Jerusalem

Such a city.  Rabbi Aharon Handalman had lived in Jerusalem for twelve years, and he was still amazed by it.  He always left home before the crack of dawn so he could watch the sunlight warm the stones.  There was a cold bite to the air this morning.  His black wool coat and hat absorbed it like a sponge.

Aharon, along with his wife, Hannah, and their three children, lived in the new Orthodox housing near the Valley of Ben-Hinnom.  At this time of the day, without the squeal and clamor of little ones, the plain, square apartments felt as hollow as cardboard boxes.  They fell away behind him as he walked, the ancient walls appearing on his right like the edge of a woman’s skirts. 

He drew close to the Jaffa gate.  Before it rose the Tower of David, a thin and pointed shadow in the darkness.  He turned into the city, the stone rising above his head.  His fingers trailed along the arch as he passed, the Shma Yisroel on his lips.

Down the ancient avenue he went, into the heart of Yerushalayim.  The roads outside these walls – especially Jaffa Road -- were too modern for his tastes.  Advertisements for Camel cigarettes and donuts marred shop fronts.  But once inside the twenty-first century fell away.  Now he only had to deal with the indignities of the Christian Quarter on the left and the Armenian on the right.  He walked quickly past these invaders, his lip curling.  He could continue straight ahead, but it was his habit to turn into heart of the Jewish quarter, choosing alleys and courtyards for their aroma of antiquity.  Later today, they would be crowded with kaftans and T-shirts, with cheap madonnas and stars of David.  But now they were only dim stone chutes that might have existed a thousand years ago, two thousand, more.

He, Rabbi Aharon Handalman, might have been from a different time as well: forty years old, of average height and weight, still handsome, brown eyes glittering, brown beard free from gray as it hung long and untrimmed, his black clothes roughly twentieth century.  If the clock were rolled back a twenty years he would not be out of place; two hundred years and the cut of his clothing might be a bit odd; two thousand years, put him in a different outfit and call it good.  He liked to think that at heart, at heart, he was unchanged from his ancestors, unchanged from an Israelite who trod this very path on his way to the Temple in the days of Jeremiah.  Reading the scriptures he identified exactly with the feelings of the prophets: that Jerusalem was storing up sins for some divine retribution thanks to the unholy ways of her people.  In the days of Jeremiah that had meant harlots and drunkards and Jews with no sense of their past.  In the days of Aharon Handalman that meant cut-off shorts and Uzis and Jews with no sense of their past.  Even Moses had voiced the same frustration: You are a hard-necked people.  More than stones never changed.

He went past the Dung Gate, down a set of stairs and through a security checkpoint.  The soldiers knew him but insisted on patting him down.  Orthodox rabbis drew as much suspicion as Palestinians these days, but with the crazy state of the world, who could blame them?  Then he was through and in front of HaKotel, the Western Wall, the only remnant of the Second Temple.

The light was rosy, pinkening the cream-colored edifice.  As always, he approached with a sense of privilege, of excitement, like a bridegroom.  He crossed to the Wall, lowering his hands gently to the cold stone, then his forehead, with the tender sigh of a lover. 

Around him were several dozen others saying their morning prayers at this sacred spot.  Some were haredim with beards, side-locks and fur hats.  Aharon, who was Orthodox but not haredim, had a beard but no side-locks, and his hat was a simple black wool fedora with a kippa, a skullcap, underneath. 

He joined a minyan of early risers from his synagogue and opened his briefcase.  He took out his tallit and tefillin, kissing them.  He wrapped himself in the prayer shawl and put on the ancient leather straps with their boxes of scripture first on his left arm then his forehead.  And he began to pray, rocking in front of the wall. 

Even though there was no pretense in it, he was not unaware of the picture he made: stately, paternal, rabbinical.  He was proud to be making it.  Someone had to show the world what being a Jew was all about.

An hour later, Aharon was in his office at Aish HaTorah.  Aish HaTorah was a ‘master of the return’ school, designed to teach Unorthodox Jews the ways of Orthodoxy.  The Jews in question were usually young Americans whose parents were non-practicing or (which was maybe worse) Conservative or Reformed.  Aharon taught Talmud and Midrash.  It wasn’t much money, but it placed him across from the Wall all day, and his class schedule left him plenty of time to pursue his real passion – Torah code.

The code was the flame in Aharon’s heart.  The greatest rabbis had always known there were messages hidden in the Torah, but the sages, may they rest in peace, didn’t have microchips.  Now you could run a program, give it a keyword like ‘heaven,’ and the search routine would scan the Hebrew letters of the Torah looking for the keyword hidden in the text.  A ‘hidden’ word appeared via Equidistant Letter Spacing – the ELS or skip.  For example, the plaintext phrase “The Rabbis hoped and prayed for God to lead the people over land and over sea to the kingdom of their being, Eretz Yisrael” contained the hidden word ‘heaven’ at a skip of eleven: “The Rabbis hoped and prayed for God to lead the people over land and over sea to the kingdom of their being, Eretz Yisrael.”

What had really stunned the world was the presence of arrays of related words and phrases in the Hebrew bible.  Arrays were arrangements of the plaintext letters into columns the width of the skip.  These arrays made it easier to find related words or phrases near the original keyword.  

The fact that such arrays were sought in the Hebrew version of the text made the task both easier and harder.

But . . . the scientific community was outraged, naturally.  What good could atheists have to say about divinely implanted messages?  Their most damning rebuttal showed that similar ‘themed word arrays’ could be found in any text – War and Peace, for example.  Hence Aharon’s current line of research.

