For the Time Being Part 4

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

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

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

No. It does not wash.

NOW "Your fathers did eat manna and are dead," Jesus told people-one of his cruelest remarks. Trafficking directly with the divine, as the manna-eating wilderness generation did, and as Jesus did, confers no immunity to death or hazard. You can live as a particle cras.h.i.+ng about and colliding in a welter of materials with G.o.d, or you can live as a particle cras.h.i.+ng about and colliding in a welter of materials without G.o.d. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER FIVE.

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

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

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

S A N D Earth sifts over things. If you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not. The debris on the tops of your feet or shoes thickens, windblown dirt piles around it, and pretty soon your feet are underground. Then the ground rises over your ankles and up your s.h.i.+ns. If the sergeant holds his platoon at attention long enough, he and his ranks will stand upright and buried like the Chinese emperor's army.

Micrometeorite dust can bury you, too, if you wait: A ton falls on earth every hour. Or you could pile up with locusts. At Mount Cook in Montana, at eleven thousand feet, you can see on the flank a dark layer of locusts. The locusts fell or wrecked in 1907, when a swarm flew off course and froze. People noticed the deposit only when a chunk separated from the mountain and fell into a creek, which bore it downstream.

New York City's street level rises every century. The rate at which dirt buries us varies. The Mexico City in which Cortes walked is now thirty feet underground. It would be farther underground except that Mexico City itself has started sinking. Digging a subway line, workers found a temple. Debris lifts land an average of 4.7 feet per century. King Herod the Great rebuilt the Second Temple in Jerusalem two thousand years ago; the famous Western Wall is a top layer of old retaining wall near the peak of Mount Moriah. From the present bottom of the Western Wall to bedrock is sixty feet.

Quick: Why aren't you dusting? On every continent, we sweep floors and wipe tabletops not only to s.h.i.+ne the place, but to forestall burial.

It is interesting, the debris in the air. A surprising portion of it is spider legs, and bits thereof. Spider legs are flimsy, Oxford writer David Bodanis says, because they are hollow. They lack muscles; compressed air moves them. Consequently they snap off easily and go blowing about. Another unexpected source of aerial detritus is tires. Eroding tires shed latex shreds at a brisk clip, say the folks who train their microscopes on air. Farm dust joins sulfuric acid droplets (from burned fossil fuels) and sand from the Sahara Desert to produce the summer haze that blurs and dims valleys and coasts.

We inhale "many hundreds of particles in each breath we take," says Bodanis. Air routinely carries intimate fragments of rug, dung, carca.s.ses, leaves and leaf hairs, coral, coal, skin, sweat, soap, silt, pollen, algae, bacteria, spores, soot, ammonia, and spit, as well as "salt crystals from ocean white-caps, dust sc.r.a.ped off distant mountains, micro bits of cooled magma blown from volcanoes and charred microfragments from tropical forest fires." These sorts of things can add up.

At dusk the particles meet rising water vapor, stick together, and fall; that is when they will bury you. Soil bacteria eat what they can, and the rest of it stays put if there's no wind. After thirty years, there is a new inch of topsoil. (Many inches of new topsoil, however, have washed into the ocean.) We live on dead people's heads. Scratching under a suburb of St. Louis, archaeologists recently found thirteen settlements, one on top of the other, some of which lasted longer than St. Louis has. Excavating the Combe Grenal cave in France, paleontologists found sixty different layers of human occupation.

The pleasantly lazy people of Bronze Age Troy cooperated with the burial process. Instead of sweeping garbage and litter from their floors, they brought in dirt to cover the mess and tramped it down. Soon they stooped in their rooms, so they heightened their doors and roofs for another round. Invaders, too, if they win, tend to build new floors on roofs they ruined. By the nineteenth century, archaeologists had to dig through twenty-four feet of earth to find the monuments of the Roman Forum.

A hundred and thirty years ago, when Heinrich Schliemann was digging at a site he hoped was Troy, he excavated a trench sixteen feet deep before he found worked stones. He had found the top of a wall twenty feet high. Under that wall's foundation, he learned over years of digging, was another high wall, and-oops-another, and another. Archaeologists are still excavating Troy.

Elsewhere, the ziggurats of the ancient Near East sank into the ground rather than having dirt pile upon them; they settled into soft soils and decomposed. "Every few years, the priests would have them built up a few steps higher to compensate for the sinking of the bottom story into the soil." Earthworm tunnels lower buildings, too, as Darwin noticed. These days the heavy Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City is sinking, according to the cathedral's recent writer-in-residence William Bryant Logan, who wrote the excellent book Dirt. The cathedral's base "is now beneath the water table," and "a living spring" has arisen in its crypt.

