by Alan Gold
Ahimaaz looked at the tax collector in fury. “For such words, as high priest of Israel, I could order that you be stoned to death. You blaspheme against the Lord our God. I will have you killed.”
Gamaliel smiled as he took out more shekels to pay his cousin for their pomegranate juice. “And will my death make Yahweh appear? No. But it doesn’t matter. Let us make a deal. You tend to your congregation and I’ll collect my revenues. We’re both now in the service of King Solomon and his temple, Ahimaaz, but we’re using different doors to enter.”
Gamaliel drained the cup of juice and looked at the priest, whose face was red, not only from the exertion of the walk to the marketplace and the heat of the sun, but also from the seditious and blasphemous words of the tax collector. Gamaliel wiped his lips and smiled. “Now, what did you really want to talk about?”
* * *
October 18, 2007
YAEL STRODE UP THE CORRIDOR and ignored much of what was going on around her. Patients, nurses, fellow doctors, visitors, the low din of clinking trolleys and the hum of machines. But the swirl of brown robes caught her attention. They billowed as the imam walked briskly down the corridor toward her. She saw the imam reach into a pocket deep within the folds of the material and draw out a mobile phone. For a second she was about to stop him, to point to the sign on the wall that declared mobile phones were not to be used in the hospital, but she thought better of it and the pace and purpose of the bearded man with suspicious eyes implied he was leaving. As she passed him their eyes met, his dark and piercing, black pools deeply set into a tanned face. She quickly looked away, unnerved by his stare. But when she was farther down the corridor and many steps past him, she turned her head to look back and saw the phone pressed to his ear. And it was obvious from the position of his body that he’d just turned back from staring at her.
Yael’s thoughts were interrupted by the abrupt presence of the uniformed guard outside Bilal’s room. He looked her up and down as though he were about to challenge her entry or search her, even though he had seen her a dozen times. But he simply sat back down on his seat without a word and shifted his rifle’s strap on his shoulder. As Yael put her hand on the door and her weight behind it, she pondered how out of place such a weapon was in a hospital.
Inside the room, the air was dry and still and quiet, the TV hanging from the ceiling remaining silent while Bilal lay in his bed. He started with a jump when she entered, and at first she wondered if she had woken him from sleep. But red eyes and the adoption of a fiercely resolute posture in the bed suggested something else. This intrigued Yael and she unintentionally quickened her steps to the bedside, but by the time she was close enough, Bilal’s face was a hard mask and he refused to look at her, his eyes fixed dead ahead like those of a soldier lined up for inspection.
“How are you today, Bilal?”
Bilal said nothing. Yael’s attention was distracted by thoughts other than bandages. As she checked his blood pressure she could not help but think of the blood that connected them. Who was this young man? Who were his family? How deep did the roots go that linked both of them, two people whose worlds were so diametrically opposed? But her musings were agitated by the image of an imam walking arrogantly down the hospital’s corridor, a man she knew must have just been speaking to Bilal. She didn’t trust any religion or any cleric, no matter how unctuous or bland they were on the surface. To her scientific mind, God was simply an invention to allay people’s fears, but organized orthodox religion had grown into a woman-hating and power-hungry institution of medieval costumes and archaic ideas. Orthodox Jews and Christians were bad enough, but when it came to hate-spewing Islamic clerics, Yael’s secular tolerance flew out the window.
In lively dinner-party debates with her educated friends she would attest to her discomfort for the faith of her own people, her frustration with the Jewish religious right, her disgust at the sycophancy of the Christian churches toward the Palestinians when its very own communities in West Bank towns had been decimated by Palestinian Muslims.
In her professional life, she kept such thoughts to herself. Now that she was in the hospital, her duty was to her patients. She gazed at Bilal and was concerned about the stress, anxiety, and fear on his face. Such emotions would adversely affect his recovery.
“Did you just have a visitor?” she asked him. “I saw a priest in the corridor.”