He was still puzzling over the latest stack of printouts when Binyamin Yoriv came in.

“Good!”  Aharon grunted.  “I have a riddle for you.”

“Is that from last night’s test?”  Binyamin crossed to the desk.  Aharon shrank back.  The boy had halitosis and a skin problem that left scales in his wake.  It was written that God gave everyone a mix of assets and flaws, but Binyamin’s assets, like the Torah code itself, were extremely well hidden.

“What happened?” Binyamin asked.  “Was there a bug in the program?”

“No.”

“But there are too many pages.”

“Nothing is lost on you, Binyamin.” 

Aharon waited for the boy to catch on as he scanned the three-inch stack. His scaly eyebrows went up.  “Hey, one of our search phrases, ‘Yosef Kobinski’ is really in all these arrays.  That’s strange.”

“Strange?  Three hundred arrays for one little rabbi.  As usual, you understate the case.”

Aharon wheeled his chair to the left, not only to get away from Binyamin’s exhalation zone, but also to pick up Chachik’s Encyclopedia – a Who’s Who of Jewish scholars.  “I would say my theory has been disproven, wouldn’t you?”

“What was your theory?”

Aharon felt a spark of aggravation.  He had explained this three or four times already.  “Witzum, Rips, and Rosenberg, in their Statistical Science article, took the names of the thirty greatest rabbis from this very encyclopedia.  They found code arrays for each rabbi where his name appeared close to his birth and death dates, nu?”

“I know.”

“That’s good that you know.  I know, too.”

“So --”

“So they took the rabbis with the longest entries in this encyclopedia.  I took the shortest.”

“What for?”

“Think!”

Binyamin appeared to give it a legitimate effort.  He shrugged.

“Someday you’re going to learn how to use that brain of yours.  Then again, someday the dead will rise, so it is written.”

“Rabbi—”

“So we run the same test they did with a new set of data, that is point one.  If we find arrays for all these rabbis also, it is further proof of the code.  As for my own theory, I had a little idea that the ‘lesser’ rabbis would appear in the code less often than the ‘greater’ rabbis.  If we could show that it would be very difficult to explain with War and Peace!”

Binyamin pointed to the open encyclopedia.  “But Rabbi Kobinski has only one paragraph, yet he appears in three hundred arrays.  That’s even more than the Baal Shem Tov, the most famous rabbi ever.”

Aharon tapped his temple, looking pained.  “Didn’t I say it disproved my theory?”

“So how come—”

“That’s the question, Binyamin, how come, as you so eloquently put it.”

“Must be a characteristic of the name – common letters or something.”

Aharon stroked his beard.  “Yosef -- perhaps.  But the phrase we searched for was ‘Yosef Kobinski.’  How common could it be?”  Aharon picked up Chachik’s and began reading the Kobinski entry out loud:  “‘Yosef Kobinski, Brezeziny, Poland.  Born, Tish’ah b’Av, 5660.’”

“1900,” Binyamin calculated quickly.

“‘Died, Kislev, 5704.’”

“November, 1943.”

Aharon rolled his eyes.  The boy had failed a test on dates last month.  As usual, he had learned it only after the rest of the class had moved on.

“‘Rabbi Kobinski was a student of Rabbi Eleazar Zaks, the famous kabbalist of Brezeziny.  He studied physics at the University of Warsaw and later taught there before leaving to pursue kabbalah.  Rabbi Kobinski was considered by many to be a genius of kabbalah.  His first and only book, The Book of Mercy, was a prelude to great things.  Unfortunately, he was lost in the holocaust when he died at Auschwitz.’”

Aharon leaned back, the chair groaning with his weight.  Yes, this certainly killed his theory.  Who had even heard of Kobinski-of-the-three-hundred-arrays?  Nobody.   A burning in his chest bothered him enough that he popped antacids from his linty pocket.  He noticed that his fingers were puffy.  (‘Salt’, Hannah would say, ‘heart’, she’d remind him, and he’d ignore her.)

“Maybe he is important.  Or will be.”  Binyamin poked his glasses up with an extended middle finger.

“He’s dead.  Somehow I don’t think he has any more tricks up his sleeve.”  

 “So whaddya wanna do?”

Aharon frowned at the boy from under bushy eyebrows.  “‘What do I want to do?’   Is that what you’re trying to ask, with your fine language?  I’ll tell you.  We’re going to see if there’s something special about our new friend.  We’ll take a few other words from the biography.  Let’s see.”  He scrabbled for a pencil and notepad.  “Brezeziny.  Eleazar Zaks.  The Book of Mercy.  Auschwitz.”  He tore off the page and handed it to Binyamin.

“All together?” Binyamin regarded the list with a squint.

“No,” Aharon said, with a martyr’s sigh.  “No, no, no.  Run each of them separately as keywords.  See if you can find any of those words in these three hundred arrays.”  He fanned the stack on the desk.

Binyamin shoved up his glasses again, his mouth open in an ‘oh.’  “That will take a while.”

“Nu?  You have better things to do?”

Aharon went to the hook on the back of the door and took up his prayer shawl.  It was time for his first class of the day.  He opened the door, waited.  Binyamin just stood there lumpishly. 

“After class?” Aharon reminded him.

As they walked down the hall, Aharon felt a new lift in his step.  He had the distinct feeling he had just had a stroke of luck.  That in itself was not so amazing.  The sages say ‘Even a fool has luck.’ What you did with the luck, that was the tricky part.