Marc Gafni – In Every Stitch

Marc Gafni
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It was the middle of the 19th century
. Heaven was joyous, hell was in an uproar, for it seems that one Hanoch the Shoemaker was about to usher in the Messiah. The Master of Rishin, tells the story to his disciples something like this,
“Hanoch the shoemaker used to sit every day intent in the stitching of his leather shoes. It was known that with every stitch Hanoch was ‘meyached yichudim elyonim.’ That is, he was unifying higher unities. Now ‘yichudim’, my holy disciples, in Kabbalah always means ‘zivug’ (coupling). {Zivug is an ultimate erotic term. It refers not to the sexual person, but to the cosmic love affair between the masculine God presence and the feminine Shechina presence. A love affair brought about by human action.}
Now the strange secret of the story, my holy community, is that Hanoch wasn’t doing anything which should have caused such ecstatic yichudim. He wasn’t fulfilling any religious commandment, he was engaged in no ritual or pious act.
“Perhaps,” said one of the disciples, “he was meditating on a passage of Zohar as he stitched.” Another chimed in, “Perhaps he was doing the spiritual exercises of Luria’s Kabbalah which cause pleasure above?”
“No, nothing of the sort,” replied the master.
“Then what was he doing while he stitched?” pressed the disciples.
“Nothing!” responded the master with a slight smile. “Hanoch was doing nothing…nothing other than being fully inside in every single stitch.”
“Fully inside in every stitch?!” Duly impressed, the eager disciples now had another confusion. “So then, Master, why is it that the Messiah has not yet announced his arrival?”
The master of Rishin sighed and said, “The force of evil discovered the cause and countered it. Sadly he seems to have gotten the best of our holy shoemaker.”
“But how?” the crestfallen disciples asked.
The reply, “With plenty of good business.”
And so it was, rushing to fulfill his flood of orders, Hanoch became the busiest and most prosperous cobbler in the region, mindlessly producing shoe after cookie-cut shoe, and the Messiah still has not yet come.