For the Time Being (23 page)

The previous night, which Suri Feldman presumably passed in the woods, and which her parents presumably passed in living hell, had been cold; it rained several times before dawn. Now meteorologists were predicting a heavy rain. When one of us dies, William James said, it is as if an eye of the world had closed. What is the possible relation between the “oyster-like, gray, or quite black” Absolute and a Brooklyn schoolgirl in a plaid shirt? Well, that’s just the question, isn’t it?

“For the Jew the world is not completed; people must complete it.” So said a nineteenth-century Frenchman, Edmund Fleg. Recently Lawrence Kushner stated the same idea powerfully and bluntly: “God does not have hands, we do. Our hands are God’s. It is up to us, what God will see and hear, up to us, what God will do. Humanity is the organ of consciousness of the universe…. Without our eyes, the Holy One of Being would be blind.”

May 6, 1995: Among the thousand volunteers searching the woods for Suri Feldman were six hundred Hasidim, bearded men in black three-piece suits, who drove from New
York, from Montreal, Boston, and Washington, D.C. One group brought truckloads of kosher food for all the searchers. Isaac Fortgang of Boston explained, “It says in the Bible that to save a life is to save the entire world.” It is the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 37a) that says, “He who saves one life in Israel is considered as if he saved the whole world.” Suri, the paper said, was one of fifteen Feldman children.

Her father, who works in real estate, brought to the woods her pillow from home so bloodhounds could get a scent. The bloodhounds, police, firefighters, volunteers, and even helicopter pilots using infrared sensors could find no trace of her. Police were looking for a slender man in his early twenties; the paper printed a sketch. Meteorologists called for a 100 percent chance of rain that night, and temperatures in the forties.

Aryeh Kaplan, who wrote
Jewish Meditation
, cites the paradox that the God of the galaxies, for whom a galaxy is “no more significant than a bacterium,” is at the same time “great enough that a single human being can be as significant to Him as an entire universe.” Many people cannot tolerate living with paradox. Where the air is paradoxical, they avoid breathing and exit fast. (Of course, many people also disapprove of Mircea Eliade’s task of comparing religions—as if comparison itself were somehow disrespectful of each religion’s uniqueness.)

In the United States, only 6,381 of us die a day, on average, and 10,852 new people emerge from their mothers. Her mother remembers Suri Feldman’s birth and everything else about her, I expect.

On April 14, 1977, at dawn, I saw a cloud in the west from an island in the Pacific Northwest. The cloud looked like a fish fillet. Recently, hundreds of volunteers searched the world’s skies, but they could not find the cloud again.

N O W
      
       Now, back and forth across the top of the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, a man is walking day and night without ceasing. It is the Baal Shem Tov, limping in his topboots, who thought most of the best of these thoughts.

Now, on a sidewalk outside a U.S. hospital, three twiglike hominids are walking, male and female and child. One of them experiences a moment of doubt.

Now, in striped prison clothes on his cot, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is writing a letter to express his—outdated and perhaps when all is said and done, even accurate—belief that “the theological category” between God and human fate is “blessing.” He hopes someone will find a moment to untie this thought.

Now, somewhere in the northern hemisphere, a woman is
carrying over her arm a basket in which sits her superior-looking child, a bird-headed dwarf.

Now, visible though the window from my daughter’s crowded homework table, a thin man sorts bones on a crate by his tent. Does this bony sorter of bones know the Mishnah? During the six days of creation, according to the Mishnah, God created the idea of fire and the idea of mules. Later, people discovered how to make them: fire, and mules, with which the man is exploring the desert.

May 7, 1995: They found the Hasid girl. Suri Feldman had lain low in the woods near Breakneck Brook. She left a fresh footprint. An Irish cop from Massachusetts noticed a nearby dirt road that no one had searched. With five other cops he drove down it and saw her beside a tree. She was warm enough, thirsty, fine. Hearing that she was found, the Hasids in the woods danced. A volunteer searcher from upstate New York said, “We’re gone. See you later, Connecticut.” Various authorities took the girl to the hospital, checked her over, and brought her home. When the vehicle bearing her drove into the Brooklyn parking lot, it could scarcely move. Hasids filled the lot, Hasids in black coats from the eighteenth century and black beards and black hats. A local volunteer said, “I’ve never seen so many people dance in a circle.”

An orange banner hung in her neighborhood, the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. In Hebrew letters, it read “Say
praise to God, for his goodness is for always.” It is true that joy recurs.

