For the Time Being (17 page)

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.

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
circumcises 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 passed 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, Massachusetts, 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 assume 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 assurance 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 assenting intellectually to a series of doctrinal propositions; it is living in conscious and rededicated relationship to God. 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.

Time had stuffed Peking man, and all his pomps and works, down a red fissure in a blue cave wall at Zhoukoudian. Fossils crammed the red fissure. The team called the skull’s first owner Peking man. His species was
Homo erectus
.

The team originally found the Zhoukoudian cave by questioning a big-city pharmacist. Many old folk in China drink suspended fossil-bone powders as elixirs—so-called dragon’s teeth; consequently, paleontologists for two generations have checked Chinese pharmacies and asked, “Where did
these bones come from?” Shopping for fossils, a specialist recognized an ancient human tooth. His inquiry led to the caves at Zhoukoudian—Dragon Bone Hill.

Teilhard hauled his camp cot from Peking, lived with Chinese villagers, and directed the dig. Over the years he sorted and eventually named the fissures’ animal bones. He discovered bones from saber-toothed tigers, ostriches, horses, a large camel, buffalo, wild sheep, rhinos, hyenas, and “a large and a small bear.” Ultimately, and spectacularly, he was able to date Peking man in the Pleistocene. He established the date by many methods, one of which was interesting: Among the bits of debris under, around, and above various layers of Peking man’s bones and tools were skulls, whole or in fragments, of mole rats. He undertook his own study of the mole rats’ evolving skulls, dated them, and so helped confirm Peking man’s dates.

The team dug further into the immensities of the Zhoukoudian caves; for ten years they excavated, for eight months a year. Teilhard retrieved five more human skulls, twelve lower jaws, and scattered teeth. It was his major life’s work.

During those ten years, squinting and laughing furrowed his face. His temples dipped as his narrow skull bones emerged. When he could not get Gauloises, he smoked Jobs. Daily he said the Divine Office—the liturgy, mostly psalms, that is the prayer of the Catholic (and Anglican and Episcopal) church. A British historian who knew him described his
“kindly and ironic grace,” his “sharp and yet benevolent refinement.”

In all those years, he found no skeletons. When colleagues worldwide praised him for the discoveries, Teilhard spoke with modesty and exasperation: “Heads,” he said, “practically nothing but heads.” Paleontologists from all over the world are again—seventy years later, after several decades’ chaos halted the work—finding hominid bones, and choppers and stone flakes, in the Zhoukoudian caves.

Peking man and his people walked upright: with limbs like ours they made fire and stone tools. That land was jungly then. They ate mostly venison and hackberries. They hunted elephants, tigers, and boars. They lived before water filled the Great Lakes and the Florida peninsula lifted from the sea, while camels and mastodons grazed in North America. They lived before two great ages when ice covered Scandinavia and Canada, as well as the British Isles, northern Germany, and the northern United States: they lived before the Atlantic Ocean drowned eastern North America between glaciations. Their human species is extinct, like the Neanderthals’.

Most paleontologists believe that we—we humans in the form of
Homo erectus
—left Africa ninety thousand years ago by walking up the Great Rift Valley, generation after generation, to the valley’s end at the Sea of Galilee. Recent, much
older
erectus
finds in Java, China, and the Republic of Georgia seem to show, however, that our generations started leaving Africa about a million years earlier—unless humans arose in Asia. The new ancient dates jolt paleontologists, who one might expect would be accustomed to this sort of thing by now—this repeated knocking out the back wall, this eerie old light on the peopled landscape.

Whenever we made our move, we did not rush to Corfu like sensible people. Instead we carried our cupped fires into the lands we now call the Levant, and then seriatim into China, Japan, and Indonesia, whence we hopped islands clear to Australia. There, on a rock shelter, we engraved animals twice as long ago as we painted cave walls in France. People—including
erectus
—plied Asian islands thousands of years before Europe saw any humans who could think of such a thing as a raft.

“However far back we look into the past,” Teilhard said, “we see the waves of the multiple breaking into foam.”

During the violence and famine the Japanese invasion of China caused, that first Peking man skull disappeared from the Chinese museum. Scientists suspect starving locals pulverized and drank it. There is a plaster cast of this skull, as there is of every bit of bone and tooth—forty people’s remains—that the team found by working the site for all
those years. The plaster casts proved handy, since every single one of the Peking man bones, crate after crate, disappeared in World War II. Scientists cached the crates with a U.S. Marine doctor, who tried to carry them back as luggage. The Japanese caught him. Before he went to prison he was able to entrust the crates to European officials and Chinese friends. He left prison four years later, when the war ended; the crates had disappeared. Recent searches draw blanks.

The man of the red earths, Teilhard called Peking man. And of Christianity he said, “We have had too much talk of sheep. I want to see the lions come out.”

C H I N A
      
       When Emperor Qin was thirty-one years old, a rival prince sent him an envoy bearing routine regal gifts: a severed head and a map. The envoy also bore a poisoned dagger in his sleeve. The comedy played itself out: When the assassin grabbed the emperor’s sleeve and drew the dagger, the sleeve tore off. The emperor found his dress sword too long to draw. He dashed behind a pillar. His courtiers gaped. The court doctor beaned the assailant with a medicine bag. The emperor ran around and around the pillar. Someone yelled to the emperor that he could draw his sword if he tilted its length behind him. He tried that, and it
worked; he slashed the assassin’s thigh. The assassin threw his dagger; it hit the pillar. The emperor and his courtiers finished him off.

Seven years later, someone tried to kill the emperor with a lead-filled harp. The next year someone tried to ambush his carriage; the hapless assassin attacked the wrong carriage.

Emperor Qin was almost forty by then, and getting nervous. Surely power and wealth could secure immortality? At that time, intelligence held that immortality, while elusive like a treasure or a bird, could enter some people’s hands if they sought it mightily and used all means. The emperor sacrificed to mountains and rivers; he walked beaches, looking for immortals. He sent scholars to search for a famous Taoist master who had foiled death by eating a flower. No one could find him.

Taoist monks, then and now, run medical laboratories. The emperor ordered the monks to brew a batch of immortality elixir, under pain of death. Consequently, they took those pains. Again, it was common knowledge that immortal people lived on three Pacific islands, where they drank a concoction that proofed their bodies against time. The emperor sent a fleet of ships to find the islands and fetch the philter. Many months later, the expedition’s captain returned. He knew he faced death for failing. He told the emperor he had actually met an immortal, who, alas, would not release the philter without the gift of many young people and craftsmen.
The emperor complied. Away sailed the same canny captain with many ships bearing three thousand skilled and comely young people. They never returned. A widely known Chinese legend claims they colonized Japan.