A. Yehoshua - Friendly Fire - A Duet

"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."

"And what is said between the lines?" Daniela takes off her shoes, pushes back the seat, and puts up her bare feet, which reach almost to the windshield.

"Between the lines and in the lines. Death, destruction, exile, punishment, more punishment, devastation, plague, and famine. Starving people eating their babies. It's true that sometimes, amid those horrible passages of rebuke phrased in such flowery language, an implausible snatch of consolation will creep in, something utopian and grandiose. Conditional consolation, annoying consolation, because it all comes down to the fire normally aimed at the people of Israel being redirected toward other nations. As if there can never be in this world a minute of genuine peace, and the axe always falls on someone.

"And this we have drunk in with our mother's milk, we've been fed it like baby food. So it's no wonder that we're all set for the next destruction that will come, yes, speedily in our own time, maybe even yearning for it, look, it's already right here, we've been hearing about it, we've read it word for word in wonderful language."

The dirt road is well packed. The Land Rover's tires ride as smoothly as if it were asphalt. The haze blurs the sunlight. The visitor takes off her sunglasses and studies the large man who so enjoys having an attentive audience for his fervid obsessions.

"You would also lecture my poor sister about all these theories?"

"Not much, because I didn't want to burden her with more gloom and doom. And soon enough reading the Bible began to nauseate me. But before I finally abandoned the book to gather dust on the shelf, I shared my thoughts with Rafaeli, the deputy director-general, and to his credit I must say he listened with great patience, like a therapist with his client, and didn't try to argue with me, but merely recommended that I drop the prophets and move on to Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, and I said to myself, Fine, let's give the Bible one more chance. So I went to the Scrolls, and it was actually in the Song of Songs that Eyal's death suddenly overwhelmed me, and I read this poetry drowning in tears."

"Death in the Song of Songs?" his sister-in-law asks with a gasp.

"Because the beauty overwhelmed me. The love… the wondrous eroticism, the descriptions of nature. And then it hit me hard what Eyal would never be able to enjoy."

"And you never returned to the Bible?"

"Never touched it again. I cut myself off from it along with all the other useless texts."

Instinctively she presses the book to her chest and looks up at a vulture perched on a treetop, spreading its broad wings.

"Did you also read Jeremiah?"

"Of course. After all, I am his namesake, tied to him from birth. And I quickly caught on that he was the sickest and most dangerous of all the prophets. An unstable man. Exasperating. Jumping from topic to topic. A professional grouch. A low-rent strategist. Don't be misled by the beautiful language, the pretty words, the metaphors and similes, the rhythm of the sentences. All these only interfere with hearing what actually lies behind them. Now, with the English translation in your hand, you can uncover all the violence and despair. And indeed if you translate it back into Hebrew, into real everyday language, the hatred and extremism will appear from behind the feathers of the peacock's tail. Try it… why not? Here's an exercise for a teacher of English. You wanted to test your vocabulary? By all means, give yourself an exam."