Aside from the evening meal, every aspect of my married home life was to be maintained by Hodel. She prepared my ablutions in the morning, washed my linen, cleaned our room, and laid herself out on the bed for me each evening like a nightdress. Yet I had the impression, when we coupled, that she was holding her breath. The only time she seemed happy was when she took out her dolls and induced me to play house with them. It was a pathetic image: a young man and his bride feeding invisible porridge to a couple of rag babies. I was being sucked into her little world of the imagination, and actually began to feel paternal toward these poppets. We slept with them between us at night, made them speak in baby language, moving their heads and arms in a lifelike way. When we had intercourse, they lay with us, their bored button eyes fixed on the ceiling as if waiting for us to finish up.
After a few weeks of marriage, Hodel began to have attacks of an explosive intestinal nature. Mornings were spent almost entirely in the latrine. Her gas smelled like rotten meat. She lost weight. Her skin became pale, her face gaunt. I was increasingly repulsed by her. I hawked my merchandise through the city day after day, spending extra hours working in order to stay away. At night I bundled myself at my side of the bed and shut my eyes, conjuring delights of the flesh with plump, healthy women I had seen on the streets, and trying to ignore my wife’s toxic night flatulence. When I overcame my revulsion and mounted her, I kept imagining necrotic stalactites of excrement clinging to the inflamed lining of her intestines. Her fits of homesick weeping rained down on my ears like needles. When I managed to fall unconscious, I slept fitfully in a slick of erotic dreams oozing one after another into my head. Often I woke sticky with nocturnal emissions. I would wash myself off and try to cheer up poor tear-stained Hodel by feeding her dolls their breakfast. Given the state my life was in, it’s no wonder that I turned to religion.
My cousin, Gimpel Cerf, had come to Paris from Mezritch, in Poland, to try to make a little money selling merchandise with my father and me, and in order to raise awareness of a radical new type of Judaism. They called themselves the Hasidim, the holy ones. They were known for their dancing and singing, a joyous form of worship. They put less emphasis on learning than we Talmudic Jews. For them, the simple were most beloved by God. I first met Gimpel in my parents’ apartment one Saturday. My mother liked me to come to eat the last Shabbat meal with her, my father, and my brother every few weeks. I was grateful for a respite from dinners at the Mendel household, and walked up the rickety stairs of our tenement the first Saturday of every month without fail. Hodel rarely accompanied me on these visits; either her bowels were liquefying, confining her to the latrine, or she said she needed to help her mother—who of course would have liked nothing better than to be rid of her for a day.
The first person I saw when I walked into the room was my little dumpling of a mother, the crisp lace of her Shabbat bonnet framing her scrubbed, full face, her small, upturned mouth and pointed nose giving her the look of a cheerful fox. I hugged her, drinking in her intoxicating aroma until my sinuses were filled to the brim. My mother worked in a bakery. The nooks and crannies of her head—the soft cartilage valleys behind her ears; the neat crease where the solid flesh under her chin joined her neck; the downy nape—smelled of challah, every day of the week. It was her perfume. When I was a boy, I imagined that my mother was originally made of challah dough. Instead of being born like everybody else, she had been baked in the oven until she was the perfect mother. Anyway, I released my hold on her, and was very embarrassed to see a shambolic young man in a stained black caftan beaming at me from the kitchen table with a smile of benevolence and understanding, a fur hat set back on his head, plump hands open, palms down, on the table. One brown eye wandered in its socket; the other gazed at me with burning affection. His beard was sparse, his side curls long. When he saw me loosen my grip on my mother, he stood, opening his short arms, and exclaimed, “Jacob! At last!”
Reluctantly, I walked up to him. I felt the shock of his hug deep in my rib cage. His breath was hot and smelled rather pleasantly like a pond. The hug went on far longer than I had anticipated. There was rocking back and forth involved. My arms dangled crookedly, splayed out by the force of his embrace. I looked imploringly at my mother, whose hands were clasped at her breast as she watched, her neatly frilled head cocked.
“And this, of course, is your cousin Gimpel, who has come to visit all the way from Mezritch,” said my mother, who then walked over to the hearth, lit that afternoon by a gentile woman my parents hired for every Shabbat, and began to serve the stew that hung in a pot over the fire. Shlomo, my scholarly younger brother, walked in, shuffling his feet, a book under his arm. I noticed he was developing a faint dark mustache, like a smudge of dirt on his upper lip. He would be fifteen soon. I felt for him, thinking they would try to marry him off any minute. Then his life would be over, just as mine was.
