The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

Thus even the name for the world contains within it the story of God’s departure. The world was able to arise solely because God was not in it. First there was something, and then that something was gone. That is the world. The world then, in its entirety, is lack.

may the memory of this righteous one be a blessing.

those who say that certain souls recognize each other instantly and cling to one another inexplicably are right.

the mind of the sage is unfathomable.

His ideas, at first glance, would appear preposterous, but when we gave in to them, it always turned out well for us.

My soul wants to be like a ship in the sky, and the body’s boundaries cannot hold it back.

Give me the ability to speak, give me language and words, so that I might speak the truth of You.

Leah was willing to receive me, and I felt a great deal of tenderness toward her for this. She knew how to orchestrate a plentiful and peaceful life.

I understood then that human life is made of suffering, that suffering is the true substance of the world. Every single thing was screaming in pain.

from there we unhurriedly went where God would lead us.

an indispensable aspect of the vastness of this world, built intelligently and perfectly, the tiniest thing connected with the greatest.

In Nikopol, for example, we would say that in Ruse there was a young man, kind and well-educated, by the name of—let’s say—Shlomo, whose parents were seeking for him a nice wife with a dowry. In Craiova we would say that in Bucharest there was a nice girl, a good girl, without much of a dowry, but so pretty you had to squint to even look at her,

We carried such information as ants transport their bits of leaves and sticks until an anthill arises from the earth. If it came to a wedding, we would be invited, and for our matchmaking we would earn a grosz or two as well as being able to eat and drink our fill.

well. Reb Mordke would wave his hands then, as if he wanted to drive those terrible words away.

Such a rectification, or tikkun, consisted in the holy man joining with the sinner’s soul, step by step, passing through all three of the soul’s different forms. First the nefesh of the holy one—his animal spirit—connected with the sinner’s nefesh, and then, when it became possible, ruah—the feelings and will of the holy one—joined with the sinner’s ruah, so that in the end, the holy one’s neshama—that divine aspect we all carry within ourselves—could join with the sinner’s neshama.

“The Messiah will be internally good, but he will be clothed in evil.”

during the hot Smyrna nights, I took in that strange knowledge, kept in secret, that prayer and meditation alone cannot save the world, much though it may have been attempted. The Messiah’s task is terrible—the Messiah is a sheep for the slaughter.

The Messiah must descend into the abyss of every type of evil and destroy it from within.

I was young then, and although I had an awareness of suffering and pain from what I had already glimpsed of life, I still trusted the world to be good and humane. I enjoyed the cool, fresh early mornings and all the things I had to do. I enjoyed the bright colors of the bazaars where we sold our silly wares. I relished the beauty of women, their cavernous black eyes and their lids lined in black, and the delicacy of boys, their nimble, slender bodies—yes, that could make my head spin. I enjoyed dates laid out to dry, their sweetness, and the veins in turquoise, which I found touching, and all the colors of the rainbow in the spices at the bazaar.

“The world doesn’t come from a kind or caring God,” Reb Mordke told me, when he decided I had seen enough. “God created all of this by accident, and then he was gone. That is the great mystery. The Messiah will come quietly when the world is submerged in the greatest darkness and the greatest misery, in evil and in suffering. He will be treated like a criminal. So the prophets have foretold.”

He feels Hayah’s gaze on him, sticky, wet—like a dog’s tongue, you could say.

The air he takes in and then releases from his lungs is from a different world—Nahman’s

The beauty, gentleness, and thoughtfulness of young women are what give humanity hope.

Nahman is quiet for another moment, to give his listeners time to take their full pleasure in all this. In how the world is filling out, coming together again. The tikkun has begun.

prophets never come from within. All prophets must come from elsewhere, must suddenly appear, seem strange, out of the ordinary. Be shrouded in mystery, like the one the goyim have, even, of the virgin birth. A prophet has to walk differently, talk differently. Ideally he hails from some unimaginable locale, source of exotic words and untasted dishes and unsmelled smells—myrrh, oranges, bananas.

a prophet must also be one of our own. Let him have at least a drop of our blood, let him be a distant relative of somebody we know, even if perhaps we’ve forgotten what they look like. God never speaks through our neighbor, through the guy we’re in a fight with about the well, or the one whose wife attracts us with her charms.

comes a thought that reassures them. Everyone is connected to everyone else. The world is simply the multiplication of this room

Through the slits in the curtains and the haphazardly nailed door starlight seeps in, which means that even the stars are close acquaintances, that some forebear or cousin must certainly have had some close contact with them.

soon the grapes will look like Lilith’s nipples as she nursed.

