Terrors Lined the Road and the Almond Tree Blossomed White

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The Morning He Asked About the Thorns

Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta stood in his doorway with his staff in his hand and would not cross the sill. His student waited in the yard with the loaded donkey. It was the new moon, and for twenty years the new moon had meant the road to Beit She'arim.

"Are there thorns on the way?" the old man asked.

"The same thorns as last month, rabbi."

"Are there ascents there? Are there descents?"

The student told him the truth. One rise past the olive press, one dip where the winter water cut the road, and a child could walk both without noticing.

Shall I go, or shall I not go. He turned that over until the traveling hour went by, and in turning it over he answered it. The staff went back against the wall.

Three new moons passed that way.

He had drawn a line and told nobody where it ran. As far as the corner where the potter's wall turned, he could go. Not past it. The border kept walking toward his door.

The Street That Had Become an Ambush

On the fourth month he crossed the sill before dawn and sent the student ahead with the donkey, because he wanted no witness.

He had walked this street since he was a boy. It had changed nothing about itself. Terrors lined it anyway. His ankles carried him the way a grasshopper carries a load slung over its back, and the small rise past the olive press stood up like a city wall. He stopped twice on it, and the second time gripped a fencepost until his heart quieted.

At the potter's yard, wet vessels went into the kiln one behind another.

"First ones in come out last," the potter said, not looking up. "That is the whole trade."

Farther along a funeral crossed him and he stepped into a shuttered doorway. The hired mourners circled the bier, beating their palms, calling the dead man's name. Under the ground there were other mourners who circled without being hired and used nobody's name.

At the last turn before the gate an almond tree had blossomed, white along every black branch, before one leaf.

What He Said in the Doorway at Beit She'arim

Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi came out himself when he heard whose donkey stood in his courtyard.

"Why have we been privileged to see the radiant countenance of the rabbi today?" he said.

Rabbi Shimon set both hands on the staff. "The distant have become close," he said. "The close have become distant. Two have become three. And what makes peace between a man and his wife has ceased."

Nobody spoke. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi looked at the staff planted between the old man's feet, the third leg, then at the eyes that no longer found what was near.

"There is a word I keep hearing on that road," Rabbi Shimon said. "Hevel. Breath. Steam off a pot. The king in Jerusalem wore it out. It is not a complaint. It is a banner, it belongs to the Angel of Death, and it stands at the end of every street. I have walked far enough down mine to read the stitching on it."

The Bone That Split the Anvil

Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi took his arm, brought him inside, poured wine, and answered him with Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananya, who once stood in front of the emperor Hadrian and was asked a question no Roman had business asking.

"From where does a man blossom again?" Hadrian said.

Rabbi Yehoshua reached back and touched the top of his own spine. "From the little nut here. The luz."

Hadrian wanted it proved. They soaked the bone and it did not soften. They put it in the fire and it came back out. A millstone turned over it and gave it up whole. Then they laid it on an anvil and a smith swung a hammer down with everything he had.

The anvil split. The hammer split. In the wreckage lay a bone the size of a nut, and nobody put out a hand for it.

"You passed a tree in blossom this morning," Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi said. "There is a smaller one at the top of your neck, and it has not started yet."

Six Hundred Thousand Before the Sun Went Down

A young student in the corner took the pause. Not a day goes by, he said, without six hundred thousand born and six hundred thousand carried out, the count of the generation that fell in the wilderness. Between sunrise and sunset one generation goes and another comes up.

"Then the potter has it backwards," Rabbi Shimon said. "He loads his kiln and the first vessels in are the last ones out. Ours go in first and come out first."

Someone in the room said the name Yehuda bar Rabbi Hizkiya, worth remembering, and nobody there had thought of him in years. That was the terror under the arithmetic, not the dying but the quiet after it.

Each man goes to his eternal home, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi said, not to the eternal home. And the righteous nobody remembers will be stood up and counted, and the Holy One will sit as though inside a circle, with them ranged around Him like the court in its half ring, no face hidden from any other. Then He will lead the dance Himself, and they will point at Him with their fingers, the way girls point over their timbrels, and sing that this is God, our God for ever and ever, who will lead us past death.

Rabbi Shimon went home at dusk with the student and the emptied donkey. The almond tree had dropped nothing yet. He walked under it and kept going, past the corner of the potter's wall where his border had been, and did not ask what was ahead.