In Santa Monica, California, early every morning a worker in a bulldozer stirs the previous day's trash into the beach. I saw it. He turns the trash layer under as a farmer lashes fields with last year's leaves. He finishes the top by spreading a layer of sand, so the beach, rising on paper and Styrofoam, looks clean.

There are two kinds of deaths, according to an old saying that Rabbi Pinhas cited. One death is as hard as pa.s.sing a rope through the ring at the top of the mast, and one death is as easy as drawing a hair from milk.

C H I N A In World War I, he had survived thirty months at the front; he rescued the wounded-it was his job-under heavy bombardment. A witness remembered his "rough-hewn face that Greco had prefigured" and his "total lack of ecclesiasticism." One of the officers serving with him wrote, "Two features of his personality struck you immediately: courage and humility." His regiment's Tunisian sharpshooters, who were Muslims, used to say rather cryptically that a "spiritual structure" protected him when he plucked bodies from the ground in crossfire. In battle, he rejoiced in his anonymity and in the front's exhilaration. Precious few men left the Battle of Ypres with a beating heart, let alone a full stomach, let alone exhilaration: "n.o.body except those who were there will ever have the wonder-laden memory that a man can retain of the plain of Ypres in April 1915, when the air of Flanders stank of chlorine and the sh.e.l.ls were tearing down the poplars along by I'Yperle Ca.n.a.l-or, again, of the charred hillsides of Souville, in July 1916, when they held the odor of death.... Those more than human hours impregnate life with a clinging, ineradicable flavor of exaltation and initiation, as though they had been transferred into the absolute." The "clinging, ineradicable flavor" was perhaps mud-the mud of Ypres in which two hundred thousand British and Commonwealth men died, ninety thousand of them lost in the actual mud.

Action he loved. His ever increasing belief that G.o.d calls people to build and divinize the world, to aid G.o.d in redemption, charged every living moment with meaning-precisely why the battlefield gripped him. "The man at the front is ... only secondarily his own self. First and foremost, he is part of a prow cleaving the waves." He dared t.i.tle an essay "Nostalgia for the Front": "All the enchantments of the East, all the spiritual warmth of Paris, are not worth the mud of Douaumont.... How heart-rending it is to find oneself so seldom with a task to be accomplished, one to which the soul feels that it can commit itself unreservedly!"

When he entered the war, he was already a priest. One dawn in 1918, camped in a forest in the Oise with his Zouave regiment, he had neither bread nor wine to offer at Ma.s.s. He had an idea, however, and he wrote it down.

Five years later, he sat on a camp stool inside a tent by the Ordos desert cliffs west of Peking. He reworked his old wartime idea on paper. What G.o.d's priests, if empty-handed, might consecrate at sunrise each day is that one day's development: all that the evolving world will gain and produce, and all it will lose in exhaustion and suffering. These the priest could raise and offer.

In China again, four years later yet, he rode a pony north in the Mongolian gra.s.slands and traced Quaternary strata. Every day still he said to himself what he now called his Ma.s.s upon the altar of the world, "to divinize the new day": "Since once more, my Lord, not now in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia, I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I shall rise beyond symbols to the pure majesty of the real, and I shall offer you, I your priest, on the altar of the whole earth, the toil and sorrow of the world."

C L O U D S Surely the most engaging of Jorge Borges's fictional characters is the boy Ireneo Funes, "Funes the Memorious." He could neither generalize nor abstract. "In his world were nothing but details." "He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882," and he could compare the clouds' shapes to a pattern in marbled endpapers he'd seen once, and compare the clouds' shapes to spray an oar threw on the Rio Negro before the battle of Quebracho. The fictional Funes, a Uruguayan, would have been fourteen years old on the dawn he saw the clouds.

Geologists have named fourteen thousand separate soils.

Some few wandering Hasids go into exile in order "to suffer exile with the Shekinah," the presence of G.o.d in the world-which is, as you have doubtless noticed, lost or strayed. "The man who is detached in this way is the friend of G.o.d, 'as a stranger is the friend of another stranger on account of their strangeness on earth.'"

N U M B E R S One-tenth of the land on earth is tundra. At any time it is raining on only 3 percent of the planet's surface. Lightning strikes the planet about one hundred times every second. For every one of us living people, including every newborn at the moment it appears, there are roughly one thousand pounds of living termites. Our chickens outnumber us four to one.

One-fifth of us are Muslims. One-fifth of us live in China. Almost one-tenth of us live in range of an active or temporarily dormant volcano. More than 3 percent of us are mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded. We humans love tea; we drink more than a billion cups a day. Among us we speak ten thousand languages.

