“On the contrary,” said Nachum, “your voice has that unique quality of producing just the right level of background noise to drown out all distractions and allow for optimum focus. Please continue.” He gave a little wave of his hand.

Rather than be a human sound machine, though, I chose to spend the remainder of the trip reading the Chazon Ish’s Emunah U’Bitachon (a suggestion the Rosh Yeshivah gave me after the breakup); watching the sprawling swatches of green farmland out the window; and staring at the El Al plane featured on today’s Yedioth Ahronoth that the man opposite us was holding to his face. At last, the train lurched into our station, and Nachum and I managed to gather our belongings and make our way to the bus that would take us to Rechov HaGefen. I was hot and hungry, and I began to wonder if this hotel would have hospitality boxes on our beds like the program in Ashdod.

“Ready for a walk?” Nachum asked as we got off the bus.

“How long a walk?” I asked, already feeling daunted.

“About ten minutes.”

“That’s not too bad,” I said, trying to stay positive.

“Uphill,” Nachum appended, gesturing to a sandy path leading up to a small hill far, far in the distance. How long had it been since breakfast? My stomach was starting to make noises.

“It’s a good thing neither of us are Kohanim,” I said as we began our trek. There was a cemetery on both sides of the sandy path, with broken gravestones dotting the overgrown, grassy landscape.

“What a quaint area,” Nachum noted cheerfully.

“If quaint is British for haunted,” I mumbled under my breath.

We climbed the hill in silence, the cemetery slowly giving way to a flat field with a white building in the center. A lopsided, faded sign welcomed us to the Yahalom Hotel. My heart fell as I took in the dilapidated wooden pergola, the dingy toolshed, the murky lake, and the overall style of the hotel, which looked to me like a holdover from the days of the British Mandate. Even the knobby-kneed cows grazing lazily around the surrounding fields looked so old I imagined they might have supplied milk to members of the Haganah.

When I conveyed this to Nachum, he replied that this would surely have been the case had the Haganah been stationed in Teveria instead of Tel Aviv and if a cow’s natural lifespan was more than ten decades instead of two. “But otherwise you’re right on target as usual, Rosen,” he added helpfully.

We were a couple of feet from the front door when a middle-aged man in a white shirt, black pants, and black sneakers came running out, neatly curled peyos swinging, his hand extended in a shalom aleichem.

“You must be Jake Klein,” he said breathlessly to Nachum.

“Sorry to disappoint,” said Nachum, shaking his hand warmly. “I’m Nachum Sparks and this is Aryeh Rosen. We’re the mashgichim.”

“Oh, right, right,” said the man, looking flustered and introducing himself as Shua Brown, the program manager. I suddenly noticed that a thin kid of about 18 stood awkwardly behind him.

“Aryeh’s pretty good at omelets when he remembers to salt them,” Nachum continued, “but I’m afraid neither of us can take the place of your missing award-winning chef.”

Shua’s eyes widened. “How do you know Jake?”

“I don’t, but the panic on your face tells me that the person you’re waiting for isn’t merely the hypnotist for your Chol Hamoed night activity. Jake Klein, let’s see” — I imagined Nachum was pulling down a book from his brain-shrank — “he’s the one with that omakase restaurant in Crown Heights, right? Mizu?” Nachum paused again. “He must have been on the El Al flight out of JFK last night.”

Shua nodded in wonderment.

“I’m afraid he won’t be coming,” Nachum declared.

I watched as the color drained from Shua’s face. “How can — are you sure?”

“Quite,” replied Nachum breezily. “The flight made an emergency landing in Cyprus after three cases of measles were discovered aboard. They’re quarantining the passengers for seven days. I’m guessing the Wi-Fi here isn’t great, if he hasn’t made contact with you.” Nachum put a hand on my shoulder. “Aryeh, I’m sure, can fill in the rest of the details — he was staring at the cover story in today’s Yedioth Ahronoth for the duration of our train ride.”

“Oh — umm,” I said, “Sorry — I was actually just spacing out.”

