Premonition

by R. S. Ingermanson

  It was driving Rivka nuts. Thanks be to HaShem that Ari and Baruch bent the rules a little. The four of them lived in one house together—much too cramped for two pairs of newlyweds. Until Ari found work, they would be living like this, all sleeping on the floor in one room of a very small house, living on the wages of one poorly paid scribe. Within that house, Baruch did his utmost to treat “Sister Rivka” as a human being. Not merely a woman, but a real person. He understood that she and Ari came from a different land, a different time, with different customs. On the street, though, he followed the customs of Jerusalem. Ari did the same.

  It hurt. A lot. Rivka knew the rules. Understood why they had to do it. And yet it made her angry. Furious. She was trying to get over it. Trying desperately hard.

  Failing miserably.

  Whereas Hana was happy as a kitten in her new life. When Rivka had met her, Hana was working the streets in what preachers called The World’s Oldest Profession. Rivka hated stupid euphemisms. In blunt speech, Hana was a zonah—a whore. Had been a zonah, anyway. No longer, thanks to Rivka and Ari and Baruch.

  Now, Hana was a respectable married woman. Pregnant, even, and thrilled to death over it. She was the wife of Baruch, a Torah scribe, a good and honorable man who followed The Way of Rabban Yeshua. She lived in the upper city now, far from her former haunts in the filthy Ophel district south of the Temple Mount. Few here knew Hana’s past. Men in this part of the city didn’t leer at her in the street. Women didn’t spit at her feet. Children didn’t shriek horrible names at her from the safety of their doorways. Here, barely half a mile from her former life, Hana had dignity. Blessed be HaShem.

  They turned left onto the street of their synagogue. Ari led the way, pushing forward through the narrow street, crowded as always. Rivka felt claustrophobic. This street—an alley, really—was barely wide enough to drive a Volkswagen through. A narrow stone gutter on each side stank with the detritus of the city. Rotting vegetables. Dead rats. Human waste.

  There was no sidewalk. The doors opened directly onto the dirt street. To go into a house, you stepped over the open gutter, and heaven help you if you missed your step.

  The whole city was like this. Unsanitary. Disgusting. Gross.

  Home.

  Rivka was getting used to it. So far, she hadn’t died, or even caught any kind of weird disease. She didn’t trust the drinking water, but oddly enough, that wasn’t an issue, thanks to the beer.

  If anything was going to kill her, it was the culture shock. She had been raised in a Messianic Jewish home. She had known before she came here that the Jerusalem church was an ultraconservative Jewish community. Even so, she constantly felt stressed. Half the followers of Yeshua here were Pharisees. Nice people, but just ... awfully Orthodox. And some of them seemed incredibly ignorant about what Yeshua had actually taught. Of course the New Testament wasn’t written yet, and all the apostles were long gone to foreign lands, but still. Rivka wished The Way was just a little more ... Christian.

  “Brother Baruch! Brother Ari!” A familiar voice from up the street shouted a greeting to the men. Ari and Baruch waved both hands overhead. Hana shrieked with delight and hurried forward, throwing her arms around ...

  A man. Not just any man. The kindest, strangest, holiest man in the city—Yaakov the tsaddik.

  Yaakov wrapped his arms around Hana and gave her a full body hug, the kind an American daddy might give his young daughter. Definitely not the kind a sixty-something Jewish man here in ancient Jerusalem would give a young married woman on the street.

  Yaakov kissed Hana on both cheeks. Then he stepped back and admired her bulging belly, his eyes shining with pride. He put both hands on Hana’s unborn child and raised his eyes to heaven. “Blessed are you, King of the Universe, Maker of Heaven and Earth, who brings forth life and hope out of death and despair.” He leaned forward and whispered something in Hana’s ear. Hana hugged him.

  And then Yaakov turned to Rivka. Opened his arms to her. She jumped forward and hugged him tight. It was so good to hug a man in public, to be touched, to be loved, to be treated like a ... person. Rivka felt the anger melting out of her heart.

  Yaakov’s strong hands patted Rivka gently on the back. He leaned down and whispered into her ear. “I have a word for you from Brother Shmuel the prophet. You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor the arrow that flies in the daylight. If a thousand fall at your side, or ten thousand at your right hand, the evil one will not touch you.”

