Three elderly kibbutzniks were busy in the anteroom. There was a pair of gray-haired women tapping away at large typewriters, and eighty-two-year-old Jonah Friedman at the center desk manning the switchboard.
“Jonah,” Deborah asked in frightened tones, “what’s the big emergency?”
The old man shrugged. “What do I know? I’m just a receptionist. Shall I tell Boaz you’re here—or do you want to freshen up?”
“Why would I need to ‘freshen up’?” she asked impatiently.
“Well,” he answered with an apologetic smile, “you’re a little shmutzik here and there.…”
“I’ve been picking potatoes—how else do you expect me to look?”
“All right already. Just go the way you are.”
She knocked softly.
“It’s okay, Deborah,” Boaz said solemnly. “Take a deep breath and come right in.”
A breath? She was about to faint. Slowly she opened the door.
Standing before her, looking incongruous in his ill-fitting sports clothes and lobster-red from the Israeli sun, was a man whose face she had carried in her thoughts for three long years. Someone she had never dreamed she would see again.
At first, she was totally paralyzed.
Timothy, no less confused, could manage only, “Hello, Deborah. It’s good to see you.”
The room was silent except for the steady hum of Boaz’s air conditioner.
At last Tim spoke. “You look wonderful,” he said softly. “I mean, I’ve never seen you with a tan.…” His voice trailed off.
Suddenly, she was embarrassed.
Though long accustomed to the casual attire of the kibbutzniks, now standing in front of Tim in her shorts, she somehow felt undressed.
Boaz tried to ease the strain.
“Listen, Deborah, I can see you two have things to talk about. Go to the kitchen and get some sandwiches. Have a picnic.” Then, adding with mock severity, “Only be back in the fields at four o’clock sharp.”
He rose and marched out of the office, leaving them too stunned to know how to behave.
They looked at each other. Neither moved.
Tim asked her hesitantly, “How are you feeling?”
“Cold,” she smiled, rubbing her suntanned arms. “The air conditioner—”
“Me too,” he replied, already feeling more at ease. “Let’s go somewhere warmer.”
They put pita bread, cheese, and fruit in a wire mesh basket, and were about to leave, when the master of the kitchen called out, “Wait a minute.”
They stopped and turned. In his beefy hands, Shauli was holding out an opened bottle of red wine.
“Take this, children—” he offered in broken English. “It’s on the roof.”
They sat beside the lake, watching the little boats bob in the distance.
“So this is where St. Peter fished,” Tim murmured.
“And where Christ walked on the water,” Deborah added.
Tim’s eyes widened. “Don’t tell me you’ve accepted Jesus.”
“No,” she smiled, “but He spent so much time in this area, He’s almost a member of the kibbutz. Have you seen Bethlehem?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, I drive now—maybe I can take you.”
“Oh,” he said, somewhat surprised, not at the nature of her suggestion, but that she could think of anything beyond the reality of this one distilled moment.
The present was difficult enough, the future too fraught with a thousand unanswerable questions. Indeed, all they could discuss with any equanimity was the past.
“How did you ever track me down?” she asked.
“My guide was Jeremiah 29:13—‘And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.’ ”
Deborah was moved. “Your Hebrew’s beautiful, Tim,” she said softly.
“Well,” he replied with a touch of embarrassment, “I’ve been really working on it. I guess I’ve learned a great deal since we saw each other last.”
So have I, thought Deborah to herself. And then said aloud, “No, seriously, how did you really find out where I was?”
“I would have started in the Sinai and searched right up to the Golan Heights—except by sheer coincidence I ran into Danny on the subway.”
“Oh.”
“I saw it as the hand of fate,” he insisted.
Deborah averted her eyes and nervously plucked at blades of grass. At last she spoke.
“I’ve really been through a lot since … that night.”
She told him about her servitude in Mea Shearim and her flight to freedom.
“You were very brave,” he murmured.
“My father didn’t exactly see it that way.”
“I’ll bet,” he acknowledged. “He’s a very strong-willed person.”
“So am I. I’m his daughter after all,” she said. “Besides, I’ve done a lot of growing up. I’m nearly twenty now.”
“Yes,” he responded, gazing at her face, “and very beautiful.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said shyly.
“I know. I was just changing the subject to something more important.”
“Don’t you want to know the rest of my story?” she asked uneasily.
“Some other time.” He moved to within an arm’s length of her, still not touching.
“I’d like to hear about how it was in the seminary,” she said.
“No, you wouldn’t,” he whispered. “Not this minute anyway.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Deborah,” he persisted, “I can read your thoughts. You’re feeling scared and guilty.”
She lowered her head, clenched her fists, and said, “Yes, you’re right—I am. But it’s natural to be scared. I just don’t know why I feel so guilty.”
He held out his hand and raised her face to look at his. “You’re afraid it’s wrong,” he murmured. “But it isn’t, Deborah. Believe me, there’s nothing wrong with the way we feel about each other.”
His hand was moving gently down to her shoulder.
“Tim, what’s going to happen to us?”
