Jumping the Road
                         Jack Dann
   It really isn’t right that I should give you my name. True enough that
this is history, and history, if it is to be kept alive, must be recorded for
posterity. But the name of Isaac ibn Chabib of Philadelphia need not be
mentioned.
  However, does not the Pirkei Avos, the Ethics of the Fathers, demand
that we repeat a saying in the name of the one who said it?
  I will admit to being Isaac ibn Chabib, fool, hypocrite, rabbi, and
unregenerate disbeliever in miracles.
  So for posterity, for all those who will listen, here is my story.



  First of all, I should tell you that I didn’t want to go to Tobias.
   Tobias is not even the real name of the planet. The Jews who live there
call it Bharees, or Covenant, because the remnants of one of its moons
form a ring of dust and stones that appear as a gauzy rainbow in the night
sky. It is, I will admit, a beautiful sight; and as if that’s not enough, the
comets rain across the heavens and sheets of aurorae shimmer like tinted
crystal.
   Everyone else calls the place Ulim, which means world. We named it
Tobias, after Martin Tobias, President of the United States of Canada. But
I’m getting away from the point. The point is that all Jews—any Jews on
any planet—must trace their cultural heritage back to Earth. There can be
only one Sinai, one Torah, one Adonoi.
   If the Jews have scaly skin like alligators and yellow eyes and seven
fingers on each hand, that’s fine. Good for them; they’re converts. The
Torah doesn’t discriminate. At some time, some adventurous Jews
colonized Covenant and converted the natives. Or the natives listened in
on our radio transmissions—not that Jews have so many programs on the
air—and decided to become Jewish. (Which just goes to prove that you
don’t need to be human to be a masochist.) That’s the only logical
explanation why the Good Will Traders discovered Jews on Covenant.
  That was my argument, but the xeno-historians and cultural
anthropologists had written an Encyclopedia Galactica detailing that the
“Ulim Jews” were as indigenous to the planet as the electric cats and the
flimflams that soared in the sky like birds and burrowed into the earth like
worms. It seemed that Judaism had actually, impossibly, evolved
independently on a different planet. Oh, there were plenty of theories
about how such a thing could happen, but they were as wild and esoteric
as anything Leibniz or the Lurianic Kabbalists could have imagined:
ghostly quantum worlds splitting into imperfect copies of themselves (not
so different from the mystic’s worlds of angels and demons), the
Copenhagen collapse, mirror universes, splitting universes, the Everett
Wheeler Graham metatheorem, the turbulent effects of chaos, the great
fractal chain, and who knows what else.
   So now we are to believe in two Sinai’s, two Torahs, and four Talmuds,
for like us, the Ulim Jews had two versions of Talmud, which, in case you
might not know, are chronicles of Jewish culture, law, and myth. They
even spoke Hebrew… well, they spoke something like Hebrew.
 Why didn’t I want to go to Tobias—to Covenant, to Ulim, if you like?
Why wouldn’t I want to verify a miracle and renew my faith?
  The truth?
  I was afraid. I had come to terms with history. Faith could not supplant
reason. The evidence was incontrovertible.
  Had been incontrovertible…



   The shuttle landed in the country of Chakk, which had once been the
Mesopotamia of this planet. Although it was in a northern latitude, it was
quite temperate. The landing field was huge, for this was a major
spaceport, but it was, in effect, a crater in the center of a coral green city
of bole and root and leaf the size of New Boston. I waited in the airlock,
alone, staring out the bolted plastocene door, as if I was a pariah; the crew
and other passengers had debouched earlier. As this was my first visit, I
had to wait in isolation. It seemed like days, but it was only hours. By
exposing me to enough radiation to make me glow like a tropical fish, they
would certainly make me kosher. I guess they didn’t trust anyone’s
infection control procedures but their own. So what could be lost but a
little time? I’m ninety-seven years old. I’ve got a slow metabolism. A little
radiation won’t kill me, and if it does, that wouldn’t be such a loss.
   The Tzaddik—the “Good Jew who makes miracles and talks with God,”
the grand rabbi, my boss—would just have to send someone younger and
less cynical to discover the nature of God.
  So I stood before the lock and stared out into the landing field. It would
soon be time, for an alien stood on the field below and waited for me. He
didn’t wave, nor did he move around or shift his weight from foot to foot.
He stood still as stone, his yellowish eyes fixed on me. He wore a blue
yarmulke that fitted tightly to his bald, blue-gray head—the kind of
yarmulkes handed out at Bar Mitzvahs on Long Island—and a
black-striped prayer-shawl was draped over his shoulders. Suddenly a
crowd of other Ulimites gathered before the shuttle, but they stayed well
away from the one dressed as a Jew. Those that came too close to him
moved away quickly with nervous grins on their faces. Except for the Jew,
they all seemed agitated. The Ulimites were dressed in fine linens that
billowed and ballooned, multi-hued gowns and coats and breeches that
were meant to create new shapes rather than accentuate or improve
nature. It reminded me of sixteenth-century English fashion, the kind of
clothes worn during the reign of Henry VIII.
   A human delegation arrived, all in evening clothes; so I was to be
formally received.
  I would have preferred to go off quietly with the alien in the tallis.
   Then the ship wished me farewell, the lock sighed open, and I walked
down the enclosed gangway. The mossy smells of forest and grass, which
were carried on gentle breezes, were overwhelming. I shook hands with the
ambassador from the Canadian States and his officers from the foreign
office, and was introduced to the alien ambassador and other dignitaries
who extended their seven-fingered hands to greet me. Their skin was
surprisingly hot, and leathery as the case of an old book. It took a moment
to get used to looking at the aliens and listening to the translator, who was
a young woman with a hard, shiny face and a deep voice.
   Two men clutched my elbows as if I were a fugitive and gently propelled
me toward what looked to be a slidewalk the size of a thoroughfare. They
were going to ghost me away before the alien in the tallis could introduce
himself. “Excuse me,” I said to the man on my right (after all, I’m
right-handed), “but what about my friend there?” I waved to the alien in
the yarmulke, who stood alone away from the crowd. He frowned, which
for an Ulimite is the same thing as a smile. (I had had the whole voyage in
the starship to study, so I knew a few things.)
  “Shalom,” he said in a voice that carried over the noise of the others.
The intonation was odd: he pronounced the word as if it were divided into
three distinct syllables, and he glottalized the “al” and “om.”
  I asked him who he was: “Mee Ahtaw?”
  He spoke quickly, as if the group surrounding me would stop him any
second, but it was as if he didn’t exist: his brethren either didn’t notice
him or were purposely ignoring him. Although he used words I had never
heard, I understood most of what he said. His name was Tahlmeade,
which meant student, at least in Terran Hebrew.
   A member of the Ulimite delegation stepped right in front of me, even
as I was speaking to Tahlmeade. I thought it very rude, and odd; but
Tahlmeade simply moved around the periphery of the nervous crowd and
re-established eye-contact with me. As he moved about, like a child
playing peekaboo, I could not help but smile. All the Ulimites were
short—about four and a half feet tall—and their flattened features, serious
expressions, and roundish heads made them seem… cute. But even to
think about them that way was condescending. No, more than that. Was it
not just another form of prejudice? Of racism? Indeed, the human
dignitaries might well think that an old man with a long beard and
earlocks was cute, especially one wearing a fur-brimmed hat, and a black
caftan with a silk cord knotted around his waist to separate the Godly
parts?—the mind, the soul, and the heart—from the lower parts.
  And who knows what the Ulimites thought of humans? Most likely, they
didn’t perceive us as cute. Perhaps they considered us smelly, sweaty,
brutelike, fleshy as mushrooms, and most likely crazy: meshuggener.
   The uniformed young man beside me motioned to Tahlmeade. He was
with the consulate mission and held onto my elbow as if I was on my last
legs and about to fall face-flat on the ground. “Don’t worry, Rabbi, he
knows his way around. He’ll catch up with us later.”
  “I should hope he knows his way around, but where are we going?”
  “To the consulate. A party has been prepared in your honor.” The young
bureaucrat was quite handsome: dark hair, a good sharp nose that you
could see, a strong chin, and dark eyes that would make women talk.
  “Please, let’s bring the alien in the prayer-shawl along with us. It’s
obvious that—”
  “I’m afraid that would not do, Rabbi.”
  “Would not do?”
  The young men pulled me along, and I, of course, did not resist; I just
walked slowly—after all, I’m an old man.
  “After the briefing, you’ll understand.”
  “Ah, now it’s a briefing!” and after a step or two, I asked, “So if Jews are
not allowed at this party, what am I going to do there?”
  “With all due respect, Rabbi, you’re jumping to conclusions,” said the
ambassador, who walked beside us; he was tall and gray, and wore a thin
mustache that was black as a pencil mark. Then he frowned at the aliens
and smiled at me. The Ulimites frowned happily back at us, indicating
that all was well with their world.
   As I was whisked across the spaceport, I looked over my shoulder. But
Tahlmeade and the ship had disappeared, replaced by an architectural
chaos of brown and green. The city of Kharig, the largest and most
fabulous city on Ulim, was a sculpted garden, and I was passing through it
at a hundred miles an hour. Arches, stadiums, peristyle courts, statues as
large as skyscrapers, castles, rotundas, pavilions, halls, lodges, offices,
governmental complexes vaulted over razor-cut avenues; they grew out of
the ground complete with flying buttresses, towers, domes, and cupolas;
their architectural styles were as exotic as the Hagia Sophia or the Cetian
monoliths. I imagined that I could see the façades of San Carlo, the Doric
porticos of Hagley Park, the Romanesque and gothic pinnacles of the
Milan Cathedral, and the glass skyscraper needles of van der Rohe. The
Ulim had planted a city, had shaped trees and shrub and mirrored leaves
into habitation: into civilization. I felt dizzy, overwhelmed, enraptured. I
felt swallowed by the silvery green alienness of it all.
  So this was culture shock.
  If such a thing could turn an old man with ear locks into a poet,
imagine what it might do to someone who still had some juice left inside
him?



