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By Root 2178 0

did it come from within? In a waking or a dreaming state? What is its relation to individual piety and organized society? What is the difference between prophecy and vision, vision and hallucination? Can it be that one must be a Jew to have visions? What about Balaam in the Bible or the oracle at Delphi? And who was Isaiah? And why is he called the prince of prophets? What were his complaints against his people? Why was he so harsh with them? If we compare him, say, to Jeremiah, which of the two touches us more deeply? How to define his relation to language and to prophecy? Didn’t other prophets, like Moses himself, or Jonah, try to escape their prophetic obligation? More generally, does a prophet have the right to reject his role and mission? Doesn’t the law say that a prophet who rejects his prophetic mission merits death? Is that why he died an unnatural death, his body cut in two by King Manasseh? Why did all the prophets die tragically? Without ever departing from the verse, Shushani swept us along at a dizzying pace, as other realms and horizons opened before him and before us. He left us breathless, hovering between the summit and the depths of knowledge, the one as disturbing as the other.

One day he asked us to question him about anything we wanted, the Bible or politics, history or the Midrash, detective stories or the Zohar. He listened to our questions, eyelids drooping, waiting for everyone to finish. And then, like a magician, he gathered it all together to create a mosaic of stunning richness and rigor, harmoniously weaving our questions and his answers together. Suddenly each of us realized that all these themes, raised at random as if for his amusement, were in fact linked to a center, to a single focus of clarity. Yes, Cain’s murderous act contained that of Titus. Yes, Jacob’s wrestling with the angel heralded the adventure of the Jewish people defying their fate.

The village clock in the distance had long since tolled midnight, but the inexhaustible orator talked on, endowing his words with a thousand shining highlights and his thought with as many shadows, and it was our common prayer that his rough, monotonous voice would never fall silent.

Detractors called him a modern-day Faust. Had he sold his soul to Satan in exchange for limitless knowledge? A daring hypothesis, but I rejected it. I don’t know if he was a holy man in disguise, a kabalist wandering the earth to gather “divine sparks” so as to reconstitute the original flame, or an eternal vagabond, the timeless outsider who embodies doubt and threat. But I am sure he did not belong to the powers of “the other side,” that of darkness.

One day, unable to contain my curiosity, I foolishly violated his sanctuary, asking him the question that haunted even my dreams: “Who are you? Who are you really? If I have children someday, I would like to be able to tell them about you.… I mean later …” He froze, and a cruel expression came over his face. I could hear his rasping breath. Then he unleashed his fury: “And who says there’ll be a later?” Fortunately, his anger subsided as quickly as it had been aroused.

I sometimes talk about Shushani in my writings and in my lectures. Whenever I mention him, strangers write to me or come up to me adding this or that detail about his life and his mystery—a young rabbi in Connecticut who had met him in Montevideo, a merchant in Paris who told me that Shushani gave him financial advice, the mother of a Jewish beauty queen in North Carolina who remembers listening to him in Taverny. In San Francisco and Montreal, Caracas and Marseilles, when I mentioned Shushani, a smile would appear on some listener’s face, and I knew I had just rekindled a spark.

Haim-Hersh Kahan, a childhood friend, wrote from Oslo that he had attended one of Shushani’s courses in a synagogue near the Rue des Rosiers: “Everything I had learned till then was as nothing by comparison.”

The latest to date is a nuclear physicist, Jacques Goldberg, who shared with me a khidush (a finding in biblical exegesis) that he attributes to Shushani. Knowing