by Alan Gold
So he’d eschewed his personal comforts in Peki’in for the joy of remaking his fortune as a merchant. In Jerusalem, he’d risked his wife and family living such a fraught life as a spy for the Zealots. But now he realized that he wanted nothing more than a quiet and peaceful life with Sarah, to share her bed, know her body, love and revere and worship her as he worshipped Adonai Elohim.
And if the price he’d have to pay was to build a synagogue in Peki’in to the memory of her first husband, well, so be it.
* * *
November 8, 2007
IN THE MORNING Yael put on a warm winter jacket when she got out of bed. The house seemed cold. Even though it often snowed in Jerusalem in the winter, her apartment was heated and air-conditioned and the ambient temperature rarely varied. To go to work, she would get into a climate-controlled car and drive to a climate-controlled hospital.
So being in a simple stone house on a hill in the Galilee, she was closer to nature than she’d been in years, and for a moment enjoyed the sensation of leaving the warm bed and feeling the chilly bite of the air.
She walked out of their tiny bedroom and down the short hall to where Bilal slept. In her mind she played out what else she could possibly say to him about who he was—who she was—now that he’d been told the truth.
The revelation she had laid before him the previous night had caused a mix of emotions. At first his reaction had been one of shock, then denial; then, when she explained about the letter and his mother’s need for absolute secrecy, Bilal began to understand the implications. He said very little but his silence belied a mind in turmoil that struggled to reconcile the life he had led, the identity that had been built up based on hate, and the reality of the world he was in right now. A life that had Yael the Jew, who had saved his life, sitting in front of him and connected to him by blood.
When he finally spoke, his question was strikingly practical. “If I’m now a Jew, will I be treated differently?”
At first Yael had not known how to respond. In her mind’s eye she saw Jerusalem, a city divided. She saw his village and she thought of her own upbringing, her own home. Their worlds could not be further apart.
“Yes,” she had said. There could be no other answer.
Bilal had looked down at his very own body as though it were now foreign to him as Yael had pressed forward with the raw truth.
“Your mother believes that if you are known as a Jew, you will be freed or sent to a better prison. That you will be safe.”
“Will I?” he asked.
“Who you are, what your bloodline is . . . this doesn’t change what you did, Bilal. You killed a man.”
“So my mother gave up this terrible secret for nothing.”
“She believes it will save you. And she needs to believe that. She has nothing else to hope for.”
Bilal stared hard into her eyes, boring down into her soul. “And you, Dr. Yael? Who are you?” Bilal spread open his hands. “If I have your blood, then you have mine . . .”
In that moment the night before, the labels, the divisions, between Arab and Israeli, Muslim and Jew, seemed so utterly incomprehensible to her. Artificial barricades that had wrought such destruction seemed washed away. Now, in the cold of a Galilee morning, their harsh reality lay just beyond the door. In the gunsights of two men who fanatically followed the extremism of their faiths.
* * *
WHEN YAEL KNOCKED at Bilal’s bedroom, there was no answer.
She turned the handle and found that she couldn’t open the door, as if something were jamming it. She pushed and called out his name. She pushed again, harder, and it still resisted. But the timber was old, rot had taken its toll, and with a further shove the door swung inward with a creak.
The window was wide-open; two of the horizontal iron bars that had sealed the portal had been removed by deep cuts made into the wooden frame. Bilal was gone.
“Yaniv!” Yael shouted, and he came running, looking into the empty room.
“Shit!”
He dashed back to quickly put on his shirt and trousers. Yael followed. In the hallway Yaniv reached into the small table for his watch and phone. In shock, he realized the phone was missing.
“Jesus!” he said. “The little bastard’s stolen my phone.”
“The one with the video on it?” asked Yael.
“No. No SIM card. His can’t make calls. He’s taken mine. He’s phoning somebody . . . the little backstabbing bastard. He’s phoned the fucking imam . . .”
