by Steve Alten
For the moment, let us eliminate God from the creation equation. From a purely scientific perspective, we now know that the Big Bang begat the physical universe, that the physical universe birthed galaxies and solar systems and planets—one of which was our own superhot volcanic world. The Earth cooled and developed an atmosphere through asteroid bombardment over millions of years, each space rock containing molecules of life-giving H2O. Gradually the planet cooled and the oceans and atmosphere formed, and then, some three-and-a-half billion years later, life took hold in the sea through a combination of chemical reactions and perhaps a random stroke of lightning. Another billion years of trial and error birthed more complex organisms, evolving into oxygen-producing coral, trilobites, and fish. Amphibians charted the land, becoming reptiles and dinosaurs … and a fragile new class of life form evolved: mammals.
And then, sixty-five million years ago, another seemingly random sequence of cause and effect unfolded with the arrival of a seven-mile-in-diameter asteroid, which struck our planet in the Gulf of Mexico near the future Yucatan Peninsula. The cosmic collision enveloped the Earth’s atmosphere in dust, blotting out the sunlight and warmth. Photosynthesis ceased, the ensuing ice age wiping out the dinosaurs. When the sun returned, the planet had reshuffled its deck, allowing our surviving mouselike mammal ancestors to evolve into primates: a missing link away from primordial man, which eventually became Homo sapiens sapiens—modern man.
While this reverse-engineered scientific method offers us a convenient hook upon which to hang our hat, it does little to help us understand who made the hat or why He needed a hat in the first place. And so man invented religion, and religion gave us a “Big Guy in the Sky,” along with war and hatred and all the other wonderful things our egos demanded as we set out to force others into believing which “Big Guy” was the right Big Guy to believe in. And yes, since religion required organizations and establishments from which to pray, money was required. Not just tithing to help the poor, but endowments and donations to seed seats of great power and political influence, along with inquisitions and crusades. Because there’s nothing more spiritually uplifting than torturing and robbing and massacring your fellow human beings in the name of God and patriotism—those annoying ten commandments be damned.
But again, we have no concept of why our Big Guy created us, or why we’re here, or why our species is so prone to doing everything counter to what formalized religion tells us we’re supposed to do—namely, love one another.
Raised a Christian, I questioned religious dogma, but was more than willing to sprinkle a “supreme being” over my theories of evolution, mostly because my donors felt more comfortable signing their checks to a “God-fearing scientist.” Logically, I saw no reason to exclude a Creator from the evolutionary process—provided, of course, the evidence could be found.
Maria Rosen was a friend and fellow student at Cambridge, majoring in religious studies. The future Mrs. Julius Gabriel was born in London to a British father and Spanish mother, she and her two sisters were raised as Reform Jews. While on summer break, Maria traveled to Israel, to pursue her archaeological interests.
By fate or chance, she met Rabbi Yehuda Tzvi Brandwein.
Brandwein was an Orthodox rabbi living in Tel Aviv. In clear defiance of the ultraconservatives, Brandwein was openly teaching a secret ancient wisdom that, for the last two thousand years, had been rigorously restricted to devout Orthodox Jewish males over the age of forty. Rabbi Brandwein believed the time had come for all people, regardless of their particular faith, to have an opportunity at spiritual fulfillment. At his own peril he began offering this long-hidden knowledge to the masses.
The secret ancient wisdom: kabbalah.
The word kabbalah translates as “to receive,” a reference to receiving fulfillment from the Creator’s light. While some may define kabbalah as “Jewish mysticism,” it is in fact a nondenominational primer of spirituality that predates organized religion. Four thousand years ago, God passed this wisdom down to Abraham, the unintended patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Abraham encoded the knowledge into the Book of Formation, where it was secretly passed down through the ages, its information far too “mystical” for ancient man to comprehend.
