by Colum McCann
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Seven Jordanian pounds: at the time, twenty-eight dollars.
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In Jewish tradition it is forbidden to throw away writings invoking the name of God. Prayer books. Scrolls. Encyclopedias. Garments. Tefillin straps. Even pamphlets or cartoon books. Instead of being destroyed, the texts are interred in a genizah, a burial place for the written word.
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The Dead Sea scrolls were originally hidden in clay pots and placed in caves to protect them. If they were not to be found again, the writing would decay naturally. In the sealed jars—with no light and no rain—the scrolls could slowly molder away.
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The modern-day genizah is often found in the attic or basement of a synagogue, or even in a sanctioned dumpster on the street outside.
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One night, driving through a settlement outside Jerusalem, Rami saw a group of Orthodox men and boys gathered by a genizah near a synagogue. They were chatting and laughing, pushing each other around. Two of them wore machine guns strapped across their shoulders.
An elderly man drove up and threw the contents of his trunk into the blue container. The car drove off. The young men lifted the lid of the genizah. Rami saw one of the smaller boys take his hat off. He was hoisted in the air, like a gymnast. The other men dangled him inside the container by the ankles. He appeared to be swallowed whole.
Rami was taken aback: they were dumpster diving.
After a moment they dragged the suited boy up with an armful of books. It happened several times over until the group sat around and spread the books on the ground, flicked through them.
Rami opened his car door and walked along the side of the road. He nodded to the young men but they didn’t nod back. Their guns sat on the ground beside them.
He turned back at the corner and passed the group again.
It intrigued Rami. The heritage. The belonging. The things that were passed along. Their black hats. Their suits. Their white shirtfronts. Their payot. Their guns. It struck him that he must have appeared as foreign to them as they were to him. Men of another country. It wasn’t so much that they frightened him, it was more that they just did not seem to live on quite the same earth.
Rami gestured good night, but they did not move until he had closed the door of his car. He caught sight of them in the rearview mirror. They were leaning towards each other, laughing. The books were ranged in a circle around them.
He found out later that the men had dangled their friend in the dumpster rather than just climbing inside because it was forbidden to tread with your feet on the name of G-d.
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On the Sabbath: No sowing, plowing, reaping, binding sheaves, threshing, winnowing, selecting, grinding, sifting, kneading, baking, shearing wool, washing wool, beating wool, dyeing wool, spinning, weaving, making two loops, weaving two threads, separating two threads, tying, untying, sewing two stitches, tearing, trapping, slaughtering, flaying, salting meat, curing hide, scraping hide, cutting hide, writing two letters, erasing two letters, building, tearing a building down, extinguishing a fire, kindling a fire, hitting with a hammer, taking an object from the private domain to the public or transporting an object in the public sphere.
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The custom of substituting the word G-d for God is based on the traditional practice in Jewish law of revering God’s Hebrew name. The name most often used in the Hebrew Bible is the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, considered too sacred to be uttered aloud, and frequently anglicized as Yahweh or Jehovah. The other names of God that, once written, cannot be erased are El, Eloah, Elohim, Elohai, El Shaddai and Tzevaot.
In prayers the pronunciation Adonai is used, and in discussion it is usually said as HaShem, meaning The Name.
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In Islam there are ninety-nine names for God—ʾasmāʾu llāhi l-ḥusnā, meaning the Beautiful Names of Allah.
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In 1995, the shepherd Muhammad—who had, since 1947, made a living searching for scrolls in the caves around Qumran—gave an interview in an antiquities shop in the Old City of Jerusalem.
Some of the scrolls that he had left hanging in his hut, he said, had been discovered by children who used them as kite strips until they disintegrated and blew away on the wind.
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Four of the Dead Sea scrolls were taken to the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York in 1954, where they were sold at auction for a quarter of a million dollars.
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Muhammad said that one of the things he regretted now, as an old man, was that he had never found the body of his lost goat.
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And we think the myths are startling.
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Abir would sometimes draw her name in the dust on her father’s car. Her writing was tight and controlled. She wrote in naskh and was just beginning to learn the ruq’ah. She flourished the initial arc and moved seamlessly into the underlying line. She joined the dots above the third arc. Her work was fine and decorative. She would write it in one patch at a time, on the passenger door, the trunk, the front bumper.
She liked the notion of her name traveling down the road at fifty kilometers an hour.
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After the shooting, Bassam walked around the car and tried to find a patch where her writing remained. He found a faint imprint on the rear window.
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Sometimes Rami would step into Smadar’s room and think of it as a sort of genizah too.
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Costigin and the sailor hauled the wooden boat over the cliffs by rope. For hours they picked their way through the rocks and stones, searching for a path away from the river so they could join the larger road.
