Transgression

by R. S. Ingermanson

  “No.”

  Rivka’s heart skipped a beat at this staccato sentence. Why was he lying to her? “Are you angry at me?”

  Ari unfolded his hands, then folded them again. “Rivka…I make an effort to be at peace with everyone.”

  So she was right. “And…?”

  “And I also insist on the truth. That is something I value very highly.”

  Rivka gave a little half-laugh. “Um…good. I kind of like the truth too. Is there something I’m missing here?”

  “Tell me again about this temple you attend in San Diego,” Ari said. “It is called Beth Simcha?”

  Rivka didn’t really want to talk about Beth Simcha. “I don’t live in San Diego anymore. I’ve been in Berkeley for three years now.”

  Ari’s eyes narrowed, and now he raised them to look at her. “But your family lives in San Diego.”

  “Yes, that’s right.” She noticed again how intense his eyes were. Not intense and angry. Intense and sad.

  He dropped his gaze again and pushed his chair back from the table. “It is not important. Please forget that I mentioned it.”

  “Ari! You can’t just drop it like that. What’s the matter?”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed twice. For a long moment his eyes drifted down Ben Yehuda Street. Then his features hardened. “So. You grew up in San Diego. And you had a bat mitzvah.”

  “That’s right.” Rivka suddenly felt a bit chilly. Where was he going with this?

  “And this temple of yours is Reform?”

  Rivka hesitated. Now she could guess Ari’s direction. She just didn’t know why. “No, not Reform.”

  “Conservative, perhaps?” Ari’s long fingers splayed out on the glass table. “Not Orthodox, surely?”

  “No, neither,” Rivka said. “And not Reconstructionist.” She swallowed hard. This was as good a time as any to just come out with it. The truth. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, Ari.”

  “Yes?” His voice sounded thick. Again, his eyes drifted up, almost, but not quite locking on hers.

  Rivka took a deep breath. “My father left my mother and me when I was five years old. Just walked out one day and didn’t come back.”

  Ari’s eyes clouded with sympathy. “I’m sorry.”

  “Neither of my parents was very religious. My mother had grown up Orthodox and hated it. My father was raised in a non-observant home. The amount of religion I got from them was exactly zero.”

  Ari said nothing.

  “My mother wanted to get away from the East Coast, so she packed us up and we headed for San Diego. She got a job with General Dynamics, and a few years later married a supervisor in the Aerospace Division.” Rivka paused. “A nice Jewish guy, but no religious affiliation.”

  Ari nodded.

  Rivka hesitated, wondering how much of this she should tell. Would he laugh at her, if she told him all of it? She decided on the short version.

  “Right after my eleventh birthday, my parents…decided to start going to temple. They had some personal stuff going on, and…well, they ended up going somewhere unexpected.”

  “Beth Simcha,” Ari said. “Jews for Jesus.”

  So. He knew it all. Or thought he did. “Not quite,” Rivka said. “Beth Simcha is a Messianic Jewish congregation. Jews for Jesus is a para-church organization—”

  Something snapped in Ari’s face, as if a wire stretched very tight inside his head had suddenly broken. “Yes, church,” he said. “Very well put, Rivka. A Christian organization, not Jewish.”

  “Wrong.” She said it firmly, but in a nice tone. “We are very much Jews.” 5

  “Do you worship That Man? Do you believe he is a god?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then you are Christians. Therefore you are not Jews.”

  Rivka pressed her hands to her temples. She was tired and beginning to feel a bit irritable. This wasn’t the time to get into a long discussion about Judaism and Christianity. Why did he think all this was so important, anyway? “Listen, Ari, can we talk about this some other time? I’m really not in the mood for it right now.”

  “I only want the truth,” Ari said. “Is that too much to ask?”

  “No, but why now? Can’t it wait?”

