by Alan Gold
Eliahu’s wife continued to view the rabbis with derision bordering on hatred, but the Shin Bet leader still listened to their words carefully as they enticed him out of the protective shell of his previously secular life. His wife railed against them and their desire to destroy the State of Israel. Soon they became the focus of her grief, expressed as anger and hatred against those who wanted to demolish her homeland and replace it with a Messianic theocracy.
The rabbis of the sect told Eliahu that the only way for him to meet again with his daughter was with the establishment of the Holy Nation of Israel, not the secular state that had been founded by Zionists and the irreligious. They said that this was holy land and that the Lord God was ready to send his Messiah to ease all the pain and suffering of His people, provided certain conditions were met. The rabbis begged Eliahu to come and see their mentor and spiritual leader of the Neturei Karta, Reb Shmuel Telushkin, who would explain more, much more, to him.
But when the thirty-day period of mourning was over, Eliahu stopped thinking of his conversation with the Hasidic rabbis. He returned to work after the religious s’loshim ended, and threw himself into his job with renewed energy. He wasn’t ready to go back onto the streets, and so they created a research position for him. And he ate hamburgers and french fries and drank liters of Coke and Pepsi at his newly created desk in his new office, rarely moved from his chair, took a taxi home, and sat in front of the television watching American cop dramas. The words of the Neturei Karta faded.
That is, until the morning he’d just finished a meeting and was crushed by a pain in his chest. His heart failed just as it had been broken when his daughter died. In the hospital he was immediately injected with thrombolytics to dissolve the clot and was wheeled up to an operating theater to be given a quintuple bypass, a wonder of modern surgery. And it was in the hospital that he saw the light . . .
Literally!
While he was waiting for the operation to begin, he was given oxygen and injected with drugs to keep him alive before the surgeons could open his chest, and while he was lying in the pre-op ward, he slipped into a coma. The trauma nurses hit the alarm buttons and doctors rushed in. He was given electric shocks and wheeled immediately into the theater. But what the medical staff didn’t know was that while he had his eyes closed he could sense that massive things were being done to his body. His eyes were tightly shut but he could actually see a brilliance above his head. The noises of the theater, the urgent instructions of the surgeon and nurses—even the smell of the disinfectants and the anesthetic—all faded, replaced by a warm and gentle atmosphere of peace, serenity, and calm, and the smell of jasmine. Jasmine, Shoshanna’s favorite perfume.
He opened his eyes and near the ceiling, floating above him, he saw his beautiful daughter Shoshanna, dressed in the white of purity, smiling at him, waving to him, encouraging him to leave his pain and grief behind and follow her into the whiteness. Behind her, he saw an even more brilliant light, which he could hardly look into, but it shrouded his daughter in a sort of halo. He clearly heard her saying, “Abba, come, follow . . .”
And he did. He rose from the bed and could see the faces of the nurses and surgeons desperately trying to keep him alive. He saw his chest open, his heart beating, surgeons quickly trying to hook him up to machines to keep the blood flowing. He looked around the room and could clearly see the surgical table on which he was lying, the doctors and nurses, the instruments, the bottles and syringes and medicines and tubes. As he floated, trying desperately to reach his daughter’s outstretched hand, calling out her name, he heard a voice in his ear. He recognized it immediately. It was the rabbi who had visited him months earlier when he was in mourning for Shoshanna, the rabbi who was a Hasid and who told him that the answer to his nightmare was the Neturei Karta. The rabbi’s voice whispered, “Reb Shmuel.”
Fifteen hours later, he woke in intensive care, but all he could remember was the brilliant white light, his beautiful daughter, and the urgent need to see Reb Shmuel Telushkin so that he could understand why the vision had come to him.
He’d discussed it with his cardiac surgeon, who had told him blithely that it was an unusual but perfectly understandable function of oxygen deprivation and the bright lights of the operating theater, and that he was to put it out of his mind. Which he assured the doctor he would do.
But the image stayed with him, haunted him, and even when he was exercising and trying to get his mind and body back to the way they once were, all he could think about was the way his beautiful daughter had looked, so grown-up and peaceful and serene. When he left the hospital two weeks later to go home, the voice and images remained as strong as ever in his mind. After two months of boredom, walking, watching television, and going to the hospital for checkups, and out of curiosity, he went to see Reb Telushkin in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim district.
Yet, Telushkin knew that he wasn’t ready to join the sect, and so he sent him home and a month later they began the first of a series of regular talks, prayer meetings, Bible readings, explanations of the Zohar, the Book of Splendor, the Mishnah, the Gomorrah, and other spiritual books, which, despite being a Jew, he’d never bothered to open or read.
It took two full years before Reb Telushkin thought he was ready to join their sect. For the better part of six months, Eliahu had begged to be allowed to leave all of his ways behind him and become one of them. Every day he was increasingly estranged from his wife and wanted to leave the world of security and Zionism and politics behind him. But the rabbi refused his request and told him firmly to remain in his secular life, and only to come to them when his heart and mind could bear it no longer.