Watching Cousin Gimpel eat was a diverting experience. He took ravenous bites, hunkering low over his bowl, then hummed as he chewed, gazing up at the ceiling, entranced. My parents ignored him as he did this, though the muscles in my father’s jaw were standing out like cables as he chewed, and my brother shook his head in disapproval several times. At one point Gimpel stopped humming, looked down from the ceiling, and saw me staring at him. He smiled, half-chewed noodles peeking out from between his teeth.
“I am releasing the sparks,” he explained, his s’s spraying a little shower of kugel across the table at me. “From the food.”
“The sparks?” I asked.
“The spiritual life in the food,” he said. “That’s what produces the taste.” I looked at my father. Impassive, he took a helping of cabbage. ‘“And they saw God and they ate and drank,’” continued Gimpel, smiling, holding up his small wineglass. “Exodus 24:10. The rebbe says that when a man eats he should free his mind so that it can soar to think on God while each mouthful is being swallowed. This is how we will right the universe and bring on Moshiach. Bit by bit.” He took a gulp of his wine, then started humming again.
“By eating?” I asked.
Gimpel stopped humming and looked at me. He seemed shocked. I wondered if I had angered him. But he laughed, his open mouth packed with chewed noodles, his belly shaking. He laughed so hard his eyes were watering, and he dried them with his napkin. “By eating!” he kept repeating to himself hoarsely. Finally, when he had recovered, he looked at me with a serious, loving gaze.
“In time, I’ll tell you all about it,” he said.
The following day, Gimpel followed me on my rounds as I lugged my peddler’s box up and down the streets energetically trumpeting my wares, the leather strap cutting into my neck. As I chanted the contents of my box in a singsong voice, my bearded cousin followed silently, his beaver-fur hat gleaming atop his head, sidelocks drooping, caftan fluttering behind him like a black sail, the gaggle of iron pots and kettles slung over his arm clanging with his every step. Walking ahead of him in my elegant pointed shoes, I imagined I was leading a couple of heifers to market, such was the bell-like ringing of his merchandise. Gusts of his pond breath enveloped me whenever my pace lagged. Mortified by his absurd getup, I tried to keep a few paces ahead, proclaiming up into the balconies, “Ladies’ lace collars! Pocketknives! Snuffboxes! Wonderful prices!” I sold nothing. By noon, sheer fatigue forced me to sit down on the step of an equestrian statue. Gimpel sat beside me, swiveling my peddler’s box to face him and opening each of the smooth-action drawers with the intent curiosity of a chimpanzee.
My box was a mobile shop, meticuously organized. I had bought it cheap from a man in dire need of funds, about to be deported from Paris on charges of selling without a passport. Made of rosewood, it had four drawers. Arrayed in the first and thinnest of my drawers were small personal items: snuffboxes, shoe and belt buckles, watch fobs, and other trinkets, depending on what I had come across in the markets or fairs. In the next drawer down I kept gloves, napkins, lace collars, handkerchiefs, epaulets, and leather portfolios. In the third, I kept razors, hunting knives, and charming little pocketknives. In the bottom, largest drawer, I kept chisels, kitchen knives, small axes, inkstands, and other bulky items.
“You are not strong enough to carry all this,” said Gimpel, after his long, simian examination.
“I do it every day,” I said breezily.
“You will ruin your back,” he exclaimed. “You should let me carry it.”
My neck and shoulders were permanently sore; it was a tempting offer. Yet he was driving my business away just walking behind me.
“Thank you,” I said. “But I think it’s better if, after today, we sell separately. You might do better in our neighborhood.”
Gimpel nodded, smiling, his good eye on my face. I felt suffused with shame.
“On the other hand,” I stammered, “if you really don’t mind, I would be relieved if you—just for an hour—” Gimpel’s face brightened.
He stood, took off his hat, revealing a yarmulke embedded in a greasy mop of hair, and heaved the heavy box up, drawing the yoke around his neck. He then replaced the beaver-fur hat delicately, as if it were his crown.
“I will take your things,” I said.
“No,” he said, reaching for a kettle. “Today you will walk free. You do the yelling and the selling. I will be your ox.” We set off. I couldn’t help feeling he looked better carrying a Jew’s box, oxlike figure that he was, his untamed beard and sidelocks drooping, than I with my slim hips, pale hands, and tethered hair.
