The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six Read online

  THE BOOK OF THE UNKNOWN

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  TITLE PAGE

  EPIGRAPH

  AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

  ALEF THE IDIOT

  BEIT THE LIAR

  GIMMEL THE GAMBLER

  DALET THE THIEF

  HEYH THE CLOWN

  VOV THE WHORE

  ZAYIN THE PROFANE

  CHET THE CHEAT

  TET THE IDLER

  YOD THE INHUMAN

  YOD-ALEF THE MURDERER

  YOD-BEIT THE REBEL

  EDITORS’ AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Despise no man and deem nothing impossible,

  for every man has his hour and every thing its place.

  —TALMUD

  THE BOOK OF THE UNKNOWN

  AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

  Destiny is an accident.

  Twenty-three years ago, while I was in graduate school, the stone remains of a lost synagogue were discovered by construction workers in a small German town. The laborers were digging the foundation for an apartment complex, and the landowner, heavily in debt, permitted building to stop for just one week while every Jewish student in the region was dispatched to save all that could be preserved.

  There, beneath a scattering of rocks, I found the documents that would make my career, a crypt of interred contracts and commentaries and correspondence, buried beneath the temple because religious law forbade the destruction of any scrap of paper bearing the name of God. From that textual cemetery, or genizah, I resurrected the traditions and rituals of an extinct Jewish village. The dissertation I wrote established my reputation. By my thirtieth birthday, I’d become a leading scholar in my field, lecturing around the world. The only son of immigrants, shtetl peasants who’d escaped the Holocaust, I was living the life that my parents had struggled to bequeath, the embodiment of their dreams.

  My mother died in 1998, and my father followed her in 2004. By then my books about lost Jewish communities and their hidden rituals were standard texts. I blush to confess that footnotes from my dissertation had become subdisciplines, complete with postdocs and conference sessions. I cringe to admit that my name was cited in papers concerning archeological offal that would have passed as landfill when I was in school. Even as interest in shtetl life expanded, material dwindled. The field was drifting from the scholarly to the frivolous, and I was, to my chagrin, the honored paterfamilias. As I slouched into middle age, acquiring my father’s paunch, I was settling into academic complacence.

  It did not have to be that way. That’s the shame of it. For nearly a quarter century, I’d retained a secret, holding on to a discovery I’d made while excavating that German genizah, preserving a fragment that, if my suspicion was right, would eclipse all that I’d yet achieved. Until my father’s death, I’d carefully concealed the fragment, and suppressed the suspicion. I had avoided the whole subject because it was so improbable, completely implausible to anyone who wasn’t superstitious.

  And yet, for all my sober professionalism, I’d never quite dismissed it. Superstition had saved my family. My father had been a deeply superstitious man who’d believed that the years of pogroms could be read in the Sabbath flame, an ancient tradition in his native village. The Nazis had invaded in the year he foretold, and the genocide had begun within months of my parents’ arrival on Ellis Island, the town’s only survivors.

  My father never forgot. Rather than assimilate, he carried the old country within him. He taught me the ways of dybbuks, and showed me how to make sacred amulets. He told me of powerful seraphim unmentioned in Torah. If I paid close attention, he rewarded me with honey cakes. But if I asked too many questions, inquiring about the anatomy of angels or the motivations of demons, he responded with strange tales about a rogue Kabbalist whose curiosity had once unmoored the world.

  The Kabbalist was named Yaakov ben Eleazer, and, as I later learned, his legend had many versions. According to some, he’d been a prodigy, an orphan whose only yeshiva companions were books with which he held deep discussions on subjects that fellow students could not find when they read the same passages. He memorized the Babylonian Talmud, that great compendium of law and lore, before the beard grew on his chin. Forbidden to study Kabbalah because of his age, he conjured his own version, too arcane for even the rabbis to fathom. Or maybe not. Other stories claimed that he stole sacred Kabbalistic texts from the synagogue library, yet misunderstood them so totally that he rendered them incomprehensible to learned men. By this reckoning, he was not a prodigy scholar but a precocious charlatan.

