
beloved he is touching the land of his dreams. But for that to be

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 THE LIVING PALM TREE

real, he will yet have to try his courage against earthquakes and
droughts, his patience with litigations of space and limits, and his
serenity in the face of the conceding of rights or turns of humour.
Being a cartographer he knew well that one should not mistake
maps for terrain, projects with their execution.
“After all,” he muttered, letting his feet sink in the sea, “what
is a symbol if it does not flow, or a maritime chart if we dare not
travel? And what is love if we ignore the sway of its waves?”

One of the Hebrew words for symbol is remez 1, and Mediaeval

cartographers like our Jewish-Majorcan Yehuda Cresques made ample
use of them as they filled their maps with griffins, leviathans, the jaws
of monsters, enormous whirlpools, wind roses and more. This showed
that travelling across land or sea not only depended on one’s skills
or on the weather’s changing fortunes, but also on companions on
the route. The vitality of asymbol, following Cresques’ thought, will
depend on remez 1109 preserving at every moment its quality of zerem
011, flowing, natural current, so that we may reach the shore of our
designs. Otherwise their very form veils the meaning they are intended
to convey.

88
 The Dot and the Line

The young student Mordechai of Prague came to pay a visit to

the well-known rabbi and geometer Hillel of Vienna, to whom
he had addressed a letter querying him on a mention of the fe/i,
or dragon, found in the Book of Formation or Sefer Yetsirah. Of the
three principles mentioned in the 13th century Book of Brightness
or Bahir, namely the celestial dragon, the Zodiac circle and the
human heart—three levels interrelated in such a way that there is
a dragon in the heart, a heart in the Zodiac and a Zodiac circle in
the mythical beast—this image of the dragon was in his judgment
the hardest to understand.
“I can clearly see, master,” said Mordechai to Hillel the geo-
meter, “that the Zodiac or wheel of life causes our months and
seasons, and that it projects its symbols over our heavenly rhythm;
and I can also see clearly that the ¢simtsum, creation, the expan-
sion and contraction of the cosmos, is echoed in every single one
of our human heartbeats; but when it comes to the dragon...”
“According to some Kabbalah masters,” answered Rabbi Hillel
as he turned an 18th century armillary sphere reproducing the
movements of the sky, “eli or the dragon would be the imaginary
axis around which the skies revolve. It is supposed to be a
fantastic line from which hangs the heavenly sphere, like an
orange from its tree or a fuchsia from a branch. However, I think
the dragon is that scaly, reptilian bridge extended between our
principles and our actions or, if you prefer, between the letters
yod and vav, the dot and the line, Father and Son. The head is
the fruit of our body’s tree: should it hang too low, any passer-by
could pluck it. If on the other hand it is buried deep amongst the
branches, the sun will never ripen it; and should it happen that

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 THE LIVING PALM TREE

its leaf stalk is weak, no sap coming from the heart would give it
the glow it deserves and awaits.”
“What if the head grows too high?”
“Blackbirds will peck it and gales will bite at it. It will
inadvertently take its position for maturity and its pride for
wisdom.”
They were slowly sipping their afternoon tea, and beyond the
window-panes of the geometer’s studio you could see spring
sneaking away between lush chestnuts and broad oaks.
“We have an astronomical confirmation for the Zodiac, and
an anatomical confirmation for the heart,” said the master, “but
about their relations, synchronies, conflicts, that is, about the
dragon, we know little or nothing. If you prolong the letter yod
downwards, the Father becomes Son, the principle action, the
brainstem and spinal cord. From the divine, or rather, from the
secret to the revealed, there is an expansion, but from the human
back to the divine there is a path of synthesis, contraction after
contraction, since the vav, in order to become yod again, must
perforce shrink, grow smaller.”
“But then,” continued young Mordechai of Prague, “is there a
number, some concept that protects us along that journey from
heart to head, from the sensible to the intelligible?”
“If you chance upon the door,” replied the master, “and
sometimes that door is a simple word, a syllable, a knock, a
sunrise, an embrace, a fall, a spark, a taste, a flash, a death, a
dream; if you chance upon that door, the dragon will lift its wings
for you to see the treasure they were covering.”
“And what is that treasure?”
“The one about which it is said in Exodus 19:5: ‘you shall be a
special treasure to Me.”
“T don't follow you.”
The master stood up, set in motion the armillary sphere, and
taking a mirror confronted Mordechai of Prague with it.
“Look at yourself: He is your treasure if you are His key.”

gO
 Mario Satz

Within the oral tradition or Kabbalah, it is not uncommon

for the
,

Tetragrammaton to be written vertically: 4 presumably to highlight

n
the likeness between the Creator and Adam Kadmon or Archetypal
Man. In that case, the letter yod? would stand for our head, while vav
1 would symbolise both the spine and the heart axis. Besides, from the
numerical point of view, the difference between these letters amounts
to four (*=10, 1=6), whose alphabetic character is dalet and whose
symbol ts the door, hence the master’s mention of it. At the same time,
the Biblical passage hinges on an emblematic term, li », to me, a
word where we can see outlined, behind the directional factor of the
lamed 5, the yod ?of the Creator, the basic dot from which all lines
are made. Now ifwe add to this i to me, one more letter, namely the
tau n, representing the world, the earth, the visible universe, it turns
out that we will have tamed the dragon, teli *5n, at the same time we
acknowledge that the universe is his, since he 1s in fact the universe
itself.

91
 Light from the Air

Every morning as he got up, Schmuel the Bark Gatherer, admirer

of Baal Shem Tob, whom he had seen healing children and elder
people, would come out of his hut, were it winter or summer,
under snow, or rain, or shiny sun, and he would say aloud:
“Light from the air, light from the air: let every point of the
world hold for me the entire world.”
After that, carrying his little polished axe, he would plunge
into the Carpathian forest around his village, with a huge sack
upon his shoulders and the round flask in which he collected
birch sap. Schmuel would pull the barks apart, then sort them
according to their humidity and colours, while he hummed tunes
whose origins were unknown to him. This melodious habit had
earned him the friendship of birds and bees. The few letters he
had learned were barely enough for him to spell his full name on
ruled paper.
In spite of eating like a lion, he was slimmer than an Egyptian
bas-relief, and so stealthy in his comings and goings that you
would hear the thump of the bark sack on the ground before
noticing his own footsteps approaching. In those days, poor
people would boil and eat the tender barks, and shoemakers
would use them to make flimsy summer sandals. Also in those
days, whoever could would leave for America, looking for wider
skies and more extended lands, far from the Cossacks’ reach and
from disdainful noblemen. But since Schmuel had many children
to cater for, few lights and practically no ambition, he would
just ask of each of his daily movements to take him to a humble
plenitude. This is why he repeated:

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 Mario Satz

“Light from the air, light from the air: let every point of the
world hold for me the entire world.”
Once, upon hearing him, Rabbi Mendel came back home with
tears in his eyes, for he had just verified through the mouth of
a simpleton that for which most sagacious minds never cease
striving: for what 1s in front of their eyes to become a revealed
vision.

In Genesis 3:8 we can read: “And they heard the voice of the Creator
walking in the garden at the air of the day.” Rabbi Mendel could not
help recalling this passage once he had heard the words of the Bark
Gatherer, evoking the fact that for the Kabbalah it is the air, avir Ws,
which acts as a vehicle for light, or Ws, stirring it into motion with the
diamantine power of the tiniest ofsacred letters, yod ?.
 Perfect Ear and Imperfect I
Nathan of Kuopio, whose family was originally from Leningrad,
used to be an entomologist before he took to studying the
secrets and beauties of the Torah. He came to have such a
knowledge of his country’s lakes, that locals would ask him about
weather movements upon his return from field trips, knowing
that Nathan would have seen before anyone else had, reflected in
the mirrors of the water, the first glimpses of brewing storms and
the delicate early signs of oncoming spring. The habit of ground
level attention and the lonely practice of silence had sharpened
his ear so much that Nathan could make out a middle scale C
sharp in the passing flight of a buzzing bee. Water insects over
and around the lakes during the summer produced, according to
him, a rather dull F sound. He went as far as ascertaining that the
higher pitched the note emitted by recently fed mosquitoes, the
hotter the day would be. Thirty metres away from their nest, he
could tell the oriole chicks were complaining for lack of food; he
knew the differences between the bumblebee’s thorough bass and
the lower notes of a double bass. Whenever a kingfisher plunged,
Nathan of Kuopio knew, without any need to look, whether it
had been successful or not. His hearing was so remarkable that,
like with oriental monks, his earlobes grew very long, to the point
that his disciples, once he had become a rabbi, used to call him
Oznei Sheket, Ears of Silence.
In spite of such a marvellous auditory faculty, it happened that
whenever he was absorbed in his studio, or lost in his vague
meditations, Nathan of Kuopio would very seldom hear when
he was being called. Were it his wife, or one of his children, or
were it that a disciple or another master needed his attention, he

94
 Mario Satz

would always take long to respond. And when he did, he seemed

so absentminded that more often than not he would need to have
questions repeated.
“His capacity of abstraction became greater than his capacity
of attention,” said his closest disciple upon Nathan’s death.
“T don’t think so,” replied Rabbi Adam of Vaasa. “In him we
could simply see verified the saying attributed to Rabbi Meir
Hamishpat of Girona: “Whoever hears the delights and wonders
of the world is deaf to his own name.’”

During the Talmudic period, the existence of the sagi nahor 11773730,
the “blind through excess of light’, became proverbial; in a similar
way, the greatest of those who attend to the wisdom of the Torah are
often referred to as oznei sheget Opw "mK, “hearers or listeners of
silence”. Because of the gematric equivalence between silence, sheqet
vpw (soo), and root, shoresh W1W (800), they say that only he who
is silent on the surface will understand in depth.

7
 The Carob Tree Water Carrier

Up in Northern Greece there lived a man known from childhood

to Rabbi Hanan Mariasis because he had been a patient of his
father, the physician Rabbi Moshe Mariasis of Abdera. As a young
man, this patient had worked as a shoeshine boy for the Turkish
army, where he had had no end of miseries at the hands of the
Ottoman officers. He used to come to his health checks carrying
an old dark leather goatskin he would never part with, not even
when he disrobed for examinations. Out of discretion, out of
consideration to his age and his venerable white moustache, the
doctor would let him be, thinking it was a mere childish habit he
had not given up entirely. But one day the son, less tactful than
his father, queried him:
“What do you have, good man, in that old goatskin you never
once leave aside?”
Surprised by the question, the man, whose name was Yohanes,
Yohanes Afitis, replied:
“You see, I grew up herding goats ina place full of carob trees. |
ate from their sweet pods, I took shelter under their branches for
fifteen years before I had to go reluctantly to serve the Turks. Now,
in the courtyard of the barracks where they forced me to work
there happened to be a huge and lonely carob tree. The soldiers
were in the habit of plucking its branches to feed their night fires,
and one after the other, stick by stick, they used its wood until in
a few years they left it utterly wasted, like a dark, rugged and sad
skeleton. One day, as I walked past, the carob tree told me: ‘I am
thirsty, give me water; I am thirsty, give me life.”
Rabbi Hanan Mariasis, bewildered, stared at the water carrier,
noticing the strength with which his tough hands held the

96
 Mario Satz

goatskin, and he turned to look at his father, who stood with a

very serious air at the entrance of the surgery.
“You see, my boy,” said Yohanes to Rabbi Hanan, who was no
more than a child then. “Water was so severely rationed that we
servants were made to die with thirst. So I took the few seeds left
on the poor abused old tree, and I swore to myself Iwould keep
them always wet. They are in here: listen.”
He shook the goatskin, and a rattle was heard, a whisper oflittle
bells, dull and faint; the voice of the old seeds.
The water carrier let out a smile, and with a gesture of assured
momentousness he added:
“At last, when they let me go, I returned to my land, went back
with the carobs. Since then I water them every day, even when it
rains. I still wonder if the one who spoke to me did so because
it could not bear any more, because the pain it endured was so
intense as to force out a cry of help. Let me tell you something,
little one, and do not forget it: two equal sufferings are needed in
order to grant a reunion in infinity. One is not enough.”

The word carat, used to value the quality ofgold and diamonds, derives
from the constant weight of the little karat, or Arabian carob seed,
employed as a unit of measure in jewellery from a remote time. Its
Hebrew equivalent is the term harub 310n, which shghtly alliterated
can be read as be-ruah na, in the Spirit, or through the Spirit.
Everything that happens, whether we know it or not, has more than
one reading, and behind every abstract fact there is usually, and
originally, a sensible reality.

97
 When Facing Doubt, Trust the
Work of the Universe

Many people came to visit Abu Salish of Marrakesh, in whose

shop were sold the finest Persian rugs, Chinese silk tapestries, and
bird and fruit-pattern embroidered wedding belts from Pakistan.
Even though an insidious diabetes had made him all but blind,
Abu Salish, who had in his childhood learnt by heart entire
passages of the Zohar, used to rhythmically spell out loud Biblical
verses, turning them over a hundred times, and commenting on
them from all angles—upside down, downside up, from back to
front, and from the inside out. Each time someone asked why
he would make the same interpretation again, or why he would
return to the same sentences, he would answer with an ironic
smile:
“What matters is the point of view, the angle of observation.
The earth avails itself of seasons to make its colours known, but
beneath its bones, the rock stays equal to itself. What changes
is called freedom; what remains is called constancy. If we are
constant in spite of change, and if moreover we change with
constancy, there is nothing we are not equal to.”
His youngest grandson poured tea in tiny goblets which made
music when the little spoons stirred the sugar, and afterwards, if
he was not too tired, with the remaining quarter or less of his
full vision, Abu Salish, the albino Jew, would read the destiny
of his guests in the minuscule tea strands left at the bottom of
the glasses. In his youth, as a tradesman, he had travelled much,
crossing deserts and seas; but when he discovered the silence
rising from a pile of a hundred or two hundred rugs together, he
understood that that was his place: a shop filled with woven wools

98
 Mario Satz

simulating Paradise, or cotton gardens so tiny and flexible as to

fit in the handkerchief that holds a sneeze.
“When facing doubt,” went one of his favourite sayings, “trust
the work of the universe. Let him be the one who achieves what
¥rou can not achieve.”
“Is perchance the universe a someone?” his grandson once
asked him.
“In any case, it is not simply a ‘what’,” replied Abu Salish.

