What if you found you could not live without the last person on earth you ever wanted to love?
For my readers:
This week I continue with this brief and last instalment of my fourth book, a story about a Jewish bookseller who is confronted by a vision of Christ and is eventually forced to choose between ancient Jewish tradition and his new-found knowledge that Jesus is the Christ. For more info about how to receive your copy, please see the bottom of this post.
____________________________________________________________
PEOPLE OF THE BOOK (AM HA-SEFER TORAH)
(Instalment 3 Ch 2)
S H E N E I (Two)
The service tonight had begun with the usual Shabbat Sholom,[21] a song of happiness and joy welcoming in Shabbat, led by Rabbi Schechter. Yesod moved his body to the ritualized, meandering tune, repeating a capella the Hebrew words in the minyan in unison with the others. Yarmulkes of white, black, and embroidered red and gold bobbed up and down emphasizing the words.
A few more members had filtered in, two couples who sat together and several boys who had been Bar Mitzvahed the year before. Each worshipper then opened the siddur to the section called Shabbat and Festival Services, to begin the long service with songs of praise. The book, opened from the right, featured Hebrew on the right page and a fair English translation on the left. The congregation sang the melodies as they had been taught, a capella and from memory, for there are no musical notations in a siddur.
Yesod closed his eyes and sang in Hebrew the opening Psalm 95 by heart, as he had done most of his thirty-four years. The words he knew. They were engraved on his heart, a conduit from a timeless world to the present, from the robes of prophets to the present day fabrics that layered his skin. Hebrew words unchanged since antiquity rose from the few gathered there and surrounded them like a tapestry of voices living and past. Guttural sounds, ritual mutterings meant only for the Eternal One’s ear, they were like a spell cast upon the chorus as well.
As in all Jewish liturgy, Yesod sang to celebrate the past because it cemented his faith to God in memory of an entire nation scattered like sand but enduring as earth. Cantor Rosten’s voice trembled with emotion at his words. His vibrato rumbled throughout the room. The simple, ageless melodies proceeded until six had been sung.
How reassuring this was, yet in his intense concentration Yesod looked pained. His visage appeared characteristically pinched and irritated, as if his soul were on a sacred quest and had despaired permanently of consolation and food, though he ate his meals ravenously. His nose was reminiscent of ancient Abrahamic/Arabic emblems, a protean protrusion between his eyes. The bridge extended in broad forward arch, bent upon forceful extrusion, then sloped smartly downward toward its nares, a tiny boomerang of cartilage, a canopy of flesh, a rounded slice of hill on a narrow ramp of face.
He always appeared preoccupied with difficult thoughts, and indeed he often was. He’d developed the habit of hunching his back when intense in thought or prayer, reading Kabbalah aloud in his room, or shelving volumes onto the crowded pine thoroughfares of his bookstore. At these times, his nostrils would flare and his dark eyes took on a hawk’s glare through the lenses of his wire-rims. His mouth alone seemed to smile in its precarious perch beneath his nares, and this gave him a somewhat laughable mien at times.
He had not yet begun to bald, but he wore a short beard like many in his synagogue. He looked indefensibly Jewish.
Now Yesod swayed jerkily to the chanting in a little sideways dance, his head keeping to the steady beat. Sometimes he tried to visualize the very first desert wanderers, castoffs, ragtag Hebrews trudging in the wake of prophets, camping along the scorching shores of the Dead Sea or traveling slowly on foot. Families in exile beneath a desert blazing with heat that leathered their skins and cooked thin meal into thinner page-shaped matzoh[22] crackers on their backs.
This book is available only from Amazon in paperback and as a Kindle book or personally from Marlena at www.jewishconvert-lds.com and comes with a bonus book and handouts from Marlena’s firesides.