To Whom it May Concern, I hope this letter comes to Nahor, may he be blessed with bulls potent and cows fecund, and if not Nahor then Bethuel, may he be blessed with dirt and not sand, and if not Bethuel then Laban, whom I remember only as a little pischer but I’m sure has grown into a righteous and honest man - may he too be blessed with cows and dirt and slaves cooperative.
As Avraham’s healer, chamberlain, taskmaster, and scribe, tidings of the evil eye fall to me. I’m sorry to say that the cursed fate Abba Terakh predicted for Brider Avraham rose to the breath of life. You always knew his yetzer to see invisible things, and perhaps wisely, you sent Brider Avraham away to carry on with his meshuggas somewhere else. I’ve done everything I can to lead him back to the better yetzers of our nature, but his vision of an invisible, silent god is long since more vivid to him than the dwellers of his house. Every year, the god gets less silent, and he’s conversed with it all day every day for fifty years.
It all seemed so benign, we told ourselves, and as his faithful bondsmen we pretended to believe everything he saw. We sacrificed three times a year to Avraham’s god in whom we don’t really believe, we prayed to this god we can’t see for a couple hours every Saturday, we gave money to plant trees in some place Avraham keeps talking about called the State of Israel, and sent our children to Hebrew school every Sunday - where for all we know all they did was play sports.
It’s all been well and good until last week when the invisible god commanded Avraham to kill little Yitzhak, burn him, and eat him. What a shandeh! Everybody loved little ‘Tzakhi, though he was 37 and almost four cubits tall so really he wasn’t so little anymore. And look, I know that this isn’t actually weird behavior. Everybody sacrifices their children, but for Avraham, this is really weird because, as I’m sure you remember, he was the bokher who made enemies by yelling at everybody that nobody should sacrifice their children. And it’s one thing when you get rid of them when they’re two or three, but by the time they’re 37, they should probably be left alone. Anyway, Tzachi was friendly, he was nice, he never raised his voice or his hand, he always wanted to help, he always stood up for the slaves even when they were weak or lazy. Everybody liked him, and even Avraham must have known we would stop him if we’d ever heard about what the voice told him, but everybody saw that week that Avraham was peculiarly verklempt even for our beloved meshuggener, may he be blessed with a hole in the head that balances against the one which is already there.
I trust Nahor and Bethuel you are as alright with my saying all this about Avraham as you were when we left, since Nahor you promised that it was imperative I speak my mind to Avraham to make him remember which world is the real world. For sixty-two years, I’ve been Avraham’s most faithful bondsman, exactly as I swore in blood to Nahor and Haran. I’ve taken every eruption from the god of anger, every attack from the god of fear, every fistblow and whiplash from that amoretz with smiles. Every time he heard the voice I pretended the voice was real as though he were still the boy who broke Abba Terakh’s idol.
The problem though is that Tzachi’s mother really loved him. After we left Ur she spent the next twenty-five years trying to have a child and had to watch as all those concubines Avraham geshtupped got pregnant - and in all fairness, most of them were the maidlakh you introduced him to before we left and his children are all still alive and have kinder and grandchildren of their own by now that Sarah has to watch every day. So Sarah knew that the problem was her rather than Avraham and understandably loved her only son. Well, when Sarah heard that Avraham killed their son, she died on the spot. Who can blame her? That son was a lot of work and not just for her!
It’s probably about thirty-eight years ago that you got that letter from Avraham, saying that three angels came to him to announce to him he was going to have a child. Let me tell you, they were no angels. They were Canaanite healers that I sent for to examine Sarah. Sure enough, it was exactly what I thought it was. The problem was that special diet Avraham was always such a fanatic about where nobody eats shellfish or pork or most parts of the animal. The healers came for six weeks, I explained to them that Avraham was a little fertummelt and to just go along with it. So Avraham almost immediately asked if they were angels. They looked at me and I just shrugged so they said yes, so then they were angels! And when they wanted a little butter to go with their meat, would Avraham really say no?