The Hebrew preposition but, abal 92x, contains, when read with a
different vocalisation, ebel, a duel, an affliction, a loss. We have
thus the affirmation of a certain conditionality and a certain logic
in the cosmic activity, since the mechanism ofa given reasoning is
introduced. Nevertheless, ifwe turn the word further and read it as \e-
ab ax, for the father, or to God, then there is surrender, acceptance
of the unknown and unconditional.
 Divine Presence

On the island of Djerba, Tunisia, among the cushions and

wooden benches of the old synagogue, three disciples of Rabbi
David Chambi, wrapped in the scent of mint and seashore
murmurs, were discussing the meaning of the Shekhinah or
Divine Presence.
“T can’t remember any passage in the Torah where it is explicitly
mentioned,” said Moshe of Nefta.
“It is said to have hovered above the Tabernacle during the
entire Exodus,” remarked Abu Israel of Bizerta very seriously.
“As far as I understand, the Shekhinah is a sort of ‘shadow of
light’, following the facts in the same manner as our shadow is a
projection of our body,” added Rabbi Azulai of Gabés.
None of them, however, appeared to be sure about what he said,
since the ambiguity of the immanent is elusive as well as limited.
Ibn Ezra, Maimonides and the masters of Islam had spoken about
how, and from immemorial times, the infinite was reflected on the
finite, but it was somehow easier to define what is vast and sublime
than what belongs to the moment and daily life.
“They also say,” continued Moshe of Nefta, “that the Shekhinah
is the kehilah or the community of Israel itself whenever it invokes
and incarnates the Creator. It will adopt the measure of the one
experiencing it.”
“This makes me right,” said Rabbi Azulai of Gabés, “since in
the same way that each body has its own shadow, every person
has his or her share of divine radiance in their entrails.”
The mint fragrance became stronger as the leaves were soaked
in the hot tea. It would soon be dark over the sea, and the seagulls
would continue their weightless flight through the air currents.

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 Mario Satz

“Our master, Rabbi David Chambi,” said Abu Israel of Bizerta,

“used to belittle the importance of this kind of conversation. Do
you remember? He often said that thinking on the effects of the
Creator upon His Creation would paralyse the creature.”
“And he also said,” intervened Rabbi Azulai, “that it is in
language where He is best revealed to us, His students, in the
language that recounts His adventures in the memory of the
human race.”
“It is true,” smiled Moshe of Nefta while relaxing. “I had
forgotten: shekhinah hi ha-safah, the Divine Presence lives and
manifests itself in the Hebrew letters.”
The dusk found them reading and commenting on the passage
from the Song of Solomon 2:13, where it is said: “Arise, my love,
my beautiful one, and come away.”

Both Shekhinah Ara, or Divine Presence, and safah 7dw, tongue,

language, add up to 385, this being the reason why many Kabbalists
hold that divine immanence is, above all, a linguistic fact. In doing
so, they are not oblivious to the fact that every written sign, every ot
nix, being of feminine gender like Shekhinah, is in reality a womb of
meaning or mother-letter.

101
 The Onion and the Value of Symbols

“You hold,” remarked Rabbi Haim Vega Hacohen of Safed to

his master, a faithful follower of the teachings of the Ari, Rabbi
Menashe Albatel, “you hold that the entire Torah is a symbol
which cannot be explained literally, and that it thus changes with
every new reading, that it expands, branches out, spreads without
thereby losing sight of its departure point.”
Swaying under the spring breeze, vine leaves would off and
on scrape their greenery against the white-washed wall of the
synagogue courtyard. The sky looked like a lake surrounded
by light from all quarters, and the deep earth a basket full of
wonders.
“And so it is: words obey a bilateral symmetry, like your arms or
legs; but symbols obey a radial symmetry, much like stars, which
radiate from a centre in all directions.”
“But the Torah,” observed young Rabbi Amos Kaplan, “is
woven with words, but does not seem to abound in symbols.”
“You are wrong, Rabbi Menashe Albatel immediately replied.
“Mount Sinai is a symbol, the Tabernacle yet another, as are
also the twelve precious stones on the pectoral worn by the high
priest.”
“Tam sorry, but I do not understand well how it is that an object,
an event or a particular place,” insisted Haim Vega of Safed, the
only one who had been born in the holy city, “all things alluded
to by words, how it is that they acquire the status of a symbol.”
“Every word,” explained Menashe Albatel, “comes from a
preceding one and goes on to a third one, but symbols are like
onions: they grow in the dark, and as you peel them, they reveal
more and more layers, and this in such a way that force lines,

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 Mario Satz

subtle structural lines you see on each level, are reflected on each
new layer. This is why, if you understand properly the play of
allusions, you will obtain, as with the onion, a nourishment of
multiple uses. Words are, in general, two-dimensional; symbols
are polyphonic.”
A bottle of Carmel wine was produced and the master poured
a little in each glass.
“Let us drink to the onion,” said Menashe Albatel smiling, “that
from its tasty shade it may lead us to the enlightened contentment
of the heart.”

The Hebrew word for onion, batsal 5x3, can indeed be read also as
tsel 5x, shade, and leb 15, heart. Curiously enough, it is said that
the onion (Allium cepa), an edible bulb in the Liliaceae family, acts
as an excellent cardiac tonic.

103
 The Ear of Cereal

On the outskirts of Safed, where the slope of the Galilean

mountains would allow it, like in the times of the Second temple,
Kabbalists of the brotherhood of the Sacred Lion, Rabbi Luria,
used to bury their dead in caves dug with diligence and care, deep
enough to enable those who had been study companions in life
to exercise their otherworldly dialogues upon the transparency of
this or that verset. After introducing the corpses wrapped in their
prayer shawls inside fragrant pine wood coffins, their next of kin
and friends would throw wheat or barley seeds over the bare floor,
at times singing the nigun, or the favourite tune of the deceased,
or occasionally reciting the Shema Israel with swift, dry lips.
Rabbi Natan Algazel of Casablanca, who resided in Safed since
the 1492 expulsion, wiped his tears as he left the cave where the
remains of Rabbi Israel, dubbed the Ear of Cereal, had just been
lain, and remarked:
“Every day of his life he was sitting at the bottom of his heart,
attentive and happy before the Throne of the Most High, letting
the ends of the shabat reach into every nook and cranny of his
profane life.”
The nearby mountain was ablaze with chirping birds, more and
more unclouded with every twitter. It would soon be Easter. The
Sultan’s armies moved to and fro under their red turbans. Poverty
among Safed’s Jews was as common as a patch of grass on the
edge of a cliff.
“I would like to know,” remarked young Rabbi Amos Vital
somewhat sadly, “why he was called the Ear of Cereal.”
“Ah,” smiled Rabbi Natan Algazel tenderly, “just as other
people finger their amber rosaries or play with a clock as they

104
 Manto Satz

study, Rabbi Israel would hold a ripe ear of cereal which he used
to move as deftly as a draftsman his pen. He would as easily use
it to scratch his beard, as to rub his forehead saying: ‘Lord of the
Universe, boreh olamim, Creator of the Worlds, fill my head with
good thoughts and even better deeds. Grant my mind the endless
fertility of the earth and the marvellous display of the heavens,
and make unknown to me, I beg You, two of the saddest futilities
of the soul: boredom and indifference.’ ”

‘The ear of cereal, or shibolet n?aw, does indeed contain the heart, leb
35) of the thirty-two paths of wisdom, and the root sat NW, meaning
a base or foundation. It is, however, also possible to read it, after
a slight alliteration, as \e-Shabbat naw», for the Shabbat or to the
Shabbat, an expression which can in turn, through a mere change in
the vocalisation, be made into lashebet naw, to sit down.

105
 His Soul Blossomed

Every time one of his disciples died, or arrived suddenly at the

understanding of a difficult verse of Ecclesiastes—his favourite
book of the Bible—the legendary and already elderly Rabbi
Abraham Kalan of Singapore would say in Hebrew: parahah
neshmato 1nnw) AND, his soul blossomed.
Being asked why death and profound understanding were in his
eyes identical would usually take him over the darkest passages
of history, a discipline whose study had earned him a doctorate
at Oxford. He used to recall, for instance, that Greeks of the
Classical period gave initiation in their Eleusinian mysteries the
name of teleuwte, to cease, to die; and that among Kabbalists there
was no access to fam Dn, the perfect, without going through its
opposite, or met ni, death, what is dead. Other times he would
hold that Yama, the Hindu god of the deceased, gave rise to the
Sanskrit verb yam, to offer, to tame, or to transform, to convert,
whence the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of living every
instant as it arises anew, that is, unless you become capable of
dying at every instant that passes.
“I can accept that,” his friend Rabbi Yosef Sinlan of Malacca
sighed one day, “but I frankly do not understand why you should
use the verb ‘to blossom’ before the very gates of death and
understanding. Is the soul perchance born when it dies? And do
plants know what they are only after they have blossomed?”
“Let us take one verse,” said Rabbi Abraham Kalan of Singa-
pore, ‘let us say, for instance, Ecclesiastes 3:19: ‘they have all one
breath.’ The word ‘all’, /ekol, in this phrase has the same numer-
ical value as va-ed, for ever, eternally, and this gives us the idea
of the immortality of cosmic life, the life of species that transform

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 Mario Satz

into one another. When young Rabbi Saul of Baghdad came to

see me, and I told him there was a message for him in that ‘all’, as
there is one now for you, lekha, his eyelids broadened like jasmine
petals under the first summer sun.
A smile then kindled Rabbi Yosef’s face. He rose from his chair,
and taking a few steps through the exotic garden of his host, he
told himself that should he die at that moment, it would have
been worth living until then, if only to live the previous scene.
The master, in turn, plunged his flat nose into a large gardenia
and half-closed his eyes. It was the evening, and yet it felt like
day; it was a Tuesday, and yet it felt like Saturday.

The saying parahah neshmato 1nnwi 1nd alludes to expiring,

dying, while at the same time pointing to the word perah 8, a flower.
The quotation from Ecclesiastes 3:19, which contains the meaning-
laden expression lekol 539 (80), numerically equals the eternal, the
continuous, va-ed 3); but it also includes lekha 7%, for you, to you,
showing that every one of us belongs to that “all” to which we are
threaded even unawares.

107
 Blessing of the Moon

Whenever Nissim Ezekiel saw the crescent moon, he went to the

seashore, and while the sky was still rosy with the last twilight
glimmerings, he would say:
“Lovely Lady of Mother-of-Pearl, beautiful Mother of Jasmine,
lieht hidden in our nails: no matter how far we go, do not forget
us. Be for our memory like mint refreshing, kindle our passion;
and cease not going around the navels of the women of Israel.”
Not all the Jews in Konkan, Western India, saw the same won-
ders in the moon. Pearl and sponge fishers as they were, mother-
of-pearl carvers and sitar luthiers, they were more interested in the
success of their businesses than in what took place in the skies.
“May your dew be made of happy tears,” repeated Nissim
Ezekiel, who had studied some Hebrew in Bombay under Eph-
raim Baghdadi, “and may all our building help us unite and not
be separated.”
Like other romantics in the way of the Chinese poet Li Tai
Po, Blue Lotus Flower, who drowned after singing to the moon’s
reflection, Nissim rowed into the sea on a starless night never to
return. It may have been that he fell asleep and a sudden blast
of wind made his vessel turn. Or he may have drunk too much
wine on the eve of the Shabbat. Over the years, many conjectures
were brought up about his fate, and some claimed Nissim Ezekiel
had migrated to England, while others held he had been seen
at a temple of Kali down south in the Subcontinent. Yet others
thought he had married a Dravidian prostitute and was devotedly
sharing with her his meagre earnings. The community which saw
his birth grew larger; winds ofwealth raised families and enlarged
households. Gardens became greener and lusher. So much so that

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 Mario Satz

old friends stopped visiting each other, and women did not gather
to cook anymore.
One morning of Hanukah, the Feast of Lights, Ephraim
Baghdadi arrived at Konkan and asked about Nissim Ezekiel,
whom he had taught a little and from whom he had learned much.
It struck him as strange that he had vanished without leaving a
trace, although looking well upon it, such a fate had also befallen
Moses, whose burial place, near Mount Nebo, was still unknown.
There was also nothing further known about the chariot of the
Prophet Elias. Furthermore, was it not common in India, that
upon reaching the age of wrinkles people would leave everything
behind to sail upstream on the Ganges?
“IT remember what he used to say,” recalled a woman who had
met the visitor from Bombay, “as he faced the moon: ‘May our
building help us unite and not be separated.’ ”
Ephraim Baghdadi smiled: those were his own words, varnished
over by the years, but still recognisable.
“And so it is,” he sighed, squinting in order to better evoke his
friend. “Those who, on the wake of their death, leave objects and
property promote rivalry, dissension and fences, but those who
leave words are sowing passage and alliances—bread made with
syllables for the mouths of the future.”

It is often said that the moon, \ebanah miad, has the same root as the
word bniyah 313, building. Thus, what the sun projects is articulated
by the moon; what the greater star designs is materialised by the
gentle mistress of the night. But if it happens that the thickness of a
building obstructs the osmotic principle of dialogue, then walls and
fences separate mouths from the fluent purpose of their words. And
then, instead of wise men, a community 1s left solely with owners.

109
 Yoshka the Hunchback, Thief of Twitters

There lived in the forests of Moldavia a hunchback butcher

everybody called Yoshka the thief of twitters, because his major
amusement was going in the spring to the most obscure areas
of the woods, setting a decoy trap, thus catching some Jay or
bunting, which he would tease into singing to somehow unravel
their simple melodies, and finally let them go back into the good
air of God. Malicious tongues surmised that he rubbed the wild
birds against his hunch in order to have their music straighten
what his mother’s weep, upon seeing him so frail, had contributed
to bend. Good tongues, instead, held that Yoshka ought to know
the location of the Earthly Paradise, called in the Zohar, or Book of
Splendour, nothing less than The Bird’s Nest. Otherwise, they said,
it was impossible to explain his ability.
Having learnt about Yoshka, the thief of twitters, Rabbi Amos
ben Eliezer of Turda asked to meet him during one of his trips
across the region.
“He is much too humble a man, Master,” they told him.
“Not very cleanly,” they explained.
“Of very few words,” they clarified.
But as the master insisted, they went for Yoshka the hunchback,
whom they found, now past the joys of Easter, cleaning his cages
and gathering crusts and crumbs of bread.
“I want to see how you work, Yoshka, what you do in the
woods,” Rabbi Amos said to him respectfully, getting only a
dubious nod as a reply from the hunchback, who was in the habit
of going alone on his excursions. “I mean it: our Mishnah tells
us we must learn everything from everyone, and that there is no

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 Mario Satz

knowledge, however useless it may seem, which is not a form of

happiness,” he told him in order to win him over.
The following day they prayed after washing their hands, then
drank a strong tea and set off, the Rabbi and the hunchback
alone together. The master noticed with wonder that Yoshka
would tweet under the tall fir trees, by the rocking shadow of the
birches, and that upon his call countless birds of different colours
would come, which fluttered around his hunch as they eagerly
awaited his crumbs. The heart of the master beat faster when he
remembered a quotation from the Zohar that goes: “The voice of
the turtle-dove was the voice of God heard for the first time upon
earth after the creation of man...,” exactly when one of them
was alighting! Afterwards, barely recovered from the surprising
synchronicity, he remembered Solomon’s loquacious hoopoe, the
seer goldfinch of Sultan Alkabul, and the dwarf peacock of the
Celebes, of which they said it would utter your name if you
managed to hold its gaze long enough. But none of these winged
creatures inhabited these regions.
Yoshka then set his first trap, and he waited with half-closed
eyes. When a finch finally arrived and he captured it, he whistled
something, then pricked up his ears to listen to its fearful call and
smiled, looking at his companion to tell him:
“There are three kinds of twitters, and this bird sings the last
one.”
“What are they?” Rabbi Amos of Turda wanted to know.
“The first one says: the sky has limits, but I cross them. The
second one: the sky has no limits, and there where I sing is the
centre of the world. And finally, the third one goes: the sky is my
third wing, sustaining me beyond weariness and oblivion.”
“Where have you learnt all these things? I find it hard to believe
from the sole eloquence of the twitters,” avowed the rabbi.
“Do you perchance ignore,” answered the hunchback, “that for
whoever believes in them, birds form part of his own self, and that
the reverse of the self is an uninterrupted song owing them more
than one chirp?”

