Only Yesterday (74 page)
Darkness covered the land and everything on it is gloomy. But when Balak raised his head up, he saw that the world wasn’t as dark as it looked from below. The planet of Jupiter shone and Procyon and Sirius, two knightly dogs in the firmament, hastened to Jupiter. Balak lifted his eyes to the sky and asked the stars and the planets, If I and man are equal in death, why does he exalt himself over me and why is he eager for my death? What does he care if I exist, do I eat his world, do I hurt what is his? If the end of both of us is to die, let him wait for me until my years are out and I shall die by the hand of Heaven and let him not sin with my blood.
Jupiter is called Justice, since he governs justice and law, and the eye of his justice illuminated the whole world. But everyone who observed him carefully saw that his eye was damp. That he looked over the earth and saw that there was no just judge and no one was judged by law, and so a tear flowed from his eye and the gleam of his justice shed a tear. Balak despaired of the planet of Jupiter and put his trust in Procyon and Sirius. At that moment, the two knightly dogs in the firmament were preoccupied with their desire to don light, to appear beautiful before the stars of Virgo, the Virgin, and Balak knew that when the stars are conjoined, one who asks them something is answered immediately, therefore he put his faith in them.
Suddenly a star fell from the sky. Balak was startled and all his bones began trembling. He called with all his might, Not me and not my family, until the Angel of Death comes and say your star fell and your constellation died. At last, he dropped his head and took his
mind off the stars on high for we don’t get anything from them, for they frighten us and don’t do us any good.
A north wind blew and midnight came. The Children of Is-rael awoke, as they awake for a midnight vigil to mourn the Destruction of the Temple. The trees heard and rustled and quivered. Few and meager are the trees of Jerusalem and their force isn’t visible dur-ing the day because of the dust that covers them. But when midnight comes and the Children of Israel lament the Destruction of the Tem-ple, they remember the ancient days, when the city stood in her glory and the Children of Israel dwelt in tranquility and all the mountains were crowned with olive trees and all kinds of beautiful trees, and all kinds of songbirds nested in them and sang songs to the Lord, the kind of song they heard from the Levites in the Temple, immediately all those trees remaining from the Destruction rustle and quiver and moan, and their voice is heard from one end of Jerusalem to the other.
Hell Opens Beneath Him
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That moan filled Balak with pity for the Children of Israel and he wanted to remove his anger from them. But his anger was greater than he was, because of the troubles that had come upon him. His guts started rumbling and his pity turned back on himself. His eyes rolled up, as if to say, Did you see my suffering?
A few of the stars began to decline, and the other stars followed and declined, except for the morning star that ruled at that mo-ment and shone and twinkled. Little by little, the firmament emptied out and a kind of dark whiteness or whitish darkness rose from the earth. And from the mountains beyond the Jordan a kind of light flickered, like the flicker of sunlight, for the sun had already begun digging herself a place in the firmament, but her effulgence hadn’t yet risen.
Balak saw that the sun was about to come out, and when the sun comes out, human beings are wont to get out of their bed, and when they get out of their bed, they are wont to go outside, and when they go outside, they will see him, and when they see him, woe unto him. He looked here and there for a place to hide from them. He saw a dungheap and crept into it. And we will cover it up and will not re-veal the location of that heap where he hid.
Balak lay down wherever he lay down. Sleep descended upon him and he dozed off. But he didn’t admit that he had dozed off, as suffering people are wont to do, for since they don’t enjoy sleep, it seems to them that they haven’t been sleeping at all. And how do we know he dozed off? If he hadn’t dozed off, would he have dreamed? He dreamed of this, that, and the other thing. Four dreams
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Balak dreamed during that sleep. Three dreams he forgot and one he remembered. And this was that dream: Balak was strolling in Meah Shearim and two wild animals came toward him, a jackal and a fox, one from Lifta and the other from Eyn Kerem. And the head of the jackal is erect like the head of the legendary bird Bar Yokhani, and spectacles of flesh cover his eyes from below halfway up, and the spectacles gleam like a peacock’s tail. Smaller than the jackal is the fox, and he had no spectacles of flesh, but his eyes are big and bulging, and they look purple and black like the turban of Hakham Bashi. And the mouths of the animals, oh, their mouths, herald evil. They walked and walked until they came to that neighborhood called Abu Tor, Father of the Bull. At that time, turkeys were strut-ting around the street of the neighborhood. Balak recognized from the mouths of the animals that they wanted to devour the turkeys. He wanted to warn the neighborhood. But his throat was parched and he couldn’t shout. The animals came to the fowls. The fowls raised their necks and lifted up their heads, until their heads came up to the heads of the animals. The animals stood still and didn’t do a thing to the fowls.
