Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel (In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel)
- Book Review,
by Hillel Halkin
From Publishers Weekly
Noted author and translator Halkin (Letters to an American Jewish Friend) offers a captivating tale that is part travelogue, part ethnography, part cultural treasure hunt. His trail of tantalizing clues too often leads nowhere, but readers should hang in, because the search is not in vain, and the culture Halkin describes is in itself striking. He visits the Mizo people of northeast India a people who improbably but passionately claim to be descendants of the ancient Israelite tribe of Manasseh, one of the 10 tribes of northern Israel who were exiled by the Assyrians around 720 B.C. and then lost to history. Mizo tradition says they are the "children of Manmasi" possibly a corruption of Manasseh. Their rituals include a fragment of a "red sea song" and the symbolic circumcision of a baby boy eight days after birth; their god is named Za or Ya, possibly linguistically related to the biblical Yahweh. The attempt to trace Mizo traditions is frustrated by the disintegration of what they call "the old religion" as Christianity has insinuated itself into even remote regions of Asia. The intense desire of the Mizos to be considered Jews is both comical and touching (and colored by an equally intense desire to emigrate to Israel); their internecine conflicts over theology will be sadly familiar to Jews everywhere. Halkin offers a rich portrait of an entire people suffering an identity crisis in the midst of a region filled with ethnic turmoil, and his conclusions about the origins of the Manmasi people will amaze even skeptical readers.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Like the search for Atlantis and for Noah's Ark, the search for the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel has entranced both professional scholars and amateur sleuths. Native American and Bantu tribes, North African Berbers and Tauregs of the Sahara, have all been linked to the tribes with varying degrees of credibility. Halkin is a native of New York City who has lived in Israel since 1970. His search for a lost tribe led him to scour remote regions of China and the borderlands of northeast India. He writes with a beautifully descriptive, flowing prose that enhances our appreciation of the exotic locales and peoples he encountered. He also marshals some fascinating anecdotal and semihistorical evidence to support his conclusions. Ultimately, however, his claim to have "proved" that the Kuki-Chin-Mizo people of northeast India and Burma are linked to the ancient Israelites does not ring true. Still, his efforts to prove his case have resulted in an absorbing tale of a quest that succeeds as a travel book rather than as a work of historical scholarship. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
The San Francisco Chronicle
"A good-humored travelogue."
Review
"A good-humored travelogue."
Commentary
"Spirited, engaging, and charmingly written . . . fascinating, full of vividly rendered encounters . . . rendered with insight, wit, and considerable humor."
Publishers Weekly, Starred
"A captivating tale that is part travelogue, part ethnography, part cultural treasure hunt. His conclusions . . . will amaze even skeptical readers."
Booklist, ALA
"Halkin writes with a beautifully descriptive, flowing prose that enhances our appreciation of the exotic locales and peoples he encountered."
Review
"A good-humored travelogue."
Book Description
The fate of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel has fascinated Jews and Christians throughout the ages. Hillel Halkin, a distinguished writer and translator, has long been intrigued by the old legend that the tribes still exist in distant corners of the earth -- a legend that, like nearly all contemporary investigators of the subject, he considered to lack all factual basis. In 1998, he accompanied a Jerusalem rabbi and dedicated Lost Tribes hunter to China, Thailand, and northeast India in search of traces of the biblical Israelites who disappeared in the eighth century B.C.E. The journey ended among a little-known ethnic group living along the India-Burma border who had themselves been swept in recent years by Lost Tribe fever. Halkin returned twice more to the Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur for a deeper look. Gradually, despite his initial skepticism, he became convinced that this remote group is -- incredible as it may seem -- historically linked to the ancient biblical tribe of Manasseh.Across the Sabbath River is the compulsively readable account of Halkin's experiences in arriving at this conviction. A superb writer, he effortlessly interweaves the biblical and historical backgrounds of this centuries-old quest with a captivating account, both funny and poignant, of his own adventures. In vivid, engaging portraits, he introduces us to a wide and memorable range of characters at once alien and familiar, while transporting us to an exotic society obsessed with the enigma of its own identity. Piece by piece, as in a tantalizing detective story, he amasses the evidence that finally persuades him, and will persuade many of his readers, that, for the first time in history, a living remnant of a lost biblical tribe has been found.
About the Author
Hillel Halkin was born in New York City and has lived in Israel since 1970.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1Siyata Di-ShmayaHillerh, I have bad news," said Chen-Hua, waking me from my nap in our fourth-floor room in the Wenchuan County Teachers Center Guest House. The news must have been bad, because he usually pronounced all the l"s in my name without difficulty. "The police are here," Chen-Hua said. "They say we must move immediately. They say this is not a hotel for tourists. They say we broke the law by going to the Chiang village today. It is in a restricted area." "Restricted for whom?" "For foreigners. We are close to Tibet." "Tibet is hundreds of miles from here. Who told them we went to thevillage?" "I don"t know. Perhaps our driver." Of course. The man had driven like a maniac, using his horn instead of his brakes. An hour ago he had been in our room, demanding the two hundred yen promised him for the day. The day had ended for him in midmorning at the bottom of a pitted jeep trail he had refused to drive his jeep up, leaving us to climb to the village on foot. In the end he had settled for fifty — and the satisfaction of snitching. My watch said five-thirty. Although it was the week of the summer solstice, the sun had already dropped behind the high mountains across the river. The river"s roar pounded through the open window like a trucking route. "Have you told Rabbi Avichail?" "No," Chen-Hua said. "Well, he"s not going to move now," I said. "It"s too close to the Sabbath. Go tell the police it"s against our religion to change hotels before tomorrow night." Chen-Hua stood in the doorway beside the earthenware spittoon that the Wenchuan County Teachers Center Guest House provided for its guests. He was wearing the green shorts and cream-colored polo shirt with black squiggles that were the only clothing he had brought with him and holding the transistor radio he took everywhere. He was wondering how to explain our religion to the police. "Go tell them," I repeated. Chen-Hua must have stopped on his way down to the lobby at Avichail"s room on the second floor, because when I knocked on the door, Avichail already knew. Dressed in his trousers, a large knitted skullcap, and a tallit katan, the fringed undershirt worn by Orthodox Jews, he was steering a head of cabbage through a hand-turned grinder on the dresser. The hotel table was covered by a white cloth set with four paper plates and cups, an open can of Israeli gefilte fish, a bottle of Carmel-Mizrachi grape juice in lieu of wine, and two crackers standing in for the traditional challah. Avichail"s traveling companion, Micha Gross, sat