Authors: Naomi Ragen
She saw the two of them signal to each other with their hands and eyebrows. She imagined it must be code for “meet you later, honey, when the old lady is disposed of.” She felt like the meddling busybody in some Noel Coward comedy, trying to thwart the obvious. She would no doubt achieve the same farcical results. Besides, she had her own problem, she realized. A gigantic one. She actually found Daniel more congenial than Seth, who had always
intimidated her a bit. Also more attractive. He seemed more rugged, more manly. Seth had always secretly reminded her of those male dolls manufactured to serve as Barbie’s boyfriend. She secretly blamed him for Kayla’s leaving. If he had been more of a man, if he had supported her…
“I’ll see you later.” Daniel nodded to them both, turning back into the lit tent. She watched Kayla’s eyes follow him greedily until he disappeared.
“So, how did you like the lecture?”
Abigail was silent for a moment. “Tell me, Kayla, you didn’t say anything to him… your Rav Natan… about… our situation, did you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Ah, I was just wondering if that speech was custom-designed for me…”
Kayla shrugged. “As I’ve already told you, Mom, lots of people here have had ordeals. It’s that kind of place.”
“So I gather. A place to run away to. What is your friend Daniel running from?”
She met her mother’s eyes. “Sorrow.”
“Yes. He has sad eyes.”
Kayla nodded, some of the brightness fading from her own.
“He says he’s a doctor. A medical doctor?”
She nodded. “But he doesn’t practice. Not anymore.”
“He seems a bit young to have retired.”
“It’s a long story.”
“And what’s the story with the black woman and the Asian girl? And that Arab chef with the kaffiyeh who comes to lectures? They aren’t even Jewish.”
“They aren’t. There are people here from all over the world.”
“Really? How did they even find out about this place?”
“Through the Internet. Rav Natan’s lectures are online, translated into several languages. Anyone can read them, or hear them.”
“Why would a Muslim or Christian or Buddhist be so fascinated by what a rabbi has to say? And why, in Heaven’s name, would they travel all the way here just to be near him?”
“Why did Madonna start learning Kabala?” Kayla shrugged. “People all over the world are overwhelmed. Things are happening too fast. Awful things. All the red lines have been crossed. There isn’t a single person alive who isn’t
terrified about the future. No place seems safe anymore. People are searching for a way back, a way out. The old religions seem so helpless.”
“So, you’re founding a new religion here?”
She grinned. “Nothing so exciting, Mom. We are just listening to some of the old wisdom that has been forgotten. Trying to figure out a better way.”
That actually makes sense, Abigail thought. “But what’s with the clothes?”
Kayla laughed. “I also thought it was weird at first. I think people here just shed whatever they’d brought with them because the climate here is so different. And then, a certain style just evolved: comfortable, modest, sun-friendly…”
“But why the turbans? And those colors?”
“A few of the married women decided to follow Orthodox Jewish tradition and cover their hair. But they made the custom their own, doing it with elaborate headdresses and bright colors. My own theory is that it’s sort of a protest against the idea that women should cover themselves up in order to become invisible.”
“They do look pretty!”
Kayla nodded, pleased.
“But why Israel? Why the desert?”
“Some people say that just like some places have an abundance of sunshine or rain, Israel has an abundance of God.”
Could this be true? Abigail thought, strangely elated and even a bit frightened by such a concept.
“And the desert has always been God’s crucible, hasn’t it? It’s got no distractions. It’s easier to find God here. Easier to find yourself. That makes sense, doesn’t it, Mom? And if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re in the same boat. We all are.”
Abigail was silent.
“So, what did you think of the lecture?”
“He’s a very stirring speaker. But maybe that’s because I am so vulnerable right now.”
“Did you do the meditation? That would have clarified things for you.”
“What meditation?”
“He always ends each session with a guided meditation.”
“No, I left before that. It’s… I’m… too…”
“What? Too skeptical?”
“Let’s just say I don’t know if I could force this stiff body into a lotus position.”