The verb to believe is in Hebrew he’amin PANNA, and even though it

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 THE LIVING PALM TREE

is unlikely that a simpleton such as the hunchback would be coining

puns, the Talmud says that ever since the destruction of the Second
Temple, wisdom speaks through the mouth of children and fools. The
verb mentioned contains the words I, ani73x, and they, hem on, which
shows that the question asked by the rabbi was well answered by Yoshka
the butcher. Furthermore, when a question is answered with another
question, surely the answer is in the possession of whoever asked in the
Sirst place.

112
 Death and the Thistle

Rabbi Anatoli Lifshitz of Riga used to say:

“Well looked upon, death has two thirds of perfection. Other-
wise, how could our deceased, once past the panting irregularity
of agony, exhibit such calm, relaxed faces?”
The master and his disciples were walking through the Russian
steppes on a summer afternoon shortly after the rain. The grass
and the herbage had grown tall. Birds were busy enjoying
their feast of insects. That year the emperor had succeeded in
restraining his Cossacks, and the Jews could walk more peacefully
through the muddy streets of their bleak villages.
“On the last summer I went to meet our master, Rabbi
Alexander Ismae! Midot of Sarajevo,” continued Anatoli Lifshitz
of Riga as he plucked a violet thistle from the roadside without
fear of its thorns. “Our beloved master, an expert in brews and
proverbs, cut then, just as I did now, a thistle, and explained to
me the following: “The Torah likens Israel to the rose among the
thorns, but it seems to me that for a very long time our life has
been more like the thistle, rugged and prickly at the stalk, and
only tender and perfumed when it looks upwards, opening its
composite flower. Day after day we are little more than beasts of
burden, and we take our own braying for wisdom, when most of
the time we are but letting out hoarse and disconnected sounds.
However, it is not uncommon that at the moment of dying, like
the thistle, with the Shema in our mouths, our minds open almost
entirely to the violet of the Spirit, exhibiting the ineffable smile
of the angels.’”
The disciples knew that the presumptive Alexander Ismael
Midot of Sarajevo was a fiction of Rabbi Anatoli, as were

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 THE LIVING PALM TREE

Rabbi Isaiah of Tarko-Sale and Rabbi Uri of Orsk, hypostases

or mouthpieces for the master himself to say through others’
tongues what came in abundance from his own. But even so
they believed him, for with the course of centuries, someone
somewhere might indeed have that name, and he could then come
to easily and ingenuously quote the very words Rabbi Anatoli
used now to speak to them. Sons of Adam after all, we are
descendants from the same father. On what grounds should we
privilege one generation over another, a real mouth before an
imaginary one?

The Hebrew words death, mavet nin, and thistle, qgimosh wip, have
the same numerical value of 446. As for death having some measure
of perfection, this is ascertained by the fact that two of its key letters,
when read together, form the word tam DN, perfect, innocent, whole.

114
 The Times of the Cherry Tree

From all the phrases, sentences, teachings and parables in the

Bible, Rabbi Ezekiel of Radom, son to the famous scribe Itzi of
Radom, preferred the one from Ecclesiastes 3:11 which says: “He
hath made every thing beautiful in its time: also He hath set
eternity in their hearts.” And every time he had a chance, he would
explain again the reason for this choice, as if he still found hard
to acknowledge the illumination produced by his understanding
of it, and as if he wished, by evoking it, to make it more and more
profound.
“It took place under a cherry tree,” he used to explain, “near
the beginning of June. The tree was so full with fruits, and they
were so shiny that they resembled big drops of blood an instant
before their coagulation. I was witnessing the birds’ quarrels, the
tickling of the leaves, the creeping of the first butterfly grubs,
when suddenly, lo and behold, I caught the delay of a flower
which in a nook of shade had missed the sun’s signal for it to
close down. Thus, I told myself, this cherry tree gathers in itself
every time: the one of youth and the one of ripening, the dead
phases of its bark, the hard days of its wounds, the sweet hours
of its fruits, and the bitter ones of its branches broken through
excessive weight. I was rapt in that perfect contemplation when I
felt in my chest, amplified by the grace of the instant, the soft beat
of the human cherry, my own heart—the rhythm of its alternating
flow under my skin.”
Upon reaching this point in his narrative, no matter where
he was, Rabbi Ezekiel of Radom would take his right hand to
his thorax; he would sigh, half-closing his eyes, and then he
would quote in Hebrew: ha-olam natan be-libam 0372 {ni DoyA,

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 THE LIVING PALM TREE

“He hath set eternity in their hearts,” thus conclusively giving

as understood, for whoever would be listening, one of the most
enigmatic verses of the Scriptures.
Afterwards, more relaxed, he would add:
“When, grateful for that vision, I embraced the cherry tree,
I realised in an instant that by referring myself to my own
intimacy I was satisfying my spiritual longing; I was pushing
myself towards the dark estuary of my blood, where eternity is
a cordial fact which heartbeats keep in synchronicity with time.
Out there, on the cherry tree, all its ages were present in their full
embodiment. Inside here,” Rabbi Ezekiel of Radom said, rubbing
his breastbone, “inside here all our blood cells keep at play with
the universe.

The phrase “in their hearts’, be-libam 0172 (74), is numerically

equivalent to lomed or lamad 779, to learn, to study, to be taught.
It is for this reason that they say, within the circles of students of
Kabbalah, that knowledge is centrifugal and wisdom centripetal. This
on condition that we go away, if we ever really do so, only to better
return to ourselves.

116
 The Best Way

Every time his work as a professional circumciser made him

take the road, Rabbi Obadiah Raphael of Marrakesh would read
Psalm 27:11: “Teach me your way, O God,” not because he felt
unsure about the righteousness of his steps, or his knowledge of
the towns and villages he went through, where he occasionally
had to spend the night, or because haste would force him to
take faster ways through shorter paths. No, he read it because
he needed to have the certainty that he walked at every moment
under the light of the Most High, in pain as in grace, in temporary
abandonment as in intimate satisfaction.
“The way to men is made up of steps,” he used to say, “but the
way from and towards the Creator is made up ofdeeds. Our steps
must have the firm consolation of a supporting foothold; they
owe the heels their leverage and the toes their continuity, but
our deeds are not measured the instant we perform them, nor are
they judged the instant they become manifest, and they are only
grounded on a fickle soul which changes emotions as the clouds
change their form and course.”
“It seems,” his study companion Rabbi Gershom Azuly com-
mented one day, “from what the psalm lets us guess, as if the
Creator had only one way, one single path. Otherwise, the sen-
tence should offer us a plural form, shouldn't it?”
“Mother-of-pearl is one, but its reflections are many,” replied
Rabbi Obadiah Raphael. “We know that the way to Him is the
good one when before our eyes, and due to our own deeds, the
blissful iris of other’s smile shines out. If the way is good, a very
good one, the foot feels winged. And if our relations to others
are just, then it is not necessary to explain ourselves, to question

17
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

why we act as we do. The economy of gestures fosters richness of

thought, and everything—everything around us—weighs a little
less.”
“May it be so,” smiled Rabbi Gershom Azuly.
“Take this,” replied his friend, offering him a luminous piece
of mother-of-pearl, “a sea compass to walk the earth, a shell to
admire here and now.”

The sentence from the psalm quoted reads in Hebrew: horeni adonai
darkekha 7307 MW IN, but we can also read “your way", darkekha
7217, as a combination of two other words, dar 11, mother-of-pearl,
and kakh 792, thus, in such a way. The Book of Brightness, or
Bahir, of the twelfth century, dwells at length upon this mysterious
stone or substance of organic origin called dar: “Ihe Holy One, Blessed
be He, took a thousandth part from the power of that light, and He
created with it a precious substance (dar) in which He included all
commandments.”

18
 On the Reverse of the Word Sleep

A man called Manasseh came to visit Rabbi Oded Malachi of

Tangiers for him to help solve a problem.
“They say that the words of our Torah are, amongst other
things,” he confided, “doors of syllables opening onto the world
of serenity. As I have trouble sleeping, I have thought that if
I managed to open the door of the word sleep, occurring in
Jeremiah 31:26, where it says: ‘Upon this I awaked, and beheld;
and my sleep was sweet unto me,’ then perhaps I could truly rest,
for I am sure that on the other side I shall find some formula
that promotes repose, or at least some sort of consolation. Do
you know how the doors of words are opened?”
Rabbi Oded stroke his beard. This man was asking a breath-
taking question: he had never heard it said that the words of
the teaching were doors leading to the world of serenity. They
would certainly grant beauty, encouragement, inspiration, and
they would sharpen your understanding, but as for serenity...
“Have you tried drinking a lime tree infusion?” he attempted
as an answer. “It is sometimes our nerves that will not let us sleep
well.”
Respectfully, the man returned home with the rabbi’s advice,
forgetting for a while about the doors of words, but Oded Malachi
opened his Tanakh looking for the verse in question, and he fell
asleep as he meditated on its letters and numbers.
Thus it was, he told his friends afterwards, that the doors of
Jeremiah’s passage opened for him, and he found himself walking
over a sea of clouds whose waves were future dreams, and whose
fading outlines resembled endless shores. Later, when he woke up,
he understood that serenity is a weightless gift, a soft atmospheric

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 THE LIVING PALM TREE

lapse without any support or grasp, and that this same feeling
was bestowed by the Torah. The following day he made his way
to the dwelling of the insomniac to whom he had recommended
an infusion, meaning to apologise.
“Forgive me,” he said to him, “I know how the words are
opened, and | did not tell you.”
“T understood you perfectly,” the man replied. “The hot water
opened the dry lime leaves, and I drank the entire cup and
procured a sleep so perfect that I did not need to bother the
prophet.”
“Well done,” sighed Oded Malachi. “The useful is not always
straightforward. On the other side of words there are other words
that refer us to this side.”
“Thank you,” the man managed to say, “thank you anyway for
this unexpected visit.”

What makes one man sleep will awaken another, what dulls one,
amazes another. The lime tree is called in Hebrew tirzah ann, and
it holds within a secret splendour, or zohar 171, for whoever is able to
see it.

120
 The Son of the Sea of Air

In his youth, when he worked as a chemistry lecturer in Berlin

around the time of the beginning of the century, Rabbi Yoshuah
Erlich, who was then not yet a rabbi, heard a Polish Jew saying
that the Baal Shem Tob, the Master of the Good Name, founder
of the Hasidic movement, used to go to meditate in the forest and
become rapt with the green transparency of the leaves, through
whose nerves he had realised that besides being a son of his family,
he was also a scion of the air surrounding the trees.
“I am a son of the sea of air,” the Baal Shem Tob used to
proclaim. “Its waves support me, and my lungs teach my blood
how to swim in the foam of the breeze.”
“We thought you had been born in the mountains, Master,” his
friends and disciples would tell him.
“As if there was no air in them,” smiled the Baal Shem. “It
happens that out of laziness we number our birthdays based on
what is visible, without ever considering the days, minutes and
seconds of our invisible and silent breathing; but it is there where
neither linear time nor genealogy count, because from the skin
inwards we owe everything, or almost everything, to our parents
and ancestors, but from the skin outwards, from the very tip of
our nose, we owe everything to the Living Creator, who is right
now hovering in the sea of air, breath after breath.
Twenty years after hearing this story, and in the manner of St
Paul falling from his horse, Yoshuah Erlich of Berlin fell from a
ladder in his laboratory, crashing against a window and luckily
breaking only the glass thereof. Now, the March breeze wafting
through and entering his nostrils was so laden with early spring
perfume as with spiritual aroma. And thus ever since, the chemist
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

changed his test tubes for Kabbalah texts; he transmuted sulphur,

alcohol and vanity to silence and meditation, and one day, when
he had already become Rabbi Yoshua Erlich of Berlin, he left
aside the research of ozone, whose blue colour he had helped
discover, and whose purity he was certain of, and he repeated to
himself that he was also, at last, a son of the sea of air—a traveller
of boundless space.

There where Psalm 2:7 reads ha-yom 0%, today, in the sentence “My
Son; this day have I begotten thee,” PNT7 07 8 AN 32, many
scholars read ha-yam 07, the sea. Now, as the letter hei 7 stands
for the breath, the soul, both Baal Shem, perhaps unknowingly, and
Rabbi Yoshuah Erlich of Berlin, knowing the value of oxygen in its
relation to the Spirit, declare themselves to be sons of that which goes
beyond and comes nearer than our biological ancestors.

129
 Panting or Inspiring

Rabbi Mikhail Volodin of Sarajevo, a surveyor, translator and

miniaturist, used to ramble around the city markets and antique
shops looking for brass objects such as inkwells, magnifying glass
stands or rasps, a search which made him acquainted with junk
dealers, gypsies and all sorts of pilferers. When he travelled to
Jerusalem in the company of his disciple Rabbi Amiram Obadieh
of Tirana, they were both seasick aboard their ship, which made
the master recall the following:
“Once, ina market in Edessa, where I got a beautiful eighteenth
century English spyglass—probably stolen from an embassy—a
gypsy heard me sighing, upon which he asked me: “What kind of
man are you? Are you of those who pant, or are you of those who
inspire and are inspired?’ Looking at him with bewilderment, I
replied with another question: ‘What do you mean?’ “Those who
pant, and go through their lives sighing as if they had just run a
hundred metres sprint,’ he told me, ‘are usually horses of others,
donkeys of many, and mules of themselves.’ “What about those
who inspire and are inspired?’ I queried. ‘Ah,’ said the gypsy, who
was one-eyed, and dusky like a blackbird, ‘there are very few of
those. They are the ones who, when facing any situation, either
pleasant or unpleasant, thrust their chest out, drawing breath and
getting ready in case there is something else to live, as nothing
seems too much to them. Their character is like a prow, and they
break through reality as boats break the waves, making the foam
crackle.”
Rabbi Amiram Obadieh of Tirana, who had barely recovered
from his latest bout of sickness, managed to comment:
“A hidden sage, it seems to me. Or in any case a good observer.”