on a bed, slicing the main course for our Sabbath meal, thick slabs of Israeli baloney. "When will you pray?" I asked. There was no pressing need to decide on a course of action. Chen-Hua was still talking to the police, a conversation Avichail deemed it best to keep out of. Whatever came of it, he and Micha would stay put unless dragged off bodily. "Six-thirty," he said. I glanced down at the courtyard on my way back to the fourth floor. Two soldiers with rifles were standing beside a pickup truck. Its tailgate down, it was waiting for our bags. The Teachers Center Guest House was the only hotel that had seemed livable to us when we arrived the night before in Wenchuan, a city of fifty thousand in the Min River Valley of western Szechwan Province. It had toilets that actually flushed, faucets that yielded hot water, electric fixtures that did not dangle from the walls with copper wires extruding from their casings like the tongues of poisonous snakes. No one had told us it was reserved for teachers. The manager, Mrs. Li, a carefully groomed woman with a smile of hot lipstick and cool amusement, appeared happy to take our money. The place looked empty. It would be a blow to have to leave it, even though Wenchuan was a drab town that attracted few travelers, except for those on their way to Juizhai Gou, a famed nature reserve a day"s drive past the valley"s head to the north. I showered and stepped out of the bathroom to find Chen-Hua jumping on his bed. He leaped three or four times, straining to touch the ceiling, fell back on the mattress, reached for his radio on the night table, and switched it on. "Chen-Hua, what are you doing?" "Exercising." He held the radio close to his ear, playing with the dial. "It is good for the leg muscles. Soon President Clinton will give a press conference." The president was in Beijing. Chen-Hua did not have much in the way of muscles. He was twenty-one years old, an interpreter we had picked up in Chengdu, Szechwan"s capital, and weighed perhaps a hundred pounds with his transistor. Yet on our ascent to the village he not only had carried all our packs, he had run ahead with them like a gazelle. "What happened with the police?" "The police." Chen-Hua had a Chinese habit of thoughtfully repeating the last part of one"s question. "They are considering letting us stay until tomorrow night. Mrs. Li spoke to someone on the telephone. I think he was the local party boss." The radio glued to his ear, he leaned over the edge of the bed to switch on the television while opening a book. Presently he asked, "There is an English sentence — "That was quite an accomplishment." Is it also correct to say, "The man paid the woman an accomplishment"?" "No," I said. "What he paid was a compliment." He looked again at his dictionary and asked, "Then what exactly is the meaning of the phrase "A left-handed compliment"?" I was becoming fond of Chen-Hua. "Suppose I told you," I said, "that for a Chinese you were extremely intelligent. That would be pretty lefthanded." He went back to his book. Troubled, he glanced up from it. "So you think I am intelligent only for a Chinese?" By the time I had extricated myself it was time for the Sabbath prayer. "It will take half an hour," I told Chen-Hua. "Then I"ll come for you and we"ll eat." "Oh, good," he said. Having never before tasted Western cuisine, he had developed a liking for canned Israeli hummus and cucumber-and-tomato salad smeared with mayonnaise. His face fell each time I insisted, desperate to get away from such fare, that he accompany me to a local restaurant instead of partaking of Avichail"s kosher food. I returned to the second floor. The soldiers and the pickup truck were gone from the courtyard. Avichail and Micha, in clean white shirts, were already swaying back and forth, facing west toward the river and Jerusalem. Unlike them, I had to use a little prayer book I"d brought from Israel, because I no longer remembered what I"d known by heart as a boy. Only now did I notice that, by an odd coincidence, the book"s silver-plated cover was stamped with the names and symbols of the biblical tribes: Reuben, Simon, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Benjamin, Ephraim, and Manasseh. Avichail"s prayer was pleasant. It had a droning sadness like my father"s, a melancholy that asked for nothing but its own bittersweet longing. Only his melody for "Come, My Love, to Meet the Bride" was different, importuning. It had a faster, more urgent tempo:Shake off the dust from thee and arise,My people, and don thy glorious clothes;The son of Jesse soon arrives;My soul"s redemption draweth nigh. When the prayer was over I went to get Chen-Hua, and the four of us sat down at the table. Avichail recited the Kiddush, the blessing for the fruit of the vine, over the grape juice and rose to go to the bathroom, followed by Micha and me. "Oh, wash hands," Chen-Hua said happily, coming after us. It was the one Jewish ritual that made sense to him. Hands washed, he asked Avichail, "What will we do about a hotel tomorrow night?" "Mmmmm!" Avichail said, putting a finger to his lips and shaking his head. "Mmm-mmmmmm!" Unable to explain that one was prohibited from talking between hand washing and bread blessing, he waited for Micha to take his seat. "Blessed art thou, O God, our Lord, King of the Universe, who bringeth forth bread from the earth," he intoned, breaking the crackers and giving each of us a half. "You may speak now," he told Chen-Hua. But when Chen-Hua repeated the question, Arichail still refused to answer it. It was the Sabbath; vexing and worrisome topics were forbidden. "Eat," he said, passing the cole slaw. Chen-Hua took the bowl but not the hint. "My opinion is that we should leave Wenchuan," he said. "It is boring here anyway. We can go to Jiuzhai Gou. There is much to see there." Avichail and Micha exchanged glances. I said, in Hebrew, "I think it"s time to tell our friend what we"re up to. We can"t go on hiding it from him." "I"m not so sure," Micha said. "If the police question him, he may talk. What do you think, Eliahu?" Avichail said, "I don"t think it makes much difference at this point. You can tell him after dinner. Have some potato salad." The potatoes had been boiled in an electric kettle and drenched in mayonnaise too. "Ya ribon o-o-lam ve"olmaya, ve"olma-a-a-aya," Avichail sang, breaking into a Sabbath hymn. Micha joined him. They both had good voices. We sang some more hymns and recited the Grace After Meals. When the table was cleared, we went for a walk by the river. Micha and Avichail fell behind, and I strolled ahead with Chen-Hua. "So you"ve had enough of Wenchuan," I said. "Yes. Jiuzhai Gou is beautiful." "So is the Min River Valley." In a way, once you got past the industry in its lower stretches, it was, with its gray, angrily foaming water bordered by a narrow strip of farmed land on each bank and towered over by green peaks, heavily terraced below and shooting up to heights of nine and ten thousand feet. "There is nothing in it but Chiang villages." "Look, Chen-Hua," I said, "there"s something you should know. The Chiang are the purpose of this trip." "The Chiang?" We had turned onto a bridge that crossed the Min slightly below its confluence with its tributary, the To. "They"re a people found nowhere else in China." "But what is interesting about them?" "Rabbi Avichail suspects they are lost Jews." Chen-Hua consulted a mental dictionary. "I think lost means misplaced," he said in puzzlement. Since he knew no more about the Bible than most Chinese, it took a long walk up the To"s right bank for me to explain. We were out of the center of town now, and the low current of the Chinese street lamps left the buildings in dingy obscurity. A few families still sat at their dinners at the sidewalk restaurants, where the day"s dirty pots and pans had been piled on the outdoor stoves for washing in the street. Long ago, I told Chen-Hua, when the Jewish people first lived in their land, they were divided into