“Fantastic,” said Nachum, patting my shoulder. “Helpful as always.”

“And here I was thinking things were going too smoothly,” cut in Shua. “But it’ll be okay,” he added, sounding like he was reassuring himself more than the two of us. “It’s not like I don’t know how to cook. I’ve been a private chef for many years, actually, but I was hoping to take it easier this Pesach.” He gave a little glance back at the teen behind him.

“So you’re the one who hired Jake Klein?” Nachum asked casually, but I knew my roommate well enough to catch his probing sideways glance at Shua’s face. “Were you involved in hiring all staff members?”

“It’s a boutique program,” Shua answered. “The staff list is quite small, but actually, he’s the only one I contacted. The Big Boss took care of the rest. Anyway, you’re still holding your bags. Where’s my hachnassas orchim? Come inside. Put your stuff down. My son Dovid will get you a mezo— I mean a shehakol.” We followed behind him, the key ring on his belt jangling as he led us inside.

Dovid served us Coke in plastic cups and slices from a package of kosher for Pesach pound cake in napkins.

“I’m usually a fan of Osem Pesach cakes,” I mumbled to Nachum as I tried in vain to chew the cake down to a swallowable consistency, “but something’s really off with this flavor.”

“It’s not Osem, genius,” said Nachum between polite little nibbles, “it’s Otsar — an Osem knockoff brand. Very popular, too. Trailing Osem in sales by a very small margin last I checked the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.”

After the cake, Shua gave us a brief tour of the hotel — outside where the cows were grazing was the pergola and toolshed I had spotted when we first arrived. Inside, on the bottom floor, was a small administrative office, a dining room, a conference room that would be repurposed as a beis medrash and shul, and the kitchen. The bedrooms were on the second floor, and Shua left us in our room to unpack and wash up before joining him in the kitchen.

I collapsed onto the bed as soon as Shua closed the door behind him. Sadly, there were no hospitality boxes, but I noticed that sitting on each of our pillows was a sealed sleeve of an Otsar kosher for Pesach marble cake and a bag of soup croutons.

I closed my eyes, trying to block out the paint peeling off the ceiling or the fact that the linen smelled like mothballs. To think that my siblings were probably all huddled around our warm Silver Spring kitchen, cutting into a tin of my mother’s freshly baked mocha bars.

With my eyes shut, I heard a shuffling noise from the direction of Nachum’s bed, where I guessed my friend was neatly organizing his custom-made mashgiach’s toolset.

“I’ve added some new tools for Pesach, of course,” he enthused, “and I’m quite excited to show them off to you.”

“I’m excited to see them,” I answered politely, thinking that the only thing I could be excited for at that moment was hot food and a shower, but the croutons would just have to suffice. I polished off the bag and gradually worked up the momentum to get up and go into the shower, where I tried to ignore the silverfish bugs under the toilet and the clump of hair in the drain.

When we headed down to the kitchen about a half-hour later, a delivery of produce and pantry items had just arrived, and Shua was showing the deliveryman where to deposit the boxes.

But Nachum, peering over the man’s shoulder, began modifying Shua’s directions:

“You can put the potato starch over there,” Shua told the man, pointing to a lined counter.

“Actually,” interjected Nachum, pointing at one of the boxes, “that is from at least three Pesachs ago and is crawling with saw-toothed grain beetles, judging by the size and shape of the holes bitten into the corners. Take it back to your supplier and reimburse us, please. We will not be your disposal site for inventory you didn’t sell in previous years.”

“Oh, um…” the delivery man stammered helplessly, “Okay.”

“And we won’t be needing those potatoes over there,” Nachum threw an accusatory finger in the direction of a netted sack near my feet. “That sticky substance on the outside of the spuds are aphid droppings, a clear sign of infestation.”

“This sparkly stuff?” I said skeptically. “It just looks like a bit of honey” — I pointed to the caramel-colored bottle next to the potatoes — “spilled on it.” But when I gave the sack a little kick, the potatoes were suddenly covered in vibrating green dots.