  What nobody disputes is that Yaakov could sing. After his voice broke, mothers kept their daughters well covered in synagogue, wrapped up in mantles and shawls, lest his baritone open wombs and his words gestate children. The women’s concerns were unwarranted. Yaakov wasn’t training his voice for matinee seduction. He had studied that God sang the world into existence using the sounds of the Hebrew alphabet, and that those syllables, rightly pronounced, were all-powerful. The orphan, lacking every earthly influence, intended to produce that heavenly music in his gullet.

  For a time, he must have kept his ambitions sotto voce, as we hear about him again only as a grown man, assistant to the cantor at the synagogue. He kept a small room in the temple attic. Strange noises emanated from that cell at night. Scholars in the adjacent study house claimed they sounded less like prayer than copulation with demons.

  Yaakov responded to their accusations by revealing the system that he’d been developing since summoning Kabbalah as a child. He believed that the true sounds of the Hebrew alphabet were concealed between the consonants, where ordinary people put vowels. Those vowels, never written in ancient days, muffled the music that carried God’s word. He wouldn’t explain how to read the music, but, compelled to prove his system, promised to betray a great secret: With the unearthly power his song gave him, he would discover the thirty-six hallowed names of the Lamedh-Vov.

  Or was this all rumor? Had others simply heard unnatural sounds and assumed that the orphan who’d once conjured, or stolen, Kabbalah was pursuing greater dangers? Either way, the secret of the Lamedh-Vov, the notion that it might be revealed, would have terrified as much as it beguiled.

  The Hebrew letters Lamedh and Vov together signify the number thirty-six. That many righteous people are needed at any time, Talmud relates, to justify humanity in the mind of God. Without them, the world would be doomed. Yet, unlike the elect of other religions, these living saints—I use the word saint because no other term in the English language adequately conveys their spiritually elevated status—are necessarily anonymous. Learn the identity of a Lamedh-Vov, and that person would no longer be among the thirty-six; another righteous man or woman somewhere would be called for to keep the world in balance. Why the secrecy? Why are the elect themselves even forbidden from knowing their virtue? The self-righteous are abundant in any time. The saintly are of another order.

  By seeking to learn the thirty-six names, then, Yaakov ben Eleazer was putting the world in jeopardy. The Lamedh-Vov have been described as pillars, replaced one at a time on account of death or other events. But to grasp for the entire roster? Yaakov would fell every pillar at once.

  Legend claims that he did it. Late one night, as his song peaked, the world lurched. Every scholar in the study house rushed to his room. His cell could not be breached. Ten men together knocked down the door. Yaakov had fallen dead in front of it, struck by the consequences of his deed. The forbidden knowledge died with him, before the pillars could topple, and the world tumble to oblivi
on.

  The scholars, perhaps complicit for not curtailing his experiments, were quick to dispose of the evidence. Fearful of seeing the dreaded list of thirty-six, they gathered all of his papers and books in darkness. Blindly they carried his written belongings, interring them in the genizah beneath the synagogue, under ancient volumes turned to sod.

  Rustling in their hands, the sacred list of names, some say, unsang Yaakov’s sins.

  This, then, was the folklore, dimly remembered, that came to mind twenty-three years ago as I worked to excavate the old German synagogue, and unearthed, beneath several feet of scriptorial sediment, a pale skin of parchment listing thirty-six people in ancient Hebrew. Already I’d observed the name Yaakov ben Eleazer on several genizah documents, though there must have been many Yaakovs born to Eleazers in the day, and I’d merely smiled at the coincidence that he was a scholar of Kabbalah, an amusing anecdote with which to tease my superstitious father. The skin of parchment, however, was less easily laughed away.

