Tohu

Until this moment I'm still not sure whether it's even advisable, or permitted, to speak about this — but in light of the way recent events have unfolded, I have no choice but to gather what remains of my courage and try to call things by their names. At least so as not to lose my self-respect as a human being. I've already accepted that, as things stand, my physical life is worth nothing and isn't really important either.

It all started at the beginning of my work in cinema, and at first I didn't attribute much importance to it. Over time I identified a stubborn, nagging pattern in myself: every time I was on the verge of a breakthrough in a screenplay, every time I sensed an unusual spark, every time a genuinely strange new idea appeared — something that might disrupt my whole way of building a story, that might reverse the language of cinema entirely — at exactly that point, peripheral, seemingly unrelated events would occur. And in their roundabout way they would delay me, or stop me altogether, from carrying out the important move I had been about to make. I'd come down with some bizarre, unrelated digestive infection that would knock me out of commission. The computer would catch some maddening, persistent virus. I'd get an unexpected fine and find myself entangled in bureaucracy. Or — out of nowhere — a close friend's mother would die, and I would be conscripted for a full week of helping out, and would forget entirely that just a moment ago I had been on the verge of a breakthrough. By the time I returned, I could no longer find my way back to it.

When I was younger I attributed this to some kind of self-destructive mechanism inside me. It never crossed my mind that there might be a malicious hand directing all these events for one purpose only — that Sasha not discover what he was on the verge of discovering about the world. No, no. I always blamed myself.

A few years later I was deep in research in a new field I had more or less invented, and I was sunk in it entirely, to the point of exhaustion, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week: the strange link between a branch of linguistics that studies signs, called semiotics; the study of Kabbalah; and a mathematical analysis of the rhetorical devices of metaphor in the cosmological poetry of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi.

Toward the end of the research I stopped leaving the apartment. I cut off contact with the outside world. The place was littered with strewn clothes and food scraps. I was thin, exhausted — and yet I felt a kind of weightlessness, an exalted sensation. My brain was processing every gram of food and water I put into my body, working at turbo speed, on the widest possible band, like a particle accelerator. I was a step away from a breakthrough whose importance would be hard to overstate.

And then — it began.

At nine in the morning I heard heavy knocking at the door. I didn't want to open, but whoever was there refused to leave, and after a few minutes of silence kept knocking with mounting force. Eventually I started to lose concentration, and barefoot, in my underwear, I opened the door. Standing there was a young, exceptionally robust man dressed in the uniform of some delivery company. Without asking, he came inside, carrying an enormous box on his shoulders. He set it down in the kitchen, handed me a phone for a digital signature, and simply walked out. I tried to mumble that this was a mistake, that I hadn't ordered any delivery, but it was already too late, and I was left standing in front of the box in a kind of helplessness.

On the box there was a label, and on it I recognized my exact address and my full name. That was strange. But stranger still was the sender's name: "Avi, your sergeant from Battalion 51, Golani — enjoy, brother!" So many years had passed since the army. I tried to remember whether I'd had a sergeant named Avi. I started to feel a faint cold sweat. Even if I had had a sergeant by that name — and it didn't seem to me that I had — why now, twenty years later, was he sending me a package? How did he know my address? What was happening here at all?

I lit a cigarette and started to open the box. Inside were the most expensive food items I had ever seen, most of them foreign brands I didn't recognize, mainly French and Italian. Several kinds of foie gras, expensive and rare cheeses, exotic fish, black caviar, costly Italian pastas, lamb chops, cigars — and what struck me hardest, in retrospect, was that there was also a parcel of the most expensive, prestigious alcohol.

Still not digesting what was happening, but with a thought already of returning to the study, I suddenly heard the doorbell. I began slowly to retreat. But from behind the door a woman's voice called out my name: "Sasha, open up. I know you're there. It's me, Brachi Lifshitz." Brachi Lifshitz? What was happening here? Brachi Lifshitz had studied with me at university; she was a religious girl, very beautiful, elitist, who had rejected all my attempts at courtship with a haughty laugh. I hadn't heard from her in seven years. Various disturbing, unformulated thoughts began to race through my head, and a sharp headache appeared at once, the kind that felt like the onset of a migraine.

The woman standing there kept ringing, and the most disturbing thing was that she had begun to giggle in a strange, out-of-place laugh. With heavy misgivings I slowly opened the door. To my great astonishment, Brachi Lifshitz really was standing there. She smiled, kissed me on the cheek, and walked into the apartment. I closed the door and followed her in, very confused.

She spoke quickly, laughed constantly, with an exaggerated self-confidence that everything was fine and that this was the way it ought to be — as if we'd arranged the meeting only yesterday. Twice, even, while talking, she winked at me with a strange mischievousness, as though we were part of some game.

I looked at her, and a strange feeling began to take hold of me — that this was indeed the same Brachi Lifshitz, the young and ambitious researcher, only she no longer looked like that religious, pure girl. There was something very liberated about her. She wore fairly revealing clothes, her body was deeply tanned, still very beautiful but already a mature woman's body, heavily made up. She stood very close to me and I could smell coming off her the heavy scent of expensive perfume, of suntan lotion and cigarettes.

Without giving me a chance to digest what was happening, she told me that her father had died suddenly a month ago, that she'd been through a difficult period and wanted to get away. She hadn't yet been to the sea that summer, had heard I lived near the shore, and asked to stay with me for two days, during which she would mostly not be at home — and in the evenings she would even be glad to reminisce together about our student days.

Speaking slowly, I told her I was sorry for her loss — her father had been a worthy and good man — and agreed to host her. Again she gave that strange giggle, planted a kiss on my cheek, and I led her to the bedroom, clearing a single bed for her and a place in the closet.

I returned to the kitchen, and the first thing I did was take a bottle of whiskey out of the parcel, pour myself a full glass, and light a cigarette. From the bedroom the sounds of irritating pop music began to play. Moving slowly, I began to put the apartment in order — gathering up clothes, food scraps, piling mountains of dirty dishes into the sink, washing everything. Little by little the place started to look something like normal again. Returning to the study to continue the research did not, of course, even cross my mind. Too many things had happened that morning to leave my brain anything but a little fogged, to put it mildly.

