So I started on my way to Haran, it was a shit journey. They say the Levanese coast is beautiful, I wouldn't know. I just wanted to get to Haran as quickly as humanly conceivable, and I could conceive of a lot of things happening on the way. One of them already did happen when that piece of shit Eliphaz came up to kill me. He was a smarkatiner yingle as a kid, he's an asshole now.
I really did want him to kill me. I wanted to die, no question of that. I meant to die, I thought about doing it every day of that journey. The only thing that got me through was the idea of what might eat my corpse. It's not fair that Abraham and Sarah get a cave and a proper burial, and just in case there's ever a resurrection they can walk around with a whole body. Me? I would just get picked apart by some vulture in two or three days and my bones would scatter everywhere and if some kind of revelation's at hand I'm nothing but a drumstick.
So, yeah, that dream... fuck if I know. Angels going up, angels going down, angels going all around... it's just a fucking ladder. Everybody asks me what it means, I think it means I could have charged them a lot of money as a motivational speaker and people would have eaten that shit up, at least until they talked to me and realized I didn't have much motivation in me to begin with.
It is fucking tough being the grandson of Abraham. Esau agrees. Our dad was fine, he clearly didn't get me but he tried hard enough, harder than I've tried with a few of mine, I could've done better to them, we all know that. You bask in the glow of Hashem long enough and eventually you think even your khara smells beautiful. Dad had the same problem, and Abraham? Well, God made him meshuggeh so was he ever gonna be a good dad?...
Mameh was, well she's just Bubbie, still sitting around the campfire, one hundred... what the fuck is it now, sixty-seven? sixty-eight? Always up in your business and mine. Nothing's ever good enough for her but she cares, and look, even if we've spent the last hundred twenty years bickering I owe her a lot. She let me live on the land for seventy-seven years before I got to Kharan and made my money, Before I was 'Israel Abramowitz' to the world I was just the 'idiot son Yaakov' who needed setting up in business.
Oh god, what a n'dot it was getting to Lavan. Dealing with that ganav was bad enough, but the journey there was the worst part. If you think the trip to Egypt is bad, try getting to the Armenian highlands. You gotta go through the Surian coastal mountain range, climb one, then the next, then the next. They're beautiful: trees on all of them with lots of green valleys and farmland, but you don't give a shit when you're exhausted and mosquitoes are eating you up everywhere, the animals you kill all have fleas and you've got athlete's foot from getting sandals wet that were already falling apart.
So I went to sleep early that night. I guess I had a sleep deficit, but it was at a very high altitude, I wasn't just tired, just feeling loopy all day. It was one of the few days on that trip I wasn't hella depressed, and I was making very good time. But my neck was bothering me like you wouldn't believe from field dressing all that Surian brush-tailed moose. It was just a miserable time generally but that was frankly one of the better days. Maybe we all should have settled in the mountains...
So I gather a bunch of rocks as an 'orthotic pillow' and I go to sleep. A bunch of rocks became one rock. I've never been a sleepwalker but I have my own theory what happened... but you'd think from the way the Children of Babel acted when I told them about it that Hashem himself was making a cameo. The next night, it did seem a bit like he was making a cameo. Not him, but everybody else: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Abdiel... all the el's... and they were just... doin' their thing, up and down. You'd think they'd have somewhere better to be, but no, they just hang out on a latter. Maybe it's an exercise thing...
But that wasn't the memorable moment, and here, Binyomin, I'm gonna tell you something I think nobody's ever known, unless the angels were still there, which I guess is always a slight possibility. Everybody thinks it was an angel. I never thought it was an angel, I pretended to agree with everybody, but here's the truth...
A few days later, another mountain, this time around the Armenian border, around sundown I spot a hermit in the mountains. He must have been about the same age I am now. Pure white beard and wither, and he was naked. You saw every bone on him, and he looked unmistakably like Zaydie, right down to where the skin cancers grew. But he had food, and he prepared it: deer, gazelle, and yeah, the usual goat. Don't tell anybody but I ate the deer... that's not the secret don't worry...
For a hermit, he was a surprisingly chatty guy, and for an old guy, surprisingly spry, but he seemed more than a little crazy. All those hermits are, what can you do, and with our august lineage we're not exactly in a position to judge... All the usual questions go back and forth about where we're from, and he claims he's from Levanon. I asked him what he's doing around here, and suddenly he goes very quiet. So I change the subject and we start talking about our old days tending sheep and the various techniques we got good at, but when he heard that I'm from the family of the one true god, dude had a freakout. Just pacing around the fire, practically running, and screaming to himself, not in Aramaic or Akkadian, in Hebrew! Talking about how Hashem has finally found him and is going to complete the sacrifice.
Sacrifice? What sacrifice? Another sacrifice? Another HUMAN sacrifice? Everybody knows that elter-Zaydie went meshuggeh and tried to kill Zaydie and stopped at the last minute, and then he went to get a ram.
Yeah your elter-Zaydie was meshuggeh and kind of a schmuck: as you know, this is often what fathers are. His mind was already slipping at that point, but it was right around then that he had the stroke and semi-vegetative for a couple years. So, what happens?
I asked him, are you the son of Abraham? I'm nearly as freaked at this point as he is, but instead of saying yes or no he starts bleating like a ram. So then I have no idea why I'm asking this, but I ask, 'are you Isaac?' The bleating gets louder and he starts crawling on all fours.
I have no idea what to do at this point, but by then I thought I'd lost the birthright and the blessing to Eliphaz, I'm as penniless and homeless as this guy and had no more chance of going home than he does. I was running from a father who never paid much attention to me and running to relatives my mom always said were dirtbags.
What am I supposed to do in that moment? I am face to face with the man I think is Isaac which means my father is either not my father or not at least who he says he is. Something in me was breaking, and I asked him to bless me. He stopped bleating and said no. I said 'bless me' again. He said no. He suddenly stands up and says he has to leave.
I'm not letting this guy leave. Not without either the truth or without a blessing. So I block him. He tries to run away, I run after him and catch him. We wrestle for... what? Forty minutes? An hour twenty? I was exhausted by minute 4, but this ancient apparent uncle of mine had the strength to wrestle the whole time. At one point I was sure he broke my leg but somehow I could keep going.
Finally the sun was coming up, and I said 'we gotta stop this and I have to get on the road. It's been real.' So he stops and at this point he says that there's no point after all this for not blessing me. He told me since I'm from Israel, call myself Israel, the land will bless me and he misses it.
I hope you miss us Binyomin. You've been a hostage now for 100 days, we think you're still alive but we have no way of knowing, and I'm going to keep writing you these letters until you come home.
Love,
Abba
No comments:
Post a Comment