“Mom, I know you’re afraid. But that’s normal. It’s terrifying to open yourself up like that. I was so frightened the first time. Being alone with your thoughts is the scariest thing in the world.”
Abigail stiffened. “I’m not afraid.”
Kayla looked at her mother with compassion: “You’ve never had a real communication with God, have you?”
Abigail felt her insides contract. The words scrambled hotly to her lips: “Don’t
presume
to tell me what kind of relationship I’ve had with God! Do you really think you are the first person to discover ‘the meaning of life’? I’ve been around a little longer than you! Everything you think you’ve just discovered is old news.”
“I can see I’ve hurt you.”
Of course, that was true.
“Promise me you’ll try to meditate. Just for ten minutes. It isn’t hard. Just cleanse your mind of everything.”
“I’ve had enough…” Abigail said firmly, rushing down the path back to her room, her heart beating wildly. She slammed the door, then leaned back against it, feeling dizzy with anger, and sorrow. Could Kayla be right? Was she terrified of facing a God she didn’t really know, had never encountered despite a lifetime of faithful ritual observance? Or was it herself she was afraid to meet? Had it all been a waste, then? Years invested in faith with nothing to show, and one minute alone with herself and God too much to bear?
She walked out of the room into the night. There were so many, many stars! A kaleidoscope of diamonds that had been hovering over her for a lifetime unseen, hidden by city lights. An amazed shudder went through her.
She closed her eyes, sinking down to the ground, her back resting against a tree. Her mind went suddenly blank—a white screen with no subtitles, a white nothingness, an emptiness. This is stupid, she thought, jumping up and opening her eyes. But some mysterious force pulled her down again. She closed her eyes once more, leaning back. She sat awkwardly at first, sensitive to the slightest discomfort, shifting to make her legs more comfortable, taking her elbows
off her knees. Gradually, she found a place for all her limbs, which seemed to melt away, moving out of her consciousness. She was no longer a body, she realized, just a yearning soul crying out in the wilderness in its terrifyingly separateness. She took deep breaths, trying to keep herself from panicking.
Then came the images. She glimpsed a sea turtle gliding along the ocean floor in the Great Barrier Reef. Giant sea lions basking in the sun on a riverbank in Alaska. The sunset over the ocean in Kauai.
Maybe this is what it’s like to die—she suddenly thought. Your consciousness lives on with all its experiences and memories, detached from anything physical. You have no arms with which to embrace, or build, or fight. No legs to carry you from place to place. No eyes to see outward, only inward toward memories. No taste, but the memory of taste.
The living were blessed with powers to create. When these powers were gone, they never returned, she understood for the first time, startled at how simple a thing that was, how simple and true. She felt like mourning everything she had not yet done, filled with a new ambition to use her lips to pray while she still could; her tongue to taste delicious fruits while she still could; to dance, to kiss, to speak, to sing a beautiful new song. So many things that only the living can do for such a short time.
“Dear God, help my family. Help me to find You again.”
For the first time in a very long time, she could hear God listening. She understood how distant they had become, and how lonely she had been for Him. And how lonely He had been for her.
“Mom, there you are! I was so worried…”
Abigail got up and held out her arms, enfolding her daughter’s young body, all the years stored up ahead of her to feel and experience, all the years to create those things she would take with her into eternity. Who was she, or Adam, or anyone, to take those choices from her, the essence of being alive, the freedom to choose?
“I’m so sorry, Mom! I never wanted to hurt you or Dad! I’ve been incredibly selfish. Dad needs me. And… Seth. I’ve treated him really badly. Maybe you are right. Maybe I should go home.”
“NO! NO!” Abigail wanted to shout: “Don’t do it! Don’t weaken! Don’t listen to me! Or your father. We don’t know anything!” Instead, she found
herself thinking of Adam, alone in the house thousands of miles away. She was here to plead his case, to wrench her daughter back to familiar ground, to the only life they had both ever known.
“That would make your father and Seth very happy, Kayla,” she said, betraying them both.
