The Ascent of Eli Israel

by Jonathan Papernick, Dara Horn

  “You’re only forty-three, dude.”

  After Eli rested and drank some coffee, he felt somewhat renewed. His footsteps marched in synch with Zev’s down the hill past dimly lit Arab homes. They heard children laughing and the sound of televisions blaring in Arabic. Zev pointed out, “This was a Jewish home. This was a Jewish home,” as they walked.

  The air smelled to Eli like nothing he had ever smelled before, clean and fresh and natural. He felt the cool spring air wash over him and felt healthy for the first time in a long time. He looked up in the sky and the stars seemed closer than they had ever been before.

  The synagogue was crammed with black-clad yeshiva bochers, and full-bearded men wearing jeans and knitted kippahs, like Zev. It was the first time he had been in a synagogue since his bar mitzvah, not long before he left home for good. This was not the way Eli remembered synagogue.

  Zev whispered in Eli’s ear, “It’s like we are actually standing at Sinai waiting for Moshe Rabeynu, our great rabbi of rabbis, Moses to bring us God’s commandments. You have no idea how special it is when a Torah scroll is completed. They are not mass produced like some Gideon’s Bible, they are written by hand on parchment the same way they have been written since the time of our prophets.”

  Eli noticed there were no women and thought of his life in New York. His wild days when his shows were doing well: Spy, Berliner; Hotel Cadillac; and Walkabout Willie, all top ten in the Nielsen ratings. Women constantly. He remembered going on a talk show and admitting he was a sex addict. Later he said he had become a Buddhist. He didn’t come home for days at a time, found himself in orgies without even knowing how he got there. His wife was hysterical, threatened to throw him out. It was simple to drink. And then that last night with the prop from the set. Didn’t she know he was only playing?

  Eli saw a room full of praying men and was thankful that temptation had been removed. Had these men also been called by God? And where was God now, hiding in the parchment of the new Torah scroll? A whining clarinet started up and the men began to dance in spinning circles.

  Zev squeezed his hand and pulled him closer to him. “This is great,” he shouted. “I can see us together on Judgment Day, riding the lightning with Moshiach.”

  Eli stood still, trying to maintain his balance. The nap and the coffee had only provided a temporary respite. Zev invited him to join the circle, but he begged off, saying he wanted to watch first. He felt his eyes must have looked like swollen golfballs. His head began to spin again as the men whirled around and around.

  “Am Yisrael Chai, Am Yisrael Chai, Am Yisrael, Am Yisrael, Am Yisrael Chai!” they all sang.

  Zev pumped his fist from where he stood beside Eli and sang along. The room smelled of sweat and one of the dancers slipped on the floor, flying out of the circle.

  “Have some vodka,” the man said, gripping a bottle in his hands. Sweat poured down his face from underneath his large-brimmed hat. He looked like a gangster. This can’t be what God intended, Eli thought.

  “I’m okay,” Eli said.

  “Drink,” he said, climbing to his feet.

  “No,” Eli said.

  “Take a drink,” Zev said, taking the bottle in his hands. “Just one.”

  He gulped at the bottle and a lightning bolt shot straight to his head. He felt adrenaline kick into his heart. The man plunked his hat onto Eli’s head and pulled him into the circle. The Torah scroll appeared, carried by a tiny white-bearded man under a blue wedding huppa, and the men began to whirl even faster. Eli felt his legs melt beneath him, and then he saw feet blurring all around him.

  “Am Yisrael Chai, Am Yisrael Chai, Am Yisrael, Am Yisrael, Am Yisrael Chai!”

  Eli survived on olives, almonds, figs, sage, carob, mint leaves, anything he could find in the hilltops and wadis out there in the wilderness. He slept in caves when he could find them, bathed himself in fresh mountain water, and sometimes didn’t speak a word aloud for weeks.

  One day as he was grazing his sheep on the rough tangled bushes and grasses of the Judean hills, an army jeep pulled to the top of a rocky cliff above him. He could see an Israeli flag standing stiff in the wind. He knew there was no use in running, so he sat among his sheep, staring into the distance. They called and waved him to come up. And now the grass stopped singing to God and Eli’s blood began to churn up again.