  Tears welled up in Rivka’s eyes. “Thank you, Abba.”

  Yaakov kissed both her cheeks. “Fear no evil, my daughter, though you are a stranger in a strange land. You were brought here for a purpose, and you must obey your calling.”

  “What calling?” Rivka asked.

  Yaakov gave her an enigmatic smile. “That is for you to find. But do not turn from your task, be it ever so small, if the Spirit leads you.” He released her and stepped back.

  Rivka’s mind began racing. What could Yaakov possibly mean by that?

  Yaakov turned to Ari. “Come, my son, Aryeh, you young lion. Let me kiss you. And I have a word also for you from Brother Shmuel.”

  Rivka felt a glow of warmth encircling her. Yaakov was a special man. A holy man. A tsaddik. The history books had got him wrong. Completely wrong. Even his name, they got wrong. “James the Just,” they called him. Or “James the Righteous.”

  Which was like calling a certain famous physicist “Einstein the Patent Examiner.”

  According to a fragment recorded by Hegesippus, James was some kind of an ascetic, a self-flagellating martyr, the kind who spent all his time in a hair shirt, praying on bleeding knees.

  Dead wrong. James—Yaakov in Hebrew—was a tsaddik, which was about as far away from a fourth-century desert ascetic as you could possibly get. It was worth the humiliation and the stench of this wretched city to see a real, live, breathing, honest-to-God tsaddik. A tsaddik who didn’t care if you were peasant or king, bond or free, man or woman, because when he looked at you, all he saw was a child of HaShem. When Rivka looked at Yaakov, she saw Yeshua. If the rest of the men in Jerusalem could have been like Yaakov, the city would have been bearable.

  “Shalom to you, Baruch, my son.” Yaakov kissed Baruch on both cheeks. “You will rejoice in Shabbat in peace and the fullness of joy, be glad and celebrate.” He stepped back and raised his hands in blessing over the four of them. “Now may HaShem bless you children and watch over you, may his face shine upon you and be merciful to you, in the name of Yeshua the Mashiach. Amen!”

  Yaakov waved to someone coming up the street. “Brother Yehudah! I have a word for you from Brother Shmuel the prophet!” He hurried away, beaming.

  Rivka noticed a tall young man standing quietly near the synagogue. Long black hair hung to his waist. Brother Shmuel the prophet. When he saw Rivka looking at him, his face reddened and he turned away.

  Rivka smiled. Yaakov the tsaddik and Shmuel the slightly wacky prophet. Extreme extrovert and extreme introvert. She loved them both.

  “Blessed be HaShem,” Baruch said. “The Spirit is here. Do you feel it, Brother Ari?”

  Ari looked dazed.

  Hana’s face beamed. “The tsaddik told us we will celebrate today.”

  Rivka shifted on her feet, wishing it were that simple.

  The four of them went into the synagogue. Baruch reached inside his tattered old belt and pulled out his tallit. A coin clattered onto the stone floor. All four of them stared at it. A silver dinar! It was a day’s wage for a working man, enough to buy food for all of them for three days. Baruch shook his head and laughed. “Yaakov!”

  “Blessed be HaShem!” Hana said.

  Rivka felt a pulse of joy in her heart. That was just like Yaakov, to slip someone a little money in secret. And just like Shmuel to know where it was needed.

  Baruch turned to Ari. “The dinar is like the electron, yes? First it is not here. Then it is here.”

  Ari mumbled something. His eyes
glittered, vague and unfocused. Distant.

  Infinitely sad.

  Chapter Three

  Ari

  * * *

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, OBEYING THE “word” Yaakov had given him, Ari slipped off quietly and attended the afternoon sacrifices in the Temple alone. Not exactly alone. Ten thousand other worshipers packed into the open-air Court of Women. But ... yes, alone. Ari had been alone all his life.

  After the service, Ari let himself be carried along with the crowd leaving the inner Temple. Yaakov the tsaddik was a strange man, and the message he had whispered into Ari’s ear yesterday still tingled in his mind. After the sacrifices, hurry to the Royal Portico. Do not turn to the right or the left. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.

