Zion Sank Under a Cloud and a Demon Walked at Noon

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The Wall Went Down a Little Every Morning

The watchmen measured the north wall at first light, and every morning the cord ran longer over the top of it. Two and a half handbreadths gone since yesterday. No crash, no breach, no ram at the gate to blame. The stones were sinking into their own ground the way a man's knees go when he has decided to stop standing, and the army outside did not have to do anything but wait and cut its ladders shorter.

Over the roofs sat a cloud that would not move off. The splendor of Israel had been thrown down out of the sky into the dirt, and the footstool of glory went unremembered by the One who had rested His feet on it.

Israel stood before the Holy One with her complaint. "Once I was the terror," she said. "Men ran to fetch Haman to his death at a word from me. The chieftains of Edom shook when the sea stood up in two walls. Now the terror has turned around and it has me by the throat."

A broken length of pillar can roll a hundred paces across a plaza, strike one rock, and stop there for good. The wrath rolled into Jerusalem and stopped there. It did not glance off toward Tyre or Moab. It leaned on the city and stayed leaning.

The Days Closed Like a Corridor

Her pursuers caught her in the straits, and the straits were a stretch of calendar rather than a canyon. From the seventeenth of Tamuz, the day the wall finally let the enemy walk in, to the ninth of Av, the day the House went up in fire, the year narrowed until there was no side street to step into.

The sages counted the debt back to a lock that had never been opened. Hebrew slaves had been kept past the seventh year, in houses where the door should have swung wide at the end of seven and did not. Men who should have walked out free stayed under another man's roof. Now the whole city was being walked into somebody else's house.

She would settle among the nations and find no rest anywhere, the way the dove came back over the water with nothing under her foot. Had she found rest, she would not have come back at all.

Something Walked in the Shade at Noon

In those weeks a thing walked the streets from the fourth hour to the ninth. Not in the sunlight. Not in the shade either. In the narrow strip of shade that lies against the sunlight, the hand's width where the two edges meet. Its name was Ketev Meriri, the bitter destruction that lays waste at noon.

It was covered over in eyes and scales and hair, and one eye sat in the middle of its chest. A man who looked into that eye fell where he stood and did not get up. One pious man met it at midday, went down on his face in the road, and died there. They still argue over who he was. Some say Yehuda son of Rabbi.

Shmuel met it and stayed on his feet. He looked at it the way a man looks at something moving behind the grain jars. "That is a house snake," he said, and went on walking.

Rabbi Abahu Shouted Across the Synagogue

Rabbi Abahu was bent over his books in a synagogue outside Caesarea when a man crossed the floor with a stick in his hand, going for another man's head. Behind the man who was about to be hit, matching him step for step, stood something carrying a bar of iron.

Abahu stood up and shouted the length of the room. "Why do you want to kill your fellow?"

The man stopped and turned the stick over in his hand. "Nobody kills anyone with this."

"There is a demon standing behind him with a rod of iron," Abahu said. "You hit him with that, and it hits him with this, and he dies."

The stick came down to the man's side. Outside, the shade lay against the sunlight in a line the width of a palm.

The Teachers Put Down Their Straps

Rabbi Yohanan went to the men who taught Scripture and the men who taught Mishnah and told them to keep their hands down in those days. Not a swat. Not a rap on the knuckles for a verse learned lazily. A teacher's arm could come down on a boy at noon, and something else could bring an iron rod down after it.

Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahmani went further and told them to send the children home for those four hours. So at midday, in the worst weeks of the year, the schoolrooms of the land sat empty, benches bare, scrolls rolled and tied, the teachers standing in doorways with nothing in their hands.

Above the city the cloud held its place. Before morning the wall went down another two and a half handbreadths, and the watchmen measured it again, and wrote the number down.