But he said nothing. His eyes locked on an imaginary spot on the far side of the room.
“You’ll be leaving soon.”
This statement turned Bilal’s head but he remained silent.
“Can’t stay here forever . . .” She stopped her inspection and returned the clipboard to the end of his bed. “So we’ll be saying good-bye to each other, Bilal.”
“I am not afraid of what happens next,” said Bilal flatly but unconvincingly.
“So you’ve said.”
“Understand, woman. I am not afraid.”
“Yes, Bilal. You’re very brave,” replied Yael. She was feeling sardonic and didn’t mind sounding patronizing.
“I will stand up straight and say to the world that I am a freedom fighter!” said Bilal, exhaling defiance with every syllable.
“Then your trial will be mercifully short.”
Bilal turned his head and looked Yael hard in the eye. “I will be a hero! My brothers will embrace me and they will call me a hero. Of that I promise you.”
Yael knew she should remain silent and dispassionate. She shouldn’t have cared for his beliefs or assertions. They were nothing to her. But despite the bluster in his voice she could not dismiss him. Whatever he’d done, he’d been controlled by others and he was only a kid. Sure, he was eighteen, but in his attitudes he wasn’t much more than a boy.
She stopped examining his wounds and looked at him intently. “Listen, Bilal, you’re in trouble. You don’t understand. These people you think love you . . . they . . .” Yael snatched at words. “You have no value to them anymore, Bilal. They don’t need you. And they will abandon you. They’ve used you for a couple of weeks, and they’ll leave you to suffer for the rest of your life.”
“You lie!” Bilal spat. “My imam tells me that—”
“Son, listen to me for a minute . . .” Yael put her hand on Bilal’s arm. He tried to snatch it away but the handcuff held it and Yael’s grip was firm. She could feel his pulse throbbing under her fingers, feel his blood pumping, blood that they shared. She softened her attitude toward him but her grip on his arm remained. “Bilal, you’re not safe. You won’t be safe in prison. You need to protect yourself. You need to tell the police that you’re not a hero but that you’ve been led astray—”
“You lie!” Bilal yelled, as if he could drown out her words.
Behind Yael, the door was suddenly pushed open and the security guard entered the room to see what the shouting was about. His eyes narrowed on Bilal and Yael turned to him. “It’s okay. We’re fine.”
Bilal yanked with all his strength at his handcuffed wrist in anger and the bed lurched with a force that surprised Yael and brought the guard over to the bedside.
“It’s okay. We’re fine. You don’t have to . . .” Yael said urgently to the guard, but as she did she was conscious that the chance to garner more information from Bilal about his heritage had slipped through her fingers.
“Calm down, boy!” said the guard with one hand outstretched and the other hovering near his weapon. There was no chance the guard would actually use his rifle, but many years serving on West Bank checkpoints had ingrained a muscular memory and a reaction to Palestinians that was not easy to let go.
“You lie!” yelled Bilal again. “I am a hero. I am a fighter. And you lie!”
The guard pushed Yael away from the bed with a sweep of his arm, a strong signal that she should leave.
“Bilal . . . Please . . . It won’t be what you think. You won’t be a hero in prison. You’ll—”
But her words were smothered by Bilal’s yelling. “YOU
LIE!”
Yael turned her back and moved toward the door with the image of Bilal’s enraged face in her mind. She left the room, and as she walked down the corridor her mind began to doubt the science that had been her mainstay since she’d been a university student.
The match between their DNA must be wrong, the idea absurd; how could this idiotic failed terrorist be related to her? This deluded boy shared nothing with her—not heritage, not culture, not reality. The blood profile was a mistake, the DNA map was wrong. Or it was a one-in-a-billion chance that their DNA was identical but that they had no relationship to each other at all. And the proof was in the room behind her, painted in denial and ignorance.
