For the Time Being (7 page)

T H I N K E R
      
       After the war, poet Nelly Sachs called the Baal Shem Tov “The last sheaf-carrier of Israel’s strength.”

The year 1712, district of Podolia, in the Ukraine. As a boy, the Baal Shem Tov worked as a beadle. We know little else about him, except that he read both Hebrew and Aramaic; no one knew he could read at all. Stories of famous rabbis as boys say they studied Talmud all night, each and every one of them, in secret, while everyone else slept. In the case of this boy, I think we had better believe it. His name was Israel ben Eliezer. Later, when people called him the Baal Shem Tov, the master of the good name, they meant he was the greatest of those who know and use the name of God.

He was a yellow-headed boy; to move benches and sweep, he tucked his blond
payess
behind his ears. His family was poor as mud; his father was dead. He lived in the study house, in a back room with the broom and the washrag. For shelter and some food, he cleaned the place and ran errands. He joined his family for most
Shabbos
and holiday meals.

When the men entered the study house in mists of rain, their boots resounded in the doorway and the air they stirred smelled like wet wool. They pulled their prayer books from their coat pockets and lifted their prayer shawls from bags.
The boy saw his own male relatives. They found him simple-minded, he knew: He had already failed at his studies because he skipped school, and now he was failing as beadle, because he fell asleep.

Standing, the men began: “What happiness to be in Your house…. What happiness to worship God!” After they uttered the last word of afternoon prayers, they broke into evening prayers at once: “God, being merciful, grants atonement for sin and does not destroy.” When the liturgy ended, most men removed their prayer shawls and phylacteries, and left: a few lingered to study. Later, if the boy saw a book left open on a bench, he spread a prayer shawl to cover its open pages. In his world, people respected books. When a book wore out, they buried it like a person.

E V I L
      
       Emperor Qin declared himself the first emperor of China 2,220 years ago. He built the clay army and buried its thousands of men to guard his afterlife. In this century, he was Mao’s hero. The emperor longed, his adviser confided at the time, to swallow the world. He conquered all the neighboring kings and unified China. He standardized laws, weights, carriage widths, measures, money, and the mass of written characters. He built good roads and irrigation canals, razed hills and filled valleys. He built the Great
Wall of China. China then, and for centuries and dynasties to come, yielded and enjoyed more fine art, literacy, wealth, and complexity than any other civilization.

He was forty-five years old when he buried 260 real Confucian scholars alive. Some accounts say he buried 460 Confucian scholars alive. It scarcely matters—two hundred here or there. Whatever they and their wives, children, and parents suffered has vanished, too, whether he buried alive 260 scholars or 460. The emperor ordered his soldiers to plant some of them in pits up to their necks. Then the soldiers beheaded the sproutlike heads with axes; they bent their knees to swing low to slice. Soldiers buried the other living scholars deep, and those died whole.

“These scholars,” Emperor Qin explained, “confuse the black-headed people.” After he killed them, he burned their books: In fact, he burned every book in the empire except those in his own library and some farming and divination manuals. He ordered his far-flung soldiers to kill anyone who quoted books, and, for good measure, anyone who sang old songs.

It is never easy to find good fill for construction. Many workers died building the Great Wall; no one knows if millions died or mere thousands. They were conscripted peasants. Under emperor’s orders, living workers crushed their fellows’ dead bones and stuck them into the Great Wall as
fill. Similarly, perhaps, according to I. J. Singer’s
The Brothers Ashkenazi
, “ancient Egyptians forced the Jews to build their children as living sacrifices into the walls of Pithom and Ramses.” Again, chiefs in Fiji used to force captives to stand in the postholes of houses—to hold up the houses. Without iron tools it is, of course, cumbersome to fashion trees into posts. (Few thinkers try to guess why we are here; of those, few concur. Maybe we are here, or once were here, to serve Fijian chiefs as posts.) In Teilhard’s novel about World War I, a soldier says before a battle that if he dies, he would like his body “to remain there, molded into the clay of the fortifications, like a living cement thrown by God.” Doubtless the conscripted peasants who built the Great Wall, the enslaved Jews, and the living Fiji cornerposts held no such view.

The emperor’s architect who designed the Great Wall tried hard—real hard—to build it to jibe with the magical terrain, but in the course of all those miles he was bound to have cut through “some veins of the earth,” as he wrote in his forced confession. For this geomantic blunder the emperor ordered him to commit suicide, and he did.

The thousands of wealth have fallen with wonders, said Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov. Do you find this unclear? It certainly sounds like the sort of thing thousands of wealth do. They fall. Does anyone know what the rabbi meant by wonders?

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav said that God studies Torah three hours a day. The Talmud notes that God prays, and puts on phylacteries. What does God pray? “May it be my will that my mercy overcome my anger.”

After one battle, Emperor Qin killed four hundred thousand prisoners. After another he located all the members of families who were his mother’s family’s enemies, and had them buried alive. Those were cruel ages, East and West.