The secret is so powerful that they say your body starts to shake all over if you learn it. It can only be whispered into the ear of the person closest to you, and on top of that only so that no one can see, so that no one guesses either by reading the lips of the teller or by the changes in the listener’s awestruck face. It can only be whispered into the ear of the chosen,

“How can this great secret be contained in a single sentence?”

Perhaps it’s something complex, because complexity is always closest to the truth, a sentence that acts as a cork that closes off the mind to thought while opening it to truth. Maybe the secret is a curse,

Who are we, and what awaits us?”

full of pigeons that mark out time with layers of droppings—living clocks.

It would be wasteful to devote space to flowers other than hollyhocks, which grow straight up.

Smyrna knows it sins, deceives, cheats.

no wise book, not even the best map, portrays the world so clearly as the profiles of rulers with their names minted into copper, silver, and gold. It is from here that they really rule, gazing sternly out at their subjects like pagan gods.

And just like that, faith manifests itself in clothing.

Learn from the young, the inexperienced, those who remain untarnished by books—that is Reb Mordke’s counsel.

He has the right and the obligation to ask questions; there are no stupid questions, and each must be considered properly.

Isohar teaches that there are three paths toward spiritualization. The first is the broadest and the simplest. This path is followed, for example, by Muhammadan ascetics. They’ll seize any possible ploy to kick out all natural forms—meaning all the images of the earthly world—from their souls.

images interfere with the forms that are properly spiritual—when such a form appears in the soul, it must be kept separate and thus nurtured in the imagination until it occupies the entire soul; in this way, we become capable of prophecy. For example, they will ceaselessly repeat the name Allah, Allah, Allah, and so on, endlessly, until that word occupies the whole of their minds—they call this “extinguishing.”

The second is the philosophical path, and it has a sweet scent to our reason. It consists in the student’s acquiring knowledge in some field, for example in mathematics, and then in others, until finally he reaches theology. Any subject he has penetrated and that his human reason has mastered will come to dominate him, while to him it will seem that he is an expert in each of these disciplines. He’ll begin to understand complicated connections and be convinced that this is the result of a broadening and deepening of his human knowledge. But he will not realize that it is the letters grasped by ...

The third path consists in Kabbalist shuffling, pronouncing and counting of letters, which leads to true spirituality. This path is the best, and besides, it also gives great pleasure, since by traveling it one can commune with t...

The first thing every neophyte must understand is that God, whatever he is, has nothing in common with humankind, and that he remains so far away as to be completely inaccessible to the human senses. The same is true of his intentions. At no point will people ever learn what he is up to.

“You pay for being Jewish. You live by the grace of the lords, the king. You pay your taxes, but when an injustice befalls you, no lord and no king is going to intercede on your behalf. Is it written somewhere that your life must cost money? That your year or your month has a price, and that every day of yours can be converted into gold?” says Reb Mordke, methodically filling his pipe.

Where did it come from that certain people have such an amount of land they can’t even traverse it all, while others have only a little plot, paying so much in rent they can’t even afford a loaf of bread?

“Seems to me land oughtn’t to be sold or purchased. Just like water and air. Nor do people deal in fire. Those are things given to us by God, not to each of us individually, but to all of us together. Like the sky and the sun. Does the sun belong to anyone? Do the stars?”

“You’re telling us the sun has no use!” cries Yeruhim. “If the hands of the greedy could only reach it, they would slice it into pieces, lock it in a vault, and sell it off when the right time rolled around.”

the cabbage the size of an infant’s head. She wasn’t even allowed to take that with her. The comparison to an infant’s head effects a mysterious result—other women start to cry as well, so they pour themselves a dash of vodka, and, still sniffling, they are soothed, and then they go back to their work, to darning or plucking goose down, since their hands ought never to be idle.