In the coming weeks, we became companions. We shared the weight of my peddler’s box, and some of my profits. Gimpel loved Paris, and kept exclaiming about the proportions of the buildings, gesturing broadly with his free arm.
Due, I think, to Gimpel’s flamboyant appreciation of the Pont Notre-Dame, coupled with his super-Semitic attire, Inspector Buhot, the police inspector in charge of the Jews, stopped us on the bridge one morning. Buhot was a gaunt man with a chapped face who carried a notebook everywhere, jotting down the comings and goings of each Jew in Paris with persnickety attention to detail. Buhot knew us all, and had us individually pegged, good or bad, honest or dishonest. He arranged to have us deported and imprisoned regularly, like a stern mother sending her child to sit in the corner, then welcomed us back after a few months with a cool smile.
“Good morning, Jacob,” Buhot exclaimed with edgy affability, the skin beneath his eyebrows red and flaky, his lips chapped. “Who is your friend? I don’t recognize him.”
“This is my cousin, Gimpel Cerf,” I said. “Gimpel, may I present to you Inspector Buhot.”
“Beau—beau!” exclaimed Gimpel in what was perhaps the only French word he knew, his unruly eye floating upward, his free arm sweeping wide to include the bridge built up on either side with shops and houses, the clusters of ragamuffins, peddlers, nobility, and tradesmen swarming by us, the glittering Seine below. Inspector Buhot assessed him warily. Gimpel’s caftan, wild beard, and long sidelocks were of interest to him.
“Gimpel doesn’t speak much French,” I explained. “He is here from Poland. Mezritch.”
“Ah—Poland. Is this how they look in Poland these days?” he asked me. I blushed. “You are always so tidy, Jacob,” said Buhot. “You should teach your friend how to present himself. He will make a lot more money that way. Parisians aren’t used to shaggy Jews. And teach him some French,” said Buhot.
“We will teach him.” I said. “Give him your papers,” I instructed Gimpel in Yiddish. The penalty for being a Jew without a valid passport was deportation or imprisonment. Smiling like an idiot, Gimpel handed the tall, bony Buhot a wrinkled paper covered in florid script. Buhot squinted, attempting to read the tiny writing. I noticed a faint tremor in his fingers.
“It’s in Polish,” I said helpfully.
“He should have reported to me when he got here,” said Buhot, handing the paper back to Gimpel. “He’s here illegally.”
“He only just arrived. We were going to pay a visit to you this afternoon.”
“What is your business in Paris?” Buhot asked Gimpel, his eyes two crystalline points of inquisition. I translated his question into Yiddish.
“I have some pots, some pans …,” said Gimpel with a shrug. “I would like to sell them.”
“How long do you intend to stay?” asked Buhot.
“That depends on you,” said Gimpel, with a servile bow. “I must return to Poland within the year, anyway.”
“You’ll be back in Mezritch a good deal sooner than that, my man,” said Buhot with a fatuous smile. Then, turning to me, he announced, “I will be in my office at the Châtelet in two hours. Bring him in, I’ll give him three months. Your father is a pillar of the community, Jacob. It’s for him I am being so lenient. Normally I would send this fellow back out of the city tonight.” I nodded, proud of my swift translation. My French was better than I’d realized.
When the inspector left, Gimpel chuckled and poked me in the ribs.
“You were ashamed of me,” he said without rancor.
“No, I wasn’t,” I said, irritated.
“It’s true what he said,” Gimpel said, looking over at me. “You don’t look like a Jew. You look like a Frenchman. That’s the problem with the Jews in Paris. They all want to be French. How many—two hundred and fifty males in the whole city, your father said? In Mezritch we have more than a thousand people! We have schools. We have a synagogue. You don’t even have a synagogue. It isn’t right.”
“They only let a few of us into the city at a time,” I whined, “to lend them money and sell them what they need. They love to borrow money from us but then they blame us for lending them money. What are we supposed to do? We aren’t allowed in the guilds, we have to carry everything around all day on our backs. We can’t own land. The Portuguese Jews, they do better. I don’t know why …”
Gimpel wagged his head. I wondered if he was a simpleton.
One morning I woke up in a puddle of cold, sticky semen. Hodel’s hand passed through it as she stirred to wake and she sat up in bed with a start, wiping her palm on the sheet with a disgusted expression.
“I told my mother about that,” she said, looking down at my sodden long johns. I lay waiting for what she would say next, bathed in humiliation. It was no use admonishing Hodel for betraying me to that black-eyed bitch. She would only cry.
