Then there’s the baker whose last name is Loaf, which always delights the vicar forane because it suggests a sort of hidden order that—were it more visible and consistent—might lead people to live more virtuous lives.

The farther you look down the little side streets, the more obvious the poverty becomes, like a dirty toe sticking out of a torn shoe; a plain old poverty, quiet, low to the ground.

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.

This makes sense: 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. And yet 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.

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. This is because such 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 his mind and imagination that are acting upon him in this way, ordering his mind with their movements, opening the door to inexpressible spiritualization. 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 the very essence of creation and get to know who God really is.

When Nahman went out into the streets of Smyrna, passing hundreds of people hurrying about their business, he couldn’t shake the thought that among them might be the Messiah, but that no one was able to recognize him. And the worst of it was that the Messiah himself might not be aware of it. When he heard this, Reb Mordke nodded his head a long time before saying: “You, Nahman, are a sensitive instrument. Sensitive, delicate. You might even be this Messiah’s prophet, just as Nathan of Gaza was the prophet of Sabbatai Tzvi (of blessed memory).” And after the long pause it took him to crush the bits of resin and mix them with his tobacco, he added mysteriously: “Every place has two characters—every place is double. What is sublime is also fallen. What is clement is at the same time base. In the deepest darkness lies the spark of the most powerful light, and vice versa: where omnipresent clarity reigns, a pit of darkness lurks inside the seed of light. The Messiah is our doppelgänger, a more perfect version of ourselves—he is what we would be, had it not been for the fall.”

In the end they speak a mixture, not worrying about the provenance of words; words are not nobility that want their genealogical trees retraced. Words are merchants, swift and useful, now here, now there.

I took to heart what Isohar had taught us. He said that there are four types of readers. There is the reading sponge, the reading funnel, the reading colander, and the reading sieve. The sponge absorbs everything it comes into contact with; and it is evident he remembers much of it later, too. But he is not able to filter out what is most important. The funnel takes in what he reads at one end, while at the other, everything he’s read pours out of him. The strainer lets through the wine and keeps the sediment; he ought not to read at all—it would be infinitely better if he simply dedicated himself to some manual trade. The sieve, on the other hand, separates out the chaff to give a result of only the finest grains. “I want you to be like sieves, and to discard all that is not good or interesting,” Isohar would say to us.

Jacob has begun to introduce himself not as before, not as Yankiele Leybowicz, but as Jacob Frank. Frank is what Jews from the west are called in Nikopol; that’s what they call his father-in-law and his wife, Hana. Frank, or Frenk, means foreign. Nahman knows Jacob likes this—being foreign is a quality of those who have frequently changed their place of residence. He’s told Nahman that he feels best in new places, because it is as if the world begins afresh every time. To be foreign is to be free. To have a great expanse stretch out before you—the desert, the steppe. To have the shape of the moon behind you like a cradle, the deafening symphony of the cicadas, the air’s fragrance of melon peel, the rustle of the scarab beetle when, come evening, the sky turns red, and it ventures out onto the sand to hunt. To have your own history, not for everyone, just your own history written in the tracks you leave behind. To feel like a guest everywhere you go, occupying homes just for a while, not bothering about the garden, enjoying the wine without forming any attachment to the vineyard. Not to understand the language, and therefore to register gestures and faces better, the expressions in people’s eyes, the emotions that appear on faces like the shadows of clouds. To learn a foreign language from scratch, a little bit in every place, comparing words and finding orders of similarity. This state of foreignness must be carefully guarded, for it gives enormous power.

He ponders this sudden change in his own mood and sense of wellbeing. A radical and unexpected change. When he left cold Russia a few years earlier for the Greek and Turkish countries, he became another man, someone “luminous and airy,” as he might say. Is it that simple—is it just about light and heat? Oh, the sun—its abundance renders colors all the more intense, and because it heats the land, fragrances dazzle. And because of all that sky, the world appears to be subject to mechanisms other than the ones that apply in the north. Here Destiny is still in effect, the Greek version of Fatum that sets people in motion, marking out their paths like little strings of sand that flow along a dune from top to bottom, creating arabesques and other figures of which the finest artist would hardly be ashamed, twisting, chimerical, exquisite. Here in the south, all this exists quite tangibly. It grows in the sun, lurks in the heat. And the awareness of its existence brings Antoni Kossakowski relief, so that he becomes lighter, softer, more tender toward himself. At times he feels like crying, that’s how free he feels.