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When he awoke, he didn’t linger long, but set off for the place where all his thoughts were, to Meah Shearim. He turned southeast and descended to the Valley of Hinnom, to get used to human creatures. When an hour had passed and they didn’t say a thing to him, he raised his eyes a bit and started looking here and there. He saw this, that, and the other thing. Aside from carcasses of dogs and carcasses of cats and carcasses of mice and cadavers of reptiles and maggots and bones and other kinds of garbage, it’s doubtful if he saw anything. Balak slipped from dungheap to dungheap and sank until nothing was seen of him but his tail. Like a mouse swallowed by a cat and his tail is hanging outside. Said Balak, I won’t budge from here until the dung covers me and I am released from all trouble. But suffering was still in store for him. A blind man who had lost his cane chanced by there. The blind man was groping with his hand for what he had lost. He came upon Balak’s tail. The blind man
grabbed the tail and pulled it. Balak was pulled after his tail and came out of the garbage. When he came out he ran away. The blind man spread out his hands and was stunned at the cane that fled from his hand. Balak turned his head around and looked behind him to see if they weren’t pursuing him. All his bones were scared and his whole body trembled.
We have no specific information about what terrified Balak. Whether it was because he was about to lose his tail or because he feared for his whole body. Since the place he had happened upon was the Valley of Hinnom, where sons and daughters were put through fire as a sacrifice to Moloch, Balak feared he would be sacrificed. And he already saw Moloch, as if his hands were reaching out to receive him, and the priests were banging drums to Moloch and bellowing and telling him, May you enjoy it and may you find pleasure in it. And he didn’t know that they sacrificed human beings and not dogs, and he didn’t know that that pagan ritual was no longer practiced.
Balak ran away and fled for his life. He urinated and started running to the left of his tail, that is toward Yemin Moshe, and didn’t enter Yemin Moshe but threaded between one rock and another and between one valley and another below Yemin Moshe, until he came to Jaffa Road. At that moment, the whole street was empty of the Children of Israel, not a peddler nor a dweller, not a buyer nor a seller, no stringer of beads, no dealer in seeds, no pastry chef who bakes, no customer to eat his cakes, neither a castigator nor a prestidigitator, no charity collector, no lottery winners, no slanderers or other sinners, no one preaching, none beseeching, no emissaries and no mission-aries. No Ashkenazim and no Afghanistanis and no Babylonians and no Bukharim and no Georgians and no Dagestanis and no Cau-casians and no Aleppans and no Sephardim and no Persians and no Crimeans and no Yemenites. Not to mention those who didn’t amount to a national community, like Urmeans and Urpalis and Ira-nians and Arbals and Assyrians and Garmoklites and Damascans and Zakouans and Mashedans and Suidicilans and Adenites and Kurds and Arameans. To make a long story short, not a single one of the Children of Israel was to be seen in the street, for everyone with ears
went to hear the word of the preachers. There were only Ishmaelites and Edomites there, sitting on a stool or sitting on a chair, some smoking a narghila and on the qui vive, some thinking about Adam, and some about Eve, some playing darts and some playing dice, all of them wearing striped clothes that are nice, with chains in their hands counting the beads, and listening with one ear to tales of great deeds, waving their hand to shoo the flies away, who pester human beings all the livelong day. If you shoo them away from here they come there, if you shoo them away from there they come here. The flies ask, Since we don’t come to you secretly like lice, that’s what you do to us? If you don’t like us dwelling with you on your forehead, we’ll dwell on the bridge of your nose. And if you don’t like us dwelling on the bridge of your nose, we’ll dwell in your eyes. All Gentiles pick up a swatter to expel them. The flies immediately take wing and fly into their mouth. Meanwhile, they don’t see Balak. And if they had seen him, they wouldn’t have done anything to him. For
Havatselet
and
Ha-Or
and
Ha-Herut
they don’t read, and their newspapers hadn’t yet printed things from our newspapers.I
The sun was at its zenith and neither weariness nor fatigue was to be seen in it. On the contrary, it was clearly coming up and overcom-ing. Opposite it stood the ground scraped and arid. And between Heaven and earth the air was blazing and ablaze, covered with a garb of dust, and when it shook its garment, the eyes of human creatures were blocked and so were the eyes of Balak. Balak stuck out his dry tongue and shouted Arf arf arf, bring us a downpour, bring us a drop of water, I am going mad from thirst. He bared his teeth and looked at the firmament. Presumably he recalled the deed of his forefather, the Great Dog who, during a drought, poked a hole in the firmament and brought down rain.
