Not For Glory by Joel Rosenberg

complicated. It's much simpler, really: the sages used to insist that a rabbi must have another way of earning money; the Akiva himself, we are taught, was a common laborer. Why? Because Torah is not a shovel; Torah is too important to be a way to make a living.
    The Arts aren't a shovel, either, although sometimes we have to use them like a headsman's axe. When we do, it should feel like sacrilege, like hitting someone over the head with the Torah scroll.
    It doesn't, not for me.
    So much the worse for me.

    The room doesn't exist. Warrens and wings are named; sections begin with One, compartments with Aleph. There have been maps smuggled off Metzada, by the occasional offworlder we allow in Metzada. All of them show named warrens and wings, section numbers starting with One, compartments with Aleph.
    Follow the syllogism: since Section is Section 0, Section doesn't exist.
    Neither do I. You don't exist, either. Everything is, is not, will be, will ever not be. All is illusion.
    An arc of ten men, each clad in a worn gi, ranging in ages from seventeen to almost seventy, knelt on simple mats of surface grass. Not all of Section, of course. Not even all on-planet. Just those who were there that night.
    Ten is a special number for us. There were ten lost tribes, ten commandments, ten is minyan.
    Halfway across the circle from me Zev knelt, his dark face impassive, not with strict control of emotions, I think, but with mind like water, mind like the moon, the mind that sees everything, but lets all wash over it. Zev was farther along than I was.
    Even with the whir of the air conditioners, the room was stifling, the air so humid that the rough rock walls glistened in the warm light of the overhead glows. It is impossible to practice without raising a sweat, and all of us had been working out for a solid two hours, fists flying in seiken and uraken, open hands thrusting and slashing in shuto, feet moving in geri and keage.
    There is something special, something beautiful in what happens in the dojo; I've always felt that to have to bring any of it outside is only to soil it with blood. The beauty is in the thing itself.
    At the focus of the arc sat Pinhas Levine.
    Ten minutes' rest would have been enough to loosen tired muscles; a full night's would not have been enough for me to completely recover from the exercise.
    We sat zazen for more than an hour before he spoke.
    I do not practice the Arts because they make me a better person; they don't. I don't practice the Arts because it somehow makes my vision clearer; I've always seen everything and nothing. I don't practice the Arts to make myself wise; I'm already a fool and a sage, who knows all and understands nothing.
    The universe is a cruel joke, but cruelty is kindness.
    Ignorance is truth.
    Trust me on this one: in truth, we are all ignorant.
    War is peace; George Orwell should have studied the Arts. He would have been just the same as he was before he started, if he studied it long enough and well enough—but not hard enough. He would have had to study without trying.
    "Metzada is a cold rock," Pinhas said, beginning without preamble or warning, his voice barely above a whisper, although I had no trouble hearing his every syllable. "Still, it preserves. The religious preserve the Law; stories told in the refectories after supper keep the families strong; the army keeps Am Yisroel, the people of Israel, from dying.
    "We preserve something else here, something that's valuable, too." His lips quirked into a smile. "In its own way."
    He said it with the quiet practiced patience a man can use when he says something he believes fully, if not unquestioningly, when he takes that belief out only to display it to others who value it.
    I've heard that tone elsewhere, seen that expression in few other places. If you happen to be up at the pulpit for an aliyah, you may be lucky enough to see it in his face for a moment when a devout rebbe, the meaning of what he does fully upon him,