“Today? Tomorrow? Next week? I don’t know, Deborah, and I don’t care. I just know I’m with you now. I love you, and I won’t let you go.”
Their faces were inches apart. It was as if she had been holding on to the edge of a precipice for the three aching years they had been separated.
And then suddenly Deborah let go.
She put her arms around his neck and kissed him.
She remembered how it had been with Avi.
And now she knew the difference.
As they held each other tightly, Tim whispered, “Deborah, I can’t believe this is a sin.”
She nodded wordlessly as they embraced.
Both were nervous, yet neither was afraid. Though completely innocent, they intuitively knew the intricacies of the act of love.
It was yet another sign that what they were doing was meant to be.
And so, in a wooded corner near the Sea of Galilee, the future priest and the rabbi’s daughter consummated the passion that had begun one Sabbath eve so long ago.
Deborah referred to him simply as Tim. That night at dinner in the hall, she introduced her friends to her American visitor. Tactfully, they all refrained from asking what he did at home. Their only question was to them the most essential: “How long will you be staying?”
Tim looked at Deborah, hoping that her eyes would tell him how to answer, but all he read in them was, That’s what I’m wondering too.
“Don’t think we’re just being nosy,” Boaz explained. “We are, of course, but we have rules—anyone who visits the kibbutz for more than two nights is obliged to do his share of work.”
Tim answered instantly, “What would you like me to do?”
“Are you any good with cows?”
“I’m afraid not,” he apologized. “But back in America I did some gardening. I’d be happy to work in the fiel
ds.”
“That’s fine,” said Boaz. “Only wear a broad-brimmed hat and shmeer yourself with lotion. Otherwise you’ll get red as a tomato, and they’ll pick you by mistake.”
Tim was assigned to a bungalow with two Australian volunteers. But everyone knew that this was just pro forma.
Deborah had been sharing her new srif with Hannah Yavetz, who, by happy coincidence, was off doing her annual thirty-day stint in the Signal Corps. For their brief time together, the lovers had a private place to call their own.
Each day they worked side by side in the fields—the first opportunity they had to talk and get to know each other without the pressure of a clock racing toward twelve on a Sabbath eve.
With each night they spent in each other’s arms, the notion that their lovemaking could possibly be sinful vanished like the early morning haze upon the lake.
They were already married in a way no earthly force could ever separate. Why could they not remain this way forever?
Indeed, that was the real question burning in Deborah’s mind.
Could she ask him to stay?
Would he ask her to go?
Deborah wanted to share every one of Tim’s feelings. Overriding his objection that the only thing that mattered was being together for these precious days, she obtained permission to take him to see the holy sites of his religion.
Supported by a month’s advance in Deborah’s pocket money, they planned to set forth like pious pilgrims to trace the footsteps of Timothy’s Messiah.
By unspoken agreement, they did not—dared not—talk about the future. They lived merely from day to day. But each circle of the sun brought them inexorably nearer to the moment when difficult decisions could no longer be avoided.
Yet were they not in a land where Joshua had commanded the sun to stand still—and had it not obeyed him?
Late one afternoon, Deborah was walking along the lake shore, asking herself a million answerless questions, when she came upon Boaz, who was reading quietly on a grassy bank.
She knew that he sometimes went there to escape the burden of his leadership (“Two hundred kibbutzniks—two hundred opinions”) and intended to leave him in peace. But even from afar, he could sense her need to talk and beckoned to her.
He dispensed with cordiality and went to the heart of the matter. “How much longer?”
“I don’t know.” Deborah shrugged.
“Of course you do,” he said paternally. “You know to the very hour—the very minute maybe.”
“We’re leaving to drive around the country tomorrow,” she offered.
“But you’re not going like Moses for forty years in the desert,” he answered. “He has to be back in Jerusalem—when?”
“On the fifteenth,” she replied tonelessly.
“Well,” he said quietly, “that gives you five days.”
“You mean for one of us to make up his mind?” she asked hopefully.
“No, Deborah,” Boaz replied as gently as he could. “Neither of you can change what you are. The five days are for you to get used to the idea.”
The next morning Deborah and Tim climbed into a beat-up sedan for what they both knew—but neither said—would be a journey of separation.
Deborah took one last look at the srif, as Tim put his suitcase into the trunk. He was taking all his belongings. Everything. There was nothing left of him she could come back to.
The next few days were all a blur. Long sun-filled expeditions with guidebooks in Nazareth, Caesarea, Megiddo, Hebron, Bethlehem.
Then in the evenings, they would check uneasily into modest hotels, feeling self-conscious—although dozens of other young couples were doing the same.
Finally, there was Jerusalem, a city fraught with passion for them both. Not merely for their faiths, but for their lives.
They did their best to stave off sadness. Deborah even joked that their inn was a mere ten minutes from Mea Shearim, and playfully threatened to take Timothy to meet the Schiffmans.
They walked everywhere—visiting the Old City, now united physically yet still divided into tiny spiritual fragments.
