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From Chapter Six: The White Fire
of Destiny
"See, I have taught you rules and laws as the Lord God has commanded me,
so that you will be able to keep them in the land to which you are coming…. Safeguard
and keep them, since this is your wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations.
They will hear all these rules and say, 'This great nation is certainly a wise and
understanding people.'" [Deuteronomy 4:5-6]
The only possessions Rabbi Weissmandl had with him in the bunker were his three
books: two volumes from the Talmud; the third a commentary on the Torah. One of the
two Talmudic volumes--titled Makkoth--says much about the state of Weissmandl's tormented
soul: it is devoted to finely nuanced discussions of the punishments to be meted
out for various crimes. This volume he studied intently, weeping, for he considered
himself personally at fault for his failure to have done more to save his people--and
his family. He was a man of complete honesty and integrity, yet he had poured out
his life's blood negotiating with thieves and murderers, lying to them without scruple
if only he could save but one life more.
Yet at the end, his great rescue schemes had crumbled into nothingness. He had
been unable even to save his own wife and children. When he missed a deadline with
a Nazi official by a single day, the man sought out the Rabbi's brother-in-law, wrapped
him in his prayer-shawl and shot him.
There was however, a remnant of joy to be found in the one thing Rabbi Weissmandl
knew to be eternal: the Torah; the "Torah of Delight" as he would later
title a collection of his own commentaries, assembled by his devoted students after
his death. Perhaps this other possession--the only other one he chose to bring with
him on his own personal exile--an analysis of the Torah written in 1291, says even
more about him, and about the fire that illumined his soul.
Like most Jewish boys, the young Michael Ber Weissmandl participated in his first
reading of the Torah in synagogue at age thirteen, at his Bar Mitzvah. In preparation
for it, he wrote an original lecture to be delivered to the congregation, as is customary
still. But just before the event, his grandfather from Bratislava, Rabbi Menachem
Meir Berthauer, stopped him with a striking offer: if the boy would refrain from
delivering the lecture, his grandfather would give him ten gold crowns.
As a young boy, Rabbi Weissmandl had already established a reputation as a prodigy,
not only in sacred studies, but in mathematics and astronomy as well. His grandfather
had had a chance to read his Bar Mitzvah lecture, leading to the strange offer. There
was nothing wrong with it. In fact, the talk was brilliant. Rabbi Berthauer feared
that the adulation which would surely follow would have a dangerous effect on the
boy's character. (Thirty-six years later the nearly fifty-year-old Rabbi Weissmandl
would deliver that same lecture publicly for the first time to students at the yeshiva
he founded in America following the war. Even then, "the audience was deeply
impressed by his brilliance and erudition.")
The boy agreed to his grandfather's offer, and with the money he purchased the
volume of Torah commentary that would remain with him his entire life. It was to
exert a profound effect on him, especially given the boy's love of mathematics and
astronomy. The book was written by a thirteenth-century sage, Rabbenu ("Our
Rabbi") Bachya ben Asher of Saragossa, in Spain.
Rabbenu Bachya's more general writings are widely taught today, especially because
of the clarity and simplicity of his style. His teachings in "Kabbalah"--the
Jewish mystical tradition, combining contemplative prayer with a variety of mathematically-influenced
methods for studying Torah--were highly respected at the time, and until today. Yet
his commentaries contain some unusual and cryptic asides.
For example, at the very beginning of his major work (the one Weissmandl was
given by his grandfather), Bachya makes a remark that clearly must have electrified
the young Weissmandl when he first came upon it. Indeed, he would return again and
again throughout his life to the principles therein hinted at, especially during
the dreadful days in the bunker. Bachya introduced the subject as follows:
"You should know a decryption [lit. kabbalah] of this second section in
Genesis has been passed down to us, beginning from the verse 'In the beginning…'
up to the letter b[beyt; the 42nd letter in Genesis] which contains a name of 42
letters that hints at God's activities before the creation--but only by means of
'many permutations.'
