Nehunya Opened the Secret of the World Against Rome's Decree

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The Word From Rome Reached the Study House

The messenger came in with the road still on him and would not sit down. Rome had taken counsel against the mighty ones of Israel, and the counsel was to destroy them. Not a levy. Not a governor in a bad season. A decision reached in a chamber none of them would ever stand in, about men whose names were already written down there.

Rabbi Ishmael looked to the front of the room. The old man there had not moved when the messenger spoke, and he did not move now, and his stillness pulled the air out of the place faster than shouting would have.

Then Rabbi Nehunya ben Hakkanah laid both hands flat on the table.

"Bring me the names," he said.

The Names Ordered by Their Last Letters

What came was not a prayer. It was a list, and the list was one power wearing many spellings. Totrosyah. Totrosy'a. Totrosih. Totrosiel. Totrosi'ai. Totrosith. Standing in among them were Zurtag and Zoharariel and 'Ashrawwili'ai, and every one of those names pointed at the same seat of judgment, because no mouth can carry the whole designation in one breath and go on breathing afterward.

The order was the hard part. A man does not run the chain from Totrosi'ai down to Totrosith the way a boy runs a genealogy. He takes the letters that finish the names, yod, he, aleph, heth, lamed, gimel, kaph, pe, zade, and sets them in the sequence of the alphabet. The tails of the names carry the weight. The heads open nothing.

Ishmael had learned the chain years earlier as a curiosity of the school. He heard it now as a bar being worked under a sealed door.

Nehunya spoke it once, quietly, in the correct order. He told the room he was opening the secret of the world. His chin came down toward his chest, and after that he was no longer with them.

Rivers of Lava Went Round the Throne

Nothing above had been arranged for a visitor's comfort. Lightning crossed and recrossed the upper air, and beneath the lightning ran rivers of lava, ringing the throne one circle inside another. Bridges had been flung over the burning the way a road is flung across a gorge, and the fire under them was not one degree cooler for having a road above it.

Dust rose off the conflagrations, and smoke came up behind the dust and swallowed the chambers of the seventh heaven, so that the palaces stood inside their own weather. Through all of it the holy beasts held their places. The cherubim held theirs. The ophanim turned, the wheels of the Shekhinah (the Divine Presence), and the King sat upon the throne of His glory in the middle of that burning arrangement, which had not been softened by so much as a spark because a man in a lower study house had said nine letters in the right sequence.

Surya Stood in the Glare

Surya, Prince of the Presence, servant of Totrakhiel who is called the Lord, stood where the light was worst and did not shade his face.

Nehunya had come up with a sentence ready in his mouth. The wicked city has voted. Lift the decree. He had climbed to the one place in creation where a request that size has an address, and he stood there with the lava turning slowly at his back.

The throne room spoke first. It was not speaking about Rome.

The Voice Took Its Own Share of the Ruin

"You had rest between your captivities," the voice said. "A long rest. I was waiting to hear the words of My Law come out of your mouths again."

Nehunya braced for the second half of the verdict.

It turned around and went the other way.

"You have not done well," the voice said, "and I have not done well. I was angry against you, and I arose, and I brought utter destruction on My city and My house and My children."

The lava kept its circles. The bridges kept standing over the fire. God had put His own name on the ruin of Jerusalem, out loud, in the seventh palace, in front of one visiting mortal and every burning creature that serves there.

"Shall that which endures forever and ever, world without end," the voice went on, "contend with that which has no endurance but for a year, or two, or ten, or thirty, and at the most a hundred years, and then passes away?"

That was the arithmetic of the distance between them, spoken by the side that never dies about the side that dies at seventy and argues the whole way down. After the arithmetic came the sentence Ishmael would repeat afterward without softening a syllable of it.

"But in that you have rebuked Me, you did well. Already have I accepted your rebuke."

He Came Down and the Decree Still Stood

Nehunya opened his eyes in a room that smelled of lamp oil and old parchment. Rome had not been struck. The counsel taken against the mighty ones of Israel sat exactly where it had been taken, and someone had lit the lamps without being asked.

He did not tell them the decree was cancelled.

He told them what the throne had said about itself.

Ishmael wrote the chain out that night, Totrosyah through Totrosith, the tails of the names laid in the order of the alphabet, and set beside it what the King had granted a people who shouted at Him from under the rubble of His own house. They had rebuked God. God had taken the rebuke and called it good work.

Out past the wall, in the direction of the sea, the empire that had voted went on with its evening.