He considers that the farther south he goes, the weaker Christianity becomes, the stronger the sun, the sweeter the wine, the more Fatum there is—and the better his life gets. His decisions are not decisions, arriving instead from outside, having their proper place in the order of the world. And since it is this way, there is less responsibility, and therefore less of that internal shame, that unbearable feeling of guilt for everything he has done. Here every action can be corrected, you can have a chat with the gods, make them a sacrifice. That is why people are able to look at their reflections in the water with respect. And look upon others with love. No one is bad, no murderer can be condemned, because it is all part of a larger plan. That is why you can feel the same love for the executioner as you can for the condemned. People are gentle and good. The evil that happens comes not from them, but rather from the world. The world can be evil—and how! The farther north you go, the more people concentrate on themselves, and in some sort of northern madness (no doubt due to the lack of sun) they ascribe to themselves too much. They make themselves responsible for their actions. Fatum is punctured by raindrops, then farther on, snowflakes making a final incursion, and soon it disappears altogether. What remains is the conviction that destroys every person, supported by the Ruler of the North, the Church, and its ubiquitous functionaries, that all evil is in man yet can’t be fixed by man. It can only be forgiven. But can it be forgiven? Hence comes that tiring, destructive feeling that one is always guilty, from birth, that one is stuck in sin and that everything is sin—doing something, not doing it, love, hate, words, and even thoughts. Knowledge is a sin, and ignorance is a sin.

In a quiet voice, Nahman tells of the four great paradoxes that must be contemplated by anyone who considers himself a thinking person. “First, in order to create a finite world, God had to limit himself, but there still remains an infinite part of God completely unengaged in creation. If one accepts that the idea of the created world is one of an infinite number of ideas in the infinite mind of God, then it is, without any doubt, marginal and insignificant. It is possible that God didn’t even notice he had created something.” “Second,” Nahman continues, “creation as an infinitesimal part of God’s mind strikes Him as insignificant, and He is only barely involved in this creation; from the human perspective, this indifference may be perceived as cruelty.” “Third,” Nahman continues in a quiet voice, “the Absolute, as infinitely perfect, had no reason to create the world. So that part of the Absolute that did lead to creation must have outsmarted the rest, and must go on outsmarting it now, and we take part in those machinations. Do you get me? We are taking part in a war. And fourth—since the Absolute had to limit Himself, in order for the finite world to arise, our world is for Him a kind of exile. Do you understand? In order to create the world, the all-powerful God had to make himself as weak and passive as a woman.”

I saw him among the others. He had gotten very thin. He had deteriorated. His beard had grown. But something new had also appeared in him—a new fervor, a self-assuredness. Who had led him to this, who had helped him get like this while I was gone? As I looked thus at his movements, as I listened to what he said, I slowly realized that it was good that he was able to give relief to others with what he said. It also seemed to me that in his heart there was a kind of wholeness that already knew what direction to go in and what to do. And looking at him sometimes sufficed; it was the same thing that attracted other people to him. There is nothing that brings greater relief than the certainty that there is someone who really knows. For we ordinary people never have such certainty.

Lwów is not as receptive to Jacob as the poor villages and towns. The rich and the satisfied are in no hurry for the Messiah; the Messiah is, after all, the one on whom the world must wait forever. The one who arrives is a false Messiah. The Messiah is the one who never arrives. That’s the whole point.

Now Jacob’s message becomes as clear and distinct as the footprints stomped in the snow for warmth by those who didn’t make it inside and will have to find out about all of this secondhand. It is a question of uniting the three religions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Sabbatai was the First, and he opened the door to Islam, while Baruchiah paved the way to Christianity. What appalls everyone and makes them stomp and shout? It’s the fact they have to ford the Nazarene faith as they would a river, and that Jesus was a shell and a shield for the true Messiah. At around noon, the idea seems shameful. By the afternoon, it’s up for discussion. By evening it’s been assimilated, and late at night it’s perfectly obvious that everything’s exactly as Jacob says. Late at night, yet another aspect of the idea, which they hadn’t really taken into consideration before, occurs to them—that once they are baptized, they will cease to be Jews, at least as far as anyone can tell. They will become people—Christians. They will be able to purchase land, open shops in town, send their children to any schools they wish... Their heads spin with possibilities, for it is as though they have suddenly been given a strange, almost inconceivable gift.

“In many noble houses, and amongst certain of the townspeople, this book sits in the living room, and persons young and old alike will reach for it, and bit by bit, nolens volens, they soak up information on the world.”

