The Cave Man
From "The Brutal Death of the Caveman" By Shalom Yerushalmi
In a cave in the forest near Mount Herzl, near a tree planted by Ben-Gurion and communication channels from the days of the Turks, lived for 17 years a man named Jacob Weissblom.
The order in the cave was masterful. On the right the cans, the empty glasses, the plates and cutlery and the bathroom utensils, on the left the old books and newspapers in English, which he would read with a magnifying glass he found near Mount Herzl. His schedule was also meticulous, although parts of it are hidden from us to this day.
How would he get his food? On the tree near the cave Jacob hung a tin box with the words "charity" written on it. People passing by used to donate money. Sometimes Jacob would collect alms. The little money he collected he would distribute to the poor people he met along the way. This was his benevolence, a mitzvah to which he attached great importance.
Jacob was born in 1937 in New York and lived in the Jerusalem cave for 17 years. 82 years old when he died, reached his cave in the late 90s. His father was a traveling cantor, who took him on his journeys between the communities in New York, and Jacob never forgot those chants and tunes, and occasionally marveled at them in his last years.
He once said that his anxious mother took him to a meeting and consultation with the Rebbe of Lubbitch himself, because he refused to go to study in a yeshiva. The Rebbe amazed them both. "Yaakov does not need to study in a yeshiva. The main thing is to be a good person," he ruled briefly, and sent them back to their home in Brooklyn.
Jacob was an educated and broad-minded man. He studied linguistics at City College in New York and specialized at Princeton University in New Jersey and Berkeley in California. In the 1960s he divorced and left his family in the United States and moved to Israel. At first he lived in Haifa and taught linguistics at Haifa University, where he met his second wife. "We were married for three years, and we had no children. She was a wonderful wife for me. The daughter of a judge. We had a wonderful love, a holy love," he said. Later he repented according to his ways and the couple moved to live in Jerusalem, until he abandoned again.
"Life in the city is unbearable," he once complained. "We lived in an apartment in a shared house with noise and overcrowding with neighbors who didn't let me rest." Jacob got up and left and wandered the city streets and forests until he discovered, as I recall, the opening to the cave that became his home.
Jacob was a polite and sympathetic man. He had a good control of many languages, as befits a professor of linguistics, including Hebrew, English, Yiddish and Spanish. With the help of phenomenal knowledge and extraordinary ability to think and express himself, he broke down various issues in the fields of thought and philosophy and discussed them in an astonishing way. He was well acquainted with the writings of Maimonides, Immanuel Kant and Baruch Spinoza, but his favorite was the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, "the philosopher of pessimism".
Jacob thought that this world was hell incarnate. Man's behavior towards nature and the relationships between people convinced him that this world is hopeless.
He often quoted the verses in the Bible that expressed God's disgust with the world he created. Jacob behaved in these moments like a furious prophet with burning eyes, raised his voice, locked in his anger and did not give much hope.
And yet, Jacob was a believing Jew who observed the religious mitzvot, and especially kept the Sabbath. During his days in the cave, he used to go on Thursdays to the mikvah on Har Nof. In the cave he would prepare as many white and ironed clothes as he could, which he would wear with holy fear when Shabbat came and the candles were lit. Jacob would accompany Shabbat many hours after it ended. "This is my queen's companion," he said.
(Anecdote authored by: דניאל)
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