The Caleb Collection

by Ted Dekker

  “It is life!” Solomon thundered.

  They glared at each other for several beats, and then the room erupted with ten voices, all demanding, all argumentative, all at full volume.

  “Silence!” Ben Gurion yelled. “Be quiet, all of you! Sit! Sit, sit, sit.” He’d stood and now walked around them. “Another outbreak like that and we will adjourn. I have invited you here out of courtesy—don’t abuse it.”

  Those standing, sat—Goldstein lastly and most reluctantly.

  “We will have a hearing on the issue of the Temple before the full Plenum if the Ark actually makes it to Jerusalem, but I can’t stress enough the need for prudence in the days to come. Whether some of you like it or not, King David brought the Ark to this holy city. God’s presence dwelt within that Ark, and King Solomon built the Temple for that Ark. Also, whether you like it or not, over 70 percent of this country’s citizens favor the rebuilding of the Temple in the event of the Ark’s discovery.”

  “Which is why we have no business uncovering the Ark!” Goldstein said.

  “We’re beyond that.”

  “Not necessarily. What’s uncovered can be covered.”

  “Perhaps. But I refuse to be the man who covers up the discovery of the Ark. I may be a politician, but I am first a Jew.”

  The table broke out into heated discourse, and the prime minister held his hand up. “Please! Listen to me.”

  The room quieted.

  “That doesn’t mean I know what to do with the Ark. I would like to hear from some of you.” He faced an older Orthodox gentleman, Shmuel Halpert of the United Judaism Party. “Rabbi, what do you think will be the position of the Orthodox?”

  “It is forbidden to go on the Holy Mount before the Messiah comes. How can we take the Temple Mount without going up on it?”

  “You’re standing in the Messiah’s way!” Solomon said.

  “The Messiah’s way? The Messiah’s way is for man to overcome evil impulses. Not to hunt down lost treasures.”

  “We are overcoming evil! The evil that lives on our Temple Mount in the form of Islam! Satan himself has set up shop in God’s Temple, and you have the gall to talk about impulses?”

  “Please,” Ben Gurion interrupted. “We’ve heard the arguments a hundred times. Are you saying, Rabbi, that the Orthodox community will not favor bringing the Ark into Jerusalem?”

  The rabbi thought for a few seconds. “This is the original Ark; you’re sure of that?”

  “Yes,” Solomon answered.

  “Then how can we not bring it into the city?”

  It was the typical double-mindedness that had frustrated Solomon for two decades.

  “The Likud will favor bringing in the Ark as well,” Ben Gurion said, “although I’m sure we can expect the usual squabbling. As will Meretz. That will give us a significant consensus, not only in the polls, but in the government. But I want you to understand that it’s primarily out of my own convictions that I have guaranteed the safe passage of the Ark into Jerusalem, if it has indeed been found.” He looked at Solomon. “It sounds like the Ark is coming, ladies and gentlemen. We should get used to that idea. The real issue facing us now is the Arab reaction once they learn that we have the Ark.”

  “We have no right deciding any matters without the full Plenum in session,” the Knesset Speaker said. “Which committee would have jurisdiction over this?”

  “No committee. I have jurisdiction,” Ben Gurion returned. “We will get to the Plenum. I haven’t stepped beyond my authority in bringing the Ark to Jerusalem.”

  The Speaker was accustomed to setting the agenda, and his frown made it clear he wasn’t completely satisfied. “Perhaps not yet. But any decision regarding the Ark must be a matter for Israel and its elected leaders.”

  “What do you think this meeting is about?”

  Several others jumped on the point, and Solomon walked calmly over to his chair and sat. They went back and forth, arguing a dozen angles for over twenty minutes with hardly a pause for breath. Thank goodness that Ben Gurion had decided to float the notion of the Ark’s return with these before taking it to the Knesset. There were a few enemies in the room, but not like in the full Knesset. There it might come to fisticuffs.

  Goldstein returned the discussion to his insistence that they halt the progress of the Ark immediately, but as the arguments were cast, it became apparent that he was in the minority. The prime minister fell quiet and let them argue—it was the way of their government.