  “If you are ashamed of the truth…”

  That struck a nerve. Because she was ashamed. A little bit anyway. She was tired of this kind of thing, had come to Israel precisely to get away from it, and here it came flying back in her face again. Fine. If he wanted the truth, she was going to give it to him—as much as he could stand. She leaned forward. “Ari, did it ever occur to you that maybe you don’t know everything? That maybe your preconceptions might possibly be wrong? That the things other people have told you about Yeshua might—”

  “Yeshua!” Ari’s face darkened. “That is a fraud. Why not call him by his true name, which is Jesus? You put a Jewish veneer on a Gentile concept. Perhaps you can sell it to American Jews who know nothing of their heritage, but not to Israeli Jews.”

  Rivka knew this gambit. Big mistake, Ari Kazan! I’ve got you now. “You need to study up on your history, Mr. Brilliant Physicist. Yeshua was as Jewish as they come. The earliest so-called Christians were all Jews. All of them! At first, they couldn’t believe that Gentiles had any share in the Mashiach. Go back and read your history books.”

  Ari looked stung. “I am not ignorant of history. So let me tell you some history, if you are willing to listen without insulting me.”

  This was going to be interesting. “Go ahead.”

  “After the Babylonian exile, our people lived in many lands—among them Persia.”

  Rivka nodded.

  “In Persia, certain Jews became infected with an avatar myth. You are familiar with such things?”

  So he wanted to play a weird card here. Rivka leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. “Yes, I took a comparative religion course at UCSD.”

  “Therefore you know that the myth of a god coming down to be incarnated as a man is not new.”

  “Nothing’s new, Ari. The Greeks thought of atoms twenty-five hundred years ago. They knew the earth was round two millennia before Columbus. There’s nothing new under the sun.”

  “You are correct but irrelevant. Atoms exist, whether imagined by Greeks or not. Likewise, the earth is round, without regard to its geographers. But Jesus is a fraud. He never existed as a man. 6 He is an instance of the avatar mythos perpetrated by quasi-Jewish syncretists. Failing to find an audience among true Jews, they turned to Gentiles with much greater success. Ergo, Christianity.”

  Rivka laughed out loud. Many educated Jews actually believed Jesus had never existed. She was used to that one. But this avatar stuff was new. And absurd. “Ari, I expected better of you. Do you have any evidence, or are you just making it up?”

  “You believe that Jesus is the incarnation of a god?”

  “Not just any god. Our God. The living God. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

  “So you concede the point.” Ari ticked off one of his fingers. “And you believe—”

  “No!” Rivka slapped her hand on the table. “I don’t concede anything.”

  “You just did. And you believe in the so-called Trinity, three gods who are alleged to be one. Very nice arithmetic. Perhaps you could educate me on this new type of mathematics?”

  Great. That one was complicated. How did you explain the Trinity to someone who would just twist anything you said? Especially if you didn’t understand it yourself? Time to veer back, put Ari on the defensive. “We were talking about avatars a minute ago. Why the change of subject?”

  “Because I won that point,” Ari said. “Your Jesus is nothing more than an avatar myth. He is no more real than those people in the computer game which Dov likes so much.”

  “Ari, you’ve got it backward. In that game, the most real character is the avatar—the representation of the actual human player holding the joystick. The other characters are completely unreal. The
y’re figments generated by the software, no more real than shadows on the wall.”

  “So now you give me echoes of Plato, analogical thinking. Unfortunately, not logical thinking. Since you concede that Jesus is an avatar, you must resort to an analogy to make your point. Why do you avoid the truth?”

  That got under Rivka’s skin. “What is it with you, anyway? What are you, the truth fairy?”

  Ari jerked backward as if she had slapped him.

  Rivka tried to think of some way to defuse things. How had she gotten into this mess?

  “It seems a small request that you should tell the truth,” Ari said. His fingers lay clenched on the table, the knuckles white. “It is a lie to call a church a synagogue. It is a lie to call a Christian a Jew. Messianic Jews are an oxymoron.”

  “You have some problem with Jews who believe that the Messiah has come?” Rivka asked. “Were the Lubavitchers suddenly not Jews when some of them claimed that Rebbe Schneerson was the Messiah?”