The whole time I kept sipping the whiskey, and slowly a sensation of warmth, of calm, even of a strange pleasantness, began to spread through me.

I asked Brachi if she wanted to eat, and for the first time I was glad I had received a delivery with a week's worth of food. I put a pot of pasta on the stove, opened the foie gras and the caviar, arranged all the kinds of cheese on disposable plates. I set everything on the kitchen table and called Brachi.

From the room she shouted that she was extremely hot — that you couldn't possibly live like this without air conditioning. And it was true: I hadn't noticed that we were already in the middle of summer. The unit had broken back during Passover and since then I'd done nothing about it. I'd seen nothing apart from the work.

And then she appeared in the kitchen. She was again heavily made up, her hair gathered up, with a mischievous smile on her face — but what stunned me was that she was wearing only a white bra and white underwear. At first I just listened to her quick, assertive speech, but with time the food was so extraordinarily good and the alcohol so excellent that I started to enjoy the situation.

I made tea, we lit cigars, sat close. I could smell her tanned skin, the alcohol, the cigars. Suddenly I heard myself telling juicy, foolish jokes and laughing aloud at my own jokes, pouring us more and more alcohol. Brachi not only didn't refuse — she pushed me on, listening to me. Our chairs drew closer and closer, until the last thing I remember was the entire kitchen dancing and swaying around me, and through a cloud of smoke I could see up close only Brachi's red lips and her white teeth — and that was it. Black screen.

The only thing I had managed to register was that Brachi wasn't getting drunk at all. The more we drank, the sharper, the more clear-witted, the more assertive, the more in control she became.

I woke up late in the morning with a severe migraine attack. Brachi wasn't home — she had probably gone to the sea — the kitchen was clean, tidy.

I lay in bed until past noon, with a throbbing pain on the left side, with the taste of warm rubber in my mouth.

After a few hours, a cautious thought rose up about perhaps trying to make it to the study, to work on the final pages of the research. But there was no chance. I barely managed to drag myself to the kitchen for a glass of whiskey and a cigarette.

In the afternoon the pain eased. I took a shower, heard once again from the bedroom Brachi's irritating electronic music. We met in the kitchen and again repeated the same ritual of food, drink, and foolish jokes until the middle of the night. And this repeated itself over the next two days or so.

On the third day there were no more of Brachi's clothes in the room. Her bed was made, and on it lay a note that, for some reason, she had written by hand.

I read the note, sat down on the bed, stared at the white wall for a minute, and read it again.

It began with the fact that she addressed me as Rami. The note opened with the words "Dear Rami!" Then came a long sentence about how she had received a message from her travel agent that her flight to Thailand was leaving the day after tomorrow instead of in two weeks, because Thailand was expecting a rare tornado storm. Then came a long sentence with a precise scientific description of all the consequences of tropical storms in Southeast Asia. Then a sequence of foreign letters and numbers, and suddenly she writes: "Sasha, you know where to find me if you need to," and then again she addresses me as Rami and conveys regards from her mother and father. At the end she wrote: "Hahaha!" and kissed the paper with her red lipstick.

I lit a cigarette and tried to organize my thoughts. I had the disturbing sense that I had just read a text full of bugs and hallucinations from an artificial intelligence.

And then I noticed that something was missing from the room — above the bed there had always hung a wall clock, and now it was gone. It was a simple wall clock; I had bought it in the Old City of Jerusalem, but I was fond of it, and I didn't understand why Brachi had stolen this clock of all things. It left a bad taste — something not important, but disturbing. And in general I was trying to understand what had happened here since nine in the morning on Sunday. Something in the combination of food, alcohol, cigarettes, and the smell of suntan lotion had completely disrupted the chemical-hormonal activity of my brain. Until the end of the week I didn't get out of bed, not until I had finished all the alcohol in the house.

From here I'll try to be brief. Over the next two weeks I tried to recover and rehabilitate myself. I went on a juice fast, traveled to the Kinneret, took long walks every evening, hot showers, a clean bed, lived like a soldier. The whole time I held on to the thought that soon I would cut myself off entirely from what had been happening and return to my research.

On Sunday of the third week, I sat down again at the computer in the study. I shut off the phone, disconnected the doorbell, drew the curtains and closed the shutters, set on the desk two bottles of water, a handful of dates and nuts, and a pack of cigarettes. I opened the file, slowly retraced my steps, analyzed the entire thread of thought I'd been on when I was at full throttle before stopping for the known reasons. I began to ground and thicken the line of thought, drawing on the research literature, adding footnotes, links.

I didn't notice the time passing. I began once more to feel that spark — the unstoppable drive of the brain to make a quantum leap, to take in all the material with a single gaze, in the flash of a fraction of a second. Once again I began to feel, physically, as though a small electric bulb were lighting up inside my brain. I could really feel its warm light.

And then, at last, I was ready to begin the final and concluding chapter. And then I felt a sudden surge of hunger — very strong, almost animal. I literally felt my whole stomach as a kind of empty cavity that urgently needed to be filled. The salivary glands began to work fast, the brain cried out for energy.

I looked around. Without my noticing, five hours had already passed. The dates and nuts were long gone, only half a glass of water was left.

With apprehension and no real choice, I gave myself an order: get to the kitchen, in seven minutes prepare an omelet with six eggs and strong black coffee, and return.

The fridge was empty apart from three cans of tomato paste, and I couldn't find any coffee either. And then I made a serious mistake: in an attempt to order delivery, or at least to find out where the nearest open convenience store might be, I turned on the phone.

In the first second I didn't understand what I was seeing. The whole screen filled and overflowed with dozens of messages, alerts, push notifications, across every app. I sat down slowly on a chair. There were messages from the bank, from a family doctor, messages from the profiles of Filipinos on Facebook, a fine from the traffic police. There was a message from an aunt of mine who lived in Or Akiva, whom I hadn't seen for twenty years, saying she was coming to visit me today with her three small grandchildren, and that they would be staying with me for several days. There was an urgent message from a woman named Aviva, a kindergarten teacher, saying that my child was acting up and being very violent, demanding that I come immediately and pick him up. And on and on — a flood of messages. The last message I managed to read was from Brachi. She wrote: "Rami, don't open the door for anyone, get out of the city immediately. I'm sorry."