   The cocktail party was endless, the talk small, and although the
ambassador took special pains to provide me with some ninety-proof
Slivovitz whiskey (which he thought all Jews drank), I left all the schnapps
alone; neither did I take any narcodrines or enhancers; neither did I
attend any of the Virtual parties that were also being held in my honor. I
am a simple man. I drink in private. I am too old for sex. (I could still
perform, I suppose; but I’ve courted peace and privacy for far too long to
give them up for a wife.) I like to read, go to bed early, eat like a glutton at
the Tzaddik’s court, argue pilpul and philosophy with the other rabbis,
smoke the flat, foul-smelling cigarettes from Turkey, and wake up with the
cock (not what you think!) to begin another—and perhaps final—day.
   Yet I felt like the alien here, and not because I was carrying on
conversations with creatures with yellow eyes and blue-gray skin the
texture of alligators (albeit through my interpreter, who indicated that she
would be willing to warm me up during the night, and then gave me a
blank look when I told her that I was no Gandhi—she probably thought
“Gandhi” was a Jewish perversion); no, I felt just now like the hypocrite I
was. You see, Jewish guilt is indeed a fact. I was a fraud, and these people,
both alien and human, thought they were talking to a real Chassid master
rebbeh, a living anachronism, a mystic who believed in kabbalah and
amulets, who had his own derekh, his own special channel to
communicate with God, and who knew His secret name: the
Tetragrammaton. Indeed, they thought they had found a human who
would understand and could explain the mystery of the Jews of this
planet. The “Jewish Mystery” seemed to be a major philosophical problem
for the intelligentsia of Ulim, both human and alien. It was as if they had
to go to secondary sources to find out about these Jews… as if it never
occurred to anyone just to go and ask a blue-skinned Jew.
   So they asked me, a human hypocrite who remained a Chassid and a
rabbi only because that was all I knew. I was too old and frightened, too
corrupt, to leave the Tzaddik’s court and die alone among strangers. I
needed respect, and wasn’t willing to give up my few servants and my
small congregation. I could tell you that I lost my faith because of
Auschwitz, but who remembers Auschwitz? Not my Tzaddik, who believed
himself to be the melits yoysher, the one who pleads for the Jews who
violate any one of the six hundred and thirteen positive and negative
commandments, who believes that all tsores, all the troubles visited upon
the Jews, are punishment for collective and individual sin. So six million
Jews die because they sinned…
   Oh, I argued with the Tzaddik, I told him that only a madman could
believe in prayer after the Holocaust. If there was a God, He was no longer
in the world; He was not the God of history. He could not be propitiated.
After all, what terrible crime had we committed? The Torah says, “for our
sins we are punished,” but who was punished, who was murdered? The
poorest, the most faithful, the most pious. This, then, was the revelation,
and the Holocaust was the modern Sinai—if one could call an event that
happened two hundred years ago modern.
  So what did my Tzaddik do? He told his three thousand followers that I
had had a revelation, that God had revealed himself to me alone, that I
was now a Tzaddik.
  And that’s why he sent me to Tobias instead of going himself.