  “I would like to hear from the military,” the prime minister finally insisted. “We won’t stop the Ark’s coming—your arguments notwithstanding, I’ve already made that quite clear. The real question is what we can expect from the Syrians. Or from the others.” The place settled into silence.

  “Defense Minister Yishai?”

  Defense Minister Benjamin Yishai nodded at another man in full military dress. “I will defer to General Gur for the moment.”

  The air force’s top man cleared his throat and let them sit in silence for a few seconds. “If our enemies believe that we intend to take the Temple Mount, we will have trouble.”

  “Of course we will!” Goldstein said. “Only an idiot would think otherwise.”

  “Let the general talk,” Moshe Aron snapped.

  “Please, Stephen. You’ve had your say.” The prime minister stood and paced to his right. “We will have trouble, yes. You’ll remember the havoc of October 8, 1990. The Temple Mount Advocates put up posters announcing plans to lay a cornerstone for the third Temple.” He cast a sideways glance at Solomon. It was Solomon’s doing, and most of them knew it. “The Palestinians took the posters as a declaration of war. Thousands marched on the Mount, and within a few short hours a score of them lay dead. The Palestinians will riot; we can expect that much.”

  He turned to General Gur. “But what about our neighbors?”

  “It depends,” the general said. “If we take the Temple Mount, they will engage us. The whole world of Islam would engage us.”

  “And that is a matter for the full Knesset,” the prime minister said. “But in bringing the Ark to Jerusalem, what risks do we face?”

  The general turned to a dark-haired man on his right that Solomon did not know. “That’s a matter for intelligence. Daniel?”

  “That the Arabs would be forced to engage us over the Temple Mount isn’t in question,” the dark-haired man said. “The question really boils down to two issues. Their intelligence—how much they know—and timing. Obviously they can’t act on what they don’t know. If we were to bring the Ark into Jerusalem without their knowledge, we would be in a much better position than otherwise. But if they knew we had the Ark, and they believed that our possession of it would lead to an imminent assault on the Temple Mount, they might attempt a preemptive strike of their own. This would be a potentially catastrophic scenario.”

  “They tried a preemptive strike in ’73,” Moshe Aron said. “It didn’t work then.”

  General Gur answered, “It didn’t work because we caught wind of it and struck first. But the landscape has changed. Then, we didn’t have forty thousand Palestinian soldiers to think about. Now we do. A sudden coordinated attack on four fronts would be a significant challenge.”

  “Our military is far superior to any of theirs,” Aron pushed. “We’ve faced challenges before.”

  “I’m not talking about anything like what we’ve faced before. Frankly, our superiority is in our air force, not in all of our armed forces. And the air force requires twenty-four hours to fully mobilize.”

  “Then mobilize now!”

  Gur glanced at Daniel, the intelligence man, who spoke. “If we mobilize now, then they will mobilize. It’s a quid pro quo we’ve operated under for some time. Mobilization alone could push us into war, and I would go one step further than the general. Our air force is not the dominant power it once was—the Egyptians have modernized considerably. Our real strength lies in unconventional weapons.”

  T
he table went silent. He was talking about nuclear weapons, of course.

  “This is asinine!” Goldstein said. “I can’t believe we’re sitting here talking like this. We are not all powerful—we will always have our neighbors to live with. We can’t risk war, and we certainly can’t risk mobilizing! We’re talking about an archaeological find, for God’s sake. This Messianic fervor will be the end of us!”

  “We are already at our end!” Solomon said. “Israel is nothing without God! Since our inception we have run from God because we fear our neighbors more than we fear him. Even the rabbis have supported the status quo with their excuses of not wanting to step on holy ground—for what? For fear of Islam! We live in blasphemy!”

  “Stop!” Ben Gurion’s voice rang out.

  He glared at Solomon and faced the general again. “We have no reason to believe the Arabs know anything.”

