The Jerusalem Inception

Chapter 3





Rabbi Abraham Gerster led his men up the dirt path. Behind them, West Jerusalem glowed in the reddish evening sun. At the top of the hill, he mounted a squat, massive boulder, which overlooked the Armistice border that cut Jerusalem in half. The wind suddenly lashed at him, trying to snatch away his black hat, but he held it and recited in a booming voice, “Hear us, God! Gentiles defiled your Temple, turned Jerusalem to ruins!”

Psalms seventy-nine, Lemmy thought as he climbed after his father onto the boulder.

“They fed your chosen to the vultures, your faithful to the wild beasts.” Rabbi Gerster paused as the men repeated the words.

Lemmy pressed down his hat, shading his eyes, and stepped to the edge of the boulder while chanting the next line, “Spilled our blood like water around Jerusalem.” He gazed at the rolls of barbed wire below, running north-south like rough stitches left by a careless surgeon. Beyond the serpentine wires, he saw the Jordanian bunkers, gun barrels sticking out of shooting slats. They occasionally fired across the border, killing or maiming a passerby on the Jewish side. But they never did it on a Friday, Islam’s holy day.

“Pour your wrath, God,” Rabbi Abraham Gerster continued, “upon the Gentiles.”

As the men repeated the words, Lemmy looked further up, beyond the border and bunkers, at the Old City. It had been in Arab hands since 1948, and he could smell the familiar mix of smoke and dust and reeking human waste. The Dome of the Rock dominated the skyline, a golden mosque built atop the ruins of the holy Temple. The Old City seemed to float in the air, on wings of holiness, as his father had once said. It was built on Mount Moriah, where God had once told the patriarch Abraham to sacrifice his only son. Lemmy imagined little Isaac following Abraham up that hill—

“Pssst!” His father motioned him to get off the boulder.

Lemmy jumped down and rejoined the group. He bumped into Benjamin, his best friend and study companion, who was rocking devoutly, his eyes shut in devotion. Benjamin stumbled back, and they pushed each other, laughing. A young scholar nicknamed Redhead Dan turned and glared at them. Benjamin resumed murmuring Psalms, and Lemmy pretended to do the same.

Up on the boulder, Rabbi Gerster opened his arms and sang, “Bring us back to you, God, and we shall come.”

The men of Neturay Karta—“City Sentinels” in Aramaic—sang with him as they had done every Friday afternoon for eighteen years, “Return us to the old days of glory!”

The wind picked up again. It had risen from the Dead Sea, through the barren canyons of the Judean Desert, collecting dust, which lodged in their beards and spiral side locks. They swayed in prayer, fists pressed to their chests, clustered behind the boulder and their rabbi’s open arms. Behind them, the red ball of the sun descended toward the distant Mediterranean Sea.

In the back of the group, Lemmy picked up a pebble and tossed it up in the air, catching it with a fast hand. He watched his father’s arms reach wide in a symbolic embrace of the Old City, the same arms that had used to carry him onto the boulder. He had grown since, almost eighteen, almost ready for marriage and children of his own. But still, even now, his father seemed like a giant to him.

The pebble by his ear, he imagined hearing swords clinking as men in armor marched by. Were they Absalom’s rabble rousers, seizing Jerusalem from his aging father, King David? Or the crusaders, rushing to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher? In his mind he walked the narrow alleys of the Old City, smelled the bittersweet aroma of burning hashish and camel feces, heard the chimes of bells and the prayers of muezzins.

“If I forget thee, Jerusalem,” Rabbi Gerster led his men in a mournful chant, “my right hand shall wither.” They repeated the chant, and the rabbi glanced over his shoulder at his son. Lemmy joined the chant, swaying back and forth, “My right hand shall wither.”

Rabbi Gerster turned back to face the Old City, his voice louder than the wind. “My tongue shall stick to my palate, if I don’t remember Jerusalem!” He raised his right hand, his fist clenched.

A shot sounded in the distance, and the black hat flew from the rabbi’s head.

Lemmy stared at his father up on the boulder, expecting him to collapse.

A second shot. Dirt blew up near the rabbi’s feet.

The men yelled and fell to the ground, cowering behind the boulder.

But Rabbi Abraham Gerster kept his fist up in defiance of the anonymous Jordanian sniper and continued the chant, “If I don’t remember thee—”

Another shot, the bullet shrieking above.

Peeking over the rock, Lemmy tried to locate the source of the fire, but the echoes bounced from all directions.

“If I don’t put Jerusalem above my own happiness!”

With the chant concluded, Rabbi Gerster bowed in the direction of Temple Mount and stepped toward the edge of the rock. A final shot popped, and the bullet hit the ground where his shoe had rested a second before.

This last one sounded like it came from the north, an area under Israeli control, but Lemmy knew that was impossible. He heard a distant siren from the UN observers’ station to the south.

Bent over in fear, the men ran downhill, except for their rabbi, who paced calmly, indifferent to the shrieking bullets. Lemmy chased his father’s hat, catching it halfway down the hill, and brought it back. Rabbi Gerster examined the hat and poked a finger through the bullet hole. The bearded men congregated around their leader, watching in awe. Redhead Dan yelled, “A miracle! A miracle!”

