Two days after the war started, Aaron’s exhausted. He doesn’t know if it’s because of the multiple times he wakes up at night, or the tension that grows every time he runs to the shelter, or the fact that he spent all day alone in Shammai’s apartment. He tried to meet up with people during the day, but everyone’s either working from home or taking care of their families. That’s the problem with visiting your homeland, even when there’s no war – everyone’s got their own life, and they don’t stop living it just because you dropped by. 

In the evening, he’s invited to two events. The first is a Zoom call with a group of friends, one of whom is afraid to leave his house for the fear that a rocket will fall on him (a fear Aaron finds a little ridiculous, even as he sympathizes). The second is an invitation to Yael’s apartment to eat salad and maybe talk about movies before she goes off to a medical appointment.

He leans towards staying inside, crashing on the couch and chatting with his bodiless friends. But if humanity learned anything in 2020, it’s that being with people, physically, is what counts. He dresses, camera off, while listening to his friends through the computer’s speakers, and in a feat of sheer willpower gets himself out of the house. Now he’s just tired–but he knows there’s a way worse feeling waiting for him if he stays in.

After so long indoors, even the simple car ride is dizzyingly invigorating. 

On the way to Yael’s house he passes Oved’s Sabih, a landmark of Israeli junk food. Aaron respects it from afar – he’s never understood how a deep-fried eggplant inside a pita can be regarded as a meal. The smell of oil pours downhill to him, as if the air is heavy with it, and sinking.

Her house, if you could call it that, is a residential unit within another unit. There’s a living room, a bedroom, and about a square meter for both toilet and shower. The entrance is a tall window so narrow that Aaron can’t get in without tilting his shoulders sideways. They do a small, embarrassing dance when she makes room for him to enter, but this also shows that she’s waiting to hug him. 

Yael is an improbable combination. Aaron met her at a meetup for readers of a blog that deals mostly with rationality and psychiatry. She picked the place, brought watermelons and water, and asked for nothing in return. Among the conversations about artificial intelligence and different drug policies, she stood out by starting a discussion about the horror movie she was writing at the time, and whether AI could be used to create particularly scary special effects. Rational without being emotionless, clever without being a showoff. Aaron adores her scripts – her protagonists tend to be resourceful but still gentle and full of emotion, like her. 

When they’re done hugging, even Aaron can see something’s bothering her.

“I was just at a memorial candle-lighting for the victims of the massacre,” she says, after he asks what’s up. “It wasn’t a demonstration or anything—we just went, lit the candles, chatted a bit, and left. We had flags with us, though¹. Somebody passed us in a car, slowed down, and yelled ‘leftie traitors!’. That was it. He didn’t get out of the car and stab somebody, didn’t spit on us—he just claimed that we were leftie-traitors. Those aren’t two separate words, mind you: he didn’t note that out of the group of ‘lefties’ we’re a part of the subgroup of ‘traitors’. It was one word—he used it to argue that there aren’t lefties who aren’t traitors.”

“It’s not a debate,” Aaron says. “It’s a war, and the winning move is not to prove that we’re wrong, just to posit the fact that you’re not allowed to be a leftie. You can no longer say out loud that we should kill fewer people and maybe fix our country.”

In the last couple of months, a lot of video calls that Aaron tried to initiate from Canada were postponed because of the many demonstrations against judicial reforms that were happening in Israel. While he was drinking his Saturday morning coffee on a chilly balcony, Yael was sweating in the heat of fires on a main highway on Saturday evening. These demonstrations were a phenomenon never before seen in the state of Israel. Things had never been so bad, but also, if the protestors were to be believed, there had never been such unity. These demonstrations were widespread, held every Saturday for months. 

As Aaron’s grandmother learned in Poland, the moment you say “things are the worst I’ve ever seen them” once, don’t be surprised to say the same thing the month after, and the one after that. The moment a ship starts to sink, the passengers should expect it to keep sinking.  

But Yael doesn’t expect it to keep sinking. Science, wrote the supreme poet Serj Tenkian, failed to recognize the single most potent element of human existence—faith. 