“I’m never eating another potato,” I declared.

“Wrong holiday for that, Rosen,” said Nachum, who nixed a couple more things before the deliveryman finished and headed for his truck, dolly loaded with rejected items. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a vehicle pull out of a driveway faster.

With the pantry stocked, Nachum turned to setting up his tools, installing little alarms that went off whenever any substance in the kitchen reached yad soledes bo and building what looked like a walk-through metal detector that washed, cleaned, and dried every part of your clothing when you entered the kitchen.

“I feel like I’m in a car wash,” I lamented as I walked through it. “Do I really have to do this every time I come in?” Nachum replied that I should just be grateful he didn’t make me change my shoes, too.

As Shua and Dovid cooked dinner for the guests arriving throughout the day, Nachum and I got to work checking all the maror for the Seder. With gloved hands, I began pulling apart the stalks of Romaine lettuce and swirling the leaves around in a tub of soapy water.

“Agitate the leaves, Rosen,” Nachum remarked, glancing over at my tub, “don’t destroy them.”

And: “If you need a lightbox to see that leaf’s infested, it’s time to visit the eye doctor.”

And then: “A little slower, Rosen, and we’ll be finished on Isru Chag.”

I tried ignoring Nachum’s running commentary as Shua and Dovid’s bubbling pots made my stomach grumble. After what seemed like a decade but was really only about an hour — the towering stack of checked green stalks was now so tall I could barely see Nachum’s blond head over it — Shua finally told us to take a break until after dinner.

As soon as we got back to the room, I made a beeline for my bed. Nachum, though, stood by the window, his hands clasped behind his back and his posture ramrod straight, like a sentry at his post.

“He’s not well, you know,” Nachum said suddenly, turning his neck back toward me.

“Who isn’t?” I asked from behind the open pages of Emunah U’Bitachon.

“Dovid Brown — Shua’s son.”

“How can you tell?” I asked, closing my sefer and joining Nachum by the window. Below, Dovid and Shua were like little animated figurines, smoothing out the sand and putting down orange traffic cones to create makeshift parking spots.

“Too many signs, I’m afraid,” Nachum said sadly. “The face that’s unnaturally tan, shades darker than his hands. The bloated fingers. The shortness of breath I observed while we were working in the kitchen together. I’d guess he has some sort of blood disorder.”

As Nachum spoke, I spotted a figure with a knitted kippah and a hiker’s rucksack making his way up the hill. He turned in to the Yahalom Hotel, and Shua, dropping a stack of orange cones, raced over.

From our window above, we watched Shua and the man exchange words. The man was tan with a trim beard, a muscular build, and a gun slung around his shoulder. He looked exactly like the type of person you’d want in your apartment if it just so happened that the Russian mafia came looking for you. (In our case, the mobsters actually got confused and went to the Pessins on the floor above us, where our landlord, the four-foot-two-inch Mrs. Sarah Pessin, managed to hold them off with a platah until the police arrived. Please see our next podcast episode, which I plan to upload after Pesach, for more details.)

Nachum had a hand over his eyes to block the glare of the sun. “I recognize that man!” he exclaimed. “And you should, too!”

I pressed my forehead against the glass of the window. “I’ve never seen him in my life, Sparks.”

“Incorrect!” exclaimed Nachum. “He’s the guard at the Tachanah Merkazit on Motzaei Shabbos, and I’ve been with you at least three times when he’s scanned our bags. I’d say he started there around three months ago, if memory serves right. Frankly, I find it rather remarkable that you don’t recognize him.”

“And I find it remarkable that you do,” I said, thinking of the tens of security guards I passed by in a given week in Jerusalem.

“I won’t deny my G-d-given gifts, Rosen,” Nachum conceded as he squinted at the horizon, where a small car was gliding along the sandy road, “but I think you underestimate the extent to which my memory is aided by my desire to remember.”

