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Just don't forget the name. Remember the name carved into the ancient stone. The letters are unclear. We see the name Rabbi Hanoch on one, and on another Dunya Paduinia, and after that Rabbi Shlomo Bar Abraham Ben Yaish and other names carved on headstones saved from Jewish cemeteries in Spain. And we murmur their names. How many years have passed since their names were last said, 600 or 700 years ago?
Let's go back to the beginning. A small group of us, researchers in literature, Kabbalah, and history; caregivers; and poets decided to travel back to Spain of the Golden Age and the birth of the Kabbalah. We wanted to study Raz Hashabbat ("The secret of the Sabbath") in a way that would shed new light on the Israeli reality. The visit was organized by the Shabbat Unplugged initiative, which is trying to renew the significance of Shabbat in Israeli society and encourage people to detach themselves from screens and everything that keeps us glued to them throughout the week and use Shabbat as a time to connect with family and the day's special values. With us was Ruth Kabbesa-Abramzon, who directs the project, and Roi Horn, director of content, and plenty of other intelligent people full of ancient and modern-day wisdom who at any point during the trip could have taken the lead and enriched our world. A years-long fantasy of mine had come true.
On to Spain. We went back in time to the Middle Ages, to poets, philosophers, kabbalists, Torah scholars and rabbis; religious and political leaders; and an Inquisition that put an end to the days of our people there and left hundreds of thousands of descendants of Jews, who have since become millions and been absorbed into the Spanish people. Before we land, we see broad spaces, hills and valleys, and I imagine the pair of strange innocents who went around there in the 15th century on an ailing horse and a donkey, one wearing a heavy old suit of armor and the other dragged after his master's insanity. Don Quixote, as he appeared in the outstanding, partial translation by our national poet Haim Nachman Bialik. I read it as a child, roaring with laughter at the adventures of the pathetic knight. Eventually, I would sit and read the same book to my own children.
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We landed in Madrid. Surrounded by Spanish on all sides and I was confused, as I have recently been studying Italian. And then we were on our way to the Spanish National Archives, a true tunnel through time. Long shelves full of files and cartons of documents hundreds of years old. A smell of different generations who assembled wisdom on the crumbling pages. We must handle them with care. The greatest researchers in the history of our people spent time here, gleaning testimony about Jewish life from the depths of the archives and giving new voices to our saints who were burned alive, whose testimonies were written down as part of the documentation by the court of the Spanish Inquisition, which investigated Jews who had converted to Christianity while accusing them of not fully accepting their new religion and clinging to their old faith at heart.
We gathered in a wood-paneled room in the middle of which stood a long table that held findings from 600 years ago – original Spanish Inquisition investigation files that Roi had requested ahead of time. A date appeared on one of them: 1483. About nine years later, our people would be expelled at the order of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. These holy pages must be touched with gloved hands, lest they fall apart.
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One file contains the protocol of the trial of a woman named Maria Gonzales, who sinned by maintaining Jewish traditions. People who testified against her said she would visit relatives on Shabbat. Shabbat has always been a time for family. To redeem her soul, a Catholic priest ordered her to read seven Psalms. Maria and her family took advantage of the order to recite them at a family gathering, on Shabbat. Imagine a Shabbat service in the home of Spanish conversos, just before the expulsion, that included reciting Psalms, even before Rabbi Yitzhak Shlomo Luria amended the Shabbat service in the 16th century to include the Psalms we still read today. Circles open and close. One of the verses the conversos said every Shabbat, possibly while hiding in their basements, was Song of Ascents: "Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!"
Shabbat saved the souls of the conversos; it gave them sanity and a place and time after a tension-filled week of living a double life and pretense and confusion and contradiction between their new faith and pricks of conscience from the old one. Women would prepare dishes that would be enough to last through Shabbat so they wouldn't need to light a fire. In Spain of the Middle Ages, Shabbat was a day of trade, and the converso communities were forced to work to dispel any suspicion of them. To solve the problem, they sent their young daughter to work in the family's shop, not the adults. When Maria was asked to baptize her daughter, she did it on Shabbat, as a way of keeping the memory of Shabbat alive. In the end, she was burned to death at the order of the Inquisition.
