A Soul Ripens on the Tree of Souls and Falls Toward Birth

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The Tree That Blossoms With Unborn Souls

Deep inside Paradise, a tree stands taller than any cedar and heavier with bloom than any orchard in spring. Its blossoms are not flowers. Each one is a soul that has never lived, folded tight in its own light, waiting. This is the Tree of Souls, and every soul that has ever breathed and every soul that ever will breathe first opened here, on a branch, in the windless hush before the world.

One blossom hangs near the outer boughs. It has no name it can speak, but its name is already written. Down in the dark where the roots grip the ground of Eden, the names of all the righteous are inscribed along the living wood. The roots feed upward. They carry whatever it is that makes a soul a soul into the blossom on the branch, and the soul does not know it is being fed. It knows only the light around it and the other blossoms breathing beside it.

The Guardian Beneath the Branches and the Four Winds

Beneath the tree sits an angel who never leaves. This is the Guardian of Paradise, and the tree is the whole of the Guardian's watch. The angel counts nothing and hurries nothing. It waits the way the tree waits.

Around them both the four winds of the world turn. They come from the corners of everything, and they move through the branches without breaking a single blossom. One wind is cold and smells of far water. One is warm. One carries something like the memory of a voice. The winds breathe over the tree, day after day that has no day, and under their breathing the blossoms swell.

The field below the tree is not ordinary ground. Its grass shines, and stranger trees grow across it, trees with no likeness in any wood a human has walked. The grass and those trees are themselves souls, rooted and flourishing, a whole country of them. The soul on the branch looks down into that shining field, and something in it leans toward the green, though it cannot yet fall.

The Ripening and the Loosening From the Branch

Then the ripening begins.

The soul grows heavy. The light that folded it starts to press outward. It has taken in all the roots can give, and the branch that held it so long begins, very slightly, to loosen its grip. The Guardian looks up. This is the moment the angel has waited for through the long patience beneath the boughs.

The other blossoms do not stop the soul. They cannot. Each ripens alone. When a soul is full it is called, and the calling is not loud. It is more like the branch opening its fingers. The soul is aware of the last thread of wood letting go.

For one instant it hangs free above the shining field, above the grass that is souls and the trees that are souls, and it wants, with everything it now is, to sink down and root there and be nothing but light among light.

It does not stay. The ripe soul does not fall into the field. It falls out of Paradise entirely.

The Descent Toward the Waiting World

There is a place the ripe souls go before they are born. Tradition calls it the Treasury of Souls, a great held stillness where the loosened blossoms gather and wait to be summoned into a body, a cradle, a mother, a world. The soul passes into that waiting. It is no longer on the branch and not yet in the world. It is held.

Somewhere far below, the world it is bound for turns without knowing it is coming. A woman it has never met. A name it will answer to and will not remember choosing. All of that waits at the bottom of the descent. And the soul, held in the Treasury, already aches backward toward the field it just left, the shining grass, the green country of Gan Eden (the Garden of Eden) where it grew.

Every soul carries that ache down. It is the oldest homesickness, older than the body it is about to wear.

The Naked Souls Beyond the Border of the Field

Not all souls keep the road home.

Beyond the borders of the field wander souls with no covering, stripped and lost, driven out past the shining grass into the cold of the fallen world. They strayed, or they fell, or the world tore them from the field, and now they cannot find their way back. Even a great soul, once it has left, struggles to return. The exiles cry across the border toward the field, "Repair us. Bring us home."

Someone answers. Jewish tradition names him the field master, the one who gives his whole self to the labor of gathering the naked souls and mending them, the tzaddik (a righteous person) who takes the exile's wound as his own. It is brutal work. The sources say he can finish it only by passing through his own death, worn down by affliction, and in the end he prevails, and the field is tended, and the wandering ones are led back in.

The ripe soul, descending toward its birth, knows none of this yet. It knows the ache, and the field growing smaller behind it, and the world growing nearer below. It falls toward a first breath it will draw in a room full of people who have been waiting for it, and it carries down, sealed inside its light, the shape of the branch it grew on and the green field it means, someday, to reach again.