I was reflecting on this last point when the toy car in the distance grew and grew until it morphed into a life-size silver SUV, which slid smoothly into one of the parking spots Shua had set up moments earlier. Out piled a family of five, all wearing white sneakers and Mets baseball caps. Their suitcases emerged next. Or at least all except one, which seemed inexplicably stuck to a seatbelt in the back row.

We watched through the window as the father tugged and pulled, red-faced. Next, he took out his phone and began tapping at it with his fingers. The wife had a hand on one hip and was scrolling on her phone. The kids — two boys and a girl — were each staring intently at a tablet screen.

“The luggage lock got stuck around the seatbelt and he lost the key,” Nachum explained to me as if giving the play-by-play at a football game. “Now he’s asking ChatGPT. Let’s see what the bot comes up with.” We watched as he yanked and tugged. It was only when he started biting the suitcase zipper with his teeth that Nachum exclaimed that as much as he enjoyed seeing the limits of artificial intelligence illustrated so clearly before his eyes, he could not, in good conscience, watch the man struggle one minute longer.

His long, decisive strides led us down the rickety staircase to the first floor and then out to the front of the building. The man was now in the SUV’s trunk, wrestling with the seatbelt — and losing.

“What seems to be the issue?” Nachum asked politely as he leaned forward into the trunk. He turned his neck back to beam a quick smile in my direction, apparently proud of himself for following one of my recent social skills lessons: “Do not inform strangers of their problems — even when you’re coming to solve them.” (I had to work hard to convince Nachum that the time wasted asking someone in need an unnecessary question was not grounds to abolish the rule.)

“THIS! STUPID! LOCK!” the man choked out between tugs of the seatbelt.

“Daddy, I need the bathroom,” said a young boy standing next to the car.

“Daddy, what’s the Wi-Fi password?” said a girl.

“Daddy, someone’s here to help,” said the oldest of the kids, a tall teenager with a smattering of pimples on each cheek.

The man’s head jerked out of the car a little. “Who’s here?”

“Nachum Sparks,” my roommate said, hand extended parallel to the man’s nostrils.

“Wait — aren’t you that Sherlock Holmes wannabe? OUCH!” We heard the thud of the man falling backward into the trunk. The only remaining sign of life from him was his phone, still held aloft. “It says to twist once and pull three more times,” his voice rang out from the bottom of the trunk.
The teenaged son put out two hands and pulled his father to a sitting position.

“Daddy, you don’t need ChatGPT anymore. Nachum Sparks is here.” In the minute it took for the man to climb out of the trunk, Nachum borrowed the younger boy’s kippah clip to pick the luggage lock, release the seatbelt from the straps of the suitcase, and gracefully transfer it from the trunk to the ground.

“Now my stuff’s covered in sand,” the man said, the palms of his hands turned upward in annoyance. Gruffly, he commanded his kids to help him clean off the luggage. Shua came over and, his eyes reading off the small paper he withdrew from his pocket, introduced us to Alex and Yaeli Sabag and their children Joey, Kobe, and Ariella from Brooklyn, New York.

“Where’s the bellhop?” Alex now wanted to know as he began taking wads of cash from his wallet. “Is he the bellhop?” He pointed with his thumb at the Tachanah Merkazit security guard. In all the commotion, I had forgotten the presence of the man with the hiking rucksack, who was hanging back at some distance, a cow grazing near him. “No,” said Shua, “that’s Dror Zimran, one of our guests.”

“Can I pay you to bring our bags to our room?” Alex yelled to Dror.

“Mah?” asked Dror.

Alex repeated himself slowly.

“Lo shamati,” Dror called back.

Out came Alex’s trusty phone, and we all stood by and watched as he plonked at the screen with fat fingers.

“Let’s see if the bot is better at Hebrew than it is at unlocking locks,” Nachum whispered in my ear.

Alex read slowly from his screen. “Ha-im (pause) a-ta (pause)—”

“Daddy, I really need the bathroom,” whined Kobe.

