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Chapter 2 The Dead and the Possessed Several times I was with my teacher, may his memory be a blessing, walking in the field, and he would say to me: "Here is a man by the name of soand -so, and he is righteous and a scholar, and due to such-and-such a sin that he committed in his life, he has now transmigrated into this stone, or this plant. . . . My teacher, may his memory be a blessing, never knew this person; though when we inquired after the deceased, wefound his words to be accurate and true. There is no point in going on at length about these matters, since no book could contain them. Sometimes he would gaze from a distance 0/500 handbreadths at a particular grave, one among twenty thousand others, and would see the soul [nefesh] of the dead there interred , standing upon the grave. He would then say to us, "in that grave is buried such-and-such a man by the name of so-and-so; they arepunishing him with such-and-such a punishment for such-and-such a crime." We would inquire after that man,and found his words to be true. [There are] so many and great examples of this that one cannot imagine. —R. Hayyim Vital1 R. Isaac Luria constantly beheld the dead in his midst. So recalled R. Hayyim Vital in the preceding passage, among many others. Luria gazed upon the dead, seeing souls suspended over their graves. Vital emphasizes that Luria did not merely feel the presence of the dead, nor did he conjure them up with his "sacred imagination"; he sawthe souls of the dead "with his eyes."2 For Luria, the dead mingled with the living. They appeared with transparent immediacy in the rocks and trees of Safed and, of course, in and about its graves, marked and unmarked. The Dead and the Possessed 33 City of the Dead Safed, then as now, is a city that lives with its dead, its stone domiciles and synagogues poised on sloping hills that are home to 20,000 dead, whose graves begin only a few steps beyond the homes of the living.3 Safed embraces its graveyard,which, like the stage of an amphitheater, is alwayswithin view, commanding one's attention. Not far in the distance, every denizen of Safed can see hills filled with the graves of rabbinic-era sages, culminating with Mount Meron, graced with remains of the second-century R. Shimon bar Yohai, Moses of the mystics, and, in their eyes, author of their bible, the Zohar.4 Sixteenth-century Safed was a city shared by the living and the dead, a sacred space that might be compared to sixteenth-century Spanish churches, "where the dead were relentlessly buried under the worshipers' feet."5 Many who made their way to Safed did so to partake in this sacred space and the special benefits it afforded their souls. R. Moshe Alsheikh, Vital's teacher in rabbinics,6 described Safed in his Hazut Kasha (Terrible Vision) of 1591as a city which has forever been a city of interred dead, to which people from throughout the lands of exile came to die. A holy place, a city of our God from the day of its founding, they come to die there and be buried. Within it are many more than 600000 men, not to mention the bones of men continuously brought to the righteous [dead] in its midst, beyond measure, for "there is no end to its corpses." (Nahum 3,3) Who from all the cities of the exile, near and far, does not have in her a father or brother, son or daughter, mother or sister, or some other kin, them or their bones?7 This depiction of Safed by an elder contemporary of Vital could hardly emphasize more vividly the exceptional nature of the place of the dead in the economy of the city,broadly construed. If historians have sensitized us to the regularity of medieval and early modern trafficking with the deceased, few contexts could claim the amplification of this relationship suggested by Alsheikh .8 According to other authorities of the period, living in Safed was conducive to penetrating the secrets of the Torah. The insights one could expect along scholarly lines were not unrelated to the qualities of the city that promised one a good death as well. R. Abraham Azulai wrote the following about Safed around 1619, some twenty years after his...

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