Speed Levitch, Lamed Vovnik?
The mysterious phenomenon of holy fools and divine eccentrics
For about a year and a half in the late 1990s, I was a film critic at the New York Post. I saw between five and ten movies a week, almost every week. One of the most extraordinary ones I saw was The Cruise, a documentary about Timothy “Speed” Levitch, a total eccentric who had minor fame leading bus tours of Manhattan. Levitch was a strange dude who had a blissed-out, sweet, psychedelic-slacker approach to the world, but who could also be quite angry, and ultimately a loner. I liked the movie so much that I hired Levitch to give some visiting out-of-town friends and me a personal walking tour of the city. It was a blast.
I watched The Cruise on Amazon streaming the other night for the first time in over twenty years, for old times’ sake. I found that I didn’t like it as much, probably because I find beatnik jabber less endearing than I once did. Maybe it’s because I live less lightly than I used to do, I dunno. I still have a soft spot for Speed, but after 22 years, he comes off as a sadder figure than I remembered. I probably do too.
I had completely forgotten the story he tells of the Lamed Vovniks, a kabbalistic teaching associated in part with Hasidic Jews (“lamed vovnik” — pronounced lamm-medd voav-nikk — means “thirty-sixer”). Fortunately, I just this second discovered that the excellent Jewish magazine Tablet published a piece on Levitch and the Lamed Vovniks that recounts the story. From Tablet:
Near the end of The Cruise, Levitch recounts extemporaneously—with power and passion—how the Baal Shem Tov [the 18th century rabbi who founded Hasidism; he is also called the Besht] inadvertently came to reject from among his followers one of “The Just,” the 36 Lamed Vovniks of Hassidic lore who, with their ordinary acts, most often unknown to others and even to themselves, save and preserve the world each day. To hear Speed tell it, the Hasids had assigned Mordecai, a poor and ignorant yet hyper-enthusiastic young Hasid, the lowest of loathsome tasks: to clean the privies by himself. “They called him [Mordecai] ‘The dancer of God,’ ” Speed states, “because when the Hasids would form for their reels of dance, in honor to their ecstasy to their God, Mordecai would jump so high, and would dance with such an exuberance, the other Hasidics were embarrassed about him—and for him—and he was exiled from the dance. And so he appeased himself by dancing alone at night, in the shed reserved for the sick and dying. And he would entertain them in the evenings, alone.”
When the Gaon of Kiev informs the Baal Shem Tov that there is a Lamed Vovnik among his followers, his attempts to identify the Just One prove fruitless. Only after the shunned eccentric’s departure from the scene does the Besht realize his mistake: “That one was healthy among the sick,” he says, “and I did not see him.”
The Cruise intimates that Levitch, the oddball outsider, might be a Lamed Vovnik. James Winchell’s lovely piece in Tablet runs with that insight.
Lamed Vovniks sound something like what Russian Orthodox call yurodivy, or “holy fools,” also known as “fools for Christ.” The (terrific) contemporary novel Laurus, set in the 15th century, features two holy fools. Its author, Evgeny Vodolazkin, a historian of medieval Russia, explains the phenomena:
The fool for Christ, or Holy Fool, is similar to a biblical prophet, prescient, but more importantly able to reveal truths. As one church hymn has it, the yurodivy (holy fool in Russian) strives “with imaginary insanity to reveal the insanity of the world.” He not only fights the insanity of everyday sins but the crimes of the mighty as well.
After devastating Novgorod during his reign in the 16th century, Ivan the Terrible moved on toward Pskov. The only person to stand up to him was the yurodivy Nikola Salos. As legend has it, he offered the Tsar a piece of raw meat out of hospitality. Ivan objected that he did not eat meat during the fast; Nikola retorted that the Tsar did a far worse thing in devouring the flesh of Christians. Startled by the encounter, Ivan the Terrible did not touch Pskov, left the people in peace, and instead returned to Moscow.
The fool for Christ, who can still be discovered in contemporary literature and films (such as Pavel Lungin’s “Island”), is someone who has broken away from society. To withdraw into such religious folly is effectively dropping out of mainstream life. It truly is a departure, because a person who chose this path usually left his home region for places where no one knew him. We only know of men for the most part, who “died for the world.” Arriving in strange lands, the fool for Christ did not join his new community. Yet it may still surprise readers that a number of Russian yurodivye were not Russian in origin but came here from the West.
