The Devil in Jerusalem (24 page)

In some ways, this breakdown made her even more dependent on God than ever. I will be more devout, more observant, she thought in gratitude, feeling doubly obligated to please Him.

Thus, instead of being wary of the wonder worker who had showed up to take Amos's place, she instead blessed God that just at this moment of darkness in her life, He had sent them a true light, a mentor, a real tzaddik, an anchor to holiness and truth who would guide them through the dangerous waters of life.

Both Shlomie's studies and activities and her own devout observance took on a new intensity. He spent almost all his time studying with Reb Shem Tov and his Hassidim in the small, run-down building near the shuk they called their
beit midrash,
and she studied late into the night every book on kabbalah she could get her hands on.

One year into their studies, out of the blue, Shlomie suggested that they move to the Old City. “The spiritual life is stronger there, better for our children. We are so fortunate that we live in an age when it is possible for Jews to live right near the Kotel.”

It was easy to sell Daniella, pregnant with number six, on the idea. The secular, snobbish, moneyed people of Rechavia—most of them senior citizens—among whom they now lived treated them like pariahs, constantly complaining about the noise the children made, the candy wrappers on the staircase, the bikes and carriages in the hallway. They needed a more congenial, child-oriented neighborhood in which to raise their children, Daniella thought. The Jewish Quarter of the Old City, with its large religious families and hordes of riotous children at play, fit the bill perfectly. It was also a place where she could join other women growing in religious devotion through the plethora of women's study programs offered day and night.

They went shopping with a real estate agent. The homes ranged from tiny, cramped hovels to enormous multimillion-dollar mansions that overlooked the Western Wall from every window. They didn't want either. Finally, they came across a five-bedroom cottage with a roof garden from which, if you craned your head, it was possible to see the golden Dome of the Rock.

“This is perfect,” said Shlomie, rubbing his hands as he walked through the generous living/dining room, imagining the long table with Reb Shem Tov at its head as he held classes there. He thought it best not to mention this to Daniella, the way he hadn't mentioned that Shem Tov's beit midrash was now closing down, him having been summarily evicted by the devout owner of the small building, a man who looked with horror at the group's continued efforts to master the forbidden knowledge of the mystical texts of practical kabbalah, especially the
Book of Creation
.

Throughout the ages, conventional religious leadership had always looked askance at efforts to learn the secrets of creation ex nihilo. That was not to say they refuted such knowledge was real and such power attainable. Was it not written in the Babylonian Talmud that “on the eve of every Sabbath, Judah haNasi's pupils, Reb Hanina and Reb Hoshaiah, masters of cosmology, used to create a delicious calf by means of
The Book of Creation
to eat on the Sabbath”? And had not many a great rabbi asserted that Abraham himself had used the same method to prepare a meal for his three angelic visitors who came bearing the miraculous news of aged Sarah's coming pregnancy? Some even asserted that it was none other than Abraham who had written the book, while still others contended that Adam had written it in the Garden of Eden.

Even skeptics agreed it was ancient, dating from the second century B.C.E. In a copy in the British Museum, called
The Laws of Creation
, its preface warns those who would venture to read it that its wisdom would be inaccessible to anyone but the truly pious.

Modern readers—whatever their level of piety—found it no less obscure.

It was not the kabbalah of populist preachers in Los Angeles but an older, deeper version involving techniques aimed at altering nature. It was the original abracadabra: “Twenty-two [Hebrew] letters: God drew them, hewed them, combined them, weighed them, interchanged them, and through them produced the whole creation and everything that is destined to come into being.”

This sacred knowledge was only to be used for good, the book asserted. The legendary Jewish Frankenstein, called a “golem,” supposedly created by the Maharal of Prague using formulas from the
Book of Creation
, was supposed to protect the Jews from their enemies. But when the golem ran amok, the Maharal removed the letters placed on his tongue, turning him back into clay.

