Verse (15 page)

Chapter 66

I don’t really know what to say to God. What do you say to God? Praise God.

God, you know how I feel. What I think. Do I really need to phrase my thoughts in some way to signify prayer? What is prayer?

God, what do you want from me? How do I tell the difference between your path and Satan’s? Or are all paths God’s path, even Satan’s? Stop philosophizing. Pray.

Please guide me.

No, I want to be in service to you, not to ask you to serve me. I’ll do my best to serve you fully. I will serve you fully. I swear myself to you unconditionally. I will serve you as completely as I can.

Praise God. Praise all his works. Praise all his creations. Praise his will. Praise God.

The stones are hard and hurt my knees as I kneel. I put my hands on the rocks of the Wailing Wall and lean forward, touching my forehead to it.

I don’t know what I expected. That I would feel God here? That his presence would be stronger here? It’s just a place. Just stones.

I stand up and turn around, putting a hand on my kippah to keep the wind from blowing it off my head.

The crowd watches and the video cameras record me. Maybe the most personal moment of my life and the whole world is watching.

Cohen comes out from the crowd wearing that ridiculous outfit from
Leviticus
, a blue robe with gold bells and blue clay pomegranates hanging off it, a gold and gemmed apron, and a turban with a gold plate on it, and holding a horn of oil.

He stands next to me, his sweaty smell emanating, and pours some oil on his finger and reaches forward and touches my forehead.

I look around at all the journalists of Jerusalem. They understand what it means.

Why I’m here.

Who I am.

Chapter 67

I can hear the television as I open the door to our apartment. I come in and close it and take off my coat and say, “Are you watching the news?”

“Yeah,” Erwin says.

I look around, we gotta buy a coat rack, and I toss my coat on top of a box. “Are they talking about the ceremony?”

“No.”

I go into the living room.

He’s sitting on a plastic lawn chair watching TV. They’re showing the destroyed remains of a shop or something. He says, “Did you hear about this?”

“No.”

“Suicide bomber. In Tel Aviv. It says eight are dead, thirty-two in the hospital, four in critical condition.”

I nod.

“It says Khaled Urdunn has claimed credit. A Palestinian terrorist leader.”

It shows a mutilated girl in a hospital bed.

I look at Erwin.

He says, “I mean I know we hear about this stuff in America, but now it’s just a few miles away…”

“This stuff happens all the time.”

“I know, I just… Yeah.” He turns the volume down.

I take a seat on the other plastic chair. We need some real furniture.

He says, “How did the ceremony go?”

“Good. Fine. Were they showing anything about it before?”

“Yeah. I saw it. It looked… Well, they said you said you were the messiah and you were at the Western Wall, so that’s what you wanted, right?”

“Right. They were critical?”

“They were teasing.”

“Well, I mean, it was a publicity stunt and we got publicity.”

“Yeah, but now all the news is focused on the bombing.”

“The story’ll cycle back.”

“Yeah.”

I say, “Since when am I the optimist? Starting to regret coming with me?”

“No! Of course not. I wanted to come here my whole life. Well, ever since my parents sent me to temple camp.”

“Okay, good.”

“Besides, I didn’t apply to college, I thought I was gonna come work for you in LA.”

I laugh.

He says, “This was meant to be.”

I shrug.

He indicates the footage of the bombing, “This is why we’re here, right? To stop things like that.”

I nod. “That’s right.”

Chapter 68

As we walk down the cobblestone road toward the café, Cohen says, “Could you try to be polite this time? Please?”

I say, “Those last rabbis weren’t going to endorse me, that was pretty clear. What’s the difference?”

“Yes, but let’s not burn too many bridges, shall we? Everyone knows each other in Jerusalem and you know there’s a lot of loshon hora. We just need a few to endorse us and the others will turn around. But not if you’ve made them all hate us!”

“All right, all right.”

We arrive and go inside.

Rabbis Moiseev and Kerimov are waiting for us just inside and we shake hands. The host takes us to a booth in the back and we take the bench facing the window and they take the bench facing the wall.

I order a sparkling water and the lamb kebab. They order and then we chitchat about the latest news regarding the rockets getting fired in and out of Gaza.

