The End-Time Foretellers

by Ran Weber

  “And then?” I asked. I felt one in a million. I imagined myself sitting in a café by the door, a glass wall separating me from the street, and suddenly, Binyamin comes from outside and knocks on the glass, crying, pleading for us to listen to him, but I just turn my head away, add another bag of brown sugar to my coffee and stir. Then, just as suddenly, I was a Yeshiva student in one of the crowded ultra-orthodox cities, sitting hunched over a table in a house of learning, studying a complicated halachic issue. I am completely absorbed in the study of the Talmud, when Binyamin enters the house of learning, comes to me and pleads me to listen, but I don’t even look at him. I continue to read the Talmud, mechanically taking out a five-shekel coin and placing it in his hand. “All the salvations,” I say and Binyamin disappears.

  All at once, I was back on the deck, in a back porch somewhere in the desert. Tears of anger, guilt and frustration welled in me. “And then, Binyamin? Then what? What could we have done?”

  “I don’t know,” shouted Binyamin and smashed his fist on the table. “I don’t know! This is not about what we should be practically doing; this is the sound of the soul screaming. It screams against all this separation, against the insanity, and then the man does what he needs to do. Each man will understand for himself. We should have said: I’m different from him, but that doesn’t mean I should hate him. Perhaps I can learn from him. Perhaps he, too, is a piece of the cosmic puzzle that I don’t even understand or know what it is composed of? Each person would discover what it is that he should be doing, if he’d only stop shutting out his heart all the time.”

  “So you decided to do something about it.” Suddenly, Binyamin’s insanity took on a different meaning.

  “It was a desperate attempt to bring about unity through war. This wasn’t the right or good thing to do, I agree. I simply tried to do what I could. I couldn’t, Yoav, I just couldn’t stand by and continue to watch the indifference, the idiocy, the pathetic political wings, each thinking they own the truth and whomever thinks differently is incorrigible. I couldn’t stand the emptiness in the hearts of those around me… but it turns out I’ve failed in doing that too. You ‘saved the world’ and me? I failed big time. There’s no unity, no peace and no nothing. The world is as it has always been, marching steadily towards the precipice. I wish someone would listen and do something.”

  He closed his eyes. I felt his pain piercing my heart. Tears poured from my eyes. I realized my life would no longer return to “normal.” For the first time, I actually felt that there was a lot to do in the world.

  111

  Ben Gurion International Airport, Israel

  “There he is!” cried out Adi. I caught Uri from the corner of my eye and saw Adi running to me. “Welcome home, dear brother.”

  Uri got closer. “Can I take your bag?”

  “No need,” I said.

  Uri gave me a warm hug.

  “Come,” they cried together.

  I trudged along after them. I felt like I’ve traveled worlds.

  I made myself comfortable in the backseat of their car. “New?” I asked.

  “No. Got it from work,” said Adi. “So how are you?”

  “I’m cool.”

  “You’ve had some major action over there,” said Uri.

  “What do you mean?”

  “In Los Angeles. They arrested the… you know, that Jewish businessman…”

  I said nothing.

  “Schetritt or something,” he said and I simply shrugged.

  “It was amazing,” said Adi. “What, you haven’t heard about it? An Israeli guy named Slotzky arranged the whole operation. They found out about it only yesterday when he got back to Israel. Some serious mess, Iranians, hackers, agents from all over the world. In the end, that Israeli guy, who had gotten there by mistake, stopped them all by himself, a real national hero. Plus, they managed to take down those other guys, the End-Time Foretellers. They had a big press conference revealing all the information.”

  “Really?”

  “As soon as I saw it, I just felt in my guts that my brother had something to do with it,” Adi smiled. “I’m positive,” she nodded.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Really.”

  “We’ll talk about yet, Adi,” I smiled at her from the rearview mirror.

  “Let him be, Adi,” said Uri. “He’s still jet-lagged. Give him a few days to settle in.”

  “Dad called,” she said and glanced at me through the mirror.

  “What?”

  “Maybe it’s time you called him?”

  I looked out the window into the distance.

  “Maybe.”

  112

  Yehuda Halevi Street, Tel Aviv

  They dropped me off by my apartment and we parted with a mutual promise to meet for dinner soon. The store was already closed. I looked at the sky. It still looked the same. So did the building. I went up the stairs and stopped by the door. I took out the key and inserted it into the keyhole. I stopped again.

  I was afraid. I didn’t want to get back to being the same, to get back to the same old life. I felt that something had changed in me. I had been sure everything would be different once I got back, that nothing would be familiar. Now, suddenly, everything seemed too familiar.

  I took a deep breath and turned the key. The door slowly opened. Same apartment, same familiar armchair. Nothing had changed, but I felt different. I walked about my small apartment and felt that something had changed after all. Suddenly, I just didn’t fit into the picture.

  You’re not staying here, I told myself, something’s about to change. I looked at the walls, those comfortable prison walls I had built for myself, and wanted to fly out of there, to live the next step. I guess while I had still been in America, with everything that I had gone through there, I had believed that there was always somewhere to go back to, that I could return to nestle in my comfortable, safe nest. Only now, in my house, did I realize something internal had shifted and was pushing the outer shell to change too. I was happy. My eyes rested on the driver improvement course summons resting on the table, patiently waiting for me to return from abroad. I opened my laptop and logged in, for the last time, to the Department of Transportation’s website. I brought up my record and returned the lost points, twenty-two points. They’d probably send me a new summons.