twelve tribes: two in the southern kingdom of Judah and the others in the northern kingdom of Israel. The tribes were small, surrounded by powerful enemies, and in 720 B.C.E. the northern capital of Samaria was conquered by one of them, the Assyrians. According to the Bible, they carried away the northern tribes into exile and replaced them with people uprooted from elsewhere. The exiles were never heard from again. "What happened to them?" "No one knows. Some think they assimilated into their new environment and disappeared. Others say that only the ruling class was carried off and that the peasantry stayed behind and mixed with the newcomers to form a people called the Samaritans. Their religion was similar to that of the Judeans, who became the ancestors of today"s Jews. Most of the Samaritans eventually converted to Christianity and Islam, and today their descendants are Palestinian Moslems. Less than a thousand of them still practice the old Samaritan religion." "You still have not said who was lost." "For thousands of years there have been legends about the northern tribes still existing somewhere in remote and inaccessible regions. People have searched for them all over." "Has anyone found them?" "Many have claimed to. The scholars don"t take them seriously." "Then Rabbi Avichail is not a scholar." "No. He"s a rabbi from Jerusalem who believes some of the legends are true and has traveled widely trying to prove that. He"s come to China to investigate the Chiang." "But the Chiang don"t look like you Jews," Chen-Hua said. "They look like us Han." "That"s true." When they weren"t wearing their traditional clothing, I couldn"t tell them apart from Chinese. "Rabbi Avichail believes they may be lost Jews because of some books written by a man named Thomas Torrance." It began to drizzle, the first rain we had seen in China. Chen-Hua and I passed the last bridge across the To and headed toward the toll gate at the road to Songpan and Jiuzhai Gou. Trucks loaded with big logs were parked near the barrier. All the way from Chengdu they had kept rolling by, the logging trucks, carting away whole forests from up north. "Torrance was a Scots missionary who lived among the Chiang after World War One. They still spoke their old language and practiced their old religion then, not like the villagers we met today. He wanted to make Christians of them. But the more he came to know them, the more he believed they were descended from an ancient tribe of Israel. Rabbi Avichail wants to see if the customs and beliefs he described in his books still exist." "But we saw today that they didn"t." "That was only in one village. Rabbi Avichail hopes to find Chiang who are more knowledgeable. The problem is that the authorities mustn"t know what we"re doing. We didn"t ask for a research permit, because it could have been denied us or taken too long to be issued." We reached the barrier and turned back. The blurry lights of Wenchuan were now ahead of us. "Does that mean we will stay in this place?" "If we can." "We will not go to Jiuzhai Gou?" "I"m afraid not." "Do you think the Chiang are lost Jews?" "I doubt it." Chen-Hua mulled this over while we retraced our steps along the To. He said, "Hillerh, I am very disappointed."I couldn"t say I was. My expectations had been low from the start. I first met Eliahu Avichail the year before, in the summer of 1997. For some time I had heard of him as a Lost Tribes hunter, one of the last of a nearly extinct breed that had once roamed the earth more prolifically. Scholars and academics considered him a crackpot. "You"ve got to be kidding," one said when I told him that I planned to join the rabbi on an expedition. Yet in the living room of his small Jerusalem apartment, through which his grandchildren wandered freely in search of chocolates and crayons, he had seemed level-headed enough as he described his travels to Moslems in Kashmir, Tatars in Dagestan, Knanites in Kerala, the Karens in Burma, and other peoples whose customs supposedly resembled those described in the Bible. The Kashmir trip, made in 1982 in the hope of meeting Pashtuns from across the border in Pakistan, a country for which his Israeli passport was invalid, was the first. The Pashtuns had caught his attention when, while teaching in a religious high school, he came across literature linking them with ancient Israel. In 1975 he had given a lecture on the subject at the Rabbi Kook Yeshiva in Jerusalem, the intellectual bastion of modern Israeli Orthodoxy where he had studied. Tsvi Yehuda Kook, the yeshiva"s head and the son of its founder, sent for him and said, "If this is true, you can"t just lecture about it. Do something!" It took him a while. For several years he tried to contact Pashtun informants through intermediaries. Then he decided to look for them himself. As his interest in lost Jews widened, so did his travels. They yielded more than mere knowledge. In Portugal he reached communities of Marranos, descendants of Jews forceably converted to Christianity at the time of the Inquisition, and kindled in them an interest in Judaism. From the northeast Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur he brought to Israel several hundred men and women who called themselves B"nei Menashe, or Sons of Menashe, and claimed descent from the Israelite tribe of Manasseh. Mestizos living as Jews in the Peruvian Andes were also encouraged by him to come to Israel. The Indians and Peruvians underwent Orthodox conversions and applied for Israeli citizenship. Neither the country"s rabbinate nor its interior ministry were happy with the development. "You mustn"t confuse the two things," Avichail told me. "The Peruvians, like the Portuguese, have nothing to do with the Lost Tribes. Some of their ancestors were Marranos from Spain who fled the Inquisition to South America. It followed them there, and they went underground. All the stories about biblical tribes in the Americas are nonsense." A white-bearded, mild-mannered man in his sixties, he had an obsession that sounded rational once you accepted the initial premise. "If the Bible says the tribes were carried away and will return," he maintained, "they were carried away and will return. But you have to look for them in the right places. That means starting with the Assyrian empire, which was expanded northward and eastward by the Babylonians who conquered it and by the Persians who conquered the Babylonians. The exiled tribes could have moved in the same directions, migrating along trade and caravan routes until they lost contact with their southern brothers. The Caucasus, central Asia, even the Far East — that"s where you would expect to find traces of them. And that"s where you do find many traditions and practices reminiscent of Jewish ones — the growing of ear locks, for example, or the lighting of Sabbath candles, or the Pashtun joi nemaz, which is like a Jewish prayer shawl. Today, the people who do or remember these things are Christians and Moslems, but their ancestors must have been Jews." The fax phone rang in his study. He went to check it and came back with a sheet of paper bearing news from Manipur. An outbreak of ethnic hostilities in the area had forced many B"nei Menashe to flee their rural homes for the capital of Imphal. "The situation is difficult," said the message. "Please help and advise." "What help can you give?" I asked. Avichail, who ran a minuscule organization called Amishav, My People Returneth, looked worried. "I don"t know," he said. "We don"t have much money. There"s not even enough for the next expedition." "Where would you go if there was?" "China. There are people there known as the Chiang. They have Semitic features, believe they are descendants of Abraham — they call him Biran or Bilan — and worship a single God named Abba-Malakh. In times of danger they call out to Him, "Ya-Weh!"" Abba-Malakh meant Father-Angel in Hebrew, and Ya-Weh, or Yahweh, was how Bible scholars believed the sacred four-consonant name of the biblical God, once