* * *
BILAL COULD ALMOST HAVE HEARD Yael and Yaniv starting to search for him from where he was. He was just two streets away, hiding in a corner of the courtyard outside the ancient synagogue, where he and Hassan had planned to meet. He looked at the time on Yaniv’s phone and realized that the imam was probably on his way, as he’d arranged. With trembling hands he phoned Hassan’s number.
“Where are you, brother?” he asked.
“Close to the village. Where are you?”
“In the synagogue.”
“Ten minutes,” said Hassan.
Bilal waited in the shade of a corner of the wall. He hadn’t slept all night. If what Dr. Yael said about him being a Jew was true, then who was he? All his life he’d grown up to believe in Allah and that Mohammed was his prophet. But now, if his blood was different from that of his friends, if he wasn’t the same inside as he’d always been, what did it mean? Was he still Bilal haMitzri, Bilal the Egyptian? Why was he the Egyptian? What did that make him? Was Allah still his god? Had his life been a lie?
Bilal examined his hands, his arms. They were the same as yesterday morning, but last night they became the hands and arms of a Jew. But they couldn’t be. It was impossible.
It was all too much. He needed to talk to somebody. But who? Who could he speak with that wasn’t trying to kill him? Not the imam, who wanted him dead; not the Jews, who wanted him imprisoned. Dr. Cohen? Could he trust her? Hassan, his brother? Only Hassan could help him . . .
* * *
ELIAHU SPITZER WATCHED as the kid, Bilal, who had become such a problem, slunk down the narrow streets of the village. The boy wasn’t entirely stupid, staying out of the open, but he was easy to track from the clear vantage point on the hill where Spitzer had positioned himself. His high-powered field glasses gave him a clear view of almost the entire village.
Eliahu hadn’t known where the boy was in the village. Going from door to door wasn’t an option, and there were no informers in the Druze village that could be relied upon. But the Shin Bet officer didn’t need such ham-fisted searching. He only had to sit in his hiding place and wait.
He removed the tiny electronic speaker from his ear and slipped it into a pocket. He had earlier been listening to the voice of a young Arab man, apparently named Hassan, and the more familiar mutterings of the imam, Abu Ahmed bin Hambal, as they drove toward the village. The car the imam and Hassan had taken had been easy to bug and from his position he had only needed to wait for their arrival, which he knew would draw Bilal out.
* * *
73 CE
SAMUEL THE MERCHANT stood in awe and looked at the doors of his synagogue.
His synagogue.
It wasn’t the Peki’in synagogue, or Abraham’s synagogue, but his synagogue.
Not, of course, that he would ever use this name to his wife, Sarah, or to their newly born baby boy whom they had named Abraham in memory of his mother’s first husband, a man the child would never know. But as he’d paid for the stone and the timber, the stonemasons and the carpenters, the artisans and the other craftsmen, he felt entitled, when he was alone and provided he said it silently to himself, to call it “Samuel’s synagogue.”
It was finished, complete. The final stones had been laid, the women of the village had put in a special effort to sweep the floor and polish the new pure silver seven-branched menorah he’d bought from a craftsman’s shop in distant Acre, and now he was making a final inspection before its consecration in the
morning by the learned and blessed Rabbi Gamliel of Yavne, leader of those Jews who had not fled from Israel to other lands after the destruction of the temple. Rabbi Gamliel was also the head of the Great Sanhedrin of Israel, the body of lawmakers and adjudicators that had re-formed since the obliteration of the city of Jerusalem.
Such great rabbis rarely left their schools, but Samuel had known Gamliel from his days in Jerusalem when he was a friend to the Romans and a spy for the Zealots. Gamliel was one of the few who stood up for Samuel when he was accused of being a traitor to the Jews by those citizens who were ignorant of his role as a spy. And so, when Samuel had sent word to Gamliel that the synagogue he’d financed was about to be opened, Gamliel asked whether he could consecrate it.