“Ein ba’ayah,” said Dror, seeming to catch on as he effortlessly hoisted a suitcase in each hand high above the dirt road, to the stunned expressions of the Sabag family.

“Tip him,” hissed Yaeli Sabag under her breath.

Alex waved a 20-shekel bill rudely in Dror’s face. “Lo,” said Dror, shaking his head at the money. “B’chinam.”

I overheard Shua direct Dror in Hebrew to leave the bags outside of Room 5 on the second floor as he led the Sabags toward the hotel.

“Daddy, where’s the pool?” asked Kobe.

“Daddy, where’s the tea room?” said Ariella. “I’m hungry.”

“I’m sure,” said Alex, adjusting his Mets cap and flashing his white teeth, “that this nice man will tell us once we get settled.”

“Er — umm—” Shua stammered. “We don’t have a pool — but — we do have a lake.” He pointed to the murky stream to the left of the hotel.

“No pool?” Alex repeated slowly, as if he was vocalizing words in a language he could read but not understand.

“I told you we should have gone to that program in the Maldives,” Yaeli said coolly.

N

achum and I stood and watched as the next family arrived: three adults pushing suitcases across the sandy driveway.

“My toes! My toes!” cried the middle figure, a woman in a sheitel.

“If you would have just worn sneakers like I told you,” said the younger woman.

“Oh no,” Nachum whispered in my ear, “when that family was getting on to the train behind us this morning, they had eight bags, not including their pet carrier. Now they have only seven.”

Abruptly, the middle figure stopped short as the younger woman and the man continued without her.

“Stop! Yoel, stop!” The man’s suitcase rolled to a halt.

“Shouldn’t we get inside so you can rest your toes?” he asked.

“We’re going to need ice,” said the younger woman knowingly. “Why are we stopping, Ima?”

The woman raised her hand, which was in a brace, to point at the bags and count them slowly.

“Carpal tunnel, I’d guess,” Nachum whispered to me.

“We’re short one bag,” the woman with the hand-brace announced. “Emunah, you’re missing your makeup bag!”

“Oh,” said the girl, whose face wore a kind of sheepish look. “Oh — well.”

“Emunah Tehila Brooks,” said the older woman, eyes narrowing, “did you purposely leave your makeup bag at the Tachanah Merkazit?”

“What?!” she said, sounding incredulous. “Now, why would I do that?” I thought I saw her wink at her father.

“Emunah!” her mother cried, “there could be eligible people for you to meet here! You need to look your best.”

“Very eligible,” Emunah agreed, “especially that one.” She pointed to a man with a silver beard and a walking stick who was slowly making his way out of a Gett taxi. A barking sound alerted us to the presence of his Seeing Eye dog. The cat in the Brooks’ pet carrier began making high-pitched hissing sounds.

“Ok, obviously not him,” said Mrs. Brooks, “but he might know someone.”

“Not so obvious,” answered Emunah. “That man you and Chani forced me to go out with last week was fifty. The waiter actually asked if he was my grandfather.”

“In our defense,” replied her mother, “he said he was forty-five on his resume. And you’re thirty-five, Emunah. Fifty is not that crazy.”

“Yes, I know, I haven’t forgotten I’m thirty-five,” Emunah said, sounding frustrated, as she knelt to remove a ginger-colored cat from the carrier.

“Hello,” called out the old man with the walking stick to the Brooks family. He had a weak, wheezy voice. “I’m Izzy Engel. Have I made it to — what did it say in that letter? The print was so small — the Yarkon — I mean, the Yahalom?”

“Yes,” said Yoel. “You made it.”

“Oh, good. There was that time I set out from my apartment in Rechavia for the local makolet and ended up in Rosh HaNikra. Glad to have made it. Where are you from?”

“Yoel Brooks, a pleasure to meet you. We’re from Romema.”

“My dermatologist’s from Romema. Or is he from Raanana? I can’t recall.”

By now the figures had nearly reached us, so Nachum and I introduced ourselves and helped move the Brooks’ and Izzy Engel’s luggage inside, trying to keep the latter’s dog from pouncing on the former’s cat.