This state of existence is characterized by contempt for one’s own flesh. The fool for Christ would go barefoot or even naked all year round, which in Russia means some serious physical endurance. Sleeping in a barn and eating leftovers, the fool for Christ let those around him know that he too was a part of this filth and that he had almost ceased to exist.
The most glorious monument to a holy fool is St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square:
The cathedral complex (it’s a cluster of churches) was built by Ivan the Terrible in honor of one of his military victories, but came to be known popularly as St. Basil’s in honor of the beloved holy fool Basil (1468-1557) who was buried in the church’s graveyard. Here is a link to a short life of St. Basil, who lived in Red Square and wore nothing but rags and chains, and who once rebuked Ivan the Terrible for not paying attention during the Divine Liturgy. When Basil died, the Metropolitan (Archbishop) of Moscow led his funeral services, and the Tsar, Ivan the Terrible, was a pallbearer.
If you’d like to see a modern Russian movie featuring a holy fool, stream The Island via Amazon, where you can rent it for $1.99. It’s an exceptional drama. Here’s a modern depiction of St. Basil, Fool For Christ, by the Russian painter Vasily Grafov:
We never really know about people, do we? The insane beggar might be a holy fool. The awkward shy person hovering nervously on the outskirts, a Lamed Vovnik. I expect all of us, if we make it to paradise, will be shocked as the Besht was when we discover who among us, in our earthly lives, were true saints, and who, in their disordered appearances, were secretly cooperating with God to return the world to right order.
With that in mind, contemplate this passage from a deep book called Orthodox Spirituality, by a priest-theologian named Dumitru Staniloae:
So it is a main idea of St. Maximus [the Confessor, d. 662] that things hide divine logoi in them, as so many rays of the supreme Logos. He who discovers them in things ascends on their thread to the knowledge of God and this knowledge must anticipate His direct knowledge.
This teaching attributes to creation and the thought referring to is a necessary role in the ascent of man to God. St. Maximus is a stranger to the idea of a vision which we might attain by bypassing the forms and laws of the cosmos. On the road of our approach to God stands the world — we must pass through the understanding of it. Every man has a mission connected with the world. Everyone must know it according to the power given to him, inasmuch as knowledge can’t come until the gaining of the virtues; everyone must develop beforehand a moral activity in relationship to the world. A mainly negative attitude toward the world frustrates salvation itself. The world is imposed on everyone as a stone for sharpening his spiritual faculties.
By the world man grows to the height of the knowledge of God and to the capacity of being His partner. The world is a teacher to lead us to Christ. Of course it can also be the road to hell. It is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree of testing. If we look at its beauty in order to praise its Creator, we are saved; if we think that its fruit is pure and simply something to eat, we are lost. Salvation isn’t obtained in isolation, but in a cosmic frame. The value of the world as a road to God is explained by the fact that man must have an object of giant proportions for strengthening his spiritual forces, but also from the intrinsic structure of the world as a symbol of transcendent diving realities. A symbol (from the Greek symballein, to throw together, to unite two things without confusing them), is a visible reality which doesn’t only represent, but somehow makes an unseen reality visible. A symbol presupposes and shows two things simultaneously. It is “a bridge between two worlds,” as somebody has said. A word, for example, is a symbol of the spirit, uniting and simultaneously presenting the materiality of the sound with the meaning of thought without confusing them; the human face likewise, makes the spirit in man transparent by its materiality, and if he is living in Him, God Himself. A symbolic consciousness of the world:
“…sees everywhere in this world the signs and symbols of another world, and perceives the divine as the mysterious and infinite, beyond that which is finite and transitory.” [Berdyaev]
All flesh is a symbol of the spirit, the reflection, the image, and the sign of another far off, yet much more profound, reality. [pp. 205-6]
If that is so, then what profound reality do the outcast and the freaks among us make real? We have to be careful not to sentimentalize people who suffer in this way. The esteem of holy fools declined sharply in Peter the Great’s era, because the tsar saw them as backwards. While that could signify Peter’s hard-heartedness, and the shame he felt over what he considered to be Russia’s cultural poverty compared to the West, historians tell us that it is nevertheless true that many swindlers posed as holy fools to fleece the pious.
That said, watching the Speed Levitch movie made me think about how I ought to be less quick to classify and dismiss others. It’s a tricky thing, though. How do you love someone even when they are being destructive, cruel, harmful, and so forth? This is the art of separating the sinner from the sin. Who does that well? I know I don’t. People like me — solid, polite middle-class Christians — tend to turn away from radical disorder in fear or distaste. But there are other solid, polite middle-class Christians who are eager to welcome and affirm radical disorder, so long as it is the right kind of disorder (e.g., the sexually exotic, but not Trumpy trailer trash).
