The Ascent of Eli Israel by Dara Horn Jonathan Papernick Page A

back. You must simply learn to take lighter steps or else” — and here Luria’s voice fell to a whisper — “you will be blind before the year is over.”
    â€œWhat shall I do?” the rebbe asked.
    â€œTomorrow you will walk. But softly. Today we must take care of your precious eyes.”
    â€œYes. Yes! We must. Without my eyes I cannot read the Torah.”
    Lev Luria concocted a potion of kiddush wine, sage, egg yolk, and a sprinkle of golden Jerusalem earth to bathe the eyes of the ailing rebbe. He also placed a fist-sized stone, purplish-blue in color, underneath the rebbe’s mattress.
    â€œThis is the Stone of Issachar. It will help cure what ails you.”
    Sarah applied the concoction to the eyelids of her husband, and stroked his hair when she was done. Then, she placed two cucumber slices on his eyes and told him to rest.
    The next day, the rebbe was in a rage. He had slept badly, tossing and turning from the pain, feeling every contour of the Stone of Issachar beneath his back. And now his eyes really did hurt. They were red and bloodshot, and he screamed at his wife Sarah to call the kabbalist to come to his bedside immediately.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?” Luria said, entering the dark room shortly afterwards. He leaned over and pulled back the rebbe’s eyelids with his index fingers.
    â€œWorse today,” the rebbe moaned.
    â€œGood, we have no time to waste. It is happening even faster than I thought. You must stand up now.”
    â€œBut I can’t,” the rebbe said. “Termites are eating at me.”
    â€œStand up,” Luria said, and pulled the rebbe’s arm.
    The rebbe slid out of bed and fell onto the floor in a heap of bones. He felt as if he was going to burst into flames. “Pick me up,” he screamed.
    â€œThe floor is hard. Today you will sleep on the floor.”
    The great Dokszycer rebbe cried out for his wife Sarah to throw the mad kabbalist from his house. “The Dokszycer rebbe does not sleep on the floor. My father slept on goosedown, and his father on swan feathers.”
    That evening, the rebbe’s followers stood above him and performed the Ma’ariv services. From the floor the rebbe could easily see the nine smiling faces that completed the minyan. He slept better that evening, but in the morning, cried out in pain once again.
    Sarah came to comfort him with a cold towel for his forehead, and though she was not much taller than his congregation’s large Torah scroll, he believed she could cure any ill. “If I see that Luria again, I will beat him about the head,” Sarah said, shaking her little fist like a dried-out citron. “He is as bad as the cut-and-slash doctors. I will fix you a warm bath with Epsom salts.”
    â€œWife,” the rebbe said, “how wonderful it would be to pray again at the Wall and to walk back and forth over the earth as I please. But I am afraid my spine is broken like a matchstick.”
    Sarah knelt down and he looked into her smooth, worn face and remembered her as a young girl when she still wore braids on either side of her head. Now she wore a blue snood adorned with gold stars that covered all of her still-brown hair. “You are a good wife. Bring me the bottle of wine.”
    Sarah brought an herbalist who concocted a mixture of valerian root, skullcap, and devil’s claw to soothe the rebbe’s pains, but the rebbe wouldn’t touch the murky elixir and shouted the herbalist from his home. Sarah brought a Yemenite master of prayer who offered mud and salts from the Dead Sea to rub against his skin, and a rabbi who could read cures in the stars, but the rebbe would not see them, preferring the solitude of his dark room. Sarah only entered while he slept to remove the refuse bucket from beside the bed. When she brought him food and knocked, saying, “If you chew well with your teeth, your back will find its strength,” he