On the Mountain of the Lord

by Ray Bentley

  What was that about? Jack wondered. The three males got big, jovial hellos, but Bette got—what was it? Respect? Admiration?

  “So, Dr. Garrison,” Lon said, his strong grip on Jack’s shoulder propelling him toward a terraced hillside. “You are with the ECMP, eh? Perhaps you have questions for me about Ariel?”

  “Yes,” Jack said, surprised at the warmth of Mayor Silver’s welcome. The ECMP was widely known to disapprove of Israeli settlements on West Bank land and Ariel was its fourth largest.

  “In 1978,” Silver explained, “I asked the military for West Bank sites that could be developed as defensible positions—as well as population centers. Of the three they offered, I chose this one. Why? I don’t know! Truly crazy! Twelve miles inside the Green Line and only twenty miles from Jordan and on a likely Jordanian invasion route in case of another war. ‘Give it to me,’ I said, ‘and I’ll use it to defend Tel Aviv.’ How could they say no?”

  “Tell him about the hill,” Lev urged.

  “So who’s telling this story? I’m coming to that. So this place, this hill…” Silver waved toward the northwest. “The Arabs called it Jabel Mawet—the Hill of Death.”

  Silver laughed at Jack’s stricken face. “Arab exaggeration. No battles except against too little water and too much rock. We pitched two tents on top. That was the beginning of Ariel. Lion of God, eh? Some lion. That year forty families came. It was a hard winter. Water came by tanker truck. Only generators for electricity for four years. But now. . .”

  Lon Silver paused and with manifest pride remarked, “Now 18,000 people call Ariel home. Ten thousand students—Jews AND Arabs—attend university here.”

  They reached the terraced hill where there was a flatbed wagon bearing a load of grapevines in plastic pots, and a heap of shovels. “So what are we doing here today, Lon?” Lev asked.

  “I needed labor and look what I got,” Lon said, picking up a shovel and extending the handle toward Jack.

  Jack was amused but also impressed. What was the quote from the Prophet Jeremiah? Something about planting vineyards on the hills of Samaria? Was it not only one day earlier he asked that question?

  Placing the blade of the tool on the first marked spot, Jack drove it into the earth. What was that unfamiliar sensation? Jack felt as if he were planting his heart in the soil of God’s word. Jack made quick work of creating the hole for planting the baby vine. Kneeling beside the space, he shucked off the plastic shell, lowered the plant into its new home and patted the soil around it with a wish—a prayer?—it would prosper.

  “So, we dig, we plant,” Lon said. “And maybe we live long enough to taste the wine, eh?”

  On the other side of an equipment shed was a travel trailer; what the Brits call a ‘caravan,’ Jack thought. A wooden porch was added to the front and it was overhung with a canvas awning. A cheerful, gray-haired woman with attentive, sparkling eyes waved to the vine planters from the deck.

  “My wife,” Lon Silver said, waving back. “That caravan is like the one we lived in when we first came to Ariel. She put up with a lot, eh?” He laughed. “She puts up with me! Why? I don’t know!”

  After urging all her guests to a seat on the porch, Dorith Silver offered the choice of wine or pomegranate juice. Lon distributed cigars to the men. He offered one to Bette, but she declined. “Ha! Cuban,” Lon said. He lit up, puffed the tobacco alight, and exhaled a fragrant, bluish cloud.

  “So, Jack Garrison,” Lon said. “How does it feel to be part of fulfilling prophecy?” Without waiting for Jack’s response, Lon continued, “Also from Jeremiah: ‘The watchmen will cry from Mount Ephraim, “Arise and let us go up to Zion to the Lord our God.”’ Do you know what is this ‘Watchmen’? It is the Hebrew word, ‘natzar.’ It is the root word of ‘Notzrim’; what we modern Jews call Christians.”

  “Like ‘Nazarenes?’ ” Jack ventured.

  Waving his cigar in agreement, Lon said, “Exactly! Why? I don’t know. Perhaps our friend Lev can tell us.”

  “It also means, ‘to keep safe,’ or ‘hidden until revealed later,’ ” Lev explained. “The connection makes sense: Jesus was ‘hidden’ in Nazareth until it was time for Him to be revealed.”

