#i reckon that's why the silent king made his universal language. so people could pronounce his name how HE specifically wanted it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

pentomic · 6 years

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The man was insane, probably, but he was compelling.

Day after day, he would stand in the town square, ranting, raving, screaming, cursing, exhorting. The people have gone astray, he would cry, casting his blazing eyes to the heavens, begging some unseen god to have mercy on his nation. The people would sometimes come to watch, and some would stay for hours, lost in the man’s rumbling tones and emphatic hand gestures.

His voice was deep, his eyes wild, and when he thrust a finger into the sky, the clouds seemed to dance and recoil out of its way. So it was no wonder a small crowd of spellbound individuals always seemed to surround the box where he stood, in the very centre of the town square.

But the ranting and cajoling wasn’t why the people of the town had come to view him with affection. It was what he did on the seventh day of the week, when he would set aside the box and sit on the ground, and with eyes closed and voice soft, he would spin the most fantastic, incredible stories, and to listen to him drew people not just from the city but from the farms outside and around it. They would sit for almost the whole day, lost in the fascinating worlds he created.

He told stories of his god, a god who could not be seen, yet filled the universe, and how this god had breathed life into mud and made the mud a man, and of a tower built to the sky, of prophets chosen to bear god’s message, of kings and sons of kings, of teachers who could split whole seas with a staff, famine, plague, redemption, struggle, battles, of priests and prophets and kings and teachers and faith.

The most chilling parts were when he would open his deep, dark eyes and stare into the souls of every person in the crowd, and he would growl these are not stories, they are history.

“Your history” he would say, and the crowd would gasp. “You-- all of you-- are HASHEM’s people, and I have been sent by the great King Artaxerxes to gather you from the dust and raise you back to HASHEM’s light.”

The people of the town-- Yerusalayem was its name-- always went away from the man’s stories with strange doubts. It was true, there was something in his tone that pulled on another something in their hearts. Yet this god the man spoke of: how could one venerate something invisible? It was easier, far easier, to direct their worship to the little icons on the god-shelves in their houses. Much easier to pray to a tiny wide-hipped Ashtara or her consort Ba’al. They provided good harvests, fat calves, profit-- and what else could a householder want?

Yassib bent towards the god-shelf and tried to direct his thoughts toward Ashtara, dancing her endless dance among the wheatfields, of the half-naked Ba’al walking towards her, grinning. Yet there seemed a mental block now, a block that had simply not been there before.

He shook his head and refocused. The image of Ashtara grew hazy in his mind, and he snapped his eyes open, staring at the god-shelf peopled with its tiny images. His voice seemed to come without willing.

“Are you real?”

Ashtara’s dancing hips did not move, as they so often had in his mind. The clay was fixed in place. His heart was racing.

“Gods of mine-- are you real?”

He looked now towards Ba’al, the master, the great shepherd, smiling his fixed, beatific, frozen smile. He slowly reached out a hand to touch the god’s flesh, but it was not flesh. It was clay-- cool, rough, and dead. His hand closed around the idol and he brought it close to his face. Yassib realized he was shaking.

“Ba’al, if you are real, if you truly reign over this earth, send me a sign!”

Yassib closed his eyes. A drop of sweat trickled down his temple. Nothing moved. No wind blew, no thunder sounded. Not even a tiny breeze ruffled his beard.

He dropped the image. It hit the ground and shattered into a million pieces. Yassib started at the sound, tears suddenly leaking from his eyes. Outside, the sky was growing dark.

He ran. Pushing past his wife and children, out of the god room, out of the house, towards the walls of the town, sobs pushing their way from his throat like shoots from parched earth. There were guards on the walls, but he did not care.

Up the stairs he ran, while the soldiers stared after him in confusion. Now the wind was up, and the dark clouds roiled out of the sky, blowing his clothes around him, his hair, his beard. In a daze he reached the eastern wall of the city, where the wadis and valleys and farms seemed to stretch for eternity.

Yassib was crying for real now, and it was effort to speak.

“WHO MADE THIS?” he screamed, but his words were lost to the wind.

“WHO MADE THE WORLD? WHO MADE THE WORLD?” He tasted blood in the back of his throat.

