by Dan Sofer
“Poor, Dave,” said the blond goddess beside Ben at the dining room table.
Yvette, in her mild French accent, referred to Dave’s account of the previous night. In her presence, Dave felt as though he had wandered onto a movie set and found himself face-to-face with the dazzling female lead. Often, he forgot to close his mouth.
Ben’s marriage to Yvette remained one of the unsolved mysteries of the modern era, on par with the Pyramids of Giza, Stonehenge, and Einstein’s hair.
Ben belched softly. “Why don’t you call this, what’s her name?”
“Mandy.” He spooned more cholent onto his plate. Yvette’s version of the traditional beef stew hit the spot. Cholent solved two pressing problems: to feed many mouths with little meat, and to provide a hot meal without lighting a fire, a forbidden act on the Sabbath day. In this sense, the slow-cooked goulash joined the ranks of Gefilte fish, which obviated the need to pick out unwanted fish bones, yet another prohibition.
Yvette brushed strands of perfect hair from the face that had launched three perfumes and a dozen lines of designer clothing. “Call her. If it’s meant to be, you’ll come together.”
Dave snorted beef stew out his nose and fumbled for a napkin.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m not sure I believe all that beshert business.”
Yvette looked at him in shock.
Dave waved his fork conversationally. “It’s a dangerous idea. How do you know if you’ve found The One? What if your marriage has problems? Did you make a mistake? Is your True Love still waiting?”
“That’s so sad,” Yvette said.
“It’s not rational.” Dave turned to his friend. “Tell her, Ben.”
Ben frowned and stared at his plate. “Many religious concepts are not strictly rational,” he said, in his lecture-hall tone.
Dave could not believe his ears. Ben’s perfidy whet his appetite for battle.
“All right,” he said. “If everyone has one soul mate, how can anyone remarry? Are soul mates exchangeable? And, back in the day when it was legal, how could one man marry two or more women? Were they all his soul mates?”
“Interestingly enough,” Ben said, “the Dead Sea scrolls forbid bigamy outright and partly for this reason. After all, the animals entered Noah’s ark two by two. They even interpret the verse against marrying two sisters as referring to any two…”
Ben noticed the blank stares and cut short his academic discourse. “Professor Barkley’s class at Hebrew U,” he added by way of apology.
“Don’t give up, Dave,” Yvette said. “You’ll know when the right girl comes along. Be open-minded.” She leaned on Ben and caressed his ear. “You never know when love will arrive.”
Dave watched the happy couple like a hungry kid outside a candy store window. Married people belonged to an elite club that rejected him. They lived on a verdant planet, light years from his barren, solitary moon. They breathed different air. They were a different species. After the dinner fiasco at Nat’s, the distance between worlds seemed unbridgeable.
“Remember how we met, Beni?”
Ben helped himself to more cabbage salad. “We don’t want to bore Dave with all that, love.”
“You never did tell me exactly how you met.”
Dave remembered Ben’s wedding. Yvette’s family, a pride of tall, tanned Belgians, wore designer suits and shell-shocked expressions. Of all the eligible, successful men in the world, and after a fast-track courtship, how had their precious Yvette decided to spend her life with this short, brutish academic?
Yvette sipped her chardonnay and sighed. “I had flown in for a two-day shoot.” Her eyes sparkled at the memory. “Middle Eastern theme. Beni guided the tour the agency had arranged.”
Ben, a hunted expression fleeting across his face, pulled a large volume of Gemara—the Talmud’s gloss on Jewish law written in the style of a lively debate—from a shelf and hurriedly turned the pages.
“I didn’t notice him at first, poor thing,” Yvette continued, “but then he swept me off my feet. I just knew he was The One.”
“Here it is,” said Ben. “Here’s your source.”
He translated as he read.
“A man marries the woman he deserves… Skipping a few lines… And it’s as difficult as splitting the sea… Some verses… Here we go. The Gemara quotes an apparent contradiction. Forty days before the fetus is formed, a Heavenly voice decrees: the daughter of So-and-So will marry So-and-So. There,” Ben concluded triumphantly. “It’s pre-determined. Beshert.”
