He coughs. “The guards are dispelling people each night.”

The heaviness returns. She should have known that she was being called upon to solve something, save someone. “And so?”

He hesitates for a long while, pulling his fingers through his short, tufty beard. She waits, pushing away the urge to take up her accounts or break the seals on the letters that arrived the previous evening.

“There is still widespread opposition to…”

“To all that is happening.”

He bows his head in agreement.

The familiar frustration rises in her. Do these people not realize, do they not see it? That history waits for no man, and just as it has struck down so many of them, so it will raise them up.

Before she opens her mouth to speak, she modulates her voice. “Do you have any suggestions?”

Amram threads his fingers together. She gestures to the chair. Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. There is time, still, before morning calls us to its duties.

“The people, they do not just need force.”

“Yes?”

“They need words. Persuasion. Reassurance, that they are doing the Will of the Almighty, and that He is orchestrating this crescendo of history.”

“The basic tenets of our faith.” Her voice is dry.

“We all need strengthening, Mama. Especially after all that has happened.”

She nods. This is true.

Amram continues. “And so, I suggest that we put out a treatise. Explaining the challenges of the time, the changes, with a view to our history, and our hopes.”

She looks at him, concentrating.

His voice picks up and he takes from inside his cloak a thin book. He sets it down in front of her. She brings it up to the light of the candle. “Sefer Hamefoar.”

She opens it and sees the author’s name written as an acrostic: Shlomo Molcho.

Amram speaks. “It is his thoughts about these times and the coming of the Redemption.”

She flips through, lifts the book close, and reads:

“And it shall be when the ark travels. The Divine benevolence that Israel first received will be reversed, and the holy ark will travel from its place, and Israel will be lowered from their former height and be stricken with suffering… and afterward it says, ‘Rise up, G-d’… and we do not say rise up except to one who has fallen…”

She looks up at him. His face is anxious. He is looking for her approval, and oh, how she wishes she had been that kind of mother, a mother whose children did not have to work quite so hard for her approbation. But she knows no other way.

“Rav Shlomo Molcho is dead. Three years ago. Burned at the stake.” She pauses. “And the hopes of so many joined the conflagration.”

“I know.”

She remembers it: the imprisonment. The hope. The deputations. The sickening wait. The reports: flames, burned flesh, Shema Yisrael. Another hope for the coming of Mashiach, dashed.

Amram’s voice is insistent. His hand has turned into a fist that bangs on the tabletop. “But what remains is that he persuaded people to believe in him. He had followers. He lit hope.”

She closes the book and pushes it across the desk towards him.

“But what does all this have to do with me?”

“If you want people to support your efforts, then you cannot simply post guards before each and every of your endeavors. You should write something. Persuade them.”

She nods. “You seem to have forgotten something. There are no printing presses here in the Holy Land.”

Amram stares at her for a moment and then bursts out into laughter. “Since when did that stop you, Mama? Since when?”

She looks at him and then, suddenly, finds herself laughing along with him, rocking back and forth.

“It is true.” She flips open the cover of the book. “This was published in Salonika. In 1527. The type is good.”

“Rav Alkabetz came from Salonika. And also Rav Yosef Caro.”

She thinks for a minute. “So they did. And Salonika is nearer than the printing presses in Italy.”

She nods slowly. “All right, Amram. I accept your suggestion. Ask a few of the scholars here for essays. Heaven knows, I pay them enough. And get this printer from Salonika — I want him here in Tzfat in…”

She creases her forehead into a question. “How fast can you get him here?”

Amram seems to grow in stature even as she talks.

“Within the month? Is that reasonable? I am not asking him to leave Salonika entirely. Just to come here with a small version of his press — perhaps just the moveable type — the frame of the press we can build him here, heaven knows we have space for it, it can take its place in the wool factory.” She nods sharply.

“Yes, Amram. Bring him here. It may take money. It may take other forms of persuasion, but you are my son, you know my ways. We shall not just have our guards. We shall have our words.”

***

The house is draped in burgundy, the damask woven with gold thread so that when the candles are lit, the gold will catch the light and glow. And there are many candles, 338 in all, 13 times the numerical value of the Almighty’s Name of Mercy. Thirteen for the 13 tenets of faith, and for the full expression of the Oneness of Hashem’s name.

Leonora walks around the tables, adjusting a glass, pulling at the tablecloths, pushing the candlesticks into the center. She notices that her fingers are shaking. Well, let them.

There is that moment before any occasion, when the tables are laid and the food is ready and you do not know, you never can tell, if the evening will be a triumph or a disaster. Mama used to say, “The moments beforehand are always better than the party itself.” She does not know if that is true.

What does the Almighty observe, in that quivering moment before He comes to redeem them all? Does His divine spirit pass over the roads and forests, gathering each sigh and tear, each clenched muscle, each determined thought of faith of His wandering people? It is a moment born of destruction, but surely, the destruction has passed?