A hundred million of us are children who live on the streets. A hundred twenty million live in countries where we were not born. Twenty-three million of us are refugees. Sixteen million of us live in Cairo. Twelve million fish for a living from small boats. Seven and a half million of us are Uygurs. One million of us crew on freezer trawlers. Two thousand of us a day commit suicide.

HEAD-SPINNING NUMBERS CAUSE MIND TO GO SLACK, the Hartford Courant says. But our minds must not go slack. How can we think straight if our minds go slack? We agree that we want to think straight.

Anyone's close world of family and friends comprises a group smaller than almost all sampling errors, smaller than almost all rounding errors, an invisible group at whose loss the world will not blink. More than two million children die a year from diarrhea, and eight hundred thousand from measles. Do we blink? Stalin starved seven million Ukrainians in one year, Pol Pot killed two million Cambodians, the flu epidemic of 191718 killed twenty-one or twenty-two million people....

The paleontologist suffered, he said, the sense of being "an atom lost in the universe." Individuals blur, journalists use the term "compa.s.sion fatigue." What Ernest Becker called the denial of death is a kind of reality fatigue. Do you suffer this? At what number do other individuals blur for me? Vanish? Our tolerances, I think, vary not only with culture but with age; children rarely grieve for strangers-"lots and lots of dots, in blue water."

Teilhard called us "the whole vast anonymous army of living humanity ... this restless mult.i.tude, confused or orderly, the immensity of which terrifies us, this ocean of humanity whose slow monotonous wave-flows trouble the hearts even of those whose flame is most firm."

Los Angeles airport has twenty-five thousand parking s.p.a.ces. This is about one s.p.a.ce for every person who died in 1985 in Colombia when a volcano erupted. This is one s.p.a.ce each for two years' worth of accidental killings from land mines left over from recent wars. At five to a car, almost all the Inuit in the world could park at LAX. Similarly, if you propped up or stacked four bodies to a car, you could fit into the airport parking lot all the corpses from the firestorm bombing of Tokyo in March, 1945, or all the world's dead from two atomic bombs, or the corpses of Londoners who died in the plague, the corpses of Burundians killed in civil war since 1993. You could not fit America's homeless there, however, even at eighteen or nineteen to a car.

Zechariah saw a man on a red horse. The man and horse stood among myrtle trees in a hollow, and other horses, red and speckled and white, stood behind them. Zechariah asked, "O my lord, what are these?"

The man answered, "These are they whom the Lord hath sent to walk to and fro through the earth."

This took place on the night of the twenty-fourth day of the eleventh month in the second year of Darius.

I S R A E L Through the jammed lanes of Jerusalem's Old City came a Palestinian pus.h.i.+ng a wheelbarrow and shouting, "Yo hablo Espanol! Yo hablo Espanol!"

Here in Jerusalem was the ongoing generations' party and war, whence the groaning prayer of the world arose. Isaiah says: All nations flow to her. Streaming from the ends of the earth, we have come saltating to wors.h.i.+p here-to knap ourselves round.

It was in the grand loose s.p.a.ce at al-Aksa Mosque that I saw the lone long-bearded man sitting against a pillar. A black kaffiyeh wrapped him. He held the Qur'an in broadsheets up to his face, and read it. When I looked away I discovered, by triangulation and inference, that this old man had stuffed wrapped candy up his sleeves, great lots of candy, and was sneaking it all to the barefoot children. Whenever I looked back, I saw him absorbed in the Qur'an; he appeared not to have moved a muscle in weeks.

From the Qur'an's Sura of the Cow: "They shalt ask thee concerning what thou shalt expend: say, The abundance."

Painter Joe Ramirez and I were drawing Jerusalem from a roof. It was Easter Sunday morning, as the Eastern Orthodox church reckons. A Palestinian woman emerged and lifted her blue skirt to step from the door of her rooftop apartment. She squinted in the light, and her round forehead glowed. She walked across the roof to Joe Ramirez and me and handed us each an Easter egg; she had dyed one egg red and the other orange.

We are earth's organs and limbs; we are syllables G.o.d utters from his mouth.

The Dome of the Rock surrounds Mount Moriah's top; the peak bursts through the floor. Here to this bare rock Abraham bore his son on a three days' journey to slit his throat, and here David built an altar which Solomon incorporated into his Temple. Babylonians destroyed the Temple, Hebrew exiles rebuilt it, and it stood for 970 years until Romans destroyed it 2,000 years ago. From here Mohammed, with the archangel Gabriel, rode all night to heaven on a winged horse. To honor the site not much later, an Arab caliph's men had to dig through "many layers of debris" before finding the mountaintop. There they built the octagonal building scarcely altered in the thirteen centuries since. Its gold dome arcs over the rock mountaintop as the real sky's dome arcs over the earth.