The firmament stood as was its wont in those days, white hot with the blue steel of the blacksmith’s shop and laughed at Balak. Balak put his tail between his legs and drooled and thought to himself, Maybe those who blow the Shofar are right, that the sounds com-ing from the Shofar burst all four firmaments and they are shocked
and bring down rain. But there are seven firmaments, so why does he say four firmaments? Because, like all the other beasts and animals, Balak could only count up to four. Less than them, are birds who count to two. Less then them are those racehorses who have eight legs, four to run on and four to rest on, who don’t count at all, for they are busy with weariness and rest, and haven’t got enough time to consider intellectual matters. And when Balak recalled those who blow the Shofar, he recalled Meah Shearim. And when he recalled Meah Shearim, he picked up his feet and ran there.
It’s not known what route he ran, whether the route of Hotel Kamenetz, where the old post office was, and from there to Musrara Street; or whether he went through Jaffa Road and jumped up to the street of the Diskin Orphanage. Or perhaps he didn’t take the former route or the latter route, but opened himself another route. But pre-sumably he walked on the sides of the roads and barked, and his voice wasn’t heard. And it seems that our assumption was close to the truth, for if he had walked in the middle and his voice had been heard, they would have seen him and stopped him, for all those places are inhabited, Thank God, by our brothers the sons of Israel, and they are wont to read the newspapers, either secretly or openly, and if they had seen him, he wouldn’t have reached Meah Shearim alive.
Balak Reaches His Place
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Balak enters Meah Shearim walking on the sides of the roads and his mouth gapes open and his saliva drools and his ears droop and his tail is between his legs and his eyes are bloodshot and he barks and his voice isn’t heard. He stood still and cleansed his body of the forbidden food in it. He folded two of his legs beneath him and sat on them in the style of an Ishmaelite and put out his tongue and breathed like a blacksmith’s bellows and looked all around and didn’t see a living soul, for Meah Shearim was gathered inside to hear Rabbi Grunam May-Salvation-Arise. When Balak saw that he was alone, he prostrated himself in prayer and asked mercy for himself that his tongue wouldn’t stumble and his voice would please human beings.
At that moment, Rabbi Grunam was standing on the stairs of the tabernacle of the Yeshiva and a few score people surrounded him on all sides, aside from women who stood in the doorways of the shops and were eager to hear. And his words flew like arrows and his face burned like a torch and his voice went from one end of Meah Shearim to the other, and whenever a sigh or a groan or a whine or a wail came out of his mouth, it also came from the hearts of his lis-teners, and he tossed his body back and forth and shut his eyes and opened them and tossed out his hands and brought them back and beat his heart. We shall copy a bit of his sermon here, and everyone who can cry will sigh and cry.
Our holy sages, of blessed memory, said in the Talmud Tractate Ta’anit, Rain is withheld only when the enemies of Israel have merited destruction. Gentlemen, what is the meaning here of
the enemies of Israel
? For we know that the world stands only for the sake
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of the Children of Israel, especially the rains that were promised to the Children of Israel that they would come down for their sake. And that is known by all the nations, as we find in the book
A Bundle of Myrrh
on the Torah portion that begins, If ye walk in my statutes, on the verse then I will give you rain in due season, and he didn’t say the rains, to indicate that the rains are ours. And that was the glory of our might when the nations accepted us, because we could bring water in due season.