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The Book of Israela
Rena Blumenthal
THE BOOK OF ISRAELA
Copyright © 2018 Rena Blumenthal. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Resource Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-5848-8
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-5849-5
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-5850-1
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 10/25/18
Author’s Note
There is only one character in this book who is modeled on a real person: Kobi’s paternal grandfather, Reb Yakov, who is based on my maternal grandfather, Naftali Tzvi Kartagener.
זכר צדיק לברכה
1
It looked, at first, like another case of Jerusalem syndrome. We’d been overrun with them since the turn of the millennium, and the epidemic had only intensified in the eighteen months since the start of the second intifada. He was a skinny fellow in white rags, with a shaved head, a scraggly beard, and a fiery insanity in his eyes. That’s pretty much how they all looked. Tourists from every corner of the globe would show up in the Holy City, throw on a bedsheet, and start preaching the coming apocalypse, suddenly convinced that they were the Son of God or an ancient Israelite prophet—a brief, transitory psychosis that would resolve itself by the time they were safely home. But no, on second glance this was a case of more mundane psychosis—the oratory was in fluent, even poetic, Hebrew. A local boy. Hard to believe that someone who grew up in this obviously God-forsaken country could believe, even in a state of psychotic delusion, that the spirit of God still walked its streets.
The tension in the waiting room was palpable. Sami, our burliest security guard, was seated next to the scrawny prophet, effortlessly holding his bony arms behind his back. The young man wriggled his body as if trying to break free, but making no real effort. A pretty young woman with thick brown hair, vaguely familiar from staff meetings, was seated to his other side, whispering earnestly into his ear, though he seemed oblivious to her presence. By the exit door, two older men were engaged in a loud, emphatic disputation as to what right the hospital did or didn’t have to hold people against their will. A middle-aged woman was shrieking, “Let him go! You’re hurting him!” The receptionist had come out from behind her desk to shush the woman and try to calm the roomful of increasingly agitated patients.
My instinct was to march quickly through the waiting room and out the door to the stairwell, as if on urgent business, which, in a way, I was. I wanted to be home before Nava, peace-offering in hand, and had meant to slip out of the office early to stop at the jewelry shop where she had recently admired an expensive silver necklace. But something about the girl’s desperate efforts made me pause. There had been a lot of grumbling about me in the office lately; it wouldn’t hurt to play the gallant knight to her damsel in distress.
I walked up to the receptionist, who pretended, as always, not to notice me. It was the fireplug with the muscular arms. What the hell was her name?
“Uh . . .”
“Yael.”
“Right, Yael. Whose patient is he?”
“He was brought in by the police. They found him wending his way through traffic on a busy street in Katamon, in those rags, in this horrible wind. He was calm when they brought him in, so they just left him here. The clinician on call was our new intern, Dina. She took him in for an emergency intake, but the questions must have gotten him agitated. He barged out of her office and started scaring all the patients with his fire-and-brimstone preaching. Thank God Sami was around—he’s the only one who can keep these types in check.”
“Has he seen a psychiatrist?”
“Dr. Barak’s on call, but the patient refuses to see him. I’ve notified the emergency room, and they’re sending up the heavies. There’ll probably be a forced hospitalization.” She shook her head. “I’m not sure the intern’s going to hold up.”
It was, indeed, a perfect chance to prove how useful I could be. A new boss had just come in a couple of months before—a puckered, no-nonsense Anglo who regarded me with a hefty dose of suspicion. It wouldn’t hurt to have her hear a few good things about me.
I walked up to the girl. From up close, you could smell the unwashed odor of her disheveled patient. She was much too young to be in this position, looked barely old enough to be out of the army.
“Do you need some help?” I asked.
She looked up at me mutely, on the verge of tears.
“Dina, right? Why don’t you come into my office? I don’t think that talking to him right now will do much good.” I turned to the receptionist, whose name had already slipped my mind. “Uh . . . can you call us when Security arrives?”
The girl sat on my office couch and cried as I fed her tissues, scrunching up her nose with every sniffle. What compelled a young innocent like her to go into this crazy field? She probably wanted to save the suffering souls of the world. Well, it wouldn’t hurt to have some reality drummed in early in her career.
“What happened to upset you so much?”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Benami. I’m so embarrassed by my unprofessional behavior.” She was visibly struggling to compose herself. “It’s just that at first he seemed OK. He was upset, understandably, about the political situation of the country—the suicide bombings, the increasing poverty in his neighborhood. It all seemed perfectly reasonable, but as he talked, he became crazier and crazier. He told me that God speaks to him all the time, that God’s angry at us, punishing us. Then he started describing these wild visions, and before I knew it he was rambling incoherently.” She stifled a sob. “He was still calm; I thought I could handle it. But then, when I told him he needed to meet with a psychiatrist, he completely lost it, became mean and abusive, called me ‘bitch,’ described all these terrible things that would happen to me. I got really scared, told him he had no right to speak to me that way. That’s when he called me a ‘no-good whore’ and stormed out of the office and into the waiting room.” She burst into another round of tears. “It’s my first emergency intake. I didn’t handle it very well, did I?”
“It was a difficult case. You handled it fine,” I said reassuringly.
“I feel so stupid, so naive,” she sobbed, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
I assumed a comforting, fatherly tone. “Psychotic patients can be frightening. One of the most important things you have to learn in this field is that you’re going to encounter people who are totally irrational, people you can’t possibly get through to. You have to grow tougher skin—it’s never personal.”
“But there was something about him, when we first started talking.” She scrunched her nose, fighting back the tears. “I liked him, a lot. He’s genuinely distressed about the state of the country. He was so passionate and eloquent. Even his visions, they were really weird, but kind of stunning too. He described them so vividly, it was mesmerizing.” Her eyes again pooled with tears. “But then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he became angry and abusive.”
“That’s not uncommon with psychotic patients,” I said soothingly. “You say he’s having visual hallucinations?”
“Yes, very elaborate and detailed. He sees visions of God, surrounded by ministering