  I told the story of my Tzaddik to my hosts, and everyone frowned and
shook my hand, until I actually almost began to feel like a Tzaddik who
could do no wrong. I told them funny stories, and they especially liked
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav’s story of the wise but skeptical man who had
been sent a message from his king, but refused to open it because the
messenger couldn’t prove to the wise man that the king existed; nor could
anyone else.
   “ ‘Now do you see?’ the skeptical wise man said to the messenger.
‘People are foolish and naive and believe what they wish. They live a lie
because they fear the truth.’ ”
   Everyone agreed with Rabbi Nachman, who probably would have gotten
a kick out of knowing his story was being told by a poor Jew to goyim who
lived in the heavens.
   Against all my good judgment, I began to enjoy myself a little; and just
when I was about to indulge in a finger of Slivovitz (even if it tastes like
rubbing alcohol, why break tradition?), the ambassador’s aide relieved me
of my newfound admirers and took me down narrow, labyrinthine
corridors to an inner sanctum for the threatened briefing. I have to say,
though, that these people were poets; they knew a good metaphor when
they saw one. Although the striated walls of this grand salon seemed to be
made of wood, they looked like meat. Whether it was sap or water, I don’t
know; but the very walls seemed to be sweating.
   And there were no windows in here. A perfect place for an
interrogation.
   “Well?” I asked the ambassador, who was sitting opposite me with his
staff beside him. We sat at a conference table made of the same stuff as
the walls, but I didn’t touch the table or anything on it. There was a
setting before me: blue monochrome Delft china, heavy silverware, and
crystal; and within easy reach were sandwiches on painted porcelain
plates, and liquor, juice, and wine in clear Bristol goblets. A pear-shaped
silver coffee pot took up an entire corner of the table, which seemed to be
sweating profusely under the feet of the pot. The slightly acrid aroma of
coffee was delicious.
  “It’s all kosher,” he said, gesturing at the food and drink. “I noticed you
neither ate nor drank at the party. Surely you must be hungry…”
  “Why all this fuss over a rabbi from Brooklyn who’s not even
published?”
  “Because it seems that you’re the key to the mystery.”
  “Ah, yes, the mystery of the Jews,” I said. “Why are these blue people
asking me to tell them about their own Jews.”
  “Ulimites,” the ambassador said, correcting me; yet there was no
condescension in his voice.
   “Ulimites.” Then after a beat, I said, “They had a Jew right at the
shuttle port. Why didn’t they ask him? And why wasn’t he allowed to come
along?”
   “That’s just the problem. They can’t even see him. They have some kind
of proprioceptive sense that he’s there, but that’s all.”
  “That’s crazy!”
  The ambassador shrugged. “The Ulimites can’t see Jews. Why? We
don’t know. Yet they’re absolutely obsessed with finding out all they can
about the Jews.”
  “Well, they certainly seem to be able to see me,” I said. “So either I’m
not a Jew or—”
  “They have no trouble seeing humans, whether they’re Jewish or not,”
the ambassador said, humoring me. After all, what else could he do?
  “So before you came to colonize—”
  “Not to colonize, Rabbi. We do not colonize planets that—”
   “Excuse me for my ignorance, Ambassador, but before you came here to
visit—”
  “—To establish diplomatic relations.”
  “—How could they be obsessed with finding out about Jews before you
arrived, if they couldn’t see Jews or ask anyone else who could?”
  “It was like an itch they couldn’t scratch,” one of the aides said; the one
with the handsome face and good nose.
   The ambassador glanced at the aide, who reddened slightly, and then
said to me, “They discovered various Jewish texts that had not been
destroyed.”
  “Destroyed?”
   Again he shrugged. “We know very little about what happened. We
expect, or hope, that you can answer those questions for us. But the
Ulimite Jews here seem to be the only religious group on the planet. None
of the other Ulimites have any sense of the spiritual at all. It’s as if part of
their psyche has been entirely wiped away, lost.”
  “They lost their ability to hear their God, or gods,” said the aide who
had spoken before. “That’s what they’ve told us, anyway.”
  “And what about the… encyclopedia your historians and
anthropologists wrote about the Jews?”
  “All correct, as far as we know.”
  “Then they interviewed the Jews?”
   “No,” the ambassador said. “All the information is gleaned from
secondhand sources. Although we know where the Jews live—or think we
do—we have not been able to initiate any direct contact, except with their
intermediaries.”
  “Ah, the shtadlans,” I said. “The fixers. So Tahlmeade is a fixer… But
why should he help you? You treated him as if he were dreck. A nothing.”
  “He had planned to see you, Rabbi. He understood that it would be
impossible for him to join us.”
  “Why? If no one can see him, what’s the difference?”
  “They sense him and become very nervous. Believe me, it would be a
mistake; but you’ll see for yourself soon enough.”
  I waited for him to tell me what I would see soon enough, and when he
didn’t, I let it alone; I would find out in due time. “How can one believe
anything when it’s all secondhand and censored, when nothing is
mentioned about your claim that the Jews are… invisible?” I asked. “Why
wasn’t that in your reports?”
  “This is a very sensitive and… explosive issue,” the ambassador said.
“We considered what to do very carefully, and finally decided to keep the
mystery confidential until we’ve resolved it. All the reports and
monographs, although true, are smoke-screens.” He paused, as if to study
my expression, but I have what’s called a poker-face, which I understand
has something to do with an ancient game of chalnce. “There are too
many implications for Jews at home,” he continued.
  “Implications?”
  “Something terrible has happened here. We do not wish to give
extremists an excuse to kill any more Jews, not after what happened in
Savannah.”
 I didn’t retreat from his stare. History repeats itself in different guises.
What had once been America was now like ancient Poland.
  “You know,” I said, “I’m going to ask you something every Jew asks
himself: Why me?”
   The ambassador pushed his chair back, and an aide stood up to help
him, although I saw no reason why he needed help. The ambassador was a
relatively young man. “Because the Jewish government here, if indeed
there is a government, asked for you.”
  “Asked for me?”
  “Over a month ago, Earth time. The one you call Tahlmeade made the
request.”
  “He asked for me?” I was sounding like an echo, but I couldn’t help it.
  “Yes. He specifically asked for you, by name.”
  “How could he have known my name?” I asked.
  The ambassador stood up and looked at me until I felt uncomfortable.
“That’s exactly what we’d like to know, Rabbi.”



   Tahlmeade came to the consulate to pick me up. He had come right
into the suite where the party was being held in my honor, and was
standing in the doorway waiting for me. His prayer shawl was wrapped
around himself as if for protection, but it didn’t seem to be Tahlmeade
who needed protection. The other aliens in the room seemed somehow
dislocated, lost; they moved aimlessly about the room, every one in a
sudden state of agitation. I could not help but imagine that they were in
some kind of psychic pain, yet—if I didn’t know better—I would have
thought them happy. They were all grinning at each other, at me, at the
tables and walls and ceiling.
  But their grins were frozen.
  And I knew that on Ulim, a smile was not a smile.
   Tahlmeade and I left quickly. We rode an elevator though the center of
the building, which was a tree, or a forest that had grown into one solid
mass. We stepped outside, and for a few moments we were in the streets,
streets that smelled like thyme and roses, that were as clean as my wife’s
(may she rest in peace) table. But the street crowds were agitated, too;
people dashed past us and eddied around us, giving us a wide berth.
  We were the quiet eye of the storm.
   Then Tahlmeade led me below ground, into what seemed to be another
city. We waited on a transparent platform that seemed to be situated on
the edge of an abyss. Above and below were contrasts of light and dark;
but below were huge organic stalactites and stalagmites worked with
glastex and metal: trees as large and high as skyscrapers, their flesh
smooth and irised. People lived in these illuminated boles, which were
connected by communication grids and transportation tubes. I looked
down into the descending levels of habitation. I might have been looking
at jewels, at strings of light set upon velvet; I might as well have been
looking into the eternity of space.
  Just looking down made me dizzy, made me a little meshuggener.
   Made me, God forbid, want to leap into the darkness. But such things I
ignore; even when I was young, I had a fear of heights.
  A transpod rushed into the station and hushed to a stop. The pod
cracked open and we climbed in. Tahlmeade punched in the coordinates,
and it suddenly seemed as if we were falling. Yet there was no definite
sense of motion, just the buildings rushing past us as we sped forward
through tubes that choked through the city like transparent vines.
  “If you would close the windows,” I said in Hebrew, forgetting that
phrase was slang for “opaque the walls.” “I’m getting dizzy.” But
Tahlmeade seemed to comprehend what I meant immediately, for in an
instant, gray walls surrounded us. Graffitoed images glowed redly over the
gray: some smart youngster must have figured out how to change the light
patterns.
  My dizziness passed, and I asked, “Why can’t they see you?” Only after I
spoke the words did I realize how blunt I had been.
  Tahlmeade frowned at me and said, “Perhaps for the same reason that
they are able to see you.”
  I was going to ask him what he meant, yet somehow I knew… I knew
what he meant.
  They could not see Tahlmeade because he was a Jew.
  But they could see me.
  And what did they see?
  A fraud, a fool, a counterfeit. A phony.



