Rabbi Gabrielle Ignites a Tempest (5 page)

When she first joined Congregation Ohav
Shalom as the associate to Rabbi Dr. Jeremy Greer, her board of
directors seemed pleased to have a dynamic female speaker on its
pulpit, one willing to say what was on her mind. A short honeymoon
at Ohav Shalom ended abruptly when Rabbi Greer resigned and she was
promptly promoted to his senior post. Soon after, she testified for
an accused rapist in a trial that captured national attention. Most
female members of her congregation were convinced the defendant was
guilty as hell and that their rabbi had gone overboard to protect
him, accusing her of a severe lack of judgment. Even friends in the
feminist movement, to which she had been an ardent member, publicly
denounced her.

No sooner had people begun to forget when she
was once again in the news, this time for leading the police in
pursuit of a ring of gunrunners selling Saturday-night specials to
high school kids in the District of Columbia.
The
Washington Post
made her into a civic-minded hero, but the
black community was outraged by a white do-gooder importing her
values to their neighborhood. She might have survived these attacks
had not a personal tragedy occurred. Her crusade ended in bloodshed
when a close friend sacrificed his life to draw gunfire away from
her. Despite Gabby's personal grief, the majority of her
congregants felt that their rabbi had no business getting involved
in law-enforcement. The accusation that she was ultimately
responsible for the death of her friend was especially hurtful.

In the wake of this tragedy, she turned her
attentions to what she then believed to be the less controversial
field of Jewish scholarship. Since her earliest days as a
rabbinical student, she had been fascinated with the nature of
prophetic revelation, the manner in which humans claim to
communicate with God. Within a year, she was publishing articles in
scholarly journals and newspapers, challenging the reliability of
biblical texts. Her clerical colleagues, even the liberal ones in
the rabbinate, reacted with public outrage, insisting that instead
of helping the pious to understand what God sought of them, Rabbi
Lewyn was undermining the authenticity of the Holy Writ.

Controversy followed her from the pulpit to
the halls of academia. On a televised panel of biblical experts,
she struck out against Christian evangelicals who claimed to talk
directly with God. "Anyone," she said in a quote that was widely
disseminated in the press, "who says God talks to him or her
personally is either lying or suffering from grand delusions."

In the wake of this unsought celebrity, so
many calls came in from TV talk show hosts and journalists that
Gabby felt herself losing control. To catch her breath and put what
had happened into perspective, she holed up in her Hyde Park home.
Even in the dusty, out-of-the-way library of the Oriental Museum on
the university campus, she felt the eyes of other readers scouring
her. She managed to avoid just about everyone except the senior
advisor on her PhD dissertation, Professor Alexander Cross. Though
Dr. Cross provided no reason for an unexpected invitation to have a
drink with him and Dr. Simon Pines at the Faculty Club, she was
certain it had to do with the current controversy.

Simon Pines, a scholar of Arabic studies on
loan from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was waiting for her
in the foyer of the Faculty Club. A scholarly man who had grown up
in Palestine well before the founding of the Jewish state in 1948,
he peered at Gabby through glasses so dirty she wondered how he
managed to read the Arabic texts for which he had built a solid
reputation. Alexander Cross, a middle-aged scholar who broke all
the stereotypes for the ivory tower academician, showed up a few
minutes late. His full head of silver hair was immaculately
blown-dry into place, following the natural curvature of his scalp.
Not a single garment he wore had been purchased off the shelf, but
rather measured and cut by personal tailors in New York and Hong
Kong. A waiter ushered them to a corner table, then hovered nearby
like a pelican preparing to dive into the ocean for lunch.

"Do you enjoy your new celebrity, Gabrielle?"
Simon Pines asked in English thick with the Hebrew accent of a
Palestinian Jew.

"I hate it," she said, looking to Cross to
assess his interest in the question. "Anybody with more than
spaghetti for brains knows that however politically incorrect my
statement about evangelists, it's true. When I agreed to let Twila
Aubrenie write my profile in
The New
Yorker
, it never occurred to me she would contort my theory
on divine revelation into a Jewish battle cry against
evangelists."