  Zev had warned Eli before he left Hebron not to talk to anyone; Arabs, of course, but especially the army.

  “That’s my hill,” Eli shouted and pointed with his staff to another bare hill. “And that belongs to King David.” He had not spoken aloud in such a long time, he was not even sure his voice would carry far enough for them to hear.

  He sat on his carpetbag and looked back toward his sheep. The sun was a giant copper disk, pressing down on his head, and he looked toward his .38 lying nearby.

  A few minutes later a dark, Sephardi-looking soldier wearing a helmet two sizes too big sauntered down the hill lighting a cigarette. “Nudnik. Boker tov,” he called.

  Eli called back good morning in English.

  The soldier lit another cigarette then took off his helmet and sat on it near him. He unstrapped his M-16 and laid it on the ground beside him.

  Eli’s heart began to pump faster than it had since he had come to the wilderness. He could feel his heart squeeze like a fist. He shifted on his pack. Eli thought, this punk is eighteen, nineteen at most. What does he know?

  “Nize day. Cigariah?” He held the cigarette out to Eli, who didn’t say anything. He noticed that the soldier had a terrible case of acne and a long feminine nose. Two soldiers laughed like camels at the top of the hill and danced to music blasting from Army wave radio.

  “You don’t smoke,” the soldier said with a slow thick accent. “You can’t to be here. It’s not safe.”

  “I don’t see any Arabs,” Eli said. “Just me and my sheep.”

  “You are paralyzed to an army shooting range,” the soldier said.

  “You mean ‘parallel’?”

  “It’s not safe,” the soldier repeated.

  “I’m okay,” Eli said. He only wanted the soldiers to go away. But then he thought about his beard, and sidecurls, and the fringes of his tzitzis hanging from his pants and realized: these rock ’n’ rollers think we all look the same.

  “What is that stink?” the soldier said, pinching his nose.

  Eli didn’t even notice anymore that his bag smelled. He didn’t answer.

  “Come. Have some tea and nana in the jeep. Let me invite you,” the soldier said, pointing up to the jeep.

  “No.”

  “You must not to be here,” he said, putting the second cigarette in his mouth. And then one of the other soldiers called to him from the hilltop. “Motti. Yala! Imshi! ”

  He waved him away and said, “You like young girls? Boys? Come to the base. You can’t to be here. We have food and beds to sleep.”

  “What about my sheep?” Eli asked.

  “You like fuck sheep?” The soldier laughed. “Okay. Sheep okay.”

  “Get out of here,” Eli said. “My sheep don’t eat in a mess hall, and I don’t need a bed. The land will take care of us. I can go wherever I want, I’m a Jew on Jewish land.”

  “It’s not safe,” the soldier said.

  “Safe, not safe. I don’t gave a damn.”

  The soldier looked toward the red, black, and green bag again. Eli shifted uneasily. “That is the Palestine colors,” the soldier said, moving closer. “I should take that from you.”

  “No!” Eli screamed in the upper register.

  “I joke,” the soldier said, laughing. “Let me help you carry your sack up the hill.”

  “No,” Eli said forcefully.

  “Homo,” the soldier said, laughing, and ran back to meet his comrades. “You stink.”

  The jeep drove back toward the road, and Eli could still see them laughing. He picked up his .38 Special from the ground and pointed it toward the soldiers in the jeep as they g
ot smaller and smaller in his sight. “Bang,” he whispered. “Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.”

  Eli’s beard grew in thick and gray and he rested in Zev’s bed for the next month. He was restless to answer his God when he first arrived, anxious to walk the land and drink in his wisdom, and he felt God’s spirit burning through his veins, but was too weak to move. This must be a joke, Eli thought. I’m here and I can’t even get out of bed. He threw up in the mornings and apologized to God: “I’m failing you. I’m sorry.” Zev slept on a cot in his makeshift kitchen, cleaned up Eli’s vomit, washed his urine-stained sheets, and nursed Eli back to health.

  During the first week of his convalescence Eli awoke one night and thought he heard Josh calling, “Daddy!” He rolled over to tell his wife to check on him, but the bed was empty. He could see stars and a glowing moon pasted onto the ceiling, as mysterious as the real night sky, and he remembered he was with Zev in Hebron. It frightened him at first and he rolled over, sure that he smelled Kate on the sheets. He felt emptied out inside and thought out loud, “What do I do now? What do I do now?”