And then I heard heavy knocking at the door.

I stood facing the door. I felt I was standing facing some foreign, vast power, and I didn't understand what it wanted from me, or what to expect. The knocking grew louder, a male voice shouted: "Open up immediately, police." I began to retreat. And then the door was forced open. I expected to encounter every kind of dark, terrifying creature, even Satan himself.

But at the door stood two policemen and a policewoman. The first officer looked like an investigator. He was wearing sunglasses. He held out a sheet of paper to me and said: "Rami, we have a search warrant. Please sit in the living room." Then the three of them walked straight to the study. They knew where to go.

I sat in the living room. What I most felt like was a glass of whiskey, or at the very least to crush three Klonopin tablets between my teeth. But for some reason I focused on wiping a small stain off the table.

Four minutes later the officers came out, in their hands the computer, every electronic device, all the papers and binders. They walked out and started downstairs, but the investigator with the sunglasses came over and sat down across from me in the living room. He looked very pleased, smiling. "What am I suspected of?" I asked him. Suddenly he called me Sasha. He said: "You know, Sasha — what I'd most like right now is to have a glass of whiskey with you, or to chew a couple of Klonopin together. Got any whiskey left? Ah — you drink fast, eh?" And then he winked at me and burst into rolling laughter.

He went to the door, then turned to me and said: "You know, Rami — that porcelain marble you took to play with from your brother, the one you thought you'd lost and your brother beat you bloody over — you know where the marble is? It just rolled under the bed. It's still there." I stood without words, without thoughts, drops of cold sweat running down my neck. Then he again put on his sunglasses, and suddenly, in the formal tone of a police officer, he said: "Rami, the Israel Police thanks you for your cooperation. You are welcome to file an appeal and to submit a complaint regarding any wrongdoing or distress you may have suffered. Thank you very much, and goodbye." He shook my hand and walked out of the apartment.

I couldn't stay alone in the apartment. I took the phone and went downstairs, walked away from the building, and sat down on a piece of playground equipment in a small park. It was beginning to grow dark. My hand reached for the phone. I wrote a message to Yoni, my best and only friend, who was a respected psychiatrist. A quarter of an hour later, Yoni picked me up and we drove to his house.

Outside, heavy rain had already begun to fall. Yoni sat me down in the kitchen, made me tea, dispersed his children to their rooms, and sat down across from me. He had good features, brown eyes, human, intelligent. Slowly, over the course of an hour, I told him everything that had happened. As time passed his face grew more and more serious, worried, sad. In the end he hugged me hard, said he needed to make a few phone calls, and stepped out.

He came back, closed the kitchen door, placed his hands on my knees, and said in a serious, calm tone that he didn't think I was hallucinating, that he believed I was not in a psychotic episode — that I had been through something very hard and unusual, something for which, at least for now, no simple rational explanation could be given. He had already been in touch with a friend of his who worked in the Shin Bet, who had promised to listen and to help. As an extra precaution, he was suggesting that tomorrow we drive to the mental health hospital where he worked, just for a few days of quiet and rest in the intake ward. No antipsychotic medication, no treatment, only some mild sedatives, sleep, supervision, walks along the quiet, pastoral paths of Kfar Shaul. He heated water for a shower, gave me a strong sleeping pill, and I fell asleep fairly quickly — my exhausted brain simply went to immediate lights-out.

For the next two weeks I was almost alone in the quiet ward. I lay reading articles about sheep-herding methods in Australia, manuals on training Jack Russell dogs, recipes for broccoli smoothies. I slept well, ate well. Yoni came to visit me every day. We walked on the beautiful paths. He told me I was improving rapidly and that he was very optimistic. His friend from the Shin Bet had completed his inquiries, and to his satisfaction everything was more or less falling into a relatively logical picture: Brachi Lifshitz was indeed on a trip to Thailand. He had made contact with the police investigator — they had indeed conducted a search and confiscated items, but a regrettable mistake had occurred. They had been searching for someone else, a criminal. He too was Caucasian and a bachelor, lived in Jerusalem, and his family name was exactly the same as mine. His name was Rami Agronov, and he had apparently stolen my digital identity. That explained almost everything. There were still, admittedly, a few things that for the moment couldn't be explained, but they were marginal — most of the story more or less checked out.

After two weeks I was released and began a new, balanced life — with a fixed daily routine, healthy food, physical exercise. Above all I tried not to think much, and to go to bed early.

After two months, the welcome routine had done its work. I had become very stable, much stronger physically as well. There were dumbbells lying in my living room, a punching bag hanging up; I didn't use public transportation, I walked everywhere, I didn't use the elevator in my building and would climb the seven floors on foot.

When I would sit in the kitchen smoking a last cigarette before bed, a thought would slip in that, in fact, since then I hadn't touched my research. For some reason the police still hadn't returned my things — but all the material was saved on a USB stick attached to my keychain, and theoretically I could have gone back to it even now. But I wasn't driving the thought away, nor was I answering it. It would remain hanging in the air of the kitchen along with the cigarette smoke.

But as time went on the routine started to wear on me. Once again I was looking for something that would challenge me. I felt ready for the fight.

I bought the cheapest laptop I could find. One bright summer day I sat down again in the study. I inserted the USB stick and opened the file. I sat in silence for a few minutes, doing nothing. Slowly I typed today's date into the document. I looked around. Everything was quiet. Outside, the birds were chirping; the phone wasn't ringing and there was no knocking at the door. Then I began to write the first line.

Ten seconds later there was a loud, muffled noise — a kind of heavy, distant impact. Then, a second later, the room began to shake, and for a fraction of a second I felt a slight weightlessness, the way it feels when an elevator first starts to move. But it stopped at once.