Yvette asked, “What was the contradiction?”
“Well, if a man marries the girl he deserves, then it depends on his deeds. It can’t be pre-determined because of Free Choice.”
“And the answer?”
Ben read on: “The one refers to the First Pairing, the other to the Second Pairing.”
“Hold on,” Dave said. “So your first marriage is made in Heaven but a second marriage isn’t?”
“And as difficult as splitting the sea,” Ben said. “Major headache for God. So do us a favor, don’t get divorced.”
Dave wouldn’t let Ben off that lightly. “But if the first marriage was made in Heaven, why didn’t it work out?”
“Death? There’s another interpretation, though.” He flipped to the back of the book and ran his finger along a column of fine print.
“Ya’avetz,” Ben said. “Rabbi Ya’akov Emden. Eighteenth-century Talmudist. No intellectual slouch. According to him, the two marriages are not necessarily chronological. Souls arrive in this world in pairs, male and female. The First Pairing mentioned by the Gemara refers to the reunion of twin souls. Made in Heaven, as you put it. But a man’s actions might render him unworthy of his true soul mate. He may end up marrying another woman altogether, a Second Pairing, although chronologically his first marriage.”
“That’s terrible,” Yvette said.
“So we can mess it up,” Dave said. He had won the argument. Vindication left a bitter aftertaste.
Dave had met his soul mate. Two years ago, he had dated her. Hers was the name his mother had searched for, the sacred mantra he hesitated to utter even in his mind.
Shira Cohen. There. He had thought it. Shira Cohen. Shira Cohen. Shira Cohen. Only now she went by a different name. Because he had blown his only chance at true happiness out of the water. His First Pairing sunk, Dave would have to settle for second best, and even that after an arduous splitting of the Red Sea.
Unless. Unless he was mistaken.
“How do you know if you’ve found your twin soul?”
“According to Rabbi Emden”—Ben snapped the book shut—”you don’t. Only God, the Maker of Souls, knows.”
They sang zemirot, Dave’s tenor harmonizing over Ben’s baritone. They devoured Yvette’s homemade Halva ice cream and chocolate brownies. After the Grace After Meals, Yvette excused herself to her ladies’ afternoon shiur a few blocks away, and the two men retired to the living room for a postprandial whisky.
Dave sank onto a leather couch, his belly heavy with cholent. Glenmorangie washed over his tongue and slipped down his throat. The vapors numbed his brain pleasantly.
The salon walls, stone masses three feet thick, rounded toward a central ceiling shaft and recalled the old cistern the Greens had renovated and now called home. Sections of native rock peeked through smooth plaster on one side. On the other, the wall receded, forming a niche where a spotlight illuminated a slender earthenware jar of a familiar Middle Eastern style. The jar had a matching cap and its rounded bottom sat on a wire stand. Dave marveled at Yvette’s good taste. Sitting there felt like lying in the lap of history.
Ben flopped beside him and peered into his whisky glass.
“Something was stolen from the City of David.”
He processed Ben’s words. “During the break-in? The papers didn’t say anything about that.”
“They didn’t know because Erez didn’t tell them. Bad publicity, he says. Piss off the donors.”
>
“What was taken?”
“A clay jar. Two thousand years old.”
“Valuable?”
Ben shot him an injured look. “It’s history, Dave. It’s priceless. Although,” he admitted, “not in a strictly monetary sense. Few hundred dollars on the black market.”
Robbery made more sense than vandalism. But why attack Ben for a few hundred dollars?
“Do you think Erez is involved?”
Ben weighed his words. “Unlikely. Erez could study it whenever he wanted. And he could make it disappear with little noise. Take it down for cleaning or restoration and keep it on his mantelpiece for a year or two.”
Dave’s quality assurance intuition kicked in, a honed sixth sense that sniffed out the most unimaginable and unlikely of computer glitches. “Unless Erez wanted to divert suspicion.”
