by Alan Gold
Abram sat with his friends, the rabbis, and refused their offer of food. “My mother prepared this for you, and I can eat freely when I go home this afternoon,” he said.
The rabbis nodded and continued eating the bread, saying separate blessings over each different part of the meal.
“Rabbi,” said Abram.
“Yes?” they both said at once, the son smiling and nodding in deference to the father.
“Yes, Abram, what is it?” asked Rabbi Shimon as he stuffed another piece of sheep’s cheese into his mouth.
“There’s talk of another uprising against the Romans. Another Zealot uprising. If there is one, should I join in?”
Rabbi Shimon reeled in horror. “God forbid, my child. Don’t talk that way. Don’t think that way. The last time there was an uprising against the Romans, they crucified Zealots by the thousands, called our land Judea, and even then took away our name, Israel, the name that our forefather was given when he changed his name from Jacob. It means triumphant with God, but God’s home has now been destroyed. And to further humiliate us, the devils now call our beloved nation Philistia, mocking us by calling us after King David’s mortal enemies, the Philistines. And Jerusalem, our precious Jerusalem, was destroyed. And look at it now. A foul Roman city they call Aelia Capitolina with pigs roaming the street and with temples and idols where their gods Jupiter and Mars and Venus are worshipped.
“No, Abram, God’s eyes are closed when He looks at the Israel of King David and the prophets. He smiles on our brothers, who have been exiled to distant lands, but He doesn’t smile on us, and if we do anything to further anger the Romans, they’ll bring legion after legion to our hills and valleys and then there will be nobody left. We’ll be crucified or exiled. And only God Almighty knows which is the worse fate for the Jews.”
Abram shook his head. He was only fourteen years of age, a man by Jewish custom and tradition, but he was still loath to argue with such a renowned figure as Rabbi Shimon. “But, Rabbi, when the emperor Hadrian visited Jerusalem a few years ago, he promised to rebuild the temple. Isn’t that good?”
Rabbi Eleazar interrupted. “He will rebuild the temple, but he’s announced that the new building will be dedicated to their god Jupiter. And don’t forget Hadrian’s ban on circumcision, the act of commitment of Jews to our Lord God. No, Abram, we are a defeated people, and you must not—”
“But what about Simon bar Kokhba? Even Rabbi Akiva has called him a messiah. He will rise up and defeat the Romans and save us all. Won’t he?” the boy said plaintively.
The two rabbis looked at Abram’s eager face, a young Jewish boy hoping for an end to the misery of the Romans, a boy just wanting to be free of the chains that bound him into servitude.
Rabbi Shimon sighed, smiled at the lad, and nodded. “Perhaps Bar Kokhba will gather our people together and fight the Romans. And please God Almighty that if he does rise up, that he wins, because if he loses, then the Romans will be merciless. They’ll exile every Jew and the land will be empty and desolate of people, our fields sowed with salt, our woods burned. Then where will we go?”
Abram looked at Rabbi Shimon, his face creased with a frown.
“But these things probably won’t happen, my dear. God will protect us. Those who were sent into exile will return. It may take a hundred years, a thousand years, maybe more, but they will return. Meanwhile, those of us who remain in Israel will keep the flame of Judaism alive, just like the Maccabees kept their flame alive in the time of the Greeks. Who knows what plans the Almighty has in store for us?”
Now the father and son looked at each other. Abram wondered what they were thinking.
“Abram, my child. As you know, my son and I are unable to leave this cave. And it is very likely that most of the Jews who live in Israel will be expelled should there be another onslaught by the Romans. Many will tell you that it is not going to happen, but God has spoken to us and has told us to prepare the Jewish people for a long and sorry separation from our land.”
Abram began to argue, but the elderly rabbi held up his hand. He reached into his robes and took out a piece of stone. It was beautiful, made perhaps of alabaster or white onyx. Looking at it closely, it had very odd Hebrew writing on it, writing such as Abram hadn’t seen before.
