When she got it, she nodded. “You’re right. And we’re secular, remember, he and I. Some Orthodox Jews still won’t come up here,” she answered. “No matter what Kupferman says, they worry about trespassing on the old Holy of Holies.”
In a way, with the real Ark in the Shrine of the Book, that was funny. In another way, it was admirable: some people stuck to tradition come what might. In yet another way, it added more complications to what was already complicated. “Are they more Orthodox or less than the guys who are up here?” Eric asked.
“I don’t know.” Orly looked startled. “I don’t think it’s a question of more or less. They’re just different.”
“I guess.” Eric snapped his fingers. “I know what we should have asked Lester Stark when we ran into him.”
“What he’s doing here?” His lady love liked Christian ministers even less than secular Muslims.
“Well, that, too,” Eric said. “But I wondered if he was a pre-, a mid-, or a post-Tribulationalist.”
“A what?” Orly didn’t speak this lingo.
“Whether he thinks the Rapture is coming before, during, or after the Tribulation.”
“Rapture?” Her blank look proved she didn’t grow up in the States. Whether you believed in it or not, you couldn’t not hear about it there.
“Where all the believing Christians get snatched up bodily into heaven to be with Jesus in the Last Days,” Eric explained.
“They really believe that?” Orly sounded as if she didn’t trust her own ears.
“They do.” Eric held up his right hand. “So help me, they do.” He hesitated. “You know what else? After so many freaky things already, ruling anything out is harder than it used to be.”
“No, it isn’t. I know bullshit when I hear it.” Orly came straight to the point.
“Did you think we’d find the Ark? Did you think somebody would die if he touched it? Did you think it would knock rockets out of the sky and treat the President of Iran like King Nebuchadnezzar?” Now Eric sounded like the believer.
“The President of Iran had it coming,” Orly said, which wasn’t the point. “Besides, the Ark comes out of the Old Testament, not the New Testament.”
That was to the point. The stories I grew up believing in are true, she was saying. The stories those other people grew up believing in are nonsense. Everybody was saying that, even if everybody couldn’t be right. There were at least three competing stories. Some people would end up disappointed. Some people were liable to end up a lot worse off than disappointed: dead, maybe toasting in hell forever.
One of Orly’s eyebrows quirked as she tried to make a joke: “Some people ought to disappear. Nobody would care if they didn’t come back, either.”
“Yeah.” Eric grinned, but his heart wasn’t in it. He looked back to the Tabernacle that would house the Ark till the Third Temple grew over it. A year earlier, he would have figured the Ark was lost for good and the Dome of the Rock was a permanent feature of the Temple Mount.
Permanent? The word made him want to laugh—or shake. What was permanent? God only knew. Then he did shake, because chances were that was true.
* * *
—
Yitzhak Avigad hadn’t pulled strings to help carry the Ark back through Jerusalem to the Temple Mount. There were no strings to pull, as far as he knew. But when Rabbi Kupferman called to ask if he wanted to do it, he didn’t turn him down.
Kupferman waited outside the Shrine of the Book to get him through security. “Are you ready?” the rabbi asked gruffly.
“What? You think I’ll tell you no now?” Yitzhak said.
Kupferman’s mouth twitched. “Mm—maybe not. Come on.”
Yitzhak thought he’d been early, but most of the other men who would bear the Ark waited inside the Shrine of the Book. They were praying before it. He joined them. You had to be careful not to pray to the Ark itself, but to God through it. Otherwise, how was it any different from praying to the Golden Calf?
After Kupferman brought in the other bearers, he too paused for a moment to pray. Then he said, “Let’s go,” as if they were furniture movers. And they were, though the furniture belonged to God, not man.
As Yitzhak bent to take up a gold-plated shittim-wood pole, fear ran through him. If this wasn’t what God wanted, he would be dead the next instant. Well, he probably wouldn’t know what hit him. Brandon hadn’t seemed to. Worse ways to go: his stretch in the IDF taught him that.
His hand came down on the gold. It felt cool. That he knew it felt cool meant he still lived, meant God approved of what he was doing. “Lift!” Kupferman said.
