We conducted many investigations into the Trinity in Ivanie, and it seemed to me that I had come to grasp its meaning.

What is our real task if not the establishment of equilibrium between the unity of God and the multiplicity of the world created by him? As for ourselves, people—are we not abandoned in this “in-between,” in between the One and a world of divisions? This limitless “between” has its strange critical point—the double. This is the first experience of the thinking man—when he notices the abyss that appears between himself and the rest of the world. This is the painful Two, the fundamental crack in the created world that gives rise to contradictions and all sorts of dualisms. This and that. You and me. Left and right. Sitra Achra, or the other side, the left side, the demonic forces in the guise of the broken shells of the vessels that could not hold the light when they were broken (shevirat haKelim)—that is the Two. Perhaps were it not for the Two in the world, the world would be completely different, although it’s hard to imagine that; no doubt Jacob would be able to. One time we worked ourselves to the bone, late into the night, trying to complete this assignment, but it was to no avail, for our minds think in this rhythm: two, two, two.

The Trinity is holy, like a wise wife, reconciling contradictions. Two is like a young roe doe, leaping over every contradiction. That’s what makes the Trinity holy, that it can tame evil. But because the Trinity must ceaselessly work on behalf of the equilibrium it disturbs, it is shaky, and it isn’t until you get to Four that you attain the highest holiness and perfection that restores divine proportions. It is not in vain that God’s name in Hebrew is composed of four letters, and that all the elements of the world were established so by Him (Yeruhim once told me that even animals can count to four!), and everything that is important in the world must be quadruple.

Once Moshe went to the kitchen, took some challah dough, brought it back, and started forming some sort of shape from it. We laughed at him, especially Jacob, because nothing went together less than Moshe and kitchen work.

“What is it?” he asked us, and revealed the result of his project.

We saw on the table an alef made of dough, and we answered him accordingly. Then Moshe took the ends of the holy letter made of dough and in a couple of simple movements reshaped it.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Now it was a cross.

For, Moshe argued, the holy letter is the germ of the cross, its original form. If it were a living plant, it would grow into a cross. The cross thus contains a great mystery. For God is one in three forms, and then to the threeness of God we add the Shekhinah.

Such knowledge was not for everyone. People who had gathered with us in Ivanie were of such varying backgrounds and had had such different experiences that we all agreed not to give them this holy knowledge, lest they understand it amiss. When they asked me about the Trinity, I would raise my hand to my forehead and touch the skin there, saying, “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

These were the kinds of conversations we had only with each other, in a small group and in hushed voices—for the walls of the Ivanie huts tended to not be sealed completely—when we finished writing letters, and our fingers were all covered in ink, and our eyes were so tired that all they could do was gaze into the dance of the candle flames. And then Moliwda would tell us tales of the beliefs of those Bogomils, as he called them, and in those beliefs we were surprised to determine that we had much in common with them, as if the path taken by both us and them were in the beginning one but later bifurcated to then converge again into one, just like our two roads in Ivanie.

Is life itself not a stranger to this world? And are we not strangers, and is our God not a stranger? Is this not why we appear so different, so distant, so scary, and incomprehensible to those who really do belong to this world? But this world is equally bizarre and incomprehensible to any stranger to it, and its rules are incomprehensible, as are its customs. For the stranger comes from the farthest distance, from the outside, and he must endure the fate of the foreigner, alone and defenseless, completely misunderstood. We are foreigners’ foreigners, Jews’ Jews. And we will always be homesick.

Since we do not know the roads of this world, we move through it defenseless, blind, knowing only that we are strangers to it.

Moliwda said that as soon as we strangers, living amongst those others, get used to and learn to take pleasure in the charms of this world, we will forget where we came from and what sort of origins were ours. Then our misery will end, but at the price of forgetting our true nature, and this is the most painful moment of our fate, the fate of the stranger. That is why we must remind ourselves of our foreignness and care for this memory as we would our most treasured possession. Recognize the world as the place of our exile, recognize its laws as foreign, as strange . . .

Dawn is beginning to break when Nahman finishes; a moment later, just outside the window, the rooster crows in such dramatic fashion that Nahman trembles like a night demon who fears the light. He slips into the warmth of the bed and lies there for a long time on his back, unable to go to sleep. Polish words crowd into his mind, sticking together into sentences, and not even knowing how, he silently composes his prayer for the soul, but in Polish. And since yesterday he saw Gypsies here, they, too, are jumbled up in his mind, and they jump into his sentences, the whole caravan of them:

Like a sailor visiting the sea’s abyss,

Or, in the vast uncharted wilderness,

Like a Gypsy caravan, my dear soul

Won’t travel toward just any goal.

No shackles of iron can close it in,

Nor the pompousness of their chagrin,

No custom, no tradition will strain it.

Not my own heart’s shelter can contain it.