“Did I tell you about my visit to the post office? My usual branch wasn’t open, so I went to the Bnei Brak² branch. I said to myself, what does it matter? Religious or not religious, it’s just mail. So I wait in line and I remember I have a tank top on because I’m getting some stares. It’s a little annoying, but not anything to get loud about. Just as I’m about to leave, a man who’s been waiting in line approaches me and says – Look, I respect you, it’s all good, but I ask you to respect me too, and next time don’t come to our mail office dressed like that.”

Aaron says something I’d rather not document.

“So I told him – Look, I don’t agree with what you’re saying, but we can talk about it. And he says – I don’t want to talk about it.” She raises her hands in frustration. “What do you mean, you don’t wanna talk about it? You approached me. And he says – I don’t want to have a discussion. I’m just making a request. So I said okay and left.”

Aaron says, “And that’s how he determines the status quo. Next time you go there you’ll have to decide whether to wear a T-shirt, to avoid the same situation, or a tank top, out of principle, which is also unpleasant. And a lot of women would just prefer to cover up, which will only make you more of an odd one out, and his request supposedly more legitimate. One step at a time they draw the line about what’s okay and what’s not.”

She slams her hand on her thighs. “Why do we need this shit? Why can’t everybody just be cool?”

“Because it’s a war. They’re fighting to make this country what they think it should be. And it’s much more important for them to win than to enjoy their lives, and that’s precisely why they’re winning.”

“Okay okay, enough. Let me deal with one war at a time. What about you?”

He tells her about his idea for a horror movie, based on a bunch of his friends who rented a villa together as soon as the war started because they didn’t have saferooms in their houses. One of the friends woke everyone up when she thought she heard somebody walking on the roof. “How cool would it be to make a movie where the characters aren’t a couple of teenagers going to a cabin on summer vacation, but instead some exhausted thirty-somethings who rent a villa so they can sleep at night without worrying about getting hit by a rocket. And then a monster comes along.”

“What kind of monster?” she asks.

“No idea. A vampire?”

Her expression becomes serious as she thinks about it for a moment, like a cardiologist listening to an irregular heartbeat. “The monster needs to reflect the real subject you want to talk about,” she finally says. “If you want to talk about what’s happening now, you need zombies, I think.”

“Why zombies? COVID’s over.” 

“Not biological zombies. Magical ones. Of Hazal³! Religious saints who refuse to die so they can keep enforcing their will.”

“Oh, that’s great! We’ll use Talmudic figures like Shimon Bar Yohai, who could turn people into piles of bones just by looking at them, or set fields on fire with the purity of his holy rage.”

“Wait, what? We never learned that in Bible class.”

“It’s not the Bible—it’s the Talmud.”

“Can you, once and for all, explain to me what the difference is?”

“Do we have time? I thought you said you needed to leave for the hospital at nine.”

“Yeah, the test’s at ten, and by the time I get the bus…”

“So I’ll drive you there, drop you off a little early.”

She packs the things she needs and they leave, again passing Oved’s Sabih. It rained while they were chatting inside: the sidewalks and roads are wet and the smell of oil has been washed away. The route from Yael’s apartment to the hospital overlaps with the one Aaron used to take when his relationship with his now-ex started, when she still lived with her mother. He recalls that wonderful autumn, the many times he drove home on this road, his heart flooded with joy and hope too great to hold. He can almost remember what that felt like.

“Okay, so it’s like this – the Bible passed from mouth to ear, or at least was written according to stories that passed orally, which means it went through a lot of editing, and there were lots of opportunities to eliminate the redundant parts. The result is a very strong text when it comes to the choice of symbols, like why Abel is a shepherd and Cain a farmer and stuff like that, but also when it comes to prose, like why Abraham says ‘here I am’ when he does. In the Talmud, almost everything that was written has been kept, and a lot of things that were kept should have been taken out, so it has a much more improvisational tone. Yeshiva students study to become great experts in the Talmud, but are encouraged not to delve too deeply into the Bible. And that’s why our country looks like it does.”

“What does that mean?”

“That new Judaism has little to do with the old, and they know it. Okay, are you familiar with the snake oven?”