“The worst thing about death must be the first night,” wrote the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez. Inside the walls of Jerusalem, a Roman soldier flays an old man. He separates his muscles from his bones with a horse’s currycomb. A doctor labors over a newborn baby’s face. After a long time, the baby starts breathing. It gasps, stretches, and begins to wail.

God’s being immanent, said Abraham Joshua Heschel, depends on us. Our hearts, minds, and souls impel our spines to lift or dig, our arms to take or give, our lips to speak good words or bad ones. God needs man; kenotically or not, he places himself in our hands. Some Christian fundamentalists, too, find this most modern of ideas invigorating.

In March, 1992, Brother Carl Porter, an Evangelical Holiness minister from Georgia, preached to a responsive crowd in Scottsboro, Alabama, where writer Dennis Covington heard him. “‘God ain’t no white-bearded old man up in the sky somewhere. He’s a spirit.’
Amen. Thank God
. He’s a spirit. He ain’t got no body.’
Amen. Thank God
. ‘The only body he’s got is us.’
Amen. Thank God
.” The only body he’s got is us: a fine piece of modern theology. That it bollixes the doctrines of God’s omnipotence and completeness-in-himself apparently bothers few believers, perhaps because it
solves more problems than it makes—saving, for a mere example, the doctrine that God is merciful and good.

What was Jesus writing on the ground? A list of things to do before being crucified? An itinerary for the next few weeks? Go beyond Jordan, then to Bethany in Judea, to Ephraim near the wilderness, back to Bethany, and into Jerusalem?

“Till the very end of time matter will always remain young, exuberant, sparkling, new-born for those who are willing,” Teilhard wrote. The finest loess and the finest sand are particles so numerous and small that they make clay: clay to make the emperor’s stiff soldiers who kept his corpse company deep in the loess, clay the Baal Shem Tov dug for his living in the Carpathian Mountains, clay Lucile Swan molded over a cast skull of Peking man to make a face, head, and neck.

You cannot mend the chromosome, quell the earthquake, or stanch the flood. You cannot atone for dead tyrants’ murders, and you alone cannot stop living tyrants.

As Martin Buber saw it—writing at his best near the turn of the last century—the world of ordinary days “affords” us that precise association with God that redeems both us and our speck of world. God entrusts and allots to everyone an area to redeem: this creased and feeble life, “the world in
which you live, just as it is and not otherwise.” A farmer can unfetter souls and free divine sparks in “his beasts and his houses, his garden and his meadow, his tools and his food.” Here and now, presumably, an ordinary person would approach with a holy and compassionate intention the bank and post office, the car pool, the God-help-us television, the retirement account, the car, desk, phone, and keys. “Insofar as he cultivates and enjoys them in holiness, he frees their souls…. He who prays and sings in holiness, eats and speaks in holiness, in holiness performs the appointed ablutions, and in holiness reflects upon his business, through him the sparks which have fallen will be uplifted, and the worlds which have fallen will be delivered and renewed.”

“It is given to men to lift up the fallen and to free the imprisoned. Not merely to wait, not merely to look on! Man is able to work for the redemption of the world.”

The work is not yours to finish, Rabbi Tarfon said, but neither are you free to take no part in it.

“In our hands, the hands of all of us, the world and life”—our world, our life—“are placed like a Host, ready to be charged with the divine influence.” It is the paleontologist again, making a Christian simile. “The mystery will be accomplished.”

That morning by the emperor’s tomb in Xi’an, that morning beyond the trenches where clay soldiers and horses seemed to swim from the dirt to the light, I stood elevated over the loess plain, alone. I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure’s blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season, peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under, and the spade, and the plow. No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting.

Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don’t fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat’s stem slits the crest of the present.

Nurse Pat Eisberg holds in her arms a two-foot bird of prey, a kite. She releases the kite which uses one point of its
forked tail to pry open the mouth of infant Leonardo da Vinci. The kite runs its tail’s length between the newborn’s almost invisible lips; then it widens into flight and flaps down the corridor. Pat Eisberg places the da Vinci bundle on the counter to her right and reaches left for another. This newborn, like everyone, is someone’s great-grandchild. You are dead, and daily, then as now, waves of new generations appear in bundles on counters.

In Highland New Guinea, now Papua New Guinea, a British district officer named lames Taylor contacted a mountain village, above three thousand feet, whose tribe had never seen any trace of the outside world. It was the 1930s. He described the courage of one villager. One day, on the airstrip hacked from the mountains near his village, this man cut vines and lashed himself to the fuselage of Taylor’s airplane shortly before it took off. He explained calmly to his loved ones that, no matter what happened to him, he had to see where it came from.