   We hurtled forward at three hundred miles an hour, a slight rhythmic
vibration and the digital read-outs on the control console the only
indications of movement. I tried to communicate with Tahlmeade, but he
was preoccupied. One thing was certain: to him I was not a Tzaddik. He
stared at the control console as intently as if the apocalyptic words of the
Torah were flaming across the screen, and tented his fingers. I interrupted
his thoughts a few times, but he simply frowned and then turned back to
the console. He was, of course, shutting me out. My questions would have
to wait… at least, until he awakened.
  For he gave himself away when he began to snore.
  So our species were not so different, after all.
  It took five hours to reach our destination: Michborah.
  Which meant graveyard.



   This was mountain country: cold, rugged, inhospitable, and beautiful.
The mountains—white and bald and worn, except for foothill sheathing of
bright green scrub—seemed to reach into the hazy expanse of red sky like
the towers of a completed Babel, and huge cumulous cloud formations
scudded past above, carried on storm-winds. The sky was in constant
movement: continents formed and reformed, arms and ships and towers
swirled into being, and then dissolved; phantoms and spirits roiled and
sailed in pursuit, one after another, chasing themselves into the ominous
blackness of a storm, which suddenly erupted, dropping torrents and
covering the world in a caftan of fog. The sun was smeary, and low; and
night, which came fast on this planet, was but footsteps away.
  But night would be like twilight, and the sky like the inside of a dance
hall.
   I pulled my threadbare coat tightly around me for protection from the
rain, which splashed from the wide brim of my hat, and I followed
Tahlmeade down the winding road that cut into the side of a mountain;
the road was paved with sharp, jagged, and slippery stones. As would be
our luck, we were walking along the side of the mountain that offered us
no protection from the pounding rain.
   Lightning snaked across the sky ahead of us, lighting up cliffs, gorges,
and the grotesque rock cones in the valley ahead. I shivered and
remembered the blessings: the blessing upon seeing lighting and—I waited
a few seconds for the crashing boom of thunder—the blessing upon
hearing thunder. A Jew must pronounce a minimum of a hundred
blessings every day: a blessing when he gets up, when he eats, prays, goes
to bed, puts on clothes, eliminates, sees a rainbow, a scholar, a beautiful
or strange-looking person, or hears bad news, or good news. Breathing
itself is a prayer, yet breathe as I might, I had been silent for years. Only in
public would prayers pass through my mouth as naturally as greetings and
commands. Yet just now I remembered my Tata, my father, teaching me
the prayer over lightning as we both stood in just such a rain as this one.
  “Borouch ahtaw Hashem Eloheinu melech ha’olam . . .”
  “Well?” Tahlmeade asked. “Are you going to say the blessings, or not?”
  Startled, I glanced to the side, as if I would see my father standing
there, my father who had been dead for over thirty years: Tahlmeade had
asked the question exactly as my father used to, with the same intonation,
the same voice, the same accent. In fact, it was as if my father had just
spoken to me from Heaven, where there is no distance.
  Of course, I didn’t believe that for a moment, but nevertheless…
  “Did you read my thoughts?” I asked him.
  “The blessing… ?”
 I said it: “Blessed are You, Hashem, our God, King of the universe, who
makes the work of Creation.”
  Together, we said the blessing for thunder: “Blessed are You, Hashem,
our God, King of the Universe, for His strength and His power fill the
universe.”
  “… v-g’vuraso mahlay olam. …”
  The rain became drizzle as day gave way to twilight.
  “Well,” I asked again as we walked, “Did you read my thoughts?”
  “Yes, but not the way you think.”
  “Then how?”
   “You’ll see, I assure you, Reb Isaac.” It was kind of Tahlmeade to
address me by the title of teacher, but perhaps that was an Ulimite form
of sarcasm. Who could know?
  “Nevertheless, I don’t see.”
   “You will,” Tahlmeade insisted, yet I had the very strong feeling that he
was speaking by rote, as a good salesman often does when making a sale,
although his thoughts might be entirely elsewhere.
   I suddenly smelled something acrid, like smoke, and tar, and as I looked
around to discover the source, Tahlmeade said, “Do you smell the volcano,
Rebbe? It’s old and quiet now, but it was quite an artist in its day, and still
wakes up to cough and fart.” The road turned and then abruptly ended in
a sheer drop. Ahead was a chasm, and below and beyond were canyons
within canyons, ravines, and a huge dry lake. Steps cut into the rock led
down to a high plateau that was filled with conical fairy chimneys, which
were over fifty feet high and capped with hard stone: natural sculptures
created by millennia of wind, rain, and snow. But the chimneys were
dwarfed by stone chimeras that stood hundreds of feet high and were
evenly spaced along terraced cliff walls that had been carved and sculpted
and hollowed into a city. The chimeras had heads like cats, or tigers, and
the bodies of eagles—that’s what they looked like to me, anyway. Yet as I
looked down at them, I felt a terrible emptiness, as if somehow gravity
itself was leaching away the stuff of my soul, as if I were falling, falling into
a grave; and I could only think of Auschwitz, of death and the choking,
second-by-second eternity of gasping pain that ended in the chest-still
darkness of the ovens.
   I felt as if I was looking straight into Hell, and I felt soiled and
frightened, for it was horrifyingly, terrifyingly beautiful, in the same way
that a cat must appear to the bird caught in its claws.
   “Thought is like an atmosphere, like clouds,” Tahlmeade said, although
I must admit I was still caught by this place, by its dead immensities, and
I heard Tahlmeade’s voice as if it was my own thoughts, my own internal
voice. “Usually you can make out vague shapes, and sometimes you can
see with absolute clarity, but not as often as we’d like. So you’re making
out shapes now, am I correct? And what do you see, Rebbe? What do you
see?”
  I was fixed on the chimeras and the city carved out of the cliff behind
them; the city was like a bas-relief of rust-red arches, columns, cupolas,
pavilions, spires, and balustrades, all fluted, the arches and horizontal
planes covered with chimeras, smaller versions of those that stood guard
below, blindly waiting through the centuries. The storm had blown itself
away, leaving the sky pink and still; spirals of clouds seemed to cling to
Me’al’lim, one of Ulim’s two moons, which was now a pale crescent.
  “I don’t know,” I said, replying to his question.
  “Yes, you do, Rebbe. Reveal yourself.”
  “I fear I am already revealed.”
  Tahlmeade was silent.
  “I feel empty in this place, as if something terrible has happened here. It
reminds me of death, of what Jews on Earth refer to as the Holocaust.”
  “It reminds you of Auschwitz.”
  “So you know of our history,” I said.
  “Yes, Rebbe. We know each other’s histories.”
   “What do you mean?” I asked, but Tahlmeade led the way down the
steps into the valley, and I followed him.
  Into Hell.
   The emptiness seemed to take everything from me, especially my
questions; it was as if I could feel gravity pulling harder on me with every
step. I clung to the side of the stairwell chipped out of the mountainside,
afraid that I would become too heavy and fall. Water pooled in the hollows
of the steps, and I was careful, for the stone was slippery. I was soaked,
and my clothes smelled musty. Once at the bottom, we walked toward the
chimeras. The sandy ground was muddy from the rain. As we walked, the
sun set, shadows deepened and lengthened, and the shattered remains of
Ulim’s third moon appeared as pale fire overhead: a celestial rainbow.
Now there were two moons in the sky, one vague, the other as sharp and
distinct as Earth’s, and the stationary fireworks above provided enough
light to read by.
   I saw movement ahead of me in the distance, and at first imagined that
smaller versions of the chimeras were alive and prowling about. They
glowed like ocean algae and fluoresced with every movement.
  “N’mdr.”
   I turned to Tahlmeade, happy to hear a sound in this desolation… and
then I realized that he had not said anything. I thought he had said
“tigers.”
  “This is their mating season,” Tahlmeade said; and this time he was
speaking. “They come here to mate, and to die. Ancient peoples
worshipped them, for they believed the animals had souls, which were
what they saw glowing.” Tahlmeade’s skin, which was scored, as if made
up of thousands of shale pebbles, glistened, and his wet tallis clung to his
shoulders like a mantle. “But don’t worry, Rebbe, voracious as they can be,
they can’t see us… or smell us. We are like ghosts, even here—especially
here.”
  I felt suddenly weary, exhausted; every step was a trial. I could only
concentrate on getting out of here, of putting the great stylized, stone
chimeras behind us, souls or no souls, ghosts or no ghosts.
  “Now you have no questions,” Tahlmeade said. Or perhaps it was a
question; I could not be sure. After a beat, he said, “You see, Rebbe, you
are a Tzaddik.”
  “What do you mean?”
  “Because you can see, and feel, and hear.”
  “So can all men.”
  “No, not all men… nor all of us.”
   Although we had turned away’from the chimeras and the glowing tigers
and had cut across to the southern edge of the field, which was close to us,
I felt the place pulling at me, pulling me back as if into a vortex, pulling
me to its center, which I imagined was as deep and lifeless as the pits in
Poland. Mass graves…
  “It is,” Tahlmeade said.
  “What?” I asked, still shocked at the soft explosion of his thoughts
touching my mind.
   “It is a mass grave, all of it a cemetery. As are the cliffs, the cities in the
cliffs: a necropolis. On Earth you have nothing like this, Rebbe. You ask
where the Jews are.” He swept his hand in the air, as if he were throwing
sand. “They are here, all twelve million of them. We walk on bones, on
lives, on ashes.”
  “How did this happen?” I asked, but for an instant I could see engines of
death working in the labyrinths behind the carved facades in the cliffs. I
could smell the charnel house. Here was where Ulimite technology had
reached its perfection.
  “It happened as it happened on your world. Those who killed us, if they
were alive to talk, would say their gods told them to do it. Those Gods, the
N’mdr that guard the ground.”
  “But you are alive,” I said, and there was desperation in my voice. “We
are alive.”
  “Do you feel alive… here?” Tahlmeade asked, and I felt rooted to the
ground, as if their gods had buried me where I stood. For an instant I
panicked; but I could indeed still move my arms, my legs.
   “Is it because of what happened here that your brethren can’t see you?”
I asked.
  Tahlmeade did not answer my question, but said, “The statues are
almost as old as the cliffs. This place is known as the Valley of Creation.”
He frowned, as if savoring the irony, and then led the way to a corner of
the cliff wall and into an arched entrance flanked by fluted columns, all
carved into the stone.
  I followed him through pitch-dark catacombs.
  I was blind, but I could feel the weight of the dead all around me, as
heavy as the crushing darkness itself.
  I was breathing it, dissolving in it.
   And then I saw light, a dim flicker at the end of a long tunnel. I felt
relieved, as if I had escaped the death that permeated the very air of the
Valley of Creation; death was like a thought, and thought like a vapor, or
perhaps an odor, a perfume that could be breathed, inhaled and exhaled,
passing from one person to another. Thus could I feel the heaviness of the
martyrs buried in the valley… thus could I hear Tahlmeade even when he
didn’t speak.
  We walked out of the catacomb into the bright night, and my mood
suddenly lightened, as if the mass of the mountain we had passed through
was acting like a psychic shield.
  “Good Shabbos,” Tahlmeade said. He frowned at me and nodded his
head; his mood, too, had changed.
  So on Ulim it was Friday, Ereu Shabbos: Sabbath eve.
  “I apologize that we had to pass through Gehenna to greet the Queen
Bride of the Sabbath, but I assure you, she is here.”
   The Sabbath was a Queen to be made welcome, for she was the
foretaste of Heaven, God’s great gift to those who obeyed his Torah. But
for me, for years, Shabbos was not a gift, not a freedom, but a prison of
rules and regulations. It was, of course, not enough merely to obey the
Law. You had to believe in it, take joy from it, give yourself up to it.
   I was bursting with questions, but Shabbos would not allow sadness or
bitterness: I would have to wait.
  A Shabbos calmness came over me, such as I hadn’t felt in years.
  “Good Shabbos,” I whispered.