“Nope—never heard of it.”

“Good thing you’re already sitting down. So one day during the Babylonian exile, all the wise rabbis are sitting down to argue whether a stove made from linked units, like snake’s scales, can bear an impurity. Rabbi Eliezer, who was a great wiseman, said – What are you guys on about? It’s just a stove. How does its construction have anything to do with whether or not it’s tainted? But the other rabbis tell him that because it’s actually a broken vessel, and broken vessels can’t become tainted according to the halacha on clay vessels, it doesn’t hold contamination. Rabbi Eliezer tells them – Walla, if I’m right, let the carob⁴ decide. He points at the carob tree, and a miracle happens: the carob detaches from the tree and yeets itself away, one hundred arm’s lengths, or maybe four hundred; I don’t remember. And so the rabbis tell him – Walla, my brother, what does a carob know about halacha? That is, since when do we take into account the opinions of fruit? Rabbi Eliezer can feel his pulse accelerating and tells them – You know what? If I’m right, the river will decide. And another miracle happens, and the river starts flowing upstream. The rabbis still aren’t impressed, and start talking smack about the authority of bodies of flowing water. Rabbi Eliezer doesn’t know what to do anymore, and he goes off on them, like – You know what? If I’m right, fucking Metatron will decide’.”

“Wait, who’s Metatron?”

“The one that comes along every time God wants to say something. He speaks for God so people’s heads won’t explode from direct contact.”

“Sababa.”

“So the clouds open up, and Metatron comes out and says – What’s wrong with you guys, Eliezer is obviously right. And here’s the important part: instead of the rabbis just telling him – Walla, we took it too far, they say – Hold up: but when Moses went down from Mount Sinai, with the Bible in his hands, he said ‘It is not in the heavens’ and from that, the rabbis derive their authority to interpret the words of God, and their interpretation comes before what God intended. And then Metatron says – Believe you me, you guys are a bunch of shrewd dudes. You beat me. And he returns behind the clouds and leaves them alone.”

“And that’s it? They just ignored God’s opinion?”

“That’s exactly the point of the story – that human interpretation is more important than reality itself. ‘It is not in the heavens’? So when Moses said it, he meant that the Torah should be close, in our hearts and our mouths and actions, and that we shouldn’t treat it as something mysterious and ethereal. It has nothing to do with Rabbi Eliezer and the snake stove. Even the interpretation rabbis use to prove that interpretations should ignore the original intent ignores the original intent.”

She takes a deep breath. “They’re just a bunch of annoying children. A bunch of kids causing a ruckus outside your house, and when you tell them to go somewhere else they say no, I don’t have to, mom said I’m allowed to be here.”

“Very accurate,” Aaron says, and sighs himself. 

“You okay?”

“I just… I don’t know how we’re gonna get out of this.”

“What did Rabbi Eliezer do when he realized the rest of the rabbis were just bullshitting and it was actually working for them?”

“He fell into despair so deep that a third of the world’s wheat withered, and Rabban Gamliel, who was on a boat at sea, saw a great tsunami pass by, and as if he were in a Naruto episode he just sighed and said—Rabbi Eliezer’s at it again. I think at some point Rabbi Eliezer prayed that Gamliel would die and he actually died.”

“Well, I hope you don’t fall into a despair so deep there’ll be a famine.”

“I’ll try.” 

After he drops her off at the hospital and parks near Shammai’s apartment, there’s a strong smell of after-rain, and he feels something in him loosen. It wasn’t just getting out of the house. By turning everything into a story, he made it easier for himself to understand.

NEXT: Residents

1. During the demonstrations opposing the judicial reforms, the protestors, perhaps in response to being called anti-patriotic traitors, started carrying Israeli flags. Walking with an Israeli flag in Israel is now, absurdly, identified as left leaning. ↩︎
2. An extremely religious municipality near Tel Aviv. ↩︎
3. An acronym standing for “Our sages, may their memory be blessed”, meaning the great rabbis of the exile period, who are credited for writing the Talmud. ↩︎
4. A common fruit tree in the middle east ↩︎