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 THE LIVING PALM TREE

“He knew a little Yiddish, and I knew some Rumanian,”

Mikhail Volodin of Sarajevo continued, “so we went to share
a coffee in order to deepen our dialogue. Once he saw I was
interested in his ideas he carried on:
““He who sighs and pants, if you watch him closely, wants to
quickly finish whatever he is doing; he would throw in the towel at
any minute, which he feels is wet due to his prenatal fatigue. But
he who inspires and is inspired would like everything to come to
him in a double share, even calamities, in order to try himself and
prove to himself not only that the air is still good, but even more,
that there is plenty for everyone.’ ”
The ship on which master and disciple were travelling came into
port in the most complete stillness, since it was September, and
the sea was as smooth and shiny as it was calm. They strolled
through Haifa for a while as they stretched their legs; Rabbi
Mikhail Volodin of Sarajevo uttering a blessing to the Creator
for the fig he had just bought and was about to eat, and Amiram
Obadieh of Tirana trying—without his companion noticing—to
change his usual desolate sighs for inspirations.

124
 Eliezer Ben Yehudah Surrounded by Words

They say, but it is difficult to know with any certainty, that

whenever Eliezer Ben Yehudah, the re-creator of modern Hebrew,
who lived in Jerusalem surrounded by dictionaries of Coptic,
Greek, Aramaic, Latin, German, and all sorts of Biblical lexicons,
that whenever he was looking for a word in the Torah, intending
to graft it onto another in order to obtain a third one fitting
what he needed to name, that the angel of language, Safael,
who assisted him unawares, would turn like a fast whirlwind
on his rainbow wings, then ascend up to the divine Throne and
ask the Creator about the legal validity of the whole procedure.
How is it possible, some would question on seeing his efforts, to
transform a sacred language into a profane instrument without
falling prey to the fevers of prophecy or without falling into the
archaic dilemma of the judges or the praising intoxication of
the psalmist? This was an irresolvable mystery. His work, indeed,
implied enormous risks, and required a wise serenity. On the
one hand, there were those who supported the linguist, those
who encouraged him to keep finding adjectives, striking the right
tones, renewing functions, lightening nouns; and on the other
hand there were his detractors, old Talmudists shipwrecked in a
sea of prayers, with no help other than a highborn order which
was, by definition, safe; rabbis angered at modernity, poetry, and
at the sacred being available to children and women—at once wise
men of the trivial and keepers of the ashes of the wonderful.
Eliezer Ben Yehudah was a man of small build, with highly
polished spectacles and attentive eyes. Combining the passion
of a stamp collector with the rigour of a chemist, he would take
apart triliteral roots and play with prefixes and suffixes, passive

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 THE LIVING PALM TREE

and active voices, out of use verbs and new inventions, trying to
kindle in his child what he found to be dormant in the millenary
archives of his people. One afternoon Rabbi Eliahu Sorek of Vilna
paid him a visit. He was one of the few religious personalities who
respected him and tolerated this apparently profane endeavour
of the obsessed grammarian. He was younger than Eliezer, but
he looked older, for his beard reached down almost to his belly.
His green eyes had the meekness ofa river pool, but his knuckles,
those of a binder of holy books, were as strong and decisive as
vine shoots.
“Tell me, Eliezer,” he asked Ben Yehudah, “amongst all the
words found, reconstructed, polished and restored to circulation
in daily speech, amongst all the terms of our holy language, which
is the one that has afforded you the most happiness?”
The linguist did not reply immediately. He went to his library
and came back with a copy of an engraving attributed to
Schwann, the author of cell theory. It was an intricate maze of
concentric circles, dots, nuclei and alveoli.
“Listen to these words,” he said: “The elementary parts of tis-
sues are formed by cells according to similar modalities, although
diversified, so that you could say there exists a universal develop-
ment principle for the essential parts of organisms, and that this
principle is the formation of cells.”
Silence grew thick in the studio sheltering the two men, the
religious one and the layman.
“The Hebrew word you ask me about, my dear friend,” Ben
Yehudah then continued, “the word for whose preservation and
restoration I would give my life if needed, is our et N&, composed
by the first and the last letters of our alphabet, which is also, when
inversed, ta xn, the cell.”
Rabbi Eliahu Sorek ofVilna could still not understand, and he
intervened:
“Et for us means Or Torah 771N 7x, the Light of the Teaching,
but it is also Eben Tabon pian jax, the Stone of Discernment.”
“Unknowingly,” the linguist carried on, “and while he conduc-
ted his biological research, Schwann was rediscovering the mysti-
cism of the Kabbalah, which affirms that all words, adverbs, ger-

126
 Mario Satz

unds and prepositions, and indeed all language, is built upon that
basic unit, e¢ or fa, and as likely to become our gaol as our free-
dom.”
“Our gaol? Why our gaol?”
“It is so: a cell can as easily be a living cell as a prison cell.
Furthermore, the Romans saw in cella also a granary, the place
where you keep your food. This is why, if a word does not feed
you, if language is a prison cell for you instead of a living cell,
if it oppresses you and distresses you and locks you within its
repetitive solemnity, it will be something dead for you. But if
it is something living and throbbing, if it expands and blooms,
engulfing a new sky and a new earth, then it will enliven you,
exalt you, and it will transform you so that you can at last say, as
Schwann himself: “The cause of nutrition and growth lies not in
the totality of an organism, but in its elementary parts: the cells.’
Likewise, our survival is also in that word, that particle of light
by which we have been nourished for more than three thousand
years.”
“T understand now,’ said Rabbi Eliahu Sorek with a half-smile.
“The word for which I live and die, for which I am reborn and
I work, for which I smile and weep is et, the beginning and end
of our language, its feminine
you protecting us and holding us.”

That the same root, formed by the letters aleph and tau, is used to
indicate the verbal accusative as well as to name the cell, the living
cell, and that this very root is at the same time the feminine pronoun
at, you, all this 1s too much to be understood at once, since the semantic
here becomes ontological. On another front, based on Revelation 1:8,
where mention is made of the letters alpha and omega (AQ), early
Christianity would make of this Hebrew polysemy the principle upon
which is established the Mystical Body of the believers united
by the Holy Ghost. Only that, while hidden in Greek, the principle
in question becomes evident when we understand that the Hebrew
digraph ta xn is the basic unit of Biblical language as a whole, its
primordial cell.

127
 Black Fire, White Fire

About to fall under the cruel grasp of the Roman legions at

Qumran, Rabbi Barak Gilgul took his voung disciple Yehiel to
the ritual bath. This happened before dawn. The most nimble
of the Essenes were high up in the caves, putting away their
remaining sacred texts to keep them from falling into the hands
of the invaders. Further south the smoke of fire and destruction
was rising in sad and slender eddies.
“There is a passage in Daniel 1:35 which warns us,” observed
Rabbi Barak with a trembling voice, “Some of the wise shall fall,
to try them, and to purge and to make them white, to the ume of
the end: for it shall yet be for the time appointed. ”
Both of them, master and disciple, plunged in the cold water
which had a taste of bitter herbs. At that very moment, not far
from them, those who defended Masada were taking each other's
lives, but neither the old master nor the young scribe Knew or
would ever know about it.
“[ invest you,” began Rabbi Barak once he had dried himself,
“with the white tunic of our community, so that vou come to
be a true son of the heart, an altar of praise whose freedom ts
unbribable and from whose music we live.”
Roman legionaries had set fire to the fortress gates, and after
their long siege they were ready to ruthlessly storm in. Judea
would be finally vanquished in its most harsh desert quarters,
at the farthest dependencies of Herod’s summer palace. Shortly
afterwards they would go for the solitaries, those magicians and
doctors of the soul who lived on the shores of Sea of Salt.
“IT receive it with honour,” replied Yehiel, “and I shall pass
 Mario Satz

with happiness from difference to likeness, from solitude to

communion, from the mirror to the light.”
“Our sages,” sighed the old master wearily, “held that the Torah
was conferred on Mount Sinai with two kinds of fire, black and
white. Due to the darkness of its letters, to the irregularity of its
profile, the world is created in a series of opposites, from contrary
to contrary; but due to the peaceful whiteness which groups them
from above and below, the universe is re-created in light, from
circle into circle, from wave into wave. Thus it is, and thus it
will be. In the likeness of coal, with souls extinguished, Romans
pursue a fate of mere ashes and iron, while our task—like the glow
of a dying flame—has been to sow with solar hymns the ways of
the Eternal One. This is why no peace is possible between us. No
physician can cure omnipotence in an ailing one, nor, far from
home, does the soldier tread the ground compassionately. They
work for discord and taxes; we to further concord and grace. They
think they are oppressing a small people, and they do but prepare
to reveal its greatness to the world. Be prepared then, Yehiel,
to wear with this tunic the sign of those who return clarity for
clarity.”
The silence inside the fortress of Masada was complete. Beyond
the blood-stained rocks, the legionaries caught sight of the blue
woollen strands of a doll in the hands ofa girl who had died with
wide open eyes. In Qumran, however, within the ascetic halls of
the Essenes, there were no colours other than the black and the
white—and eyes to see them unfold their dance upon the land of
the ancestors.

The sect of the Essenes, who, between the 2nd century Bc and the 1st
century AD, were devoted to medicine, meditation, and to the copying
and preservation of traditional Hebrew sacred texts, used to initiate
their members by investing them with a white linen tunic. On its rim
were knotted the thirty-two paths ofwisdom of the Kabbalah, as in the
tallit, or praying mantle, still worn today by the Jews. Since the word
Sor white is in the language of the Bible laban 329, containing both the
son, ben ]2, and the heart, leb 25, every initiate had to assume that
his own body was all the family he had. They had to see in each
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

of their organs a sibling, in every sigh a dead self, and in every breath
a subtle rebirth from the breath of the Only One. The Essenes also held
that under this colour was hidden, transliterated yet whole, the lute,
or nebel 413, of the vertebrae, able to change noise into melody, and
oblivion into memory.

130
 Ecstasy under the Vault of Shade

According to the different times of the year, the Ancient of Days

used to take his disciple Lo-Yadua out on a walk through the
different quarters of Jerusalem. In winter, he preferred the distant
hillocks, the very limits of the city, where there were the stones
of a colour reminiscent of tea with milk, keeping a strong grasp
on some perfumed shrubs. In spring, they would travel to the
Judaean desert, to watch the flowering lilies and listen to the
Beduins’ melancholy music. But it was the hot summers that the
master really enjoyed, and he would encourage others to enjoy
his walks through Rehavia, among streets whose names evoke
Ibn Ezra or Alharizi, mediaeval Hebrew poets, kindred souls long
gone, yet still alive in the resounding measure of their verses.
“Observe this vault of vegetal coolness,” he said one morning to
Lo-Yadua. “May is a feast of branches and an explosion of roses
for hearts thirsting after beauty. Every time I walk down this way,
I am overcome by such a feeling of gratitude, that I touch every
tree, every bench, every myrtle and every stone with devotion, as
if they had just been newly created.”
“A minimal space for an enormous feeling,” commented Lo-
Yadua, the Unknown.
“T would rather say,” the old man commented, “that this is one
centre of the world.”
“You say one, as if there were many. Are there really so many?”
“A dozen, perhaps two, or even less.”
“And how would you define them? How would you explain
what a centre of the world is?”
“In the likeness of what our sages have always done, with a pun,
which is at the same time a subtle swaying of the spirit within the
orb of their feelings.”
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 THE LIVING PALM TREE

“T am all ears, Master,” smiled Lo-Yadua.

“If, instead of reading merkaz 1370, centre, you read raz mimkha
JN 1, your secret, written with the same letters, then after their
positions have been altered, you will discover that arriving at
the centre of the world means discovering your own mystery, the
throbbing ecstasy beneath your awestruck veins. We spend our
life travelling, coming and going, disheartened and restless, to
and fro, and only rarely do we have the feeling that we have
arrived somewhere. But when our being and our location do
coincide, then Being Itself wraps with Its whirl of light the
helicoid of Its shadows, and it seems to us we are being held
without hands in the miracle of perplexity—until what must
take place does so: the last of your sighs appears, between your
sternum and your navel, to be the first one of them all, for
breathing is a treasure open through your nostrils. Doubtlessly,
under this shady vault,” he added, pointing towards the tall
and lush pines, “the will abdicates for perception to be reborn;
intention falls, for spontaneity to rise.”
Then, after a few silent seconds, he remarked:
“Listen—a nightingale is singing, yesterday’s water still drip-
ping from its beak.”

Jerusalem, like Mecca or Cuzco, is one of those centres of the world

where our species has treasured awakenings and enlightenments,
psychic transmutations and endless joys. Now, the Ancient in our story
sustains that merkaz 127, centre, can be unfolded as raz mimkha
TAN 4, your secret, or your mystery, whence he who reaches his own
centre reveals to himself his own enigma. That is the place where he
belongs completely to himself, and where he can therefore surrender
himself completely.

132
 Sulphur and Musk

On board the aeroplane which took him from Addis Ababa to

Israel during Operation Moses, Rabbi Obed Ge’ezi, his eyes
blinded by cataracts, carried with him a piece of sulphur and a
piece of musk, as a memento of his days as a poor Felasha, when
he outweighed his meagre earnings as a goldsmith with the trade
in what was then known as fragrance stones, mother substances
for the production of remedies and essences. The musk came
from Karachi, but it had been earlier in the hands of a Muslim
tradesman from the Kandahar region. The sulphur piece, in turn,
had been bought at the Aden market.
“Why are you taking these hand-worn stones to Israel, Father?”
asked his son, Abiach Ge’ezi.
“In my youth I got lost in the desert, with scarcely any water and
under a head-splitting sun. I was on my way, or was supposed
to be going, from Sana‘ to Khaybar, but my mules died, my
load was stolen from me, and I could only hide in my clothes
this piece of sulphur and this remnant of musk, tokens of Hell
and Paradise, between which we always stand. I think it was
them—these stones—that saved my life.”
“You had never told me, Father,” said Abiach Ge’ezi, looking
with wonder at the sinuous Red Sea shoreline. It was the first time
in his thirty years that he had travelled by aeroplane.
““The universe is held together by its secrets,’ so say our sages,”
observed Rabbi Obed Ge’ezi. “And now that we return home after
so many centuries,” he added, “I can be frank with you: just as
Hell has to do with our bottom, even so, Paradise depends on our
mouth. It is for this reason that the smell down there is often of
death and sulphur, while up here, between our lips, scanty and yet

133
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

present, the good word springs up perfumed for our own benefit
and that of others.”
Amazed, Abiach Ge’ezi looked at his father as if he were looking
at another person—someone distraught by this flight over the
burning Arabian desert, the same Happy Arabia, Arabia Felix, did
he but know it, whence mythical myrrh and incense sprang from,
the very same ferra speciorum of ancient times.
“Hell is the place of what is undone, and Paradise the place
of what is done,” Rabbi Obed Ge’ezi went on, opening wide his
veiled eyes. “Like the musk deer from which this stone comes, we
tend towards Paradise when all our messages are love calls, and
we shall not move away from Hell unless our deeds become edible
fruits, living and fragrant works—healthy waters for the thirst of
many.”
“But then,” his son sighed with a certain dismay, “we will always
be in the middle, between Paradise and Hell, hanging from our
mouths above and depending on our bottoms from below.”
“You are wrong,” his father smiled. “We are always, as we are
now, in flight, in movement, oscillating, and this is what human
grace consists of—the right swing. If you go too low, the stench
of sulphur fills you with disdain, and once and again you are
expelled from the body of life; but if you go instead too high, the
musky smell of your pride loses you, the fragrance of your vanity
stuns you, and then you are estranged from those who need you.
You must swing like your own heart, and there will not be a place
you cannot reach, no compassion you cannot feel, no joy which is
barred to you. Only when the extremities are known is the wisdom
of the centre attained.”

