Book of Proverbs—’
‘Chapter ten?’
‘Yes, Mr Monroe. Chapter ten. That’s right. You knew all this already?’
‘Think of it as an informed guess. Don’t let me interrupt you; please, continue.’
‘Well, as you say, the Rebbe would either quote a verse from Proverbs, Chapter 10, or he would quote from the prophets. Specifically, Isaiah, Chapter 30. Now that got Yosef Yitzhok very excited. Because kabbalists know one important thing about Isaiah, Chapter 30, Verse 18. It ends with the word lo, the Hebrew for “for him”. The full phrase is “blessed are all they who wait for Him”. But the real significance of the word—’
‘—is the way it is spelled.’
‘Tova Chaya has beaten me to it. The word lo is made up of two characters, Mr Monroe. Lamad and vav. It spells thirty-six. Now the Rebbe was a careful speaker. He did not say things by accident. He did not pull quotations out of the air. Yosef Yitzhok was convinced there was a deliberate intent.
‘So he went through every transcript. And, sure enough, the Rebbe spoke of tzedek, followed immediately by a verse from one of those two chapters, thirty-five times. By that method, he left us with thirty-five different verses.’
‘But—’
‘I know what you’re thinking, Mr Monroe, and you are right. There are thirty-six righteous men. We’ll come to that. For the moment, Yosef Yitzhok has thirty-five verses, staring at him from the page. He wonders what they could mean. And then he remembers the stories that children like him and like you, Tova Chaya, were raised on. Stories of the founder of Hassidism, the Baal Shem Tov; stories of Rabbi Leib Sorres.’
‘Men of such greatness, they were privileged to know the whereabouts of the righteous men.’ Will looked at Tova Chaya as she spoke: she had, he was sure, worked it all out.
‘Exactly. Few men knew the mind of the Rebbe as intimately as Yosef Yitzhok, and he also knew the Rebbe’s worth. He knew that he was one of the great men of Hassidic history. Some of the very greatest had been let in on this divine secret. It was not absurd to imagine the Rebbe would be one of them.’
‘So Yosef Yitzhok reckoned the Rebbe knew who the thirty-six were. And he goes further: he thinks these thirty-five verses he quoted are clues to their identity?’
‘Exactly, Will. Yosef Yitzhok has this thought in the very closing days of the Rebbe’s life, when the Rebbe is too ill to answer any questions. He can barely speak.’
‘So what does he do?’
‘He stares at the thirty-five verses for days on end. He is sure the Rebbe wants them to be understood, that he is passing this information on for a reason. So he is determined to break them open, so to speak, to find out what is inside. He looks at them from every angle. He translates the letters into numeric values; he adds; he multiplies. He reproduces them as anagrams. But of course there is a logical problem.
‘How could the identities of the righteous men be contained in those verses? The identities change in every generation. Yet the verses stay stubbornly the same. Even if, say, verse twenty included the name of tzaddik number twenty for this year, where would we find the name of tzaddik number twenty for the year 2020 or 2050 or, in the past, 1950 and 1850? How could the names of men who are alive today be concealed in a text that remains static?
‘And that’s when Yosef Yitzhok’s remarkable powers truly shone through. He remembered the answer.’
‘You mean the Rebbe had already told him?’
‘Not directly, of course. But the Rebbe had given him the answer. Yosef Yitzhok had heard it. All he needed to do was to remember it. And do you know what it was? It was the last line of the last talk at the last farbrengen the Rebbe ever addressed. “Space depends on time. Time reveals space.” Those were his last words in public.’
There was a pause.
‘Incredible,’ said TC.
‘You’ve lost me, I’m afraid,’ said Will, suddenly the dunce of the class.
‘Don’t worry. Yosef Yitzhok was baffled too. These were beautiful sentences. But they were an enigma. Space depends on time. Time reveals space. What does that mean? That’s when Yosef Yitzhok came to me, letting me in on his theory. The Rebbe often spoke in riddles, in elliptical sentences that might take many hours – many years even – to study and interpret. Yosef Yitzhok spent a long night working away at these sentences. And then he had what you would call a brainwave and what I would call a helping hand from HaShem.
‘You may know that the Rebbe was a very close follower of science and technology. He read Scientific American and Nature and a whole variety of journals. He was always up to date on the latest developments, in neuroscience, in biochemistry. But he had a special interest in technology. He loved gadgets! He never owned them: he was the least materialistic man you could ever know. But he liked to know about them.
‘Yosef Yitzhok knew that about the Rebbe. And that’s what gave him his idea. Here, I’ll show you.’
Rabbi Freilich reached for a worn, leather-bound book and thumbed rapidly through the pages. He found the page and then the verse he was looking for.
‘Now what is the year?’
Will was about to answer when TC got there first. ‘Five thousand seven hundred and sixty-eight.’
Will frowned. ‘What?’
‘It’s the Hebrew calendar,’ TC explained. ‘It dates back to creation. Jews believe the world has been in existence for less than six thousand years.’
‘OK,’ said the rabbi. ‘The year is 5768. And here is a verse from Chapter 10 of the Book of Proverbs. In fact this is a crucial verse. Verse 18. This is what Yosef Yitzhok tried out. We count along the line and mark the fifth letter.’ The rabbi’s finger stopped at the selected character. ‘Then the seventh from there.’ It stopped again. ‘Then the sixth from there. And then the eighth. You see: 5-7-6-8. And we keep doing that till we get to the end of the line. So in this case, the fifth letter is a yud. The seventh letter after that is a hay. The sixth is a mem. And the eighth is also a mem. You keep on like that until you have a string of letters.’
‘Which then convert into numbers.’ Will was guessing.
‘Precisely so. A string of numbers. Here, I’ll show you one of the very earliest ones Yosef Yitzhok worked out.’
The rabbi stood up, leading Will and TC over to a second wipe-board. There, neatly written in a black marker pen, was a long series of digits: 699331, 5709718, 30.
‘Don’t tell me that’s a phone number.’
‘No, it is not. We wondered about that, too. We even tried a few. No, this is where the Rebbe’s eye for the latest advances in technology was so important.’
TC was staring at the figure, as if the sheer penetration of her gaze would crack it open.
‘It is—’ and at this the rabbi could not deny himself a little smile of amused pride, as if he had still not got over the brilliance of it all ‘—a GPS number. Or rather, contained in this number are the co-ordinates of longitude and latitude that give you a GPS number, co-ordinates for the Global Positioning System.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Will. ‘You mean that whole satellite navigation thing?’ It sounded preposterous.
‘That’s it. A system that maps the entire globe, watched from space, and which gives precise co-ordinates for any spot on earth. The Rebbe must have read about it. Or maybe he just knew.’
‘You’re telling me that contained in those thirty-five biblical verses are the co-ordinates for thirty-five righteous men?’
‘We did not believe it either, Mr Monroe. One verse gave us a number