  “Two-thirds of my men are reservists,” General Gur said. “You had better be sure about your intelligence. And you’d better expect a fight like you’ve never had if the Knesset even suggests rebuilding the Temple.”

  “When will the Knesset meet?” the Speaker asked.

  Goldstein stood and his chair toppled. “I strenuously object to bringing the Ark to Jerusalem! War will be unavoidable! Some of you might welcome death, but I am not ready to die.”

  “That is your problem,” someone said.

  Ben Gurion broke the following silence. “The full Knesset will meet the day the Ark arrives. Assuming the Speaker approves, of course.”

  Moshe Aron ignored the jab. “And when do you expect that?”

  Ben Gurion glanced at Solomon. “Within seventy-two hours.”

  They traveled until the sun fell again. The Ark of the Covenant was on its way to Jerusalem. The fact that Rebecca had ended up here, in the desert, while Israel’s finest hour approached saddled her with a dread she could hardly contain at times. A dozen scenarios regarding Avraham’s intentions had spun through her mind. But in the end it all began to feel distant and impossible, and she found herself thinking more and more about the man seated on the camel, ten meters ahead.

  She nudged her camel and closed the gap. His dark hair covered his head like a hood, to his shoulders, but the moon lit his face. She could no longer deny the simple fact that she was drawn to this man. She was a soldier who might fail in this mission to return the Ark to Jerusalem. But she was also a woman, and she was seeing Caleb not only as a man, but as one who claimed that he could rescue Israel somehow. It all seemed impossible, of course, trudging through this desert fifteen hundred kilometers from Jerusalem. He a Christian, she a Jew.

  The scene of her failed attempt to seduce him played through her mind, and she stopped nudging her camel forward.

  Caleb turned and smiled. “You slept? That’s good.”

  “I wouldn’t call it sleep. You did a little nodding yourself.”

  “The heat gets to you out here.”

  They walked on, towards the white moon.

  “How far to the sea?” she asked.

  “Twenty kilometers, I would say.”

  “And when we get there, what do we do?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  She nodded. Whatever Caleb was, he wasn’t a soldier. “You don’t know? We’re following your plan and you don’t have one?”

  “My plan is to prevent a war.” He said it so matter-of-factly that she honestly thought he believed he could do such a thing.

  “My, my, you just refuse to be normal, don’t you? Is everything a game to you? We’re powerless here, mounted on camels in Eritrea, and in Jerusalem the fate of Israel is probably being argued in the Knesset. They’re deciding whether or not to nuke the Syrians, but that’s okay because down in the desert Caleb has a plan. What is his plan? To prevent a war, of course. It doesn’t sound just a bit strange to you?”

  Caleb began to laugh. “You do have a sense of humor, Rebecca.”

  She grinned at the way he said it. Might as well. She was with him now, for better or for worse.

  “Actually, I wasn’t trying to be funny,” she said.

  He sighed and looked up at the starry sky. “Do you ever wonder why God placed so many stars in the sky?” he asked. “They say that if the sky were a beach, what we can see is like a single grain of sand on that beach.”

  She looked up. A million white pinpricks flickered against the black sky. “I’ve never heard it put like that. It’s a good way to say it.”

  “I’ve found my love again, you know.”

  Rebecca’s first impulse was to think that he was speaking about her. She cast him a sidelong glance, but he was still staring skyward and she knew he was back in Hadane’s world.

  “So you lost your love?”

  “Yes. My first love. That crazy love I had as a child. Somehow I misplaced it.”

  The night suddenly felt very thick. “And you learned to love God by walking with him. In his kingdom, right?”

  He looked at her, surprised that she remembered what he’d told her. “Yes. In his kingdom. Do you love God, Rebecca?”

  “Yes. Yes, I think so.”

  “But you don’t love Christ.”

  “I said that I loved God. The Nazarene was not God. I’m sure he was a good prophet—one that the Jews might have misjudged. But he wasn’t God.”

  “Then how do you explain my love for him?”

  She looked to the horizon. “Just because the Arabs love Mohammed doesn’t mean that he was sent from God.”

