Gaster's exemplum No. 365 preserves one of the most vivid Kabbalistic legends from medieval Ashkenazi Jewry — a tale about the Chasidei Ashkenaz, the mystics of the Rhine Valley in the 13th century, and their famous encounter with the great philosopher Rambam, Maimonides, in Egypt.
The evening before Passover, Rabbi Eliezer of Worms, author of the mystical work Sefer HaRokeach, told his students he intended to travel to Egypt to meet Maimonides before the Seder. His students were astonished. The journey takes months by caravan; Passover was hours away.
But Eliezer was a master of the practical Kabbalah. He uttered certain Names, conjured a cloud, mounted it, and was carried in the blink of an eye to Fustat in Egypt, where Maimonides lived.
That evening Maimonides invited a strange, unannounced Ashkenazi Jew to his home for the Seder. Throughout the Haggadah, Maimonides discoursed philosophically on the meaning of each passage — his signature mode, all reason and rigor. Rabbi Eliezer sat silently and never opened his mouth.
Maimonides, a master diagnostician of the intellect, concluded that this guest must be a simple unlearned man — probably an ignorant Ashkenazi, perhaps a poor refugee. He felt a little sorry for him.
In the morning, wanting to protect the stranger, Maimonides warned him not to walk through a certain street on the way to the synagogue, because the authorities had decreed that any Jew found on that street would be burned alive. Rabbi Eliezer nodded — and walked directly down that street. He was arrested and condemned to burn.
On the way to the execution, he stopped at Maimonides's door and asked him to wait before making the midday Kiddush; he would return. Maimonides now decided the man was mad. But he waited.
At the market, through his Kabbalistic power, Eliezer transformed the face of one of the governors — a known persecutor of Jews — into his own face. He gave his own face to the official. The official, now appearing to be Eliezer, was burned. Eliezer, wearing the governor's face, walked away unharmed.
At the appointed time he appeared at Maimonides's door, resumed his own form, and explained the whole affair. He had come, he said, to demonstrate to Maimonides that the practical Kabbalah was real — that there were whole levels of Torah the great philosopher had rejected as superstition. Maimonides, who had famously resisted Kabbalistic claims, was converted on the spot.
The legend concludes: Rabbi Eliezer stayed a year in Egypt, and Maimonides became a student of Kabbalah.
The story is almost certainly unhistorical — Maimonides died in 1204, and Eliezer of Worms died around 1230, but they never met. And yet the medieval Kabbalists loved this tale because it was their thesis in story form: rationalism alone is not the whole Torah. Somewhere above the reasoning mind, a cloud is waiting to carry the righteous across the sea in an evening.