To this day, Jewish tradition views the saga of the golem as a cautionary tale: however learned and holy the practitioner of kabbalah, rabbinic wisdom has always held that the use of such knowledge is dangerous, if not absolutely forbidden, akin to idolatry and witchcraft. Calling on angels who do not wish to be ordered about can easily turn against the conjurer at any moment, demons arriving instead, not as servants but as masters, exacting revenge by bending the conjurer to their will, body and soul.

People like Shem Tov ignored these warnings, promising their eager students that practical kabbalah was a way for man to connect more closely with God. But even he had a caveat: One's faith must be so absolute and unquestioning that hearing something must be the same as having seen it with one's own eyes. And thus Shlomie came to believe, with a perfect all-consuming faith, that he had not just heard about the great miracles Shem Tov had supposedly performed but had actually witnessed them with his own eyes.

But soon it wasn't enough just for him to believe. His wife, his children, must also believe. And so Shlomie thought longingly of the day when he could invite Shem Tov to use the Goodman home so that several times a month his family might benefit from the truths as taught only and exclusively by Rav Shem Tov, whom his devoted followers had taken to calling secretly among themselves the Messiah.

 

22

His mother always said, “When Menachem was born, a light filled the room.”

She was a small woman who wore hats and scarves over her dark, stiff wig. The Shem Tovs were Ultra Orthodox Sephardim, the kind whose customs and beliefs from the old country had been belittled and denigrated out of them by the snobbish, elite Lithuanian school of Judaism, Ashkenazi extremists who arrogantly claimed to be the only faithful adherents to the most authentic and rigorous version of the religion of Moses. Quite the opposite, of course, was true. The Ashkenazi elites were the people radically rewriting the Torah and Jewish customs at a lightning rate, creating an ugly new religion that had more in common with Islam and the Mormons than the ancient Hebrews.

Picture her then as she remembers it: a run-down labor room in the old Bikur Cholim hospital in the 1980s on Strauss Street, where shower curtains separated mothers screaming in pain because the hospital couldn't afford to give epidurals to the fertile, devoutly religious population they served. Her final scream, and then, the walls going neon, the midwife gasping, and she, as adoring as one of those Magi in a Christmas painting she would never in her life see, holding out her arms to accept the infant. She does not remember that he was brown, small, and wiry; that he struggled, flailing, as she clasped him in her arms, as if trying to leap out of them. She remembers him shining like gold mined from the deep, dark crevices of her family's despair. A son, after so many daughters! A child who simply by virtue of his maleness had been granted the possibility of becoming a great scholar and religious leader, redeeming his own father's bitterly disappointed hopes.

They had not always been so devout. Part of the desperate flow of Jewish refugees from Arab lands fleeing the newly awakened hatred of their Muslim neighbors, their families had arrived penniless to tent camps in the desert in 1948. Slowly, the fledgling Jewish state provided them with shelter in huge, ugly housing projects. But Menachem's father, Aaron Shem Tov, joined the army and served well, making influential friends who helped him find work in the civil service. He rose through the ranks until he and his young family could afford a larger apartment near the shuk.

It was a neighborhood of outwardly charming Jerusalem stone houses built at the turn of the last century by warm-hearted Jewish philanthropists endeavoring to help the devout, visionary, and impractical immigrants who chose to leave their homes and find their way to the Holy Land. Inside, they were decrepit, damp, dark, and cramped, the alleyways between them shrinking as ugly add-ons made of tin and chicken wire grew like weeds, choking off the light and air.

But Aaron had seen the apartment's potential, taking down walls, repainting and adding modern conveniences, turning the dark spaces into spacious, light-filled rooms. Not all of his neighbors felt it was worth the effort. One by one, the descendants of the original North African immigrants for whom the housing had been built sold their picturesque homes, purchasing boxy modern apartments in dusty, outlying suburbs. Those coming in their stead were invariably stringently devout, indigent Ashkenazi Jews who looked askance at him and his Sephardic ways.

