The Angel Who Digs for the Lost and the Sage Who Gathers Souls

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The Diggers Who Carry Shovels Into the Dark

Somewhere below the floor of the world, an angel is digging. His name is Yode'a, which in Hebrew means "to know," and knowing is the whole of his labor. He does not sing at the Throne. He does not carry decrees down to the living. He lowers himself into the places where light has never once reached, and he looks for what has slipped out of the world.

He is not alone. Yode'a has servants, and his servants have servants, and every last one of them carries a shovel. They fan out through the deep wells and the buried seams and the cracks under the cracks, turning the darkness over like soil. A word someone meant to say and swallowed instead. An hour a mourner can no longer find. A spark that fell when the first vessels broke and scattered across all of creation. Every bit of it is down there, and the diggers do not stop.

The Candle Planted in the Righteous

Every righteous man, in his own way, is one of Yode'a's diggers. A tzaddik spends his life recovering what other people let fall, coaxing the lost back up toward the surface. But there is a danger in the work. A man who goes down far enough to find the lost can himself become lost, until he is standing in a darkness so complete that no shovel and no map will ever reach him.

What does he search with then? Not a torch. There is a small light planted inside him, no larger than a single candle flame, set there for exactly this hour. The soul is that flame. A man can carry it down into a well where the dark has never been broken, hold it up to every wall and every corner, and it will be enough. Small is enough. He follows the little light, and the little light knows the road his eyes cannot find.

The Sage Who Left Jerusalem Every Week

In Jerusalem there lived a man who did this work with his own two feet. His name was Hayim ben Attar, and after the great commentary he wrote, people called him the Or ha-Hayim, the light of life. Every week, the moment Shabbat ended and the last of its light drained out of the sky, he walked out of his house and up into the mountains that ring the city.

He carried almost nothing. Seven loaves of braided bread, one for each day, and a pitcher of milk. Then he vanished into the hills, alone, for the whole of the week. Just before the next Shabbat came down over the rooftops he would return, dust on his clothes, the seven loaves gone, and take his place at the table in time to greet the holy day.

The Sound of Wings at the Shabbat Table

When Shabbat arrived he would open his mouth and chant the Song of Songs, "Shir ha-Shirim," the old poem of love and longing, and he chanted it with a fire that frightened the people sitting near him. As he sang, they heard it. Wings. Not one pair but a great multitude, beating the air around him, unseen, filling the room with the sound of arrival.

They asked him what the sound was, and he told them the plain truth. All week, alone in the mountains, he had been finding souls that had come loose from the world and could not find their way home, and he had been mending them, one at a time. The wings belonged to the souls he had repaired, following him back down to the table to sit near a righteous man on the holy day. Later his wife would shake the crumbs of the braided bread out the door after the meal, and even then the air would stir and beat, because the souls came down for the leftovers of a tzaddik (a righteous person).

The Eve of the New Year at the Kinneret

Once a year the search changed its ground. In the days between the new year and the day of atonement, when heaven opens its books, the Or ha-Hayim left Jerusalem again and went north to the shore of the Kinneret, the wide sea of Galilee. He kept the eve of the new year alone in a small hut beside the water. Those who watched him saw him walk down to the lake and step into it, over and over, wading out into the dark water and coming back to the shore.

Someone finally asked him why. "I am helping the souls that have gathered here to immerse themselves in the Kinneret," he said, "so they can make themselves clean before the new year begins." He was doing in the water what Yode'a's diggers do in the dark. He waded out again, and again, gathering up the loosened and the abandoned and the fallen sparks, carrying them out of the lake toward the new year the way the diggers carry the lost up out of the wells. When he walked back to Jerusalem at last, the wings came with him.