“Mama says it’s a succubus, coming to steal your seed and make baby demons with it,” said Hodel, opening her clear blue eyes in credulous wonder, her little bud of a mouth puckered like a nursling’s. “She says we have to have relations every night I’m clean, otherwise the baby demons that the succubus made with your seed will kill our babies when we have them. They’ll suffocate them in their sleep.” My child-wife’s eyes were filled with tears—whether at the thought of dead infants or nightly encounters with her husband’s prong, I could not tell. I lay there in a cold, congealed puddle of my own spunk and imagined a female succubus hunched, squatting over me, wild-haired, naked, with wine-dark nipples and a fleshy mouth, shuddering as she stole my seed for her evil progeny. I found the image intensely erotic and had to lie on my stomach to hide my condition from my wife. What was wrong with me?
I discharged my worries into Gimpel’s willing ear that afternoon as we walked single-file along a narrow, muddy street. In the middle of my speech, a carriage passed; I flattened myself against a building. “Mme Mendel thinks it’s succubi, coming to steal my seed,” I said, wiping specks of mud from my face.
Gimpel chuckled, lumbering in front of me, kettles clanging, his broad back slightly bent. “The Besht says that’s just a natural occurrence.”
“So you don’t believe in demons?”
“I didn’t say that! Demons were created by Hashem. In fact, Cain’s wife, Lilith, may have been a demon! But the body—the body is basically good,” he shouted over his shoulder, stopping to let a clutch of Cistercian nuns rush by. The sisters held up their starched white and black habits as they leapt over a stream of sewage that coursed down the center of the street. Paris stank in those days. “The act of love between man and wife is a holy thing,” Gimpel continued loudly. “There is even a belief that it can help heal the universe, which was torn when the vessels were broken!” Gimpel turned then and smiled at me, his anchored eye twinkling, the other, disconnected one rotating freely in its socket.
“Shsh,” I begged. “The world doesn’t need to know my problems.”
“The world doesn’t speak Yiddish,” he said.
Once we had reached our destination and sat organizing our wares on the Place Louis XV, I went on: “What if I am no good? No good at all? I can’t stop myself from thinking about carnal matters. I mean, even succubi don’t sound so terrible to me. My wife—being with my wife is—like being with a sick child. She holds no appeal. Yet I am tormented by lust.”
“The Besht says it is possible that even sin is from Hashem,” Gimpel pronounced sagely, biting into an apple. “When you have strange thoughts, during prayer, for example about women, think about the origin of those thoughts—the origin is divine love. If everything is Hashem, and Hashem is in everything, then He is in badness too. If you were destined to think bad thoughts, you will think them. Even sin has an element of destiny. There may not be such a thing as evil in the world. I admit, I don’t know much about any of this—I am at the beginning of my studies. But I get to eat the crumbs that fall from the rebbe’s table, and I have learned a lot that way, believe me. You mustn’t turn away from your wife, Jacob. When a man couples with his wife, the Shekinah couples with Hashem in heaven.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The heavenly spheres reflect our sublunar world,” he answered. “Our acts—good and bad—have the power to shift heaven. The more good we do, the faster Moshiach comes. Simple.”
“But the Shekinah—”
“The Shekinah is Hashem in the world. She is female. She is the part of Him we can touch down here. She reunites with Hashem.” He clasped his hands together, whitening the knuckles. I stared at this simple elucidation of what I imagined as a hermaphrodite God, my mind drawn to the mystery without understanding. Gimpel’s simple authority was irresistible. I took him that day as my model and my leader. I grew my sidelocks and curled them. I grew my little goat’s beard as long as I was able. When Gimpel and I walked through the streets in our caftans, Jews and French people alike stared at us. Every morning when I prayed, I wound the leather strands of the tefillin around my left arm: thrice around the upper arm, seven times around the forearm, with the little leather box containing tiny scrolls from the Torah nestled at the biceps, pointing toward my heart. I wore the head tefillin strapped to my forehead. I rocked back and forth as I prayed beside Gimpel, the enthusiast. Gimpel never missed a chance to pray. Every morning he rushed off to a home where a makeshift shul had been set up—these moved from week to week, to keep ahead of the police, who sometimes raided places of worship—and I tagged along. When we set off with our wares, he brought along his striped prayer shawl, which he folded up and tucked into a little velvet pouch. Wherever we were in late afternoon, Gimpel managed to find eight more men so we could pray, even if he had to run out in the street collaring Jews for a minyan. In the evening it was the same. He never missed a prayer. He even prayed spontaneously at non-prescribed times, to my father’s irritation. He began to be known in the neighborhood as Holy Gimpel, or, behind his back, “That crazy Hasid from Mezritch.”