commonly transcribed as Jehovah, was pronounced. "Their religion forbids graven images and has a hereditary priesthood that offers sacrifices like those in the Bible. The B"nei Menashe and the Karens have traditions of coming from China, too. I suspect all three groups are related." "Well," I said, "if you ever do go to China, perhaps you"ll take me along as a journalist. Maybe I could help with the financing." "Why not?" said Eliahu Avichail. It was a deal — and one that, several months before our planned departure, I nearly backed out of. Avichail"s knowledge of the Chiang had been gleaned from a single author, and one day, while on a visit in New York, I ventured into the East Asian department of the Columbia University library to see what else I could find. The catalog listed several works in Chinese, as well as an article in English, "The Chiang People of Western Szechuan: The Miscalled "West China Jews,"" written by Professor V. R. Schuyler Cammann. It began:The Chiang people were an ancient tribe of non-Chinese aborigines who lived in the mountains of west China bordering on Tibet until they were annihilated or dispersed in recent years. Aside from brief mention of them by occasional travelers, the only relatively complete accounts of them in English were written by two missionaries who lived in Szechuan during the first half of the present century. The first of these writers was a devout Scotsman with a highly developed imagination, named Thomas Torrance, who gradually became convinced that the Chiang were descended from ancient Israelites, and discussed them with this bias. The other was David Crockett Graham, Ph.D., an American missionary-anthropologist, who gave straightforward factual reports on Chiang religion and culture, inevitably exposing the lack of foundation in Torrance"s theory. Drawing on Graham, Cammann proceeded to demolish Torrance. The Chiang, he wrote, had been shamanistic animists, not monotheists. They had also had the bad luck during the Chinese civil war to be in the way of the Red Army"s Long March and to oppose it, in consequence of which they were treated badly by the Communists. "Even if survivors might still be found in the former Chiang territory," Cammann concluded, "it seems most unlikely that they would retain any traces of their traditional religion." I phoned Avichail and told him to cancel our trip. "Why?" I recounted the gist of Cammann"s article. "So what?" he said. "If I believed what every professor wrote, I"d never get past my front door." He thought as much of the professors as they did of him. A deal was a deal: we flew to Hong Kong and then to Chengdu. Nevertheless, we did meet there with Professor Shi Ying Pin of Szechwan University. A specialist in the province"s ethnic minorities, he caused a vindicated look to be sent in my direction when he assured Avichail that the Chiang, though reduced in numbers to a mere 80,000, still existed and practiced their old faith. "In one God?" Avichail asked eagerly. "One God, they believe in Him?" "Ummm," answered the professor. It was not quite clear what he meant by that. He unfolded a map on his desk and drew a circle around Wenchuan to show us where the Chiang could be found. "Ah! Must ask proper authorities," he replied when pressed for further details.Although the village we had visited without police permission was not far from Wenchuan, it seemed remote by the time we reached it. In fact, it had seemed remote from the road below: a cluster of gray houses high up on the terraced flank of a steep mountain, with a tall stone tower looming above them. Such structures, Torrance had written, were characteristic of the Chiang, built as early warning systems and defensive bastions against the Chinese armies that repeatedly marched into their secluded valleys. The To River foamed behind us. It looked as treacherous as the Min, though neither had anything on our driver. Chen-Hua had found him on a street corner during our first morning in Wenchuan. Before that, stepping out of the Wenchuan County Teachers Center Guest House, we had passed a group of elderly people sitting on some steps. The women wore the blue tunics and black turbans that were a Chiang trademark, according to my guidebook. "Chiang!" I sang out. Avichail said to Chen-Hua. "Go. Go ask them where their wise men are." But the old people did not know where their wise men were and we walked to the corner to hire a four-by-four. Despite our rations of kosher food that were doled out as carefully as water in a lifeboat, I was beginning to realize that we were going to rely heavily on improvisation. If not for me, we wouldn"t even have had a guidebook, a map, or malaria pills. "Is this Eliahu"s usual method?" I asked Micha as we watched Chen-Hua negotiate with drivers. "His method is siyata di-shmaya," Micha answered, using the rabbinic term for "the help of Heaven." He had been with Avichail on many trips. If it was siyata di-shmaya, however, that made the next driver agree to take us to a Chiang village, siyata di-shmaya was out for lunch when he dumped us at the foot of the mountain. "Just head up that trail," he said to Chen-Hua, not wanting to stress his new tires. It would take us half an hour, he promised. It was more like two and a half. We soon left the trail, which looped around the mountain"s far side, and hiked straight up, following paths and steppingstones that zigzagged from terrace to terrace and stopping often to catch our breath. Corn, peppers, eggplants, and pole beans grew in plots so small that some had only a single plump plant. Barefoot men and women coming down the mountain with baskets on their backs or water buckets balanced on their shoulders glanced wonderingly at us without breaking stride. For part of the way we were joined by some Tibetan boys looking for farm work. "Ask them, Chen-Hua," Avichail said, "if they know about a river that spits rocks." The Tibetan boys, though, did not actually come from Tibet, where a nineteenth-century Jewish traveler had reported the existence of the Sambatyon, the legendary river beyond which the Lost Tribes were to be found. They came from north of Songpan and were ignorant of Tibetan geography. The Chiang village looked empty when we reached it. Most of its inhabitants were presumably in the fields. The houses, built of chinked stone and stacked on the mountainside so that the flat roof of one formed the patio of the one above it, did not look Chinese. They bore the resemblance, remarked upon by Torrance, to peasant houses in the Middle East. "Keep your eyes out for white stones," Avichail said. Torrance had written at length about these stones, describing them as the Chiang"s most important cult objects. Placed on the rooftops, where the Chiang sacrificed to the one God, their simple purity symbolized the "effulgence of His glory." We had seen such a stone in a museum in Chengdu, a rough sphere of quartz, about a foot in diameter, that looked like a big lump of frozen dough. Yet while we had passed shiny outcrops of quartz on our climb, no specimens were visible on the village roofs. The only signs of religion were Buddhist posters of guardian spirits glued to some of the front doors. From afar came the chant of children at their lessons. We headed for the tower along a passageway of roofs strewn with farm implements, firewood, heavy logs, and bales of wattling. Lying cracked in an open shed, like a deposed idol, was a stone bust of Mao Tsetung. Avichail raced ahead, pointing his video camera like a gun, sprinting up ladders and across parapets like the paratrooper he had been before his rabbinical ordination. All at once, in the fortress-like window of the last house beneath the tower, appeared two small faces. Another peered out from behind the parapet of the roof, and a fully visible child was perched on a bare rafter. A woman looked down, too, from a window above the first. No one waved or smiled. No one seemed frightened or amused, not even when Avichail stumbled and nearly went flying