Sam Bourne 4-Book Thriller Collection

‘Rabbi Freilich?’ It was TC. ‘Do you think you could start at the beginning?’

The rabbi led them to the front of the room, where a desk had been set out as if for a teacher to invigilate an exam. The three of them sat around it.

‘As you know, the Rebbe in his later years spoke often about Moshiach, about the Messiah. He gave long talks at our weekly farbrengen touching on this theme. Tova Chaya will also know how we preserved those talks for posterity.’

TC took her cue. ‘Because he spoke on the sabbath, the Rebbe could not be tape-recorded or filmed. That’s not allowed. So we relied on an ancient system. In the synagogue would be three or four people chosen for their amazing memories. They would stand just a few yards away from the Rebbe, usually with their eyes closed, listening to every word, memorizing what he said. Then, the minute the sabbath was over they would gather together and kind of spew out their memories, while one of them would scribble it all down. They would get it out of their heads as quickly as they could. While they were doing it, they would check what they remembered against each other, adding a word here, correcting a word there. I can still picture it: these guys were incredible. They could listen to a three-hour speech by the Rebbe and recite it off by heart. They were called choyzers, literally “returners”. The Rebbe would say it, they would play it back. They were human tape recorders.’

‘And, Tova Chaya, do you remember who was the most brilliant choyzer of them all?’

TC’s eyes suddenly widened, as a long-buried memory came back. ‘But he was just a boy.’

‘It’s true. But he became a choyzer soon after he had reached the age of Bar Mitzvah. He was just thirteen when he began relaying the words of the Rebbe. He had a special gift.’ Freilich faced Will. ‘We are speaking about Yosef Yitzhok.’

‘He could memorize whole speeches, just like that?’

‘He always said he could not memorize whole speeches. Only the words of the Rebbe. When the Rebbe spoke, he would make himself, his own thoughts, disappear. He would try to insert himself into the mind of the Rebbe, to become an extension of him. That was his technique. No one else could do it the way he could. The Rebbe had a special affection for him.’ Rabbi Freilich rolled back into his seat, his eyes closed. Will could only guess, but this grief looked genuine.

‘As I said, in the last few years, the Rebbe began to speak more and more about Moshiach. Telling us to prepare for the coming of Messiah, reminding us that Messiah was a central belief in Judaism. That it was not some abstract, remote point of theology but that it was real. He wanted us to believe it, that Moshiach could be with us in the here and now.

‘No one knew this teaching of the Rebbe’s better than Yosef Yitzhok. He heard it week after week. But it was more than hearing. It was absorbing. He was ingesting this material, taking it into himself. And then, in the last days of the Rebbe, Yosef Yitzhok – who was a brilliant scholar in his own right – noticed something.

‘He thought back to all the talks the Rebbe had given on the theme of the Messianic age and he discerned a pattern. Very often the Rebbe would quote a pasuk—’

‘A verse.’

‘Thank you, Tova Chaya. Yes, the Rebbe would quote a verse from Deuteronomy. Tzedek, tzedek tirdof.’

‘Justice, justice shall you pursue,’ TC murmured.

‘The English translation the books give is, “Follow justice and justice alone, so that you may live and possess the land the Lord your God is giving you.” But it was that word, tzedek, that caught Yosef Yitzhok’s attention. To use it so often, and always in the same context. It was as if the Rebbe was reminding us of something.’

‘He wanted you to remember the tzaddikim. The righteous men.’

‘That’s what Yosef Yitzhok thought. So he went back through the texts, examining them intensely. And that’s how he saw something else, something even more intriguing.’

Will leaned forward, his eyes boring into the rabbi’s.

‘In close proximity to the quotation – tzedek, tzedek tirdof – he would offer another quotation. Not the same one every time, but from the same two sources. Either he would cite the Book of Proverbs—’

‘Chapter ten?’

‘Yes, Mr Monroe. Chapter ten. That’s right. You knew all this already?’

‘Think of it as an informed guess. Don’t let me interrupt you; please, continue.’

‘Well, as you say, the Rebbe would either quote a verse from Proverbs, Chapter 10, or he would quote from the prophets. Specifically, Isaiah, Chapter 30. Now that got Yosef Yitzhok very excited. Because kabbalists know one important thing about Isaiah, Chapter 30, Verse 18. It ends with the word lo, the Hebrew for “for him”. The full phrase is “blessed are all they who wait for Him”. But the real significance of the word—’

‘—is the way it is spelled.’