  We came to a sheer cliff that looked unscalable. Tahlmeade guided me
through a concealed opening in the rock, and we took a lifter deep inside
the mountain.
   It was cold and bitter atop the mountain plateau, yet this place was
verdant: trees were thick, if stunted, and we took a winding road through
forest. Past the edge of the forest with its sharp tang of wood and sap, we
came to fields covered with flowers that appeared translucent in the night
light; and the ring glittered above, a metallic rainbow of color that
appeared and reappeared as cloud masses scudded across it. The haze of
aurorae was purple and pink, sheets of gauze that seemed to shimmer in
the sky like illuminated silk curtains.
  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “But how can anything grow in this cold?” I
pulled my coat around me.
  “The ground is warm, Rebbe. You see, your feet aren’t cold. The
mountain is alive, it breathes, and one day, it will explode.” He frowned. I
was beginning to understand his humor.
   Children were shouting ahead; they stood on the edge of the field and
were bundled in shiny black caftans and caps. Behind them was the
village, which seemed ethereal in the colored veils of night. The town
seemed to be cut out of the mountain itself, but it was an incongruous, yet
charming marriage of wood and stone: elongated domes sat upon thick
towers; other buildings were tent-shaped, and had galleries with open
sides to give shelter; and everything was glimmerous and multi-hued, as if
the village was mimicking the heavens.
  “Rebbe Tahlmeade!” they shouted, and waved their arms. “Good
Shabbos.”
   Tahlmeade motioned to them, and then stopped walking. He looked up
at the sky, at the ring—at Ulim’s night rainbow—and made a prayer. He
gazed at me steadily and said, “The rainbow is our covenant, just as it is
yours.”
   He continued to stare at me, making me uncomfortable. I was
beginning to realize that Tahlmeade was not merely a fixer, an
intermediary, as the ambassador mistakenly thought, but that he must be
the Tzaddik himself.
  “Have you nothing to say to that?” he asked.
  “The children, if they are children, are waiting for you.”
  “Waiting will not hurt them. And, yes, Rebbe, of course they are
children.”
  “What do you wish me to say, Rebbe.” I had to smile, for I had not
called him a rabbi before. Then I caught myself, for I remembered that a
smile did not signal pleasure to a Ulimite.
  “I wish you to say the truth. That you believe the Covenant has been
broken.”
   “Can it be otherwise?” I asked. “You have been nearly destroyed. Did
God hear your prayers? And do nothing?” I recited the words of the
Prophets, one of the Thirteen Articles of Faith, “ ‘I believe with perfect
faith that the Creator, blessed be His name, rewards those who keep His
commandments and punishes those who transgress them.’ Is that not the
pact between God and the Jewish people? But if Jews are to remain Jews,
they must suspend that; they must suspend all traditional doctrine and
remove God from history, for it would be sacrilege even to contemplate
that God would allow millions of innocent children to die as punishment
for the sins of other Jews!” After I said that, I asked, out of respect, “But
do you wish to speak of such things on the Sabbath?”
  “One can always question, Rebbe, especially on the Sabbath, for that is
the time when God is most visible.”
  “Let me ask you, then, if you knew that the Holocaust would come to
the next generation, would you raise your children Jewish? If Jews are
responsible to each other, you to me, me to you, and both of us to all of
them”—I motioned toward the children, who were waiting
impatiently—“then those who died in the Holocaust did not die because
they failed to keep the Covenant. They died because their grandparents
and parents kept it. So, Rebbe, I suppose I answered my own question.
They did die because of the sins of others… the sin of their parents for
remaining faithful to the Covenant!”
  “So God has abandoned us?” Tahlmeade said.
   “Unless you wish to believe our respective Holocausts were the means
by which God tested his people, as he did Job. But I cannot imagine such
a cruel conclusion.”
  “Then what do you imagine, Rebbe?”
  “Emptiness,” I said. The cold worked itself over my face until I felt I was
wearing a mask.
   “Better Job.” Tahlmeade frowned and then made a coughing noise,
which I understood as a laugh—but I could not tell if it was good-natured
or derisive. He opened his arms and walked toward the children, who ran
to meet us. Their small, pebbled faces seemed very gray; perhaps it was
the light of the night, or the cold. “Perhaps you’ll feel differently when you
jump the road.”
  “What?” I asked, surprised. “Jumping the Road” was an old
superstition, like the “evil eye.”
  “We’ll talk tomorrow, Rebbe, after you’ve—” The children distracted
him with questions.
  But I learned what he meant that night.