Suddenly he remembered the man, the storyteller, and his name-- Ezra-- and his god, and he yelled to this god, this god who spanned existence, who was so vast and so holy he could only be referred to by a pseudonym, a single word that meant the whole world, that fell with the force of a hammer the size of a planet, he yelled it to the wind and the rain that lashed his face, to the thunder and to the lightning. He yelled and yelled until he could yell no more, and then a great warmth surrounded him, and he heard a great blast of song, and he fell senseless.

When he woke up, he was wrapped in a scratchy blanket, and a man was holding a cup of something warm to his lips. He started when he recognized the dark eyes, the heavy beard, the blocky hands.

“Ezra.”

Ezra nodded, and turned his head silently towards the centre of the small room, which Yassib now noticed was crammed with people.The people were huddling around torches and small lamps, uncoiling long scrolls of parchment. They were reading, sounding out words in a language that Yassib had never heard, but a language that set his heart on fire.

“How did I get here?”

Ezra’s voice was a growl. “You came to us. We found you outside our door in the middle of the storm. Your face was sunburned.”

Yassib raised a hand to his face. Every touch stung.

Ezra nodded. “You were speaking Hebrew.”

“Hebrew?” Yassib frowned. “Where do they speak that?”

“Heaven.”

Yassib almost laughed at that, but the sound stuck in his throat. “Is that-- is that what these people are learning?”

Ezra nodded again, casting a roving gaze over the group of learners. “Not these people, Yassib. Your people.” He touched his chest. “Our people.”

“Me?”

“HASHEM calls his people to him. The day of reckoning is near. The day when the souls of his nation will rise anew and stand like an eternal flame among the nations-- or be lost as river water is when it flows into the sea.”

“HASHEM.” Yassib pronounced the name gingerly.

“Our god. The only god.”

“I remember” said Yassib. “The invisible god.”

“The indivisible god.”

Yassib sat up. “And I belong to him?”

“The whole world belongs to him. You-- you and I and these people, and more, millions you have never met-- he has chosen especially. This is your home, your destiny.”

“But I don’t know anything! I can’t even read!”

“Neither could these people. They learned. They are learning. They will learn for the rest of their lives, for true learning never ends.”

Yassib ran a hand through his hair. This was all too much. “If-- if I wanted to learn-- would you teach me?”

“I would. I will teach you all. I will teach your wife, your children, their children. I will teach the nation. It is my mission.”

“Your mission?”

Ezra chuckled. “From King Artaxerxes. I come from Persia, where the Israelite community is thriving in exile. But my real mission comes from one place only” and Yassib knew exactly what place Ezra was referring to. He grasped the older man’s hand.

“Teach me. Teach me everything these people know, and more. I am in HASHEM’s hands now. If this is my destiny, I embrace it with both arms.”

“It won’t be easy. This is not a festival, like you gave to Ashtara or Ba’al. This is your life, your whole life.”

“If I am not ready now, I may never be.”

Ezra reached for a scroll that lay on a table. “Then we will start at the beginning. The very beginning.”

Yassib-- now Ya’akov-- walked home feeling, somehow, as if something fundamental inside him had shifted. There was so much to do, so much to learn, so much in his life that needed to change. His family awaited him at home, and he wondered how and what he would tell them. How would they feel about changing their lives like this? Would they come to believe in the true god, in HASHEM? Would they change their names, like he had?

He hummed the single line of Torah to himself. It truly was as Ezra had said: black fire on white fire.

He trusted in HASHEM. He didn’t know how, or why. He didn’t know how he knew what he knew now about the world, but he knew one thing. It was a small thing, but he knew it, and he would carry it forever. His wife would carry it, and his children would carry it, and his children’s children would carry it, until the day when he descendants would stand on this exact spot in the holy city of Jerusalem, and carry the verse home, to the Mashiach.

It would be the first thing he would teach to his family tonight, and he ran through it in his head to make sure the order was correct.

Bereshit bara HASHEM et ha-shamayim ve-et ha-aretz.

He was a link now, a link in a chain that would last forever. It was a nice thought.

#judaism #ezra #my writing #a very earnest effort brought on by watching the prince of egypt #jewish writing #the jewish experience tag #neviim

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