The Angel of Death Walks the Middle of the Road

The Plague Crossed Where the Road Lay Open

When pestilence entered a town, the people learned to walk along the walls.

The danger sat in plain sight, down the center of every street, where the way ran widest and nothing stood to slow a traveler. That was the path the angel of death favored. He moved fastest along open ground, and a man who strolled down the middle of the road put himself in the current where the killer ran. So the sages told their students to keep to the edges, to walk close against the stones, to give the empty middle of the street to whatever was already using it.

And they warned against another open space. A man might think a synagogue the safest room in a plague town, four walls and the smell of old prayer. It was not safe when it was empty. When no children sat learning their letters there, when no ten men had gathered to stand and pray, the angel of death made the abandoned sanctuary his arsenal. He laid his weapons down inside it and rested between his rounds. Only a child reciting, only a quorum rising to pray, turned the room back from a storehouse of death into a refuge.

Watch the Dogs

The clearest sign came from the animals, who knew before any man did.

When the dogs of a town began to howl in the dark for no reason a person could name, with no stranger at the gate and no moon to set them off, the sages said plainly what it meant. The angel of death had come into the streets. The dogs felt him pass and they cried out, and a wise household heard the howling and understood that the invisible traveler was already among them, walking the open middle of the road while the people pressed against the walls.

But the same animals carried better news, too. When the dogs played, chasing one another through the dust with a loose and senseless joy, tumbling and circling for no cause at all, it meant that Elijah the prophet had drawn near. The dread one and the holy one both crossed the same streets, and both were announced by the same beasts. A town learned to read its dogs the way a sailor reads the sky.

The sages added one careful warning, lest a man frighten himself over nothing. If a female ran among the pack, the commotion might mean only what nature meant by it, and no more. The sign held when males sported together for no visible reason. Then, and only then, did the playing dogs announce that the prophet had come.

The Two Who Walked Each Jew Home

There was other unseen traffic on the roads, and it walked beside every Jew on a particular night.

On the eve of Shabbat, when a man left the house of prayer and turned toward home, two angels went with him. One was good and one was evil. They were not idle companions. They were witnesses, and they had a verdict to render the moment the door swung open, and what they would say depended entirely on what the lamplight showed.

If the man came through his door and found the Sabbath lamps already lit, the table laid under a white cloth, the beds made, the whole house turned and ready and at peace, the good angel spoke first. "May the coming Sabbath be even as this one," he said. And the evil angel, though the words cost him and he wished them unsaid, was compelled to answer. "Amen."

But if the door opened on darkness, on a cold table and an unmade bed and a house that had done nothing to receive the day, then the order reversed. The evil angel spoke first, and he wished the same neglect upon the week to come. And the good angel, with the same reluctance turned the other way, had no choice but to answer him. "Amen."

The Same Streets, the Same Reading

So the streets of a Jewish town were never as empty as they looked.

The angel of death ran down the open middle of the road and hid his blades in the unused sanctuary. Elijah crossed the same stones and set the dogs to playing. Two angels, one bright and one dark, kept pace with a man all the way from the synagogue to his own threshold, waiting to see which of them would have to swallow his words and say amen against his will. A person who knew all this did not walk through his town as through dead space. He walked the edges in plague, he kept the study hall loud, he watched the dogs, and on Friday he hurried home before sundown to light the lamps, because the angel at his shoulder was already deciding what to wish on him.

None of these powers waited to be summoned. They were already moving. The most a person could do was learn the signs and arrange his house, his street, and his Sabbath so that when the unseen ones passed, the verdict they were forced to pronounce came out in his favor.