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Another one of the files before us was about Mary Diaz, the wife of Juan Diaz, a doctor and pharmacist. On Nov. 14, 1483, her trial began. File 196, No. 143. Her name had come up in another Inquisition trial as the main activist in the converso community of Ciudad Rial in Palma. Mary did much for Jewish life: she helped a converso woman bathe in the mikvah before she was married; she organized a Passover seder; she observed Sukkot and the rest of the Jewish holidays; and she brought other conversos in so they could observe the commandments while teaching them Torah herself. In general, it seems women were the heroes of the time. Through their devotion to tradition, they kept the fires burning for as long as possible, and often paid for it with their lives. Mary Diaz escaped the city two weeks before the Inquisition arrived, and her life was saved. My mind was racing: why did the Jews, and their forcibly converted brethren, agree to live like that? While Ashkenazi Jews opted to die as martyrs, the Jews of Spain – a significant number of them – tried to live as Jews in secret. I remembered a line from a poem by David Avidan: "Oh, how I knew to die for you / and how I did not know to live for you." How did these two directions influence the Jews' existential views?
A few hours earlier, I was thinking about Don Quixote, and now I was standing, thrilled, looking at a letter by the writer himself, Miguel de Cervantes, in which he asked the relevant government minister for permission to publish his book. Cervantes was apparently the son of Jews who were forced to convert, too. It was not by chance that he knew how to hide his criticism of the time in a supposedly innocent tragi-comic book about a bizarre knight who sticks to the values of chivalry hundreds of years after they vanished from the world, and whom society treats as insane for clinging to them. We'll talk more about him later. Another moving document appears before our astonished eyes: correspondence between Ferdinand and Isabella and Pope Sixtus IV, in which the rulers ask the head of the Catholic Church in Rome for permission to set up the Spanish Inquisition. Sixtus agreed.
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What do people who spend their entire lives poring over ancient texts, loving the Hebrew words, do when one hand is holding onto the current time and the other is constantly digging through earlier periods, sending their consciousness back and forth between present and past, and before their eyes the ancient words take on a life and soul? They lived here, these women, on this ground. Here they loved and here they had children; and here they were persecuted and led to the auto-da-fe in the city square, humiliated and booed, to confess for sins they never committed and finally were burned at the stake. And they come to us, as we stand in the Spanish National Archives, 536 years later – Mary Diaz and her friends, and we are beside ourselves with excitement.
We wanted to sing a Hebrew song in their memory. So I used my phone to find the poem "Ana B'Koach," to a melody by Ovadia Hamama, and we all joined in. From the circles of Jewish Kabbalists in Ashkenaz, to the great and tortured spirit of our people in Spain. There, in the corner, Ruth Kara Kaniel, who in her childhood in Soviet Moscow experienced the life of a "converso" family, was weeping. Her parents were not allowed to make aliyah and did all they could to maintain their Jewishness in secret, behind heavy curtains and under the noses of KGB agents. There wasn't a minyan of men in the Spanish archives, but there was one of women. So I gave Ruth the words of the Kaddish mourning prayer. Her prayer erased the last trace of cynicism that remained in us, and we all responded "amen" for the souls of the tortured women, our far-off sisters who for a moment returned to us from the fog of history.
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The next day we reached Toledo, an ancient city that dates back to before Roman times. During the Muslim conquest, members of all three religions lived there in harmony, and the city saw a golden age, and even after the Christians recaptured Toledo, the spirit of that age remained. Until the expulsion that toppled the city from its stature. Rabbi Yehuda Halevi and Rabbi Abraham Ben Ezra lived and worked there in the 12th century. "Zion! Do you wonder how and where your captives are now, and if they think of you, the far-flocked remnants?" asked Halevi. Some 700 years later, toward the end of the 19th Century, Naftali Herz Imber, the poet who wrote "Hatikva" asked us in another poem not to forget that ancient poet of Zion: "Beware, my people, take great care / lest you ever in your life forget Halevi." The power of Halevi's poem also inspired him to write the words to our national anthem.
We entered the walls of the city, where there are so many churches, and in my mind I heard the poem of Ibn Ezra "My soul thirsts for thee," which contains the refrain: "Show the woman the truth / ranting harlot / The dead is thy son, and the living is my son." He took the Judgment of Solomon, on a dispute between two women about who was the baby's true mother and hinted at the disputes in his own age between Judaism and Christianity about who were the true sons of God. The facades of European churches feature two women, one heroic, the other with her eyes covered, a hint at the blindness of Judaism. In Ben Ezra's poem he defends the faith of Israel as "Lady of Truth." How much courage he needed to summon to write that.
At the start of the 14th century Rabbi Asher Ben Yechiel (Harosh), one of the great Torah scholars of the ages, arrived here from Ashkenaz. He was appointed the head of the rabbinical court and head of the Toledo yeshiva, and was buried here in 1328. His commentary on the Talmud was the first we read after Rashi and the Baalei Hatosafot. Suddenly, the words I knew from the tractates and the various books of response, where Rabbi Ben Yechiel is prominent, took on new life and became flesh and blood people, who lived in this city and wrote down their wisdom.