Two of them would distract Avraham during the day and every day they made sure Avraham ate plenty of oranges and pomegranates, and they served him some tea from the East they called ‘ginseng.’ while the other one would cook Sarah a special meal. They didn’t know which meal would work but they promised me that one of them would. They fed her boiled octopus and fish eggs, they fed her pig liver and testicles, and at first, when Sarah got disgusted with the idea of eating testicles, they ground it into a powder and served it to her in a potion! And while Avraham ate the good cuts of the veal and lamb, they gave her the heart and the kidney. They sawed the bones of the animals to get the blood inside and and put that special blood into a stew, they even made a broth out of shellfish. Every night they told Sarah to go to Avraham so he could schtup her while wearing damp wool boiled in ass’s milk. I’m sure you remember, Sarah was always very pretty but for years and years she barely ate a thing. She told me she hadn’t eaten for years because she hated Avraham’s diet, but this was the best food she’d eaten in forty years! Suddenly she looked much healthier and wouldn’t you know it, she was pregnant.
Anyway, that was all almost forty years ago, and it’s been more than sixty years since Avraham was banished rom Ur and we his servants laid eyes upon our beloved mudbricks and tombs and cuneiform documents, An & Enlil and Enki be praised. We all long to return and eagerly await the day Brider Avraham comes back to his senses. ‘Next year in Ur’ we all chant in secret, and now more than ever await the second coming of Brider Avraham’s sanity.
But Brider Avraham’s good senses seem farther away than ever. After Sarah dropped dead, he too dropped to the ground, and we thought he was also dead. I’m slightly ashamed to say we secretly rejoiced as we believed the time of our deliverance was at hand, but Avraham came back to us, yet when he returned, he was even less Avraham. Divine Nergal seems to have taken from him use of an entire side of his body. He no longer can walk nor ride, and he can only speak out of the side of his mouth. Avraham now barely speaks, believing that he misheard the invisible god and was justly punished by him for killing and eating his son.
Anyway, I’m sorry this letter is so long but the reason I write you is because I have an idea and an urgent plea to make things right. In addition to the physical maladies Nergal inflicted upon him, Nergal took from Avraham his short-term memory, and it is only a matter of time before all memory of the sacrifice is no more. In a few months, even were we to tell him that he killed Yitzhak, he would forget after ten minutes and ask ‘Where’s Yitzhak?’
So it is only a matter of time before the Canaanites were to discover that Avraham is demented and Yitzhak is dead, and we are therefore leaderless. We long to return to Ur, but we know that so long as Avraham is alive, we are banished; and therefore dead men, sitting and squabbling in the Judean Desert, unable to elect a leader for war or even organize for proper training.
It’s been roughly twenty-five years since Sarah entreated Brider Avraham to banish Yishmael and Hagar and we sent him to Ur to live as a servant in the House of Nahor. But at the time Yishmael was near his thirteenth birthday, and a spitting image of his father, just as Yitzhak was until our divinely inspired nudnik put him to death. The seed of Avraham is obviously strong even if the brain is feeble, and if the physical resemblance continues, then Yishmael must look exactly the spitting image of both Avraham and Yitzhak.
Please. I ask, I beg, that the House of Nahor send Yishmael and Hagar back to Hevron, where I believe Avraham will immediately recognize Yishmael not as Yishmael, whom he has not seen in a generation, but as Yitzhak. We then may marry Hagar to Avraham as perhaps she always should have been, and while everyone will recognize her as Hagar, she can live under an assumed name as Brider Avraham’s second wife and continue to take care of her son who will pass as Yitzhak, and our enemies shall be none the wiser.
Your most devoted servant who prays every day to the East for his return,
Eliezer
PS: The two servants with Avraham at the sacriice, Paebel and Keret, ran away from the site the moment they bound Tzachi and told me everything. They are the ones coming to you with this letter, and they’re both as illiterate as a pillar of salt. They do not know its contents, but it is vitally important you kill them both as soon as you finish this letter. They’ll understand.
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