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From Chapter Two: Journey to the Center
....Much of what followed came as a surprise: Without quite realizing it, I had
entered an arena with dimensions far beyond those I already understood. The questions
concerning the scientific accuracy of the codes, and their religious implications,
sat atop a volatile subterranean cache of entirely different, highly fluid concerns
and interests, now suddenly mixed together: a major international business intrigue,
risk to personal reputations, even, indirectly, Mideast terrorism and counterterrorism--not
to mention large sums of money. The only element of a classic thriller not hinted
at was sexual scandal. I remembered that I had been warned--laughingly--by Yehoshua
Hecht, a friend in Connecticut who is himself an Orthodox rabbi with close ties to
Israeli circles, that in Israel, as elsewhere in the Middle East, everything takes
on a Byzantine quality: there were always wheels within wheels. He could not have
been more correct.
....[T]he scope of the imminent battles was far larger, and had swelled more
rapidly than anyone had anticipated. No one could quite keep up with press of events
and there was wide disagreement over how best to proceed. The tension was enormous.
(This had been part of the urgency behind my summons to Israel.) Although I myself
had been politely insisting for almost two years that such an eruption was looming
on the horizon, the speed of it took even me by surprise. The codes community, almost
completely cloistered within the inward life of Torah studies, was utterly unprepared,
and was now in a commotion.....Among other things, rumor had it that, after a four-year
hiatus, a man apparently hostile to Witztum and Aish HaTorah had once again turned
up on the Israeli scene just three weeks before and had wrangled a private meeting
with Benjamin Netanyahu's father--and was pushing for a meeting with the new Likud
Prime Minister himself--to tell him what he had in fact already been allowed to tell
the Mossad: that the codes foretold a soon-to-come nuclear conflagration in the Middle
East. The very idea that the Mossad had listened to such nonsense should have been
completely beyond credibility were it not for the fact that it was also widely rumored
that during the Gulf War some kind of super-secret use had in fact been made of the
codes by the Mossad. Not surprisingly, this man was seen as a time-bomb ticking in
the background, and he had everyone nervous.
But of most immediate concern was the newly organized effort by a growing body
of intellectually superbly-armed academic critics to destroy the credibility of the
codes--and inevitably, therefore, the reputation of the researchers. In fact, an
unnamed group or individual had placed a large sum of money at the disposal of this
team of mathematicians and statisticians for the sole purpose of proving once and
for all not just that the codes were meaningless, but that possibly the entire scheme
was concocted by presenting research only on carefully crafted data sets selected
over many years from a mountain of concealed failures.
The people I have spoken to on the "anti" side (many of whom wish to
remain off the record until their own investigations are completed and published)
acknowledge that it's possible for such hidden failures to have accumulated unintentionally--the
result more of wishful thinking and selective attention than deliberate concealment.
But below the professional restraint, one sometimes detects a note of suspicion.
After completing rounds of meetings over a couple of days, and feeling somewhat
dazed by these complexities, I went over to the Aish HaTorah yeshiva...and walked
outside to take in the sun. I was startled to see that the school occupied one of
the most coveted sites in the world: it looked out directly on the Western Wall of
the Temple Mount.
The plaza below was teeming with people of every imaginable color and nationality.
Both Jews and non-Jews stood before the Wall, offering prayers: "It shall be
a house of worship for all the nations," in the words of the Hebrew Scriptures.
I heard a distinctively Jewish voice, speaking loudly in English, to a group of tourists
he was guiding: "We will go down to the Wall where you may offer your prayers
to God. This is your place to pray as well as ours," he emphasized. I turned
to look. He was addressing a group of black Christians, most dressed in African garb.
My heart leapt a bit, and I decided to follow his instructions myself.
I headed down to the broad plaza in front of the Wall, past the numerous checkpoints
manned by the relaxed boys and girls of the Israeli army, all carrying loaded Uzi
assault rifles, and stopped a meter or two away from it. The Wall stood before me,
ancient and massive, the huge cubic stones from which it was built long since worn
smooth at eye level by the generations of my people who had likewise stood before
it, pouring their hearts out, touching and kissing the stone tenderly--first for
the horrendous destruction of our nation that occurred nearly two thousand years
ago under the Romans; then continually over the centuries for all manner of suffering,
personal and national, that followed ever since. I walked up to it and reached my
hand out, comforting it, as it comforted me: Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people.
As I stood facing the wall and musing, tears flowed unbidden from my eyes, blending
into the vast river of history. I quietly recited the eighteen ancient benedictions
of the Shemoneh-Esrai or Amidah, the lengthy prayer always said standing that forms
the core of almost every worship service. Before my eyes I could see literally thousands
of scraps of paper upon which were written the hopes and dreams and griefs of people
from all over the world. I had prepared mine, too, to place between the stones, but
waited until the end of my prayer to do so. Then I, too, gently kissed the stone
before me, found a place for my folded prayer, and turned to go....
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