"That should be a lesson," Professor Cross
said, uncurling his fingers with their lacquered nails in a
dramatic gesture. "None of us say no when journalists seek us out,
but we never like what they write. Simon and I are well aware of
your rabbinical credentials. When we accepted you into our doctoral
program, we knew you would come to us with professional baggage.
But irrespective of what you were in the past, you're now a
graduate student and are expected to conduct yourself like one. By
questioning in public how God communicates with his prophets, you
impale not one but all three monotheisms. What do you expect to
gain by this?"

Gabby paused for the waiter to set before her
a glass of sherry and watched him place a vial of Kentucky bourbon
before Professor Pines and a glass of Merlot before Dr. Cross. When
he stepped away, she said, "I never questioned how Jesus, Mohamed,
or Moses receive the revelations that they claim or, more
accurately, what their practitioners claim for them. I have
purposely limited my criticism to born-again evangelists who say
that God talks to them daily and therefore they have the right to
tell the rest of us how to live our lives."

"You can't expect them to be happy," Cross
said.

"That's their problem, not mine," Gabby shot
back. "If they think God communicates directly to them, that's
their business. Belief is belief and people have a right to believe
what they want. But the rest of us shouldn't let them upgrade their
private communications into divine revelations."

Pines cautiously sipped his whisky as though
he didn't enjoy the fiery liquid. He put down his drink and peered
over the top rims of his filthy glasses. "Now wait a moment,
Gabrielle. You're marching in a minefield and you're not the only
one to get hurt."

She suspected her advisors would move in this
direction. Like Congregation Ohav Shalom, the University of Chicago
didn't enjoy controversy. "Is this an official reprimand?" she
asked.

Alexander Cross was too polite for a blunt
warning. Instead, he said, "The university is in the evidence based
business. Our job is to gather evidence that the non-academic
public is unable or unwilling to collect. In this department, we
seek from our students what we professors demand of ourselves: to
marshal proof before we go shooting from the hip."

"Am I being censored?" Gabby pursued.

Cross looked uncomfortable as he adjusted
himself in his chair. "How can we recommend you for a teaching
position if you establish a reputation for undisciplined outbursts?
We want our PhD. candidates to succeed. And we want you to do the
excellent academic work we know you're capable of. But until you've
got your degree, keep your head down."

"From your lips to God's ears," she said. "I
never sought this publicity."

"What does Timothy think?" Simon Pines
reentered the conversation.

"I haven't talked to him about this brouhaha.
I haven't been able to reach him. He's disappeared."

"That's not good news," Pines said, mopping a
double chin that had begun to roll over the rumpled collar of his
shirt. "Tim's a risk taker who's prone to trouble."

"Would any of your colleagues in Jerusalem be
able to find him?"

Pines sipped the last of his bourbon and
passed a small burp. He bobbed his head as if trying to shake off
effects of the alcohol. "I've received five calls from Jerusalem in
the past week alone. Nobody's seen or heard from Timothy.
Something's brewing."

Thirty minutes later, as the three were
standing on the granite stairs of the club looking down 56th
Street, Gabby was gratified that her advisors had let her off with
a warning, not disciplinary action. It seemed to her that Simon
Pines was more interested in Tim than her. By the time she reached
her home, she was convinced that something untoward had happened.
Why else would Tim's colleagues in Jerusalem be making repeated
inquiries?

***

Two days later, on a bitter-cold February
morning, Gabby stepped into a taxi in front of the Oriental Museum
and rode to O'Hare Airport for a non-stop El Al flight to Tel
Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport. Mid-morning the following day, she paid
a taxi driver outside the Ussishkin Street apartment she shared
with Tim in Jerusalem, then searched the tightly parked cars on the
street for his Hyundai. A man smoking in the front seat of a
sand-colored SUV nearby caught her attention. In the States, she
wouldn't have taken notice, but it was uncommon for Israelis to sit
in parked cars like Americans. The incongruity of this left her as
she mounted stairs to the second floor apartment. After knocking on
the door, in case Tim might have returned, she let herself in,
switched on the vestibule lights and was immediately struck by the
musty odor of abandonment. An initial survey of the adjoining rooms
confirmed that this was, indeed, none other than Tim's palace with
homeless books and manuscripts strewn about and every horizontal
surface covered with papers. She had once accused him of converting
the objects that cluttered his life into nomads like himself, waifs
of the air like the
Luftmench
she believed
him to be.