“My child, this tablet was put inside a tunnel that runs from the floor of the Kidron Valley to the top of the mountain, where the Romans now live. The top of this tunnel comes out at the very foot of the temple. It was placed there in the time of King Solomon and was removed by those Jews who were exiled to Babylon in the time of King Nebuchadnezzar. They returned it and replaced it, Abram, but when we were forced to leave Jerusalem, my son, Rabbi Eleazar, though but a child, risked his life to retrieve it. We didn’t know then what would happen to us Jews, but it now looks as though there will be no Jews living here when the Romans are done with us.”
The old rabbi didn’t know how to make the request he had in mind, and he looked at his son, tears filling his eyes. But suddenly Abram said, “Why don’t I go to Jerusalem and put it back? Then, if all the Jews leave Israel, at least the Lord God Adonai Elohim will know that we used to be here.”
The boy’s eager and innocent face, completely unaware of the dangers that faced him on the incredible journey he was offering to undertake, made the old rabbi cry. He hugged the boy and kissed his head.
“And,” said Abram excitedly, “when I get to Jerusalem, I’ll hide the tablet in a crack in the wall and cover it with mud so that no Roman will find it. Of course, Adonai will know where it is, because He sees everything.”
Rabbi Eleazar said softly, “Let us pray, Abram, for God’s love and mercy to save our people, Israel. Let us pray that we are not exiled as we were in the time of the Babylonians. Let us pray for your safe return from this journey.”
They walked to the precipitous edge, surveyed the village of Peki’in far below them, and prayed together. In the center of the village was the square, populated by many people walking about on a Sabbath afternoon, sitting on stools shaded by cloths from the midday sun, and enjoying the weekly luxury of not working. In the middle of the village square, a spring, which slaked the thirst of the rabbis in the cave before it descended back into the mountain, ran out and cascaded down the ruts it had cut into the rock over countless millennia. Not far from the square was the roof of the synagogue where the villagers had just been praying, a prayer house built by Abram’s grandfather to the memory of a good doctor, long forgotten.
It was a building of love and peace and harmony, where the Jews gathered every evening and many mornings before work to pray to the Lord God Almighty.
Rabbi Shimon sighed as he looked down at the amity and accord of the village. Perhaps this is what God wanted for His people Israel. Jerusalem had been nothing but a thousand-year dream, one that would be inhabited by the Romans for another thousand years. And when their empire came to an end and died, as had the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek empires, Jerusalem would be inhabited by another invader. Or maybe the Jews who had been exiled would return and rebuild the temple. Who knew?
But in the meantime the Jews of Peki’in, and those Jews adjusting to their new lives in distant lands, would carry the Temple of Jerusalem in their hearts. And a part of the Temple of Jerusalem would be in every synagogue where they gathered: to pray, to do, to be.
* * *
November 17, 2007
YANIV FELT HIDEOUSLY uncomfortable in the synagogue. He didn’t want to return to Peki’in, to relive the horror, to remember the smell of bullets and hatred and death. But Yael had insisted. She had to reclaim her memory of that terrible day, and no matter how much Yaniv told her of what had happened, no matter that he related the incidents minute by minute, it didn’t satisfy her. She had to return to recall, to re-create, to reexperience, to fix the day in her mind: the time between arriving in Peki’in and waking up in the hospital to the sound of beeping monitors and the expectant faces of nurses and doctors.
Th
ey walked into the synagogue and Yael’s gaze was immediately drawn to the blood on the floor. After the police and forensic experts had departed the place and the synagogue was no longer a crime scene, attempts by caretakers and cleaners to remove the stains had been valiant but ultimately unsuccessful. Where once bright red blood had pumped from the still-beating hearts of three men mortally wounded, now the luminous sheen had become a dark brown ominous stain. It was as though the lives of three vital men had oozed through the floorboards and drained into the ground, invisible, veiled, and eternal.
She looked at the stains and wondered whether the good or the evil had leached out of their bodies into the ground. Troubled, Yael reached for Yaniv’s hand and their fingers intertwined not in affection but for protection.