  The thirty-six names appeared not to have been inked in lampblack, but emblazoned with fire. Moreover the lettering resembled no calligraphy I’d ever seen, let alone other writings I’d found in the Kabbalist’s fervid hand. There weren’t any pen strokes. Every line appeared to have been laid down at once, thirty-six names of men and women, each, in the old fashion, with a town of origin. I was well acquainted with the premodern age through my graduate research. I knew the materials and traditions. I’d seen census ledgers and divorce petitions. A list like this didn’t fit.

  Yet what could I say? I’d have been mad to mention Yaakov’s legend to my devoutly secular colleagues, and anyway I didn’t really believe, I thought, in the Lamedh-Vov. Embarrassed by my hesitation over the vellum, I slipped it under my shirt. And mortified by my impulsive theft, I kept it locked in an old suitcase for decades.

  I intended to tell my father about it, to show him the list so that he could reassure me that it was not sacred, that the story of Yaakov was myth. But for five years I couldn’t confess to him that I’d stolen it, and for eighteen years I couldn’t admit to myself that I’d been unable to confess. Then he was dead and I was alone.

  While my parents passed more than half their lives in America, my mother had insisted on burial in her family plot near Lodz. In death, my father followed her there, and I accompanied the coffin. Pressed between two starched shirts, I brought the list of thirty-six, intending finally to bury it as well. First, however, out of respect for his cherished superstitions, if not acknowledgment of my own latent beliefs, I vowed to visit one town on the list, to see if I could find any trace of saintliness.

  The closest was a village of several hundred people. I set out the day after the funeral. In my rented sedan, I was conspicuous. Was I lost? Why had I come? In my adult life, I’ve never felt as dumb as I did then, when, as if by way of explanation, I mumbled the name of a man who’d supposedly lived there centuries before.

  I was met with incredulity. Silently, I was brought to the tavern by the villagers who’d found me, and poured a draft of beer. They repeated my words to the aged barkeep. Her voice, barely audible at first, gradually recovered youth as she told me an old folktale, localest of local legends, about a fool with that name.

  I missed my return flight, rescheduled twice. I lived in that village for weeks. I asked all the people who’d ever heard the legend to relate it as they remembered it. I asked each of them if they knew any of the other names on my list. I asked if they’d ever heard of Yaakov ben Eleazer. They had not. Yet when I told them the tradition of the Lamedh-Vov, they didn’t find surprising the inclusion of their local idiot, whose foolishness, they believed, brought the village wisdom.

  Naturally, I was familiar with the idea that the Lamedh-Vov were people who appeared insignificant. The beauty of the tradition, perhaps its lesson, was that saintliness, unlike heroism, is quotidian. The Lamedh-Vov were said to be chimney sweeps and water carriers, humble folks untutored in ethics.

  Why not also an idiot? Thoughtless deeds, even acts deemed wicked, may do right, though the merits may never be apparent. Talmud instructs followers to praise God for good and evil alike. I was not one to judge a Lamedh-Vov. With copious notes and a hastily arranged sabbatical, I traveled to the next village on Yaakov’s numinous itinerary.

  In every town the beer was differently brewed, yet the response was similar when I named a Lamedh-Vov. People didn’t think of these figures as saintly: One was a thief, another a whore, and yet another, God forbid, a false Messiah. I was sometimes unable to discern the good in their deeds, yet the villagers, hearing for the first time about the list of thirty-six, always did. And, after all, the stories had sustained them. I was merely a folkloric tourist, rolling through in a rented sedan.

  Twelve villages in twelve months. I intended to return from my sabbatical with material to write an academic study of folklore and history. I thought I’d examine the epistemological status of collective memory, the ontology of living myth. I would reinvigorate my career, revive my field. My pen went dry. I had no theories, only stories.