The kitchen, where Tim concocted his
imaginative meals, reeked of his presence, or was it his absence
that struck her so acutely? The cabinets were crammed with canned
foods and dried pasta. Plastic bottles of condiments and
half-filled jars of sauces stacked on top of each other filled all
available shelf space. A dark growth of mold coated a half-dozen
desiccated lemons on a serving platter, citrus remnants Gabby
vaguely remembered being there from her previous visit. Cups
containing rings of evaporated tea marked stations where Tim had
once stopped, perhaps to read archeological article or scribble one
of his ubiquitous notes to himself. Unwashed dishes still encrusted
with food particles were piled in the sink. The mess confirmed her
conviction that she was still needed in his domestic life. This
disarray somewhat eased her mind. For weeks, she had wrestled with
a nagging thought that Tim had found another woman to replace her.
But if this were true, he certainly had never brought her here. No
woman Gabby could imagine would put up with such untidiness.

The answering machine contained dozens of
messages, including those she had left from Chicago. His laptop
computer might have provided a clue to his whereabouts, but it was
nowhere to be found. That wasn't unusual because Wi-Fi access to
the Internet was ubiquitous in Israel and Tim usually took his
laptop with him wherever he went.

As she unpacked her clothing in an armoire,
she was suddenly struck by a sense that Tim was not the last person
in the apartment. What gave rise to this premonition she could not
identify, still the feeling was nevertheless palpable. To test this
intuition, she walked over to the bookshelf in Tim's study and
glanced at the bottom three shelves reserved for her books. She and
Tim had once had a nasty spat when he had borrowed her
Commentary on the Book of Revelations
, by Remosa
Singer, and failed to tell her. When she needed it for reference,
he couldn't remember where he had put it. Since he seldom returned
a book to its original place, that was no surprise. The lost
commentary threatened severe damage to their relationship until he
agreed to designate the bottom three shelves of a bookcase for her
exclusive use.
Exclusive
was the operative
term they used.

As a subliminal message directed to him, she
carefully arranged her books alphabetically by author's last name.
But when she lifted the first volume from her top shelf, she found
not her copy of
Ancient Judea
, by Sigmond
Abbot, but
Biblia Hebraica
, the text of
the Bible as recorded by 9th Century Masoretic scribes, and
compiled with scholarly notes by Rudolf Kittel. Further examination
confirmed that additional volumes had also been tucked in new
locations. Had Tim violated their agreement? Possibly, but that she
deemed unlikely after their explosive argument over the matter. She
knew him to be messy beyond belief, but never duplicitous. Besides,
if he had actually borrowed a volume, there was little chance that
it would make it back to the bookshelf at all.

A cup of tea settled her nerves as she
considered her next move. First, she would clean the apartment,
preparing herself for what she suspected might be a long stay. By
the time she finished a can of corn to satisfy a ravaging hunger,
she had mapped out a preliminary plan. She phoned the École
Biblique et Archéologique Française in Bethlehem and asked to speak
with the director and Tim's longtime collaborator, Father Benoit
Matteau. An English-speaking receptionist with a French accent
replied that Father Benoit was in retreat and unavailable. But if
Gabby would leave a phone number, she would see it would reach
Father Benoit. The receptionist refused to say when Gabby might
expect a return call.

Her thinking was interrupted by a heavy,
determined knock on the door. In the corridor stood a lean,
strong-featured man with bronze skin from exposure to the elements
and wavy salt-and-pepper hair. He thrust a strong hand out for her
to shake, formally introducing himself as Dr. Itamar Arad, director
of the Israel Antiquities Authority.