Putting one hand in her pocket as she walked quickly toward the stairs that would lead her back to modernity and the certainty of her reality, Yael felt for the slip of paper that she’d retrieved from her hospital mailbox: the letter from Bilal’s father. They deserved to know the truth of their son’s fate and Yael needed to put this stupid absurdity to rest.
* * *
STANDING BY an empty hospital bed, Mahmud had watched the imam from a distance for some time, but although their eyes never met, he knew that the imam had seen him too. Dark Semitic features were common to Arabs and Jews, but the imam would recognize Mahmud for what he was.
Mahmud had been watching as the imam entered Bilal’s room. He’d waited patiently for the imam to leave. Now Mahmud stood outside the front doors of the hospital. The sunlight on his face felt good after hours drenched in the cold fluorescent light of the hospital. Before too long the brown robes of the imam emerged from the automatic sliding doors of the hospital and Mahmud saw him blink in the sun.
“As-salamu alaykum,” said Mahmud, and he took three paces toward the man. The imam seemed startled by the Arabic words and blinked again as he tried to focus on Mahmud while his eyes adjusted to the glare.
“Wa alaykum as-salamu wa rahmatu Allah wa barakatuh,” came the holy man’s reply.
“What brings you to the hospital today?”
“I go where I am needed,” the imam replied bluntly as he looked Mahmud up and down. “You are a doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you from?”
“Beit Safafa,” replied Mahmud.
“Ahh . . .” said the imam, as if the name of the town where Mahmud grew up said it all.
Beit Safafa was an Arab neighborhood in southern Jerusalem. For decades it had been split down the middle, an invisible division of hatred and suspicion separating the Israeli side from the Jordanian side. But after the Six-Day War, when the Israeli army drove back the Jordanians, the township became a symbol of cooperation where both Jews and Arabs lived side by side peacefully. But in truth it wasn’t where Mahmud had been born. Desperate for his son to grow up away from the tension and violence of the West Bank, which had characterized Mahmud’s father’s upbringing, the family had moved to Beit Safafa. Arriving poor and illiterate, they lived four people to a single room while his father drove a taxi eighteen hours a day to send Mahmud to school—an education that had been a gateway to a life his father never knew but had had vision enough to dream of for his son.
While the town of his childhood was a source of pride to Mahmud, the tone of the imam’s response was very different.
“You grew up among the Jews, then. And now you work among them too.”
“Do you know that boy? Bilal?” Mahmud asked, ice in his voice.
“He is a child of Allah. As are we all.”
“And did Allah wish for him to carry a bomb?”
The question was so blunt it surprised the imam, but he didn’t flinch, instead replying, “Did Allah wish for his people to be brutalized into poverty?”
Mahmud said nothing. The imam continued. “You are a doctor?”
Mahmud nodded.
“You are a good Muslim?”
“My father taught me to be so,” replied Mahmud.
“I see . . . Then why are you here? Why don’t you use your doctor skills to help your own people instead of helping these Jews?”
“Jews and Muslims and Christians come to this hospital. We treat the sick. We don’t ask what they believe. Anyway, what kind of help are you offering to Bilal?”
The imam’s eyes narrowed and his lips tightened. “I am guiding him to Allah. Who is guiding you?”
“When does it end?” asked Mahmud. His voice had lost its edge. It was barely more than a whisper. He turned away from the imam and walked back into the hospital.
* * *
THE OUTWARD CHANGE in Eliahu Spitzer’s appearance was minimal but momentous. It was glacially slow but, now that he came to look back on events, inexorable. Perhaps, in all his secular life, in his work protecting the State of Israel from Palestinian terrorists and other madmen, he’d hungered for a higher calling, for a spiritual side to his innate practicality, but there were times when Eliahu’s change surprised even him. Yet, when he had a moment of doubt, he remembered back to the events two years ago that had triggered his transformation, and it all somehow came together.