I rose carefully to my feet. The strangest thing was that everything was completely silent — not an ordinary silence, but an absolute silence. No chirping of birds, no traffic, nothing. The hush of a vacuum, as though the world had stopped turning.

I went out to the living room. In front of me was a large window, wide open, that looked onto the inner courtyard between the buildings. Always, in the center of that courtyard, in the window, I had seen a giant cedar tree — truly enormous, very ancient, with vast roots. To me it had always been a kind of old, wise friend, and yet always young and green and very strong. And now it was gone. My head turned slowly toward the wall of the living room. In the middle of the wall a huge crack had opened, from ceiling to floor, and through the crack a giant green branch of a cedar tree had pushed its way into the room. I looked at the surrounding walls — in fact, the entire building, all of the walls, were warped. Doors had jumped from their frames. The living room was strewn with shards of shutters and soot.

The last thought I remember was the realization that the cedar tree had collapsed onto the building and crushed it — or, more precisely, the last thought was that standing before me was a foreign, violent power, the most real thing there is, that would destroy anything that stood in its way, and that for some unclear reason it really did not want me to finish my research.

Black screen.

The next thing I remember is the screech of brakes and a heavy impact against my hip, and I'm flying three meters across the asphalt in the middle of the road. Later, Ruth would tell me that I had been wandering the streets half-naked, weeping without stop

As I lay on the asphalt, I saw a young woman of about thirty stepping out of a very old Subaru pickup, with black curls and deep black eyes. She came over to me and shouted: "Oh! What have I done — sir, are you alive? Where does it hurt? I'm calling an ambulance."

She helped me up, looked around to see whether anyone was watching us, and then drew close, pressed herself against me, and whispered quickly into my ear: "Why didn't you do what Brachi Lifshitz told you to do? Why didn't you leave? Idiot! You're in immediate danger. Come with me." She pushed me into the pickup and started it with a screech. We drove for quite a while, mostly along back routes — dirt roads, through the Palestinian village of Silwan. She tossed a clean set of clothes back to me, a bottle of water, and a Snickers bar. It was beginning to get dark.

We entered a large Jerusalem neighborhood. In retrospect I understood that we had come to one of the Russian housing blocks in Pisgat Ze'ev. We went into a simple, clean apartment. Ruth led me to a small kitchen where four people were sitting, who looked at me with warm feeling and with curiosity, as though they had met a relative they hadn't seen for many years. This was the first time I had met any of them.

We started meeting almost every day in that apartment of Natan's. On the kitchen table there always waited a pot of strong, good tea, and a plate on which five slices of plain bread were arranged with pieces of yellow cheese. Later, we moved to live in that apartment. We learned to operate like soldiers — without an internet connection, only with kosher dumb-phones with single-use SIM cards. We learned to bypass street cameras. We wore plain clothes that didn't draw attention, and in general tried to stand out as little as possible. We became invisible.

All of us had similar stories. The first was a researcher from Ben-Gurion University who had been on the verge of a breakthrough in quantum computing. The second was a thirteen-year-old boy who studied at the Technion. He had built an algorithm that used the tools of weather forecasting to analyze network behavior. He was the first to introduce, into scientific use, concepts like "clouds of digital density" or "electromagnetic sunrise." But what brought him here was a powerful tool he had built, one that knew how to gather and analyze all the data from every public information source and to predict global processes — wars, droughts, epidemics, earthquakes. For example, in a fraction of a second the tool could connect a severe drought in the endless rice fields of southeast India to an outbreak of severe migraine attacks in Siberia, to a sharp rise in suicide rates in Norway, to a steep increase in oil prices on the Asian markets, to a mass beaching of whales on the coasts of Australia. At the same time, he and his parents were summoned to an urgent meeting at the research division of Aman, and to an analytical lab for data collection and analysis at the Mossad. But his parents refused every offer, however fantastical it might be. Very quickly, heavy debts appeared in both parents' bank accounts; they received termination notices, files were opened against them at the enforcement office. The father, although he had been a very healthy man, fell ill with cancer. Fairly quickly they went from a bourgeois middle-class family to a poor, sick, hunted one. The grandmother adopted the boy. But she died suddenly. And so Natan found him.

Although he was a genius, he was still a child. He kept demanding candies and chocolate, sometimes he would interrupt us and curse with relish; from me he constantly demanded to be escorted to the bathroom. But most of the time he sat with us, silent, with sad eyes. Natan forbade him to come near any kind of computer — not the computer of an electric car, not in an electronics store, not arcade machines in the mall, nothing. Total electronic isolation.

The next was someone about whom, until the end, I wasn't sure whether he was one of us — but I trusted Natan. He was a journalist for a Bat Yam local paper. In 2006, a few months after the disengagement plan in Gush Katif, he walked at midday into an internet café on Dizengoff Street. He sat down at the computer and typed the following words into the search bar: "Rehavam Ze'evi Gandhi, assassination, Rafael Eitan tragic death, Ariel Sharon, the disengagement." He left there twenty-five minutes later, and from that moment on his life was unrecognizable — or, more precisely, it was utterly destroyed.

At the local paper he was responsible for the real-estate section, covering small operators in Bat Yam. He was completely indifferent to politics and lived an ordinary life. As the disengagement plan approached, he started to see protests, orange ribbons on cars, arrests of children. He began watching the news broadcasts, reading every report. He was quiet, didn't speak for or against, but he suddenly understood that he didn't understand what was really happening here.

When the evacuation began, he asked for leave from work and traveled to the closest accessible point — with great difficulty he reached Sderot, and stayed there for a week, sleeping on a sleeping bag in the municipal park.

During the day he went out to the roads and stood as a quiet observer of demonstrations, road closures, arrests. He watched the buses of the evacuees, with their windows pressed against the glass, pass him heading north.

He came back from there a completely different man. After work he would walk for hours along the Tel Aviv–Bat Yam road, thinking. And then, in a single moment, the conspiracy theory was born in his mind. He suddenly noticed that, around the time of the disengagement plan, within an interval of one to three years, two senior figures had been killed under inexplicable circumstances — one a major general in the IDF and a serving cabinet minister, the other a former chief of staff. Two clear-cut leaders of the Israeli right, two men of the Greater Land of Israel, longtime friends and rivals of Ariel Sharon.