Moses was handed the wisdom on Mount Sinai. Fourteen centuries later, about the time the Maya were developing their calendar, a kabbalist by the name of Rabbi Akiva began openly teaching the ancient wisdom to a new generation of Jews in the Holy Land, among them one Rabbi Joshua ben Joseph, more commonly known as Jesus. Akiva was skinned to death by the Romans, Jesus crucified. Another disciple, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, managed to escape into the mountains of Galilee with his son, Rabbi Elazar. The pair spent the next thirteen years living in a cave studying the Torat HaSod, the hidden wisdom encrypted within the Aramaic passages of the Old Testament.
The fruit of Rabbi Shimon’s labor produced the Zohar, the main text of kabbalah.
The Zohar firmly placed God behind evolution, revealing the very secrets of existence, providing answers as to how and why man was created along with the “cause and effect” that actually led to the Big Bang and the creation of the physical universe.
In retrospect, it is no wonder why the wisdom had been kept hidden from the masses for so long, for it contains advanced concepts that deal with everything from atomic structure to the quantum physics of black holes. Over the next twenty centuries the Zohar’s wisdom would be tapped by some of our species’s greatest thinkers, including Galileo, Copernicus, Albert Einstein, and Sir Isaac Newton, whose personal copy of the Zohar remains on display at Cambridge.
Included within the Zohar is a passage that refers to the End of Days. According to the ancient wisdom, when the scales of humanity are finally swayed toward the Light, fulfillment and immortality shall be had by all. But when negativity outweighs the positive forces, then the End of Days shall be upon us. As transcribed in the Zohar, this epoch of human existence shall begin in our present era—the Age of Aquarius on the twenty-third day of Elul in the Hebrew year of 5760. It shall be ushered in by an event, described as “a great tall city, its many towers collapsed by flames, the sound of which shall awaken the entire world.”
The Hebrew date translates to September eleventh in the year 2001 … nineteen days from today.
How this date ties in to the Doomsday Event forecast for December 21, 2012, may be revealed to me in three weeks’ time. In anticipation of things to come, Michael and I have returned to the States, accepting an invitation from my rival and former colleague, Pierre Borgia, to debate the Doomsday prophecy at a Harvard symposium.
What Pierre does not know is that my real purpose in accepting his invitation is to use the symposium to expose the illegal and heinous acts taking place on a remote Air Force base located in the Nevada desert. These acts and the covert operations illegally funded through our tax dollars have but one purpose—to further empower the elite while indenturing the rest of us to servitude. Armed with startling videotaped evidence, I shall once and for all prove to the world that we are not alone in the universe, and that the advances we used forceful means to render from our cosmic cousins were, in fact, a gift intended to benefit all of humanity … while preventing our own self-inflicted demise.
Tomorrow is but an opening shot. In the weeks to come, more than three hundred additional eyewitnesses shall come forth to join a courageous physician hosting a symposium in Washington, D.C., that will forever change the world as we know it.
The odds are long and the enemies of truth legion, with vast resources and influence in the halls of government. Our own vice president feeds this machine as he monopolizes energy policies with the very entities that continue to reap personal fortunes by shunting off our future. I fear for my family, yet I also have a responsibility to my Maker to do what is right. And so I steel myself for the battle ahead, knowing failure is not an option.
As Rabbi Brandwein wrote, “What is a life worth living without enemies?”
—JG
; Note:
Professor Gabriel suffered a fatal heart attack moments after delivering his speech at Harvard on August 24, 2001. All grants supporting archaeological investigations into the Mayan calendar were suspended three weeks later following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
3
When asked: “What did God do before He created the
universe?” Augustine didn’t reply: “He was preparing
Hell for people who asked such questions.” Instead, he
said that time was a property of the universe that God
created, and that time did not exist before the beginning
of the universe.
—STEPHEN HAWKING,
A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME
Earth News & Media
May 2, 2047: The US Geological Survey registered a magnitude 7.9 seaquake at 11:40 p.m. (local time Indonesia). The epicenter was located in the Banda Sea, 140 miles NNW of Saumlaki (Tanimbar Islands, Indonesia). Coastal towns in the Tanimbar Islands, Ambon, Jakarta, and the Northern Territory in Australia were struck by seven–to twelve-foot tsunamis. Government officials had evacuated the areas, keeping casualties to a minimum.