Now people like me peered over a high wall to see it as a great curiosity-the bare planet poking up inside a building. It was a great curiosity, and so were the people, for here was our condition made plain, and we came straining to see it.

E N C O U N T E R S Only some deeply grounded and fully paradoxical view of G.o.d can make sense of the notion that G.o.d knows and loves each of 5.9 billion of us.

Later that Greek Orthodox Easter Sunday, holding a dyed red egg in my hand, I was sitting in the lobby of a Jerusalem hotel. Some stout Greek women came and sat in the cl.u.s.ter of chairs around me. When another joined them, I gave her my chair and sat on the floor. More and more came-big-boned, black-clad, wide women, grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Then they all left, except the very oldest one, the very widest one. She could not rise from her chair. To help her I ditched the egg, held the woman's black-sleeved upper arms, and pulled. It didn't work.

"Sorry," she said. I clasped my hands under her arms and behind her shoulders, pressing her bosom to me, braced my knees on her chair, and used all my strength. Still no dice.

"Sorry," she said. She struggled and gripped my back; her upper body bore down on my arms, and her feet pushed at the floor.

"Sorry." We tried again. When at last she rose from the chair, she thanked me: "Sorry." I think it was her only English word.

Sometimes we touch strangers. Sometimes no one speaks. Like clouds we travelers meet and part with members of our cohort, our fellows in the panting caravans of those who are alive while we are. How many strangers have we occasion to hold in our arms? Once there was a beautiful, wasting young woman in a turnpike restroom; I held her in my arms several times as she got in and out of her wheelchair, in and out of her jeans.

In the country then called North Yemen, on the Arabian Peninsula, I visited a southern town whose tribal citizens had seen few if any Westerners. Hundreds of pedestrians were crossing an intersection. There, where jammed streets met, I saw a parked motorcycle. On a special seat behind the empty driver's seat sat a baby, an agreeable-looking, solid baby, whom I greeted. The baby generously extended to me a key ring. I could not help but notice that several hundred Yemenis, the baby's father or brother doubtless somewhere among them, abruptly stopped moving to watch.

I took the key ring, held it in sight, and thanked the baby, the way one does. The several hundred Yemenis held their breaths. I know they were holding their breaths because when-after stretching the interval until the first instant the baby began, visibly at the eyebrows, to doubt life's very fundaments-I handed the key ring back, they all exhaled at once; I could hear it.

T H I N K E R His cantor testified that when the Baal Shem Tov taught Torah, his hearers received it from his mouth "as Israel had once received it at Mount Sinai through the sound of thunder and trumpets, and the voice of G.o.d was not yet silenced on earth, but endured and could still be heard."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killing people by sc.r.a.ping their flesh from their bones was an idea that lived. In the fifth century, Christians killed the wellborn lady Hypatia, according to Gibbon, in a church; they stripped her flesh with oyster sh.e.l.ls, and threw the sh.e.l.lfuls of flesh, "quivering," in a fire. Her problem was Neoplatonism, says writer Hal Crowther; also she studied mathematics. "'After this,' comments Bertrand Russell, 'Alexandria was no longer troubled by philosophers.'"

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

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

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

G.o.d is-for the most part-out of the physical loop of the fallen world he created, let us say. Or G.o.d is the loop, or pervades the loop, or the loop runs in G.o.d like a hole in his side he never fingers. Certainly G.o.d is not a member of the loop like the rest of us, pa.s.sing the water bucket to splash the fire, kicking the bucket, pa.s.sing the buck. After all, the semipotent G.o.d has one hand tied behind his back. (I cannot prove that with the other hand he wipes and stirs our souls from time to time, or that he spins like a fireball through our skulls, and knocks open our eyes so we see flaming skies and fall to the ground and say, "Abba! Father!") N O W A man who struggles long to pray and study Torah will be able to discover the sparks of divine light in all of creation, in each solitary bush and grain and woman and man. And when he cleaves strenuously to G.o.d for many years, he will be able to release the sparks, to unwrap and lift these particular shreds of holiness, and return them to G.o.d. This is the human task: to direct and channel the sparks' return. This task is tikkun, restoration.

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

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

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

Psalm 93: The waters have lifted up their voice;

the waters have lifted up their pounding waves.

CHAPTER SIX.

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

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

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

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

Theologian Rabbi Lawrence Kushner's Reform congregation in Sudbury, Ma.s.sachusetts, naturally holds a celebration on Simchat Torah, when the synagogue completes the whole year's reading of the Torah. (Do not confuse him with bestseller Rabbi Harold Kushner.) "It is a thrilling sight," he wrote. "People come from far and wide. The dancing goes on for hours.

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

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

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

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

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