24
When Kayla rose for work early the next morning, her body felt heavy and her mind dizzy with uncertainty. For weeks, she had been jumping out of bed joyfully, eager for the day to come. She had come to love the tingling cold as she walked to and from the showers to her tent, the hot cup of coffee, the easy conversation with Daniel and the others as they bumped down the road to the tel. Recently, the dig had begun to yield some fascinating artifacts—coins, utensils, even a gold ring. There was a growing excitement in the act of plunging her shovel into the ancient earth, as if it were a treasure hunt, or a story whose exciting plot unfolded day by day.
But now she was torn. Was it merely obligation and guilt? Or were her parents right? If she went back now, she could talk to her professors, even patch things up with Seth. She might even be able to redeem herself with her father although she was undoubtedly more useful to him exactly where she was. But he didn’t know that. By moving back into the house, she could give both her parents true moral support. In no time at all, she could get her old life back. The question was: Did she want it back? Were those words she had spoken to her mother true, or a cover? Was she tossing away her future on a childish whim, an act which could never be undone? Or was staying the most adult decision she had ever made?
She looked up at the great mountain towering over her, and it seemed to look back, as if it were trying to tell her something. But what? It wasn’t like looking into a mirror, she thought, which reflects back what you want to see, the sum of all your artifices. The opposite. It somehow forced you to look inside at all the things you wished to hide, even from yourself. Was it not enormous hubris, she asked herself, to even try to live in such a place? It was so harsh and pitiless, forcing human beings to draw a line in the sand between life and nothingness. Only so far, we say to the desert. Here, at this line, life begins and flourishes. We can do this, make this bloom, because we are human. We can keep back the tide of encroaching death. We are stronger than the silence. We can fill the air with sound.
Equally hard to believe was that a settlement filled with people who had had the same religion, rituals, and God as her own family had lived and flourished here two thousand years before. They had come here looking for purity, brotherhood, and peace. They believed it was possible, if not for themselves, then for future generations, prophesying in their scrolls about the coming of a different age, a holy age when mankind would once again find its way, undoing all the human harm that had been wreaked on Eden.
She thought about The Talmidim, this strange community in the middle of nowhere, led by its strange preacher, a man who had roamed the ashrams of India and the mountains of the Himalayas, only to find that all he learned pointed him back to his own roots and the land of his birth. Like those before him, he had come with some followers to this place, trying like them to plant the seed of a new kind of human community, based on old rules that had simply been forgotten. And others, hearing about it, had followed, many of them drifters, most of them wounded, in one way or another, by human selfishness or violence, people who had tried and failed to find a home elsewhere in more hospitable surroundings. In this unforgiving, almost inhuman environment, they had finally found community, and friendship, and hope. As they huddled together on this small mountaintop, they nourished these things, the way a man lost in a snowstorm fiercely nurtures and protects a small flame he has managed to ignite.
It was impractical, silly really. How would they ever support themselves?
From goat’s milk? From tourists? From selling tapes of Rav Natan’s lectures on busy intersections to indifferent drivers? From their savings? And when the savings ran out, then what?
She looked around at what they had planted: the baobab tree, brought as a seed from Africa; the ficus and the fast-growing cotton silk; the myrrh and frankincense bushes; and the Sodom apple trees, which let loose thousands of pieces of fluff, each holding a seed in its center that the wind carried for miles. She looked up at the top of the mountain, where the fig trees flourished. Fed by an artesian well that had taken a hundred years to travel through the mountains from Jerusalem, the water had finally reached this spot to nourish their roots. It was unimaginable.
Looking at all this flourishing growth made you think God had changed His mind and decided to bless this place after all, plucking it out of desolation. It made you believe in miracles, in taking leaps of faith.
She loved it.
But what of tomorrow? she thought. What would it be like here in the summer, if it was so hot in the middle of the winter? The heat would be unbearable, although there were those who had borne it. And what of next year, and the year after?
Once again, she felt that tightness in her chest she thought she had left behind her forever, along with her textbooks and day planner. It made her want to cry. She didn’t know what to do. Her gut was telling her one thing, her mind another.