  In the middle of the night, as light poured like mercury though the
small high windows of my little room in the highest part of Tahlmeade’s
house, I listened to the voices downstairs and dreamed.
   I felt myself being hurled into the darkness. Yet who could imagine
speed without the reference of light or the pressure of gravity? Perhaps I
flew. Perhaps I fell.
  To Earth. Into the heart of Philadelphia. Into the Tzaddik’s court.
  Into the Tzaddik’s dream.
  “So, have you renewed your faith?” he asked. We sat on stone steps in
the ruins of a synagogue; after all, it was my Tzaddik’s dream.
  “I’m asleep,” I said.
  “As am I, but certainly you’ll remember this when you wake up.”
  “Remember what?”
   “That you jumped the road and spoke with your Tzaddik.” He smiled at
me, and then looked down at his age-freckled hands, which rested on his
lap. He was several years younger than me, yet I always thought of him as
much older. (Of course, how much older than me could anyone be and still
be alive?) His beard was mottled white and gray, which gave it a yellowish
cast.
  “I told Tahlmeade that you were a Tzaddik,” he continued. “I told him
that you had the ‘kuk,’ that you could ‘see.’ But I told him you didn’t know
any of these things.” When I didn’t reply, he said, “Of course, Tahlmeade
helped you jump, just to get you started.”
  To “jump the road” was to see into other places without being there. It
was the miraculous means by which Tzaddiks could help and protect other
Jews who were in trouble.
  It was pure, unadulterated, medieval, Jewish superstition.
  “If it’s superstition, then what are you doing here?” the Tzaddik asked.
“You came to me.”
  “I am not here,” I said.
  “Well, as long as you aren’t here, do you wish to ask me a question?”
  “Ah, so you’ll give me proof that I’ve jumped the road.”
  “Tahlmeade told you that you would do so. Doesn’t that tell you
anything?”
  “It tells me that I’m suggestible.”
   “Ask him how Jews came to be on two planets,” the Tzaddik said. “And
tell Ruchel that I send my felicitations.”
  Ruchel was Tahlmeade’s wife. But I knew that, and it was my dream.
   I awakened with a start, and stared up at the ceiling, which, like the
walls, seemed to be constructed out of one solid piece of wood the color of
mahogany. I wiped my eyes, for the ceiling seemed to be moving,
undulating ever so slightly, but that had to be an effect of the light drifting
in.
  I heard something, whisperings that seemed to be right here in the
room. A voice that could not be denied, for I could not help but think that
God was speaking directly to me.
  Giving me a history lesson.



   The children woke me up with an aromatic glass of sweetened tea. It
was barely dawn, and the light made everything in the room seem soft and
gauzy. My back ached from sleeping on the mattress on the floor, for I was
too large to fit on the bed, sumptuous as it might be. I sat up and thanked
these two tiny versions of Tahlmeade, dressed in their Sabbath best. They
fell over each other to get out of the room and made loud chirping noises
as they ran down the hallway; I assumed they were feigning terror, for I
understood their chirps to be laughter. Last night at Shabbos dinner, they
stared at me throughout the meal, except when Tahlmeade made them
sing the z’miros, the traditional songs of praise.
  As I dressed, I remembered that I had dreamed of my Tzaddik, and that
he had told me—no, a voice had whispered to me, whispered the answer to
my questions… but I couldn’t remember. It frustrated me for a moment,
and then I shrugged it off and went downstairs. Dreams were always like
that. They make sense only to the sleeper.
   By the time I came downstairs, the house was already filled with people,
male Ulimites wearing shiny hats and large black-and-white prayer shawls
the size of blankets. Like Tahlmeade, they dressed in black caftans that
were tied around the waist with cords to separate the lofty parts from the
profane. There must have been sixty Ulimites in the living room and more
crowded in doorways, all here for the privilege of accompanying
Tahlmeade to synagogue. Tahlmeade’s home, I should mention, was huge,
more an inn than a house for a single family. It was all rather plainly
furnished, except for the dining room, where the candelabra and kiddish
cups were kept. Tahlmeade’s table could comfortably seat twenty-five, and
at the head was his golden chair: a throne. The table was filled for every
meal, for many of his followers had sacrificed to come to his court; in
return, he gave advice and relief and expounded the word of God—who
better to do so, for was he not a direct conduit to the Creator?
   We went to the shul, to the synagogue, like a conquering army
returning home. It was a parade, and everyone was in uniform, as I was. I
was dressed no differently than the Ulimites—the black caftan and prayer
shawl—and as I entered the shul with the crowd, as I was seated near the
eastern wall—a place of honor—I remembered that I had jumped the road
last night. I remembered my dream, talking to my Tzaddik. There was
more to the dream, though, but I could not recall what it might have been.
   Tahlmeade sat in a plushly upholstered high-backed chair beside the
red-curtained Ark where the Holy Scrolls reposed; he looked out upon his
congregation, as if each person was a book that he could read in a trice.
The shul was packed, every seat accounted for, both upstairs and
downstairs (for the women, dressed in their drab finery, sat together in
the balcony, separated from the men by tradition, if not choice); and in
the rear, around a study table, stood the prosteh yidden, those without
learning.
  “Better an educated bastard than an ignorant rabbi.”
  That’s from the Talmud, which has something to say about everything.
   A cantor led the morning Shacharis service, and I davened, which is
how Jews pray—we rock back and forth, as if shaking out the prayers from
a saltshaker. Like shaking oneself into a trance. Well, that’s how the
Ulimites in the shul prayed, every one of them; their yarmulkes were
pulled over their hairless heads, their pebbly faces were expressionless. I
must confess to becoming caught up in the mood, caught up in the
familiarity of the surroundings, the chanting, the prayers and blessings,
the readings from the Torah that was resplendent upon the bimah
platform, which was itself crowded with honored “guests of the Holy
Scrolls.” It was true: a Jew can go anywhere among Jews and be at home.
So did I feel at home on this faraway world, with aliens whose faces were
like blue leather with bumps. I felt sleepy, as I always did in shul on
Shabbos, for it was a day to rest. One could not light a fire or switch on a
light, for today God was in control. He was the maker and shaker. Not us.
  But could I believe, as I sat and rested with strangers who looked like
nothing I had ever seen?
  Let’s just say that I was comfortable. That was enough, and I could lose
myself in the moment, in the prayers that were said standing up with feet
together, as if at attention. I was called up to the bimah to read from the
Scrolls. I bowed and shook everyone’s hand when I was finished. I returned
to my seat. It was pro forma, familiar. Like sleeping in your own bed. As I
prayed, I thought about my dream, and remembered. “Ask him how Jews
came to be on two planets,” my Tzaddik had said. And what would
Tahlmeade tell me? That Jews have been jumping the road for centuries,
for millennia?
  That would explain how these Jews came to be.
  Or perhaps it would explain how the Jews on Earth came to be…
   But it was superstition. I could more easily believe that worlds and
universes were splitting into 10 100+ imperfect copies of themselves: the
Isaac ibn Chabib quantum theory of creating Jews.