Cohen says, “I think you understand how important it is that we find Mashiakh in this day and age.”

Moiseev says, “Of course we understand that, but what makes you think you’ve found him now?”

“I think we can agree that there may be thousands of true ancestors to David’s throne at any time. But what we have in Immanuel—”

I interrupt, “I’m willing to take the action necessary to bring a new prophetic age, to heal the sickness that infects Israel and the entire world.”

Moiseev says, “And how do you plan to do that?”

“By bringing Israel under a monarchy for the first time in nearly 2000 years. But under a true Davidic king this time. A true servant of God.”

“Ah. A true servant of God? You seem more like a tabloid celebrity to me. I’ve read about you. In the American websites.”

I say, “I’m not a perfect man, no. But I take responsibility for my actions. And I’m here to take responsibility for Israel.”

“Really? To me you seem more like a boy, incapable of controlling even himself.”

Our food arrives. Thank God.

Cohen turns the conversation to how nice the weather has gotten. We eat and they thank us for the meal and leave.

As I’m signing the receipt, I say to Cohen, “That’s twenty-two.”

“And I’m so lucky to have you update me with the count every time.”

“Twenty-two nos. No yeses.”

Chapter 69

I get back to my apartment and call Iris back and she says, “The bot’s been up for a few months.”

“Didn’t you stop all that when I quit?”

“Who were you really fooling?”

“Just myself, I guess.”

She laughs. “It’s like I said, though, it’s increased traffic to the website, but people get annoyed with it. I’ve seen arguments about it on a few forums, people saying they can’t believe you’d be a spammer, others defending you, saying you’re not connected to it. But if people knew you signed off on it, that it was your idea, they wouldn’t like that.”

I say, “What does it matter, people can’t get much more mad at me, can they? I’ve done enough to ruin my reputation, I don’t think a bot is gonna change that.”

“That’s true. But you still have a cult following online, no pun intended.”

“Ha ha.”

“And you don’t want to alienate them too, do you?”

“Well people arguing about it is good, right? I mean that’s publicity.”

“Yeah, but it’s not much.”

“Tell me about it. I feel like at this point if I wasn’t so busy running around telling everyone I exist, they’d already have forgotten about me.”

“Yeah.”

“And people remember the scandal more than they remember anything else.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

I say, “Well, what about a better bot? A more realistic one. I mean one that can seem more like people.”

“Well, I can write realistic advertisements, but a forum means each one has to be a response to another post. Ours just has a general advertisement, but a bot that tries imitate people usually just says things like, ‘I liked your video,’ or ‘You made some good points.’ To do one that realistically replies to other people means I’d have to find a way for it to actually respond and integrate its response into an advertisement in a believable way. That’s pretty advanced. Then there’s another problem. A lot of websites have security measures to prevent bots. You have to enter a verifiable code or something to make sure you’re real.”

“And you can’t make a bot that can solve that?”

“I can, but they come up with new security systems all the time.”

“Okay, what about a bot that can crack the new methods?”

“You mean reprogram the bot when the new security systems come out?”

“No, like one that can figure it out on its own.”

“Like learn, you mean?”

“Sure.”

“Manuel, you’re talking about a program that can update itself. Where you don’t have to program the next version, it’ll figure out the new needs and write the new code itself.”

“Okay.”

“You’re talking about the Holy Grail of programming. Something that every programmer and every corporation on the planet wants to do and can’t. An evolving program. It’s just not realistic. I mean, programming that is a task so big, you’d have to hire thousands of programmers and even then you probably wouldn’t get what you want. Not just probably, almost certainly.”

“A thousand people don’t come up with innovation, one person does.”

“You’d be better off hiring a thousand people to go spam for you.”

“Well I don’t have a thousand people, I just have you.”

Chapter 70

Cohen’s friend drives us south into the desert. Fifty kilometers north of Eilat, we stop at Kibbutz Chaim.

At the gate, Cohen gets out and walks to the radio box and uses the walkie-talkie to tell them we’re there.

The gate opens, Cohen gets back in the car, and we drive inside.

We pull up at the bus stop and get out.

The heat is a shock. With the air conditioning, I wasn’t prepared for how hot it would be compared to the cold up north right now.