with his camera. The grave curiosity that tracked us seemed entirely intent on our next step. Perhaps the natives had peered this way from the trees at the men stepping out of Columbus"s ships. Indeed, once we were all assembled face to face, the explorers and three generations of the explored, Chen-Hua established that the village had never before seen foreigners. "Ask them," Avichail told him, waving off a grimy thermos of red tea offered by a spiky-haired man, the head of the household, "ask where are the white stones. Ask about sacrifice." Chen-Hua looked like someone who, having been sent to knock on a strange door for directions, is now told to demand the family Bible. Avichail"s brusqueness startled me too. It had the same tempo with which he had made for the stone tower and was no way to approach total strangers. "Chen-Hua," I said, "tell these people that we saw their village from the road. Say it looked like a good place to visit. Ask how many of them live here." There were, the spiky-haired man replied, forty families. All farmers? Chen-Hua translated. All. Did they often get to Wenchuan? Often. They shopped and sold their produce there. They had frequent contact with the Chinese. There was no difference between them. They spoke the same language and lived the same way. "Ask if they speak the Chiang language among themselves." Chen-Hua asked. "No," he said. "Only Han. A terrible dialect." He sounded indignant at having been brought all the way from Chengdu to hear such terrible Chinese. "Not even the old man and woman?" The children"s grandparents stood to one side, the old woman in the Chiang tunic and turban, the old man with a long-stemmed pipe on which a high plug of tobacco balanced like an inch of ash on a cigarette. "No. All the speakers of the old language are dead." "What is their religion?" "It is Buddhism." "Only Buddhism?" "Only." "But before Buddhism," persisted Avichail. "There was a religion before Buddhism? Ask the old people. The religion before Buddhism, what was it?" Chen-Hua gave us their answer. "There was no religion before Buddhism." "All right," Avichail said impatiently, "let"s go. These people know nothing. We"ll talk to the teacher at the school." The teacher, however, was gone. It was Friday, and the school, from which we"d heard the chanting children, had let out early. We walked back down to the road in less time than it took to climb up and paid the driver of a passing car to take us to Wenchuan. "Well," I said that evening, "it looks as if Cammann was right and Professor Shi was wrong. The Chiang have lost their old culture. We"ll never know if Torrance imagined it all or not." We had come a long way just to learn that. "Professor Shi!" scoffed Avichail. "We need educated Chiang, not Chinese professors. If this is a teachers" center guest house, there must be a teachers" center. We"ll look for it in the morning." Chen-Hua was asleep when I went upstairs. The score of Titanic, his sleepy-time music, was still playing on his tape.In the morning Mrs. Li informed us that the police had agreed to extend our stay at the Wenchuan County Teachers Center Guest House. She also confirmed Avichail"s hunch. At the south end of town, across the river, was the District National Normal College for Teachers. Micha and Avichail said their Sabbath morning prayers, and we set out. Within the confines of a city, walking on the day of rest was permitted. Wenchuan was livelier by day. Fruit and vegetable vendors lined the sidewalks. Han, Chiang, and Tibetan women wove in and out of the traffic with baskets and babies on their backs. At the little restaurants, the big noodle vats blew off clouds of steam. The bells of the bicycles and rickshaws backed the piping of the sparrows in a brisk, atonal music. The sparrows, suspended from lampposts in their bamboo cages, were the only animals in town. For pets and beasts of burden the Wenchuanese made do with themselves. The District National Normal College started off well. The first person we stopped — siyata di-shmaya! — was an English teacher named Frank. All his students, he told us proudly, had English names too. Though knowing nothing about the Chiang, Frank invited us to his campus apartment, made a few phone calls, and informed us that a librarian who was an expert on the Chiang — siyata di-shmaya again! — lived on the floor above. But the librarian was out of town, and none of the scattering of Chiang students sprawled on the lawns with their Han friends were of any help. "Hello, hello!" they called, waving their chopsticks above their lunchtime noodle bowls, eager to practice their English. When asked about the old Chiang religion, they made insouciant gestures of ignorance. That evening, after Avichail had recited over the last of the grape juice the Blessing of Separation between the Sabbath and the week, we went for a ramble in the streets. Chen-Hua strode ahead. Suddenly he stopped by a sign at the foot of a dim alley and said, "There"s another school here. It is the District Normal College for Teachers." If the District National Normal College had been a flop, what, at nine o"clock on a Saturday night, could we expect from a mere District Normal College? Yet when we walked up the alley to the college gate, this reasoning proved unfounded. The student body of the District National Normal College, of which the Chiang were a small minority, came from all over China; the District Normal College, its lawnless compound shabby by comparison, accepted students from the Wenchuan area alone, among them a high proportion of Chiang. There were Chiang everywhere: hanging out loudly in the square by the gate, watching a Saturday night movie in a ground-floor lecture room, dancing to loud rock music in a hall that smelled of beer and cigarettes. A group gathered around us, and some of their friends went to look for a Chiang teacher. They returned with Mr. Yu, a tall, handsome man with a nose like a scimitar, our first case of the supposedly Semitic features ascribed to the Chiang by Torrance. A chemistry teacher, he invited us to his office, where two other Chiang faculty members joined us. One, Mr. Wen, had a blinking, rumpled face; the other, Mr. Hsiao, a beery breath and some command of English. Even so, there being seven of us in the room, all sometimes talking at once, more was said than understood. Enough got across, however, to earn me another of Avichail"s I-told-you-so looks. Schuyler Cammann, we were informed by the Chiang teachers, was wrong after all. The Chiang village we had been to was not typical. Being so close to Wenchuan, it had assimilated Chinese ways. If we ranged farther afield, we would find villages in which the old language and customs still prevailed. We could even see as many white stones as we wanted. "Just what are the white stones?" Chen-Hua translated Mr. Wen"s answer. "They are a symbol of the white stone god." "The white stone god, he is the only God?" Avichail asked. As Mr. Wen was answering Chen-Hua, who was being prompted by Micha and Avichail, Mr. Yu was speaking to Mr. Wen; Mr. Hsiao was addressing us in broken English; and the Hebrew speakers were arguing among themselves. "He is the powerful god." "The most powerful god?" "His name, it is Abba-Malakh?" "White stone bring good luck." "They say there is also the mountain and the sky god." "Ask, ask if it is Abba-Malakh." "They do not know the name of the white stone god. Long ago the Chiang lived in the mountains of Tibet. They had a big war with their enemies. When their enemies were winning, the great Chiang chief had a dream. In his dream he was told to take stones and roll them in snow. Then throw them at the enemy." "This big chief, he was Abraham?" "Bilan. Ask if they know Bilan." "All house have white stone for protect it." "The enemy thought the stones were snowballs. The stones killed the enemy. That is why the Chiang sacrifice to them." "To them or on them? Ask, Chen-Hua!" Mr. Yu screwed up his face in pain. He was describing a Chiang cheek