Dave would not put black market dabbling past Erez but not for a paltry sum.
“You sure there’s nothing special about the jar?”
Ben smiled. “Ever hear of the Copper Scroll?”
Dave hazarded a guess. “One of the Dead Sea Scrolls?”
He had seen the long scrolls on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The ancient texts began surfacing in 1947 in the caves of Qumran thanks to the serendipity of a Bedouin shepherd.
“Yes and no. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain biblical texts and apocalyptic ramblings. They were written on parchment and papyrus scrolls, remarkably well preserved thanks to earthenware storage jars.
“One scroll stands apart. Firstly, it consists of two rolled-up copper plates found on a stone ledge and not in jars. The script is sloppy and riddled with errors. The Hebrew is markedly different to anything known, the spelling unorthodox. More importantly, instead of holy texts, the scroll lists deposits of gold and silver along with their locations. In today’s currency, the hoard totals over a billion dollars.”
“Buried treasure?” Dave smirked. “This sounds like Indiana Jones.”
Ben’s cheeks turned scarlet. “The treasure is a fiction, Dave. Most authorities identify the Judean Desert Cult that wrote the scrolls with the Essenes, ascetic monks more interested in ritual purity and apocalyptic visions than pots of gold. They fled to the desert to protest the so-called corruption of the Sadducee Temple management.”
Dave had learned about the Sadducees in a high school Jewish History class. Sadducees were the bad guys, the ritualistic Temple-crazy literalists. After the Romans burned the Second Temple of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., the Sadducees all but evaporated and gave way to the Pharisees, the guardians of rabbinic tradition and the forerunners of modern Judaism.
“Even if the treasure exists,” Ben continued, “it’s practically impossible to find. The locations are too specific, tied to landmarks that are long gone. Some people, however, believe in the Copper Scroll. Enough to break into the COD.”
Dave sipped his whisky but still failed to connect the dots. “You said the Copper Scroll was found on a ledge and not in a jar. Why would treasure hunters steal a scroll jar?”
Ben lifted his bulk from the couch. “This was no ordinary scroll jar.”
He walked over to the recess in the wall and raised the clay urn from its wire throne. Cradling the vessel like a newborn, he rejoined Dave on the couch.
Dave realized why the urn had looked familiar. He had seen similar jars at the Israel Museum.
“Wait a minute. Do you mean to tell me that you stole the scroll jar?”
“Very funny, Dave. Although this is exactly like the one stolen from the COD.”
“Shouldn’t it be in a museum?”
Ben hesitated. “That’s not the question you want to ask.”
“It’s not?”
“What you really want to ask,” Ben said, “is about this.” He pointed to three angular characters etched into the urn’s grainy surface. Three vertical lines: one bisected a circle; the second formed a triangle; the last met a wavy line at the top. A lollipop, a flag, and a streamer.
“Guess what language that is.”
“Cuneiform?”
Ben shook his head at his ignorance. “It’s Hebrew.”
“Hebrew?” Dave had spent ten years in Hebrew Day School. Thrice daily, he read Hebrew prayers from his Hebrew prayer book. He lived in a country that listed Hebrew as one of its three official languages. He recognized Hebrew when he saw it and the twenty-two blocky characters shared nothing with the three glyphs on the side of the urn.
“Yes,” Ben said. “Hebrew. And cuneiform is a script, a set of characters, not a language. What we have here is Ktav Ivri, the early Hebrew script. Today’s Hebrew letters, Ktav Ashuri or Assyrian script, replaced Ktav Ivri two and a half thousand years ago. But the language of both is Hebrew.”
Ben pointed out each letter from right to left. “Tsadi. Dalet. Qof.”
Dave had read the symbols in the wrong direction. He scrawled the Hebrew letters on the whiteboard of his mind and scrabbled for the little dots and lines, the vowel points necessary to vocalize the consonants. He tackled this feat whenever he read a Hebrew newspaper.
“Zedek,” he said. “Justice.”