Some bearers grunted with effort. Yitzhak started to, but caught himself. The massy Ark should have been far beyond their power to lift, but it wasn’t. Yitzhak felt he might have been lifting ten or fifteen kilos, no more.
How was that possible? Only one answer occurred to him: the same way it was possible for a man to drop dead after he touched a box made of gold and gold-covered wood. It was a miracle.
Out of the Shrine of the Book they went, out and east. They reversed the journey the Ark made when it left its long seclusion under the Temple Mount. Security was as tight as before. Crowds were, if anything, larger and crazier.
Red-gold light from the rising sun shone into Yitzhak’s face whenever buildings didn’t block it. It seemed to strike fire from the Ark. Yitzhak let awe wash over him. King David’s men brought the Ark into Jerusalem like this after the children of Israel took the city from the Jebusites. After that? No one had had such a moment since, not for the past 3,000 years.
As David had then, Shlomo Kupferman danced ahead of the Ark. Yitzhak had watched him do it when the Ark came forth from the Temple Mount. He wasn’t a young man, but danced as if he were. And if his heart gave out and he keeled over—well, again, what better way to go?
By all the signs, he might have been ready to run the 10,000 meters at the next Olympics. A couple of bearers were paunchy and starting to sweat just from the walk. They never would have lasted kicking up their heels the way Kupferman did.
Into the Old City. It wasn’t as old as the Ark. Nothing from those days survived except a little stonework on the Temple Mount. Yitzhak set his jaw as they went through the Jewish Quarter. Back when the Jordanians held it, they’d used grave markers from the Jewish cemetery for paving stones and in latrines. The God of the Old Testament was jealous and vengeful. Maybe He was laughing, as His Ark went through these streets held by Jews once more.
How the soldiers held back the crowds by the Western Wall, Yitzhak never knew. For so many years, the Wall had been the Jews’ closest approach to the fallen Temple. As Israel had revived, so would the Temple.
Up the steps of the Bab al-Silsila to the top of the Temple Mount. The Tabernacle did duty for the Temple, as it had till Solomon got busy. The cloth fluttered and flapped as helicopters skimmed low. Were more Arab mortars zeroing in here? Would it do them any good if they were?
Those cloth walls turned sunlight to gloom as Yitzhak and the other bearers entered the Tabernacle. Two curtains separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the tent. “You have leave to enter,” Kupferman said, holding them apart with his hands. “After this, it is forbidden to all but the High Priest on Yom Kippur.”
They carried the Ark of the Covenant into the Holy of Holies. Rabbi Kupferman pointed to the exposed stone of the Temple Mount, showing them exactly where to place it. Yitzhak thought it would go on floating above the stone. But it settled into place there. The Mount trembled and creaked beneath his feet, as if taking up the weight of the world…or more. The Ark was home.
Israel was the only working democracy in the Middle East. Working often meant like yeast in dough. You could get caught in a demonstration in Jerusalem any time except during Shabbat.
The protesters were noisy and passionate. In the States, they w
ould have been screaming about war or abortion. Not much else got people there so worked up. Israelis had a lower boiling point. This was the Middle East.
And these demonstrators, shouting and waving placards and beating on drums and messing up traffic were marching because…the people rebuilding the Temple intended to sacrifice their red heifer. Some demonstrators were Orthodox Jews who didn’t believe mere mortals should do anything to hasten the Messiah. HE WILL COME WHEN THE LORD WILLS! shouted a sign held by a bearded man whose wide black hat and long black coat would have been stylish in Vilno or Cracow in 1791.
Others were dressed like anybody in the twenty-first-century West. They were left-wing, secular, and marched for the Israeli SPCA. ANIMAL SACRIFICE IS ANIMAL CRUELTY! their signs read, and SAVE THE HEIFER! They were even more raucous than the ultra-Orthodox.
Adding to the din were car horns from drivers stuck because people were marching down the street. Israeli drivers honked when everything went smoothly. To Eric, it was their least endearing trait—along with passing on the right whenever they felt like it. Drivers also screamed at the cops trying to shepherd the demonstrators along.