In 1984, during what is known as Operation Moses, 15,000 Felashas,

Jews from a hunger- and poverty-stricken Ethiopia, travelled under-
cover to Israel in one of the most amazing airlifts of modern history,
especially since the travellers were not only moving through space, but
also from the Middle Ages to the 20th century in a matter of hours. To
oscillate or to swing 1s in Hebrew hitnoded 173nn, whose most obvi-
ous component is nod 13, to err, to wander; but since the remaining
letters of the word form, in turn, the expression ha-dat n7n, the reli-

Le
 Mano Satz

gion, it is likely that its true sense is in teaching us to harmoniously

swing between the Hell of expulsions and the Paradise of integrations.
 The Root of the Past and the Cup of the Future

“Look at that tree,” said Rabbi Ephraim of Baghdad to his disciple

Yochanan, pointing towards an orange tree growing in the yard
of their study house. “Its roots sink in the past, while the leaves
of its branches prepare their own future.”
The moment had a taste of fresh water, mint and lemon. They
were in the summer of big moons, in the season of golden peaches,
and the swifts shrieked joyfully above them, for the air was full
with tiny insects.
“Slow and dark, the past in us is also feeding on humus and
death,” Ephraim of Baghdad went on. “It lives on corpses and
fermentations, but also on fixities and constancies, whence he
who does not love his past is as one who despised his ancestors
and who ignored the secret of the earth.”
“What secret, Master?” Yochanan wanted to know.
Twilight was falling, and imperceptibly for the two men, the
branches of the orange tree leant down a little towards the
ground.
“It is the earth, mistress of the dust and keeper of the seed,
it is she who teaches us that repose is joy, and that support is
continuity. Its secret lies in its having a measure for everything,”
the old rabbi observed, “whereas heaven, like our future, has no
ground and no limits; it thrives on the perpetual flight of its
light and the turning of its stars. This is why we are not free
from the past, but we are free from the morrow. A tomorrow
which is formed by these green leaves you see, swaying in the
late afternoon hours. Whoever thinks his future is meaningless,
knows nothing about the green alternation guiding the branches,
and he ignores the secret of heaven.”

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 Mano Satz

“What secret, master?” Yochanan asked again.

“It is heaven, preparing the waters yet to come, out of those
which have been, it is He Who wants us brought near Him
through the mediation of the wind generated by the two waters.
Its secret is called infinite, but its revelation, in its entirety, will fit
in your mouth’s palate, and in your pupils’ glow.”
“I can see you like to raise enigmas, Rabbi Ephraim,” said the
disciple.
“What I like is to thread conjectures with sighs, and then to
weave wonderments. This tree, the orange tree, being a friend of
time, why would it not be ours too?”

In the Hebrew word adamah 78, earth, we find the root midah,
mn, measure, as also within heaven, shamaym Nw, we find maym
on, the plural waters. Because it is the tendency of the leaf to grow
upwards, the future is said to be ascensional, and given that the root
is ever so consiantly sticking fast to the ground, it is believed that
respecting the past hidden under its surface will give us both persistence
and stability.

137
 Light for the Nations

“We read in Isaiah 49:6,” said Rabbi Alexis Suares of Alexandria

to his disciples, as they journeyed through the desert near Lake
Mareotis, “that we shall be given as a light for the nations, /e’or
goyim 0% 1x9, a task as sublime as oppressive.”
“IT can understand that it is sublime, Master,” one ofhis disciples
observed, “but oppressive, why should it be oppressive?”
“Light has always annoyed those who sleep,” the master con-
fided, “and this is why it is the awakened ones who are always
grateful for clarity upon clarity. Indeed, observe that the passage
quoted speaks of nations without specifying how many or which
ones, and that light, when it manifests, does nothing but define,
show, uncover, encompass and separate. Hence it is, or it will
be, oppressive to have to shed light on those who do not wish to
leave confusion and ambiguity, those who prefer to hide within
the crowd. One ray of light too many, and in exchange for our
light we may receive hatred, rejection and scorn.”
It was the second sunrise of spring, and patches in the desert
were glimmering everywhere after the rain, hundreds of birds
were flying over, and the master made ready to show his disciples
a copy of the Cairo Genizah texts, ancient synagogue documents
discovered decades earlier and now in the possession of some
Western museum. Three years before this outing which brought
together master and disciples, the Gnostic texts of Nag Hammadi
had been found atJabal al-Tarif, a mountain in which there were
more than one hundred and fifty caves, a finding that had made
the Christian world as excited as it was upset.
“What can we do, then?” asked another of the walkers. “Should
we silence our discoveries, mask our illuminations, restrain our
flickering?”
>
138
 Mario Satz

“Oh, no,” the master smiled, “nothing of the sort. We must

remember, remember, and not forget at any moment that we are
in the world to highlight the freedom of its hues, and that the
light revealing them, an infinite principle within man, asks ofhim,
who is finite, to be evoked every time he strives to rediscover his
origin.”

Master Alexis Suares is hinting at a gematria, or subtle numerical

correspondence, by which we ascertain that to illumine or give light,
le’or TiN? (237), is like remembering, yizkor 137, whence that,
almost platonically, light and memory are identical. Furthermore, as
we evoke the symbolic value of the three letters composing the word or
Tix, light, we can see that alef refers to infinity within man, who is
represented by the letter vav 1, contained in turn, in its manifestation,
yithin the principle set by the letter reish 4.
 The Master and the Essence

Every time Rabbi Yo’ab Zofar of Yemen was called “Master” by

one of his pupils, he used to reply:
“We are all masters, the cobbler and the blacksmith, the
singing bird and the sewing dressmaker, the lizard finding its
way between two rocks and the ray of light wounding the clouds.
What is difficult is to be a disciple; what is strenuous is to remain
a student until the last day ofour lives.
“What is then, in your opinion,” they enquired, “the difference
between a master and a disciple? Or better still: why is it easier to
teach than to learn, when in reality both actions are inseparable,
and when logic tells us that we first learn, then we transmit what
we have learnt?”
“To be wise is essential,” Rabbi Yo’ab Zofar would reply, “it is
in the nature of things, since rabi°15, master, and bori "3, essence,
have the same letters. We are born knowing, but we forget as
we grow older, we lose our inquisitiveness and we acquire pride;
our innocence dwindles, while our self-regard, sadly, increases.
You see, how many of us dedicate ourselves, with happiness and
devotion, to learning and to making use of what we have already
learnt? How many are there who reclaim their very own treasures
and are ready to be lifelong students, preserving the purity of
children as well as their adventurous fearlessness? It seems to me
that the trap into which masters fall is in a ‘sitting’ thought: the
vanity of believing there is a fixed fulcrum; whereas students are
spared this thanks to the restlessness of their feet and the thirst
of their mouths which take them to and fro among the sources of
the world.”
“But you are yourself sitting right now,” his younger students
laughed.
140
 Mario Satz

“It is true,” the master laughed back, rising and thus revealing
his worn-out seat, “but my chair-has no seat. In this way I keep
my bottom in the void, to make my head get used to the same in
heaven.”

The Hebrew words rabi?a7, master, and bori 73, essential, natural,
evident, indeed make use of the same letters in their spelling, whereas
disciple, talmid Winn, is formed by the words yeled 1%, child,
and tamid Wn, which means always. Moreover, we can see that
professors’ chairs are somewhat in opposition to the philosophical
knowledge of the Peripatetics, or those who learn while walking.

141
 The Spiral Music of the Olive Tree

Every night during the summer months, Rabbi Adam Tibon of

Yattir, born and bred in Upper Galilee, went walking through
his grandparents olive grove for what the Kabbalists know as
tiqun hatsot nin yn, or midnight reparation. Sitting on a thick
cushion he placed among the rocks, Rabbi Adam would look first
at the stars, then at the aged trees, the skyline of Mount Meron
and the ragged horizon. As a child, he had heard an Arab cobbler
of Nazareth say that olive trees produced a strange and subtle
music, a spiral music.
“T can understand that they twist upwards following the pattern
ofa rope,” he would say aloud to himself, scratching his beard, “as
if they showed in this way their bonding to sun and heaven, but
as for the music...”
Intrigued, restless, he would time and again lean his ear against
the rugged barks, and he would hug the trees, as if afraid to be
missing the mysterious melody; but as he did not hear a thing,
not even a quarter-tone that could be called music, he would
feel frustrated, to the point that he would start doubting the
truth of what Mafud, the cobbler, had told him. But after some
years devoted to this practice, with pupils wide open on moonless
nights, wrapped by darkness like a foetus by its placenta, he
had the fortune to witness a meteor shower, which he naively
interpreted as the opening of the gates of heaven, gates that had
perhaps actually turned on their hinges by grace of his meditation.
Such is solitude, that everything happening around us seems to
be our responsibility.
Initially it was a murmur from the leaves, a spear-shaped
rustling, a symmetrical swinging. Then rattlings turned into the

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 Mario Satz

sighing of boughs, and immediately the lonely chirp of a cricket,

in whose metallic shrilling would quiver the joints of the world.
After this experience, Rabbi Adam Tibon ofYattir was able to see
without looking, feeling himself beyond the spinning wheel of
riddles, and beyond the enigmas of the stone; beyond the forced
blindness that the night imposed upon him; even beyond the
botanical aspect of time, which had been growing those olives for
centuries. He perceived the rhythm ofhis inner fire, the pattern in
the sun’s flames, which would sleep, and dream, and awaken later
on in the burnt out firewood. And he could hear the fire rising up
in spirals, flicking its rings, stretching out its tongues, savouring
a rain-tasting sap, and quickening love particles in the air. Rabbi
Adam saw all that, and then he heard how, clear and precise, the
spiral music of the olive trees was encompassing the shadows with
heartbeats of living wood, and how it was caressing the earth with
roots of constancy.
“T understand now,” he said to himself, as he stood up with a
smile soaked in tears ofjoy, “I do understand now: I was unable
to hear it while my silence was not deep enough for my fail into
wonderment to match my absorption into the plenitude of the
stars. You can see the fire whilst not hearing it, but you can
also listen to the unlit flames. Imagination is a gradual treasure,
revealed by reality without any method or system.

In the Hebrew name of the cricket, tsartsar W718, are included the
roots tsar 1¥, to give form, and rats P7, to run. Perhaps, and simply,
the secret music of the olive trees that Rabbi Adam thought he had
heard, started by the insect, was the acoustic form of the stellar
movement as reflected on those trees. Besides, by its gematric value,
cricket or tsartsar WW7¥ (580) is equivalent to saraf (WW (580), no
less than a seraph, the angel offire!

143
 In Every Scroll of the Law

“In every scroll of the Law,” Rabbi Na’um of Odessa once said
to his disciples, “are stored hundreds of waves of the Spirit.
Whenever we plunge into these waves, their foam of light breaks
against our frontal lobes, refreshing our souls, and adding some
salt to the blandness of our lives.”
The students looked at him attentively, without blinking. The
master had been made blind during a fire, when a blazing beam
fell upon his head. He kept his blue eyes wide open, but his glance
seemed to rest beyond, floating on the curve of the sea. He could
see nothing, but he perceived everything; he could not tell colours
or forms, but he would divine whether there was love, or sloth, or
interest in the heart of his questioner.
“A wave is to the sea what man is to God. The manner in which
deep water renews its oxygen upon contact with the air of its
shores 1s as the way in which the Creator sees His designs fulfilled
above the human horizon,” the rabbi went on, as he moved
slowly sidewards his oak walking cane. “The wave rises, aiming
at a transparency not always reached, and it finally collapses, all
energy lost, water upon water dissolved. Thus also, man rises,
aspiring to move in ever clearer regions until, bending upon his
years, he returns his image to the Creator, whose likeness he is.”
The silence of the study house at that afternoon hour was
pierced by a ship’s distant siren coming from the harbour.
“That is a beautiful simile,” said one of the students.
“Perhaps sad as well,” said another.
“It is unquestionable,” a third one stated.
“The Torah,” smiled Na’um of Odessa at last, “is the best of
planks for the worst of shipwrecks. So much so that it preserves

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 Mario Satz

between its scrolls all those waves which, from the outside, would
be threatening our existence and sprinkling our fate with fear.
The Torah, if you believe in its currents and if you sail down
its passages, shall lead you away from deserted islands into the
continents, and from these into their substance. Every single day,
and for ever.

The Hebrew word megilah n'73n, or scroll of the Law, hides between its
syllables a gal 53, or the one wave capable ofrestoring us to the horizon
of discernment; but since biblical readings are multiple and polysemic,
we can speak, with true rigour, of waves or galim. Moreover, in the
Hindu tradition the human being is a wave in the cosmic ocean, a
brief and fleeting manifestation of its dancing totality. The Sanskrit
term vita designates the cosmic order, disposition and providence, but
also water and sacrifice.