The other day a friend sent me a photo he took from the parking lot of his church. In the background was the church and in the foreground was a car parked in front of it with an aggressive, obscene sticker affixed to the back of it. It was a shocking contrast, funny at first. After laughing at the disjunction, my thought was, “What kind of jerk is that, and what is he doing at church?” Then I thought: “He’s a sinner who is exactly where he needs to be.”
I had texted my friend to ask him if I could use the photo here, but then I withdrew the request because I didn’t want to hold the driver of the car up to ridicule. For all I know, he is more precious to God than I am, for he may well know his poverty. My friend, who is a respectable family man, says that he has been seeing at his church lately more young adults who come from disordered backgrounds, and who in many ways don’t know how to behave, but who are eager to learn more about Christ. Maybe the driver of that car is one of them, my friend and I thought.
The my friend said something to the effect of, “We need people like that around our church. We have become too complacent and self-satisfied.”
Yes. Remember Father Staniloae’s words: “The world is imposed on everyone as a stone for sharpening his spiritual faculties.”
From The Mailbag
A reader writes about last night’s newsletter, “Stumbling Into Beauty & Meaning”:
I am a physicist, like Penrose, and often wonder at the beauty of our physical laws. I am referring to the laws. I am not certain that the outcomes, such as black holes, are always beautiful. Biology is different. Unlike physics, it has no general laws and is infinitely complex, but leads to beauty,
I am Jewish and the Ratzinger quote rang another bell for me. Christianity is based on Greek logic. I personally think that basing a religion on logic is a stretch, but it is none of my business. Judaism is built around Talmudic logic. Even calling it logic is a stretch. Discussions wander all over the place, sometimes covering deep thoughts, and sometimes completely trivial ones. Usually, there are no conclusions, just a majority, and minority opinion. I think it matches how we humans think much better than rigid Greek logic does. Maybe that's why we make such good lawyers.
I spent some time reading Catholic writings. I came to the conclusion that Catholics look for answers while Jews look for questions. In the real world, disasters such as Iraq come not from having the wrong answers but not asking the right questions.
Another reader was moved to write by last night’s discussion of Penrose tiling:
I’m a disaffected Catholic (which is why I started reading your articles) who has worked in technology for most of my career (30+ years), having been part of the early build of internet infrastructure, and an advocate for information sharing and online communities. But now I am an often horrified user who has been decreasing my social media footprint over the last several years. As such, I don’t normally comment or email in response to what I read online.
But the Penrose Tiling article hit an area of long standing interest for me – specifically the Golden Ratio in nature, architecture, art, photography, etc. If you research Penrose Tiling further, you’ll see how the Golden Ratio figured in to the solution that was created. I found it interesting that you transitioned from the beauty of Penrose Tiling to the beauty and geometry of the North Rose Window of Chartres Cathedral. The Golden Ratio can be found in the design of the window, as indicated in the linked article by Christopher Baglow. It seems the closer one looks at a thing of beauty, you’ll find the ratio figures in to its design.
Here’s something interesting from a reader:
Roger Penrose must not have known anyone who quilted. Quilt piecers worked out some of this a long time ago. Take a look at antique tumbling blocks quilts. Pentagons won't lay flat when they're sewn together: they roll themselves into a ball. Hexagons, now. They will. Diamonds, rhomboids, squares, triangles. A pieced quilt is tilework with fabric.
But since housewives piece quilts, why would he, a mathematician, know or care?
There is an English tradition in piecing and quilting, by the way. It's not American. It's more like tilework and it goes way back.
One More Thing
Have you ever known a holy fool, or someone you think might have been, or might be, a Lamed Vovnik? Write me to tell the story: roddreher — at — substack — dot — com.
Remember, this is the last week of free Daily Drehers. On Friday night’s newsletter, I will include a button where you can subscribe. Five dollars per month (= 25 cents per day), or $50 for the year. I had said last night that I would have a big donor level that would entitle you to an hour each month of a private Zoom call where we can talk about whatever, but I’ve had some advice from a couple of readers explaining why that’s actually not a good idea (including from one who did something like that, and regretted it). So I’m trying to figure something out. More to come later.
Tomorrow is the final newsletter of this crazy year, and the final one of the decade. I think it’s going to be an epic production. You might not know this, but Substack cuts off these newsletters after a certain length, meaning that I can’t write one forever. This is a blessing to you and me both, as we will discover tomorrow night.