It alters since it doesn’t alter,

My soul won’t let me down or falter.

My soul rises, good Lord, to Your great dome;

Give it a fit room inside Your home.

Not even Nahman himself knows when he falls asleep. (The Books of Jacob)

By the time the Jews left Egypt, the world was ready for salvation and everything was waiting, prepared—both down below and on high. It was unprecedented—the wind died down completely, the leaves did not move on the trees, the clouds in the sky drifted so slowly that only the most patient were able to discern their movement. It was the same with the water—it became thick as cream, while the earth went the other way, became flimsy and unreliable, so that it often happened that people fell into it up to their ankles. No bird chirped, no bee flew, there were no waves in the sea, people did not speak—it was so quiet you could hear the heartbeat of the smallest animal.

Everything stopped in anticipation of the new Law, and all eyes were turned to Moses, who was climbing Mount Zion to receive it directly from God’s hands. And so it was that God Himself engraved the Law on two stone tablets in such a way that it would be discernible to the human eye and comprehensible to the human mind. This was the Torah of Atzilut.

During Moses’s absence, his people gave in to temptation and indulged in sin. Then Moses, coming down from on high and seeing what was going on, thought: I left them for such a short time, and yet they were unable to persist in virtuousness. Thus they are unworthy of the beneficent and noble law God appointed them. In his great despair Moses shattered the tablets on the ground so that they broke into a thousand pieces and turned to dust. Then a terrible wind rose up and threw Moses against the rock and set the clouds and the water in motion and made the earth solid again. Moses understood that his people were not mature enough for the law of liberty intended for the saved world. All day and all night he sat resting against the rock and looking down at the fires burning in the camp of his people, and he heard their voices, their music, and the cries of their children. Then Samael came to him in the guise of an angel and dictated to him the commandments that from then on would keep God’s people enslaved.

In order that no one would know the true Law of Freedom, Samael carefully gathered the little pieces of the shattered Torah of Atzilut and scattered them around the world among many different religions. When the Messiah comes, he will have to pass over into Samael’s kingdom to collect the tablets’ shards and present the new Law in its final revelation.

“What was this lost Law all about?” asks Wajgełe, when she and Nahman climb into bed.

“Who could possibly know, since it has been dispersed?” he answers warily. “It was good. It respected people.”

But Wajgełe is stubborn.

“Was it the opposite of what we have now? The opposite of ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ would be ‘Thou shalt commit it.’ And the opposite of ‘Thou shalt not kill’ would be: ‘Kill.’”

“It’s not that simple.”

“You always tell me that—‘It’s not that simple, it’s not that simple . . . ,’” she mocks him. She pulls a pair of woolen stockings up over her skinny legs.

“People want easy explanations, and so we must simplify everything for their sake, and since it cannot be written down, it all becomes rather stupid . . . This or that, black, white—it’s like digging with a hoe. Simple is dangerous.”

“But I want to understand it, and I can’t.”

“Wajgełe, my time will come, and your time will come. That is grace. Sabbatai, the old Mosaic law, the one given by Samael, is no longer in effect. That also explains the conversion of our Lord, Sabbatai, to Islam. He saw that Israel, in obeying the Mosaic law, was no longer in the service of the God of the Truth. That is why our Lord gave up the Torah in favor of the Din Islam . . .” (The Books of Jacob)

There exists in Ein Sof, that is, in the Infinite itself, in the divine source, absolute good, which is the origin and source of all perfection and all good in the world. It is perfection, and perfection requires no alterations, it is dignified and immovable, there can be no movement in it. But for us, who look upon it from the underside of creation, from afar, this motionlessness seems dead, and therefore bad, yet perfection excludes movement, creation, change, and therefore the very possibility of our freedom. That is why it is said that in the depths of absolute good, the root of all evil is concealed, and that root is the negation of every miracle, every movement, and all that is possible and all that might still happen.

For us, then, for people, good is something other than what it is for God. For us, good is the tension between God’s perfection and his withdrawal in order that the world might arise. For us, good is the absence of God from where he could instead be.

Nahman rubs his chilled fingers. He can’t stop, the sentences attack his brain one after the next:

When the vessels broke, and the world came about, it immediately began to climb up to where it fell from, gathering itself from bottom to top, from least to most perfect. The world ascends higher and higher and works to perfect itself, obtaining new goods and adding them to the previous ones, organizing the sparks released from the shells of matter into brilliance and strength. This is tikkun, a process of repairing in which mankind can assist. The process of ascent must transcend the law that is already in place and create a new law, in order to then transcend it again. In this world of dead husks, nothing has been given once and for all. Whosoever does not move up stands still, that is, falls downward. (The Books of Jacob)

I take it all back. I take it all back. There are certain kinds of men in every field that I can talk to as well as I can talk to a good scientist. I met a historian, a writer of history from France once, and had a marvellous conversation with him. Maurois, his name was, André Maurois. And then I met an artist, Robert Irwin, who’s a very important artist in Los Angeles, in modern art, and I could talk to him at the same depth of excitement.