PEKI’IN, ISRAEL
The western Galilee town of Peki’in is one of the most ancient villages in Israel. The population of twelve thousand is dominated by the Druze—Greek Orthodox Arabs who live in peace (usually) with their Christian, Muslim, and Jewish neighbors. Peki’in is old stone houses and olive trees, with grapevines as thick as your waist that wrap around windows and doorways. The town’s synagogue contains carvings that date back to the Second Jerusalem Temple after the Roman destruction.
Peki’in is also the site of an ancient cave used by a great sage to channel energy from the Upper World two thousand years ago.
Orthodox Jews, dressed in their traditional long black suits, matching hats, and white shirts, bob and pray in groups by the barricades. Tourists, dressed in shirtsleeves and sunglasses, mingle along the roadside, having just arrived by tour bus. The groups are wary of each other, though both are here for the same reason—to connect with the light of the soul of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai.
Tonight at midnight marks the beginning of the festival of Lag b’Omer, a holiday occurring thirty-three days after the last night of Passover. Many worshipers have arrived early, hoping to camp out by the cave of the holy man who blessed the site with his presence more than two thousand years ago.
This year, they will have to wait.
As sundown approaches, orange security signs appear, indicating the holy site will be shut down at 5 p.m. The roads leading up the mountain are closed, with police posted along the foot trails. Skirmishes break out between local security forces and disappointed visitors. The mayor of Peki’in assures the masses the holy site will reopen tomorrow morning at seven in time for the Lag b’Omer holiday. When pressed for an explanation he mumbles something about a security threat.
Having received 75,000 US dollars to seal off access to the cave from sunset to sunrise, the Arab mayor has no qualm in dealing with a few hundred disgruntled Jews.
The forty-nine days of the Omer that immediately follow Passover correspond to the period of time 3,400 years ago that followed the Israelites’ physical emancipation from Egypt and Moses’s descent from Mount Sinai. The seven weeks of Omer are considered dark days, a time when the Israelites’ uncertainty about God had cost them the gift of immortality, condemning an entire generation to wander the desert for forty years.
The thirty-third day of Omer commemorates two important historical events, both involving great spiritual sages that lived fourteen centuries after Sinai, when the Holy Land was ruled by Rome and harsh laws were enacted that strictly forbid the study of the Torah.
Akiva ben Yosef held no interest in studying the Torah. Born the son of a Jewish convert, Akiva was a poor shepherd who fell in love with the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Israel. Faced with being disinherited should she marry the shepherd, Rachel rebuked her father and accepted Akiva’s proposal, but only if he agreed to learn the Torah—no easy feat for an illiterate forty-year-old man.
Keeping his word, Akiva left his bride to study outside Roman jurisdiction. When he returned twelve years later, he was an ordained rabbi with a large following. With Rachel’s blessing he would continue his studies for another twelve years, becoming a great sage whose students numbered twenty-four thousand.
In 132 CE, a Jewish leader by the name of Shimon bar Kokhba led a revolt against the Holy Land’s Roman oppressors, the movement supported by Kokhba’s spiritual advisor, Rabbi Akiva. When the dark judgment days of the Omer came, they arrived with a plague that killed all but five of Rabbi Akiva’s students. Sages interpreted this epidemic to be a result of the students’ growing egos and lack of respect for one another while studying the Torah.
The devastation from the plague finally ended on the thirty-third day of Omer.
Despite the horror of his losses and in direct violation of Roman law, Rabbi Akiva continued to teach his surviving students. The Bar Kokhba revolt would fail: 580,000 Jews massacred. Three years later Rabbi Akiva was captured and skinned alive in front of his people, dying a martyr’s death. Before he perished, he revealed to his favorite student, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, that the Torah was encrypted with a hidden wisdom that was, in essence, the instruction manual of our existence.