The first was Rehavam Ze'evi — Gandhi — major general, war hero, sitting minister. Unusually, he was assassinated at seven in the morning in a Jerusalem hotel by a Palestinian assassin. Gandhi is the first and only Israeli minister to date to have been killed by a Palestinian assassin, and the most senior Israeli figure to be killed by armed combatants in the entire course of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

The second was the legendary former chief of staff, Knesset member, and cabinet minister Rafael Eitan — Raful — who was killed in a manner that defied logic, very close to the implementation of the disengagement plan. On November 23, 2004, while serving as director of the port of Ashdod, despite the storm that was raging there, despite the fact that the previous evening he had ordered all work on the pier halted, early in the morning he drove alone to the breakwater at the end of the pier. Some hours later his vehicle was found empty at the end of the pier, and his body was found in the water several kilometers away.

Apparently something in his personality, in the circumstances of his life, or some kind of chemical balance in the brain together led the journalist to that point — the point of no return. And then everything blew up.

A week later he published a personal blog with his theory: that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in advance of the disengagement plan, had eliminated the most prominent leaders of the Greater Land of Israel and his most dangerous rivals.

Everywhere, he started telling people that the Shin Bet was after him. Every day he visited five different internet cafés around Tel Aviv. To get anywhere he took three buses, to obscure his trail. He used only public phones.

Beyond that, he published that some of the most horrific suicide bombings that had shaken the country in the period leading up to Operation Defensive Shield had been organized on direct orders from Ariel Sharon — to unite a fractured Israeli society, to consolidate the people's mental readiness to go to war, which had been entirely cracked after the Oslo accords. Among the orchestrated attacks, he counted, among others, the bombing at the Dolphinarium and the bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya.

After two months he was arrested, interrogated, and committed against his will, with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. In hospital he was loaded with the heaviest antipsychotic medications. He became very slow, with drool at the mouth, with confused speech. His hair fell out, he gained weight extremely. But all of this was only on the outside. Inside, he remained a feverish conspiracist personality, alert to every small detail.

After half a year in the closed ward and another five months in the open ward, with good behavior and full cooperation, he was recognized as permanently disabled and released to rehabilitation in a hostel. He escaped from the hostel, went through withdrawal alone from all psychiatric medication, lost forty-five kilos, paid a private investigator to erase every digital record of him on the network, and went to live among the addicts and prostitutes of the old central bus station. There Natan found him.

The last was Ruth — Natan's right hand. She was a poet, a researcher. Everything began when she was about to publish her first book, The Book of Forgetting and Redemption. It was a book of mathematical-Kabbalistic poetry, inspired by Heikhalot literature, the Sefer ha-Bahir, and the poetry of Rilke.

Everything was in order until, in a radio interview ahead of the book's launch on Kan Tarbut, she said something that she could in no way have foreseen, that she could not have imagined would set off the chain of events that would, in the end, bring her here.

The interview went perfectly well, until toward the end the interviewer asked her what she was working on now. With slight embarrassment, Ruth began to explain that she had discovered what is hinted at quietly in Kabbalistic literature: that the Hebrew we speak today, and have spoken for two thousand four hundred years, is no longer the same original Hebrew of the biblical period. That is — it isn't merely a language that has changed because of the passage of time and eras. No: it is a language that is fundamentally different in its essence, in its purpose. Hebrew is not a holy tongue — it is the tongue of the holy. That is, the language in which the systems of the holy operate, chief among them prophecy. Hebrew is the language of prophecy, the language of the prophets. After prophecy ceased twenty-four hundred years ago, we turned from Hebrews who speak and understand the language of prophecy into diasporic Jews who use Hebrew in an attempt to understand the Torah through analytical-philosophical-intellectual tools — that is, the precise opposite of prophetic culture. The task of biblical commentators such as Rashi was, first and foremost, by every possible device, to try to bring diasporic Jews closer to understanding the prophetic Hebrew of the Torah. Ruth argued that modern Jews, including the very greatest of the rabbis, are in fact incapable of understanding what is written in the Torah. But, she added, in the wake of political independence and national revival, Israeliness is unconsciously preparing the tools for the renewal of a modern prophetic Hebrew. For instance: the steadily growing popularity of Kabbalah, even if at first it expresses itself in a primitive and even pagan form — as in the popular flocking to the Zohar, even though no one really understands it, not the rabbis and certainly not the academic researchers — because in it has been preserved the relic, the distant echo, of that prophetic Hebrew.

And then Ruth said the sentence that brought her to the point of no return. She said that she had set up an experimental laboratory, in cooperation with researchers in computer programming languages, with the aim of creating an entirely new computer language, based on the principles of prophetic Hebrew — and that there was a possibility this would lead to an immense breakthrough in every interface where humans and computers are involved.

And then she noticed that she had been speaking for long minutes without anyone interrupting her. The interview was continuing in complete silence — but the call hadn't been disconnected either. She simply realized, at some point, that she was talking to herself. But not entirely to herself. She felt that she was not entirely alone, that there was some kind of presence on the other end of the line. She heard a kind of quiet breathing of a man, someone listening to her words to the end. And then, when she had fallen silent for a few seconds, the call was disconnected.

A few days later, the owner of the publishing house that was to bring out her book died suddenly. The one who replaced him decided to shelve the book. Her doctoral advisor left the country, and the one who replaced him began to put heavy pressure on her to change her doctoral subject. That was only the beginning of the chain of harsh events at the end of which she met Natan.

But the one who stood behind it all — the one who was the brain, the one who found and gathered all of us — was Natan. He was about fifty-five, a Russian Jew who had returned to religion, a physicist, whose actual research, until the end, none of us managed to understand. He was quiet, pleasant, polite, with a fine, very sharp sense of humor. He wore modest but always elegant clothes. There was always coming off him the pleasant smell of the cherry tobacco he smoked in a pipe, a delicate scent of soap and mild cologne. Although he was a pleasant and quiet man, he had a coolness, an iron logic, a rare analytical and critical kind of thinking. He would make us tea, sit with the pipe, and listen to each of us, with intelligent eyes that noticed every small detail. From time to time he would stop and ask about some particular thing the speaker had said a minute earlier, asking him to come back and dwell on it; he would listen quietly, smile a small warm smile, and ask him to continue.