145
 The Heart of Solitude

One of the daughters of Lo-Yadua, the Unknown, once re-

proached her father for enjoying his solitude so much, being
as he was much more social than he wished to appear.
“Tt is as if,” the young woman observed, “your happiness was
never a collective fact, something you could share with others.”
“That is not true,” replied the master, “for everything is sharable,
and everything is collective, even this solitude which seems to you
overly lonely. Our prophet Isaiah has left for us the promise that
the Creator shall change our human solitude for His garden, and
this shows that unless we are near such a still way of living, near
that special experience implied in our silence and the silence of
others, we will not see the verdancy of Paradise, nor listen to the
joyous singing of its birds.”
“Why do you answer with someone else’s sentence to a situation
which is only yours?” his daughter insisted.
“Because the lonely heart of silence belongs to everyone,
whereas the varying alternation of words and languages belongs
to such and such a person. Isaiah spoke for you and for me, for
whoever wanted to listen, be it in this century or the next.”
“He may have meant to say,” the girl insisted, “that we will
be comforted in our solitude by the vision of ultimate beauty,
Paradise, but not that one is to be exchanged for the other.
Solitude is not, it seems to me, an exact equivalent of that garden
which is so miraculous in the world of the imaginal.”
“To interpret is to choose,” the Unknown smiled. “Remember
that the Scripture versets have no periods or commas, and that
when we stop we don’t do so because there is an indication, but
because we can no longer continue. In the same way, if you

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 Mario Satz

fearlessly go across your solitude, if you enjoy it and receive its

message, a path ofheartbeats shall reveal its entrance into Heaven
by making you share in the dance of its rotations. The day you
understand the heart of solitude, the entire world seems to be
cordial to you.”

In Isaiah 51:3 we read: “For the Creator shall comfort Zion: He will
comfort all her waste places; and He will make her wilderness lke
Paradise, and her solitude hike the garden of Jehovah.” But since
the original text has no punctuation, we can indeed believe that the
exchange here is of solitude
for Paradise or, even more, that only
through cultivating solitude can we perceive its delights. “The treasure
presents itself as a quest,” says Pseudo-Macarius, “until the entire
universe is revealed as a finding.”

147
 Blood and Image

Rabbi Schmuel Handas of Bukhara used to take his students

to the outskirts of Samarkand, to show them the ruins of an
astronomical observatory which had been under the custody of
his father for decades.
“My father learnt, by the sheer pleasure of praising, hundreds of
names of stars,” confided Rabbi Schmuel Handas to his disciples
during one of those outings, “and he used to sing them to me on
summer nights, when we sat at home on our veranda facing the
dark, perfumed sky. It went thus:

Sirrah, Mirach and Alamak,

Algol, Deneb and Schedir;
Pores of light on the dark body of God,
Worlds sung by Him,
Spheres by Him numbered.

“Then he would invariably place his heavy hand on my child’s

shoulder,” the Rabbi continued, “and he would quote verse 9:6 of
Genesis: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood
be shed: for in the image of God made He man.’ And thus he
disciplined my soul in peace and serenity, distancing me with his
words from any quarrel and from every violent way.”
“T do not see the connection between the stars and blood,
Master,” Amir of Fergana, his eldest disciple, then questioned
him.
“Everything that burns and glimmers in the constellations is
within your arteries and flows downstream in your veins, running
through your interior,” replied the master. “My father held that in
each name, in every one of its sounds, the stars were proclaiming

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 Mario Satz

the glory of their Creator. Then he would take my heartbeat, thus

making me aware ofit, and he would teach me how to recite them,
so that I would never forget the slow but persistent dripping of
wisdom. ‘In the night of your blood,’ he said, ‘white cells are stars,
red cells are comets, and the iron atoms are planets. In the night
of your blood He is always He Who Dawns by Himself’.”
“Did he pronounce those names without knowing their mean-
ing?” asked another of the disciples.
“Indeed,” answered Rabbi Schmuel Handas, “neither do I
know what they mean, but evoking them makes me so happy!”

Image and blood, tselem poy and dam 07, when combined, and once
stripped of the final letter mem 0 they have in common, form the
word le-tsad 185, meaning in favour of, at the side of. The wise man,
Kabbalists say, takes before men the side of the Creator, and before the
Creator the side of men.

149
 The Baker and the Angels

A baker from Cochin, a member of the Jewish community of the

Bene Israel, dubbed by his friends “The baker ofthe angels”, used
to fashion every day, with the leftover dough, a replica of himself
he would leave by night on the veranda ofhis house, for the night
dew to moisten it, and for the morning dew to bring him blessings
from afar. Apparently Simha Hineni, such was the name of the
baker, used to introduce improvements as he kneaded his double,
adding also ideas that would perfect his own inner life.
When finishing, as he delicately drew the navel, Simha Hineni
would say:
“Take away the bad from me, and bring me the good from Him;
undo my defects, and bring me all sorts of benefits.”
But it seldom happened that Simha Hineni saw again his
figure untouched on the veranda, for the ravenous birds called
in India striated laughing thrushes, about the breaking of dawn,
descended to feast upon the doughy little body of the angelic
baker, with a cinnamon-coloured hustle and bustle.
“They have started with your eyes today,” his neighbour Amos
Nisim told him mockingly, as he spied from the house next door.
“Tomorrow they may start with your secret parts, and as you rise
from bed you may not have what to urinate with.”
“Be silent,” the baker invariably replied. “One day the angels
will come, and feeding on my dough image they shall cheer my
soul in its saddest quarters, replacing longings with joys, vanities
with virtues.”
On one occasion, wishing to make a joke, two boys sprinkled
the baker’s veranda with chicken’s blood, and as he came to fetch
the remains of his dough image from the night before, he felt

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injured, not knowing whence or from whom the damage came.

Trembling with fear, he regarded the stains as a protest, and thus
it was that the following night he laid himself down, back to the
floor, on his veranda. He fell asleep until the hour in which the
birds came for their daily ration; when they saw him, they were so
surprised that they started squeaking and shrieking above their
usual chirping.
“Here I am,” he said to the striated laughing thrushes. “If you
want anything else from me, you must ask me face to face.”
A cheeky bird then alighted on his right shoulder, and confided
the following:
“You have waited so long for the angels, that you have forgotten
men. It is time that, instead of reproducing yourself, you distrib-
ute the surplus dough among those who can not even afford to
buy flour. It is not from the image of oneself that improvements
come, but from the one we form, with our thoughts and actions,
in the eyes of others. Your neighbour grants you the measure of
perfection you deserve, only in his service you have forgotten your
own.”
Simha Hineni never knew whose blood that was, nor who he
had talked to, but he did not need to ponder much over what he
had heard from the beak of the laughing thrush.

The striated laughing thrush (Turdoides striatus) is well-known for

its habit of staying in groups of six to eight individuals, and this
is why it has at times received the name of seven sisters, and in
certain zones of India seven devas or angels, who roam the earth
in order to cleanse it of evil spirits. These birds, who are gregarious
even during their breeding period, hold a constant communication
amongst themselves, letting out whisper-like noises while they feed on
insects or on human leftovers.

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 The Sweetness of Wisdom

Gil ibn Hardon, a disciple of Menahem ben Sarugq, chair of the

Hebrew School of Cordova during the glory days of Muslim
rule in 10th century Al-Andalus, wanted to know why his master
always compared wisdom to honey whenever he had a chance
to speak about this topic. Being a good student, he was familiar
with the quotation from Proverbs 24:14, which over the centuries
had given a base to such an association, but not having a sweet
tooth, he struggled to understand how honey and wisdom could
be synonyms.
“Like honey,” Menahem ben Saruq explained at last under his
insistence, “wisdom preserves us and preserves itself. It is fluid,
golden, supple and practically endless. But the most interesting
thing about it—I mean about honey—is that from a thousand
flowers it becomes one single substance, from so many hues,
petals and shades, one single colour. Wisdom also works this way:
it will synthesise the essence of each problem, and offer you its
solution when needed most. Beyond the complex swarm of daily
affairs, and if you are ready to listen, the bees of words, once they
have seized the honey of wisdom, shall fly always at your service.”
Gilibn Hardon and his master Menahem ben Saruq were sitting
next to a pond where half adozen green papyri were shooting out
from the water. A solitary lotus was starting to reveal its summer
blush above the surface.
“Besides,” the master insisted, “if you are so lucky as our
Samson to extract honey from a dead lion, if you are fortunate
enough to transmute ferocity into subtlety, bestiality into nobility,
then wisdom will not only be sweet to your mouth, but it will also
he a remedy for other people’s ills.”

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Gil ibn Hardon’s glance fell on one of the papyri. His eyes
could not give credit to what they saw: light was splitting in two
clearly different shafts at the papyrus, and travelling back towards
the water fountain; now through the two shafts of light travelled
three little humming bees. Thinking it was a trick from his master
Menahem, a sheer illusion, Gil rubbed his eyes.
“What is obvious,” ben Saruq remarked when he saw his
gesture, “what is obvious is the honeycomb of the wonderful.
Open it confidently, and eat from the sweetness of each revelation
as if it had been sent to you from the bluest and farthest corner
of heaven.

It is common in Hebrew culture to recall the relation between davar

3127 and dvash w37, word and honey, two concepts distinguished only
by the letters shin w and reish 1. The combination of these two gives
us the name for song or poetry, shar WW. ‘There exists, furthermore, a
semantic link between the bee, deborah ANAT, and davar 127, word.

193
 Breathing In Infinity

As he lay the apricots of his little orchard out to dry under the
blazing July sun, Rabbi Ovadia ben Adar of Izmir used to say:
“There is more sweetness in what shrinks and yet remains, than
in the fruit which merely reacts to the water of the moment and
the hunger of the hour. Such is also the age of a man who has
been dehydrated by the sun, but who has been concentrated by
love, giving him more flavour upon each new wrinkle, increasing
him in mildness for every hint of a smile he can give before the
abyss of death.”
Golden as honey, the apricots were placed on the run-down
edges of his veranda by the worn-out hand of the old rabbi. There
they stayed until the sugar in them reached the ideal level, and
that was the moment to sell them. Those blown to the ground by
the wind were for the hens or for the beggars, but those which
remained clean, tender and firm under the fierce sun became part
of his meagre income.
Poverty was a privilege to him, widowerhood his strongest pain,
and the relative distance from his children a relief. Ovadia had a
goat, a mule and eighteen fruit trees with which he used to chat.
The study house he attended was no richer or more comfortable
than his own home, but it was white and spacious enough to
accommodate in its inner courtyard some large pots of basil and
chairs for his friends Rabbi Ishmael Duban and Rabbi Yosef
Nissim.
“When between words and actions our breath perceives infin-
ity,” he confided once to his friends, “then wonder opens wide
our mouth.”

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 Mario Satz

“I suppose that perceiving is taking notice,” said Rabbi Ish-

mael.
“And that taking notice is feeling,” added Rabbi Yosef Nissim.
“But if you do not make yourself a little clearer, we shall not be
able to solve the riddle you are posing.”
Rabbi Ovadia then took the branch of his oldest apricot tree,
which he had skilfully turned into a staff, and wrote on the ground
two Hebrew words, meaning respectively you and now.
“Mark how the letters dance,” he observed, pointing at what he
had written over the floor covered in the finest sand. “See how
their meanings go up and down. Breath is now where infinity
was, and where infinity was, there is now the breath. Ask from
your eyelids a blink, and understanding will come to you of its
own. The moment that happens, in the instant your mind opens
its transparent butterfly wings, your thoughts will be nowhere,
and your head everywhere.

The words written by the master are the homophones ata’ 8N& and
atah AnX, the verb to come, to arrive presently, and the pronoun you.
While the first one is closed by a final alef &, indicating infinity, the
second word ends with a hein, token of breath and breathing; and yet
both words share the beginning and the end of the alphabet. When the
breathing recognises its heavenly provenance, our life-giving breath
becomes truly admirable.

155
 The Lightning of Paradise

“IT have come to think,” Rabbi Isaac of Istanbul muttered softly

to his grandson Yosef David, “I have come to think that we left
Paradise after a storm, and that we shall return there in less than
a flash of lightning.”
They were drinking golden apple tea on the shores of the
Bosphorus, and like every Saturday afternoon, they were walking
together, chatting about this and that, as they watched the hustle
of the fishing boats and they heard the distant, sinuous and
magnetic voice of the muezzins singing their call to prayer.
“Why a storm, grandfather?” asked Yosef David.
“Everything must have darkened suddenly. The sky must
have oppressed the earth,” he carried on, half closing his eyes,
“with criss-crossing thunders and broken winds. Then, when the
horizon was so close that its line matched the profile of the lips
of our ancestors, Eve and Adam realised that the rain had left wet
and sad tears over the leaves, and that they had ahead of them a
wide land to plough, a vast reality to assume, and their own hands
to cope.”
“IT asked you why a storm,” repeated his grandson, remember-
ing that the old man was almost deaf.
“Because storms transmute secrets into revelations, and leaving
Paradise was somehow a revelation which amounted to growing
centuries old in seconds, millennia in a few instants. We had
everything within us, but we did not realise anything; on the
outside we had nothing, but we realised everything.”
“You also said that we will return to Paradise in less than it takes
a flash of lightning. Isn’t it so?”

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 Mario Satz

“And so it is,” said the old rabbi, stroking his grandson’s head.
“So it is. In fact, the entire earth is a Paradise, but we have to
go very far from it to be reminded of this by the nostalgia of
its wonders. Until, on a given day—a different one for each of
us—a stirring of lightning shall allow us to be everything without
having anything and, once our steps are turning in the right
direction, to be able to say, like you and me now: how beautiful
the sea is, and how round the sun nesting in its waters.”
“Is that Paradise? A fading glint of beauty?”
“You should better say an illusion flaring up,” said the old rabbi,
“beyond our eyes, there where the world has fallen so low that it
starts rising anew.

The numerical value ofParadise, or Eden (124), is indeed equivalent

to that of beziqah Apa (124), a flash of hghtning, and hence the
correctness in the intuition of old Rabbi Isaac of Istanbul. In Chinese
Buddhism there is also a relation between lightning and illumination,
access to the non-dual or paradisal mind. They say that an erudite of
the Sung dynasty (10th to 13th centuries), by the name of <haopian,
was once sealing official documents in his studio when, upon hearing
the powerful rumble of thunder, he felt that his mind opened like a
flower, whiter than light, and then he wrote in celebration:

Empty of thoughts, in silence I sat

before my desk, facing a darksome sky,
with unperturbed mind, serene as water.
Suddenly the blast of thunder opened my senses completely,
and there was the old man sitting in all simplicity.

Likewise we read in the Kabbalistic classic Sefer Yetsirah that,

“Numbers (thefigures in the world) correspond to the ten infinites; once
they are perceived, they resemble lightning, and they are decidedly
headed towards that which has no beginning and no end. It has been
said of them that they rise and descend at the command of the Creator,
that they dive as a hurricane and they bow down before His Throne”
(chapter II, 1st paragraph). Also in the Kena Upanishad of the
Hindus it is said, “This is the teaching regarding Brahman: flashing
forth like lightning and disappearing in the wink of an eye” (4,4).

