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There are authors who, unable to locate paradise on earth, put it in the air, fifteen cubits higher than the highest mountain. But this strikes the priest as extremely silly—for how could that be? Wouldn’t those living on Earth be able to glimpse heaven from below? Could they not make out the soles of the saints’ feet?
maybe they can reach some understanding by way of books? Is this not in fact the only possible route? If people could read the same books, they would inhabit the same world.
Perhaps it also has to do with the alphabet—that there isn’t only one, that there are lots of them; each produces its own type of thinking.
“God created man with eyes in the front, not the back of the head, and that means we’ve got to think about what’s to come, not what has been.”
the science of coaxing out bloodstains. For centuries it has been taught to future wives and mothers. If a university for women ever came about, it would be the most important subject. Childbirth, menstruation, war, fights, forays, pogroms, raids—all of it sheds blood, ever at the ready just beneath the skin.
Rubin’s memory goes back, lingering on objects it’s encountered before. He is interested in what we see when our eyes are closed, and where that thing we see comes from.
What if we’re imagining all of it? What if each of us sees everything differently? Does everyone see the color green the same? Or is “green” maybe just a name we use as if it were a paint to coat completely distinct experiences in order to communicate, when in reality every one of us is viewing something different? Is there not some way this can be verified? And what would happen if we were to really open our eyes? If we were to see by some miracle the reality that surrounds us? What might that be like?
Sins get written on the human body like on parchment. The parchment differs little from person to person. Their sins are surprisingly similar, too.
all names seem somehow fluid, interchangeable, secondary. After all, no mortal holds on to his name for very long.
Asher Rubin thinks that most people are truly idiots, and that it is human stupidity that is ultimately responsible for introducing sadness into the world. It isn’t a sin or a trait with which human beings are born, but a false view of the world, a mistaken evaluation of what is seen by our eyes. Which is why people perceive every thing in isolation, each object separate from the rest. Real wisdom lies in linking everything together—that’s when the true shape of all of it emerges.
A man has to be independent, self-sufficient, and ought to know a little bit about a lot. He also has to have one real skill that will allow him to make a living when he needs to—this is to be determined according to talent.
They don’t need to understand it, all that matters is that they learn it all by heart. That will enable them to come to understand eventually.
He is someone whose insides are like a home with all sorts of different rooms—part of him is one way, other parts of him are another. From the outside, it looks like one building, but on the inside you can see that it is many.
Yente can see that a separate soul has taken up residence in Sheyndel’s belly, a soul still indistinct, hard to describe because many; these free souls are everywhere, just waiting for the opportunity to grab some unclaimed bit of matter. And now they lick this little lump, which looks a bit like a tadpole, inspecting it, though there is still nothing concrete in it, just shreds, shadows. They probe it, testing. The souls consist of streaks: of images, and recollections, memories of acts, fragments of sentences, letters. Never before has Yente seen this so clearly.
it feels like everyone is playing, the whole world, and like cards unite people better than faith or language. You sit down at the table, you fan out your cards, and there follows an order that is understandable to anyone. And one must simply adapt to that order, if one wishes to win.
something interesting always remains in one’s mind, giving one fantastic pretexts for thinking of how very great and complex this world is, so much so that one cannot possibly comprehend it in thought—no doubt only in fragments, the bits and pieces of small understandings.
Every now and then, God wearies of his own luminous silence, and infinity starts to make him a little bit sick. Then, like an enormous, omnisensitive oyster, his body—so naked and delicate—feels the slightest tremble in the particles of light, scrunches up inside itself, leaving just enough space for the emergence—at once and out of nowhere—of a world. The world comes quick, though at first it resembles mold, delicate and pale, but soon it grows, and individual fibers connect, creating a powerful surrounding tissue. Then it hardens; then it starts to take on colors. This is accompanied by a
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the desert is the only place on earth where time spins around, loops back then leaps ahead like some fat locust, select pairs of eyes might be able to get a glimpse into the future here.
He calls those notes “scraps,” for they are what remains after other, more important work. Crumbs—such is the stuff of life.
Like how could the world exist, since God is everywhere? Since God is everything in everything, then how could there be things other than God? And how could God have created the world out of nothing?
I considered that perhaps it was true that God recognized the mistake he had made, expecting the impossible from humankind. For he had wanted a person without sin. Therefore God had to make a choice. He could punish for sins, punish incessantly and become a kind of eternal oeconomist of our world, the manager who whips the peasants when they do not work as they are supposed to in their master’s fields. Yet God might also, in his infinite wisdom, have been ready to bear human sinfulness, to leave a space for the weakness of man. God might have said to himself: I cannot have a person who is
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just as a man born blind knows not what light might be, or a deaf man music, or a man without a sense of smell the plenitude of flowers, so, too, can those without the sixth sense be merely bewildered by mystical souls, take them for madmen, for fanatics, for people who make up such things for reasons unknown.
Now, to create the world, God had to withdraw from Himself, leave within His body a blank space in which the world could take up residence. God vanished from this space. The word disappear comes from the root word elem, and the site of that disappearance is known as olam: world. 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.
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 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.”
The beauty, gentleness, and thoughtfulness of young women are what give humanity hope.