  “He who pays attention to dreams should have his head examined.”
That’s from Isaac ibn Chabib, not the Talmud.



   Thus the service went on, from the morning into the afternoon, sleeping
hours dissolving into an aromatic Jewish stew of routine and memory. As
we prayed, I suddenly realized that, indeed, the world around me was
dissolving. Praying was a dream, and the congregation dreamed.
  They dreamed Tahlmeade’s dream…
  And I found myself alone. In the Valley of Creation.
  The Jews who had died, their twelve million souls massing like clouds in
the sky, whispered to me, telling me their myriad stories. They were safe,
beyond pain and chance and care.
  But the other Jews—those who were alive and singing and chanting and
praying with me in the synagogue—had disappeared.
   For their dream was death and oblivion. It was protection. It was a
river: Lethe, the drowning river of forgetfulness.
  A river that covered the world.



   So this was a dream… and it wasn’t a dream. If I were religious in the
sense that I had set out to be when I entered the rabbinate, I would call it
a revelation. I had entered what the sages called Pardes, which means
orchard, or Paradise. Ah, irony of ironies, that revelation would come to
me on the mountain of graves. The Talmud tells the story of the four
rabbis who entered Pardes: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Ben Abuyah, and the
great Rabbi Akiba. (Of course, it’s not the Talmud that tells the story. But
for Jews the Talmud is like a person; when we read the sages in this
tractate or that, it is as if the Talmud itself is talking.) They all entered
Pardes through their dreams, which took the form of fiery chariots. Akiba
said to the other travelers, “Don’t be distracted, lest you lose yourselves,”
but Ben Azzai looked about and lost his soul, Ben Zoma lost his way, and
Ben Abuyah became an apostate. Only Rabbi Akiba entered in peace and
departed with his life.
   I’m certainly no Akiba, or Ben Zoma—perhaps a Ben Abuyah, God
forbid—but here I was in the dream that was not a dream. Like them I
had, indeed, jumped the road; and this time without Tahlmeade’s help. If
Tahlmeade was worth his robes, he would be searching for me frantically
right now. But I had learned a few more things, and I wouldn’t let him in.
   Here I sat in the Valley of Creation beside a fairy chimney the color of
chalk, facing the stone chimeras and the city of death hollowed out of the
cliffs. The chimeras rose above me like Incan cenotaphs, huge and stylized
and not yet worn smooth by the turbulent elements. The sky was clear,
washed of clouds, and the cliffs stood sharply against it. It was cold, but I
felt nothing of the physical senses: wind was an idea, sight a shadow, voice
an abstraction.
   And as I sat facing death, listening to the instructions of dead martyrs,
the collective unconscious of the Ulimite Jewish race, I watched the
glowing tigers, the N’mdr, padding around me, sniffing the air. They were
frustrated, for although they could see me, they couldn’t detect my
essence.
   You see, Tahlmeade hadn’t told me that the tigers could not be seen by
most people. That was their defense mechanism. But through the eons
there were those who had learned to see them… who saw them as souls
glowing in the light. Who worshipped them and learned to use them as
familiars.
   Just so had Tahlmeade, who had inherited the second sight and the
mantle of the Tzaddik, learned to use them to protect those in his charge:
all the Jews. He had learned from his father, who had learned from his
father.
  Thus, Jews had become like the N’mdr.
  Invisible.
  Invulnerable… for how can you kill what you can’t see?
  A tiger stood before me, gazing at me, as I gazed at him. The creature
seemed to draw my essence through its burning eyes, and I had to anchor
myself to my own reality, to my past and present, or I would become
another Rabbi Ben Azzai, who lost his soul in Pardes.
  But as I stared into those numinous eyes, I drew the creature to me. I
took its habits and its tricks of evolution. And I knew then what I had to
do.