  Ari’s face flashed with anger. “The Lubavitchers are fools,” he said. “But they do not slaughter Jews, so they are not a problem. I have a problem with Christians persecuting my people for two thousand years.”

  “But—”

  Ari cut her off with a wave of the hand. “You have heard of what they did to Rabbi Akiva and Bar Kochva? You have heard of Constantine and his forced conversions? You have heard of the slaughter of Jews during the Crusades? You have heard of the torture of Jews during the Spanish Inquisition? You have heard of the strange love for Jews displayed by Martin Luther? You know about Chmielnicki and his pogroms? You think the Holocaust was an aberration?” 7

  “Ari, I know all that,” Rivka said. “There are answers—”

  “The answers of Christians begin with stones, continue with swords, and end with fire,” Ari said. “I am not interested in their answers.”

  Rivka felt heat rushing through her temples. She had studied the history of Christian dealings with Jews, and it was ugly. Unforgivably ugly. And yes, there was reason to think that the Holocaust was the natural fruit of that history. But it had been sixteen centuries of persecution, not twenty, and long stretches in the middle had been marked by peace between Jew and Christian. Anyway, it was all over now, wasn’t it? Mostly over. The pope had even declared back in the sixties that Jews weren’t responsible for the crucifixion. Evangelicals had gotten interested in the Jewish roots of their faith. The mainline Protestant churches were increasingly tolerant. Only fringe right-wing groups still called Jews Christ-killers. Things had changed.

  Mostly.

  “Just tell me this,” Ari said, jabbing a finger at her. “Are you a Jew or a Christian?”

  Rivka leaned forward, tired and angry. “Wrong question, Mr. Grand Inquisitor. I’m a Jew who believes that the Messiah has come, and his name is—”

  “Wrong!” Ari shouted. “If you believe in That Man, then you are not a Jew. Case closed.” He slammed his open palm on the table. Both glasses of water jumped.

  Rivka suddenly noticed that people at other tables were staring at them. Fine. If they wanted a show, they’d get one. She was just angry enough to do something crazy. She slowly stood, picked up a glass of water, and tossed its contents into Ari’s face.

  “Cool off, you arrogant jerk!” She slammed the empty glass down hard on the table. “And you can put that in...your wormhole!”

  She stalked away without looking back.

  Pedestrians parted for her, staring with open mouths. Let the idiots gawk. What did she care? She didn’t need any more abuse from Ari. And she didn’t need him to walk her back to the hostel. She could find her own way.

  One thing was for sure. Jessica wouldn’t be doing that stupid chant on the way back to the dig this time.

  * * *

  Ari

  Ari stood hastily and tried to brush the water off himself. He quickly gave up and began walking away in the opposite direction from Rivka. After a block, the heat of his anger began to dull.

  He had told her the truth, and what had it accomplished? He had alienated her, just like he knew he would. Poof! Gone. Whatever it was that she had, that inner fire, that grace he had admired, that wit—all gone.

  Because he was a donkey, that was why. A king-size, monumental, dumb-headed donkey. A fool.

  Why? Why? Why?

  Some questions had no answers. Ari had learned that a long time ago, at the age of three.

  Who killed Papa? He used to ask his mother that, over and over, until it drove her wild and she beat him on the head with her wooden spoon.

  Why do people hate us? That one had five hundred answers, and none.

  Why can I have either the truth or peace, but not both?

  Why, why, why?

  Once a year or so, Ari went looking for an answer to one of these questions—in a bottle. American whiskey sometimes had the answer. Or Russian vodka. Or English gin. He was not particular about the country of origin, as long as it drowned the unanswerable questions.

  After a block, Ari found a small food store, the Israeli counterpart to the American supermarket. He stepped inside and headed for the section that he usually avoided.

  The aisle with the liquid answers.

  Chapter 6

  Damien

  ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD DAMIEN WEST stared into the murky green lake water, afraid to jump, afraid not to.

  “Go ahead,” said his brother Stu. “You dive in first. I dare you.”

