The Angel Sent to Collect Elijah Could Not Interrupt the Lesson

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The Errand Nobody Could Deliver

The chariot was harnessed. The horses of fire stood ready and the whirlwind was waiting, and an angel came down out of heaven to bring Elijah up.

He found the prophet sitting with Elisha, and the two of them were in the middle of an argument. Not a quarrel. A lesson, turned over and pulled apart and put back together, the old man pressing a point and the young man pushing back at him, both so far inside it that the light changing in the doorway meant nothing to either of them.

The angel stood there. Neither man looked up.

He went back to heaven with the errand undone.

The Man Who Left His Oxen Standing in the Furrow

Elisha had been plowing when Elijah first walked past him and called him. He did not finish the row. He gave up the field, and the oxen, and everything else he owned, handed it to the community, and followed the prophet out of his own life. After that he never left him. Wherever Elijah went, the younger man was at his shoulder, and by the time the angel came for the errand the two of them had been arguing Torah together for years.

Elijah had thousands of colleagues in those days, prophets by the school and by the hundred, and some of them had been reckoned his equals. When he went up, their voices went out. The gift drained from all of them at once, and no one who had it kept it.

Except Elisha. His grew stronger instead, and the tradition is blunt about why: it was the wages for a man who dropped his plow in the dirt when he was called.

The Whirlwind Came Back When They Were Done Talking

They were walking and talking when it finally came, which was how they had spent most of their years together. The chariot of fire came down between them and split them apart, and the whirlwind took Elijah up.

Elisha saw it and shouted after him, "My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and its horsemen!" Then there was nothing overhead to shout at. He took hold of his own clothes and tore them in two.

Elijah's mantle had come down where the chariot went up. Elisha picked it out of the dust, walked to the Jordan, and struck the water with it, and the river opened for him the way it had opened for the old man. The prophets watching from the far bank said to each other that the spirit of Elijah was resting on Elisha now.

He Kept Talking After He Left

Being taken up did not make Elijah quiet. He went on carrying news, down from the world and up into the court above, telling the academy on high what was happening on the ground and telling the ground what he had heard above.

One day he mentioned to Rabba bar Shila that the academy on high never quoted Rabbi Meir. Not once. One of the sharpest readers of Torah who had ever lived, and heaven passed over his name every time. The reason, Elijah said, was the man Rabbi Meir had learned from: Elisha ben Abuyah, a sage the rabbis counted among the wicked, and no relation to the prophet who had inherited the mantle.

Rabba bar Shila did not accept it.

One Pomegranate and a Name Put Back

"Rabbi Meir found a pomegranate," he said. "He ate the inside of it and threw the peel away."

That was the whole defense. A man walking home with a fruit in his hand, eating what was good in it, dropping the rind on the road.

Elijah heard it and was persuaded. He carried it up, and the powers above were persuaded too, and after that a reading of Rabbi Meir's was spoken aloud in the academy on high, where his name had never been said.

He is not finished. The last errand of his career is still in front of him: when the end comes he will carry out God's order to kill Samael, and evil will be put out of the world for good. Until then he keeps arriving, at a door, at a table, at a circumcision, at the edge of somebody's argument, and there is still no reliable way to interrupt him.