In a light that is fierce and strong one can see the world dissolve. To weak eyes it becomes solid, to weaker eyes it shows fists, before still weaker eyes it feels ashamed and smites down him who dares to look at it.
Rachel’s husband, Dov, had come quietly into the study and stood behind her now where she was seated in her chair, his hand on her shoulder. He was gruff, nearly silent, a white-haired and white-bearded physicist in an expensive blue suit and yarmulke.
“We’ve been going through these old boxes,” Rachel said to me then. “It was such a strange thing — we just happened to be moving to this new house right when Eliav died. I guess in some ways that was good. It obviously gave us something else we had to think about.”
She had the album of photographs still in her lap. There was another thing she wanted to tell me that afternoon, it turned out, something she’d never told anyone before, except for Dov. She told me that Eliav used to say that he had a recurring nightmare. In this recurring nightmare, he was forced to stand in an empty room and watch while his father was executed.
“I always thought that was strange,” she said, looking down, the photo album in her lap now forgotten, unseen. “Not for the obvious reason, but because I had never thought of it as happening in a room. I had pictured it happening outside. But in the nightmare it would happen in a room. An empty room. ‘I was in the room where it happened,’ Eliav would say.”
In my hotel room that night, I read Haaretz, then the Jerusalem Post, all the while the TV news on in the background, a stream of images accompanied by words I couldn’t understand. Apart from Iran and the fear of Iran, the news seemed to be largely about fanaticism — extremist Jewish settlers who had attacked an Israeli military base in the West Bank, some ultra-Orthodox men who had spat on a young girl walking to school in clothes they deemed insufficiently modest. Though I’d arrived just a few days ago, Israel was already unlike what I remembered from my last trip. I felt surrounded this time not by ancient intractable conflict but by cynical gloating — Orthodox women in clothes so unflattering you wondered where they found the stores that sold such items, their sons in football jerseys and basketball shoes and embroidered kippot. I connected my laptop to the hotel’s Wi-Fi and looked further into the story about the settlers who’d attacked the military base. John Walker Lindh — that’s who they reminded me of — the suburban American boy who through aimless disaffection had wound up joining the Taliban. The settlers, I learned, were part of a broader movement known as the Hilltop Youth, who desecrated mosques, assaulted Palestinians and destroyed their fields, and had now attacked one of Israel’s own military bases. It was a photograph, as it often is, that sealed my interest. The image seemed to encapsulate all the contradictions of this group of mostly young men and their romanticized relationship to violence — the organic farming in the desert, the camping and mountaineering T-shirts, the scraggly beards and talisim and ornate skullcaps, their remote outposts consisting of corrugated aluminum sheds, or just tents and old sofas, plastic tarps and rifles and guitars. The incoherent need to believe in something — the need that then goes looking for a cause, an ideal. Fighting the Man. Fighting the Palestinians. Fighting nothing. I had a sudden waking dream there in my hotel room of David Bellen being marched across a field by some of those boys in their beards and cargo pants. I saw it very clearly: Bellen struggling forward over the rocky ground, stooped over and handcuffed, his arms exposed by the short sleeves of a stained white undershirt. His glasses were broken, his face smeared with blood. He was like an animal left in their care, a repository of some collective shame that had to do with the boys’ need to punish him. Whatever game they were playing now was played solemnly, without words, without taunting or joy. It was obvious that Bellen knew what would happen next.
The place I walked to the next morning was Me’a Shearim, the center of ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem, once a planned neighborhood of garden apartments for middle-class secular Jews, now a slum without gardens, trees, or vegetation of any kind. The cement or concrete buildings had deteriorated into something that looked remarkably like a modern version of an eighteenth-century shtetl, a place of sagging floors and flaking paint, no ornament other than the practicalities of business signs and political and religious bulletins. Laundry hung in the spaces between the beige and gray buildings. Car exhaust, litter, broken toys. It was a shtetl not by design but by choice, a ghetto or a Lower East Side slum not by design but by choice. If I’d been less irrational that morning, I might have remembered that no one had asked me to go to Me’a Shearim — in fact, there were large signs urging strangers not to intrude. It was the Sabbath, and would be the third night of Hanukkah, and so there were people out shopping for the evening meal, the storefronts open to reveal a few pale apples, onions, sacks of potatoes. I felt like a stranger in the broadest sense. “Strange,” because although the people around me were Jews, as was I, none of them looked at me, not even by accident, not once. The men wore black hats and dark suits with white shirts, or they wore outlandish silk robes and silk stockings, round fur-trimmed crowns called shtreimlech. The women were sexless, all but invisible. I was from some other place and time — probably I wasn’t a Jew at all in their minds. Rachel had invited me to Shabbat dinner at her house that night but I had declined, because in addition to Hanukkah and Shabbat, it was also the third anniversary of David Bellen’s murder. I imagined the prayers and rituals I wouldn’t know, the yahrzeit candle in its glass, and I thought of Gila’s word yored. The prayers and rituals in light of that word seemed like ash from some fire that had burned through generations of strangers who happened to be my ancestors. I didn’t want to speak to my ancestors. I didn’t want to hear what they thought of me.
In a light that is fierce and strong one can see the world dissolve. To weak eyes it becomes solid, to weaker eyes it shows fists, before still weaker eyes it feels ashamed and smites down him who dares to look at it.
Dumpsters, air-conditioning units, the street beneath my feet crumbling and rutted with potholes, almost a dirt road in places. I tried to remember that the people before me were meant to be uninterested in the griminess of the physical world, that in their devoutness they were focused instead on the imminent, holy presence beneath its surface. But the more I looked at them, the more I thought of another passage from Kafka:
What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.
The third anniversary of Bellen’s murder. When I got back to my hotel that afternoon, I looked over the piece I’d written about it in 2009, particularly at the ending, where I quote an e-mail, presumably from Oded Voss, tying the murder to organized crime: