So he does and chooses the left fork and soon recognizes bits of landscape from the morning. Relieved, he starts humming a tune and picks up speed. Then he glances at the woman whose short stay in Africa has added color to her face.
"During your career did you ever teach the Bible?"
Yes, years ago she substituted for a Bible teacher who was ill, and for a week read the story of Joseph and his brothers with her class. It was easy enough.
"Joseph and his brothers? A charming tale of a whole family that settled in Africa following one brother, the administrator. The texts in Genesis are miniature stories that can be interpreted any which way. They tell of a family that is not yet a people, and in this family, the great obsession of the patriarchs is to produce as many descendants as possible, so there'll be someone to graze the sheep, but over and over they discover to their dismay that they have married women who have a serious problem getting pregnant. Once Shuli and I went to a memorial service for the father of friends of ours, and instead of talking about the father who had died they brought some sort of lecturer, an author or poet, who rebound the binding of Isaac, and then I saw how it's possible to find new ore in texts that have been mined over and over. This lecturer tried to describe what the whole story of the captive son and the big knife looked like from down below, from the point of view of the two youths who were guarding Abraham's donkey at the foot of the mountain."
It's three o'clock already, and a wind starts up across the plain, yet the air remains hazy. Sunlight strikes the windshield, revealing spatters of dead bugs.
"You have to clean this windshield once in a while," Daniela comments.
"I also noticed," says her brother-in-law, ignoring her, "that all those public lectures about the Bible are generally about nice, clear-cut subjects. Jacob and Esau, the Song of Songs, Jephthah's daughter, Samuel and Saul, David and Absalom, Jacob's love for Rachel, Cain and Abel, Samson and Delilah. They all take the easy road, avoiding the really hard stuff, the violent texts where the prophets rant and rave."
"The prophets? I don't think I ever looked at them after my matriculation exams."
"Me neither, until Eyal was killed. And then I reread them, prophet after prophet, and suddenly one day I saw the profound curse that has penetrated the genes of this people."
"After Eyal was killed you studied the prophets?"
"Only for a little while, but intensively. It all started with the Foreign Ministry's assistant director-general, a religious and cultured man, who delicately proposed to organize a minyan in our home during the seven-day shivah mourning. And because he was my superior, and I knew I'd need him if I wanted another foreign assignment, I couldn't say no. And I didn't really mind, because Shabbat fell in the middle of the shivah, which left only four mornings for prayer. And since he also agreed not to ask me to strap on phylacteries, I said, Why not? You two were staying in a hotel in Jerusalem, and Amotz, when he would come for the prayers, also got a little friendly with this man."
"His name wasn't by any chance Michaeli, or Rafaeli?"
"Rafaeli, that's right. Amazing how you remember unimportant names."
"It comes from teaching. From faculty meetings where they would seal the fate of students I had never even seen. Amotz rather liked him."
"Yes, he is a good man. Even after the shivah ended, he kept on going with the religious instruction. Very tactfully, without pressure, and most important, without the usual sentimental schmaltz. Only now are you setting forth on the journey of grief, he said to me, so allow me to suggest a few texts you aren't familiar with, perhaps you may find some insight in them.
"I mainly got from him various reprints and photocopies of articles from Modern Orthodox journals, and I would even discuss these with him, but soon enough I realized that this was not for me. The bridge between the nonbeliever and the make-believe believer is sticky and rickety. So I said to him, Listen, my friend, maybe for starters I'll just read a little Bible, and we'll take it from there.
"So that's how I started reading the Bible, from the beginning. The Book of Genesis is very nice. Forefathers, mothers, sons and their brides, brothers and sisters, rivalries and jealousies. Except it didn't seem to me that the fathers took much interest in their sons, except for Jacob and your Joseph; if they're not going to slaughter them, they banish them from their homes, or just stop caring.
"Afterward I read a little more of the Torah, the five books of Moses — how the struggles and conflicts begin between Moses and the mob that came out of Egypt with him and now long for meat with garlic and onions, instead of which they get a severe religion. These poor souls seem to sense what will soon befall them and begin to rebel against this cosmic faith, this authoritarian and demanding creed, which got pinned on this one little people. Interesting that this Rafaeli, for all his religiosity, told me that there's an audacious theory that claims that Moses didn't die a natural death but that the Israelites murdered him. I wanted to tell him, If that's so, it's too bad they didn't kill him thirty or forty years sooner, but I didn't say anything. One good thing you can say about these stories in the Torah is that their prose is clear, not overwritten or rambling. There's no deceptive double-talk as with the prophets. The Torah does have rebukes and curses, but they're concentrated in one place, and the hopes and consolations in another place. There's order in the world.
"And then I read a little of Joshua and mainly Judges. Those little wars are quite amusing, breaking out all the time in all sorts of places in the land of Israel, just like today; and accordingly in some remote town there will pop up a homegrown judge — Ehud, Gideon, Deborah, Jephthah, Samson — to do battle for a while and then disappear. True democratic rotation."
The car arrives at a new fork and stops. What's this? The driver interrupts the stream of his lecture. Where did this come from? And he shields his eyes with his hand and peers toward the horizon.
"You can't see a thing through this filthy windshield," Daniela says, and asks the driver for some water and a cloth. He removes a dirty rag from under his seat and hands her an army canteen, and she pours water on the windshield and starts scraping off the dead bugs. Yirmiyahu gets out and starts to walk down the road to the left, looking for tracks from the Land Rover from the morning, then does the same for the right fork.
"If we go the wrong way, remember this is where it started," he warns Daniela as he turns the car to the left, out of mere faith that this is the right direction. Sijjin Kuang was so involved in struggling to convince her Arab patient to stay at the sanatorium that she forgot to provide the Jews with detailed directions home.
"Nevertheless," Daniela says, smiling ironically, "it makes me happy to hear that you still think of yourself as a Jew."
"But I am peeling it off. Soon enough I will be a muzungu to the Jews."
She gives him one of her radiant looks, guaranteed to inspire trust. Over many years she has trained herself to listen calmly to the idiosyncratic opinions, some of them childish, of this man. But the ideas he has formulated in recent times have gone over the limit. Daniela is certain that if he were to find, even at his age, a new partner, her sister, too, would have been pleased.
"Yirmi, look closely, you sure you're on the right road?"
"Not certain, but I believe so. Despite those two huge trees tangled up in each other, which I don't remember from the morning."
"I actually think I do remember them."
"If so, Little Sister," he says, tapping on the wheel with self-satisfaction, "we're on the right track, and for the duration you have no choice but to listen to a synopsis of what I think of the prophets, and you'll see why supposedly awesome poetic passages make my blood boil. Because people like us, lazy secular people, who wave the flag of the ethical teachings of the prophets, don't actually read them. They remember one lovely verse, some lines that have been set to music, swords beaten into plowshares. They attack the Orthodox in the name of prophetic morality, they speak about universal justice, about courage and nonconformity — without examining too closely what this courage was for and where the nonconformity leads. Because if you look at them, you find that all of these teachings keep hammering the same nail. Who owns the justice? By what authority is it maintained? Is it universal justice, or only the justice of the God of Israel, in a package deal of loyalty? Yes, it turns out that this justice is tied to loyalty to God, and the rage is not about the welfare of widows and orphans but about unfaithfulness to God, who is basically a kind of crazed husband, jealous of his one and only wife whom he latched onto in the desert and has tormented ever since with his commandments. The great social drama is simple jealousy. And because the language is so majestic, and the rhetoric so hypnotic, we don't pay attention to what's said between the lines."