The Kabbalist Who Tried to Break the Messiah's Chains

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The Redeemer Quarried From Sodom

Two daughters lay with their own father in a cave above the ash of Sodom, certain the world had ended and no man was left alive to give them children. From that night came Moab. From Moab, generations on, came a widow named Ruth, a Moabite who followed her mother-in-law into a foreign country and stooped in another man's field to glean barley. And from Ruth came David, the shepherd God chose to be king.

The king's blood, traced backward, does not run clean. It runs through Lot's daughters, through the veil Tamar wore at the crossroads to trap her own father-in-law into fathering her sons, through a Moabite woman a man of Israel was forbidden to marry. The redeemer of the world was being quarried, stone by scandalous stone, out of the Other Side, the side the sages name evil.

David knew it. He knew what his line had carried up out of that cave, the Evil Impulse itself, seeded in the incest above the ruined cities. He wanted it gone. He set himself to banish the side of evil from the world, to tear it out by the root so that nothing dark could ever rise against Israel again. He could not. He had no power over it. A man cannot uproot the ground he stands on, and David stood on it. He was made from it.

One Soul Gathered From Every Generation

The soul waiting to enter that stained line was not one soul. Like the soul of Adam, the first man, it held all the others inside it, the souls of every generation folded together into a single burning weight. Whoever carries all the generations carries the strength of the whole world in his chest. When such a man turns back toward God, he pulls every soul behind him along the same turn, and the age of redemption arrives in one breath.

But the weight was too heavy to descend. The gathered soul had sunk down among broken things, scattered as sparks through the wreck of every generation, and it could not fall into a waiting body and be born.

The Soul in Chains

Worse than scattered. Chained. The forces of evil had seized the soul of the Messiah and bound it, and it lay in their keeping still, a captive in the dark. Until the chains were struck off, the soul could not come down. Until the soul came down, no child was born to carry it, and the Messiah did not come. Every generation that passed and left him in irons was a generation that had chosen to leave him there.

The waiting was no longer about when he would come. It was about who would go down into the dark and break the chains.

The Mystic of Hebron

In Hebron, where the fathers of the nation lie buried, a man named Joseph decided it would be him. He did not merely long for the Messiah. He hunted him. Joseph della Reina gave his life to the secrets, pored over the mystical books through the nights, fasted his body thin, prayed until the words wore grooves in him, all to learn the single thing worth knowing, how to force the redemption open before its hour.

Then the great book surfaced in his lifetime, the Zohar, hidden for ages and suddenly in his hands, thick with the secret architecture of God and the Other Side. To Joseph this was no accident. It was a summons. If the soul of the Messiah lay chained, the book had come to show him where the jailers stood.

The Binding of Samael

The jailers had names. Samael, the great accuser, prince of the side of evil, and Lilith, his mate. They held the keys. Joseph reasoned it plainly. To free the chained soul he did not need to find the Messiah at all. He needed to overpower the two who kept him.

He purified himself and his disciples for weeks, immersing, fasting, refusing meat and wine, until they were scoured clean enough to speak the Name and not be burned by it. They climbed to a high and lonely place. They called down the great angels, who came and warned them off, and they would not stop. They spoke the holy Names, and the two powers rose in front of them as two black dogs, snarling, unable to move.

Joseph bound them. He wound the chains of the Name around Samael and around Lilith and drew them tight, and the accusers who had held the Messiah in irons stood in irons themselves, weakening, sinking, begging. It had worked. The oldest chains in the world were about to change hands.

The Handful of Incense

Then Samael spoke, low and ruined. "Give us only a little to eat," he said. "A little incense, and let us go." He sounded like something dying.

Joseph hesitated. The demon looked so weak. What harm in a handful of incense to a beaten thing already in chains. He took frankincense, set it burning, and lifted the smoke toward the bound powers.

The instant it reached them the chains slipped away like thread. He had made an offering to the side of evil, and an offering is worship, and worship is surrender. Samael rose to his full height, Lilith beside him, stronger now than before Joseph had ever touched them, and the two of them laughed. The soul of the Messiah stayed chained in the dark, sunk deeper than before. Joseph della Reina, who had come within a handful of incense of ending the exile, went down into ruin and never rose out of it, and the generation walked on wearing its chains, having freed the one prisoner it should have left bound.