157
 The Power of the Listener

For forty years Abu Moses sold towels in the desert. In the
company of his camel Little Mountain, he would roam oases and
hamlets in order to inveigle to and convince nomads about the
advantages of hygiene. They knew him as Al-Yehud, the Jew; and
also as Al-Huruf, the Lettered One, on account of his obsession
to always write on the sand the very same Hebrew word: shema‘,
listen, hear. Abu Moses had eyes scoured by storms and gales, and
earlobes so long and hanging that he could have been taken fora
Buddhist monk, had he not exhibited an unmistakably aquiline
Jewish nose. His hands were as dark as his dusky face. Of middle
height and powerful legs, Abu Moses loved in the darkness of
coffee the beauty of the night, and in the transparency of tea the
farewell of twilights. He knew a few prayers by heart, and these
he never tired to repeat while having his meagre meals, raising
his quick and high-pitched voice. At the end of those forty years
on the roads, he had registered in his memory so many sounds,
whispers and drip tones, that the dwellers of the desert had come
to trust his forecasts and suggestions as to moving their herds or
diverting their caravans. Whenever he appeared on top of a hill
with his saffron umbrella, he was a cheerful sight for everyone,
since Abu Moses, the one with storm-scoured eyes, carried with
him, wrapped among his draperies, the caressing silence ofpeace.
Once in a while, his customers would ask him:
“Why do you always write the same word, Abu Moses?”
“So as not to fall too deeply into my own thoughts,” replied the
tradesman. “The wilderness I traverse is so full of songs of the
breeze and moans of the wind, of eagle calls and the punctuation
of insects, that I have come to hear, in the quiet of dawn, and

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 Mario Satz

in the loving scrape of lizards, the green promises of oncoming

spring. Once I got to hear the birth of gold within the rock
veins, and on another occasion | heard the pace of the rain over
the dunes. One morning—and this was long ago—I heard the
crystalline crackling of the sand under the hooves of a hundred
horses, and that same day the potency of the One was in the
booming of thunder. I can, if I set about doing so—but words
would not suffice—I can differentiate more than ten tones within
one single sound, and even ten distinct sounds within one chirp.
This is because what you call hearing—I mean really hearing, you
must believe me—is a rare art in which initially you expect to find
an echo of your name in everything, only to realise in the end that
no one ever says his name in the desert.”
“How is this?” his listeners would enquire.
“It is very simple: the desert sky is so transparent, and its
emptiness so void, that under its vault your ‘I’ vanishes at every
breath. You become so eager for something to break the apparent
monotony of your advance, that the slightest colour variation in
the landscape, or the softest rustle of acacia leaves, intimate a
hundred answers before you have even asked your first question.”
“And these answers, what do they say?”
“Oh, as often as not they will say the same thing: ‘Hear, O Israel:
our God is One.’”
“Is that all>”
“No, of course not. They also say, ‘Let your eye follow your ear,
lest your pupil leads your hearing astray, and you end up where
you ought not to be, finding what is not for you.’ ”

The invocation in Deuteronomy 6:4: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Eternal, our

God, is One,’ has so many levels of interpretation as diverse as the
sounds making up its words. To start with, shema‘ ynw, hear, can
be read as shem ow, name, and ‘ain y, the eye, hence the advice
for the sight to follow the ear, and not the opposite. Besides, given its
numeric value, shema‘ ynw (410) equates with qadosh wip, the
holy, the sacred. Everything is at once One and holy, sacred, worthy
of admiration and respect. Now, ifwe transpose the sounds of shema’
ynw, we can obtain the word ‘emas ony, to carry, to burden, and

Loe)
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

hence that in order for our burden to be lighter, we must “listen” to

what it contains, looking at it as iffrom the inside out. As regards
the Divine One, ehad 1x, some masters interpret it, on the human
level, as He who is ah nx, brother, relative, and had 1n, subtle, fine,
sharp, and piercing to everything existing. Then, if considered well,
then, species and spices are subtly fraternal under the blue sky of the
Father.

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 To See the Light, to Be the Light

“It is one thing to see the light,” said Rabbi Gedalia of Kabul, the
wool-buyer, “and a different one altogether to be the light.”
The children listening to him had large, black olive eyes. If it
was difficult to teach them how to sing the Psalms, it was even
harder to have them pay attention to their contents. Especially
during the summer, when bunches of golden grapes were laid
out on the market stalls in the sun, and when the bronze
ding-dong of the tamarind juice seller would open their thirsty
mouths.
“In Psalm 36:10 we read: ‘In Thy light shall we see light.’ Will
someone here explain to me what is the deeper meaning of this
sentence?” Master Gedalia went on.
Laughter came to a halt, elbows were called to awaken, eyelids
came to a standstill.
Beyond the study hall—which smelled of wool and pistachio,
of nuts and pitch—voices and calls were heard. Their location, a
poor quarter of Kabul, was an island of meaning, the refuge of
ancestral dreams, the space to invoke spirits, and to play with the
straightness or sinuosity of the letters.
“First we must see the Creator outside ourselves,” started a shy-
looking boy called Zecher by the others on account of his enviable
memory, a child who would eventually become the famous Rabbi
Uriel of Kabul, “then to understand that we are seeing him
through our eyes, and finally to ascertain that these go from the
inside out.”
“Would this imply that light dwells as much in the inside as on
the outside of our heads?”
“It is thus, Master,” replied a tall and curly-haired teenager.

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 THE LIVING PAEUM TREE

“And then, my dear ones, coming back to my first reflection,

what will it mean to be the light?”
“To have so much happiness under the skin, so much sun in our
hands, so much joy in our hearts,” said the future Rabbi Uriel
of Kabul without knowing what he was saying, overcome by a
sudden enthusiasm, “so many sparkles in our laughter, so many
gleams on our forehead, and so much surprise in our soul, that if
we were in a dark room we would be a lamp for the others, their
human lamp, the flame to soothe their shadows.”
Some praised his memory, others patted his back. The master,
astonished, asked him:
“Who has taught you all this, Uriel?”
“Words are a river, and they carry me,” answered the one called
Zecher. “And when this word river meets the sea of the Torah, I
open my mouth, as if it is no longer mine, to let time speak—I
mean, the generations that have preceded us. My life is other lives,
as my lips are other lips.”
“This is being the light,” the master remarked. “This is what it
is to be like light beyond what light itself differentiates.”

‘The psalm in question affirms: “In Thy light shall we see light,” be-
orcha nireh or WX-AN TUNA, suggesting that between divine light
and human act are deployed, separated by a tiny space, the two letters
of the word ken }2, yes, and also, with the same spelling, kan ]3, here,
right here, whence that only through a positive, open and synchronic
attitude are we allowed to see the immense and cosmic within the small
and human. To see the light is an obvious fact; to be the light, a hidden
certitude.

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 Punishment and the Hands

One afternoon in Jerusalem, Lo-Yadua, the Unknown Rabbi,

heard from his master, whom everyone called the Ancient of
Days on account of his incomparable white hair, that the left
hand embodies punishment, while the right one embodies mercy.
Through the large window-pane of the study house you could see
the soft uneven snow falling. The old master had had an argument
with his wife, and his face showed affliction. The big age gap
between the pair would not yield to the harassments of time or
to the timing differences in their biorhythms.
“If it is so,” answered Ariel the Talmudist, one of his students,
“you should tell her to have mercy with her right hand, given that
she has judged you harshly with her left.”
“Ah,” the Ancient sighed, “you do not know, perchance, what
Shams, the master of Rumi the Persian, said regarding the wives
of the philosophers?”
The books were closed, the afternoon darkened, the tea kettle
came to a boil.
“If one of the members of the couple is more studious than
the other,” the Ancient of Days went on, “and therefore slower to
anger, and more cautious as to judgment, there is no way the other
will not always win and impose his or herself in every discussion.
If she is right, there is nothing to be done; if she is not, there
is nothing I can do anyway, because her temper has taken her
somewhere else, and thus, how will she be paying for a debt she
will not remember she ever contracted!”
The disciples comforted him as best they could, and on the
following day, the Unknown decided to intervene on behalf of
the Ancient. He went over to their house, he waited for the master

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to go to walk the dog, and he surprised the woman in the kitchen.

Considering that his visits were frequent, she was not alarmed.
She asked him to come in and she said her husband would be
back shortly. The Unknown One sat by the bookshelf and started
reciting:

If you hit with one hand,

Prepare the other for a prompt caress,
Since the longer the distance
Between punishment and pardon,
The less effective the corrective will be,
And the less sweet will pardon’s taste be
For those who are to savour it.

That very night, before sleep, the wife of the Ancient re-
membered the words of the most beloved disciple of the master,
and she caressed the old man’s head while he slept, with a re-
newed patience. She thought that as hard as it could be, their
living together was, and would continue to be, the greatest of
miracles.

164
 The Blessing of the Food

Rabbi Levi of Alexandria asked Rabbi Razi of Elephantine why

it is that foods need to be blessed, to which Razi replied:
“Gratitude tempers sacrifice, just as the awareness of what you
are eating gives depth to the flavour of what goes through your
mouth.”
During those years, in the 2nd century of our era, under the
Greek rule of Egypt, food was scarce, but it was agreeable, as
much as, or even more than, the time spent by the river watching
the ducks play or the dragonflies darting in pairs. The two friends
had chosen the shade of a sycamore to sit down and talk. Some
boats, with their red or violet sails, were transporting sailors’
songs, animals and bales of grass.
“My master, Rabbi Eliahu of Joppe,” observed Razi, “said that
every food requires a particularly suitable blessing.”
“For example?” asked Levi of Alexandria.
“For grapes, it is not enough to say ‘the fruit of the vine,’
”

observed Razi. “We should also tell them: “We give thanks for
every drop of rain you did not let fall, that you trapped under the
green transparency of your skin, sweetening it for the delight of
our mouths and for the joy of the birds.’”
“IT see what you mean,” Levi said. “According to this, when we
get a pomegranate, we should say: “With thanks for the reflection
of twilight on your grains, for the rosy light you keep, for not
letting it die, and thanks for the firmness with which you keep
your gleams together.
7”

“So it is,” Razi continued. “The soul is the manna of the body, a
Biblical delicacy which, as you know, comes from the Highest.
Thus, when we bless foods from within her, the mother of our

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tongue, we are raising them and revealing how miraculous they

are, since the greatest work of man is to join what is scattered, and
to give a voice to that which is silent.”
“Bless this date,” asked Levi from Razi with a smile, as he
offered him one, thus prompting him to look for inspiration in
the palm tree, the desert and the sun.
“Thank you for teaching us,” the man from Elephantina sighed,
“that wrinkles are something more than dry rigours, and that
the darkness sinks between your creases only in order to further
concentrate your flavour. Thank you, date, for showing us your
innocent perfection.”
When they finished talking, the first star bore witness to its own
radiation on the water, and it took back to heaven a more fluent
look.

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 The Reader of Clouds

There lived in Damascus, around the third decade of the last

century, a humble Jewish cobbler who, as chance and the
contempt of the police would have it, was jailed for a crime he
did not commit, a crime which was all the more horrendous in
the eyes of the judges, given the Jewish piety of the accused,
whose religious zeal was well-known by all his neighbours. Haim
Anan-—this was his name—knew by heart the Psalms and the Song
of Solomon, and he used to recite them in the synagogue and
during the feasts, for his voice was a wonder of grace, with the
quality of an oboe and the texture of silk. To be a Jew in modern
Syria was never easy, but it became a Calvary soon after the
State of Israel came to existence. Twenty generations of Anan had
lived in Damascus before the innocent Haim, and it is certain
that if he had had a chance to leave the city for a better fate,
he would have quickly declined it in order to keep smelling the
cardamom fragrance of his shop’s alley, the acrid glue smell, and
the harsh aroma of the leather pieces no one would now use. He
was arrested between one and two in the morning, as he devoted
himself to tigun hatzot nxn jpn, or the midnight reparation, as
recommended by the masters of Safed.
They stopped him without questions or any explanations, and
they threw him into a dark cell from which—he had forgotten
when—they moved him to a forced labour camp outside the city.
As he had no relatives other than some distant cousins, and these
afraid they might fall victim to new injustices if they interceded
on his behalf, the small Jewish community of his neighbourhood
forgot him soon enough.
Haim Anan requested a prayer book in Hebrew, his tallit or

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heavenly prayer shawl, and a pencil and paper to write, and all
these were refused. Every time he insisted on his innocence and
asked for a copy of the Bible, or at least an Arabic translation
of the Book of Genesis or the Book of Proverbs, he received the
following sarcasm in answer:
“Read the clouds, read the air. You must consider the bars of
your cell window as the vertical lines of a narrow page. You will
never leave this place, Jew.”
At dawn, in summer as in winter, he was taken out along with
the other inmates to the quarry where they extracted stones for
the rich people’s houses. Haim’s eardrums had been damaged
by the explosions, by the hammering, and by the iron picks
scratching the mountain sides. The day he forgot himself, when he
stopped thinking where he was and why, that very day the clouds
started taking shapes before his eyes, against the blue background
that gave them origin and where they would eventually return,
shapes of letters, resemblances of Biblical passages, appearances
of versets, faces of legendary characters such as Jacob or Samson,
Deborah or Batsheva. It was enough for him to raise his eyes to
the sky during the breaks, or between two hammer blows, to read
the flight of the clouds and decipher joys marching towards the
promise of rains or a simple travelling sunshade.
This was a secret he shared with no one, an unexpected event
which he received as a relief from above for his sufferings here
below. In spring, at the time of sunset, while the swifts circled
fifty, perhaps eighty times around the same place beyond the
little window of his cell, the clouds told him: “This is a cold
downward current,” “The ants are a wise people,” or “Love God
with all your soul and all your heart.” Haim would read them
effortlessly, one by one, not knowing whether he looked at cirri,
cirrostrati, altocumuli or altostrati. One morning he saw an anvil-
shaped cumulus, and behind it the image of Judas Maccabeus,
the Hammer; another morning he saw the rising of a tempest,
speaking to him about the Red Sea and Moses. Even in his dreams
he would read clouds, very thin clouds vanishing into shreds,
exceedingly white, like the breasts of doves. Haim Anan was
ignorant of there being four basic kinds of clouds whose various

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combinations give warning of the weather conditions divined by

meteorologists, but even so, he knew their evolution towards rain,
or the light creases in their edges signalling higher winds.
He came to believe he himself was a dark cloud, one under
which still stood, impeccably clean, the abode of the Creator.
On the feather-like cirri he would read geese migrations; on the
clouds formed by ice needles that he could only surmise, he
would see the ageless beards of the prophets, stroked on their
way towards bliss. He gradually forgot about the existence of
books, with their accumulation of obedient signs, their periods
and their marks. No letter stayed in his memory longer than the
fleeting transit of an aitocumulus in its sinuous advance. In winter,
with the fog, a tone of sombre sadness crept through his window
looking for his rigid coach, but in its airy shape he read a change
of season, the winter solstice in the days of Abraham, and with
Isaac he set about to study the terrain for the deployment of
troughs or drinking containers, barely noticing that the light bulb
in his room grew fainter and fainter every day. And so, as his
prison years went by like the clouds, his reading of them became
so precise that wardens would ask him about the weather, and
they would then place bets on his predictions, where there was
hardly any trace of error.
“Hey, Jew,” they would tell him, “read for me the clouds and
the weather for Wednesday.”
And after a brief minute’s silence spent looking through the
bars, Haim Anan’s answer would emerge:
“The fronts will open, and the dawn sky will be born perfect,
but at midday the clouds will join in a grey sea whose waves will
not move until the night has come.”
Thus he earned their respect—but not their admiration, nor
their affection. They were wary of his visionary ability, of his
destiny as human thermometer, of his mercurial character, and
of his eyes enraptured in the reading of the clouds. Finally, two
decades from his first day of prison, a full pardon came, as
inexplicable as the exchange of prisoners whereby, three days
later, he woke up ina kibbutz near Rosh Hanikra, by the Lebanese
border.