Their bodies were so ripped up by desert thorns that they were forced to improvise arm and leg coverings from the spare white canvas they carried for repair of the sail. They secured the wrappings with twine, then dragged the boat behind them, trying not to damage the hull.
Costigin told the sailor that he was sure they would come to no harm. They were, after all, walking in the original footsteps.
When the sun was at its highest they stopped and took shade in the cool of isolated caves. They removed their coverings, bathed their wounds. The moon moved across the mouth of the cave. The silence was immense.
Early the next day—in the still-dark, after rewrapping their wounds—they came across a small group of Bedouin tribesmen. The Bedouin were amazed at the appearance of the travelers, wrapped in canvas, dragging a boat behind them.
They put Costigin and the sailor on horseback and brought them to their camp, where they applied a special poultice made from the pulp of cactus. When they had recovered, Costigin once again hired camels to carry the boat and the remaining provisions.
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When Bassam went to lecture in the United States in 2014, he was invited to a number of churches where they sang about the Jordan—Roll, Jordan, roll, I want to go to heaven when I die; Oh the Jordan stream will never run dry, never run dry, never run dry; I’ll meet you in the morning when you reach the promised land, on the other side of the Jordan where I’m bound.
In the pews he sat and listened. He told his hosts later that the music brought him home.
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The pair arrived in Jericho by the Dead Sea in tatters. They took a couple of days to reorient themselves at a rooming house. Costigin took long baths to bring his body temperature down. A thermometer in the shade read over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. In the market Costigin restocked on water, coffee, food, clothing, then bought the thermometer from the owner of the rooming house.
They set out for the final part of their journey in August of 1835. When they got to the shore of the lake, Costigin measured the heat at 105 degrees. He knelt in the sand, put his palm upon the bow of the boat, and prayed. He dipped his finger in the lake and ran the salt across his lips
. Later, when the sun fell, he ate a meal of guinea fowl while floating on his back.
They launched onto the Dead Sea near the mouth of the Jordan. The sky was blue upon blue. The wind was laden with heat. Nothing else stirred. No fish, no birds.
The lake was bounded on either side by high mountain ranges. The mountains appeared purple in the heat. Costigin was surprised by the size of the waves across the water: he had studied the salt lake in books, but he had not reckoned on its enormity. The boat, he noticed, rode a full hand’s-width higher here than anywhere else, buoyed by the salt. He knelt on the wooden slats and began to take soundings, using the rope which went to a depth of one hundred and seventy-five fathoms.
They spent two days crisscrossing the lake. Costigin ventured onshore into the clay hills to see if he could find forgotten ruins or remnants of towns. He returned to the boat, after hours of walking, in an ecstatic fever.
He might, he told the Maltese sailor, have found the sulfur springs where Herod had once bathed.
They docked the boat and slept in their tent. A fierce north wind blew. The thermometer read eighty-five degrees. They hoisted the sail and were on the lake before sunrise. Within minutes it was over a hundred degrees again. The Maltese sailor said he could go no more, but Costigin was convinced that he would find the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The ruins would, he thought, be somewhere near Ein Bokek. They would fight their way through the heat.
By the fourth day, their skulls had begun to burn. Costigin dipped his keffiyeh in the lake over and over. Even the surface of the water seemed to be boiling. Blisters and sores appeared on his face. He dipped his clothes again. The sun baked him dry. He realized he was making a terrible mistake: the sun was burning the salt through his skin. His eyes were large and inflamed. The blisters had begun to ooze. He rinsed his headscarf in the small supply of fresh water, collected the runoff.
They struck out into the lake once more. The thermometer was stuck at 102 degrees.
By the fifth day the Maltese sailor had fallen silent. He stared straight ahead as he rowed. He no longer joined in Costigin’s prayers. The thermometer had vanished. They still had food but their supply of fresh water was rapidly dwindling. In the daytime they tried to shield the water bucket from the heat to prevent evaporation. Costigin could not sleep. His face and his body were ravaged with sores. He had begun to repeat himself, Biblical verses over and over. He accused the sailor of drinking all the water and throwing the thermometer overboard.
The sailor told him that if they didn’t leave now they would surely die.
Their fresh water was completely gone after seven days, but there was still a small amount of coffee left. Costigin thought the coffee medicinal. It would propel him forward, give him strength, they would find spring water soon.
He dipped the pan in the sea and boiled whatever coffee he could in the salt water. Within hours he was writhing in agony.
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On her wedding day, Salwa—as was her family custom—took platefuls of used coffee grounds and spread them on the doorstep of her house.
She scrunched her bare feet into the grounds, darkening her soles, and then walked in a circle in front of her house, leaving the print of the coffee on the steps as she walked.
