Who was gladder than I! I accepted the offer of the preacher with gratitude, scarcely ever left his house, and sat day and night over the Cabbalistic books. Two representations especially gave me the greatest trouble. One was the _Tree_, or the representation of the divine emanations in their manifold and intricate complexities. The other was God's _Beard_, in which the hairs are divided into numerous classes with something peculiar to each, and every hair is a separate channel of divine grace. With all my efforts I could not find in these representations any rational meaning.
My prolonged visits however were extremely inconvenient to the preacher. He had, a short time before, married a pretty young wife; and as his modest little house consisted of a single apartment, which was at once parlour, study, and bedroom, and as I sat in it at times reading the whole night, it happened not infrequently that my elevation above the sphere of sense came into collision with his sensibility. Consequently, he hit upon a good plan for getting rid of the incipient Cabbalist. He said to me one day, "I observe that it necessarily puts you to a great deal of inconvenience to spend your time constantly away from home for the sake of these books. You may take them home with you one by one if you please, and thus study them at your convenience."
To me nothing could be more welcome. I took home one book after another, and studied them till I believed that I had mastered the whole of the Cabbalah. I contented myself not merely with the knowledge of its principles and manifold systems, but sought also to make a proper use of these. There was not a passage to be met with in the Holy Scriptures or in the Talmud, the occult meaning of which I could not have unfolded, according to Cabbalistic principles, with the greatest readiness.
The book entitled _Shaarei Orah_[29] came to be of very good service here. In this book are enumerated the manifold names of the ten _Sephiroth_, which form the principal subject of the Talmud, so that a hundred or more names are given to each. In every word of a verse in the Bible, or of a passage in the Talmud, I found therefore the name of some Sephirah. But as I knew the attribute of every Sephirah, and its relation to the rest, I could easily bring out of the combination of names their conjoint effect.