The moment Samuel told his wife, Sarah, who would be visiting the village the following day and officiating at the very first community ceremony and prayers in the synagogue, she looked at him in amazement and then threw her arms around him.
“Truly, Samuel, when I was married to Abraham, I didn’t think there could be a better husband in the world than him. But in this past year as my husband, and in the two years before that as the friend who supported me and my children when we were at our lowest ebb, you have risen in my eyes to be a dear friend and a true love. While nobody can replace Abraham, you have become my husband and father to my children, and now that we have our own son, Abraham, we are a family.”
In the first several months of building, Sarah had visited the synagogue many times a week, both as a woman standing on the periphery, watching the men working on the stones and the woodwork, and as a worker, assisting the men in carrying panniers of dirt and stones to be thrown into the bottom of the valley. But as the frame of the building was completed and the men cut and shaved wood and began to carve sacred images into the stones, Sarah visited less and less. Samuel thought it was because she was bored, but her reality was very different from his. As the building became more and more complete, it became less Abraham’s memorial, and more and more Samuel’s donation to the village. She felt guilty for thinking these thoughts, as though the sacred memory of her blessed doctor husband had somehow become lost in the act of building his memorial: the flesh and blood of her first husband was replaced by the physical beauty of the building, the carvings and the ornaments. In ten years or a thousand years, who would remember Abraham the Healer when they were praying to Adonai Elohim? All they would see was a beauteous building, its purpose forgotten, its value vested in its silver and gold, not in the man whose memory it served.
She had said this to Samuel over breakfast on the day he inspected the synagogue to ensure that all was right for the visit of Rabbi Gamliel. Samuel listened attentively and said gently to his wife, “Dearest love, Abraham will live on in your heart and in the hearts of those children who you and he shared. And our love will live on through our own child, our own Abraham, whose blood is yours and mine, and who I’m sure will grow up to be a healer like your first husband.”
She smiled and said, “But from the way he grasps my breast when I feed him, I think he will be more merchant than doctor, for no matter how much he drinks, he never seems to be satisfied.”
Samuel smiled as he thought back to their conversation. He sat on a bench in the middle of the synagogue feeling the coolness that the stone building afforded. He looked around and saw in delight the niches where ancient columns from the Jerusalem temple had been saved and now stood. He saw the two stone plaques that Abraham had retrieved from the temple after the Romans had thrown the huge building blocks into the nearby streets, pulling it down and leaving one of the world’s greatest buildings in rubble.
He knew that his modest building could never begin to equate to the palatial temple that King Herod had constructed or the magnificent edifice that King Solomon had created a thousand years before; but his building was a temple nonetheless, and he loved every stone, every ornament, every niche.
Sitting alone in the middle of his synagogue made Samuel think about who he was and how he had come here. One year he was a wealthy merchant, friend of the imperial commanders, confidant of the Zealots, treading a dangerous path between the two. A year later he was doing everything in his power to earn a living from trading olive oil in a tiny village nobody in Jerusalem, even ruined Jerusalem, had heard of; and now he was making the village prosperous, he had a wife and a son, and he was sitting in the middle of the synagogue that he had founded.
How had he come to this? He knew that he was surrounded by all of the people, now dead, whose lives had gone to create him and his life. He thought of his father and his grandfather and all the unknown and unknowable generations back to the time of Solomon and David and Saul and Abraham. Had Father Abraham passed this way as he walked from his home of Ur in Mesopotamia toward Jerusalem with his son Isaac, instructed by Adonai Elohim to sacrifice the boy, only to be held back when the Angel of God told him not to slaughter the boy but instead to slaughter a ram? Had Abraham, or Isaac, or Jacob or Moses or Aaron, known of Peki’in? Did they know of the wondrous olives that grew in the valleys and on the sides of the hills? Did they know how sweet the water was that bubbled up in the center of the village? Did they know how pure the air was, or how sweet the view was to the north of the mountains, sometimes capped in snow in a harsh winter?