And here, for the first time, I disclose his real and full name: he is called Natan Strugatsky.

Most of the time we sat in the kitchen with the tea and the cigarettes, talking, trying to analyze and understand the situation we had been thrown into. The fact that we lived without any internet connection or electronic devices forced us to rely only on pure intellect, on memory, on precision in the smallest details, without distractions. We became very sharp, with quick and clear thinking, with a high and steady capacity for concentration over long stretches of time.

In the first stage, we ruled out the possibility that the one behind it all was the Shin Bet, or the Mossad, or any government agency. This was beyond even their capacity. That was clear.

In the second stage we set out to examine whether it was some kind of non-governmental organization. Without prejudice, we weighed all the popular conspiracy theories. After lengthy discussion we reached the conclusion that the one behind this is not the Illuminati, it is not a shadow government of a New World Order, it is not a project of population reduction or digital enslavement — and this plan was not concocted at a late-night supper of Bill Gates with Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Jeffrey Epstein. With full seriousness we ruled it all out.

After that, the suggestion was raised that we were facing a violent intervention by a foreign civilization from a distant galaxy, ahead of us by a light-year in technological development. But fairly quickly we ruled out this possibility too. Because for a civilization so powerful and advanced, there is no fear of humanity making a leap forward in its development; from their point of view we are only small, naive children. On the contrary — they would want to help us advance quickly so that we might reach, sometime soon, their level, and be able to conduct a dialogue as equals.

After that we turned our gaze backward, and examined the most ancient "immediate suspects" along the course of human history — the demons, the spirits, the angels of destruction, and of course Satan himself. This took a few days, but at the end of it we ruled this possibility out as well.

We returned to point zero, to non-knowing — but it was already a learned, considered non-knowing. Ruth and the boy went out to the corner store to buy candy, the researcher and the journalist played chess, I was busy fixing stuck shutters, Natan sat alone with his pipe, eyes closed.

In the afternoon Natan asked all of us to gather again in the kitchen. For the first time, Natan made himself a small strong espresso. For a minute we sat in silence and watched him take small sips, savoring the taste of the coffee. And then he told us about a conclusion he had reached, after examining and summing up the totality of possibilities.

In a calm but focused tone, he told us that we had no business with a human factor, or with an intelligent agent of any kind — and not with mystical forces either. The one standing in front of us is the universe, creation, the cosmos, nature itself.

The single, primary purpose of the universe is to maintain balance and stability. The universe is built on a delicate, constant balance between two forces — the force of building, of creation and concentration, and the force of destruction and dispersion, entropy. Anything that might endanger this balance and disrupt this stability — must be destroyed with the entire infinite power of the universe.

The universe carries a traumatic memory of an ancient catastrophe, from the beginning of creation, what is called the breaking of the vessels. And it will not hesitate to act in any way to prevent even the smallest threat to cosmic stability.

Every time humanity stands on the verge of an important breakthrough, the universe sees this as a real threat, and it will not flinch from any means — epidemics, earthquakes, wars, all of it legitimate to keep humanity from playing with dice.

People, especially those who are sensitive and less stable, sense unconsciously that there stands before them a predatory, violent, hidden power. And along the course of history they have given it various names: the powers of darkness, Satan, the Elders of Zion, the Freemasons, the Matrix, a shadow organization of European royal houses, the secret Jewish organization B'nai B'rith, the Rothschild family, and more and more.

In the first six stages of creation, the universe was constantly dynamic, in continuous motion, in becoming. Only in the seventh stage, when creation ceased, did the universe freeze and turn into nature. Teva, "nature" — from the verb l'hatbi'a, to imprint a seal, to inscribe a form, matbe'a, "coin."

On the seventh day the Holy One, blessed be He, created nature: an autonomous, automatic creature, with iron laws. In essence, on the seventh day — which is His Sabbath — the Holy One halts the work of creation, and creates nature as a kind of cosmic Shabbat clock, that turns on the sun in the morning and the moon at night. Everything proceeds in cosmic harmony.

The single factor that is least stable, least certain, that might endanger the harmony — is the human being. And within the human being there is a small entity, that is even less stable, less certain, more unusual, and most dangerous of all: a simple being called Yisrael. This is the metaphysical root of antisemitism. The universe cannot tolerate anomaly. If you put one black chick in a box of a hundred yellow chicks — they kill it. So the universe tries to crush the most anomalous element. And this is why, from the beginning of history to these very days, intensively and without mercy, the people of Israel absorbs the most terrible blows. This is why they tried to turn it into soap in the gas chambers — because it is the bearer of a hidden secret.

This secret is simple. It is called the union of measures, the unity of opposites — but the Hebrew unity is not a unity that cannot bear multiplicity. It is a unity that gives birth to multiplicity, and out of which there arises a wholly new, synthetic unity, a new harmony: Tiferet.

Like the union of two principal forces, two qualities opposed to one another in their essence — chesed and din. Chesed, "loving-kindness," is the absence of limits, an influence that spreads to infinity, a force that does not recognize boundary. And din, "judgment," is the boundary; it is gevurah, "might" — and who is the mighty one? The one who conquers his impulse. The impulse of his own self-spreading. The secret of tzimtzum, contraction.

But it is precisely chesed and din, two extremes, that join together in the middle, in the quality of Tiferet, the quality of mercy — whose divine name is a simple existence, a Being: YHVH, without vocalization or filling-in.

Avraham, who is chesed, plus Yitzchak, who is din, equals Yaakov, who is rachamim, "mercy."

The First Temple, which is whole / collective, plus the Second Temple, which is fragment / particular, equals the Third Temple — in which the particular and the collective are contained one within the other.

As in Hegel's dialectic — thesis plus antithesis equals synthesis.

The hands of Esau plus the voice of Jacob — equals Israel.

