Madeleine Albright pushed back her chair and made her way out of the room, the material of her pantsuit making a soft scuffing noise. The speaker seemed unfazed. For a moment Epstein thought he might even seize her empty chair, just as he had seized the turn Epstein had forfeited. But he remained standing, the better to command the room. Those nearby had edged back to open a space around him.
“ ‘So what is the meaning of menucha?’ the rabbi asks us. A bunch of restless kids staring out the window, whose only interest in the world is to be out playing ball. No one speaks. The rabbi waits, and when it becomes clear that he’s not going to give us the answer, a kid at the back of the room, the only one with polished shoes, who always goes straight home to his mother, the many-generations-removed progeny of the grizzled old scholar who carried within him the ancient wisdom of sitting in corners, opens his mouth. ‘Rest,’ he says. ‘Rest!’ the rabbi exclaims, spit spraying from his mouth as it does when he’s excited. ‘But not only! Because menucha doesn’t simply mean a pause from work. A break from exertion. It isn’t just the opposite of toil and labor. If it took a special act of creation to bring it into being, surely it must be something extraordinary. Not the negative of something that already existed, but a unique positive, without which the universe would be incomplete. No, not just rest,’ the rabbi says. ‘Tranquillity! Serenity! Repose! Peace. A state in which there is no strife, and no fighting. No fear and distrust. Menucha. The state in which man lies still.’
“Abu Mazen, if I may”—Klausner dropped his voice and adjusted the kippah that had slipped to the back of his head—“in that classroom of twelve-year-olds, not a single one of us understood what the rabbi meant. But I ask you: Do any of us in this room understand it any better? Understand that act of creation that stands alone among the others, the only one that didn’t establish something eternal? On the seventh day God created menucha. But He made it to be fragile. Unable to last. Why? Why, when everything else he made is impervious to time?”
Klausner paused, sweeping his gaze across the room. His enormous forehead glistened with sweat, though otherwise he gave no sign of exerting himself. Epstein leaned forward, waiting.
“So that it falls to Man to re-create it over and over again,” Klausner said at last. “To re-create menucha, so that he should know that he is not a bystander to the universe, but a participant. That without his actions, the universe God intended for us will remain incomplete.”
A lone, lazy clap rang out from the far reaches of the room. When, unaccompanied, it drifted into silence, the leader of the Palestinians began to speak, pausing for his translator to convey his message about his eight grandchildren who had all attended the Seeds of Peace camp, about living side by side, encouraging dialogue, building relationships. His comments were followed by a few last speakers and then the event came to an end, with everyone rising to their feet, and Abbas pumping a row of extended hands as he made his way down the table and out of the room, followed by his entourage.
Epstein, also eager to be on his way, headed toward the coat check. But while standing in line, he felt a tap on his shoulder. When he turned, he came face-to-face with the rabbi who had delivered the sermon on stolen time. A head and a half taller than Epstein, he radiated the wiry, sun-beaten strength of someone who has lived a long time in the Levant. Close up, his blue eyes shone with stored-up sunlight. “Menachem Klausner,” he repeated, in case Epstein had missed it earlier. “I hope I didn’t step on your toes back there?”
“No,” Epstein said, smacking the chip for his coat down on the table. “You spoke well. I couldn’t have said it better myself.” He meant it, but had no desire to get into it now. The woman working the coat check had a limp, and Epstein watched her head off to fulfill her task.
“Thanks, but I can’t take much credit. Most of it is from Heschel.”
“I thought you said it was your old rabbi.”
“Makes for a more captivating story,” Klausner said, raising his eyebrows. Above them, the pattern of deep lines on his forehead changed with each exaggerated expression.
Epstein had never read Heschel, and anyway the room was warm and what he wanted above all was to be outdoors, refreshed by the cold. But when the coat clerk returned from the revolving rack, it was with someone else’s coat slung over her arm.
“This isn’t mine,” Epstein said, pushing the coat back across the table.
The woman looked at him with contempt. But when he returned her hard stare with a harder one of his own, she capitulated and limped back to the rack. One leg was shorter than the other, but it would take a saint not to hold it against her.
“Actually, we’ve met before,” Menachem Klausner said behind him.
“Have we,” said Epstein, barely turning.
“In Jerusalem, at the wedding of the Schulmans’ daughter.”
Epstein nodded but could not recall the encounter.
“I never forget an Epstein.”
“Why’s that?”
“Not an Epstein, or an Abravanel, or a Dayan, or anyone with lineage that can be traced back to the dynastic line of David.”
“Epstein? Unless you’re referring to the royalty of some backwater shtetl, you’re wrong about Epstein.”
“Oh, you’re one of us, all right.”
Now Epstein had to laugh.
“Us?”
“Naturally; Klausner is a big name in Davidic genealogy. Not quite the same clout as Epstein, mind you. Unless one of your ancestors pulled the name out of thin air, which seems unlikely, then the chain of begetting that led to you backs right up to the King of Israel.”
Epstein had the competing urges to pull a fifty out of his wallet in order to get rid of Klausner and to ask him more. There was something compelling about the rabbi, or there would be at another time.
The coat clerk continued to spin the rack lazily, stopping it now and then to inspect the numbers on the hooks. She took down a khaki trench coat. “Not it,” Epstein called out before she could try to pass it off to him. She shot him a disapproving look and went back to her spinning.
Unable to stand it any longer, Epstein maneuvered his way behind the table. The clerk leaped back with exaggerated surprise, as if she expected him to club her over the head. But her expression was replaced by one more smug as Epstein began to look through the coats himself without luck. When she limped off to try to take Menachem Klausner’s chip, the sermon-maker with a three-thousand-year-old bloodline protested—“No, no. I don’t mind waiting. What does the coat look like, Jules?”