“Bilal was there.” He nodded toward a stain on the floor where once a congregant’s bench had sat. “Over there”—he nodded to a spot nearby—“was where Hassan fell. And there”—he nodded again, this time toward the front of the synagogue—“was where the imam’s body ended up. For some reason, when he fell, he seemed to fall furthest from you.”
She couldn’t take her eyes off the stains, knowing that once they were parts of human beings. She felt absolutely no emotion. She was a doctor and very used to blood, and in the years since she’d become a surgeon, she’d trained herself not to feel revulsion, empathy, or compassion. She would just get on with her job of saving lives. But this was different. This was a wooden floor, blemished and inanimate, and despite what her intellect told her, she couldn’t feel any association with pain or grief or loss.
Yet, she couldn’t take her eyes off the stain on the wooden floor where Bilal’s blood had been spilled. His blood; her blood. They’d come from the same bloodline. Perhaps their lines had been joined when the Muslims were exiled from Circassia in the middle of the nineteenth century; perhaps when the Jews were expelled from Israel by the Romans in the first century. It was a history she’d never be able to uncover. But in the end, what did it matter? What difference did it make that she was a Jew living in Israel and Bilal had been an Arab living in the same country but wanted to call it Palestine. What did it matter? They were all human beings. And trace everybody’s ancestry back a couple of million years and they all had the same mother, a four-foot-nothing apelike creature living in the Great Rift Valley of Africa. What did it all matter in the end?
She turned to Yaniv and said softly, “Let’s go.”
Half an hour later, they were standing on the ledge outside the cave, high above the village of Peki’in, where legend had it that a famous rabbi and his son had hidden for fourteen years from the Roman invaders. In that time they were supposed to have eaten from the fruit of the massive carob tree that had spread over the entire hillside, and drunk water from a spring inside the cave; but a landslide sometime in history had closed off the cave and all that remained was the entrance.
Yael and Yaniv sat on a bench that the local authorities had placed nearby for the thousands of religious tourists who came to say prayers at Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s cave.
“Well?” said Yaniv. He sounded diffident, almost reluctant to ask.
She shook her head. “Nothing. There’s no memory. I just can’t picture a thing. I remember the synagogue because I’ve been there before, but I have no memory at all of Bilal and Hassan and the imam being there. It’s as if my mind is a slate and somebody has rubbed out the words.”
Yaniv nodded and, deep in thought, continued to look over the town. The terra-cotta roofs, the bright café awnings, the cars negotiating the narrow lanes—it was like a picture postcard. Yet, just weeks ago, half a mile away, a murderer called Eliahu Spitzer, a willing servant of a crazed ultra-religious Jewish sect called Neturei Karta, had killed three people and almost succeeded in killing Yael and him. And, of course, it had all been hushed up by the government, who’d told him that if he had hard, concrete evidence to show them of Neturei Karta’s involvement in the murders or the plots to bring down the government, then show them; if not, keep schtum and don’t cause trouble between the secular and the religious communities. And in return for them not making waves, no charges would be brought against either Yael or him for abducting Bilal from lawful custody.
So Eliahu’s suicide had been put down to grief. The murders of the imam, Bilal, and Hassan, for want of evidence, had been earmarked as the work of a new and violent Islamic terrorist group. And the wounding of Yael had been an accident of proximity: wrong place at the wrong time. A senior executive of Shin Bet had visited the mosque in Bayt al Gizah and spoken to the community leaders, telling them that the imam’s coterie of young terrorists would be disbanded immediately or certain young people would be arrested. It was all so neat.
Yaniv felt Yael’s closeness, her warmth, and thanked God that she was alive and well and that her wound would heal and leave her with only a small scar on her chest. He reached over and kissed her on the neck, then the cheek. With a shock, he realized that he’d never kissed her before. Not properly. She had beautiful skin.
But she didn’t seem to notice. She was miles away in thought. He heard her exhale long and hard, as if she were venting her body of the last evil breath, the last evil thought, before returning to her peaceful world of trauma surgery, where she was in charge and nobody except for the fortunes of nature was ordering her about.