When, two years after his heart attack, Eliahu said that he was ready, he was surprised when Reb Telushkin told him that he would be welcomed into Neturei Karta on the condition that he continue to work with Shin Bet. He must maintain the façade of a secular life. The condition felt like an insult, an instruction that compelled Eliahu to lie and be dishonest to himself and to his newfound faith. But Telushkin calmly explained why this act was good in the sight of God, a small lie to bring about a bigger truth.
Eliahu would be their instrument to end the secular predicament, to end the abomination that was Israel. And he asked Eliahu, as an insider in both camps, how best to do it. Decades of experience with terrorism told Eliahu how to use it to pressure the Jewish community worldwide to rise up against the effete government that ran his nation and replace it with what it should all along have been: a theocracy, a dedicated group of rabbis who knew the message of God Almighty and would bring about the arrival of the Messiah and the Golden Age.
And since his heart attack, since seeing his beauteous daughter, since Reb Telushkin and he had planned their strategy, he had managed to obviate every threat to expose him, even if it meant that some people had to be killed for a greater cause. And now another potential threat was arising, one he had to keep his eye on.
Eliahu Spitzer sat at his desk, ruminating on Bilal’s failure to be killed. He thought about this young trauma doctor in the hospital. Why was she visiting Bilal so much? His guard outside the door had reported that she had been in to see him four or five times, each time just talking. Far too much for a surgeon. What were they talking about? And why had Bilal reacted so badly when Eliahu had tried to talk to him, to see what he knew and what he might tell other authorities?
What the hell was going on?
* * *
935 BCE
GAMALIEL SAT IN HIS HOME and pondered his sudden change of fortune. Though he and his wives were richly attired and they had every comfort their home needed, still his house was just above the middle of the hill on which Jerusalem sprawled. It suffered the stench of the marketplace and took the full brunt of the burning winds that blew in from the desert.
Unlike princes and priests, and Solomon himself with his vast palace at the very apex of the city’s hill, Gamaliel’s rank as a tax collector on the gates to the city didn’t entitle him to a highe
r position. But now that he was going to enter the temple, where he’d have an office and servants, he wondered whether Solomon or his court officials would grant him the right to build or buy a house much higher up the hill. If he could, then not only would his status as a lowly tax collector and merchant rise but he would be mixing with the sort of people whose patronage mattered: wives of Solomon, princes of his loins, and important people in the army and the palace itself.
His first and foremost wife entered the room, bowing her head reverentially, and stood in the doorway, waiting for his permission to enter. She still bore the marks on her face from the beating he’d given her the previous week. The truth was Gamaliel didn’t know how Solomon had discovered his fraud with the tax collection. Nor did he know which of his wives had spoken of his business in the marketplace. But he did know two things: that he had told his first wife too much of his affairs and that she had a big mouth, always chattering to her friends and neighbors. And one of the servants of Tashere, Solomon’s first and foremost wife, was probably listening as she’d boasted of their riches and fortunes.
“Yes?” he said sharply.
“She’s here . . .”
“Who?”
“The king’s first and foremost wife. I swear in the name of Yahweh, husband, I didn’t know she was coming. And I didn’t invite her. I’ve never met her. But she just appeared at the door and asked to see you. I swear.” She seemed about to cry.
“The king’s wife Tashere? She’s in my house?”
His wife nodded.
“Well, don’t just stand there. Show her in. Immediately.”
His wife ran off and returned in moments with the queen, only to disappear once again just as quickly.
Gamaliel stood when Tashere entered. “Majesty . . .” He bowed and waited for her to release him.
Instead she began to speak, and sat on a chair opposite.
“You have been lucky, Gamaliel the tax collector,” said Ta-shere in a near whisper, and she looked about the room in case people were listening.
Gamaliel didn’t respond; Tashere didn’t expect a reply.
“The money you will raise will be a fortune. But the fortune will be Solomon’s. And it will be swallowed by the temple.” Ta-shere surveyed the room, the furnishings, the matting on the floor. “No doubt you will want to rise higher in the city?”
“It is what all of us wish, to be closer to God’s house.”
“Save your piety for the priests. You wish to rise higher. And you will. But only so far. You will be blocked by Naamah and by that false high priest Ahimaaz. Is this not true?”
He looked at her and frowned. “Only last week, the king commanded me to raise the taxes. I haven’t thought about what that means for me personally.”
She laughed. “I know that you have been lying and stealing from Solomon, tax collector. But don’t lie to me, for I know you and your kind only too well. My father, the pharaoh Shoshenq, employed a hundred of your kind, and all of his troubles were caused by them and the priests of the god Horus. Their bodies were found floating in Mother Nile until eaten by crocodiles. You want money and elevation from your lowly rank, but Naamah and Ahimaaz will ensure that you fail.”
Gamaliel remained silent.
“I can prevent this happening. I can make you more than a rich man. I can make you rich and powerful,” she said.
Again he was silent, stunned by her audacity.
“I was once the most powerful woman in Israel. Solomon listened only to me. Naamah took this from me by stealth and by using her body. And she took my son from me. They think I’m finished. But they’re wrong, for I was not exiled by their lies. They left me alone because they think me weak; they have badly underestimated me. I need something from you, and you need something from me. And that is all it will take to elevate us both.”
