(Hillel and Shammai knock on the door of a horse stable. Inside they hear overwhelming screaming and cheers.)
Shammai: Rav Baba? Rebbe Babba?! He doesn't hear us.
(Shammai opens the stable door. Inside is Rav Babba, looking at a video images of the Nuremberg Rally from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. After three seconds, the images stop.)
Rav Baba: Komm mein kint! Shammai, you've done well.
Shammai: Not well enough it seems.
Rav Baba: It is Hashem's will you should fail, just as it was that I fail too.
Shammai: When did you ever fail?
Rav Baba: To pacify Herod, and even that was a success.
Shammai: You failed to succeed?
Baba: I succeeded to fail.
Hillel: He succeeded to fail......
Baba: It was Hashem's will that I fail, and now I see what Hashem wanted.
Hillel: Now he sees what Hashem wanted....
Shammai: What does Hashem want?
Baba: He wants the Land of Israel to fall.
(silence)
Baba: I came to Herod shortly before the Sanhedrin were massacred. The guards nearly killed me for approaching him. I told him it was not too late to repent his misdeeds, but he must do something for the Lord which only he could do.
Hillel: OK, I'll bite. What could only Herod do?
Baba: Only Herod had the funds to build the temple to the glory I thought Hashem wanted.
Shammai: You THOUGHT Hashem wanted?
Baba: I thought glory was what Hashem wanted, but almost all glory is false glory.
Hillel: You're the reason Herod built our temple?
Baba: God is the reason Herod built the temple. I was just the mouthpiece through which God inspired Herod to build the temple.
Hillel: So if I'm to understand correctly: you were the mouthpiece through which God told Herod to build the temple He doesn't want?
Baba: God wanted Herod's temple, but God wanted Herod's temple so that He may destroy it.
Shammai: God builds things so that He can destroy them?
Baba: There is a tree of life and a tree of death. God creates so that He can destroy and destroys so that He might create again.
Shammai: Master, surely our God is not so fickle.
Baba: God's constancy is often fickle to our eyes.
Shammai: Mein Rebbe, I have missed your wisdom every day for thirty-six years, but even I cannot believe you that God would be so indifferent to our essence.
Baba: You were not brought here for easy emes. He that sits in the heavens laughs at us in derision.
Shammai: Master!... Why?...
Baba: There is a world past this one, and we will know more when we arrive there. Perhaps many worlds.
Shammai: Rebbe, this is heresy!
Baba: Treat what you don't understand with a little khesed Shammai.
Shammai: The khesed you claim our god lacks?
Baba: He lacks nothing, neither khesed nor malice.
Shammai: What has become of you?
Baba: Sha, sha kint.
Shammai: You have succumbed to the Other.
Baba: I did not succumb to it, Hashem has.
Shammai: Hillel we must leave this evil place.
Hillel: I actually want to hear more.
Shammai: My master has become evil.
Hillel: I thought your master was a schmendrik, but your master may understand things we don't.
Baba: I understand nothing Hashem did not wish for me to understand.
Hillel: Rav Baba, please understand, Herod is very much alive and still more evil than you remember. He had a stroke after getting sepsis in his right arm. Since then he's had terrible brain damage and paranoia: he ordered one son executed and thrown his other two in jail. He's obsessed with a prophecy about a usurper about to be born in a house of bread, so he may be about to issue an order killing babies and young children around the country. Even if we wanted to stop him, he still has a bodyguard of 2,000.
Baba: The House of Bread is here.
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