Though in normal life I often skipped the afternoon prayer, when I was with Gimpel, I always prayed at Mincha. I even bought myself a little velvet tallis bag, like Gimpel’s. We threw our striped prayer shawls over our heads and rocked back and forth fervently three times a day, chanting our prayers like clockwork. I have to admit that there were moments, as I recited the prayers and read the Hebrew letters of the Torah, when I discerned the edge of something, like the fluttering hem of an infinite garment—something too vast to describe. In those moments I felt a wave swelling inside of me, carrying me up with it as it rose. But I was always washed up at the shore of my own mind, brought down, perhaps, by the instinctive irony that one day was to take over my whole spirit like a crazed vine. Gimpel, though—he was swept away daily. He cried out to Hashem, he wept, he implored. He prayed to become worthy. To stop being such a lousy sinner.
To Gimpel, worship didn’t end when you removed the prayer shawl. On the contrary, he was in a virtually constant state of joyous worship. It was a new way of being a Jew, he explained. He was a Hasid. To them, depression was sin. Happiness was good. Gimpel even said a prayer after he took a dump. I started saying it, too, when I left the latrine: “Creator, who formed man with many openings and hollow spaces … if one of them would be opened or sealed it would be impossible to survive and stand before you …” God was everywhere for this man, and everything was joyous. I tried hard to emulate him—I wanted so much to live ecstatically at one with the Creator, to escape the reality of my life—but I couldn’t avoid Hodel, weeping in our conjugal bed night after night. I couldn’t squelch the lustful thoughts that multiplied in my head like maggots.
I kept the extremity of my sadness from Gimpel for as long as I could. Finally, one afternoon as we sat by the Seine to rest, I unburdened myself, weeping: my wife was half mad, hated the sexual act. Her farts smelled like a dead rat. Gimpel nodded and sighed. “It’s hard to know what the answer is,” he said. A young water carrier trudged by, a curved stick balanced on his shoulders, two full buckets weighing him down, spilling every few feet. Gimpel watched the water sloshing around in the buckets until the boy had passed us. At last he asked, “Has this girl been given an amulet against the evil eye? She’s obviously sick.”
I shook my head.
“Well, she needs something,” he warned.
Gimpel continued to stay with my parents, taking my place in the bed I shared with Shlomo before I was married. Every Friday he used my mother’s kitchen to prepare huge pots of pea soup, which he and I heaved down our staircase just before sunset in order to feed the poor a Shabbat meal. The widow Morel, our landlady, was a branchlike, bent, red-faced woman who always seemed to be searching for her cat. She had a merciful heart and allowed us to set up a long wooden table and chairs in her courtyard. There were some desperately poor people in the few streets where the Jews lived, and Gimpel endeavored to touch each of them with his ladle. He had a kind word for every arthritic crone, every barefoot urchin, every failed peddler. He knew all their names. Occasionally a starving gentile joined us; Gimpel welcomed them all. Tucked by his joyful side, I ladled thick green soup into chipped bowls held out between dirty, cracked hands, and I enjoyed doing it—or did I enjoy looking as if I were enjoying it? No, I honestly think I was becoming good by doing good. If Gimpel had stayed in Paris, I am sure my life would not have progressed the way it did.
Once the soup was all served up, Gimpel would say a blessing over the five or six loaves of challah my mother had convinced the baker to donate to the poor. He then presided over the table as the people ate their Shabbat meal, doling out thick slices of the sweet bread, along with stories of the Rabbi ben Eliezer, also known as the Ba’al Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism—and unorthodox servings of Kabbalah. Cold as it often was in the widow’s courtyard, we were warmed by Gimpel’s impromptu and often shocking statements.
His mystical cosmology was foreign but compelling: when Hashem set out to make the world, pouring infinite light like molten bronze into vessels meant to contain it, there was a terrible accident. Hashem blundered! He poured too much light into the vessels; they shattered. Sparks of Divine Light fell onto the earth and are now trapped in every mundane created thing, with or without breath in its nostrils. The reason for the exile of the Jews is the gradual release of the sparks trapped in the world. Through the performance of our daily duties, through fervent prayer, through the sanctified marital bed, through concentrating on the Divine while eating—through all of the hundreds of mitzvot performed each day by Jews, each of whom have a certain number of sparks they are destined to release in their lifetime, the sparks will all be returned to the Almighty and Moshiach will come. I wondered at the paradox: Hashem, perfect, spilled the light. Yet clearly it was His intention. Even evil, which was the result of the accident, was in His mysterious plan. There was nothing He hadn’t thought of.