He sat there thinking how wonderful the next day would be, how glorious for himself and Sarah, when Rabbi Gamliel arrived with his students and assistants, and the whole town gathered in the center to see him, to be blessed by him, and to listen to him say his blessings when he officiated at the first ceremony in the Peki’in synagogue.
And as he remained seated, Samuel smiled to himself. Only through the joining of himself, a merchant, with Sarah, the wife of the healer, had all this glory come about. Indeed, the Lord God did work in mysterious ways.
His thoughts were interrupted when the doors of the synagogue slowly creaked open . . .
* * *
November 8, 2007
BILAL LOOKED AT THE DOORS of the synagogue and wondered whether he should wait in the courtyard or open the doors and wait inside.
While he was thinking, a dusty old Toyota pickup rolled down the central narrow street of the village. Inside were two men, one young and fresh-faced, the other much older, wearing the clothes of a Muslim priest; Hassan and the imam rode in silence amid the noise of the engine.
Bilal heard the car draw near and stop. In the early morning the village was eerily quiet. The only noises were from farm animals in nearby fields and the barking of a distant dog.
The moment Bilal heard the car, he decided that he should meet them inside the synagogue. It would make his imam uncomfortable, but that was good. The young man stood from where he’d been crouching in the corner of the courtyard since escaping from the house and walked quickly toward the synagogue’s closed doors. He pushed them open and walked inside. He’d never been inside a Jewish religious building before, and it wasn’t what he expected. It was drab, old, with white plaster on the walls, and columns that looked as if they had come from ancient Rome, and above the door was an old, brown, faded handwritten part of some ancient scroll.
Heart pounding, he found a seat and waited for the arrival of Hassan and the imam. He closed his eyes and tried not to think about the conversation last night with Dr. Yael. She’d told him so much and had undermined everything that he had ever known about himself. Yet, she’d also opened a door to hope, to a golden future. He felt like a pauper who’d suddenly seen the inside of a treasure house and been told that he could go in and take as much as he wanted.
He opened his eyes again and looked at the Jewish markings on the walls, at the ark at the front of the synagogue with its Hebrew writing on top, and at the prayer books. Was he really part of this? He’d grown up to believe that this was all evil, but . . .
Bilal’s thoughts were interrupted by a blinding light in the synagogue doorway. He looked over and saw the dark outlines of two men. One of them entered. The other st
ayed.
He heard his imam’s voice. “Bilal, my son, come outside. Come here into the light.”
“No, Imam, it’s better to meet here. Inside. Where we can’t be seen.”
He saw Hassan turn and hold out his hand for the imam, as though helping a crippled man to walk. Slowly, reluctantly, he saw the imam walk inside the doorway. They lingered at the entrance for a moment, looking into the small building, to adjust their eyes from the brilliance outside.
Bilal stood and bowed slightly as the imam walked over to him. As he neared, the imam looked around at the Jewish symbols adorning the walls, the star of the shield of David, the menorah, and the Ark of the Covenant at the front facing in the direction of Jerusalem.
The imam then turned his attention to Bilal. “My son,” he said as he walked toward the young man. He put his arms on the boy’s shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks. “It is so good you are alive. Allah the merciful has given you a great blessing.”
Bilal said nothing as the imam stood face-to-face with him, still holding his shoulders. Not so long ago such an embrace would have overwhelmed him; it was all he’d ever hoped for. But now there was no similar feeling, no sense of confidence or pride.
The imam continued: “We should not be meeting here, my son, not in this unholy place. But because Allah has willed these Jews to free you, I will stand shoulder to shoulder with you in these times of your adversity. You were right to contact us. And now you can be safe. Now you can come home.”
Home . . . Bilal pondered the word and what it might mean now.
“We should leave here. We might be seen,” Hassan said, breaking the moment, his eyes darting nervously and refusing to look at Bilal.