C

runch. Crunch. An old car pulled into the driveway, the back of which was plastered with soldier slogan stickers and a sticker of the “Lone Oak” of the Gush. Out jumped a man in a button-down blue shirt and a kippah serugah.

I watched with some surprise as Nachum strode right up to the man with an outstretched arm. “Dr. Yoram Rosental, a pleasure to meet you,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m breaking one of my friend’s social skill rules,” he gestured to me, “in calling you by name when we haven’t been formally introduced, but I recognize your face from an ad for your archaeology symposium at the Great Synagogue. Actually, I’ve broken two rules, as drawing attention to the fact that I’m breaking a rule is another one of Aryeh’s no-no’s.” I felt my face reddening.

“The pleasure is mine,” said the man pretentiously. “And to whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” By now, a woman in a towering, shimmery mitpachat had surfaced from the car, holding a yoga mat.

“I’m Nachum Sparks,” said my roommate, “and this is my colleague, Aryeh Rosen.”

“Ooh-ah!” the man whistled. “Your reputation precedes you, young man. I read your article about how that stela they just found in Beit She’an is from Bayit Rishon and not from Bayit Sheini. All based on the shape of the ‘daled’ in the inscription. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant.” There was no mistaking the pleased look on Nachum’s face. “You’re not by any chance related to the late Isador Sparks?”

Nachum’s bearing changed. “He was—” Nachum faltered, then started again. “My father.”

“Ah,” said the man, nodding his head. “I’m not surprised to hear it. Not surprised in the least. I did a sabbatical at Oxford many moons ago, and your father was on staff there. What a brave man! If not for the fact that everyone knew he was the smartest man in the entire Religious Studies department, I’m sure he would have been thrown out of the place. Cared not a whit what anyone thought, and too proud of his religious beliefs to apologize. Mentioned G-d every third sentence.” Nachum, who was always an attentive listener, was glued to Yoram’s every word with an expression on his face I can only describe as hunger. “I was so sorry to hear about his — untimely — passing.”

(Nachum’s parents had been killed in a terrorist attack when the family was spending their father’s sabbatical year in Israel. Nachum did not speak about it often.)

Yoram proceeded to explain that he had been invited to the Yahalom as the scholar-in-residence, that he was going to be giving a lecture that evening, in fact; and that — he gestured to his backpack — he had come with some very thrilling (his word) artifacts on loan from the Beit Guvrin archaeological foundation that he planned to use as “show and tell.” Then the two returned to discuss the stela that was the subject of Nachum’s article. I struggled to follow, likely because it took me about half the conversation to realize that “cognate” was a language — not a type of whiskey.

A

clunker of a minivan pulled up next, held together in the front with black moving tape and zip ties, loud screams audible even before the car doors opened.

“Tatty! Why did he get another bag of chips?”

“STOP pushing me.”

“I’m not pushing you.”

“MOMMMYYY!!!”

“Dai!”

The wailing of a baby joined this happy chorus. Out tumbled the kids, sticky, sweaty, covered in yellow crumbs. The mother emerged from the passenger seat holding a laptop.

“A programmer,” Nachum whispered in my ear, “judging by the model of her laptop compared to the model of their car. She keeps American hours — see the ‘Next to the Mir’ seforim bag along with the truckload of seforim at the foot of the car seat, and the sticky note on the laptop about a work meeting at 11 p.m. tonight.”

Nachum introduced himself to the husband, Yedidya Weil, who almost dropped the Pack-’n-Play he was unloading when he heard Nachum’s name.

“You’re Nachum Sparks? You don’t even know what you’ve done for me,” he clapped Nachum’s shoulder with his free hand. “I’ve been meaning to email you to thank you but I only had your detective agency address and I wasn’t sure I could use it for personal emails.” I liked this guy immediately. “Anyway, your Sparksnotes got me through all of my bechinos this zeman. When are you coming out with one on Yevamos? Or better yet, would you be up for a chavrusa over Pesach? I’m here on the program as a baal korei. All expenses paid in exchange for leining = — can you believe that? I read the letter over like ten times, it almost seemed too good to be true.”