‘Tova Chaya has beaten me to it. The word lo is made up of two characters, Mr Monroe. Lamad and vav. It spells thirty-six. Now the Rebbe was a careful speaker. He did not say things by accident. He did not pull quotations out of the air. Yosef Yitzhok was convinced there was a deliberate intent.

‘So he went through every transcript. And, sure enough, the Rebbe spoke of tzedek, followed immediately by a verse from one of those two chapters, thirty-five times. By that method, he left us with thirty-five different verses.’

‘But—’

‘I know what you’re thinking, Mr Monroe, and you are right. There are thirty-six righteous men. We’ll come to that. For the moment, Yosef Yitzhok has thirty-five verses, staring at him from the page. He wonders what they could mean. And then he remembers the stories that children like him and like you, Tova Chaya, were raised on. Stories of the founder of Hassidism, the Baal Shem Tov; stories of Rabbi Leib Sorres.’

‘Men of such greatness, they were privileged to know the whereabouts of the righteous men.’ Will looked at Tova Chaya as she spoke: she had, he was sure, worked it all out.

‘Exactly. Few men knew the mind of the Rebbe as intimately as Yosef Yitzhok, and he also knew the Rebbe’s worth. He knew that he was one of the great men of Hassidic history. Some of the very greatest had been let in on this divine secret. It was not absurd to imagine the Rebbe would be one of them.’

‘So Yosef Yitzhok reckoned the Rebbe knew who the thirty-six were. And he goes further: he thinks these thirty-five verses he quoted are clues to their identity?’

‘Exactly, Will. Yosef Yitzhok has this thought in the very closing days of the Rebbe’s life, when the Rebbe is too ill to answer any questions. He can barely speak.’

‘So what does he do?’

‘He stares at the thirty-five verses for days on end. He is sure the Rebbe wants them to be understood, that he is passing this information on for a reason. So he is determined to break them open, so to speak, to find out what is inside. He looks at them from every angle. He translates the letters into numeric values; he adds; he multiplies. He reproduces them as anagrams. But of course there is a logical problem.

‘How could the identities of the righteous men be contained in those verses? The identities change in every generation. Yet the verses stay stubbornly the same. Even if, say, verse twenty included the name of tzaddik number twenty for this year, where would we find the name of tzaddik number twenty for the year 2020 or 2050 or, in the past, 1950 and 1850? How could the names of men who are alive today be concealed in a text that remains static?

‘And that’s when Yosef Yitzhok’s remarkable powers truly shone through. He remembered the answer.’

‘You mean the Rebbe had already told him?’

‘Not directly, of course. But the Rebbe had given him the answer. Yosef Yitzhok had heard it. All he needed to do was to remember it. And do you know what it was? It was the last line of the last talk at the last farbrengen the Rebbe ever addressed. “Space depends on time. Time reveals space.” Those were his last words in public.’

There was a pause.

‘Incredible,’ said TC.

‘You’ve lost me, I’m afraid,’ said Will, suddenly the dunce of the class.

‘Don’t worry. Yosef Yitzhok was baffled too. These were beautiful sentences. But they were an enigma. Space depends on time. Time reveals space. What does that mean? That’s when Yosef Yitzhok came to me, letting me in on his theory. The Rebbe often spoke in riddles, in elliptical sentences that might take many hours – many years even – to study and interpret. Yosef Yitzhok spent a long night working away at these sentences. And then he had what you would call a brainwave and what I would call a helping hand from HaShem.

‘You may know that the Rebbe was a very close follower of science and technology. He read Scientific American and Nature and a whole variety of journals. He was always up to date on the latest developments, in neuroscience, in biochemistry. But he had a special interest in technology. He loved gadgets! He never owned them: he was the least materialistic man you could ever know. But he liked to know about them.

‘Yosef Yitzhok knew that about the Rebbe. And that’s what gave him his idea. Here, I’ll show you.’

Rabbi Freilich reached for a worn, leather-bound book and thumbed rapidly through the pages. He found the page and then the verse he was looking for.

‘Now what is the year?’

Will was about to answer when TC got there first. ‘Five thousand seven hundred and sixty-eight.’

Will frowned. ‘What?’

‘It’s the Hebrew calendar,’ TC explained. ‘It dates back to creation. Jews believe the world has been in existence for less than six thousand years.’