  An email from Binyamin waited for me in the inbox. I smiled. He wrote that he was hoping everything was well. He told me that things were beginning to settle down with them. Donnie ran away to the Philippines because of a tax authority investigation, at least that’s what he’d written him from the airport. Rami was caught in Jim’s net and was arrested for espionage. No one at the Israel Ministry of Defense had bothered to back him up or try to stop the move. He ended the mail saying he was hoping to come to Israel with Aharon in the summer and visit me.

  I replied that I was back in the apartment and was eagerly waiting to see them. I wrote that I was still processing things.

  I passed a sleepless night on the porch, due to the jet-lag and the sense of excitement that overwhelmed me. I felt that I had reclaimed my own life, that something deep had moved inside me.

  113

  Yehuda Halevi Street in Tel Aviv woke up to a new morning and heavy traffic. The partygoers had long gone home to sleep and Yossi the upholsterer was already hard at work. Charlie’s bodega was empty, while Charlie himself was buried behind a huge newspaper. I walked toward my store and Mr. Levi got out of his furniture store. “Welcome back!” he waved at me. “Well, how was America?” I just gave him half a smile and shrugged.

  No words could possibly describe what I had gone through there. Maybe because things still resounded in me and I had not yet had a chance to completely digest them, or maybe because some things cannot be reduced into words -- things that get straight into your heart, without the filter of the mind. In my mi
nd, I certainly didn’t understand what I had gone through there, not yet.

  I opened the ’fortress’ door and entered my kingdom. Amos was busy with one of the buyers, a seventeen-year-old teenager with a pimpled face and a curly, slightly pulled back red hair. The redheaded youth tried to convince Amos the game he’d bought wasn’t original and demanded a full refund. Amos answered him patiently and politely. I was proud of him.

  Since he was focused on the teenager, Amos ignored the opening door and the familiar noise that accompanied it. When he spotted me from the corner of his eye, he told the youth, “come back tomorrow, Udi. Don’t worry, you’ll be happy. Tomorrow I’m getting something new that’s out of this world. You’ll be happy, I promise you.” The teenager thanked Amos and left the store with a sparkle of hope glinting in his eye.

  I went to Amos and gave him a warm hug. He was surprised and recoiled a bit. “I’ve missed you, Amos,” I told him and hugged him again. “Good to see you. I liked the way you treated that kid. You’re really good with people, Amos, did anyone ever tell you that?”

  He blushed a little. “I think you’re the first one, Yoav…”

  He looked at me and said, “Wow, it looks like you’ve been through a lot in Los Angeles. Was it a good exhibition?”

  “You could say so,” I said. “How are you?”

  “I’m good, thanks. The store made some good profits when you were away.”

  “We made money?”

  “What do you mean?” he inquired.

  “I’ve had a chance to think things through. I decided that you should be the new store manager. A manager-partner, I mean.”

  He opened a pair of wide eyes. “What happened? What are you going to do?”

  “I’ve decided to take some time out to do some thinking. What do I really want to do now? I don’t know, all in due time. I look at you now and I realize that you are the best person to run the fortress. For me, being here is an escape, a rest. For you… it’s the place where you shine best.”

  “You’ve become a poet in America?”

  “Not really.”

  “I thought you’ve had time to think in LA.”

  “I was busy,” I said. I looked at the games displayed on the front counter, picked up a few of them. Most of them, I’ve never even heard about. New games. “Do me a favor, just get rid of all these violent games, it seems a bit too much to me.”

  “Think so? Actually, I can’t really connect with a lot of the stuff they have out right now. I mean, not everything, but some of the games are really…”

  “Just return them to the suppliers. I want us to get good games, with things that will make people feel good, not just senseless violence.”

  “Wow. You really have changed, Yoav. Suddenly you care about what we sell here?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “Good luck, Amos. I’ll drop by to check on things toward the weekend.”

  I moved away from him a little. He seemed surprised to the verge of shock. When I got out of the store I told him, “Amos, don’t worry, you’re talented. You can do this. Believe in yourself, there’s so much good in you.”

  I went out of the store. Behind me, I heard the metal bells meeting each other to produce a loud metallic toll. I flagged a taxi. I had no idea what I was about to do, but I knew I just needed to concentrate on my next move at every given moment.

  I looked at my wristwatch. I quickly squeezed into the taxi and asked the driver to put the meter on. “Where to, my friend?” he asked.

  “Sourasky Medical Center, pediatric oncology department,” I said. I was looking forward to meeting the medical clown Advocate Dr. Danny Halfon and the children in the ward.

  I took out the cell phone from my pocket, took a deep breath and dialed.

  The phone rang.

  “Hi dad,” I said. “It’s Yoav. I’m back.”

  The End

  About the Author

  Before settling down in a quiet, picturesque village in the Northern Galilee in Israel, Ran Weber had the chance to co-found one of the first Internet startups in Israel. Side by side with his technological endeavors, he traveled the world in search for meaning and spiritual disciplines and was one of the founders of Pacha Mama, a spiritual, ecological village based in the wild Jungles of Costa Rica.

  Hopping from India to the US and back to Israel, Ran collected experiences and met people from all walks of life, from spiritual teachers to leading business people in the internet industry. He has written in beautiful, inspirational forests, trains, coffee shops, and his private study. Ran’s mission in writing is to provide the reader with extremely fascinating experiences as well as food for contemplation about life and its meaning.

  Message from the Author

  Before you go, I’d like to ask you for a little favor.

  If you enjoyed this book, please leave a review on its Amazon book page.

  Independent authors such as myself, depend on reviews to attract new readers to our books. I would greatly appreciate it if you’d share your experience of reading this book by leaving your review on Amazon. It doesn’t have to be long. A sentence or two would do nicely.