It was then his wife decided to cover her hair with a wig, to which eventually a scarf was added. He followed suit, acquiring the black velvet skullcap covered by the large Borsalino hat favored by the Ashkenazim. He began to study the sacred texts in weekly and then daily study sessions. He saw the birth of his son, Menachem, as a reward for his growing piety. In his heart, he prayed that the child would grow to be a great Talmud scholar, a light to his generation through scholarship, diligence, and good works, and that this glow would be reflected on him and his wife and the rest of his family, so that his daughters might find worthy matches when the time came.

And for a while, Aaron Shem Tov believed that this might be possible. Menachem, the elder Mr. Shem Tov would tell reporters later when they crowded around his home looking for statements, answers, insights, or simply to find someone to blame, had led the congregation in
Anim Zemirot
—the last prayer of the Sabbath morning service—when he was barely two and had to be stood up on a chair to reach the bimah; and by the age of three, he had already learned the entire first chapter of Genesis by heart. The accusations now being made against his saintly son were lies, wicked lies, he told them, spun by his son's enemies, former classmates who had always been consumed with jealousy of his brilliant, pious son's special powers. What stories they fabricated to blacken his name and raise themselves up! How could any intelligent person believe them?

How, for example, Menachem had bullied and frightened children in the neighborhood, pushing them violently off slides and swings, tripping them with wires drawn across alleyways in the dusk. How he was eager to beat up others, but unlike most of the boys didn't stop when he drew blood. How he had been suspected of tying rubber bands tightly around the necks of kittens, of being involved in the bleeding rumps of dogs whose tails had been ripped off. All of them, Mr. Shem Tov fumed, outrageous and malicious slanders with not a shred of truth.

Not that Aaron Shem Tov believed his son had been perfect. Far from it. Yes, he had gone through a hard period, his teachers often citing him for laziness and arrogance and bullying others. But what business was that of the reporters? I did everything I could to change him, his father thought, flinching from the memories.

That was true. He had punished Menachem more severely than he had ever been punished by his own father, beatings with sticks and straps that had gone on so much longer than he ever intended because of the boy's arrogant refusal to cry.

He never cried.

No matter what punishment was meted out, Menachem's dry eyes were direct and unflinching, exposing one's helplessness, daring one to try harder, until finally his father had to recognize his own impotence. Eventually, Menachem's yeshiva, too, ran into the same wall of unabashed disdain. Running out of ways to change his character, his teachers raised their hands in defeat, informing his parents that their son would have to learn elsewhere.

To be thrown out of a yeshiva in Jerusalem was no small matter. All the rabbis talked to each other, and it was impossible to find an equally prestigious educational setting that would take him in. Having no alternative his parents, to their immense and unending shame, were forced to send him to a place that took in delinquent yeshiva boys.

The head of the yeshiva, Rabbi Kaban, was a saint, a man steeped in the wisdom of the kabbalah. It was his life's mission, he often said, to gather the errant little sparks of holiness that had not found their place in the more well regarded institutions and to bring their potential to fruition.

And it had surely been so with Menachem, who had walked in that first day with a charisma that covered him like thick honey, mesmerizing his classmates, who very soon found it impossible to do anything without his influence and approval. There followed some troubled days when even the devout Rabbi Kaban's doubts had been aroused. But he persisted, calling Menachem into his office daily for stirring private talks, attempting with concentrated love and devotion to reach the boy's soul. When nothing else worked, he threatened him: “If I throw you out, there is no place else for you to go and soon enough the Israeli army will draft you. You'll find yourself on the front lines.”

Whatever the reason, a swift, almost miraculous change came over the boy. He began to earnestly apply himself to his studies. Rabbi Kaban would find him in the yeshiva at four thirty every morning, sometimes remaining until midnight, poring over texts. It was a success story, and Rabbi Kaban's gratification was immense. He quickly made Menachem his assistant, allowing him to give lessons to the other boys.

But then, something odd happened, something Rabbi Kaban could not have predicted. Instead of focusing on Talmud, Menachem began to focus solely on the
Zohar
, a medieval compilation explaining the kabbalah, which was meant only for responsible scholars over forty years of age. From there, his studies had taken him to even more esoteric texts, the
Fountain of Life
,
The Palm Tree of Devorah
, and finally,
The Book of Creation
.