piercing ceremony to Mr. Hsiao. "On them. No. To them." "You can see for yourself, the white stone is just a household god." "He never said that. You"re putting words in his mouth." Avichail leaned over and whispered in Mr. Hsiao"s ear. Mr. Hsiao shook his head. Mr. Wen spoke to Chen-Hua. Chen-Hua said, "The sacrifice is made before the stone. The blood is poured over it." Avichail whispered again. "No understand," Mr. Hsiao said. It went on like that: white stones, sacrifice, rooftops, blood, snowballs, Abraham. Finally, Micha seized a moment of silence to ask, "Chen-Hua, is there a traditional Chiang village we could visit where someone might explain these things to us better?" Chen-Hua asked Mr. Yu. Mr. Yu spoke to Mr. Hsiao. Mr. Hsiao turned to Mr. Wen. "Chongfung," Mr. Wen said. Chen-Hua knew where that was. He had seen the road sign on the way from Chengdu. Mr. Wen spoke again. Chen-Hua said: "Mr. Wen has a friend in Chongfung. He will write him a letter. We can take a bus there." Chen-Hua translated what Mr. Wen wrote: "Dear Teacher Wang: There are some foreigners wanting to know and have a meet with the priest. Please arrange for them. Thank you." Siyata di-shmaya!The next day I asked Avichail what he had whispered to Mr. Hsiao the night before. ""Ya-Weh,"" he said. "I thought it might get a reaction." He went off to buy fruit and vegetables with Micha and Chen-Hua before taking the bus to Chongfung. I stayed behind to catch up on my notes, lingering on the stairs to listen to the wild mountain harmonies of the Chiang chambermaids singing in the kitchen. Chen-Hua looked flustered when he returned to our room. "Is anything wrong?" I inquired. "Anything wrong. No, Hillerh." But on our way to the bus station Micha asked, "Did Chen-Hua tell you what happened?" "No. What?" "Eliahu saved his life. We were buying peaches from a Chiang. Chen-Hua was bargaining, and the Chiang began to shout and knocked him down. A dozen more of them piled on, punching and kicking him. Eliahu pulled them off and crouched over him to protect him until they calmed down." On the bus to Chongfung I asked Chen-Hua about it. "They were asking for too much money," he said. "They hate me because I am a Han." "Look at it their way," I told him. "Here"s a chance for them to earn a few more yen from some rich foreigners, and you keep them from doing it." "It"s not right to charge foreigners more," Chen-Hua said. "I would not be doing my duty if I permitted that." He put his transistor radio back to his ear. "There is a discussion of the Paula Jones case," he reported. The bus let us off at the side of the road. Next to it, gray and scaly, tumbled the Min. Chongfung was on the far bank, which was reached by crossing a rickety wood suspension bridge. A banner was strung above the road. Chen-Hua translated its large red characters: "It says Chongfung, Number One Visiting Place." A few yards beyond the banner was a ticket window. Had we found ourselves by the entrance to the District National Sparrow Reserve, it could hardly have been more absurd. An official traditional Chiang village! We had been duped. Last night"s teachers were government touts. "Your number one tourist stop in a place without tourists!" Micha said. "Well, let"s pay up and get the tour." But there was no tour. There was only a little grocery store that sold soft drinks and ice cream, a cluster of houses, and a road running through a valley to a larger cluster on a low hill about a mile away. A Chiang watchtower rose above them. Having neglected to bring a tour bus, we walked. The road passed through corn fields and small orchards of plums and pomegranates. In the main village we asked for the school, and at the school, for Teacher Wang. Soon he came. Grunting unhappily as he read Mr. Wen"s letter, he agreed to take us to the priest. This entailed another long hike to the highest house on the hill. There were no theme parks or native jewelry stands on the way. Actually, Teacher Wang told us as we climbed the hill, Chongfung had been designated a tourist site only three years before because of its accessibility and adherence to the old traditions. Its inhabitants had not yet decided what to do about that. There were indeed white stones in the corners of all the roofs, ranging in size from tennis balls to basketballs. Avichail asked Teacher Wang about them. Then he asked about other things. Did the villagers perform sacrifices? Where? How did they bury their dead? Was the corpse placed in a coffin? Was it washed first? How did the people mourn? What were the marriage customs? Did the groom give the bride gifts? How was a couple divorced? Each answer led to more questions exploring possible points of resemblance to biblical rites. A cow came down the stone steps leading up to the priest"s house and we stepped aside to let it pass. At the top of the steps was a courtyard of mucky earth, from which a short ladder led to the priest"s shrine. Or was it his office? Or his kitchen? Once our eyes grew accustomed to the dark, windowless room, it appeared to be an equal part of each. A side of bacon and some strings of sausage hung from a rafter beside a weak electric bulb. From a second beam a kettle was suspended by a metal chain over an open hearth. In the middle of the room stood a center post on which was draped something furry. A pile of onions lay beside some farm tools on a bench; behind the bench was a wall with framed photographs; above the photographs, a shelf was curtained by rice-paper screens. The photographs showed the priest, in his priestly regalia, with smiling Chinese officials. His name was Wang Tsu Tsin and he welcomed us in a Mao cap and a plain shirt tucked into a black skirt. A short, grizzled man with a shrewdly good-natured face, he had his first question put to him by me. How long had he been a priest? Chen-Hua translated the reply with a grimace of concentration, condensing long sentences into short ones. "His language is hard to understand. He says he became a priest as a teenager. His father gave him the knowledge. Only a priest"s son can become a priest." "Ask if he has sons himself." "Yes. Four." "Will any of them become priests?" "No. None." "Why?" "There is not enough money in it." Avichail stirred restlessly. "What does any of this matter?" he said. "Ask him, Chen-Hua, to show us what a priest does." The priest went to the shelf and lifted a rice-paper screen. He took three objects from the shelf. The first was a highly burnished wooden staff. A wooden snake was coiled around it. The snake had a head like a weasel"s. "The bronze serpent of Moses!" Avichail exclaimed. "Torrance mentioned it." The priest thumped the staff on the floor and spoke to Chen-Hua. "It protects him when he comes to the sacrifice," Chen-Hua said. "The sacrifice takes place on the roof." The second object was a pair of silver bells. The priest shook them rhythmically. "With these he chants." "To whom?" Wang Tsu Tsin pointed to the raised screen. "Apimala." Avichail excitedly corrected him: "Abba-Malakh!" The third object consisted of two lacquered wooden tablets joined by a leather thong. Each was about a foot and a half high and had a column of Chinese-looking characters. "Ask what it says, Chen-Hua." The priest did not know. "He can"t read?" "He can read Chinese. But this is in an old language. No one understands it anymore." "Ask if his father did." "No. It is very old." "Try to read it, Chen-Hua." Chen-Hua took the tablets outside into the sunlight. "This is not old Chinese," he said. "I don"t know what it is." According to Torrance, the Chiang had once had a written language and a holy book that was lost. Cammann dismissed this conjecture. I counted the characters on each tablet. Five. Two tablets, ten characters. Or commandments? It was a wild thought. The priest took the fur from the center post and pulled it over his head. It was a monkey skin with a head and two eye holes, through which he looked out. He fetched a drum and slipped his arm through its shoulder