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.