The Armpit Voice and the Breath That Climbed to Heaven

Outside the study house a man knelt over a fresh grave with his arms pressed tight against his ribs, and from the hollows under his arms came a thin voice that was not his own. He had not eaten in days. He had slept three nights on the cold ground between the tombs, waiting for the spirit of tumah, the breath of uncleanness, to settle on a body emptied out enough to receive it. Now it answered. The voice rose chirping from his armpits, the way the dead were said to speak, low and dry, promising to tell him what the buried knew.

This is the baal ov, the master of the ghost, the necromancer the Torah forbids on pain of being cut off. He starves himself and lies among graves until the dead seem to speak through his own flesh. The voice does not come from above. It comes from the seams of his body, squeezed out from under the arm, a hollow mimicry dressed up as the speech of those who have crossed over.

The Voice That Climbs From the Armpits

The strangeness of it was the whole force of the warning. A spirit could be raised through a man's own member, but then it would not rise on its own and could not be questioned on the Sabbath. A spirit summoned through a skull rose more freely and could be consulted even on the holy day. These were the gradations of a forbidden art, measured like impurities in a ledger, and all of them were sealed under the same prohibition. The man and the dead he conjured were both in transgression together. The one who consults the dead and the dead voice he drags up share one guilt.

So the necromancer worked downward. He emptied his stomach to make room for a ghost. He lay in the dirt to invite the breath of uncleanness onto his skin. And the reward for all that hunger and filth was a voice with no height in it, a counterfeit ascent, the dead pretending to speak while never leaving the ground.

What Rabbi Akiva Heard in the Warning

Rabbi Akiva read the verse that condemned the man among the graves, and the thing that struck him was not the horror. It was the bargain. He cried out, "Woe unto us!" If the spirit of uncleanness will repose on a man who cleaves to uncleanness, who starves and sleeps in a cemetery to court it, then how much more should the holy spirit repose on a man who cleaves to the Shechinah, the Divine Presence.

The logic cut both ways and Akiva refused to soften it. Impurity rushes to the one who reaches for it. Holiness should rush faster to the one who reaches up. So what holds it back? "What brought this about?" he asked, meaning the silence, the distance, the absence of the holy breath on those who long for it. And he answered himself without mercy. "Your sins sundered you from your God." The necromancer's hunger was answered from below. A different hunger, Akiva insisted, would be answered from above, if only the reaching were clean.

The Hungry Student in the Study House

Inside the walls, far from the graves, another hungry man was reaching. Eliezer ben Hyrcanus had come to learn and could not even say the words to begin. Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai had asked him a small thing, whether he knew the Shema that declares God one, the standing prayer, the blessing after bread, and the grown man had to answer no. He knew none of it. So Jochanan taught him the three prayers like a child, and Eliezer sat down and wept.

"My son, why dost thou weep?" the master asked.

"Because I desire to learn Torah," Eliezer said. The prayers were not enough for him. He wanted the depths.

Jochanan fed him two laws a day, and Eliezer swallowed them whole and chewed them over every Sabbath until they were his. Then the hunger turned on his body. He fasted eight days straight. The odor that rose from his starved mouth filled the room, and the master had to ask him to step back.

The Savor That Rose to Heaven

Eliezer wept again, harder this time, because the man who had lifted him up now seemed to push him away like a leper sent outside the camp. But Jochanan was not recoiling. He was watching a thing climb.

"My son," he said, "just as the odor of thy mouth has ascended before me, so may the savor of the statutes of the Torah ascend from thy mouth to Heaven."

There was the answer to the man among the graves, spoken without ever naming him. The necromancer starved his body to drag a hollow voice up from his armpits, a voice that never left the dirt. Eliezer starved his body and what rose from his mouth was the smell of Torah, climbing past the room, past the master, toward the firmament. One hunger pulled a counterfeit down out of the seams of the flesh. The other sent something true upward.

When Jochanan learned the starving student was the son of Hyrcanus, a man of wealth, and pressed him to dine, Eliezer declined. He had already eaten with plainer company, with Rabbi Joshua ben Chananjah and Rabbi José the Priest. The rich man's son stayed low to the ground on purpose, and from that low place the savor still rose.

Two Hungers, One Sky

Two men starved themselves. Two voices answered. From the necromancer pressed against his grave came a dry chirp under the arm, the dead refusing to rise, the breath of uncleanness settling onto skin that had begged for it. From the fasting student in the study house came the savor of the law, lifting toward the sky that the forbidden voice could never reach. Akiva had named the rule that governs both. Reach down into the dirt and the dirt answers. Reach up with clean hands and Heaven answers louder.