“You don’t happen to have your letter with you?” Nachum asked politely.

“I wish,” Yedidya replied, “but my Shmuely actually flushed it down the toilet.”

“Mommy! It’s Nachum Sparks!” exclaimed the oldest Weil kid, an eight-year-old named Chezky, looking at Nachum like he wasn’t sure he was real or not. “I dressed up as you for Purim,” he said shyly. “I brought the costume here — my mother made it. It has a magnifying glass, and a small gemara, and a hat that I wear on a slant, just like you do.” He blinked up at Nachum with huge, adoring eyes.

“A slant like I do?” Nachum said, sounding confused.

“Like in the picture of you that Mommy showed me on her computer,” the boy said sweetly. He ran to retrieve a hat from his backpack and placed it on his head half-off.

“What picture?” Nachum turned toward me, with his arms folded.

“Well, I — I was thinking to myself—” I stuttered.

“Try to avoid that when you can, Rosen. It never ends well.”

“I was thinking,” I plowed on, “that our Substack could use some jazzing up, so I added an ‘About’ page with a picture of you.”

“With my hat on a weird slant?” He pointed to Chezky.

“Not a weird slant. Just — you know — how you always wear it… with that angle that you think looks cool,” I finished lamely.

“I do not!…Well, all right, perhaps…but it’s to deflect the sun. You should know, Rosen, that a well-angled hat can replace sunglass—”

“Can I help you solve a mystery this Pesach?” Chezky cut in. His big eyes were quivering with excitement. “Can I be your helper?”

“I’m on vacation,” Nachum answered quickly.

“But if something comes up and you have to solve a mystery?”

“Ahh,” Nachum stalled, “see, I already have Aryeh as my — er — helper, but I appreciate the offer.”

“Oh,” the boy looked like he was going to cry.

“No, don’t be sad,” Nachum said with a tone of mild panic. “I’ll try thinking of a good job for you. In the meantime, have you seen the cows?”

Slowly, Chezky shifted his gaze from Nachum to the grazing bovines.

“Parot!” he screamed to his siblings. As if rehearsed, the Weil kids all raced from the sandy driveway to the grassy field and began trying to mount the cows like they were attached to a carousel.

“Mesukan! Mesukan b’yoter!” came their mother’s hysterical voice from behind them, but it was drowned out by the cows’ low mooing and the kids’ joyful shrieks.

The unfortunate cow that Shmuely Weil tried to saddle emitted the most desperate sound I’ve ever heard — and let’s just say I’ve been to my fair share of petting zoos.

“Pharaoh HaParah!” Shmuely squealed with delight, as the cow again made that sound that was a cross between a moo, a whimper, and a plea for help. “His name’s Pharaoh,” the little boy informed Nachum and me as he stroked its fur with his pudgy fingers, “but he’s a good cow. He’s not a rasha cow.”

“

Daddy, it’s taking forever to load,” Ariella Sabag complained from her perch on the couch in the lobby. But Alex was deep in conversation with Shua.

“I thought this was a VIP program with celebrities,” Alex blustered.

“There is a celebrity on the program,” Nachum said. “Yoram. Yoram Rosental.”

Alex’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve never heard of him. Is he a DJ?”

“Actually, he’s a professor of Semitic Languages at Hebrew University, but, you know, same idea.”

Slam.

The sound of a car door shutting announced the arrival of the program’s final guests: a couple in their sixties, crisply dressed, one piece of luggage each. “Did you remember to—” the hatted woman asked, in a faint voice.

“Yes,” said the man, sounding tired. “I already told you—”

“And the pills?”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “I packed them.”

“Dr. Mark Katzenstein and his wife, Julie,” Shua read their names off from his paper,

“Welcome to the Yahalom.”

To be continued…

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1103)