So I take it all back. If you give me the right man, in any field, I can talk to him. I know what the condition is: that he did whatever he did as far as he can go, that he studied every aspect of it, that he has stretched himself to the end. He’s not a dilettante in any way. Therefore he’s up against mysteries all the way around the edge. We can talk about mystery and awe. That’s what we have in common.

The cowherds pulled her out when they watered the cattle at dawn. By the time we arrived there on our way to school, she was lying on the thin ice formed by the water which had been spilt from the well. Under this covering the black clods of earth, the pieces of straw and dung glinted and sparkled like rare jewels under glass. There she lay with open eyes in which, like the small objects under the ice, was frozen the broken terror of a startled glance. Her mouth was open, her nose rather haughtily tilted, and on her forehead and beautiful cheeks there were huge scratches which had either occurred during her fall, or had been made by the cowherds as they let down the bucket before they caught sight of her among the ice-patches in the dark winter dawn. She was barefooted, she had left her boots in the assistant farm-manager’s room, by the bed from which she had suddenly leapt and dashed straight as an arrow to the well.

I first read these words ten years ago, on a hot day in February. Early in the morning of that day I had closed the window of this room and had pulled down the blind in order to keep out the sunlight and the north wind. I had then taken a book down from one of the shelves and had sat at this table and begun to read.

The name of the book that I read on that hot day has already been written on one of these pages. I had taken the book down from the shelf in the morning because I wanted to read a book about grasslands. Even then, ten years ago, I had grown tired of most of the books on my shelves. Each year I had read fewer books. The only books I was still interested in reading were books about grasslands.

Until that hot day in February I had never opened the covers of the book containing the words that I wrote on this page fifteen minutes ago. I took down the book from the shelf on that hot day because I understood that one of the words on the cover of the book was the word for grassland in the Magyar language.

Ten years ago I believed that any person named or referred to in a book was already dead. The person named on the cover of the book might have been alive or dead, but any person named or referred to inside the book was unquestionably dead.

On the hot day when I first read in a certain book the words beginning, The cowherds pulled her out when they watered the cattle at dawn...I did not at once cease to believe what I had believed all my life concerning the people named or referred to in books. What I did was to write on a page.

Of the many hundreds of pages I have written in this room, the first page I wrote was a letter. After I had written the letter I addressed it and posted it to a woman who had once lived in a street named Daphne in the district where I was born. Then I went on writing on other pages, every one of which is still lying somewhere around me in this room. On every day while I was writing on pages, I thought of the people referred to or named in the book with the word for grassland on its cover.

At first while I was writing I thought of those people as though they were all dead and I myself was alive. At some time while I was writing, however, I began to suspect what I am now sure of. I began to suspect that all persons named or referred to in the pages of books are alive, whereas all other persons are dead.

When I wrote the letter which was the first of all my pages, I was thinking of a young woman who was, I thought, dead while I was still alive. I thought the young woman was dead while I remained alive in order to go on writing what she could never read.

Today while I write on this last page, I am still thinking of the young woman. Today, however, I am sure the young woman is still alive. I am sure the young woman is still alive while I am dead. Today I am dead but the young woman remains alive in order to go on reading what I could never write. (Inland)

Then let them that are in Judaea flee to the mountains...

In the spring of 1951 I first saw the leaves coming forth on the fig-tree in my backyard two months before I heard the fig-tree mentioned in the gospel. When I first saw the leaves I was living in the house with the fish pond behind it. I could not have imagined when I first saw the leaves that before I heard the gospel I would have travelled two hundred kilometres across the Great Divide to the district between the Ovens and Reedy Creek and then back again to the old weatherboard house on the edge of a grassland near the backyard where my father had held me for my first photograph.

I heard the last gospel of the church year only a half-hour’s walk from where I had seen the leaves on the fig-tree but I knew while I heard the gospel that I would never see that particular fig-tree again – or the house with the fish pond or the girl from Bendigo Street.

When I heard the gospel I felt a heaviness pressing on me, but not for long. I was still only twelve years old, and the summer and the new church year were beginning. I had thought, as I thought every year on the last Sunday after Pentecost, of the end of the world drifting towards me like clouds or smoke from the direction of Europe or the Middle East; but then I had thought of a greenness within the greyness.

I was thinking every day of the settlement in the mountains between the King and the Broken. I was going to ask my parents not to take me to the other side of the city of Melbourne but to let me live with one of the families who grew potatoes in the red soil of clearings in the green forest and who sang the office of vespers and compline every evening in the timber chapel built with their own hands.

Something else kept me from feeling heaviness. Among the first words of the gospel for the last Sunday after Pentecost are the words addressed to the reader. I had always considered those words as addressed in a special sense to me.

