What about "Judaism" is real?
Skinny’s people were taking their time to get back to me, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. With Sarah’s money, I rented an old minivan from my neighbor and drove out to rabbi Moishe’s warehouse on 75 Kissling Street.
I parked out front with enough distance to not be obvious but still have a clear view of the building. I had a pair of binoculars, some food and water, and even a flask of compost moonshine. I was here for the long haul, ready to spend the night if necessary.
For the first few hours, there was little to report. It was Friday morning, and there were quite a few people out. Pedestrians, a decontamination crew in yellow hazmat suits hosing down some buildings, a couple of junk peddlers pushing their carts towards Market Street…Things were just like I had seen them two weeks ago, when I first met with the rabbi. The nondescript single-story warehouse with metal bars that covered a set of tall, opaque glass windows, the alley with the dusty white van parked out front — the the same van, I was sure now more than ever, that was in the surveillance footage from the resort.
Two things had happened since my last entry. One: Tommy called. Before I left Bakersfield, I left him a bit of cash and asked him to do some snooping for me. I wanted him to ask around if anyone he knew had seen any domes out by the prison, the kind of domes that were in that photo of Misha. “I don’t need you to look too deeply. There’s gotta be people who’ve been out that way in the last year or so. Was there ever something there or not?” Last night Tommy finally got back to me. “Nope no domes. The place’s always been an empty lot…ever since the navy dismantled the entire neighborhood for building materials, I mean,” he said. “One guy, a friend of my cousin’s, does regular maintenance work at the prison a few times a month. He told me he’s sure as hell they never been any domes there or any company with no R&D department or any shit like that. So you got some bum intel, boss.”
RADIANCE, my serialized novel, continues.
After I hung up, I wondered what the whole thing could be about. Why did Misha cook up this Bakersfield R&D story? Why set up a fable about a research center and spoof photographs? Just to trick his wife? And where did he go on his business trips, if he wasn’t going down to his company’s R&D department Bakersfield? Where did he disappear to for days at a time? It didn’t really make much sense.
And speaking of his wife, Sara. The day that Audrey left, she sent over four boxes to my apartment. “For your investigation,” she explained. They were filled with books and various papers. She had found them squirreled away in a nook in Misha’s bunker office — “in a far corner of the utility closet with all the pumps and pipes.” The boxes were neatly organized. The first three of them had books — commentaries on the Torah and the Talmud, academic works on the history of ancient Judaism, Biblical archaeology and linguistics, several like antique travel books from the Holy Land… Most of the books were thick with notes scribbled in the margins — just like Misha’s Torah. The fourth box had hand written notes and pamphlets and various loose materials — organized with folders by topic: Karaites, Apocalyptic Prophesies, Illicit Centralization of God, Talmudic Degeneracy…
Figuring I’d have a lot of time to kill, I took one of the boxes with me in the van with me. Looking through it, I was impressed. It was all very meticulous, as if Misha had been writing a book or working on a dissertation. I was never as systematic about things when I worked on big projects as journalist. But it as wasn’t the OCD organization that impressed me. It was the content — or, rather, it was what the content portended…what it meant to my investigation. Until now, the only insight I had into Misha’s inner world was that single marked up Torah I had found under his couch and the religious forum he frequented before the war. But the forum only took me so far — right up until the nukes started falling. Beyond that? I really had nothing. His last few years ± everything that led up to his disappearance — have been a blank. His wife’s been no help. His old friends — at least the ones I’ve been able to track down — didn’t know, either. One thing I knew is that he had been living some sort of double life. But what kind of life, and why he was hiding it from everyone he knew…well that was the mystery at the heart of this case. I sensed that if I could answer this question, I’d be able to find out where he went. And this…well…it offered another clue.
Until now, I thought that there was some kind of midlife crisis involved. He wrote as much to his religious internet buddies before the war. He realized that his pursuit of corporate status and wealth and bureaucratic achievement hadn’t paid off in the way he thought. He felt empty, estranged from his family. He was looking for something more meaningful and durable, and that’s why he turned to religion — the Chabad-Lubavitcher sect of Judaism. As far as things went, it was all very mundane. A midlife crisis…a turning to god? This path is so common as to basically be cliche. It’s the whole Born Again phenom that people mocked. But the contents of this box showed that his religious development went deeper. No, not just deeper — the development evolved in an unexpected direction.
What do I mean? Let me give you an example from a folder titled “EVIDENCE OF REVISION (OR: WHAT EXACTLY DID MOSES WRITE?).” It had a bunch of print outs and handwritten notes, complete with diagrams and book excerpts. All of them dealt, in one way or another, with the issue of how much of the text of the Torah, which he had believed was an infallible document, could be believed.
If the text is all we have. If we believe that the text of the Torah still contains the Divine spark in it (as I do), then we have no choice but to use the text to find the truth, even if the text itself has been changed, edited, and reworked over thousands of years by human hands. And this is now our mission. This is the task that we have laid out for ourselves.
Jewish tradition has held that the Torah as a holy document was literally dictated by G-D to Moses. All the books starting from Genesis going all the way to the book of Prophets were given by G-D after he rescued them from enslavement in Egypt. There is some disagreement among the Jewish sages about the exact time and place that each book was written down. Some claim that Moses got the entire Torah while up on Mt. Sinai. Others argue that he got parts of it there, and other parts of it were transmitted to him a short time later when he was already down in the desert. Still, others claim that Moses didn’t write any of it down right away but committed it all to memory and passed it down orally for several generations exactly as G-D dictated it until it was finally written down — committed to papyrus and/or leather scrolls. But a general consensus, despite the usual bickering of the old rabbis, exists. The Torah as it exists today is the Holy Word, with each letter and each space written down exactly as it was relayed by G-D to Moses. At the synagogue on Balboa, my rabbi told me this several times: “Yes, of course Moses wrote the whole Torah down as it exists today. He wrote it down exactly as G-D told it to him.” He then sent me a link to a website — a “Torah FAQ” or something like that, and there it said something to the effect of: “Moses was the conduit for Divine communication. He received explicit instructions from G‑D and relayed precisely and without any personal interpretation or editing. At first it was likely that much of it was passed orally but it was then transcribed precisely — exactly — as G-D first relayed it to Moses. This precision is important because the Torah isn’t just an ordinary text, it contains the whole universe within it. Every word, every letter is perfect — just how G-D intended. It is why, for instance, those with proper training can use the Torah to predict the future. It contains a secret code…”
I never really thought about it deeply until I started learning Hebrew and the Torah, and getting a bit into the weeds of the history of this incredible document. Right away it was clear that something did not add up.
For one, there is no original text. There is no original papyrus or leather scroll that Moses wrote on that we can point to and say: “This is the one.” Instead, we have a patchwork of editions of the Torah — from different time frames and different Jewish sects with slight variations to them, and the earliest versions were written in a different alphabet altogether. Yes, the Hebrew that people think of Hebrew is not actually Hebrew.