  I met Tahlmeade in the bais medrash after sunset: the conclusion of the
Sabbath. The bais medrash, which means “House of Study,” was a small
room in the Synagogue. It had a high ceiling and long narrow windows,
which let in the hazy starglow. I could see comets raining like fire through
the narrow slats.
   We both sat across from each other at a study table piled with ancient
books and interactives that rested inches above the tables like rectangular
clouds.
   “I looked for you during the afternoon,” Tahlmeade said, touching an
interactive, which spoke and shivered into being, becoming its subject:
another touch and it would transform the entire room into a mnemonic of
the twentieth century mystical text Sh’ar Hayichud by Rabbi Dov Ber of
Lubavitch. Tahlmeade withdrew his finger and the interactive dissolved
into its former state. “It seems that you have become quite efficient at
Jumping the Road, Rebbe.”
  “You are a good teacher.”
   “Ah, so your Tzaddik told you that I gave you an initial push to get you
started.”
  “He did,” I said.
  “Then you believe?”
   “Only after you pulled the entire congregation into your dream this
afternoon.”
  “But you were not pulled into our dream,” Tahlmeade said. “Why?”
   “Do you think that I have some great strength that I was not sucked
into your dream?” I asked. “I could see into your dream, and it frightened
me. But then I am not a courageous man. No, Rebbe, I simply dreamed
my own dream. The Valley of Creation drew me to itself, the souls of your
martyrs—of our martyrs—drew me to them. It was the power of the dead.
They snatched me into their dream before you could carry me into yours.”
  “So you chose death.”
  “It wasn’t a matter of choice, Rebbe.” I paused, and then said, “But I
know what you have done.”
  Tahlmeade looked at me intently and nodded his head slightly as he
read my thoughts, my memories. “So you know the N’mdr. You have seen
the tigers.”
  I nodded.
  “And you have spoken to the dead.”
  “I heard voices,” I said. “Perhaps I heard the tigers, perhaps they’ve
absorbed—”
  “You are a strange creature, Rebbe,” Tahlmeade said. “You disbelieve
your own senses because they conflict with your preconceptions. You
spoke to the dead. You spoke to the tigers. Now you know.”
  “And you know what I must do.”
  “You wish to give us up, to reveal us to the world.”
  “You have not only hidden yourselves,” I said. “You have taken the
Gentiles’ souls from them; you have taken their religion, their spirit.”
  “We simply concealed ourselves,” Tahlmeade said.
  “No, you did more than that. You stole from them. You took revenge.
You’ve—” I paused, searching for words. “It’s very much like murder.”
  “No, Rebbe, it was they who murdered us. We have blinded them,
perhaps, but no more than that.”
   “And would you blind them unto the fourth generation?” I asked “Until
they became machines? When would you stop? When would you stop
being afraid? When there were no more Gentiles left alive… ?” Tahlmeade
did not answer, so I continued; after all, I have a reputation for stuffing
my feet into my mouth, for speaking when listening would be a mitzuah, a
judicious act of kindness. “You have robbed them,” I said, quoting Tosefta
Baba Kamma: “It’s a more heinous crime for a Jew to rob a Gentile than
a Jew, for such a crime involves the desecration of the Name. And does
not the Sefer Hasidim say, ‘If a Jew attempts to kill a Gentile, help the
Gentile’? You must stop dreaming their souls away, Tahlmeade. You must
return to the world.”
  “You, who believe that the Holocaust has rendered all traditional
doctrine absurd… you are quoting Tosefta Baba Kamma and Sefer
Hasidim to me? You, who cannot even find his own faith, you would
preach to me in the words of the sages?” Tahlmeade smiled at me,
showing small, even teeth: an expression of pure hatred. “The Gentiles will
only kill us again,” he said in a soft voice, as if he were teaching a child.
   “You are killing yourselves by robbing them. My hypocrisy or lack of
faith will not change that.”
  “We will not submit to them,” Tahlmeade said. “We will not allow
another Holocaust, another Valley of Creation.”
  I pushed myself away from the table and stood up.
  “I cannot let you leave, Rebbe.”
   “You cannot stop me,” I said; and I allowed myself to dream the beast,
the tiger, the N’mdr. I would jump the road. I would leave this place in the
time it takes a hummingbird to flap its wings. And Tahlmeade would not
find me, just as he had not been able to find me when I was in the Valley
of Creation. I had learned from the beasts… just as Tahlmeade had, and as
his father before him.
  I could be as invisible as the Jews of Ulim.
   I slipped into a dream, a dream of glowing tigers, and I imagined
myself… away. But I was lead. I was all mass, as heavy as any body without
its root, without its soul.
   And Tahlmeade could see me, as I could see him. We could not
disappear from each other’s sight. We could not escape each other’s grasp.
Tahlmeade stared into me like fire, for he was fire. He was the tiger, the
beast.
  And the bais medrash began to burn with a cold light.
  As stars fell by outside the windows.



  Tahlmeade and I were locked claw to claw, eye to eye, in mortal combat.
  Whosoever would let go—let down his guard—would suffer. We two
were tigers fighting in a dream—N’mdr—each caught in the grip of the
other. Our eyes were our weapons, for they are the mirrors of the soul.
Tahlmeade and I fought and burned. I tried to pull away, to disappear, to
jump the road, to escape. But Tahlmeade was like my own thought, my
own volition, myself.
  It was a stalemate.
   I remembered being in the Valley of Creation and staring at the tiger.
As he gazed at me, so had I gazed at him; and he tried to draw my essence
into his burning eyes. Eyes of fire, of sleep, of dream, of loss, of perdition.
So it was now, except Tahlmeade was no N’mdr. He was much, much
stronger.
  He drew me into his eyes, into his dream…
  As I drew him into mine.
   And yet, for all this wrestling of souls and minds, we were sitting quietly
at the study table in the bais medrash: two Jews staring each other down.
Two Jews trying to jump the road, trying to escape each other by any
means possible.
   But we found ourselves jumping the road together, as if we had but one
will… as if our two dreams had suddenly merged into one, and the one
became a chariot, the same chariot that Ezekiel had seen in a vision. In
just such a chariot had the four sages—Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Ben Abuyah,
and Akiba—entered Paradise.
  We were hurled like a meteor into the darkness.
  And a voice said, “How dare you disgrace yourselves before this court!
Stop fighting! Immediately!”
  It sounded like my Tzaddik.
  I was not surprised to find that it was.
  Tahlmeade stood beside me; before us were the Tzaddik and two other
men.
  I had been here before when I jumped the road and met the Tzaddik.
We were in the courtyard of a ruined temple, a synagogue. The air was
warm and full of moisture, and the sun was high in the sky. I thought I
was back in the Tzaddik’s dream, in Philadelphia, but he corrected my
thoughts and revealed that we were not in our own time, or place. We
were in Judea, in a place called Benei Berak, and we were standing before
the judges of a Bais Din: a Rabbinical Court. The Tzaddik and the two
other men who were as old as me—as old as the sand itself—sat upon
cushions, which faced east, the direction of prayer. They sat, and we stood,
upon cracked and crumbling stone. Although I did not know the other two
men, I knew the seating arrangements for a Bais Din: the one who sat in
the center—who leaned forward—as if to hear every word, even when
nothing was being said, was the Nasi, the big shot: the president of the
Court. The Tzaddik and the other rabbi were his deputies.
  They were certainly all Tzaddiks, all saints. They all clucked their
tongues and shook their heads as we stood before them.
  “You should be ashamed,” the Nasi said to us. “You are learned men,
not brawlers.”
  “To be one is to be the other,” I said, but the Tzaddiks were not
receptive to my wit.
  Tahlmeade began to speak, but the Nasi interrupted him and said, “All
has been decided. You will do as Rebbe Isaac ibn Chabib asks. We sent
him to you. You received him. Now let him liberate you.”
  “Avol—” Tahlmeade began to say, which was “but” in Hebrew.
  “There is no argument, Rebbe,” the Nasi said to Tahlmeade.
   Tahlmeade stood rigid as a bar mitzvah boy saying the blessings in
front of an entire congregation. He smiled, but would not go against the
decision of a Bais Din.
   Perhaps the Tzaddiks misunderstood his expression of hatred and
frustration and anger, for they smiled back at him.
  On second thought, perhaps they did understand.



  So even if Jumping the Road wasn’t a dream but a form of revelation,
we would dream ourselves back to Ulim in a fiery chariot. (After all, rabbis
are naturally a grandiloquent and flamboyant lot.)
  But before I departed, I asked the Nasi one question: “Who are you,
Rebbe?”
  “Elazar ben Azaryah Akiba,” he said, leaning toward me.
  Rabbi Akiba… ?
  “But don’t worry, Isaac,” he said. “You’re not in Paradise.”
  So now… we shall see what we shall see.
   The Ulimite Gentiles will soon be able to remember… to hear the voices
of their Gods and their consciences again. What will their voices tell them
to do?
   Who can know? (Well, perhaps Rabbi Akiba knows, but the rest of us
potzers—those of us who barely manage to get by—we’ll just have to take
our chances.) Even if we are to be slaughtered in the next generation, even
if we will have to become invisible again, even if we have to fight like
animals, we will live today. We will endure.
  And as for myself—
  I decided to stay right here and see this thing through.
  So do I believe in miracles?
  Do I believe in God?
  Perhaps it is enough to say that I believe in Shabbos. I believe in its
bready tastes, its music and spicy smells. When the candles flicker and
gutter like life itself, when the kiddish cups glisten and the stars fall into
the night like fireworks, I can feel something . . . the Queen Bride of the
Sabbath… the Shekhinah, which is the holy presence, the second soul we
are given for but one day a week. And then I, too, can taste Pardes . . .
Paradise.
  And after all, if I can be a Tzaddik, then who am I to doubt the Creator?



                                 The End