Bachya was referring to a little-known observation made two centuries earlier
by another sage, Rabbenu Tam (and even earlier by one Nechunya ben HaKanah, discussed
below). Tam had observed that encoded into the opening passages of Genesis was a
42-letter name of God. But more than that, Bachya claimed, there lay within its compass
the necessary information for calculating the unfolding of the "days and seasons,"
starting with the moment of the creation of the sun and moon and ever after, according
to the ancient tradition that "…the luminaries were created on the fourth day,
and by them we count the years of the world." Tam did not commit the details
of this calculation to writing, however.
Two centuries later, Rabbenu Bachya did so, by describing in one of his books
what he called "the date which is the true starting point of all calculations
of the astronomers" (hence the date to be used for "prophetic" calculations
as well.) He explained:
"…if the eyes of your heart will be illumined, you will find this date encoded
in the text, such that between each of its numbers lies as well 42 letters. The wise
will understand that this is not by chance, but a clear sign involving the very birth
of the world."
The calculations Bachya was talking about are extremely complicated. But even
as a boy, Rabbi Weissmandl had mastered them and confirmed for himself that the critical
number was indeed encoded precisely as Bachya said it was. Later, while a still a
student, Rabbi Weissmandl became an expert in the equally complicated rules that
govern the construction of the mikveh, or ritual bath (from which, incidentally,
the tradition of Baptism evolved). And in 1931 he published his first book, a volume
that hearkened back to his earliest discoveries in Bachya's text: Hilchot haChodesh:
"The Laws for Fixing the New Moon."
Throughout his life, Rabbi Weissmandl remained certain that there was embedded
within the Torah, via Bachya's description of the skipping of equal intervals of
letters, divinely ordained information. Bachya was not the first to point to the
existence of encrypted information in the Torah. Hints were scattered throughout
the vast store of Jewish literature. Indeed, the ancient belief that God had created
the world via combinations of letters was directly linked to the mysterious ideas
concerning the various "names of God." It was said, for example, that the
Torah consists entirely of permutations of the names of God. And of Bezalel, the
craftsman who constructed in the desert the movable Tabernacle that housed the Ark--containing
within it the Tablets of the Law and the original Torah scrolls (following the escape
from Egypt)--it was said, "he knew how to combine the letters of the Divine
Names with which heaven and earth were created."
His imagination fired, Weissmandl took an extraordinary step as a youth: he wrote
out on white cards, in ten by ten arrays, the entire 304,805-letter text of the Torah.
This formalized the method hinted at by Bachya's statement; and it facilitated the
discovery of at least those codes encrypted at intervals and multiples of ten letters,
of which Weissmandl believed there were many. Thus began Weissmandl's lifelong quest
to retrieve from the depths of history and dispersion another long-lost stream of
Jewish understanding.
Rabbi Weissmandl was aware that certain more recent luminaries--R. Moses Cordevaro
and Rabbi Elijah Solomon (the Vilna Gaon, mentioned in earlier chapters)--knew of
the codes and had alluded to them. But the heyday of such speculations seemed to
have been during the great flowering of Spanish "Kabbalah" that took place
in the Middle Ages, during an era of mounting persecution. Rabbenu Bachya's main
teacher, Rabbi Solomon ben Abraham Adret (1235-1310), was one such Rabbi in Spain.
He was reputed to have in his possession manuscripts dating from as far back as the
Babylonian captivity hundreds of years BC. Because of Adret's great learning and
massive library, students flocked to him in Spain from all over Europe.
The most mysterious of these insights were written down deliberately only as
hints, however, because of a reluctance on the part of authors to discuss "Kabbalistic"
matters. Their rediscovery was made even more difficult by the fact that manuscript
troves were periodically ravaged in the harassment and open attacks which Jewish
communities repeatedly suffered; and via the ever present danger of expulsion. (Between
1182 and 1495 there were sixteen major expulsions of Jews from their chief centers
of settlement on European soil.) Adret's library no longer exists. But the young
Weissmandl was determined to search out as much as he could of the mysterious links
among these tantalizing hints.
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