Hate in the Heart Marked Jerusalem for the Destroyers

Click for full size

Two Pens for Gabriel

The order came before the killing did. God called Gabriel and sent him the length of Jerusalem with instructions about the living. Write a tav in ink on the forehead of every man who sighs and cries over what is done in this city. Write a tav in blood on the forehead of every man who does it.

One letter, two inks. It is the letter that begins the word for live and the word for die.

Gabriel went down into the streets. Behind him the destroyers waited, and a wet letter on a man's skin was the whole difference between a house they could enter and a house they had to walk past.

A Hundred Zuzim in the Street

What Gabriel walked through was ordinary. A creditor had a neighbor down in the dust over a hundred zuzim. He beat him, stripped the coat off his back, took what he could carry, and then went and broke the pledges the man had left in his keeping so there would be nothing to argue about afterward.

Further along, a widow counted what she owed and found the sum had grown again while she slept. A naked man went door to door asking charity and got laughed down the road, which the Holy One had already named as blasphemy against his Maker.

The doors on both sides of that street stayed shut. Behind them lived men who knew every name in the business. Not one of them had ever struck a neighbor or cursed him. They kept their hate in the heart, where nothing shows and no court can reach it, and they said nothing.

The Lender Argued With Heaven

One of the lenders had his answer ready and said it out loud. "Do You not take payment from Your own world? From the earth You water, from the flowers You raise, from the light You let in. From the soul You breathe into a man and the body You keep for him. You collect. So do I."

The Holy One answered him. "Look how much I have loaned out, and I take no interest on any of it. Look how much the earth has loaned you, and she charges you nothing. I take back the principal and not a coin over. The dust goes back to the ground. The breath comes back to Me."

A king once opened his treasury to a man he trusted. The man went out with the king's silver and used it to break the poor, kill widows, shame the naked at his gate, and swear to whatever suited him, and by the time the money was gone the whole treasury had turned into lies. Mine is the silver and Mine is the gold, said the Holy One. I handed him a storehouse of truth and he made it a storehouse of falsehood.

Justice Would Not Sit Down

Divine Justice had been standing there the whole time, and she spoke before Gabriel finished his round.

"Master of the Universe. What is the difference between the two of them?"

"One is wholly righteous," He said. "The other is wholly wicked."

"It was in their power to hold the wicked back. They never tried."

"It is open and known to Me that if they had tried, the wicked would not have listened to them."

She did not move away from Him. "It was revealed to You. Was it revealed to them?"

He gave her no answer.

Begin at My Sanctuary

He turned and gave the destroyers their orders. Kill the old man and the young man, the girls, the small children, the women. Come nowhere near a man who carries the mark. Begin at My sanctuary.

Rabbi Joseph refused to hear the word as sanctuary. Read it as My sanctified ones, he said. It means the men who took the whole Torah on themselves and kept it from alef to tav.

They began with the elders standing in front of the house.

The rule those elders had been given was never a gentle one. Rav said a man goes on rebuking his neighbor until the neighbor strikes him. Samuel said until the neighbor curses him. Rabbi Johanan said until the man's anger catches. All three of them took the measure from one supper at Saul's table, where Saul turned on his own son, called him the son of a perverse rebellion, and then picked up his spear and threw it at him.

That was the price, and the elders had weighed it in their doorways with the street running in front of them, and decided not to pay. King Josiah, whom Scripture will not compare to any king before him, was charged with his own generation the same way. The ink was still drying on the foreheads of men who had wept for the city when the destroyers reached them, and they were the first ones reached.