The Two Counselors Hidden in the Flank Who Testify at Judgment

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The King With Two Counselors in His Flank

Sleep would not come to David. He lay in the dark of his own chest and listened to the two voices that never left him.

He had learned where they sat. Deep in the flank, below the heart, two kidneys pressed against the spine, and they were not silent meat. They were counselors. All night they leaned toward the heart and whispered, the way a counselor murmurs to a king before he decides. The heart was king. Every limb obeyed it, all two hundred and forty-eight, but the heart never ruled alone. First it heard its counselors.

One kidney counseled toward good. The other counseled toward evil. And the man in the bed lay between them and could feel both mouths moving.

The Poor Wise Youth and the Old Foolish King

The good counsel had a strange shape. It spoke like a youth, poor and wise. Poor, because so few in the house ever stopped to listen to it. Wise, because it had stood with the Holy One for thirteen years before it entered the body, and carried that closeness like a dowry. Each morning it came fresh with the light, urging the limbs toward mercy, and each day fewer hands obeyed it.

The other counsel was older. It had been in the body from the womb, and it did not speak like a youth. It spoke like an old king, foolish and sure, who had reigned so long over the limbs that he no longer heard any warning. It wanted one thing. It wanted to plant wickedness in the chambers of the heart and watch it take root. It had come up out of a narrow place to rule the throne.

David lay between the poor youth and the old king and did the thing the counselors did not expect. He praised. "I will praise the Lord with all my heart," he said into the dark, and he meant the whole heart, both chambers, the good inclination and the evil one together. He would not serve with half a body. He yoked the old king beside the poor youth and drove them both toward heaven.

The Chambers No Census Can Reach

Not everyone did this. David knew the others, who used the deep chambers to hide.

They dug their counsel down where no eye could follow and said the work was done in the dark and no one had seen. "Who sees us," they said. "Who knows."

Rabbi Levi told how foolish that was. Picture an architect, he said, who builds a whole city with his own hands and sets secret rooms into the walls that only he knows. Then a ruler comes to number the people, and they run and hide in those rooms to escape the count. But the ruler is the architect. He knows each hollow better than the ones crouching inside it, and he walks the city and calls them out one by one.

So it was with the One who had built the body. He examined the heart and tested the kidneys. No chamber was sunk deep enough to hide a whisper from the hand that shaped it.

The Day Justice Came for the Soul

Then the reckoning came, as it comes.

The soul was brought up out of the body it had worn, and it stood where all the deaths are sorted. There was a death that took one day, in anger. A death of panic that took two. A death of plague that took three. There were the gentle deaths that took seven, the death of love, and the long deaths of suffering after. Now the counting turned toward it.

And the witnesses came up with it. The heart came, and the two kidneys came, and they did not lie. They had weighed every counsel and kept every decision. They told what the old king had whispered and what the poor youth had begged and which whisper the hand had followed. The Architect had known the rooms all along.

The Soul That Begged Not to Be Gathered In

The soul looked at who else stood in the counting. There were the ones who had died by stoning and by fire for what their hands had done, and the ones who had died by the sword and by strangling, the people of blood. They waited to be gathered together, and the soul cried out not to be swept in with them.

"Do not gather my soul with sinners," it said, "nor my life with men of blood."

It was an old prayer. Daniel had prayed near to it in Babylon, that he and his companions not perish with the sorcerers of the king. Jacob had breathed it on his deathbed when he made Joseph swear not to bury him in Egypt, unwilling to lie even in the soil of that place. The righteous had always feared the shared grave more than the grave itself.

And the mercy the soul pleaded for had been given before. When the generation of the flood was already condemned, the Holy One held the waters back seven days, the seven days of mourning for Methuselah the righteous, so that the rest might turn and repent and not be gathered with the drowned. They did not turn. The water came on the eighth day. But the seven days had been real, and the door had stood open.

So the soul stood in the counting with its heart and its kidneys beside it, and it did not ask to have lived a cleaner life. It asked only not to be laid down among the men of blood, and waited to learn whether the door still stood open a while longer.