169
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

“Welcome home, Haim,” a man, tall and rustic, told him. “Our
children need someone to repair their shoes.” He spoke to him in
Hebrew, then in Arabic, and finally in French.
By this time, his beard and sparse hair had a fantastic glow,
even more noticeable against his dark features. His teeth were all
intact, and he wept the first time they took him to gaze at the sea.
He cried with joy, for above the horizon, spreading in fine, white
stripes he could read the passage from Kings 8:12, where it is said
that the Creator “loves to dwell in the mist” and makes of clouds
His permanent abode, since nothing could enclose or contain
Him, as is recorded on the occasion of the inauguration of the
Temple of Solomon. They had not been able to turn him, Haim
Anan the cobbler, into a mere number, neither had they been able
to take from him his age-old reading habits, his devotion to his
own past.
“Do you like the sea, Haim?” the children asked every time they
went to the beach with him and saw him shedding tears.
“Yes, he replied aloud, while in a whisper he added: “The
Creator draws with clouds astounding and fleeting wonders of
beauty, and the wind scatters and the weather allocates these
subtle marvels. Half of my life I have been a cobbler, and another
half a cloud reader. Thus, having aided the foot to bend its walk
upon the earth has allowed my head to meditate on the sky.
Blessed be He, Draughtsman of the winds, blowing breezes into
the attentive ears of the grass.”

170
 Putting Heart In

“Of all the ways of paying attention,” Rabbi Abraham of Tripoli

said to his disciples, “of ail our conscious attitudes, not one
compares to putting heart into what we think, feel and do.”
There were three of them walking together: Rabbi Yosef ben
Mulk of Benghazi, Rabbi Adam of Sabha, and the master of
them both, Rabbi Abraham. They walked by the edge of the
desert under the mauve light of a Saturday afternoon. All three
carried with them basil sprigs to perfume their steps; all three
were grandfathers, and they had known each other for a long time.
“In that case, such attention will be fleeting, like a heartbeat,”
remarked Rabbi Adam of Sabha.
“Everything ts fleeting,” smiled Rabbi Abraham.
“However it may be,” intervened Rabbi Yosef ben Mulk of
Benghazi, “heartbeats do not leave the heart: they stay in it,
similar to alternating birds, one of light, the other of shadow.”
“All things possess shadow and light,” smiled again Rabbi
Abraham of Tripoli, “but not everything has a heart, for having
a true heart requires celebrating, above all, movement, then
stillness; ascension, then repose.”
“You are making it really hard for us,” observed Rabbi Adam of
Sabha.
The afternoon colour changed from mauve to blue. One after
another, the stars twinkled over the nearby desert.
“You present your enigmas as someone who hides his wings
after having flown,” said Yosef ben Mulk.
“Look,” Rabbi Abraham said finally, taking out a plum from
one of his pockets, a plum so much like a dove’s heart that the
three friends shivered at the acuteness of the resemblance. “Even

171
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

a fruit heart like this is sweet in its surface and sour in its centre. In
the same way, when asked to pay attention, we must use kindness
to our fellows, and reserve sourness for ourselves, for sweetness
lowers our eyelids in the same measure as what is sour opens our
pupils. The attention deserved by others is called consolation; the
exercise of our own attention is called awakening devotion.”

The Hebrew expression sim leb 25 Drv, to pay attention, can also be
understood as putting heart into what we are doing. Besides, if we
read bal 5a, not, a negation, instead of leb 35, whose affirmation
is implicit, we would be giving precedence to the static bet before the
dynamic lamed. At the same time, the letter lamed 9 signals an ascent,
a climb, while bet 1 furthers stability; hence that in the way of the
realisation of the heart we must first learn how to get under way, and
finally learn how to be at ease.

172
 The Living Palm Tree

As he was pushed into the abyss on a cold morning of May, 1944,

Rabbi Ismach Atid was in his mind giving the final touches to
the story he would have liked to write: about the end of General
Vespasian, responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem, who was
undone by madness somewhere out in the far reaches of the
Roman Empire. “How foolish of me,” he thought, “that walking
towards death is making me remember that murderer, when no
extinction will pay the price of extinction, when no punishment,
however deserved, will restore a life.” In the camp, surrounded by
sallow faces and tear-emptied eyes, everyone seemed to be beyond
thought, striped ghosts of themselves. Most of these souls were
dead even before their bodies were exposed to the lethal gas—as
dead as were already their beloved ones.
Rabbi Ismach Atid looked up to the sky searching for a signal,
some sign of that craze which was destroying the entire human
race, not only the Jewish people. But above the horror destined
for some, Spring insisted on carrying aromas to others, as if the
Creator of the universe, that being he still called God and whom
he loved beyond any explanation, took pleasure in perfuming the
air with floral essences above the stench of charred meat. “What
a trifle,” Rabbi Ismach Atid said to himself, “to think of writing
something about Vespasian and the destruction of the Temple
after all the history gone by, when the present is casting such a
shadow of desolation over the future.”
And then, woven in the thinnest of clouds, he saw a transparent,
living palm rising to heaven from the deadly chimneys. And
within it the warm souls of the righteous, the ethereal heart of the
innocent ones, ascending in funereal eddies, drawing branches

73
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

and spadices; and he saw a trunk so tall and slender, that it seemed
made of the cotton from the dreams of the carbonised children...
until two burning tears, flowing out ghastly and silent, blurred his
perception. It was beautiful like life, and terrible like unwanted
death, this palm tree, foretelling a sort of posthumous miracle
on the horizon of a continent ravaged by the hordes of war.
Following a vertical order, a mysterious aspiration in the rings
of its trunk, travelled names and indelible memories, words of
love and promises; and the souls lingered and lingered among
the arms of this pale smoke, giving one another a glow as intense
as unforgettable. Was he perhaps, Rabbi Ismach Atid, the only
one to see them?
Before entering the gas chamber, he uttered a wish under his
breath: “May this faint and hesitant transparent palm have a
destiny worthy of remembrance, and may the righteous ones who
compose it tell the angels that they long to return in the rays of the
sun. All the darkness of the universe, O Lord, shall not conquer
the light of Your stars.”

174
 Index

accusative, 126 community (kehilah), 100

Adam Kadmon, 91 Cossacks, 33
adamah, 56, 137 cricket (tsartsar), 143
adamah, 77 crystals, 15
ain, 77 cube (qubiyah), 42
air (avir), 93, 121 cure, 49
alef, 8, 56, 77, 139, 155 cyclic history, 29
aleph, 127
Allah, xvi, 29, 43, 44 dabar, 86
alone (lebad), 63 dan, 50
animals; talking to, 28 ad-Darqawi, ‘Abd al-Qadir, xvi
arets, 50 death, 28, 54, 106, 113
deeds, 117, 134
Baal Shem Tob, 92, 121, 122 delight, 50, see ‘ednah
barakah, 43 desert (midbar), xvii, 28, 58, 86, 131,
baraqah, 75 133, 138, 158
Basho, Matsuo, 74 dew (tal), 32, 69
beekeeper, 43 dialogue (sah), 37
Ben Yehudah, Eliezer, 125 diamond, 67
bet, 172 dim‘ah, 77
birds, 65, 73, 151 dimayon ha-nefesh, 27
blessing, 44, 165 dragon (teli), 89
blindness, 95
Book of Splendour, see zohar Eben Tabon, 126
breath, 122, 123, 130, 154, 155 echo, 48
Buddhism, xxi, 22, 157 Eden, 50
building, 10g ‘ednah, 50
El Elohim, 42
Cairo Genizah, 138 Eloah, 63
calligrapher, 29, 45 emet, 46
carob, 97 Essenes, xviii, 129
centre, 132 et, 126
chance, 41 eternity, 116
China, xvil, 157 Ezekiel, 27
cloud, 168
colour (tseba‘), 35 family, 129

175
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

farming, 18 Jesus, xvil

fear (yir‘at), 19 joy,
44, see gil
feather, 29, 30, 45
Felashas, 134 kiss, see neshiqah
firefly, 43 Kotsuji, Setsuzo, 74
flash (bezigah), 157
flower, 107 lamed, 172
food, 165 language, 101, 127
fool, 12 lashon, 4, 46
fortress (tsur), 6 leb, 105
light, 139
gahal, 44 light (or), 80, 93, 139, 162
gahllit, 44 lightning, see baraqah
gil,44 lime tree (tirzah), 120
gilgul neshamot, xxi love (ahabah), 32
glory (hod), 48
grace, see hen Maat, 46
grace (hen), 21 manah, 2, 49, 165
manna, 49, see manah
haburah, 7 Mantiq ut-Tayr, 41
haftarah, 66 marriage, 163
hamesh, 4 Masada, 129
hands, 163 master, 141
happiness, 3, 9 mediation, 52, 84, 149
hashmal, 9, 1 mem, 86
Hasidism, xxii, 4, 92, 121 memaleh magom, 70
hayot, 27 memory, 139
hearers of silence, 95 mercy, 163
heart, 46, 63, 103, 116, 172 midnight reparation, 142, 167
hei, 2, 8, 48, 122, 155 Midrash, xxii, 45
hen, 22 mine, 2
Heraclitus, 60 mirror, 20
Hinduism, 106, 145, 151, 157 Mishnah, 54, 10
hochmah nisteret, 22 moon, 109
Holocaust, 173 Moses, 23, 45, 58, 66, 109
honey (dvash), 153 Moses de Leon, xxi
hourglass, 51 moss (tahab), 84
hozer, 59 mother-of-pearl (dar), 118
MUSIC, 143
Ibn Khaldun, 29 Muslim, 43
idiot, 54, 78, 112
immanence, 70 Nag Hammadi, 138
innovation, 29 name (shem), 60
Isis, 65 neshigqah, 23, 36, 75
night (lailah), 28
Japan,74 nimah, 2
 Mario Satz

Noah, 14, 48, 81 ; seven sisters, 151

nose, 8 Shabbat, 105
nose (af), 8 shalom, 60
notzah, see feather Shekhinah, 100, 101
numerology, 17 Shema, 104, 13, 158, 159
shibah, 23
olive, 142 shibolet, 105
onion, 103 shomem, 4
Operation Moses, 133 sumhah, 4, 1
Or Torah, 126 sleep, 120
Osiris, 65 slowness, 79
ostrich, 45 smile, 50, 13
oznei sheget, 95 soap, 14
sofer stam, 45
Paradise, 7, 8, 50, 110, 133, 134, 146, solitude, 147
147, 156 stars, 148
patience, 164 Stone of Discernment, 126
pleasure, see ‘ednah stork, 2
profane, 52 storm, 157
Psalms, XV,.55 27528) 47, 79) 117, 122, stroll (tiyul), 69
161, 167 Sufism, xv, 20, 2
psychostasis, 46 surrender, 99
swallow (dror), 65
garga’, 56
gen, 2 tallit, 129, 167
quill, 29, 45 Talmud, xxi, xxl, 3, 7, 22, 37, 45, 62,
Qumran, 128 66, 70, 112
Qur'an, 30 Tanakh, 31, 19
tarigah, xvi
reading method, 18 tau, 20, 91, 127
reish, 139 tears, 76
remez, 88 Tetragrammaton, 32, 48, 91
repose, 21 Tetramorph,
repose (noah), 22 thirty-two paths, 105
ruah, 97 thunder, 157
tiqun hatzot, 142, 167
Sabbath, 26 tithe, 45
sacrifice, 45 tongue, see lashon
Safael, 125 Torah, xix, xxil,5,,18, 25; 30, 31, 33,
sagi nahor, 95 35, 45, 68, 70, 73, 74, 83, 94, 100,
sand, 52 102, 113, 119, 125, 129, 144, 162
scroll (megilah), 145 travel, 132
seagull, 37 Tree of Good and Evil, 7
seeing, 16 Treeiot ite, 7.133534
Sefer Yetsirah, 40, 74, 89, 157 truth, see emet
Sefer Ha-Bahir, xviii, 89, 18 tsadiq, xv, 52

“fi
 THE LIVING PALM TREE

tsimtsum, 89 ya‘en, 46
yesh, 24
yesod ‘olam, 52
vav, 139
yod, 2
vav, 14, 89
Vespasian, xix, 173 Joa, 89,93
Zodiac, 89
weighing of the soul, 46 zohar, 59
word play (mitshaq milim), 35 zohar, xxi, 2, 7,18, 98, 10, 111, 120
Lightning Source UK Ltd
Milton Keynes UK
UKOW04f1350200913

217588UK00001B/221/P
 THE MATHESON MONOGRAPHS

Moving, amusing and enlightening, these poetic short stories take -

us across centuries on a beautiful journey through all the regions
where the palm tree of Jewish wisdom has flourished. From Morocco
to Iran, from Kyoto to Safed, from Pumbedita to Goa, we are given
delightful glimpses into the no-space and no-time of traditional
Jewish lore and the foundations of this ancient chain of wisdom.
By the example of their daily lives, the masters of the Torah, the
Psalms and the Talmud teach us how looking into Hebrew words in
a playful yet rigorous way, may reveal new layers of meaning within
reality.

Mario Satz (b. Buenos Aires, 1944) undertook long journeys

through South America, the USA and Europe before settling in
Jerusalem in 1970, where he studied Kabbalah, the Bible, and the
Anthropology and History of the Middle East. In 1977 the Italian
government awarded him a scholarship to pursue research in Flor-
ence on the works of the Renaissance scholar, Pico della Mirandola.
In 1978 he took a degreein Hispanic Philology in Barcelona where
he has lived since. A published poet, essayist and storyteller wit’,
more than twenty titles in print, his works are sold throughout th*
Spanish-speaking world.

THE MATHESON TRUST m 81908" 092007"

For the Study of Comparative Religion £9.99 / $14.9 5