  Bette took a sip of chilled juice and asked Lon, “Are you saying Christians are the Watchmen who have finally come to plant vines in Samaria?”

  Jack looked at Bette with renewed appreciation. This was exactly his query.

  Pushing his wire-framed glasses back up on his stubby nose, Lon next ran his free hand over his short-cropped, sandy hair. “Am I a scholar? Am I a rabbi? But Jeremiah wrote his message what, 2,500 years ago? And aren’t a couple Notzrim…” he jabbed his cigar at Amir and Lev, “planting vines on the mountains of Samaria?”

  Jack thought about the odd sensation of connecting to the land and to the prophecies he experienced in the planting. Did he wish Lon Silver also included him in the recognition of the Watchmen? He still could not bring himself to share what he felt. Nobody sensible really believed 2,500-year-old prophecies were being fulfilled today—did they?

  “You don’t think of yourself as religious, do you, Lon?” Amir asked.

  Lon shrugged. “But how can anyone live in such a place, at such a time, and not think about how we got here, eh? I am a fourth-generation Sabra. I was born before the State. I was a little boy during the War of Independence. A miracle, some say. A whole lot of miracles, I say! And 1967? More miracles. And I watched it happen.”

  Laughing, Dorith challenged him. “What did Golda say? ‘Don’t be so humble—You’re not that great.’ ”

  “Golda—as in, Prime Minister Golda Meir?” Jack asked.

  Dorith nodded vigorously. “A big part of all those miracles, Lon is.”

  “Most, not all.” Lon beamed. “My number one fan,” he added, waving at his wife.

  Amir resumed, “Do you know this prophecy from Isaiah? ‘There shall come a rod from the stem of Judah. And a branch shall grow from his roots.’ ”

  “Of course,” Lon acknowledged. “Branch: ‘netzer.’ Like ‘natzar,’ eh? Branches that grow from underground—from the roots—are hidden until they aren’t hidden anymore.”

  Lev added, “And many of us Notzrim—many around the world now—feel the need to better connect with our Jewish roots.”

  “And what better way to reconnect than helping plant vines in Samaria!” Lon declared. “So what say you, Dr. Garrison?”

  “I say—you have given me much to think about,” Jack admitted. Without speaking it aloud, he wondered if he had just seen—no, “participated in,” another proof the prophecies of Scripture were real. Millions of descendants of Abraham, he thought, returning to worship beside their ancient temple. And Christians planting vines on land that wasn’t owned by Jews—or anyone else—for 2,000 years. “Thanks,” he said to Lon and Dorith.

  “You must come again,” Lon said.

  On the return trip from Ariel to Jerusalem Bette allowed Amir to drive. She sat beside him while Jack and Lev discussed the meeting with Lon Silver. “So, what do you think of our friend, Lon?” Lev asked.

  “Is he always that energetic?”

  “Oh, no. This was one of his quiet days. You should see him when he gets wound up. But seriously,” Lev continued after the laughter in the car died down, “His grandfather and father were both mayors before him. His insistence and persistence and powers of persuasion are what brought the city to birth—and the university too.”

  “And that business about planting the vines on the mountains of Samaria being a fulfillment of prophecy—you set me up for that, right?”

  “If you mean, did I know we would be working in the vineyard—honestly, no. It was not a total surprise. Since being semi-retired Lon often works in the orchards or with the vines or on some irrigation project or other. I’ve seen him with three cell phones dangling from his belt, along with a holstered pistol, and still hoeing a furrow, like something straight out of a hundred—or a couple thousand—years ago.
But let me ask you a couple things.”

  “Go ahead,” Jack said, staring out the window at a hilltop synagogue directly opposite a mosque on the other side of the highway.

  “Even if Lon and I do read the same book, meaning Jeremiah, and both of us choose to believe it was prophesied 2,500 years ago that Christians would someday plant grapes in Samaria—even if I planned our visit that way, would that make it less true it’s really happening?”

  Jack thought a moment. “No,” he grudgingly admitted.

  “Then here’s my second question: When you were digging and planting, did you—feel anything?”

  Jack was suddenly alarmed. If he said yes, would it suddenly validate this whole prophecy thing? He hedged. “Like what?” he said. Amir and Bette paused their conversation and were listening.