As though she were talking to herself, she asked softly, “One thing I still don’t understand. How did Spitzer know that we’d be in the synagogue? Why did he come up from Jerusalem? Who told him?”
Yaniv thought hard how to respond. Just as softly as Yael had asked, he replied, “Perhaps the imam, and Spitzer used it as an opportunity to take him out. Perhaps it was Hassan playing a double game. Or perhaps he followed one of us using satellite tracking and blew away the only people who could connect him to the attempt to destroy the temple and expose him as a member of Neturei Karta.”
He instantly regretted saying it. Her mind was dazed, and he knew he shouldn’t be specific. He held his breath, hoping that his answer would be the end of her questions.
She rested her head on his shoulder. He put his arm protectively around her waist. It was so peaceful up here. Below her in the valley was laid out a history of people wrought in the landscape, in the streams and rivers, in caves and villages. A history of rulers and religion, of power and corruption. Of love and loss and hope.
People had survived here when war, disaster, and persecution were bent on destroying them. People had been trapped here when their neighbors refused to harbor them. People had fled here when they had nowhere else to go.
And yet, despite all the blood that had stained the soil in the valley below her, to Yael it seemed so very peaceful.
“This is the only country in the world that has more trees at the end of the year than it does at the beginning,” Yael said softly, almost to herself. Yaniv’s only response was to smile and draw her closer.
Looking down at the peaceful village of Peki’in, she thought for a moment how pleasant it would be to live in a tiny community and do menial work close to nature and to whatever passed in her mind for a deity.
Just weeks ago evil had visited that village, pierced the sanctity of its synagogue with bullet holes, and spilled blood in the place where men, women, and children worshipped an invisible deity. An imam corrupting a boy to strap a bomb to his body; a rabbi manipulating the pain of a soldier to make him a weapon.
To some, such acts would encourage and inspire; to others they would create outrage, fear, and distrust. As for Yael, she might never remember how Bilal shielded her from the bullets, never remember the sacrifice she would not be able to repay. But she remembered Bilal, his face and the bloodline connection she was yet to understand. Rather than despair, she felt a strange kind of calm. That bloodline was a part of the country in which she stood.
When she was a child, Yael’s family had taken a vacation to America. They had traveled through the great national parks and in South Dakota she
had visited the huge carved mountain memorial of the Native American chief Crazy Horse. His immortal words had stayed with her all these years: “My lands are where my dead lie buried.” Yet, it was only now, as she gazed out over the valley, that she understood what they meant. The country wasn’t hers; she didn’t own it. She belonged to it. The land owned her and all who lived here—it always had and always would. And it would never let her go.
She turned to Yaniv and said quietly, “I wonder when . . . when in our family history Bilal and I became joined?”
He didn’t answer. It would always remain one of the hidden secrets of human history. Just like the seal that Bilal had discovered when he accidentally blew the detonator in the tunnel and brought a small part of the roof down. Her late grandfather Shalman had been thrilled by the discovery, but for Yael and for Yaniv it was one of the mysteries of a life that other people had once lived. Unknowable, undiscoverable, and eternal. And now, regardless of the fate of the people who had made it and then discovered it millennia later, the seal would sit for all time on a museum shelf, behind glass, looked at by countless generations of people. And in the end, what did it all matter?
She nuzzled further into his neck, feeling warm and secure. As the sun began to set over the distant Mediterranean, they stood and slowly walked back to their car.
And then they drove back to Jerusalem.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the time of Austen, Fielding, and Dickens, authors invariably worked alone, isolated until the sunlight of publication. Today this is no longer the case. Authors work with a team of unseen but hugely talented people to turn their ideas into the reality of a book.
Without Harold Finger and his eagle-eyed wife, Rebecca, there would have been no Heritage Trilogy. Their support, contacts, and advice in every facet of the work’s creation has brought it to life. It was Harold who instigated this project, and to him go special thanks. And to my coauthor, Mike Jones, whose innate understanding of plotting, structure, and characters is extraordinary, my admiration and gratitude.