Newton’s Fire

II

And ye shall give the red heifer unto Eleazar the priest, and she shall be brought forth without the camp, and she shall be slain before his face. And Eleazar the priest shall take of her blood with his finger, and sprinkle of her blood toward the front of the tent of meeting seven times. And the heifer shall be burnt in his sight. Her skin, her flesh, her blood and her dung, shall be burnt.

Avram stripped naked to purify himself in the chamber of immersion then dried himself with towels of white linen from the table of vestments.

The Talmud says: When they are clothed in priestly garments, they are priests; but when they are not clothed in priestly garments, they are not priests.

The white garments first, the woven six-ply linen tunic and trousers. The belt next, then the turban.

When he’d first started on this quest many years before, Avram had hoped to bring about the new Temple within the confines of strict Judaic law. He and his fellows had therefore obsessed over what chemicals to use for bleaching the linen and the precise array of the twelve stones on the ephod. He’d become intoxicated with textual analysis, the sense that he was studying the mind of God.

One afternoon, at a friend’s house, they’d all got into a furious debate about the person who’d carry out the actual sacrifice. The texts seemed clear enough: it had to be a male of the priestly line, a Kohen like Avram himself. He had to be past Bar Mitzvah age, and he could never have been in contact with death. That was to say, not once in his at least thirteen years could he have trodden on an ancient grave or been inside a building in which anyone had ever died. But the modern world made such conditions impossible. The solution, therefore, had been to raise such a child outside the modern world. The discussion that afternoon had been about how. How to identify which male infants should be taken at birth from their parents; how high off the ground they’d need to build the compound in which the child would be reared to maturity; how then to get him from his compound to the place of sacrifice without contamination. The discussion had become increasingly heated. Voices had been raised, insults hurled. Avram had stopped participating after a while, had instead watched with a growing sense of the absurdity of it all — these fantasies of raised compounds and babies snatched from mothers’ breasts, and it had culminated in a moment of insight so blinding that it had been almost painful: these men were lapdogs yapping from behind a fence. Open the gate for them and they wouldn’t know what to do.

He’d left without another word and he’d never been back.

The ephod next, then the breastplate. The turban and the crown. By rights they should be doing this on the Mount of Olives, looking down on Mount Moriah and the Temple itself. But the Temple wasn’t yet there, and to look down on those Muslim obscenities was unthinkable. He went therefore to the wall covered by the great white sheet. He paused a moment, to add a little drama, then gave the rope a tug. The sheet flapped as it fell, revealing a plastered wall behind, painted into a dream landscape with bright acrylics: Mount Moriah cleansed of the Dome and the al-Aqsa mosque, the Third Temple standing gloriously in their place.

The cries from Shlomo and his men were cries of exaltation. And Avram raised his arms high and wide in triumph, for all the world Moses winning battles on the mountaintop.