Before his daughter’s murder, before his massive heart attack six months later, he had been—like so much of Israeli society—secular. His father, a Polish immigrant, had been ultra-religious, a former Yeshiva student who would have been a rabbi had not the war intervened. But Eliahu rejected religion and in his social life and education embraced the secular Israeli lifestyle.
For him and later his family, the synagogue was a three-times-a-year obligation at the insistence of his wife. He’d met with rabbis many times for his work and been to the ultra-religious corners of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but religion had never been anything other than what he’d done for personal cultural reasons. Yet, like a stone on which water drips and drips, after his daughter’s murder and his brush with death, Eliahu’s secularism eroded and he made room for a deity in his life. He’d actually seen God and it had changed his life forever.
He had two great regrets: the first was his rejection of his father’s faith and that his awakening to the Almighty through the sect of the Neturei Karta had taken him over fifty years to realize; and the second was that, because of his position as a senior security officer for the government, the leaders of the sect had begged him to hide his affiliation to the Neturei Karta and to continue working within Shin Bet as usual and further the sect’s cause.
He’d been hiding his faith for three years and in that time he’d worked to change the sect’s methods of making the Messiah come early. They believed in prayer; so did he, but assisted prayer. He had laid out an ambitious plan for the leaders of Neturei Karta, and they’d eventually given their approval. In the three years since covertly joining Neturei Karta, he’d paved the way for the coming of the Messiah by honing and refining plans to bring about chaos, the destruction of the government, and its replacement by fervently religious Jews. And then all Jewish voices would be lifted to heaven so that the Messiah heard and would come.
Some members of Neturei Karta refused to go along with what Eliahu suggested to their leadership, believing that the restoration of the nation of Israel should be brought about by the will of the Messiah and not at a time dictated by the sect; and when they heard that people might be killed in the process, they were horrified. But their leader, Reb Shmuel Telushkin, reassured them that fighting governments of foreign lands was unacceptable but fighting Zionists who were traitors against the laws of the Bible was necessary.
Eliahu’s identity was kept a strict secret from most of the membership while Reb Telushkin prepared him to be a member of the sect in every respect other than wearing the sect’s uniform of the black fur hat and the long black silken frock coat and growing his sideburns.
His transformation from secular to Neturei Karta was carefully handled and subtle. After the shattering events he and his family suffered, he changed his appearance only slightly. Now he wore a small blue and white skullcap, the symbol to Jews that he was a religious man. He wore his Neturei Karta
uniform of eighteenth-century garb only when he was in their synagogue, carefully screened from impure eyes; not even his wife knew.
The instrument of his change had begun with the murder of his daughter on a school excursion to the Dead Sea. For days he hovered over her bedside, looking at her torn body swathed in bandages, praying to a remote and invisible God for her recovery, one he’d not spoken with since he was a boy with his father in synagogue, knowing that her life was ebbing away as her vital signs continued to weaken.
Others might have sworn off the deity, becoming confirmed atheists because God hadn’t answered their prayers; but as the doctors switched off the machinery that was keeping his daughter’s shattered body on the threshold of life, Eliahu prayed fervently for God to look after her in heaven, now that he could no longer protect her on earth.
The month of ritual mourning had done little to mollify his hatred of the Palestinians, and he’d smoked and drunk more than usual before and after the crowds had come to his home to comfort the mourners and say evening prayers. Two of the visitors to his home had been Neturei Karta rabbis. His wife was surprised, as was he. But he welcomed any visitor who could lift the burden of grief he felt, even for a moment. At first he thought that they were just ordinary black-hatted rabbis. They kept their identity disguised until the third visit to his house of mourning, when the older man said that they were guardians of the city. In ancient Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ, that meant they were Neturei Karta. His wife, knowing they were anti-Zionist, wanted them gone, but he accepted comfort from anywhere and took them into his study, where he asked about their beliefs in God and the afterlife. They spoke soft and conciliatory words into his ears, and for the first time such words from the lips of Hasidic rabbis began to mean something to him. He knew consciously that he was clutching at straws, but he was a drowning man.