Chapter VI

After his wife died--vainly calling for her Isaac--the old Maggid was left heart-broken. It was as if his emotions ran in obedient harmony with the dictum of the Talmud: "Whoso sees his first wife's death is as one who in his own day saw the Temple destroyed."

What was there for him in life now but the ruins of the literal Temple? He must die soon, and the dream that had always haunted the background of his life began to come now into the empty foreground. If he could but die in Jerusalem!

There was nothing of consequence for him to do in England. His Miriam was married and had grown too English for any real communion. True, his congregation was dear to him, but he felt his powers waning: other Maggidim were arising who could speak longer.

To see and kiss the sacred soil, to fall prostrate where once the Temple had stood, to die in an ecstasy that was already Gan-Iden (Paradise)--could life, indeed, hold such bliss for him, life that had hitherto proved a cup of such bitters?

Life was not worth living, he agreed with his long-vanished brother-Rabbis in ancient Babylon, it was only a burden to be borne nobly. But if life was not worth living, death--in Jerusalem--was worth dying. Jerusalem! to which he had turned three times a day in praying, whose name was written on his heart, as on that of the mediaeval Spanish singer, with whom he cried:--

"Who will make to me wings that I may fly ever Eastward,
Until my ruined heart shall dwell in the ruins of thee?
Then will I bend my face to thy sacred soil and hold precious
Thy very stones, yea e'en to thy dust shall I tender be.

"Life of the soul is the air of thy land, and myrrh of the purest
Each grain of thy dust, thy waters sweetest honey of the comb.
Joyous my soul would be, could I even naked and barefoot,
Amid the holy ruins of thine ancient Temple roam,
Where the Ark was shrined, and the Cherubim in the Oracle
had their home."

To die in Jerusalem!--that were success in life.

Here he was lonely. In Jerusalem he would be surrounded by a glorious host. Patriarchs, prophets, kings, priests, rabbonim--they all hovered lovingly over its desolation, whispering heavenly words of comfort.

But now a curious difficulty arose. The Maggid knew from correspondence with Jerusalem Rabbis that a Russian subject would have great difficulty in slipping in at Jaffa or Beyrout, even aided by _bakhshish_. The only safe way was to enter as a British subject. Grotesque irony of the fates! For nigh half a century the old man had lived in England in his gabardine, and now that he was departing to die in gabardine lands, he was compelled to seek naturalization as a voluntary Englishman! He was even compelled to account mendaciously for his sudden desire to identify himself with John Bull's institutions and patriotic prejudices, and to live as a free-born Englishman. By the aid of a rich but pious West End Jew, who had sometimes been drawn Eastwards by the Maggid's exegetical eloquence, all difficulties were overcome. Armed with a passport, signed floridly as with a lion's tail rampant, the Maggid--after a quasi-death-bed blessing to Miriam by imposition of hands from the railway-carriage window upon her best bonnet--was whirled away toward his holy dying-place.