The sun’s last rays touched the roofs. Sabbath was about to begin, time to return to Meah Shearim, the enclosed neighborhood where the insular sect of Neturay Karta lived in strict observance of the Torah, insulated from the sinful ways of the surrounding Zionist society.

“It was a close call.” Rabbi Gerster put an arm on his son’s shoulders. “Blessed be He, Master of the Universe.”

“Amen,” Lemmy said.

They walked down the steep path, worn from eighteen years of weekly visits. The men glanced at the rabbi, their anxiety mixed with elation at having witnessed a miracle. They were devoted to him, a holy man who had emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust alone, not yet twenty years old. Lemmy had heard the stories from others, how his father had come to Neturay Karta to seek refuge among the faithful. His payos had barely started to regrow, the scars on his chest still fresh. But he was the scion of the famous Gerster rabbinical line, and the sect’s elders took him in. They matched him with a wife, Temimah, another survivor of the war. In 1948, when the Jordanians had exiled the Jews from the Old City, Abraham Gerster took a vow not to travel away from Jerusalem until Temple Mount was restored to Jewish sovereignty. And when a son was born to him, he named him Jerusalem, though everyone called the boy Lemmy, as if his given name was too holy to be used lightly. With the passing years, Abraham Gerster had gained a vast knowledge of Talmud and a reputation for calm wisdom, becoming the leader of Neturay Karta.

As they reached Shivtay Israel Street, Lemmy saw a woman standing by the roadside. She was petite and slender, her dark hair collected in a bun. A sleeveless dress exposed her shoulders, and her plain sandals revealed tanned ankles.

Lemmy was shocked. Zionist women never ventured near Neturay Karta with their hair and limbs so immodestly exposed.

The men murmured contemptuously and pulled down the brims of their hats to hide the sinful sight.

The woman stepped forward and blocked Rabbi Gerster’s way. She stared up at him with piercing green eyes. And before anyone managed to interfere, she reached up and touched his beard.

This unimaginable violation—a woman’s impure hand touching the rabbi!—unleashed Redhead Dan, who charged forward like a bull, ramming her. Her heel caught the curb, and she fell backward and banged her head on the sidewalk.

The men closed in, cursing in Yiddish, fists clenched. Redhead Dan shouted, “Shanda! Shanda!” He plucked off his shoe and lifted it over the woman’s head.

Without thinking Lemmy hurled himself at Redhead Dan and knocked him to the ground.

“Stop!” Rabbi Gerster raised his hand. “Enough!”

The men stepped back.

She sat up. A thin stream of blood dripped from her forehead, down her cheek, and onto her plain dress.

The rabbi kneeled by her side. He said nothing, but his face was pale. The woman pushed a lock of hair away from her face. He offered her a white handkerchief. She took it, pressed it to her bruised forehead, and began to laugh.

She laughed!

Lemmy realized she must be mad. Why else would she laugh?

She continued to laugh, yet tears flowed from her eyes.

The men watched their rabbi to see how he would react to her madness.

“Please visit us tomorrow.” He gestured at the gate. “Over there.”

She nodded.

He stood and walked away. His men hurried after him. Lemmy offered a hand to Redhead Dan, who refused it with an angry grunt and sprang to his feet unaided.

Just before entering the neighborhood gate, Lemmy glanced back. The woman was still sitting on the ground. She waved at him with his father’s handkerchief, stained with her blood.

Elie Weiss crouched on the rooftop of a deserted house near the border. The gray beggar’s cloak kept him warm, but the hood made his bald scalp itch. He unscrewed the sniper scope from the rifle and gazed through it as a monocular, watching Abraham and his bearded men disappear through the gate into Meah Shearim. Elie shifted his focus to Tanya. She pulled herself up and walked away. Unlike Abraham, the years had left no mark on her. She had remained delicate and childlike, a porcelain doll. But her appearance no longer matched her inner substance. The pregnant, teenage orphan had turned into a confident Mossad agent. It had been a stroke of luck when he had noticed her name, after all these years, on a secret list of decorated agents. He knew not to approach her directly, but had found a way to pass the information to her about the rabbi of Neturay Karta, whose name matched her dead lover. Yet throwing the two lovers back together was a gamble. It could set off a conflagration of passions that would derail his plans. But Elie had weighed the chances and bet on the idealistic innocence Abraham and Tanya shared, which would keep them from rushing into each other’s arms at the expense of their respective missions. And having watched Abraham’s son leap to Tanya’s defense so impulsively, Elie suspected the youth might prove to be the key to effectively manipulating both his father and Tanya.

The UN siren, which his shots had awakened, died down. The armistice observers would assume it had been another bored Jordanian soldier and do nothing about it, as was their custom. He used the rifle scope to watch the UN Mideast Command at the old Government House across the border. Other than the guards kicking a ball in the courtyard, there was no activity. On the hill behind the UN compound, a rotary radar antenna turned lazily, curved as a giant sail, full with wind. It monitored the airspace constantly, enforcing the ban on aircraft operations in the region.

Elie put down the scope and sat on the tar roof to wait. He leaned back against the low wall surrounding the rooftop and pulled a cigarette from a pack of Lucky Strike. He smoked slowly, drawing deep, savoring the flavor of toasted burley. He didn’t mind waiting. Darkness wasn’t far off.