As in the revolutionary cinema of Sergei Eisenstein — shot A collides with shot B, which is its inverse, and together they create not the sum of their parts, AB, but a third shot with an entirely new meaning. The synthesis: A + B = C.

But above the union of chesed and din there is a higher, more hidden union: between chochmah and binah. Chochmah, "wisdom" — this is already a faint somethingness, a slight presence, of which it is said in the book of Job: "And wisdom — from where shall it be found, and where is the place of understanding?" Chochmah is the beginning of being out of nothingness. Timatze — will be found — the beginning of reality. Chochmah unifies and encompasses everything; it does not recognize the difference between man and woman, between Jew and Gentile, between star and human being. And binah — "understanding" — is analytical. It begins, precisely, to distinguish between one thing and another, bein l'vein. Binah. She is the mother of children, the womb. Chochmah is the countenance of the father, binah is the mother, and between them there is a constant coupling.

But above chochmah and binah there is the point of beginning, of foundation: keter, "the crown" — the singular point, in which there is absolute union, in which there is not even a gram of separation, which is the gateway to the Ein Sof, the Infinite. It navigates between the ayin, "no-thing," and the yesh, "thing" — between tohu and bohu. This is the upper tip of the yod.

And the universe, which is the product of the empty space — does not, very, very, much, want to return to tohu. This is its greatest fear.

So when it identifies that humanity is disturbing the balance — then on a clear day, in a small Chinese city, one cute bat is set free, carrying an old and simple virus, but with an entirely new mutation. Within two weeks the world stops turning, and reacts to every small cough with terror. A global epidemic is born. And it gives birth to deniers and to vaccine refusers; people lose their sanity, families fall apart, economies collapse. And immediately a great war breaks out in Ukraine, and after it war in Israel and across the entire Middle East.

And if that is not enough — then on a fairly ordinary day a new Facebook profile opens, with five friends, on which testimony is posted about a secret sadistic cult of ritual abuse. And like fire across a field of thorns, another epidemic flares up, and tens of thousands of people — even the most educated, the supposedly most rational — start writing in a frenzy about a worldwide network of pedophiles, in which government ministers, military and media figures, bankers, senior judges, and on and on, are involved, and that this network operates through underground tunnels crossing continents.

Up to this point it had been a warm-up. These were things that, more or less, we all knew and understood. And then Natan poured everyone another cup of tea, lit his pipe, lowered his voice, and continued:

Most believing people, in the great majority, live in the shadow of a fundamental contradiction that they try in every way to ignore. On the one hand, the Holy One, blessed be He, leads and runs His world; on the other hand, there is so much evil, so much suffering and cruelty in the world.

And the simple secret is that the Holy One does not play games. He doesn't play pretend. The moment He created His world, He gave it absolute free choice. From that moment on, even the Holy One, blessed be He, is somewhat dependent on the world — that is, He is not obligated, He wanted this, He Himself chose to create this dependence.

This can be illustrated by a simple parable about a small Haredi boy named Moishele. As Shabbat approaches, Moishele's mother is busy all day in the kitchen — but Moishe is bored, he demands attention, he tugs at his mother's skirt, gets in her way. The mother decides to take action. She tells him: Moishele, from now on you are responsible for the cholent that will be served on Shabbat to the whole family and to the guests. This is a very important task. You will sit and peel a potato for the cholent. Moishe is thrilled. And in this moment something astonishing occurs: from now on, the Shabbat cholent really does depend on the boy. The mother depends on Moishe. She could have managed without him — but the moment she delegated authority, she truly does depend on him. She chose this dependence.

"It is a sign forever between Me and the children of Israel — for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day He ceased and was souled."

The vast majority of people read vayinafash in the sense of He went on holiday — as if God needed to rest, oh come on. That's because they don't understand prophetic Hebrew — and this isn't secret, complicated mysticism. It is always the simplest plain meaning of the word. Yinafesh — was made into nefesh, made into a soul.

And even fewer manage to hold the tension and the dynamic complexity that is not bound by rational limits — that He is both creator and soul, the most near and the most far simultaneously, as Isaiah testifies of Him: "Forming light and creating darkness, making peace and creating evil — I, the Lord, do all these things."

But the simpler and higher secret is that He is outside any place and outside any time, outside the universe, above all, above all names. There He has no proper name. He has a name without a name. The Infinite, blessed be He.

And He is our hope, He is our address — and today we are going to a man who can help us with this.

Within twenty minutes we were all in Ruth's old car and we set out.

On the drive we were silent — except for the boy, who was glad we were finally going out together on a trip, like a family.

In Jerusalem it was already autumn. People hurried about, doing their shopping for the holidays.

In the Talpiot industrial zone we stopped at a crosswalk. Suddenly a motorcycle pulled up in front of us and blocked our way. The motorcyclist looked at us for one second, drew a pistol with a silencer, and fired into the front windshield. The windshield shattered. Ruth slammed on the gas, ran him over, and he flew fifteen meters forward. Ruth shifted into reverse and we drove backward at speed, until, after a hundred meters, we collided with another car and stopped. In front of us, a large black vehicle without license plates braked with a screech, and out of it burst a woman and four men, dressed in semi-military uniforms — a kind of private security uniform. The men were bearded and looked very strong, really square-built — each of them the size of a refrigerator. The woman snatched the boy. Ruth started to fight her. One of the men jumped on me and began to strike with full force.

Here I remembered my boxing training. I dodged the blows, waited for the moment when he would expose his chin to a hit. And then, when for a fraction of a second he dropped his hands, I instantly faked left and then, with all the strength I had left in me and with my whole body behind it, I drove my right straight into his chin. He collapsed. I turned and looked for Ruth and the boy. I saw Ruth, bleeding, lifting a large paving stone and smashing it over the woman's head. And then the same one I had just put down with my right jumped me from behind and started to choke me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw another black vehicle pull up next to us, and out of it came another four men in military uniforms, advancing fast in our direction.