  That was all. If Ari did not know Yaakov, he would dismiss the whole thing as craziness.

  Everything Yaakov said was crazy and brilliant, both at the same time. Like quantum mechanics. That was foolishness too. Nobody would believe it if you explained it to them. The average man on the street in America thought physicists had some logical explanation for the universe. But they did not. They had quantum mechanics. And if the average man understood quantum mechanics, he would lose all faith in science. It took a physicist, a crazy person, to believe in physics and keep his faith in the universe.

  And Yaakov was just the same. A crazy man, to hug women in the street, to kiss their cheeks, to speak to them as if they were men. But nobody accused Yaakov of impure thoughts, because that would be twice crazy. Any fool could see Yaakov was a holy man. Such men lived by their own rules.

  Therefore, Ari trusted Yaakov. They were both crazy men. They understood each other.

  Ari saw a cluster of men gathering under Solomon’s Portico. In the middle, a short man with a thin wisp of a beard and piercing eyes sat down to teach. Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai.

  Actually, not yet. Someday he would be known by the title “Rabban.” Our Teacher. Our Master. Someday, when he was dead, all Yisrael would value this great man who had walked among them. But for now he was simply Rabbi Yohanan, one of many sages teaching Torah to a few students. This man would save the Jews from desolation—after the destruction that was coming.

  As a schoolboy, growing up in Haifa, Ari had learned about this man, Rabban Yohanan. The Talmud called him Mighty Hammer. Tall Pillar. Physically, the words did not match the reality of the tiny rabbi. But in the world of the heart, the mind, the spirit—yes.

  Around Rabbi Yohanan, half a dozen young men knelt to listen. Pious men, they all wore tefillin strapped to their foreheads and left arms, small leather boxes containing certain Torah passages inscribed on parchment. Signs of HaShem’s presence. Tefillin were more craziness. Ari wore them during the morning prayers, but they were a foolish custom. Baruch wore them all day, every day, except Shabbat and holy days, which were already signs. For Baruch and men like him, tefillin were precious, but for Ari, they were more shards of his fragmented life, signifying nothing. And yet he loved them also. Like the electron, Ari could be both one thing and another. It no longer bothered him that he was both believer and skeptic.

  Ari stopped to watch the school of Rabbi Yohanan, as he often did. Here was wisdom, esoteric and profound. He did not understand their discussions on Torah. Did not even wish to understand. It was all complex yet elegant, specialized yet general, abstract yet concrete. Far too much for a physicist who only wished—

  Ari shook his head. How long had he been standing here? A minute? Two? Five? He tore himself away from the circle and continued walking south along the eastern edge of the outer courts of the great Temple Mount.

  He only wished for work. Not alms from a holy man. Work. To take alms was dishonor. What was so hard about finding work? He was a physicist. In the United States, he could have found a hundred jobs. In the State of Israel, also many jobs. But he had left all to come to this city of God—for a girl. For Rivka. He got the girl, but he also got ... unemployment. In this city and this century, nobody needed a physicist.

  Ari was not needed, and that hurt. He understood the deep structure of the universe and the atom, knew the workings of solid and liquid and gas and plasma, could conjure the magic of electricity and magnetism and light. If nobody needed that, he could understand. People here could not be expected to make use of his mind.

  But why not his body? Ari was strong. Taller than anyone in this city, where the average man stood only a few centimeters taller than Rivka. He could dig, or carry stone, or do any of a thousand other menial tasks. Theoretically, he could even work in the Temple—he was a cohen, a man of priestly family. That was obvious from his family name, Kazan.

  He had gone once to ask for work at the Temple. Any work.

  “Your name is Ari?” A shake of the head. “A strange name. And you are a priest?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well, Ari the Priest. Where are the records of your family?”

  “They are lost. I come from a far country.”

  “Not so well, Ari the Foreigner. Without records, you are not a priest.”

  “I can work hard. I can dig or carry or whatever is required.”

  Another shake of the head. “We have many born in Jerusalem who need such work, and not enough for them. Perhaps you should return to your far country?”