  Damien shivered. Why was it always like this? Fear gnawed a hole in his gut. The diving raft swayed gently beneath his bare feet, rocked by small waves. The wind sucked the warmth out of his thin body. He peered into the water again, then backed away from the edge.

  “Chicken!” Stu said. “You never want to go first!” He was fourteen, afraid of nothing.

  “You show me how,” Damien said. “You’re better at it than I am.” He looked back toward the cabin, where their parents were still changing. Maybe he shouldn’t have swum out here with Stu before the adults were ready.

  “Okay, watch this.” Stu stepped to the edge of the raft, leaped out into space, and executed a perfect jackknife with a half-twist. His muscular body swished cleanly into the water.

  “Good one!” Damien shouted. But of course Stu couldn’t hear him underwater. Damien waited. Any second now, Stu’s head would pop up. Had he swum underneath the raft? Damien turned to look, but Stu wasn’t behind him.

  Five seconds ratcheted into ten, then into twenty. Stu could stay underwater for almost a minute—much longer than Damien. But still, he didn’t appear.

  Damien’s heart beat faster. Where was Stu? How long had he been under?

  “Stu!” Damien shouted. “Quit playing. Come on up!”

  Nothing.

  Cold dread numbed Damien’s mind, and with it came courage. He stepped off the raft, plunging feet first into the lake. The water had barely closed over his head before his feet jarred into the muddy bottom. The shock rattled through his soul.

  “Stuuuuuuuu!”

  Professor Damien West woke up shouting. His skin felt clammy and hot, and his heart galloped madly in his chest. “Stu,” he whispered into the darkness. “Why’d you have to go first?”

  * * *

  Damien

  Damien couldn’t go back to sleep, so he lay on his cot thinking about his brother until his alarm went off at 4 A.M. He flicked on the lights, blinked until his eyesight adjusted, and went to check the monitor.

  What the…? Staring at the results, Damien nearly blew a brain gasket. The wormhole looked like it was growing!

  After the first shock, he double-checked everything. It might be a calibration error or baseline drift. After all, the instruments showed only a one-nanosecond difference between the front and back ends of the wormhole.

  A few minutes later, it showed two nanoseconds. Then four. Then nine. The time gap doubled in a bit less than three minutes. Exponential growth.

  A wormhole condensate.

  Damien drank
coffee and watched the monitor as his baby grew and grew and grew. It took over an hour to grow the wormhole out to a one-second timespan. In minutes, it stretched out to two, then five, then ten seconds. Beautiful.

  In another hour-and-something, the beast had tunneled back a hundred years into the past. Damien realized he had to act fast. At this rate, in ten or fifteen minutes the wormhole would dig its way three thousand years back. He didn’t want to go that far.

  Damien dialed the feedback down a bit and let things stabilize. He decided to just run it manually from here on in. He would tweak the voltage a bit and see how far the wormhole tunneled into the past. From that, he could work out with a calculator how much to tweak it the next time.

  Unfortunately, the wormhole had a natural time delay between the action and the response, and that limited how fast he could work. Also, he had no margin for error. If he overshot his target date, he couldn’t shrink the wormhole back. This was a one-way street.

  Damien cursed his stupidity. If he had thought about this before, he could have written a control program to do this automatically while he sat back and watched. But he hadn’t thought about it. In any experiment, you ran into things you didn’t consider in advance, and that led to screwups. People always acted surprised to hear that brilliant physicists made mistakes. Damien liked to respond that physicists weren’t all that brilliant, but if you gave them enough chances, they would eventually get it right.

  Normally, it didn’t matter. If one shot screwed up, you fixed it and made another shot. That wouldn’t work here. According to Ari, this was a one-shot deal. If it worked, fine. If it didn’t, there would be no second chances. The way Ari had explained it, the machine was tapping into a nonrenewable resource. Damien didn’t understand Ari’s calculations, but he did understand that he couldn’t afford any mistakes.

  He also understood that his bladder felt ready to pop. All that coffee had come back to haunt him. He made a rapid calculation in his head, adjusted the dial to a safe setting, and ran for the bathroom.