strap. It sounded like a slow heartbeat when he beat it. He shut his eyes and chanted, shaking the bells. The chant was slow and halting, like footsteps groping in the dark. It should have been demeaning, this peep show for strangers who might leave behind a few yen. But Wang Tsu Tsin did not look demeaned. He was paid by the villagers for his services, too; perhaps to his mind there was no great difference. "What did he chant?" Micha asked. Chen-Hua said, "He told the god he is coming. He asked the god not to harm him." "When does he do this?" "When someone is sick. Or needs help from the gods." "Gods," I said to Avichail. "No," Avichail said. "He said the God." "Gods. Didn"t he, Chen-Hua?" "Chen-Hua," Avichail commanded, "ask him. Ask if there is one God. Ask who created the world." Chen-Hua asked. Wang Tsu Tsin wrinkled his brow. He pointed to two rice-paper screens and gave a lengthy reply. Chen-Hua said: "He says something about two gods. They are called Moh-chi-tsu and Zer-pir-wah. Moh-chi-tsu is a girl and Zer-pir-wah is a boy. They created people." "How, Chen-Hua?" I asked. "How did they create them?" "That doesn"t matter," Avichail said. "They are all Abba-Malakh." "Of course they"re not," I said. "Each screen stands for a different god." Avichail turned to Chen-Hua. "Ask him!" he said. "Paper is God? If I burn paper, no more God? Ask!" Chen-Hua looked horrified. He appeared to believe that Avichail was threatening to burn down Wang Tsu Tsin"s shrine. "Ask, Chen-Hua! Burn paper, no God?" "I . . . I don"t want to ask," Chen-Hua said. "I don"t understand this. I don"t understand this old man"s language." "Ask!" Chen-Hua was on the verge of tears. Micha came to the rescue. "We were told that the sacrifices take place on the roof. Perhaps the priest will show it to us." Wang Tsu Tsin led us up another ladder to the flat roof. With a sweep of his arm, he indicated where he sacrificed the animals brought to him. Once again Avichail had a list of questions. Was the animal sacrificed on an altar or on the ground? How was it killed? Was its throat slit? What was done with the blood? Was it sprinkled on the white stone? Was the sacrifice cooked and eaten? Did the priest get a special part of it? Were there purification rites beforehand? Were there holidays on which the entire village sacrificed together? Yes, the priest said. On the harvest festival the whole village climbed a mountain. He pointed to a peak behind the village. There was singing and dancing and sacrificing. "To Abba-Malakh?" Wang Tsu Tsin nodded. "Abba-Malakh," Avichail said, "he is the same as the white stone god?" Chen-Hua asked and said: "No. The white stone god is different." "But he has a name, the white stone god?" The priest answered briefly. Chen-Hua said, "He has no name." "Then he is Abba-Malakh! Ask, ask, Chen-Hua." Chen-Hua did not know what to ask. "Ask if there is one God or many." Chen-Hua asked. Wang Tsu Tsin answered. Chen-Hua asked again. The priest answered a second time. Chen-Hua clasped his head in his hands. "There are many gods. There are several gods. There are many several. He says it would take a month to explain it all. I want to go back to Chengdu." He started down the ladder. I caught him by the squiggles of his shirt. "You can"t quit on us," I told him. "We"ll get you back to Chengdu as soon as we can. Now act your age and translate." Chen-Hua bit his lip. His thin back trembled beneath my rebuke. "Ask the priest, Chen-Hua," Avichail said, "what happens to him when he dies." "When he dies," repeated Chen-Hua. He spoke to the priest. The priest smiled as if asked something funny. Chen-Hua said, "His body will be burned." "And his soul? He has a soul? What will happen to it?" But the priest did not have a soul. "There will be nothing left," Chen-Hua said. "All right," Avichail declared. "We can go." "Just a minute!" I couldn"t part with Wang Tsu Tsin like that. "Chen-Hua," I said, "ask him what will happen when he dies to the old religion in Chongfung." Chen-Hua asked. "It will die too," he said. "But what about the gods? What will they do?" The priest shrugged. The gods would manage. "Chen-Hua," I said, "ask if they are the gods just of the Chiang." The old man pushed back his Mao cap. "Some are also for the Han," he told Chen-Hua. "Let"s go," Avichail urged. "Wait!" I pointed to us three foreigners. "Ask. Are some also for us?" The priest said a few words. "Some are also for you," Chen-Hua said. There was a bit of comfort in that. "Tell the priest," I said, "that I wish we had a month to give him." The loneliness of a god with no one left to look after him was more terrible than any I could imagine.We spent the rest of the week farther up the Min River Valley, ranging as far north as Songpan. We visited more Chiang villages and received more answers to more questions, none of which altered the basic picture. In the village of Chaochung we met some young high school teachers. One said to Avichail: "You are from Jerusalem. I have heard that many tribes lived there and that one was lost and is the Chiang. What do you know about this?" An electric current ran through us. But it turned out that the young teacher was merely repeating the notions of Torrance that he had read about in a Chinese book. He and his colleagues seemed pleased by the thought of being a lost Jewish tribe. The Jews were powerful and smart. Avichail was pleased, too. He left some literature and his address. "They seemed interested," he said. "Perhaps they"ll write. I can only sow the seed. The rest is up to them." By Friday afternoon we were back in Chengdu. We viewed our week among the Chiang differently. Although Schuyler Cammann had been mistaken about the Chiang"s physical and cultural survival, I thought his criticisms of Torrance had stood up. I couldn"t see the remotest connection between the Chiang religion and the Bible. Avichail disagreed. To him, the important thing was that Torrance"s descriptions had proved reliable. It was true that we had found evidence of ordinary paganism in Chiang religion. But Torrance himself had observed that, whereas the Chiang once lived in isolation, their modern contact with the Chinese had introduced impurities into their faith. These could only have multiplied since the 1920s. The crucial question was what the Chiang religion had been like in Torrance"s day — and to that, Torrance remained the best witness. This struck me as wishful thinking. The one puzzling thing was those strange tablets. In Chengdu we shared a triple room. Watching Avichail and Micha set the Sabbath eve table, I noticed that there were only three plates. "Set another place," I said. "Chen-Hua said he"s joining us." Avichail unscrewed the cap from our last bottle of grape juice. "No, he isn"t." "Why not?" "He has a mother in Chengdu. Let her feed him." "What does that mean?" "We want to have a proper Sabbath meal." "For Jews only?" "The Sabbath was given to Jews." "I don"t get it," I said. "In Chaochung you were beaming because some Chiang asked you a few polite questions about Judaism. You said you were sowing the seed. And here"s a young man you saved from a mob who would rather spend a Jewish Sabbath with us than with the mother he hasn"t seen in a week — and you don"t want him." "He"s only interested in our food." "It"s not just your awful food. It"s —" There was a knock on the door. I fled to the bathroom to avoid seeing what came next. When I finally stepped out, the Sabbath candles were lit and Avichail and Micha were praying. A dirty plate with smearings of potato salad was on the dresser. Avichail had fed Chen-Hua supper before turning him out. I didn"t know if that made it better or worse. I sat through the meal, picking at my food. After the final Grace I rose from the table and said, "I"m going for a walk." "Sit," Avichail told me. "We"ll have a lesson. You"ll take your walk afterward." A "lesson" was yeshiva parlance for a religious homily. He delivered it, propped on one elbow on his bed, by the flickering light of