Like many children, I was afraid of the end of the world. But even at the worst moment – even when the stars of heaven were falling and the sun was being darkened – I could still hear the sound of the words being read. Not even the end of the world could drown out the sound of the words describing it.

I considered myself the Reader. Even after the greenness of the world had been buried under the greyness, the Reader would have to remain alive in order to read what the Writer had written about the green and the grey.

For twenty-five years, until I began to write on these pages, I would have said that the child had been right. I would have said that I had remained alive. I was alive and reading.

When I began to write on these pages I thought often about a person I called my reader. Sometimes I addressed the person named Reader. I could not think of words without a reader. I could not think of a reader who was not alive. But since I first began to write on these pages I have learned that a reader need not be alive. I can think of this page being read by a person who is dead as easily as you, reader, can think of this page as being written by someone who is dead.

Heaven and earth shall pass away but my words shall not pass away. (Inland)

And from the fig-tree learn a parable: when the branch thereof is now tender, and the leaves come forth, you know the summer is nigh. So likewise you, when you shall see all these things, know that it is nigh, even at the doors.

Even the gospel was more than one gospel. The reading for the last Sunday after Pentecost began with the abomination of desolation and with a warning to the reader. For three quarters of its length, the gospel for that last Sunday of the year continued to warn. Near the end came the clouds and the four winds, and then the last pause before the ultimate turmoil. And in that last pause, startlingly under the terrible sky, the fig-tree appeared, with its leaves coming forth.

More clearly than anything I read or heard in my childhood, that last pause near the end of the last gospel of the year told me that every thing would always be more than one thing. The last pause told me that every thing would always contain another thing, which would contain still another thing or which would seem, absurdly at first sight, to contain the thing that had seemed to contain it.

Five years after I had heard the last gospel of the ecclesiastical year in the parish church of Saint Mark, Fawkner, I listened for the first time in my life to a piece of what I called classical music. Near the end of that music I heard a pause. The solemn themes of the music paused for a moment. Just before the clouds had drifted over all the sky and just before the four winds whistled and the last struggle began, I heard the pause of the summer that seemed nigh.

I have heard that pause many times since in pieces of music. I have heard the pause while I read the next-to-last page in many a book. The larger, the solemn themes are about to go into battle for the last time. By now, of course, the solemn themes are not themes but men and women, and when they pause for the last time they look over their shoulders.

They look back towards some district where they lived as children or where they once fell in love. Perhaps they see the green lawn or even the branch with green leaves that they saw in their native district. For a moment a simple theme is the only theme heard; the greenness appears in place of the greyness.

For an absurd moment within that moment, the listener or the reader dares to suppose that this after all is the last theme; this and not the other is the end; the green has outlasted the grey; the grey has been covered over at last by the green.

But this is only a moment within a moment. The clouds resume their drifting; the four winds whistle. The solemn themes turn to meet the storm. (Inland)

 hen you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, standing in the holy place (he that readeth, let him understand)...

These words, like most of the words of my religion, had many meanings. Whenever I heard these words as a child, I was standing myself in the holy place: in a large weatherboard church in McCrae Street, Bendigo; or in a tiny church with poles propping its walls on the continuation inland of the Great Ocean Road at Nirranda; or in the fibro-cement and weatherboard church-school in Landells Road, Pascoe Vale. I was standing in the holy place and hearing the words, but I had my missal open in my hands – I was also reading. I was he who reads: he who was commanded to understand.

Around me in the church, hundreds of other people – children and adults – were reading the same words that I was reading. Yet I had no doubt that I was the one commanded to understand; I was of all those readers the true reader.

I was the true reader because I had always known that everything I read was true. If it was not true in the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri, or wherever I happened to be standing or sitting when I read, still it was true in some district elsewhere.

When I had read those words in weatherboard churches or in the fibro-cement and weatherboard church-school, I had understood that all the districts of the world would one day be destroyed. At some time before the end, the people of all the districts of the world would flee from their homes; they would flee with their few sticks of furniture and their rags of clothes, but they would not escape. The people of every district would suffer, and the females would suffer worst. Then, while the people were still fleeing, they would see Jesus himself: the person who had first spoken the words that had later been written by Matthew. The people trying to escape would see, towards the end, the true speaker of the words they had once read, coming in the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty.

Whenever I had read the gospel for the last Sunday after Pentecost I had seen a sky darkening, men and their wives and children fleeing, and then the grey clouds of heaven drifting towards the people. But without lifting my eyes from the page, I knew that the sky was mostly blue over the district where I was standing; I knew that men were pushing lawnmowers across their backyards and women were opening the doors of ovens and then pouring cups of water into baking-dishes where legs of lamb or rolls of beef were roasting. I knew that these men and women saw no clouds drifting towards them. (Inland)