“Cus ummak!” the drivers bellowed, and other endearments. Demonstrators yelled back. A good time was had by all.
TV crews filmed the chaos so the rest of Israel and the world could see the good time. Eric thought he spotted one of Gabriela Sandoval’s cameramen. He wondered what Reverend Stark would say about this. Nothing nice about the demonstrators, not unless Eric was way off base.
“Save the heifer!” a woman yelled. “Meat is murder!” She was skinny, with spiked, gelled hair dyed the same shade of green as her environmentally friendly T-shirt.
An Orthodox demonstrator swung his placard at a policeman. The cop clouted him with a nightstick. What had been noisy and melodramatic suddenly got more serious than Eric wanted. Protesters and police waded into each other, swearing and swinging and assaulting. He ducked into the first open door he saw.
It was a shawarma shop. The smell of roasting lamb reminded Eric he was hungry. “Some fun,” said the skinny bald guy behind the counter.
“Fun. Right.” Eric pointed to the meat. “Let me have one.”
“Sure.” The counterman chuckled. He saw the irony, too. He stuffed lamb into a pita pocket, then held out his hand. Eric gave him a 20-NIS bill. After pocketing his change, he filled the pita to bursting with salad fixings, then bit in.
“Good,” he said. “What do you think of all this?”
“You were smart to bail out of it.” As the man spoke, a tear-gas grenade, trailing smoke, flew into the crowd. Eric thought it had been loud before. The counterman ran out and slammed the door. “Keep some gas out of here, alevai,” he said. When he went back, he pulled out a gas mask. Israelis were ready for anything.
Eric wasn’t. “Do you have a back way out?” he asked. His eyes started to burn. He hoped it was his imagination. When the counterman put on the mask, he knew it wasn’t.
“Follow me. Don’t know how much good it’ll do you,” the counterman said. The mask muffled his voice.
Still clutching the shawarma, Eric let the fellow take him out to an alley. It was narrower than Jerusalem’s streets—not wide enough to let Eric spread his arms. It stank of garbage. Other people with streaming eyes came running down it, fleeing the gas. An Orthodox man vomited, then staggered on, wiping his eyes with his black wool sleeve.
“Some fun,” the shawarma seller said again.
It was either stand there and get trampled or go with the flow. Eric went. The gas didn’t help his appetite, which was a shame—it was a good shawarma. He ended up throwing out half, and hoped the rest would stay down.
Then he spotted a McDonald’s. He hurried in, not for the food but for the men’s room. He wasn’t the only one splashing his face to get the tear gas out of his eyes.
“They’ll kill the cow anyway,” said another man, yanking out paper towels and drying his face. He was secular: he wore a tank top that showed off his muscled, tattooed arms.
Jews who weren’t secular didn’t get tattoos. They thought the marks distorted the image of God…and they remembered the Holocaust. Eric had known a couple of survivors who’d carried Hitler’s numbers to the grave with them. At a different time, the Orthodox man drying his beard might have said something sharp to his fellow demonstrator. Now he nodded mournfully. “They are,” he agreed. “They think you can bring the Messiah any time, like you raise hothouse flowers. Can you push God like that?”
Eric said, “Maybe they think God is pushing them.”
He won himself two glares. The guy with the tats had really big arms. The Orthodox man was wiry, but fifteen years younger than Eric. Me and my big mouth, the archaeologist thought. “If they do, they’re wrong,” the Orthodox man said, and proceeded to start quoting the Bible to prove his point.
Eric had had enough of that. To change the subject, he asked, “What do you think will happen if the Temple goes up?”
The man threw wadded-up paper towels in the trash bin. “Trouble,” he answered. Eric couldn’t quarrel with that.
* * *
—
After more than 1,900 years, the hour was come ’round at last. From the Pool of Siloam, Chaim Avigad and the other ritually pure boys watched through binoculars as attendants led the red heifer across the causeway to the Mount of Olives. Soon, people would be able to become ritually pure without living the life Chaim and the others were stuck with. They were excited about it.