And then, suddenly, Natan appeared in front of me. He looked completely different — all of him red, sweating, with a bleeding mouth, and in his eyes a fire of fury. He raised his hand with a pistol and aimed at my head. I shut my eyes. And then the shot was fired. The gorilla who was choking me from behind collapsed. My whole head and shirt were soaked in his blood and pieces of his brain. Natan turned to all of us and shouted in a frightening voice, the like of which I had never heard from him: "Everyone run! Anyone who can run, run now — that's an order!" The last thing I did was to look for Ruth, but I no longer saw her or the boy. With all the strength left in me, I started to run as fast as I could in the direction of the auto shops in Talpiyot.

For two hours I hid in a junkyard. When it began to grow dark I got up and headed in the direction of a car wash. There I rinsed myself off with a hose, found the clothes of a car-wash worker.

We had a rule that if something happened and we could no longer return to the apartment, we had a meeting place for emergencies — a small old café in the village of Jabel Mukaber, in the east of the city. My goal was to get there along dirt roads and to hope that I would find someone else there who had managed to escape.

The adrenaline had already dropped, and I started to feel pain throughout my body, hunger and thirst. The migraine woke up. But what I most wanted was a cup of tea with a cigarette and a hot shower.

After three hours I entered the outskirts of the village, very tired and exhausted, and walked toward the café.

I stood at the entrance to the café. It was almost empty — only at one table sat a few older men smoking a hookah. I immediately found our table. Sitting at it were only Natan and Ruth. I didn't know whether to cry or to rejoice. Natan ordered me shakshuka, grapes, coffee, and a dessert. Without saying a word, everything was clear. The boy, the researcher, and the journalist — they have them. That's the situation. After I ate, I lit a cigarette.

Natan pushed a newspaper toward me. On the front page was a large headline: "Five killed in tragic accident on the Beka'a road." Below the headline, current photographs of all of us were printed. That is — we are already considered dead. We spoke quietly about what each of us had seen of what had happened to the others. Natan slid toward me a hundred-shekel note, a pack of cigarettes, and an anonymous Rav-Kav card.

Natan took out of his bag and placed on the table our secret laptop. This was the most precious thing, the most carefully guarded. On it were saved all our research, all the files, all the work. And a folder, too, with five recordings, an hour each, in which each of us tells his personal story.

"They need this," Natan said, and pointed at the laptop. "The moment we give them this, they will release everyone and leave us alone. We'll be able to go back to ordinary lives — small, sad ones. We need to decide what we choose: to surrender, but also to save our friends, or…" — and then he pointed at the newspaper.

A noisy group of teenagers came into the café. The owner shouted something at them and they left. Ruth laid her head on my shoulder. Natan smiled for the first time. His features softened. I held her gently.

Both Ruth and I said there was no choice — we couldn't deal with this. Yes, we will surrender to a blind, violent power, we will give up our dreams, our pride as human beings — but we will have our friends' lives back, and our own.

I saw Natan shift slightly in discomfort. He was looking for his pipe; he hates ordinary cigarettes.

He asked for the bill, smiled, and said: I heard you. And here is what we will do — I will leave here and drive through the center of the city with the laptop in my hand, in front of everyone. I will return to my apartment, reconnect the internet, the phone, everything. The moment they understand that the laptop is with me, that it's only me — they will release everyone and leave you alone. I will continue working on all your research, I will start to publish it on the network. This is final and not subject to appea

He stood up.

A week passed. A friend of Ruth's had gone abroad and let us stay in her small apartment in Rehavia. The boy is with us. It's strange to return and live a quiet, ordinary life. We are silent a lot; there is no need for speech. Every morning I check the headlines of the newspapers, scan the websites that cover crime, scan the lists of the deceased.

After a week I decided to make my way to Natan's apartment. The building was quiet. The front door of the apartment was open, hanging on a single hinge. In the kitchen the window was open; on the table sat a dove, eating from a piece of bread.

I went into his study. The whole wall, from ceiling to floor, was covered in deep impacts, as though someone had tried to break the wall with a twenty-kilo hammer. The shutters were perforated, evidently by bullets fired from an automatic weapon. The whole wall above his writing desk was covered in black layers of flame or gunpowder soot — apparently a high-power explosive charge had gone off here. On the desk there was, for some reason, a heap of white sand, like beach sand. I lifted my head — on the ceiling were two black footprints of bare human feet.

Yes, the universe — or whatever it is — had done a serious piece of work here. It had really tried to crush Natan. Very angry.

On the floor I found a half-burned note in Natan's handwriting. Later I discovered that it was taken from the book Orot HaKodesh of Rav Kook — who was also one of us, and who died in terrible suffering from cancer, because he revealed too many secrets.

I bring the content of the note in its entirety. In honor of Natan:

"And these are the ones called the strong of strength: those hearts whose entire content of life is the light of the Lord. Even if they have been broken and battered out of an abundance of despair, even if they have fainted from a meagerness of belief in themselves, even if they have grown weary in their war against the great multitude that walks securely toward the spirit which, by its sight, in its own opinion, will carry it — they will not cease to give their sweetness, they will not cease to take heart. And the banner of the secrets of Torah, and the strength of clear and inward knowledge and faith, and an everlasting salvation for Israel and for humankind, for bodies and for souls, for the world and for all worlds, for the great and the small, for the old and for the young — is in their hand.

And if we speak and the muteness assails us; if we utter, and the concepts drown in our silence, because we have no strength to set the speech in motion, to search for the articulation — for that we shall not be alarmed, nor turn back from our settled desire. The heaviness of the mouth shall not have the power to stop the stream of the sublime desire, in which the word of the Lord will be revealed; in which He will speak a word to give strength to the stumbling, to bring tidings of peace to the adversaries of the people. 'Creator of the fruit of the lips: Peace, peace to the far and to the near, says the Lord — and I will heal him.'"

I know that Natan is alive — that he hasn't broken, that he is still fighting. He could be right now in the caves of the Judean Desert with the Hilltop Youth, or with Sudanese in south Tel Aviv, or in a soup kitchen in Mea She'arim.

Ruth, the boy — whose name, by the way, is Uri — and I, the three of us, turn to you with one request.

Save Natan Strugatsky.