One Friday about six months after Gimpel had moved in with my family, my mother was waiting for me, smelling of challah. After sunset, she hid her eyes with her ravaged hands and prayed over the lit candles. As always there was a hush in the room as she made her wish to the Creator, the mother’s gift every Shabbat—to make her wish. During the meal, Gimpel was humming and looking at the ceiling, as usual, when he stopped and said:
“A wandering soul may have been punished for its sins by being made to inhabit food. Only by being eaten by a tzaddik—a true spiritual master—in a spirit of holiness can the wandering soul be released from this torment.”
“Does the soul know that it is a piece of food?” I asked.
“I don’t know, I’m no tzaddik,” shrugged Gimpel, and went back to his humming. Out of nowhere, it seemed, my father brought his fist down on the table so hard that it sounded like a chandelier had fallen. Everyone but Gimpel looked at him, terrified.
“What is this about wandering souls?” my father said. He was really angry. His blue eyes were sharp, intense, and fixed on Gimpel, who smiled back at him warmly.
“Wandering souls? You know,” Gimpel said helpfully, “those who go through gilgul and keep being incarnated until their sins are redeemed. It’s all in the Kabbalah, of course. And did you know that my teacher can look at the forehead of a man and tell from what source his soul came, and the process of gilgul through which it had passed, and what its present mission is here on earth?”
“Your teacher …,” said my father.
“Rav Dov Ber. He is the disciple of the Ba’al Shem Tov. The Besht, as we call him, tells of a soul who was incarnated in a fish and the soul was redeemed when it was eaten by a holy man!”
“Gimpel,” said my father, “you are my blood. But you can’t live here anymore. This muck you are wallowing in is very dangerous.”
“But we are the same, you and I,” said Gimpel. “A Jew is a Jew. It’s all written—”
“No, we are not the same. Those Hasidim over there in Poland are crazy people and I don’t want you infecting my sons with those ideas. I’m as Jewish as the next Jew, but I want my children to have a chance at a good life in this country! I don’t want them dancing around all the time in ecstasy! In this house we have the Torah and the Talmud and that’s the end of it! Do you want them to kill us all? Is that what you want?” My father’s cheeks were flushed; flecks of spittle marred his fine beard.
“Do you believe Moshiach is even coming?” asked Gimpel gently.
My father sighed, averting his eyes. “I believe he’s taking his time,” he said sadly, a depressive film coating his eyes. It was then that I realized that my father had given up on Hashem. He only believed in rules now. As much as I had resented his rigid system of behavior and belief, I despised the cynicism concealed beneath it.
The room was silent for a long time.
“This too is beshert,” Gimpel said to me as he got up from the table. I could tell that my father felt sick from his outburst. He pushed his dish away half eaten. My mother had tears shivering in her eyes, but she made no move to stop Gimpel from leaving. His mysticism and my sidelocks frightened her.
I watched as Gimpel made a bundle of his few possessions in the room where I once slept.
“I should be getting back to the rebbe soon anyway,” he said. “It’s so difficult being away from him. Paris is impossible for the Hasidim. The Besht’s work will never take root here. It is too late.”
“What did you mean when you said, ‘This too is beshert’?” I asked him.
“Destiny unfolding,” he stated, tying the bundle fast.
“I just don’t see how we can have free will, as the Torah says we do, if God knows everything beforehand.”
“That’s the mystery,” said Gimpel, sitting down on my old bed and leaning back on the wall, his belly shivering like a bowl of pudding beneath his stained caftan. He smiled, looking relaxed, satisfied. “For example, I came to Paris to make money for the Hasidim in Poland, but I didn’t make any money. I came to see if we could bring the work of the Ba’al Shem Tov. But they’re all waiting to become Frenchmen. So why did I come to Paris?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I came to Paris to meet you,” he said. “That’s what I’m guessing. Come with me to Mezritch, Jacob. For a time. You must meet my rebbe. Eat at his table. If your wife is too sick to come, return to her when you have learned something. I’m worried that if I leave you, you will be lost. You are still so soft, everything you lean against makes an impression. I don’t want your soul tossed back and forth in Gehenna for all eternity.”
Clearly, I should have gone with him.