As they passed through the narrow streets, they rubbed shoulders with priests from the Armenian, Greek Orthodox, and Ethiopian churches, mullahs from the Arab mosques—and frummers who seemed carbon copies of Deborah’s neighbors back in Brooklyn.
At last Deborah brought Timothy to the ridge atop the Wailing Wall, pointing out where her “sinful voice” had caused a riot.
“I don’t believe it,” Tim declared. “They look too pious. They’re so rapt in prayer.”
“I promise you, some of them would still recognize me, so I couldn’t even pray in the fenced-off area. But you—my blond, Irish friend—would be embraced with open arms.”
She whispered something in his ear.
“No,” he protested, smiling, “that’d be a sacrilege.”
“Not unless you make it one,” she countered.
“But I don’t have a skullcap.”
“Don’t worry, my darling, just give them a quick burst of Yiddish and watch how fast you get the accoutrements.”
Tim shrugged, and reverently started toward the crowd of worshipers.
Suddenly, a handful of young men began to point to him.
“Look, look,” they called in Yiddish, “here comes a soul to save.”
They rushed forward, surrounding him with bonhomie.
“Do you speak Yiddish?” one inquired.
“Yo, a bissel,” Timothy replied.
Their excitement mounted, as they continued in their catechism.
“Do you know how to daven?”
“Well, I know some prayers.”
“Come, we’ll help you.”
Almost magically a skullcap appeared on Tim’s head as they affectionately led him to the front, where he could touch the holy stones.
Timothy was immensely moved and they could see it.
“Pray,” one of them urged, thrusting a book into his hand. “You can read Hebrew, can’t you?”
“A little.”
Another began to leaf through the Psalms.
“Can I choose my own?” asked Tim.
“Of course,” their leader said enthusiastically. “Which one?”
“The very last—one hundred and fifty,” Tim answered.
“Wonderful,” they all responded joyfully.
Timothy recited what he had been taught was the “grandest symphony of praise to God ever composed on earth,” a song which began and ended with Hallelujah (“Praise ye the Lord”) and had the selfsame word in every line.
The spiritual recruiters were overwhelmed. “Why don’t you come with us to meet our rebbe?” they urged.
For a moment, Tim was lost. For these young men, unlike the joyless fundamentalists Deborah had described to him, were passionately infused with the love of God.
Suddenly, he thought of the only logical excuse.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized in Yiddish, “I already have a spiritual leader.”
Then he rejoined the rabbi’s daughter and began to follow the fourteen Stations of the Cross.
The last five stations—which included the site of the Crucifixion at Calvary and Christ’s Tomb—were enshrined in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a solemn place shared by six sects, the Greek Orthodox faith, the Roman Catholics, as well as the Copts, Armenians, Syrians, and Abyssinians.
As Tim stared speechless at this stark memorial of his Savior’s Passion, Deborah sensed that he was not even aware of her presence.
He was silent for nearly half an hour, and even then had difficulty speaking.
“What would you like to do now?” she asked hesitantly.
“Deborah,” he answered, his voice quavering slightly, “would you mind if we took a walk?”
“No, of course not.”
“On second thought, it’s pretty far. We can take a bus.”
“No, no,” she insisted. “We’ll walk wherever you want to go.”
/> “I want to see Bethlehem one more time.”
She nodded, and took his hand as they turned to begin the long hike.
It was late afternoon when, parched and covered with dust, they entered the Church of the Nativity, built more than a thousand years earlier, above the place where Christ was born.
They emerged from a passageway into the Catholic Church of St. Catherine, where Timothy knelt in the last pew and began to pray. Deborah stood beside him, unsure of what to do.
Suddenly she heard him gasp. “Oh my God.” And then in a furious whisper he ordered, “Kneel down, Deborah. Kneel!”
Sensing his terror, she quickly obeyed.
He whispered another command. “Lower your head—and pray.”
Moments later, two worshipers from the front pew rose, moved to the aisle, genuflected and crossed themselves, then turned to leave. They were wearing black jackets and white shirts, open at the neck.
As they approached, Tim could see what he had suspected from afar—that they were indeed George Cavanagh and Patrick Grady.
“Are you sure they didn’t notice you?” Deborah asked later as they stood in the shadows waiting for the bus to Jerusalem.
“I don’t know,” he answered, unable to control his panic. “They might have and just didn’t say anything.”
“If they did, do you think they’d tell anyone?” she asked, fully sharing his anxiety.
“I’m pretty sure Cavanagh would,” he said bitterly.
“But how will you ever know—?”
“That’s just it,” he cut her off, shaking his head in anguish. “I never will.”
They sat on a low stone wall at the top of the Mount of Olives. Neither spoke. In less than an hour, Deborah would leave him to return to the kibbutz.
A part of his life would be over.
They gazed at the valley below and the Old City beyond it almost in silhouette, reflecting occasional sparkles of gold from the setting sun.
Finally, Tim broke what was almost a monastic silence.
“We could live here,” he said softly.
“What do you mean?”
“Here, this city—Jerusalem. If you look at it, you can almost see all religions come together—the spirit of God sort of hovering in concentric circles above the Old City. This is everybody’s home.”