Soon, very soon, the notables of Safed will arrive. HaRav Shlomo Alkabetz and HaRav Moshe Cordovero and HaRav Yosef Karo, the crown of Tzfat, for all of them have accepted the invitation delivered by her sons, for this feast that will see off the envoy of prayer.

Her sons. One of the candles is sputtering, and she snuffs it out and calls for a new one. They will be here, too, and they will finally learn what it means to be her child. What it means to refuse to live in a world that is broken, that is a collection of empty shells. What it means to insist on change, to stamp your foot on the ground and say, G-d in Heaven, we cannot live like this anymore. We cannot.  For Your sake and the sake of Your children, end this façade. Remove the mask of the world and let us see how the pain and the suffering, the emptiness of this world shines with Your love. Because otherwise, we cannot continue.

People begin to fill the house. Yishai and Amram usher each one deferentially to a place at the table. The place is covered in garlands of roses — for we, the Jewish People, are a rose among the thorns. And she has brought these roses by horse from the rose garden near Jaffa.

They will dine first on fish, to hint at the seudah of the Leviathan, and then on roast beef, to hint to the great bull that will be the feast of Mashiach. They have included the seven fruits of the Land, for all the goodness of the land will only come to its fruition with the light of Mashiach. And so, the beef has been stewed with dried figs and dates, and the store of pomegranates that she buried in a dry stone well have been excavated or exhumed and sprinkled over each dish. And among the honored guests is the little boy who called out, “Mashiach will come from the Galilee.” It is from the North that the redemption will dawn.

They come and they eat and there is not a word spoken, for all know the potency, the tumult, the fear of the time. But then comes the time for them to sing, and they begin with the words of Rav Shlomo Alkabetz:

Lift us up from the dust. Too long have we dwelled in the vale of tears.

And one of the great men stands up to speak, and she does not know exactly what he says, only that he quotes the words of Yeshayah: “and our swords will be turned into ploughshares.” And she thinks, but who would she be without the sword inside her that does battle with the world? Would she even exist?

Yishai stands and reads out a tefillah composed by Rav Alkabetz, especially for this moment, and for the men to take to Jerusalem, to say at the site of the wall:

If there be among them those who abandoned their honor [converted] on a bitter day and prayed to a strange god, You alone know the heart of man, You know his hurt and the pain of his heart… In distress they called upon You and some sanctified Your name in auto-da-fes… Nonetheless they kept your Torah, neither leaving nor abandoning it… Now their spirit moves them to go up to Mount Zion, the Lord’s Mountain, to delight in its stones and to rebuild the dust of its ruins. All assemble to come to You; they take their lives in their hands and set forth by sea….

The room is warm, and she has allowed herself to drink wine, from which she has abstained for weeks. But the wine is from the vineyard of Rav Moshe Alshich, and it is holy wine, wine that speaks of the redemption, and perhaps even of times before that, of the vineyard that Noach planted, and then it comes to her: If Mashiach were to come along now, on his donkey, then she would know, she would finally know.

Somewhere, she may have a daughter, or a gravestone, or just a forgotten mound of earth that no one knows about but the village children, who will not walk past there at night. Or maybe not even that at all. The baby-girl-woman may be a Christian or a Jew, or even a Moor. She may have fled to Italy or have joined the secret Jews in Navarre, France. She could have boarded a ship to North Africa or settled in Egypt.

She never had another daughter. She never deserved to.

She is a sinner, a woman who betrayed her kin, her own baby. But wrong in this world is mingled with right, just as fear is mixed with hope and evil with redemption, and this too is part of the way in which good and evil wrestle with each other, blow after blow. I have found the Son of David. Where have I found him? In Sedom.

They sing, and then they begin to pray and she doesn’t know what they are saying, one of the holy men is chanting and all are chanting after him.

The wall. The wall that is about to be built. They are gathered here to acknowledge that this is not a decision by some Mohammedan, some murderous sultan in a far-off land. If the walls of Jerusalem are to be rebuilt from the rubble, then this must show something great and glorified is about to happen, that the Messiah is finally on his way, to stoop down and gather all of these empty, broken shells, what is left over from our losses, and breathe life into them, like the bones that are everywhere, scattered, effaced.

And then it comes to her. These men, they must touch the great stones, haul them on their backs. They must drag them into place, set them one above the other.

She is dizzy with wine, but  calls her son to convey her message. He stands up and out of respect for her, the room falls silent: He calls out. “It is not enough to pray for the wall. You will lay your fingers on the stones. You will become the boneh Yeruashalayim. As above, so below. When you set the stones into place and build, then the Almighty, too, will build.”

A strange joy fills her. She sits down and puts her head into her arms. And then she hears the words of a long-forgotten lullaby, a song she has been waiting for years to hear, to remember.

Durme, durme, hermosa donzella, Durme, durme, sin ansia i dolor, Durme, durme, sin ansia i dolor.

Sleep, sleep, beautiful child, Sleep, sleep, free from worry and pain, Sleep, sleep, free from worry and pain.

Leonora lays her head on the table, and sleeps.

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 823)