Birds Burned Above the Sage Who Opened Torah

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Ash on the Margin of the Scroll

The sparrow was over the courtyard and then it was not.

It went up the way sparrows go up, cut across the air above the low roof where Rabbi Yonathan ben Uziel sat with a scroll open across his knees, and caught. There was a sound like cloth tearing. Grey flakes came down slowly through the still air and settled on the stone and on the edge of the parchment, and Yonathan did not raise his head.

He was inside a verse. Any bird that flew over him while he sat there burned, and the students had learned to watch the sky rather than mention it. One of them brushed the ash off the margin with the side of his hand.

Nothing in the courtyard had been set alight. No lamp had tipped. The heat came off a man reading, and the air above him held it the way air holds heat over a kiln, and small living things that wandered into it did not come out.

Fire Came Down and the Trees Started Singing

In another courtyard the fire came from the other direction.

Rabbi Eleazar ben Arakh opened a passage and flame came down out of the sky and stood around him in a ring. Angels arrived. Not in ranks, not in judgment. They moved the way guests move at a wedding, crowding in, pressing close to the couple, and the trees in the yard found voices and sang.

Neighbors ran toward the light and then stopped, because the air at the edge of it was too hot to walk through and smelled of scorched leaf. They stood in the lane and watched a man read while the branches over his head sang and burning creatures danced at a wedding nobody had been invited to.

They Asked Ben Azzai What He Was Really Doing

When it happened to Ben Azzai, somebody finally asked the dangerous question.

He was sitting with flames standing all around him, and the men in the room had spent their lives being told where the boundary was. There is a subject you do not teach to two students at once, a subject a man does not expound unless he is wise and understands on his own, and men who go looking for it have come back damaged or have not come back. So they asked him straight out.

"Are you occupied with the Work of the Chariot?"

"No," Ben Azzai said.

He was doing something duller than that, and he told them exactly what. He was matching Torah against the Prophets and the Prophets against the Aggadah, running a line from one to the next, finding where they answered each other. That was all. He had climbed nowhere. He had summoned nothing.

Then he explained the fire, and the explanation was worse than a chariot. The words of the Torah, he said, are as joyful today as they were on the day they were given, and on that day they were given in fire, and the mountain burned to the heart of heaven while the people stood at the foot of it and watched.

The flames around him were not a reward for climbing. They were the original weather of the text, still in it, coming out whenever somebody stopped skimming.

The Soul That Keeps Trying to Leave

Rabbi Chiya bar Abba of Yaffo taught the quieter thing that runs underneath all of it. Every hour, he said, the soul goes up and down inside a person and tries to get out.

Every hour. Not at death. Now, while a man is chewing bread or arguing about a field, something in him is rising toward the ceiling and pulling at the seam.

So why is anyone still alive at the end of a day. Because the Holy One fills the whole earth with His glory and has set that glory inside the body as well. The soul comes up to the edge, looks, sees its own Maker standing there, and falls back down into the ribs. It happens again an hour later. It has happened to every person who has ever finished a sentence.

Rabbi Meir's students used to sing about it. Let every soul praise the LORD, they sang, and they meant every hour that it goes up and comes back, and the wonders done for a body all day long without the body noticing.

A man who reads until the air over his head catches fire is a man who has leaned that seam wide open. The bird crosses the wrong strip of sky and pays for it. The sage keeps his place on the line, because the glory set inside him turns him around every time and sends him back down to the scroll.

Rooms Standing Empty on Both Sides

There is a day when the soul goes up and is not turned around.

The righteous will be walked through Gehenna (the realm of judgment after death) first and shown the rooms in it that stand empty, and told whose rooms they were. These were yours. You earned your way out of them. Now take the garden. The wicked get the same tour in reverse, led through Gan Eden (the Garden of Eden) past doors standing open on rooms nobody will ever use, and told the names of the men who would have lived there.

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said the curse on the wicked is shame and nothing else, and that God doubles it, and that when He blesses the righteous He doubles that too.

Yonathan closed the scroll at dusk and stepped into a lane where the birds were flying low over the rooftops, and every one of them lived.