The Parting in the Hair Where the Messiah's Light Descends

The old master would not last the day, and the companions knew it. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai lay in the house with the doors shut and the few who remained pressed close around him, close enough to hear the breath catching in his chest. He had one secret left to give, and he meant to give it before the breath stopped.

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"Come near," he told them. "There is a thing hidden in the head of the King that the whole world is waiting on, and I will not carry it out of the world with me."

Rabbi Abba took up his pen.

The Track Cut Through the Hair

Rabbi Shimon spoke of the divine countenance the way a man describes a face he has stared at his whole life. Across the crown of it lay the hair, strand upon strand, black and ordered, and through the hair ran a single parting. Not a decoration. A road.

The parting was a shining track, he said, and it began in the highest and most sealed place there is, in Chochmah (חכמה), Wisdom, the emanation so far above thought that no mind takes hold of it. From that sealed place the track came down. Where it ran, it burned white.

"This," he told the companions, "is where the righteous will stand in the world that is coming." He gave them the verse from Proverbs, the one about the path of the just that shines like the gleam of sunlight, brighter and brighter toward the full noon. That brightness was no reward tucked away in a corner of heaven. That brightness was the parting itself.

The Six Hundred and Thirteen Roads

Then he widened it. The single track was not one road among many. It was the road that lit every other road.

Six hundred and thirteen paths ran through Zeir Anpin (זעיר אנפין), the Small Face, the countenance through which God turns toward the world and gives the Torah with its commandments. Six hundred and thirteen commandments, six hundred and thirteen paths. Not one of them held any light of its own. Every one of them was lit from the single parting cut down out of Wisdom.

The companions understood him. Every act of a righteous life, every command kept in a small house on an ordinary night, drew its light from the most hidden place there is. The parting was not the end of the road. It was the source.

The Breath in the Nostril

Rabbi Shimon lifted the teaching higher still, above the Small Face to the Vast Countenance, to Arich Anpin (אריך אנפין), the Long Face, the Ancient Holy One whom no eye has ever measured.

From the nostril of that Vast Countenance, he said, a breath moves. It passes down through the opening of the nose and enters the Small Face below, and the breath is the spirit of life. It is the same spirit the prophet Isaiah named when he swore that the spirit of Hashem would rest upon one man, the spirit of wisdom and understanding. That breath in the nostril is the one that waits for the days of King Messiah. When it comes down full through the channel, wisdom will settle on the redeemer, and the nostril that seemed a place only for smoke will prove to be a channel for healing and for joy.

When the Smoke Refused to Rise

But he set two verses against each other, and the companions felt the danger in it. In the first, smoke rises from the nostrils of the Face, the smoke of anger, the reek of a judgment already tilting toward the world. In the second, the prophet says God restrains himself, and the Hebrew word for that restraint carries the very same root as the word for nose.

"Do you hear it?" Rabbi Shimon asked. The same nostril that could pour smoke chooses instead to hold its breath. Even when the judgment is earned and the smoke is climbing, the Face refuses to breathe it out. It holds back. It holds back for the sake of a people not yet worthy, so that there is still room for them to turn and to grow. The restraint was not weakness. It was love, choosing to wait.

What the Master Left Open

So the whole picture stood before them. A parting cut through the hair of the divine head, running down from a Wisdom no mind can reach. A breath held in the nostril of the Ancient One. A channel kept open above the world, and at the far end of it, not yet released, the light that will summon the Messiah and rest the spirit of wisdom upon him.

The companions bent lower over the words. Rabbi Abba's pen kept moving. And the master, who had held the door of that channel open with the last of his strength so the ones beside him could see clear through it, let his voice fall quiet, the secret out of him at last and gone into the world where it would wait.