  “It’s okay, man,” Zev called from the kitchen. “Trust in Hashem. God will take care of you.”

  “Has God ever whispered in your ear?” Eli said, thinking of the voice that sent him to Hebron, the voice that was silent now.

  “Every day, brother. Every day,” Zev said. “There is nowhere that a Jew can be alone, because wherever he goes, his God is with him.”

  Eli pulled his pillow close to him, remembering the words, “You will walk in my light and follow my laws, and others will too. And I will be your God and their God.”

  “Is God with me?” Eli said.

  “You betcha.”

  It began to dawn on him that maybe Zev was one of God’s angels, sent to watch over him, to lead him in the right direction.

  The next morning Zev began to speak to him of the miracles of Torah study as he fed Eli yogurt and hard-boiled eggs for breakfast.

  “The words of the Torah, man, are like golden vessels,” Zev said, “and the more you scour them and polish them the more they shine and reflect the face of who looks at them.”

  Zev brought Eli a new hardcover translation of the Torah, with Hebrew on one side of the page and English on the other. Eli began to read, slowly, bit by bit, of the creation of man, the sacrifice of Abraham, Jacob’s blessing of Isaac, the darkness of Egypt, and the Exodus.

  He lay propped up against two pillows and thought of his studies as a child for his bar mitzvah. “Are these the same words?” he wondered.

  Later, as his mind wandered to the slick bodies of his past, his hand slid down to stroke himself underneath the blanket.

  “You’re gonna want to save that.”

  Eli stopped.

  The voice?

  It was only Zev standing in the doorway. “You’re not going to flush a nation down the toilet.”

  Zev lit candles for Shabbat and taught Eli the prayer inviting the sabbath bride.

  Eli’s fever began to break near the end of Shabbat and Zev brought in a spice box for him to smell.

  “How are you feeling?” Zev asked, taking a sniff from the silver spice box.

  “Better,” Eli answered. “But awful.”

  “You’re back in the world, man,” Zev said, smiling. “Your eyes are starting to shine again. You know, Torah can do all sorts of miracles, fighting sickness and degradation, even the Angel of Death. Saved my life.”

  The last time Eli had seen Zev before he came to Hebron, Zev was drinking heavily and eating from restaurant Dumpsters. He was in and out of jail. Then one night, under the glow of a big autumn moon, he said, “Going to see the rebbe,” and wandered off.

  “Something inside me just told me it was time,” Zev said. “I went to Brooklyn, man. Met the Lubavitcher rebbe and started studying Torah.”

  Eli learned that Hebron was the first Jewish city and that Abraham bought a field and a cave near Tel Romeida from Ephron the Hittite, and that later his wife and descendants down to Jacob were buried on that land. He learned there was a massacre in 1929 where Jews were torn to pieces by their Arab neighbors after living side by side with them for hundreds of years, and that the Israeli government did not want Jews to resettle and live in Hebron, the City of the Patriarchs.

  If Jews were told that they couldn’t live in one of the five boroughs of New York, Eli thought, if they were told that it was being reserved for blacks and Puerto Ricans and Jews couldn’t live there, people would call it anti-Semitism, racism. So, why shouldn’t I live here, he thought?

  When Eli was well enough, Zev took him to the mikvah and he immersed himself in the cleansing waters of the bath, feeling a new energy flowing through his body. He passed his days studying the words of the Lord and his prophets and began to realize the profound mistakes he had made in his past life. In the book of Hosea he learned that since he had forgotten God and married a Gentile, God would forget his child. He learned in Isaiah that he had been arrogant in his wealth, supplanting God with material gains, and that for punishment he would be “brought down to the netherworld, to the uttermost parts of the pit.” Eli remembered the darkest days after his wife threw him out and he thanked God for bringing him close to his breast. He sang psalms of praise with Zev and slept with the words of the Lord burned into his brain.