  In these pages are the dozen that I’ve collected, as I remember them being told. They came to me gradually, one at a time, and perhaps that is how they should be read. I’m somewhere in the world searching for others now. I have resigned my academic positions. Some will accuse me of slipping into mysticism. Others will dismiss me, itinerant that I’ve become, as a wandering Jew. I accept these epithets, and request only to be let go. Do not seek me. I cannot say if I’ll ever return. I don’t pretend to know what I’m doing, but I will follow my calling.

  The reader will observe that I have omitted the saints’ names. Instead I identify them by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet—alef, beit, gimmel, dalet, heyh, vov—once used to count. Perhaps I’m as touched as my poor father. These saints are long gone; others survive today. However, these old names, the fleeting knowledge of them by one man, nearly brought the world to an end. As Yaakov ben Eleazer discovered, the secrecy is sacred. These are the Lamedh-Vov. Their lives are passages in the book of the unknown.

  JAY KATZ, PH.D.

  February 2008

  ALEF THE IDIOT

  Everybody knew that Alef was a fool. By trade he was a fisherman, but folks had seen a lowly carp outsmart him. Even the fish that Alef landed seldom made it past his fellow sailors, who took turns at snookering him, to decide who among them was smartest. One might lead him to believe that the rock cod in his bucket would dry to stone, and generously offer to trade it for a worm with which to try his luck again. Another might persuade him that his flounder was no odd fish, but rather the castaway face of a diver gone too long underwater, and graciously volunteer to return it to its rightful owner. To all these propositions, Alef eagerly agreed, blessed to have friends who accepted his dim wit, and looked after him.

  Alef’s wife, on the other hand, was less forgiving of his shortcomings. Chaya was the daughter of a rabbi celebrated as a sage in the town where she was raised, and, while she had her mother’s dark hair and stormy eyes, she’d inherited her father’s luminous mind.

  Since no one else in the rabbi’s village had been bright enough to comprehend him, least of all his wife and sons, the rabbi had taken little Chaya into his library and taught her the sacred tongue, to have someone with whom to study all that was holy. She’d mastered Hebrew with alacrity, and had learned to argue fine points of doctrine by the time she was ten. A year later, she’d trounced her father in a dispute over laws governing seminal discharge when the Sabbath sundown was occluded by a solar eclipse, from which she’d deduced that she was wiser than anyone, and, therefore, no longer had to obey her mother.

  That had resulted in arguments of an altogether different order, fought in shrieks and fits and, more than once, with a hurled pot of boiling water. Scarcely his daughter’s height, and half the weight of his wife, the rabbi had studiously avoided these disputes, and even Chaya’s brothers, muscular thugs several years older than she, had learn
ed to slip out the door whenever the stormy eyes of mother and child met.

  Many times while his wife was away at market, the rabbi had tried to persuade Chaya to show compassion for her, or at least to respect her, as required by law. But Chaya had contested his interpretations, and even the ancient commentaries on which he based them, with such furious logic that the rabbi had been forced each time to concede defeat. Finally he’d gone to his wife, the rebbetzin, to explain how Chaya was different from other girls, and why obedience shouldn’t be expected of her. His wife hadn’t needed any fancy wordplay to reply. She’d simply accused the rabbi of loving his daughter in lieu of her.

  This, too, he’d been unable to deny: Chaya’s body was as lithe as a serpent’s, and his weakness for dark hair and stormy eyes had already, of course, been established. He’d nodded and dumbly looked on while his wife had sent for the matchmaker, to get rid of the little nuisance.

  In that village, the marriage broker was famous for coupling children the day they were born. Her trick was to know folks’ fortunes, and to reckon love economically, according to the supply and demand of dowry. But the rabbi had forbidden her from prematurely pairing his little Chaya: He couldn’t tolerate predestination from an omniscient god, let alone a know-it-all yenta. So the old woman, sturdy like a pruned tree, had come to the rebbetzin without a suitable man.

  — There must be someone.

  — The locals are all taken.

  — Chaya is the daughter of a rabbi.

  — She comes with no dowry.

  — My husband is not a rich man. But our Chaya is a pretty girl, after all.