  Lev elaborated: “I can’t answer for anyone else. All I know is the first time I planted a tree in Israel I instantly and powerfully felt connected to the land. Like I was rooted here myself, you know?”

  Shrugging, Jack said, “Maybe that works for you because you’re Jewish.”

  When Jack did not say more, Lev chose to let the topic drop.

  They were driving through a range of low, brown hills devoid of human habitation or agriculture. “My turn,” Jack said to Lev. “Suppose—just suppose, because I’m not suggesting I really think this—but if I did believe Bible prophecy had some degree of validity, and if I wanted to find some examples to share with a skeptic—what would you pick?”

  Without hesitation Lev said, “That’s easy. Top of the list is the return of Jews to this land.”

  “Gimme a break,” Jack complained. “That is a political hot potato, not a prophetic fulfillment. If the UN hadn’t voted in 1947 to partition Palestine into two states there wouldn’t be an Israel, and we wouldn’t be in this car having this discussion. No offense,” he said to Amir and Bette. “But that is true, isn’t it?”

  Amir contributed, “I see it the other way around. Since God said Israel would be reborn, then the only things left undecided were the how and the when.”

  “You’re not asking a big enough question,” Lev offered. “Here’s the larger context. Has any nation in the whole history of the world ever gone out of existence for 200 years—let alone 2,000—and then been reborn?”

  “Not that I know of,” Jack admitted.

  “Especially a people who have never been in authority in any culture in which they’ve ever lived? Who have always been the ones being persecuted down through the ages? And how?” Lev said rhetorically. “Isaiah chapter sixty-six: ‘Who has ever heard of such things? Who has ever seen things like this? Can a country be born in a day, or a nation be brought forth in a moment? Yet no sooner is Zion in labor than she gives birth to her children.’ ”

  “My father is not religious,” Bette said. “But even he taught me that to call Israel a miracle is about one million times too small an expression.”

  They came to a construction zone where the entire westbound traffic stopped. Amir pulled up behind a large, boxy van, with no way to see how far ahead the disruption extended.

  “And there’s this,” Amir added. “God promised Abraham a multitude of descendants, yes? No one doubts the truth of that accomplishment, but how has He chosen to do it? Not from one other country where a sizable Jewish population preserved their faith and heritage—not from a half dozen nations—not from a single continent—but from tiny pockets all around the globe where Jews were scattered and from where they escaped persecution to come home to Eretz Israel.”

  Bette, who had worked with immigration, added, “Russia and Yemen, Poland and Hungary, out of the Holocaust. . .”

  All in the car were silent for a moment. Jack remembered one of the greatest tragedies of human history was that had legal immigration into British-held Palestine been possible in the 1930s, then millions of lives might have been spared from the Nazis.

  “Iran, Iraq, and Ethiopia,” Bette resumed.

  Lev thumped his chest. “And America!”

  “Okay, okay,” Jack said, raising both hands in a gesture of surrender, but Lev was not entirely finished yet.

  “And don’t think planting vines in Samaria is the only connection,” he stressed. “Listen to this: ‘See, I will bring them from the land of the north and gather them from the ends of the earth.’ Jeremiah 31:8. And this has all happened within the last 100 years or so, and mostly within the last seventy.”

  Jack pondered what he’d heard and seen and experienced himself in the vineyard. To Lev he said, “So you include yourself as a fulfilled prophecy? Then let’s talk about you. You’re a Jew but you’re also a believer in Jesus. How’s that supposed to work and how’s it fit in with what we’re discussing?”

  Something struck the door panel of the car like a hammer blow. Then came the report of a gun. Bette shouted to Amir: “Drive! Pull up beside the lorry! Go!” And to Lev and Jack: “Get down!” She flung herself over the seatback and on top of the two men just as a second round shattered the car window where Jack’s head had been.

  The engine roared as Amir piloted the Toyota onto the shoulder and behind the shelter of the truck.

  “Keep down!” Bette urged.

  “How about you?” Jack asked as Bette struggled to draw both her weapon and a phone. Ignoring him she thumbed a call while scanning out through the shattered pane of glass. “Dispatch!” she shouted. “Shots fired! Westbound Highway Five. Five klicks from the Sha’ar Shomeron interchange. Wait. I’ll check. Is anyone hurt?”