Gamaliel leaned in closer to hear what she was about to say.
“Money!” said Tashere.
Gamaliel let out a dry, soft laugh. “What a fool you must take me for, great Queen. Your husband, Solomon, has seen my deceit once and he will not hesitate to stone me to death and exile my family if I am so stupid as to risk his displeasure again.”
“You are at risk already. Regardless of what you do, Ahimaaz and Naamah will see to your downfall. They have no control over you. Now that the priest knows you, he knows well that he cannot use you. Naamah will seek to place her own creature in your role. You have nowhere to go but further down the hill—if they allow you to remain alive, of course.” She gestured toward the markets and slums that leaned against the outer gates and walls of the city, as far from the temple and prosperity as a Jerusalemite could live.
“Join with me, tax collector, and give me sufficient funds from your revenues to raise a militia of mercenaries to deal with Naamah, and I will expel her from the palace and with her will go Ahimaaz. Then my son, Abia, the rightful heir to Solomon’s throne, will return and he will reward you for your loyalty to me.”
Gamaliel smiled. “My reward will come swiftly the moment Solomon learns I have diverted revenues to you. I will be cast into the pit at the foot of the Northern Wall. No, thank you, Tashere; I don’t fancy ending my days being crushed to death by large stones.”
She nodded. She’d expected nothing less. “Naamah is a fading light. Solomon is growing tired of her, and her body no longer pleases him. She has to resort to more and more slaves doing more and more unusual things to his body to entice him. Her days are numbered, but she still commands a bodyguard, which will prevent me from getting near to her. Solomon still visits me in my palace and I have more of his ear than before.
“But she’s also failing for another reason. Solomon now listens to me when I tell him things about her and her idiot son, Rehoboam, and he is regretting his decision to expel our son, Prince Abia. Soon, in a few days, I will say other things to him that will convince him of Naamah’s treachery. That is why I need to pay for men.”
Gamaliel listened carefully before saying, “But how do I account for giving you the revenue from the tax collections? Solomon has told me that he will be counting every shekel.”
“Naamah is not the only one with creatures. While she controls the priests and high men, she has neglected the lowly men of the palace, men who see her for what she is. The clerks and the scribes and the money counters, these are my creatures—lowly men, but they are mine and they see everything. Solomon will not see any numbers before they have passed through my hands.”
Gamaliel raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“I do not need an army. There will be no war. Just the removal of thorns. Naamah and her fool of a son, Rehoboam. Then my son will return as prince of Israel and you will rise higher than you could possibly imagine.”
* * *
IN THE YEARS SINCE becoming high priest, since the downfall of his brother Azariah and the exile of Prince Abia, Solomon’s heir, Ahimaaz had worked hard to teach Prince Rehoboam the intricacies and complexities of the laws of Moses and Yahweh. The young man occasionally asked some questions of merit, but most of the time when he was learning Jewish ways in the new and wondrous Temple of Solomon, his mind was elsewhere.
The prince even admitted he would rather be hunting or visiting other lands than spending his time at the feet of his father, learning the perils of kingship, or in the inner sanctums of the temple having rituals explained to him by the high priest.
In desperation Ahimaaz summoned Naamah, Rehoboam’s mother, now the most important of Solomon’s wives, to attend a meeting with him at his offices in the temple. He had told her to be present after the noonday sacrifice, and he sat and waited for her. And he sat. And he waited.
As the mid-afternoon prayers and sanctifications were about to begin in the western wing of the temple, Ahimaaz felt he had waited long enough and sent a messenger to ask why the queen had failed to attend. The man returned in less than an hour, red-faced and diffident.
“Her Majesty said that she was unable to attend,” he said soft
ly.
Surprised, Ahimaaz asked, “Did she give a reason?”
The man didn’t answer but looked at the floor.
“What did the queen say?” Ahimaaz demanded.
The man whispered, “She said, ‘Queens do not attend priests. If Ahimaaz wishes to speak with me, he will come to the palace and await my pleasure.’ ”
Despite the cold that was setting in on top of the mountain, Ahimaaz began to sweat. He had not seen the queen in many weeks. After his elevation to the high priesthood was secure, he’d been a valuable tool to the queen and had systematically removed any potential thorns and opposition in the temple while the queen herself cleared the palace of opponents. But with her power now seemingly secure, she no longer sought his counsel, leaving him to his rituals and the instruction of princes.
But Ahimaaz had to inform Naamah of Rehoboam’s recalcitrance, his obduracy, and his waywardness so that she would scold him and force him to concentrate. Perhaps he shouldn’t have summoned her, but he knew that was what his brother Azariah would have done. Azariah had even summoned Solomon to his home when the great king had allowed his foreign wives to place their idols close to the Ark of the Covenant so they could continue the worship they had practiced in their homes. Wary of Azariah’s fury, Solomon had ordered his wives to keep their idols in their rooms. If Solomon had come at the high priest Azariah’s behest, why wouldn’t Queen Naamah come when Ahimaaz summoned her? Was he no less the high priest?