  He was a foreigner in a land of high unemployment. And he was issah—a priest of uncertain lineage, one without records.

  Unemployable.

  He could not work as a scribe, like Baruch. His handwriting was too poor. He could not set up in trade. He had no money, no credit. He was a refugee in his own city, with no job, no hope, no dignity, living on the charity of his friend Brother Baruch. And now taking alms from a man who had nothing, Yaakov the tsaddik.

  He would have done anything to find work, but there was nothing he could do. And the hopelessness of it all was crushing him. Rivka would not understand. And Brother Baruch could not help—

  A scream slit open the lazy afternoon. The sound came from under the Royal Portico. For no reason and every reason, Ari began running. Do not turn to the right or left. Something deep in his heart told him that he had made a terrible mistake.

  Under the portico, a cluster of men stood in a circle.

  Ari rushed to see.

  A man lay on the ground, his leg crushed under a large flat block of stone—many hundreds of kilograms. Several men strained to lift one end of it. The man on the ground lay silent—already in shock.

  Ari pushed forward and grabbed a corner of the stone.

  “Try again!” shouted an older man in priest’s garb.

  Together, they all heaved on the stone. Slowly, slowly, the end lifted a few centimeters. Another man wedged a large rock under it and they all released their load.

  Ari straightened up slowly, his back aching with the effort.

  The man next to him pounded his shoulders. “Good work, Tall One!”

  Others pulled out the injured man. Blood pulsed from the stump of his right leg.

  Ari whipped off his cloth belt and pushed forward. He knelt beside the man and made a tourniquet around his upper leg. “Get me a stick!”

  Somebody handed him a short length of wood.

  Ari looped the belt around it and turned the stick until the blood flow slackened. He hoped this was the right thing to do, but nobody else seemed to know anything. If it was wrong, it was wrong.

  The priest in charge stepped in. “Very good. Are you a physician?”

  Ari shook his head. “It was only common sense.”

  “Uncommon sense, it seems to me.”

  “The physicians are coming!” someone shouted.

  Three white-garbed men in priestly linen raced up. One of them spread out a thick sheet of some kind of sturdy material. They expertly lifted the man onto the sheet.

  Ari wondered how often they did this kind of thing.

  A minute later, the three physician-priests had co-opted half a dozen men to carry off the hurt man.

/>   Ari stayed behind. “What happened?” he asked, to nobody in particular.

  “An accident,” said the priest in charge, a gray-bearded man, thickly built, with authority in his eyes. He wore no tefillin, though most of the workmen did. “We were replacing one of the paving stones and the crane tipped sideways.”

  Ari studied the fallen crane. It was an A-frame-type device, very simple. Stay-ropes were attached to the top, allowing it to lean forward at a slight angle without toppling. A block and tackle hung from the peak of the A. The legs of the A pivoted in notches at the base, allowing for limited tilt forward and backward. But something had failed. It should be an exercise of ten minutes to figure out why.

  “It was the will of HaShem,” said a short man with a scarred nose.

  “No, it was a bad design.” Ari knew at once that this was exactly the wrong thing to say, but he had said it without thinking.

  The old priest in charge scowled at Ari, his face darkening to purple. “It tipped to the side without warning. Nobody could have prevented it.”

  Anger boiled inside Ari at such stupidity. Did these people think things happened for no reason? Then they would use the same design tomorrow and next week and next year. Nine times out of ten, it would probably work. But the tenth, it would fail and they would not know why, because they had not the least idea of physics.

  Physics.

  Ari swallowed. You are meddling, Ari Kazan. Nobody will listen to you, a foreigner from a far country with no record of your family. “I could have prevented it.”

  His quiet words fell like bricks on the hard pavement.

  “Nobody can prevent the will of HaShem,” said the man with the scarred nose.

  “It is not the will of HaShem to crush a man’s legs. It is stupidity.” Ari knew this was craziness. He had no hope of winning such an argument. But he had nothing to lose either. Blind fury clawed at his heart. Foolishness had caused a man to be crippled for life. That man would never work again. Never walk. He would be forced to beg. Forced to live on charity, as Ari now did. Because another man was stupid. That was wrong. That was evil.