He wasn’t. There went Rosie, and he couldn’t do anything to help her. He would be on the Mount of Olives, and he would watch while they cut his friend’s throat. Didn’t God have another way to let people become ritually clean?
Everybody said no. Everybody said this was how things worked in ancient days, so this was how they had to work now. Chaim thought that was hooey. Had tanks protected the site the last time someone killed a red heifer? Had helicopters flown about it? Had TV waited to broadcast the sacrifice?
Not likely! Things had changed since the Second Temple. Wouldn’t God also have changed in all that time? Chaim thought so. No one else seemed to. Maybe he was the stupid, impious one. But, as boys his age often will, he was sure the rest of the world was out of kilter.
“Come on, boys!” said the man in charge of this part of the ceremony. “Dip your jars in the pool, then we’ll help you onto your oxen and you’ll get going.”
Soldiers held a perimeter around the pool, to keep anybody from sniping at the boys. If someone had a mortar or some rockets…In that case, it would be in God’s hands. So far, He’d handled things. Chances were He could do it again.
Chaim believed that along with believing God didn’t need this old-fashioned, cruel ceremony. It was like believing the earth was flat and round at once. He didn’t notice.
Bubble wrap popped under his knees when he bent to fill his jug from Modin. The water chilled his fingers. The vessel, once full, was heavy. He grunted when he pulled it out of the pool. More bubbles popped when he set it on the plastic.
He stood. A man led an ox with a board across its back up to him. The board didn’t have stirrups. The man lifted him up onto it. He sat crosslegged, the way they’d told him to. The man handed him the ritually pure jar of Siloam water. He held it in his lap.
“Ready?” the man asked. Numbly, Chaim nodded. The man tugged at the ox’s lead rope. The stupid animal walked forward. The man nodded. “Here we go,” he said over his shoulder. As far as he was concerned, everything was fine.
The Pool of Siloam lay in David’s City, below the walls of the Old City. Slowly, the ox climbed toward the Dung Gate, the one closest to the Temple Mount on the south side. More soldiers stood at the gate and on the wall. They looked ready for anything. Maybe because they were, nothing happened.
It wasn’t till you neared the Western Wall that you reali
zed how massive it was. Chaim wouldn’t have wanted to build anything like that without earth-moving machinery. People had carved those massive blocks by hand. No jackhammers. No dynamite. They’d moved them by muscle power—men, oxen, maybe horses and donkeys. No engines. No electricity. Only faith. People said faith could move mountains. How about building one?
A ramp led to the top of the Temple Mount. It had been a stairway. It would be again, once heavy machines no longer needed to go up there. In the meantime, it helped the oxen carrying the boys with water from the Pool of Siloam to the top of the Mount.
Chaim stared at the Tabernacle. That was something even more ancient than the Temple. Seeing the fabric flutter in the breeze reminded him the children of Israel had been the Bedouins of their day: nomads wandering the desert. They and the Arabs had the same roots. But we’re different plants, he thought.
The thud of the ox’s hooves on the paving stones was a sound old as time. David would have heard it, and Moses, and Abraham. Like the Tabernacle, here it was again. What was old was made new again. Like Israel, Chaim thought.
They went onto the causeway, passing over the Kidron Valley. The causeway was new, thrown up by machines: steel and cement. Nothing like it existed in ancient times. But they’d spanned the valley when they needed to sacrifice a red heifer. They’d used hand tools to build their causeways. But they’d done it.
He looked ahead. There stood Rosie, calm with bovine placidity. She didn’t know what they’d do to her. She’d known nothing but good since she came to Eretz Yizrael—and before that. Rabbi Kupferman was feeding her some grain. She didn’t know he had a knife no doubt carefully inspected to make sure the edge was nick-free.
She didn’t understand the pyre of cedar and fig and pine, either. It was pyramid-shaped, and had an opening facing west toward the Temple Mount. They would lead her in, and they would turn her around so she faced west, and Kupferman would…
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