The ritual had been passed through her family for generations: it signified that she and Bassam would be happy to return after the wedding.
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A group of rescuers brought Costigin back through Bethlehem to Jerusalem strapped on horseback. A large cushion was attached to the neck of the horse so that Costigin could lie along its length.
The rescuers had been sent out by an Anglican missionary, the Reverend John Nicolayson, who had heard of Costigin’s plight. They had journeyed at night to avoid the terrible heat, reaching Jerusalem just as the morning stars faded.
On the fifth of September, 1835, Nicolayson found Costigin a bed in a Franciscan hospice, the Casa Nuova.
Costigin was diagnosed with severe hyperpyrexia. A doctor administered emetics and wet his lips with lemonade made with fresh fruit from the hospice garden.
The young novitiate wavered in and out of consciousness. He lay in the bed under a thin sheet. His fever soaked the pillow. He wanted to be wheeled out into the garden one final time, but it was too warm outside, he would have to wait for night.
He was sorry, he told the doctor, that he had not been properly prepared for his journey to the Dead Sea, but now he was ready to meet his God.
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On the morning of Monday, September 7, 1835, Christopher Costigin was buried in a cemetery in the shade of Mount Zion overlooking the Kidron Valley, sloping down towards the Dead Sea where he had traveled.
The Reverend Nicolayson oversaw the funeral. He wrote in his diary that for a moment, just as Costigin’s coffin was lowered in the ground, a single cloud appeared and gave a brief relief from the heat.
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Point Costigan was named in 1848 when another expedition—led by the explorer William Lynch, heavily funded and equipped by the United States Navy—managed to make the first complete modern map of the Dead Sea.
Lynch named the northern extremity of the El-Lisan peninsula after the young theologian. The American fired a three-gun salute into the air in Costigin’s memory.
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The Ben Yehuda Street bombs went off in three-second intervals.
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Closed-circuit cameras later pinpointed the bombers approaching Ben Yehuda Street from at least two different directions: Bashar Sawalha came from Mesilat Yesharim Street, Youssef Shouli from Mordechai A’liash.
They arrived disguised as women. In their hands they carried shopping bags although it was never fully determined what was inside the bags: the explosives were wrapped around their bodies.
The third bomber, Tawfiq Yassine, was not caught on any footage, although investigators suggested that he had come from the area of HaMatmid Alley, past the building which housed the Israeli Ministry of Immigration and Absorption.
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The women’s clothes had been given to them a week before, but none of the men tried them on until just hours before the operation.
For their video, filmed on the morning of the bombings by the Martyr’s Brigade for the Freedom of Prisoners, they made sure they were dressed in appropriate male attire—keffiyeh and agal—and spoke their lines looking straight into the camera.
Afterwards they shaved their beards and donned the clothing.
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The patterns the bombers wore were simple and bare and black. The firing buttons were threaded into their pockets.
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Witnesses said that the bombers made eye contact with each other from under their veils when they reached the area around Hillel Street.
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The apartments above. The store awnings below. The fruit stalls, the juice joints, the fashion stores. The cash registers. The loudspeakers. The jangle. The September throb. The flick of a lighter. The opened clasp of a purse. The girls swaying arm in arm down the street. The laughter from a café. The pneumatic door hiss. A car door closing. The plimp of the bombers’ soft-soled shoes. The swish of their dresses. The rub of the wide cloth sleeves.
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Youssef Shouli’s was the last bomb to go off. He had gone deepest into the crowd of pedestrians.
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On the door of their apartment Nurit had put up a sticker: End the Occupation. Rami thrust his key in the door. She was standing there, waiting. He felt her shudder. He kissed her hair.
—Hurry, she said.
Rami moved quickly through the house. In his office he picked up the spare battery for his phone. The red light of the message machine was blinking. He hit it. The messages were a day old. The voices seemed to come from afar. He shoved the battery in his pocket, checke
d himself again for car keys and wallet.
In the kitchen the babysitter—a neighbor—was playing with Yigal. A train set was arranged on the floor. Interlocking pieces. Rami stepped across the room and took the five-year-old in his arms, kissed him, then hurried to the front door.
Nurit had tucked a small Polaroid of Smadar in her handbag. Rami knew better than to ask why.
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The photograph was taken at a jazz class, her white earphones on.
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By the time they arrived near Ben Yehuda Street an eerie calm had fallen over the area. The sirens had subsided. No screaming, no shouting. All forms of uniform were moving about: police, army, paramedic, the ZAKA.
Rami and Nurit were stopped at the red tape. They could see the distant floodlights. The shapes moving through the dark. They went to the edge of the tape, leaned over.
—I’m sorry but no one’s allowed. We’re under strict instructions.