Chapter Twenty-Four
“Far be it from Thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked, that so the righteous should
be as the wicked; far be it from Thee; shall not the
Judge of all the earth do justly?”
It was eight-thirty in the morning.
Yiftach woke up and began to prepare for the most important day of his life.
He put on his lucky boxer shorts that Ricardo had sent him and finished getting dressed.
As he faced himself in the bathroom mirror, he thought about Melody.
He didn’t know what she had decided about going to the kibbutz, and he tried to think of what would become of them if she did go to meet Eitan.
Only in the courtroom at one-thirty in the afternoon, before the session begins and the verdict is pronounced, would he see her and learn what had happened and what their future holds.
He breathed heavily as he got into the car and began his last trip to Jerusalem.
Melody also started out on her journey and, as she drove to the kibbutz, her mind once again kept reviewing the complexities of the past. Memories of Eitan surfaced and she felt that their shared history could never be fully erased.
What was unfolding now was nothing more than the conclusion of a saga that had begun three years earlier.
The thoughts that she had harbored then, she had turned into written words.
Now those words were being turned into action, which would bring the long waiting period to an end, and this end—like all ends—comprises a new beginning whose contents, for now, she cannot know.
She reached the meeting point, stepped out of her car and stood there, silent.
She felt as if clamps of ice were closing in on her cynical, tired heart.
Her chest rose and fell quickly. A shudder of fear up and down her spine.
Slowly, she spread her arms out to the sides and, as she filled her lungs with the clear country air, she felt as if they were melting inside her.
The entrance to Kibbutz Regavim was there before her.
A chill ran through her, her heart was beating like a drum, and she struggled to remain standing on her feet.
It is always like that at times of chaos—one doesn’t fight against an external enemy but rather against one’s own body.
Her irrational hope did not leave her and she anticipated seeing Eitan’s image once again.
She began walking towards the third cypress tree, as she promised she would, but felt as if she were walking towards a humiliating surrender.
Suddenly, she thought she actually saw someone approaching!
Is it he? The one whose love she believed would be as eternal as the moon?
The time was 1:20 p.m. The place—the Supreme Court in Jerusalem.
Yiftach lifted his head as Melody walked towards him.
She was pale, with an empty look in her eyes, and her gait seemed unstable.
Her eyes were wet with tears and she did not look directly at him.
She didn’t need to. She came close to him with heavy steps, her head hanging low, her spirits crushed and her soul empty.
Her agony was too great to bear, she felt nothing but the pain in her heart.
Her body was hollow. Yiftach placed both his hands on her face and could feel the pulse beating in her temples, or perhaps it was his fingers quivering on her face.
“You went…” he said.
“And you… you didn’t try to stop me…”
He had no need to interpret her defeated look.
By simply glancing at her, he understood all that had happened.
He knew now that she had waited and waited to once again see Eitan’s handsome face, near the third cypress tree at the entrance to the kibbutz, as she had written in her letter to him.
But he didn’t come. He surely forgot. He most certainly had long ago erased her from his memory.
His longing for her existed only in the imagined world she had created in her mind for over three years.
Those were three years in which she had allowed her tears to distort her sight, years in which she had lost her way inside a futile past, pacing in the footsteps of time that was forever gone.
She didn’t know that just one week after they had parted, he had begun philandering with other women and, a month later, he had totally forgotten the letter she had placed in his hand.
Only now did she understand that she must go on with her life and remain far away from Eitan and the kibbutz.
“What would you like now?” he asked her.
“To bury my longing for Eitan with the dead, and to fly with you beyond the pain.”
“Fly where?”
“Far away. But first, finish your work. Leave her to die. Slowly, painfully. Slay that bitch and leave no remnant of her.” She did not restrain herself. “Let’s pray that she is sent to prison,” she concluded and almost collapsed beside him.
Yiftach turned to look at Love, who smiled at him sarcastically and disdainfully.
He felt like punching her. His hands were clenched into fists but he gave up the idea.
His eyes were malicious. How easy it is to touch evil, he thought to himself, to cross the line for a fleeting second and immediately be brought back to the ‘right’ side.
To believe that a fantasy of such moral turpitude can be only momentary, nothing but a slight lapse and that, in fact, he always belonged to the ‘good guys.’
“Here is yet another heart that you shattered, another soul that you nearly—just nearly—destroyed.” He came close to her and continued.
“You are still smiling, but try to imagine in your distorted mind what awaits you behind bars. There you will have no power or respect. You will be tortured and disgraced. You will be alone and pathetic, like a disgusting worm crawling on a filthy floor. You probably think that future generations will clear your name and set you free. The future generations, my dear, will never know who you are, who you were. We are about to erase any memory of you. Just a bit more, just another moment and there will be nothing left of you. You will be without a past and without a future. In fact, Earth will continue to rotate on its axis as if you had never existed. You still don’t get it, do you? Your annihilation is our resurrection.”
The judges entered the courtroom and the air was thick with tension. Sabat looked at the audience as if they were a stage setting created just for him, and silence spread throughout the room. He began speaking in a deep, pleasant, confident voice, holding everyone’s absolute attention.
“We have sat here for countless hours in this courtroom listening to both sides, within the framework of a fascinating case that humankind has tried for the first time in history.” In those moments Sabat did not actually change, but the tone of his voice and the expression on his face seemed to hold warmth, understanding and more compassion for the downtrodden and the weakness of others.
“You brought before us mutual accusations, you voiced weighty legal arguments and presented well-backed theses.
Yet, despite all these, and despite the many hours spent listening to these proceedings, we feel that our feet remain rooted in the same spot from which we began this journey.
I admit… I admit without shame—we look at the defendant and we know that we did not succeed in deciphering her secret.
Although we tried, we were unable to reach an understanding of that feeling that beats in the heart of a person in love, that causes their heart to beat in a kind of wild, uncontrollable way and causes their brain to deviate from its natural course.
We were unable to explain why we, who look at a person in love, are willing to accept with understanding and forgiveness the extreme and destructive actions they committed that, had they not been done in the name of love, would have led to their punishment and removal from society.
Simply put—the answer to the question ‘What is love?’ is still a mystery to us.
“However, if we look around us, we will discover that we are in good company.
Countless highly gifted people have dealt with love—painters and sculptors, poets and writers, philosophers and clerics, psychologists and neurologists.
And now also we—attorneys and judges. We all know how to describe the feeling it creates in our bodies and minds, but none of us have ever given a sharp, clear and well-honed explanation for this phenomenon which is called Love.
“Perhaps that is the case because love is not a simple matter, and perhaps that is the case because, in fact, there is no need for any explanation. Whoever feels love in their life will never seek to have it explained and, for those who never experienced its essence, no words could ever properly explain it. Who among us does not want to love? Who among us does not want to be loved? Even God in heaven requests it. ‘And thou shalt love thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might,’ as our daily prayer of the shema instructs us.” For the first time, Judge Sabat seemed a bit confused.