Quite recently, English policy deliberately starved a million men, women, and children in Ireland—one person in eight. Pol Pot killed one (or two) million of his own Cambodians—again, one (or two) in eight. Stalin’s decision to export grain, long before his 1934 purges, killed ten million peasants, and another ten million Soviet citizens died in the purges and gulags. Communist China’s death toll tops these hotly contested charts at seventy-two million victims; Mao’s Great Leap Forward policy alone killed thirty million people in three years, mostly by hunger. In 1994 Rwandan Hutus killed eight hundred thousand Tutsis in one hundred days.

That mass killings and genocides recur on earth does not mean that they are similar. Each instance of human, moral evil, and each victim’s personal death, possesses its unique history and form. To generalize, as Cynthia Ozick points out, is to “befog” evil’s specificity. Any blurring is dangerous, if
inevitable, because the deaths of a few hundred scholars or ten thousand people or one million or thirty million people pain little at diminishing removes of time and place. Shall we contemplate Chinese scholars’ beheadings twenty-three centuries ago? It hurts worse to break a leg.

What, here in the West, is the numerical limit to our working idea of “the individual”? As recently as 1894, bubonic plague killed 13 million people in Asia—the same plague that killed twenty-five million Europeans five and a half centuries earlier. Have you even heard mention of this recent bubonic plague? Can our prizing of each human life weaken with the square of the distance, as gravity does?

Do we believe the individual is precious, or do we not? My children and your children and their children? Of course. The 250,000 Karen tribespeople who are living now in Thailand? Your grandfather? The family of men, women, and children who live in central Asia as peoples called Ingush, Chechen, Buryats, and Bashliks? The people your address book tracks? Any other group you care to mention among the 5.9 billion persons now living, or perhaps among the 80 billion dead?

There are about a billion more people living now than there are years since our sun condensed from interstellar gas. I cannot make sense of this.

A dean of Canterbury Cathedral, who was perhaps a bit of a card, once found actual numbers so alarming that in a formal
discussion, according to Huston Smith, he cried out, “Short views, for God’s sake, short views.”

N O W
      
       The good times, and the heroic people, are all gone. Everyone knows this. Everyone always has. Formerly, there were giants in the earth. The Adam and Eve of legend had every reason to think that they lost innocence, botched paradise, and erred their way into a time of suffering and evil. The men of the fifth century B.C.E. who wrote out the stories of Moses, of Abraham, and even of Noah, depicted them already pleading with God to save their visibly corrupt generations. The mournings of the wise recur as a comic refrain down the vaults of recorded time.

Kali Yuga
is Sanskrit for our own degenerate and unfortunate times: “the end of the end.” The Hindus first used the term between 300 B.C.E. and 300 C.E.

In the Talmud, a rabbi asks, “The ancient saints used to tarry for a while, pray a while, and tarry a while after their prayer. When did they have time to study Torah? When did they have time to do their work?”

Another rabbi answers, quoting yet earlier rabbis about the men of old, “Because they were saints, their Torah study was blessed and their work was blessed.” Already in the first
century thinkers thought the world was shot to hell. Paul of Tarsus, living then too, called his days “these late times.”

Almost sixteen centuries ago, Augustine looked back three centuries at the apostles and their millennialism: “Those were last days then; how much more so now!”

“Nowadays,” an eleventh-century Chinese Buddhist master complained, “we see students who sit diligently but do not awaken.”

In the twelfth century, Rabbi Judah Halevy mourned the loss of decent music: Music declined because it became the work of inferior people. It degenerated from its former greatness because people, too, had degenerated.

In the twelfth century in Korea, Buddhist master Chinul referred sadly to “people in this age of derelict religion.”

“There is so much worldliness nowadays,” Saint Teresa of Ávila wrote to her brother in 1570, “that I simply hate having possessions.”

“Nowadays,” a Hasidic rabbi said in the late 1700s, “men’s souls are orphaned and their times decayed.” This was only one generation after the great Hasidic masters—after the Baal Shem Tov and the Great Maggid. “Every day, miracles dwindle and marvels go away,” said another. Rabbi Nachman mourned “widespread atheism and immorality in the world today.”

An eighteenth-century rabbi said, “Newfangled people
have appeared now who care about money.” “Nowadays, in these generations,” wrote a nineteenth-century Hasid master, the great teachers and prophets are dead, and all we have are “lesser lights.”

John Ruskin as he aged judged that nature itself was collapsing. The weather had actually come unhinged—this after a rainy year—and it was “defiled” and “foul.”

In our time, says a twentieth-century Hasidic rabbi, we are in a coma.

B I R T H
      
       Generations of physicians have, in their witty way, given jocular names to our defects. Happy-puppet syndrome produces severely mentally retarded adults who jerk and laugh. “The laughter,” admonishes the physician, “is not apparently associated with happiness.”