Emet (Part One)
The rough skin on your feet burns with each step, the heat of the ground reaching through your worn sandals. Dry flats and sand dunes spot the landscape, the barren crags in the distance flickering in the warped air. The clear blue sky offers you not even a single cloud to hide under the shade so you might prop your tired back against a stone and touch your half-empty canteen to your chapped lips. Blood still drips from the gash on your leg where you stumbled into a tsabar and impaled yourself on the bush’s spines. You rub the sand from your eyes and spit dust from your mouth. You’re weak from hunger but make no effort to eat. Even mana no longer fills your belly.
You could never admit it to the men and women who shoulder their burdens beside you, but part of you didn’t want to leave with them. In Egypt, you built great monuments that would have been seen by your son, your son’s son, and his son after him, from the day you placed the final stone until the day the living were called to the next world. In Egypt, you looked your tribesmen in the eye and saw the same anger, the same longing as he found in yours, a look you fear has been scorched out of you in this endless pilgrimage. In slavery, there had been four walls around you when you laid down to sleep, and you had lay beside a woman who kept you warm. Now she lies cold beneath the earth, unmarked, just feet from where her crinkled, smiling eyes had closed for the last time. And now you march to… nowhere.
Those brothers, leaning on their serpent staffs and adorned with gold, had promised that they could lead you to a land of milk and honey, had neglected to mention how many of the Children of Israel wouldn’t survive the trip. After twenty years in the wilderness, there were those so young that they never worked under the Pharaoh as your brothers had. They knew only the desert, the caravan, and the promises of the prophet prince, who spoke little of the fields he never toiled, of the statues he never carved. He spoke only of the land beyond, which it seemed so many who had left with him would never live to see.
. . .
Russia, 1905: Outside the Jewish section of Kiev
Rabbi Finder shook himself awake just in time to hear the yelling begin. It sounded distant, irrelevant. In another time, in another place, he’d discount it as the celebrations of young people. But not here, and not now. Looking out the window, he saw stars still bright in the sky. The flickering red in the distance, then, was no sunrise. He threw an overcoat over his sleep clothes and rushed down the halls of the yeshiva, past the classrooms and the makeshift library his congregation had assembled. Downstairs, his students were waiting for him. It was time.
. . .
Remi and Abraham pushed their way through the tangled brush crowding their path, crashing through the entrance to the dense forest undergrowth. Though stronger than his brother, Abraham struggled through the branches, his height making an obstacle of the low-hanging trees. Remi kept pace with him, snapping branches that hung too low so as to save work for Finder, who walked behind. The frail rabbi wiped the ash from his spectacles and did his best to ignore the smoke carried by the wind sweeping in from behind him.
The light of Finder’s candle the sloped path away from town so the trio relied on sound and memory. The older man stumbled on a stone steadied himself on the firm arms of his companions. Abraham clapped his hand on Finder’s shoulder.
“Careful, Rabbi. If you move too quickly, you’ll hurt yourself.”
The bearded man spat. “And if I move too slowly, the ghetto will burn to the ground.” A muffled clamor rang in their ears, drifting to them through the trees from back home.
With that, he rose on shaky legs and inched down the slope ahead, planting his feet on the age-worn stones laid into the ground as footholds. The path stopped at a sharp cliff, the depth unclear in the twilight. The boys stopped by his side.
Abraham swung himself over the ledge and felt around for handholds. Feeling none, he braced his knees and let go, dropping through the darkness. He landed with a splash in the shallow water. Finding the fall tolerable, he stepped forward, leaving room for the others to drop down behind him.
Remi crouched as his feet hit ground and ran his hand along the bottom of the streambed. When he pulled his hand out, he held a lump of clay for observation. It was flecked with gravel, but usable nonetheless. He nodded, his scratched spectacles glinting in candlelight, while the other two began to scoop up handfuls of the thick muck and gather it into a pile. The bed was plentiful and untouched, and soon the pile grew longer than Finder was tall. Finder swept his candle over the mound, looking for large stones or other impurities in the structure. Finding none, he turned to his students.
“Abraham, your turn.”
The grim student nodded and approached the pile. Leaving a large mass in the middle, he split the lower half of the pile in two, and pulled two tubes of clay away from the center of the mass, connecting near the top, which he rounded. Though featureless, the shape was not unlike a man’s. Finder took a deep breath.
If he was wrong about how great the danger was, then he was about to commit an unimaginable blasphemy.
Call and response. Finder spoke, and his disciples spoke back to him, to the heavens, and to each other. The words were foreign to Russian soil, created by a people in a far away country thousands of years before. They chanted all the same.
The clay rippled like water in a hot pan and the mound’s features grew sharper. Where once there had been only a rough arm, there were now not only fingers, but fingerprints. The sculpture’s face shifted and lips, ears, and all the rest formed, though the mouth was nothing more than a crude hole, and the forehead was unusually smooth and flat.
Remi stepped forward and kneeled next to the clay mass. He reached into his shirt and withdrew a delicately-written note on parchment. Gingerly placing it into the malformed mouth, he pushed the jaw closed and let the wet clay seal itself shut. Then, it was Finder’s turn.
A gentle rain began to fall as Finder let his knees buckle and he ran his fingers over the thing’s clay forehead. “Lo' yih yeh-lkaa lohiym cheeriym al-paanaaya,” he murmured. The third of the Ten. There was no choice. Finder kissed its brow and moved his mouth to its ear. In less than a whisper, he called the words he swore he would never speak. A mark, a Hebrew word, sunk into its forehead. Emet: truth.
Then the moment came. Finder cleared his mind of all doubt, reflecting on who he was here for. He spoke the word, the name.
The water crackled as a lightning bolt struck the stream with the force of fifty cannons.
(End of Part One)