  “True love is found by stepping off the cliff,” Caleb said, ignoring her line of argument. “That’s what Hadane taught me again. Faith and love are bound together inseparably. If you don’t truly believe, you can’t truly love. If you don’t love, you cannot truly believe. Each is required for the other.”

  “So if you don’t have belief, how are you expected to find love?”

  He looked at her as if the answer were obvious. “By doing the one thing man can do. By stepping off the cliff.” He chuckled and nodded. “Stepping off the cliff.”

  “Stepping off the cliff?” She smiled, caught off guard by his laugh.

  “When you step off the cliff, you learn very quickly to love the one who catches you. Man’s problem is that he has become too attached to the ground he’s on. He might stick a foot over the edge, but everything in him rebels at the thought of stepping off.”

  “Maybe because when people fall off cliffs, they tend to end up splat. On the ground.”

  He grinned. “Splat?”

  “Yes, splat.”

  “But anything less is not faith at all. Faith is believing in what you can’t see. Like air. And faith is the kind of belief that makes you do things like jump—otherwise it’s not faith at all. Christ’s brother James knew that well, and I suppose it was because he spent so much time with Jesus. Most people who think they believe don’t really believe at all—not the way Christ and his brother talked about. They only think they believe, but they never really step off the cliff.”

  Christ and his brother? She wondered what the Torah had to say about faith. Her own belief had always come at the end of a nine-millimeter Browning.

  “And don’t think that a cliff has to be very high,” Caleb said. “I think for most people, standing in the market where they buy their food and telling the stranger next to them that they love Christ—I think this would be a cliff plenty high for starters. They would find themselves madly in love soon enough.”

  His words spun through her mind, like threads of gold on the wind. There was indeed something intoxicating about Caleb.

  He tilted his head back and faced the stars. “Oh, my dear God . . .” He spread out both arms. “I have found true love, Rebecca, and it is for the Nazarene!” He spun and reached out to her, wide-eyed. “That’s the point! You’re not going to find God in a gold box called an Ark! You’re going to find him in man. He is Christ, and he loves us madly.”

  He spoke it with such passion that the thought of disagreein
g felt awkward. She just grinned stupidly.

  Caleb cleared his throat and dropped his hand. After a minute, he pulled on the reins and his camel stopped. “We should rest for a few hours,” he said.

  “No, we should keep going. Plan or no plan, we have to at least get to the sea.”

  “No, we should stop.” He slipped from his camel. “Please, you’re committed to follow me, and I think we should stop.”

  Rebecca blinked in the darkness. He was growing more assured by the hour. Caleb led his own camel and the one in tow to a bush where he tied them up. He walked over to her and lifted a hand to help her down. She hesitated and then took it.

  But she didn’t dismount. She looked into his face. His eyes were green in the moonlight, and they looked directly into her own. She dropped her eyes and looked at her hand, small in his. His other arm was poised to catch her if she were to fall—as if she would ever fall. He was waiting for her to dismount, of course.

  She looked back into his eyes. A wedge of heat rose up Rebecca’s spine. For a moment Rebecca thought she wanted to fall into his arms and hold him tenderly. Her heart began to race, and suddenly her hand felt very hot in his.

  But she’d tried that once and it had not gone well.

  She jerked her eyes from his, dropped to the sand, and flashed him a courteous smile. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You are welcome.” His voice sounded tender. Not merely soft or gentle, but tender.

  They had stopped at the base of a small cliff that rose up to the full moon, and Rebecca walked towards it, at a complete loss. Behind her Caleb remained still, and she knew that he was watching her. Dear God, what was happening?

  Then she heard him leading her camel to the bush and she breathed in relief. Her belly was still doing flip-flops. Get ahold of yourself, Rebecca. Goodness, he is not some boyfriend, and this is not a high-school bar mitzvah!

  A loud crack sounded behind her. She spun around. Caleb walked quickly towards her, smiling, his arms full of dead branches. He dumped them on the ground and quickly arranged them for a fire. He stood up, hurried to his pack, and began digging through it.