  Lev and Amir replied in the negative. Jack agreed, then added, “You are.” He pointed at a streak of blood sliding downward from a crease on Bette’s forehead.

  “All okay,” Bette reported. She rang off, then said again, “Stay down. Help is on the way.”

  No more shots were fired and in less than five minutes two police helicopters arrived. While one buzzed the hills alongside the highway, the other landed near the road.

  As the quartet received an “All Clear” and uncurled from the Toyota, Jack remarked to Lev, “Ancient Scriptures are one thing—but they don’t address modern realities, do they? Settlements build resentment and resentment causes violence.” He felt angry at himself for having almost bought into a religious deception.

  It was like a council of war gathered in Jack’s hotel suite at the King David. Bette and Lev sat across a round mahogany table from where Jack paced up and down the carpeted floor. “Just look at that,” Jack insisted, pointing at the bandage on Bette’s forehead. “You could’ve been killed!”

  “It’s a scratch. Nothing,” Bette insisted.

  “You could have been killed!” Jack repeated. “Like that policewoman I saw stabbed right in front of me.” He shuddered at the memory. “Right in front of me.”

  “Protecting you is my job,” Bette said.

  “Well, I don’t like it! Besides, okay, your job. So I could’ve been killed, or Lev here, or Amir.” Pausing in his third circuit he faced Bette with his hands on his hips. “Unless you think I was specifically the target. Is that it?”

  “There’s no evidence to suggest that,” Bette admitted. “The Highway Five corridor has been a place of random shootings at vehicles before.”

  “Jack,” Lev said firmly, “We weren’t even in an official car. Do you think you’re being tracked by an assassin? Why?”

  Remembering the creepy evening paranoia back in London, Jack rejected the idea as sounding too melodramatic. “Okay, so not me,” he said. “But nobody should live like that.” Another thought struck him. “Will there be reprisals? Burn down a village or something?”

  “Jack!” Lev retorted sharply. “You don’t mean that!”

  “Well?” Jack demanded of Bette as he started treading over to the door and back again.

  “Since no perp has been caught,” the officer said. “No, there won’t be any reprisals. When we can identify a bomber, yes, we do raid his home and sometimes we destroy it as a warning—a deterrent measure.”<
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  “There, you see?” Jack said.

  “Be reasonable, Jack,” Lev implored. “It almost sounds like you’re blaming us instead of the one who pulled the trigger.”

  “I—no—I—” he ran his hand over his hair, but his eyes were fixed on Bette’s wound. “I’m blaming this whole bloody mess…” he said. “The settlements are an obstacle to peace. That means a rebuilt Temple would be an even bigger problem.”

  “So taking barren land and making it bloom—creating a city in the desert—providing advanced education to young people without regard to their nationality or religion—vines and orchards and jobs—we should tear all that down?” Bette asked quietly.

  “Israel gave up the Sinai, and we have peace with Egypt,” Lev reminded Jack. “And Gaza is Palestinian, right? But it seems no offer for a Palestinian state is ever enough. And anyway, how’d ‘land-for-peace’ turn out for Prime Minister Chamberlain? Gave away Czechoslovakia, and it delayed the Second World War for—I dunno—one year?”

  Jack threw up his hands. “So I give up, go home, and tell the committee there is no answer?”

  “Just don’t give up, Jack,” Lev encouraged. “Travel more with me. Give it another week and then see. I think you owe it to Lon Silver.”

  Jack frowned.

  “Sorry,” Lev said, smiling. “My joke. Maybe you owe it to me—or to Bette here?”

  Jack thought that through. It had been Bette Deekmann’s life on the line. “Another week,” he agreed, grudgingly. “If I’m not convinced there’s some Israeli claim that can’t be set aside, then I’m done here.”

  The daytime temperatures were noticeably warmer as Israel headed into spring. The first wild flowers—pinks and yellows—dotted the hillsides of Galilee. “Welcome to Magdala,” Amir said, beckoning his charges to come closer. “Yes, this village, discovered less than ten years ago, was the home of Mary of Magdala. She is mentioned in the Gospel of Luke, chapter eight, as having been freed by Jesus of seven demons. She was in the group of women who helped support Jesus and His followers. And most famously, she was the first person to meet and speak with the Risen Lord.”