Read Online What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander - Free Book Online Page B

was no case at all. And when Rabbi Kiggel (the man with the ice cream) offered to bring the panel of judges to her, Rena said only, “My door has been open to all comers since before there was anyone to come.”
    And so the rabbis drove up to where the road ends, the plastic furniture tied to the roof of their Subaru, and they took their places under the tree that would offer the most shade. Since none of the rabbis knew to look, they did not notice the scar at the tree’s base, grown over in keloid fashion, and healed up in the interim twenty-seven years.
    Across from the rabbis stood Aheret and her mother, Yehudit. And in a chair carried from the house, Aheret’s other mother, Rena, sat facing the rabbis, waiting for her turn to speak. Yehudit spoke passionately and with great urgency, and Rena did not listen. She just stared at the two rabbis flanking Kiggel’s side. If Kiggel was ten years older than Rena, then the one to his right was another ten years older than that. As for the child rabbi to his left, Rena didn’t believe he’d yet been barmitzvahed. Before he’d been allowed to sit in judgment of her, she’d have preferred if they’d pulled down his pants to make sure that, at the very least, he had his three hairs.
    When Yehudit was done, she again presented the single bill with which Rena had purchased her daughter. This, the rabbis placed on their table, under the weight of a stone.
    “A boy” is what Rena said, pointing at the young rabbi. “A child who has never known a world with a divided Jerusalem. Who was raised in a greater Israel, where he can pray at the foot of our Holy Temple in a united city, where he can cross the Jordan without fear and stare down at his country from atop the Golan Heights. And here he sits in judgment on my land, in the heart of Samaria, because of the sacrifices made before he was born.”
    Kiggel went to speak, but it was the young rabbi who put a hand to his arm to answer on his own.
    “This I acknowledge,” the boy rabbi said. “But in this life, I’ve already achieved—and this court would appreciate the respect it is due.”
    “And what respect is that?” Rena said.
    “The respect that comes with law. You have sacrificed,” he said. “You have fought. And I continue the fight my own way. Look at us. We live in a Jewish country, with a Jewish government, and yet its false, secular courts send Jewish soldiers to knock down the houses we build. They arrest our brothers as vigilantes, who only protect what God has given. And those same judges, in those same courts, give Arabs the rights of Jews—as if a passport is all it takes to make a person a citizen of this land. You fought your battles, and now we fight ours. I am thankful there are avenues in this country where one may be judged by Jewish law, as the Holy One—blessed is He—intended.”
    “You will judge me as God intended?”
    “We will judge based on the law that is within the grasp of humble man.”
    “That is all I wanted to hear.” And Rena stood up from her chair. She approached the three rabbis. She looked to Yehudit and to Aheret, her daughter.
    “It is not far from here,” Rena said, “where Esav returned from the hunt, tired and hungry, and traded away his birthright for a bowl of red lentils. It is among these very hills where Abraham, our father, took a heifer, three years old, and a goat, three years old, and a ram, three years old, and a turtledove, three years old, and a young pigeon and split them all, but for those birds, and left them for the vultures in a covenant with God, which gives us the right to this land as a whole. And for four hundred shekels of silver, Abraham bought the cave in which he lies buried—and over which, with our Arab neighbors, we spill blood until this very day. So tell me, these contracts, with God and man, written down nowhere, only remembered, do they still hold?”
    And the rabbis looked at one another, and the ancient rabbi on the right, the