Fleeing Roman persecution, Rabbi Shimon and his son, Rabbi Elazar, escaped to a cave in the mountains of Peki’in. Sustained by the fruit of a carob tree and water from a spring, the two holy men devoted themselves to unraveling the Torat HaSod, an ancient wisdom that Rabbi Akiva claimed had been secretly encrypted in the arrangement of the Aramaic letters in the Torah. Each morning the two men would remove their clothing to preserve the cloth, then bury themselves neck-deep in the sand, channeling the prophet Elijah to aid them in their quest.
For thirteen years father and son remained hidden, until they learned of the Roman governor’s death. When they returned to civilization, they carried with them a secret knowledge they would later transcribe into the book of splendor—the Zohar. Knowing the world was not ready for its knowledge, the Rabbi and his disciples hid the sacred text.
The Zohar would not surface again until the thirteenth century.
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai passed away on the thirty-third day of Omer.
The three Americans hike up the steep mountain trail in single file. The imposing black man takes the lead, followed by the older Caucasian, who arrived in Peki’in two days earlier with a suitcase filled with cash. Both men carry backpacks.
The third man is far younger—a white man in his early thirties, his dark hair long and ponytailed, his eyes hidden behind tinted sunglasses. Unlike his two older companions, he climbs with an athlete’s grace.
Mitchell Kurtz feels his sixty-two years as he limps up the path after Ryan Beck. The former CIA assassin’s black beard and mustache have grayed over the last decade, matching his short-cropped hair. At five feet, eight inches and 160 pounds, Kurtz looks anything but dangerous, yet what he lacks in physical stature he more than makes up for in advanced gadgetry and a ruthlessness in using it. Concealed beneath the man’s right sleeve, strapped to his forearm and powered by a waist-worn battery pack, is a pain cannon. Designed for riot control, the weapon fires pulses of millimeter-waves at its target, heating the victim’s flesh as if the subject had just touched a hot lightbulb. The device can scatter every living being within a half-mile radius or deliver a death blow to a specific target a mile away. Kurtz stays in practice by “cooking alley rats.”
Kurtz’s partner in crime is Ryan Beck, a former star football player whose six-foot, six-inch frame still carries 280 pounds. Though the cleanshaven Beck has lost his edge due to bad knees and his advancing age, his size and martial arts training still render him a formidable opponent.
Affectionately known as Salt and Pepper, the duo have spent the last fourteen years guarding one client, not for money but out of loyal
ty, love, and a devout understanding that the younger man they have known since his birth thirty-four years ago may represent their species’s last shot at salvation.
It is dark by the time they reach the cave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. The mountain air is a chilly fifty-two degrees, the wind howling through the jagged stone opening. Kurtz ducks his head and enters, using the night vision setting in his smart glasses to verify the cave is empty. Beck scans the summit and surrounding hillside with a thermal imager.
Both men concur they are alone.
The younger man with the chiseled physique kneels in the coarse sand and closes his azure-blue eyes. Moving into a transcendental state of meditation, he slows his heart and alters the rhythm of his brain, dropping from the faster Beta waves at forty cycles per second into the lower thirteen-hertz Alpha frequency. Descending farther still, he slides into a Theta trance, the electrical signals transmitting between his nerve cells aligning with the electromagnetic waves present in Earth’s atmosphere, which pulsate at a steady 7.8 hertz.
Registering the electrostatic deviations around the cave, he opens his eyes and points to a “hot spot” located just outside the cavern entrance. “There.”
The two bodyguards remove telescopic shovels from their backpacks and set to work, digging through the hard-packed sand.
The younger man peels off his clothing.
Immanuel Gabriel was born into a maelstrom of chaos. His father, Michael, who “disappeared” days after his conception, had been branded everything from a Mayan messiah to a paranoid schizophrenic. His mother, Dominique Vazquez, became the Mesoamerican Eve to Mick Gabriel’s Adam, her soul mate’s departure leaving her alone to raise Manny and his white-haired, turquoise-eyed twin, Jacob.