the candles. Micha lay on his back on a pillow. I sat in the armchair by the window. Avichail chose for his text the verses in Zachariah:And I will pour upon the house of David and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem the spirit of grace . . . and they shall look upon him whom they have pierced and they shall mourn for him as one mourneth for his only son . . . the land shall mourn, every family apart: the family of the house of David apart and the family of the house of Levi apart. "This passage is knotty," he said. "Who was pierced and why is he mourned for as an only son?" He began to unravel the knots. According to the Aramaic targum of Yonatan ben Uziel, the only son was the Messiah son of Joseph — the herald, destined to die in battle, of the Messiah son of David. Although it was the Messiah son of David and the Priest of Righteousness from the house of Levi who would bring the final redemption, each of the three figures symbolized a different sphere of deliverance. They formed a circle within a circle within a circle, all three needing to be entire for the redemption to be complete. The son of Joseph stood for the material sphere, the regaining of Jewish independence. The son of David stood for the religious sphere, the spiritual perfecting of Israel. The Priest of Righteousness stood for the universal sphere, the acceptance of Judaism by all mankind. "And so," Avichail said, "Zachariah speaks of the first Messiah, who will come from the house of Joseph. But Joseph, Jacob"s most beloved son, was the one son who did not have a tribe named after him. His own two sons, Jacob"s grandsons, Ephraim and Menashe, received that honor in his place. And just as the southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin were together known as Judah, from which came David, son of Jesse, so the northern tribes were known as Ephraim, or the house of Joseph. "He who has eyes to see knows that the process of redemption is already under way. But even its first circle, the regaining of our independence in the state of Israel, cannot be complete until the house of Joseph returns. And herein lies hidden a great truth." A candle guttered and went out. "For as the house of David represents our people"s spirit, the house of Joseph is the body. All know that the body cannot exist without the spirit. But not all know that the opposite is also true. The exile of the ten tribes was a great blow to our people, not because of the loss of numbers or of land, but because of the exile of matter from spirit. This is the true exile that we have lived in for thousands of years. Such was the teaching of my master, Tsvi Yehuda Kook of blessed memory, and of his father and master, Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook. At the redemption"s completion, matter and spirit will be reunited.We are told —" The second candle sputtered. "We are told the Messiah will come riding on a donkey. Why a donkey?" He answered his own question. "Because a donkey is the essence of materiality. Rabbi Yosef said, "May I see the Messiah even from a donkey"s dung heap." He meant that at the end of days all matter will be as holy as spirit, even the dung of a donkey. All mankind will be holy too." Avichail"s eyes rested on me. He said softly, "But that is not our task. The third circle of redemption is not given to us to complete. We are not sent to make Jews of the Gentiles. That is for the Priest of Righteousness. Our mission is to restore lost Jewish souls. Every member of the ten tribes is a Jewish soul that stood at Sinai. This is what the rabbis taught. The soul that was not at Sinai does not concern us. We have the same obligations to its possessor that we have to all men, but no more." The second candle went out. A moment later the telephone rang. No one picked it up. Observant Jews do not use telephones on the Sabbath. But by the second or third ring it struck me that, in all of China, there was no one who could be phoning us. Nor could it be Avichail"s or Micha"s families in Israel. They would not call on the Sabbath either. Even in an emergency this was permitted only if it was necessary to save a life. That left my family. The ringing stopped. Avichail continued his lesson in darkness streaked by the weak light of the lamps by the river. Damn him and his donkey dung! And his religion, with its three circles of redemption and its obligations to all men who could be made sick with worry because the flow of electrons from a telephone was comparable to the forbidden act of lighting a fire on the Sabbath. Someone knocked. Avichail broke off. Micha went to open the door. It was a chambermaid. She said something in Chinese and switched on the overhead light. Then she went to the phone, picked up the receiver, and listened for a tone. Getting one, she shrugged at our failure to respond to the switchboard, replaced the receiver, said something else in Chinese, and left the room. Avichail sat up on the bed. "Micha!" he exclaimed. "We"ll have to sleep with the light on all night. Get her back here." Micha hurried into the corridor and returned with the chambermaid. "You shouldn"t have left this on," he said, pointing to the light. He was not permitted to tell her to turn it off. She stared at him blankly. "This light. It bothers us." She regarded the light. "No good?" "No good." "Ah!" The chambermaid understood. She went to the lamp on the table and switched that on too. "What am I supposed to do now?" Micha asked. "Learn Chinese," I said. "I"m going for my walk."The caller turned out to have been Chen-Hua, who had wanted to know what time he was to come in the morning. It was our next-to-last day in China, and he had agreed to accompany me to the market and help me shop for gifts. It was raining again. Soon the daily monsoons would begin. We walked along the Jinjiang River, into which the Min emptied in the plains above Chengdu. A sluggish channel when first we saw it, it now coursed swiftly with a flotilla of refuse. Gray China grew bright in the rain. Colorful umbrellas opened like flowers, and the bicycle riders donned plastic capes of lilac and magenta. We tramped through the mud of Chengdu"s big market while Chen-Hua told me of his dream of studying computers in America. A man tried selling me a large turtle. If I ate it, he said, I would live to be a hundred. I lingered by the antique stalls. In one I fingered a necklace made of little hand-carved wooden skulls, no two of them alike. It was exquisite work, but I wasn"t sure my wife or daughters would wear skulls. "Chen-Hua, look!" From under some bric-a-brac I pulled out two wooden tablets like the ones we had seen in Chongfung. Each had five characters. Chen-Hua took them from me. "These are in ordinary Chinese," he said. "What do they say?" "They"re a pair. This one says, Shu zhong qian kun da, there is much knowledge in books. And this one, Bi xia tian di kuan, there is much to write about." He asked the stall owner about them and told me, "They"re late Ching dynasty. People hung them as decorations in their homes." So much for the Ten Commandments. "People do the same in the West," I said. "Well, that"s one mystery less." "Not really," Chen-Hua said. "We still don"t know the language of that writing in Chongfung." That was true. "There"s something else that"s mysterious," he added. "How do you explain the fact that both you Jews and the Chiang worship the same white stone god?" Could he be serious? "Chen-Hua," I said, "what makes you think we Jews worship the white stone god?" "Don"t you?" "Of course not." "But I thought . . ." Embarrassed by his blunder, he felt deceived. "Why did Rabbi Avichail make me ask all those questions if the white stone god isn"t part of your religion?" I had to laugh. It was the strangest moment of a strange trip. Avichail was right about that. Chen-Hua"s soul had been nowhere near Sinai.Copyright © 2002 by Hillel Halkin. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
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