The Watches and the Lute

In Levi’s home in Rehovot, time appeared in two forms. It rested behind glass in rows of wristwatches, each mechanism dividing the day with exquisite precision, and it returned through the strings of a lute, where no measure could become music until someone had first learned how to listen. I have often thought that something of Jewish life begins between these two forms of time.

Books were everywhere. They were not decoration, nor evidence arranged to establish the learning of their owner, but the living geography of the house: on shelves, tables and chairs, in stacks that opened passages between languages, centuries and commentaries. Levi had studied at the Sorbonne, yet his erudition carried none of the ceremonial superiority that sometimes accompanies academic distinction. Knowledge did not bring a conversation to an end. It made the next question unavoidable.

We spoke about Jewish mysticism, about the Zohar, letters, divine names and meanings that do not surrender themselves to the demand for immediate clarity. Mysticism was not, for us, a cabinet of secrets or a refined religious ornament. It was a discipline of attention, a way of resisting the assumption that the visible exhausts reality or that a word has completed its work once its first meaning has been identified.

In the mornings, we prayed together. I remember Levi standing beside me among the books, helping me with the tefillin. There was nothing theatrical in the scene. Jewishness was not being declared, defended or explained. It was present in the gesture itself: in leather, fabric, memory, breath and the quiet concentration required to repeat an ancient act without reducing it to........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)