The Ascent of Eli Israel by Dara Horn Jonathan Papernick Page B

“Your eyes are starting to shine again. You know, Torah can do all sorts of miracles, fighting sickness and degradation, even the Angel of Death. Saved my life.”
    The last time Eli had seen Zev before he came to Hebron, Zev was drinking heavily and eating from restaurant Dumpsters. He was in and out of jail. Then one night, under the glow of a big autumn moon, he said, “Going to see the rebbe,” and wandered off.
    â€œSomething inside me just told me it was time,” Zev said. “I went to Brooklyn, man. Met the Lubavitcher rebbe and started studying Torah.”
    Eli learned that Hebron was the first Jewish city and that Abraham bought a field and a cave near Tel Romeida from Ephron the Hittite, and that later his wife and descendants down to Jacob were buried on that land. He learned there was a massacre in 1929 where Jews were torn to pieces by their Arab neighbors after living side by side with them for hundreds of years, and that the Israeli government did not want Jews to resettle and live in Hebron, the City of the Patriarchs.
    If Jews were told that they couldn’t live in one of the five boroughs of New York, Eli thought, if they were told that it was being reserved for blacks and Puerto Ricans and Jews couldn’t live there, people would call it anti-Semitism, racism. So, why shouldn’t I live here, he thought?
    When Eli was well enough, Zev took him to the mikvah and he immersed himself in the cleansing waters of the bath, feeling a new energy flowing through his body. He passed his days studying the words of the Lord and his prophets and began to realize the profound mistakes he had made in his past life. In the book of Hosea he learned that since he had forgotten God and married a Gentile, God would forget his child. He learned in Isaiah that he had been arrogant in his wealth, supplanting God with material gains, and that for punishment he would be “brought down to the netherworld, to the uttermost parts of the pit.” Eli remembered the darkest days after his wife threw him out and he thanked God for bringing him close to his breast. He sang psalms of praise with Zev and slept with the words of the Lord burned into his brain.
    He wore his beard long and a kippah on his head, and prayed daily at the Tomb of Machpelah, the burial place for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their wives. When he wasn’t praying he walked the streets of Hebron. One day a man spat in his face, called him a “Zionist pig,” and cursed at him in Arabic. Eli ran after him, but lost the man in a crowd. He felt proud to be wearing a kippah. He wandered into the Casbah and the merchants would not sell him their wares. He saw a camel hanging upside down from a hook with its intestines spilling from its sides like extension cords and felt nauseated. Children laughed like monkeys and shouted at him as he passed. Eli wondered what God had in mind when he made the Arabs.
    Zev and Eli went for lunch with a rabbi and his wife who lived over at Shilo. The rabbi had planted a bomb that had blown the legs off of an Arab mayor in the eighties and had served thirty months in prison.
    Eli could not imagine spending thirty minutes in prison. The walls would close in on him and he would be alone inside his head. Eli would never go to prison. Never.
    â€œI don’t want to be a fascist, but I have no choice,” the rabbi had said. “God gave this land to Abraham and the Jewish people, forever.”
    â€œForever,” Zev added, popping an olive in his mouth.
    â€œListen,” the rabbi said, turning to Eli, “as long as we have this secular system, we are going to have chaos. The waters of Babylon are rising.”
    â€œThis is the Holy Land, man,” Zev said. “Put it back in God’s hands and give him the respect. If you want to be secular, go to America.”
    â€œI’m done with that,” Eli said. “Sodom and Gomorrah.”
    â€œYou said it,