We entered a synagogue named Santa Maria Blanca, which was the main synagogue of the Toledo community. When the Jews were expelled, it was turned into a church, until it became a museum. We walked under the apsis, imagining the Torah ark and the Jewish congregation flocking there on Shabbat, and we sang the first part of the poem "Neshmat Kol Chai," which likely dates back to Mishnaic times: "Were our mouths as full of song as the sea, and our tongue as full of jubilation as its myriad waves, if our lips were full of praise like the spacious heavens, and our eyes hone like the sun and moon, and our hands as outstretched as eagles of the sky, and our feet as swift as hinds – we still could not thank You sufficiently, Lord our God and God of our ancestors." And a Hebrew echo answered from the walls of the ancient synagogue, which for a moment hearkened back to its former glory.
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In the afternoon, we traveled to Avila. We were greeted by immense walls that had been preserved since the 12th century. This is where St. Teresa of Avila lived. She started a revolution in the outlook of the church and adopted mystic ideas that paralleled the ideas of the kabbalists. Teresa was also the daughter of descendants of Jews who were forced to convert, and who knows where she got her inspiration from. Indeed, 300 years before her time, Rabbi Moshe de Leon, one of our people's greatest kabbalists, whom many credit with writing parts of the Zohar, lived in the city.
This is where Rabbi Yizhak of Acre came on his journey to trace the source of the Zohar. He heard from de Leon's wife that "God help me, he never copied the manuscript, he wrote everything he wrote from his head and his heart and intellect." Since then, the argument about the Zohar has continued, but not in the wider world, where it has become fashionable to study it.
Across one of the gates to the city wall stood a small monument engraved with a quote from the Zohar, translated into Spanish, with Rabbi Moshe de Leon's name underneath it, with the title of the Zohar translated into Spanish: "El Libro del Esplendor." A narrow path led from the carved words of the Zohar to the opening in the wall, through which we saw the light. We walked toward the light. Is all this meant strictly for tourists, or do the Spanish people also realize that these greats who lived among them enriched their culture and left deep imprints on it, even today?
Why did the Kabbalah win out over the other mystic and secret schools? Maybe it was because it never left off the practice of Jewish law. Mysticism didn't cancel that world, the opposite: The Kabbalah offered a new take on the commandments. Long before the Renaissance and the ideas of humanism, the Kabbalah refreshed the status of humans vs. God. It was not a cancellation or a minimization, but an empowerment of the human. Kabbalists were needed to help "rehabilitate" the status of God in the world.
Elsewhere in Spain, the Rambam (Maimonides) wrote his philosophy book "Guide to the Perplexed." It presents Godliness as permanent and unchanging, perfect. The rise of Kabbalah was a response to that – like the advent of hassidism some 500 years later was a response to the elitist emphasis on study. Kabbalah discussed Godliness as something that was "hidden," dynamic, that was revealed and uncovered through Ten Sefirot. God in Kabbalah appeared as a personal God to whom people could connect to personally and both God and the person who worship him completed each other. How much of that was brought to bear on European humanism – not only from our people's sages, directly, but also through the descendants of the conversos?
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The day after that, we went to Barcelona. In the hilly stretches between Madrid and Barcelona, from mountains to valley, we would occasionally see windmills. I imagined myself going back to the famous battle Don Quixote waged against the windmills to purge the world of evil, but his loyal servant Sancho Panza wondered, "What giants?" "Those thou seest there, with the long arms." Then Sancho Panza understands: "Look, your worship, what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what sees to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go." But the poor knight dismisses his observations with contempt, and tilts at them with a battle cry, only to get stuck in the enormous sails and be thrown far off, along with his horse…
We got to Barcelona, and from there we went straight to Girona. Jews arrived in the city in the 9th century. Great figures lived there, including Rabbi Azriel from Girona; Rabbi Zarchia Halevi, who wrote the commentary Hamaor; and of course Rabbi Moshe Ben Nachman, who like Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, eventually left Spain for the Land of Israel in 1267. His mystical passion led him to the holiest of holies, and through its power the Ramban renewed the Jewish community in Jerusalem.
Will we be smart enough to take something of this vast cultural wealth our people held onto in their exile, which they carved into stone and insisted on preserving? Will we be smart enough to adopt Shabbat as a day to focus on culture, Torah in the broad sense, family, and reconnecting to the Land? Let's hope so.
After Spain, I flew to Rome. But that's another story.
Dror Eydar is Israel's next ambassador to Italy.