I look around. This is what I had imagined Israel would be like, a desert. Sand is all that surrounds the Kibbutz, stretching to the mountains on the west side and the Jordan River on the east.

Cohen says, “He said to go to the cafeteria.”

We walk through the kibbutz, all one-story buildings. I spot the cafeteria, the biggest building in the housing section.

We go inside, it looks like a school cafeteria. The sound of dishwashers comes from inside the kitchen. We take seats at one of the tables. I’m hungry. I check my cellphone.

2:46

I guess we missed lunch.

A man dressed in a white button-up shirt with a trimmed beard comes through one of the doors and we stand to greet him.

“I’m Joseph Scheinman,” he says in an accent somewhere between Brooklyn and Israeli.

I say, “Nice to meet you, Rabbi,” as we shake hands, and Cohen and I introduce ourselves.

“Allow me to give you a tour of Kibbutz Chaim,” he says and leads us outside.

He indicates the buildings that surround the cafeteria, “These are mostly residences, the school is over there and the volunteers stay over there. Do you know anything about kibbutzim, Manuel?”

“A little.”

“Everyone who lives here performs a job. In return, they get food and housing.”

Cohen says, “A commune.”

“Exactly.” He leads us to the farm, the refet he calls it, and he tells us all about how kibbutz life works.

He leads us to a concrete field of pillars with rows of tubes running between them. “This is where we grow astaxanthin.” We walk down one of the rows. “It comes from krill and shrimp naturally. It’s what turns salmon pink. We originally started growing it to sell to salmon farms to dye their salmon naturally. But it’s become quite popular in Japan as an antioxidant, and much more valuable that way, so we sell it to a dietary supplement company there.”

We reach the end of the row and Scheinman says, “That’s most of our kibbutz. So. To what do I owe the honor of your presence?”

I say, “You’ve heard about our attempts to start a messianic movement here in Israel?”

“Yes?”

“We’re looking for support. Not financial, just verbal. Vocal.”

“If you’ve come all the way to my kibbutz, you must have been turned down by every rabbi in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.”

“Just the ones willing to talk to us.”

Scheinman leads us out of the farm and back to the residences. We weave through them until we come to a squat concrete structure. We follow him inside and down two dank flights of stairs, underground. It’s a series of musty rooms, with crates along the sides. Water drips and it smells like mildew. In the middle is a table with chairs around it.

“This is a bomb shelter,” Scheinman says. “These days the kids come here to play poker, otherwise we don’t use it much. We used to hide here when Jordan would decide to launch rockets. But we’ll need it again. There will be war, inevitably.”

He walks over to one of the crates and opens it. Inside are rifles. He pulls one out and holds it up. “This is what Mashiakh means.”

I walk to him and hold out my hands. Scheinman hands me the gun and I look down at it. “I know that. I know that and I’m prepared.”

He looks at Cohen, who nods at him, and then back at me. “You misunderstand my meaning, Manuel. I don’t want war. War is a tragedy. I fought the Intifada. Whatever you’re picturing war as, it’s not that. It’s not John Wayne and a bunch of heroes. Everybody pisses their pants. People die and get mutilated, their lives destroyed or ruined forever.”

I set the rifle back down in the crate and look up at him.

He looks at Cohen and says, “And you, Rabbi, shame on you for supporting this boy’s heroic fantasy. Shame on you.”

Cohen says, “No, shame on you, Rabbi. You said it yourself, war is inevitable. How many wars has Israel fought in its short lifetime? In our lifetimes. We don’t want the war, we want to end the war.”

“By bringing more war! How many men have tried to end war by starting wars? And how has that worked out for them? For all of us. You want the messiah? We live in Israel. We have democracy. For me, the messiah is already here.”

Cohen says, “How can you say that? How can a man like you say that?”

Scheinman says, “How can you say what you’re saying? Don’t you remember
Amos
? ‘Woe unto you that desire the Day of HaShem. To what end is it for you? The Day of HaShem is darkness and not light.’”

Cohen looks at him and then nods, and then turns and heads back up the stairs.

I look at Scheinman and he shakes his head at me.

I turn and follow Cohen.

We get in the car and head back north.

I say, “Eighty-two nos.”