  He wore his beard long and a kippah on his head, and prayed daily at the Tomb of Machpelah, the burial place for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their wives. When he wasn’t praying he walked the streets of Hebron. One day a man spat in his face, called him a “Zionist pig,” and cursed at him in Arabic. Eli ran after him, but lost the man in a crowd. He felt proud to be wearing a kippah. He wandered into the Casbah and the merchants would not sell him their wares. He saw a camel hanging upside down from a hook with its intestines spilling from its sides like extension cords and felt nauseated. Children laughed like monkeys and shouted at him as he passed. Eli wondered what God had in mind when he made the Arabs.

  Zev and Eli went for lunch with a rabbi and his wife who lived over at Shilo. The rabbi had planted a bomb that had blown the legs off of an Arab mayor in the eighties and had served thirty months in prison.

  Eli could not imagine spending thirty minutes in prison. The walls would close in on him and he would be alone inside his head. Eli would never go to prison. Never.

  “I don’t want to be a fascist, but I have no choice,” the rabbi had said. “God gave this land to Abraham and the Jewish people, forever.”

  “Forever,” Zev added, popping an olive in his mouth.

  “Listen,” the rabbi said, turning to Eli, “as long as we have this secular system, we are going to have chaos. The waters of Babylon are rising.”

  “This is the Holy Land, man,” Zev said. “Put it back in God’s hands and give him the respect. If you want to be secular, go to America.”

  “I’m done with that,” Eli said. “Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  “You said it, brother,” Zev said. “Hey, today’s leaders, they haven’t even gone to any kind of leadership school. They’re just buying their way into politics and government.”

  “Amen,” Eli said.

  “Amen,” the rabbi said, standing up from the table.

  About a month before the prime minister was assassinated Eli and Zev went to a rally in Jerusalem where thousands of people crowded forward, fists raised in the air, as a man shouted from a podium before a placard that said: DANGER! ALL HANDS TO THE DEFENSE OF JERUSALEM! Their voices all raised as one, cheering at intervals. Their cries rising and falling like waves. Eli smelled something burning and saw gray smoke snaking into the sky.

  “They’re saying the prime minister is the son of an Arab and a Nazi,” Zev said to Eli, a cigarette burning between his lips. “You can’t trade land that God gave Abraham for a piece of paper.”

  The smoke carried a terrible odor over the crowd and smelled like something rotten and foul.

  The crowd let up a roar and Eli felt waves r
olling throughout his body. They were burning the prime minister in effigy and the crowd rushed forward, smashing at the body with sticks until it was beaten to the ground.

  Eli had never felt this connected to anything in his life before, even when the Yankees won the World Series in 1977. He raised his fist in the air and shouted out, “Rabin the traitor, Rabin the traitor.”

  During the curfew, Eli and Zev walked alone through the streets, sloping down to the Beit Hadassah compound where other Jews lived. Zev’s Uzi submachine gun bounced against his back as he walked.

  “Enjoy this,” Zev said, “this quiet won’t last. If you listen carefully, you can hear the violence sizzling in the air.”

  He felt proud, walking through the streets with Zev. This was not the Judaism he remembered.

  Eli thought of the schoolyard in eighth grade when Connor Peters hit him in the head with a roll of pennies and pushed him to the ground shouting, “Pick ’em up, Jew,” as a group of fifth and sixth graders laughed at him. Is this what a Jew is? Eli had thought. He picked up a stone, pulled himself off the ground, and slammed the stone into Connor’s face. Eli remembered that the laughing stopped.

  When his father came to get him from the principal’s office, he saw the two boys; Connor holding a bloody rag to his face, and Eli sitting quietly on the bench. His father looked at Eli with his frozen blue eyes, crossed his arms to cover his tattoo, and said in his thick accent, “Apolochize.”

  At that moment, Eli hated his father. He felt his father had failed a mighty test and had revealed the true nature of the mystery of what it meant to be a Jew.

  On al-Shuhada Street, “the street of the martyrs,” Eli and Zev passed shuttered storefronts spray-painted with Stars of David, some had fists painted inside them. A donkey poked his head out over a low wire fence and brayed. They passed more graffiti in red: “Rabin is an Arab!” “Kahane lives!” “Deport, Kill Arabs!” and then sloppily written and partially crossed out, “With blood and fire, Jews out.”