“That’s one reading,” said Ben. “And one translation. Zedek also means Jupiter, the planet or the Roman god. Another reading is Zeduki, or Sadducee. The more interesting one, however, is Zadok.”
“A name?”
“Exactly. A number of biblical characters went by the name Zadok, the earliest being King David’s High Priest. But Zadok also appears in the Dead Sea Scrolls as the leader of the Judean Desert Cult, usually referred to as Moreh Zedek, or the Teacher of Righteousness.”
“I still don’t see the connection to the Copper Scroll.”
Ben placed the jar on his lap. “These jars have something in common besides the letters. None of them contained scrolls. And all of them originated in a single cave: Cave Three.”
“Let me guess. The same cave as the Copper Scroll.”
“Correct.”
Not a strong link, in Dave’s opinion. He considered the jar’s cratered surface. The clay urn would not have drawn a second glance in a curio store and yet, according to Ben, it sat in the eye of a tornado.
“Assuming you’re right,” he said. “Assuming someone believes the urn is tied to the Copper Scroll. How would an empty jar help them find the treasure?”
Ben smiled like the Cheshire cat.
“I don’t know.” Like many hopeless academics, Ben preferred one good question to a dozen simple answers.
“But you have a theory?”
Ben stroked his imaginary beard. “Not yet.”
Ben rose and restored the urn, empty of scrolls but overflowing with secrets, to its place of honor.
God knows what crimes men would not commit for a billion dollars.
“You sure you want that lying around the house?”
Ben shrugged. “It’s safer here than at the COD.”
Dave downed the rest of his whisky. “It’s not the jar I’m worried about.”
***
At mid-day in a Jerusalem apartment, a man drew the curtains and turned to the knapsack on the worktable.
At last.
He had dreamed of this moment.
Fingers of sunlight thrust between the curtains and groped at countless motes of dust. The man reached into the bag, unfurled a large gray cloak on the desk, and uncovered the treasure within. He lifted the earthenware jar into the air. His fingers caressed the rough surface and traced the three characters etched into the side.
You have waited long too, my little treasure.
Jay had done well. It had taken a few days for the hubbub to settle but suspicion had not turned his way.
Now nothing can stop me.
With this simple clay vessel, he would change the world forever.
He cleared the desktop and laid the urn on its side. He opened a drawer, placed a hammer on the table, and pulled garden gloves over his hands. He gripped the base of the urn and held it steady.
; Then, the Teacher of Righteousness raised the hammer over his head.
Time to make history.
Chapter 3
Dave opened his eyes. Darkness filled his living room. Streetlights projected yellow Morse code through the window shades and onto the wall.
He had dozed through the Afternoon Service. The Evening Service too.
After lunch, he had stretched out on his couch to read, his mind abuzz with whisky, scroll jars, and the ghost of Shira Cohen.
A copy of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Lonely Man of Faith lay open on his chest.
Mandy Rosenberg.
Mike had pointed her out in Rabbi Levi’s shiur. Nat wanted to set Dave up with her. She was American, around Dave’s age, and probably Frum-From-Recent. How long would she be in Israel? Was she here to stay?
Dave needed more data.
A shuffling sound within the walls, like the patter of little rat feet, grew louder and then faded away. One of the upper neighbors had flushed the toilet.
Enough pottering around.
Dave got to his feet. He recited the Havdalah prayer that marked the conclusion of the Sabbath day over a glass of grape juice, a spice box filled with cloves, and a torch made of four interwoven candles. He clicked the shower boiler button, picked up his cordless phone, and settled on the couch.
Nat answered on the second ring.
“The girl you wanted to introduce me to,” he said after exchanging post-Shabbat pleasantries. “Mandy Rosenberg. How long is she in the country?”
“You can ask her yourself,” Nat said. “She’s right here.”
“Wait—” Dave said, too late.
The phone changed hands.
“Hi there,” said a female voice with a Southern twang.
Dave shot to his feet.
Oh, God. Say something clever. Say something funny. For Heaven’s sake, Dave, say something!
“Hi,” he squeaked.