There are external and internal things. External things are appearance, and we live amongst external things like people in a dream, and the laws of appearances must be taken for real laws when in fact they are not. When you live in a place and a time in which certain laws are in effect, then you must observe those laws, but never forgetting that they are only partial systems, never absolute. For the truth is something else, and if a person is not prepared to come to know it, then it may seem frightening and terrible, and that person may curse the day he learned of it. But I do believe that everyone can tell what kind of person he truly is. It is just that deep down, he doesn’t want to find out.

Moliwda used to wonder whether Jacob could feel fear. Eventually he decided that Jacob would not recognize the feeling, as though he’d simply been born without it. This gives Jacob strength: people can sense that absence of fear, and that absence of fear in turn becomes contagious. And because the Jews are always afraid—whether it’s of a Polish lord, or of a Cossack, of injustice or hunger or cold—they live in a state of extreme uncertainty, from which Jacob is a kind of salvation. The absence of fear is like a halo that radiates a heat that can warm up a chilled and frightened little soul. Blessed are those who feel no fear. And although Jacob often repeats that they are in limbo, they are comfortable enough in limbo.

Of course they’re not equals, thinks Moliwda. Back in the Bogomil village, they weren’t equals either. There were corporeal, psychic, and spiritual people. Somatics, psychics, and pneumatics, they called them, from the Greek. Equality goes against nature, however rightly one might strive toward it. Some are made of more earthly elements, and those people are thick, sensual, and non-creative. They are only good for listening. Others live with their hearts, their emotions, in bursts of the soul, and others still have contact with the highest spirit, distant from the body, free from affects, spacious inside. It is to this final group that God has access. But living together, they should have identical rights.

Now everything is coming true, but it could not have been so but for Jacob. When I look at him, I see that there are people who are born with something that I cannot find the words for, something that means that others respect them and hold them in the highest esteem. I don’t know what it is—is it posture, is it a head held high, a penetrating gaze, a way of walking? Or maybe some spirit hovering around him? An angel who keeps him company? He has only to enter any space, be it the most decrepit shed or the holiest chamber, and all eyes turn to him at once, pleasure and appreciation on everyone’s face, although he has not yet done or said a thing.

Moliwda said that as soon as we strangers, living amongst those others, get used to and learn to take pleasure in the charms of this world, we will forget where we came from and what sort of origins were ours. Then our misery will end, but at the price of forgetting our true nature, and this is the most painful moment of our fate, the fate of the stranger. That is why we must remind ourselves of our foreignness and care for this memory as we would our most treasured possession. Recognize the world as the place of our exile, recognize its laws as foreign, as strange . .

They say: We will not die. Baptism will save us from death. But what’s it going to be like? Will people get old? Will people stay the same age for all eternity? They say everyone is going to stay thirty forever. This cheers the old and scares the young. But supposedly this is the best age, where health, wisdom, and experience are entwined harmoniously, their meanings equal. What would it be like, not to die? There would be a lot of time for everything, you’d collect a lot of groszy, build a house, and travel a little here and there, since, after all, a whole eternity cannot be spent in a single place. Everything has lain in ruin until now, the world is made up of wants—this is lacking, that is gone. But why is it like that? Couldn’t there have been everything in excess—warmth, and food, and roofs over people’s heads, and beauty? Whom would it have hurt? Why was such a world as this created? There is nothing permanent under the sun, everything passes, and you won’t even have time to get a good look at it. But why is it like that? Could there not have been more time, and more reflection? It is only when we become worthy of being created anew that we shall receive from the Good True God a new soul, full, whole. And man shall be as everlasting as God.

The more surprised they seemed, the stranger the looks they gave us, the better. Our despair, and our grief, pulled us apart from them. Once more we were other. And that was how it was supposed to be. There is something wonderful in being a stranger, in being foreign, something to be relished, something as alluring as candy. It is good not to be able to understand a language, not to know the customs, to glide like a spirit among others who are distant and unrecognizable. Then a particular kind of wisdom awakens—an ability to surmise, to grasp the things that aren’t obvious. Cleverness and acumen come about. A person who is a stranger gains a new point of view, becomes, whether he likes it or not, a particular type of sage. Who was it who convinced us that being comfortable and familiar was so great? Only foreigners can truly understand the way things work.

After wine he sleeps badly, and wakes first thing in the morning, and that is the worst time of day: everything at that time seems to be a problem, some terrible misunderstanding. As he tosses and turns on his bed, old memories come back to him, very distinct in all their details. More and more often the stubborn thought comes to mind: When did he reach the halfway point of his life? What day was it when his story reached its highest point, its noon, and from that time on—though he did not know about it—began to progress toward setting? It is a very interesting problem, for if people knew which day was the midpoint of their lives, perhaps they would be able to imbue their lives and the events taking place within them with some kind of meaning.