PSI Blue by Robert Walker

Asian American Detective Aurelia Hiyakawa is the FBI’s secret weapon—and Rea, as her friends call her, will continue to thwart horrendous crime committed by the planet’s worst monsters if only she can keep ahead of the IRS, her child’s rebellious nature, a troublesome friend with wedding plans to marry a lowlife shiftless cretin, and if she can keep her Victorian bed and breakfast’s roof from falling through before the mortgage comes due. Unable to balance her bank book, this psychic detective for the FBI’s Psychic Sensory Investigation Unit (PSI) is absolutely one hundred percent ON when she makes multiple “blue sense hits” and is herself a stormy force to be reckoned with as a blow against evil in all its undeniable forms.

P R O L O G U E

The child, hopelessly tied, furiously fought against his bonds, but without result, and he felt dizzy from going round on the merry-go-round with the wooden seahorses, tortoises, dolphins, and other water animals. And he’d tired of hearing the demon ask, “Are you havin’ fun yet?” and then slapping on more paint each time he went around on the machine, and then the madman just cackling like a delighted old hag.

In a single turn of mind, the demon had taught him to hate the once loved joyous sounds of the carnival, as this particular fun-land had become a wicked carnival, creating a poisonous hatred that spread like jet black ink over the boy’s mind—a murderous hatred for his jailer.

This spreading poison of anger, horror, and hatred seared his young brain as if it lay on a hot Arizona pavement, and the mix of music, movement, and terror of a painful bondage—the cold hard reality of handcuffs--with the stench of paint the monster slapped his face with, turned the dark-skinned boy to thinking how high his level of hatred must rise before it became real--as real on the outside as on the inside? What would it take for his hatred to have a corporeal counterpart—someone big enough and strong enough and powerful enough to kill this satanic madman who taunted him and meant only harm to come. He felt the terror rising; he’d been led here by the nose, been made a fool, and amid the pretty sights and sounds had not realized that his body and soul were being bartered over—that he’d stood idle while being traded off like a slave to the madman, who was busy painting his terrible mural at the time.

The mural ran all along all the walls of the round room at the center of which stood the old merry-go-round. Somehow the massive mural had grown as if organically from a peaceful and lovely depiction of angels in a park holding onto one another and kissing. This scene stood at the center on two sides. But the carnival man--who called himself Carnivore Man--now busily and obsessively created a deplorable, grim red and orange hellish world in which Satan straddled all of the lost souls of Hades—lost souls who lay not beneath a usual dark subterranean cauldron normally depicted but rather bodies in a row below a sea of fire. All of the art was being painted over scenes portraying turn of the century cityscapes with busy stevedores working to unload packed ocean going vessels docked at the end of market street, people milling about smoking, shouting, haggling over scales and prices.

Carnivore Man was having trouble getting the sea of fire and foam to rise off the wall, to ‘sing’ as it were, to look as real as he wanted. At one instant, he pretended to want young Toby’s thoughts, and how Toby might improve the depiction of Satan’s sea if he were the artist. “What can we do with it? What should we add…what should we take out? What do you think, Toby?” When all the while, he really didn’t give a rat’s ass about what Toby thought, and all the same while, Toby suggested a white to gray foam here, a lilac blush, it had all been a charade down to the maniac’s sly use of the pronoun we.

“You be good,” he slapped on the last of the paint, covering Toby’s hair and head and the last unpainted portion of his face—even as the squealing old merry-go-round took him off again for another revolution.

“You be good, boy, and maybe I’ll let you live,” he said just before Toby spit in his eye.

Toby Slayter, whose thirteenth birthday it was, had awakened to a kaleidoscope of color and the sound of the Calliope music filling this place and his mind; so loud in fact, it seemed to fill his every orifice, pore, and cell, and yet no one came rushing to the boy’s rescue here in this strange back-of-the-yards area of the carnival. No one wanted to challenge Satan.

Sometime earlier, during the course of the evening, he’d been drugged and staked here--tied to a hard, cold brass post that spiked through the backside and out the stomach of a carved walrus. A surreal sort of crucifixion for the unfeeling walrus, but an even unhappier circumstance for Toby. As the boy found himself restrained here on the outer edge of insanity and the wood platform, his ankles dangling over the side, his shoes and clothes replaced with thick oil-based paint, he knew he’d been consigned to Carnivore Man’s Hell. He’d been placed on the outer ring of ‘the ocean’ with no sign of the saving grace of the Blue Lady except as he saw her go by amid the painted figures on a myriad of murals in this place—murals presumably painted by his conqueror. But Toby knew that the murals stood still, that it was he and the damn walrus who were moving.

Toby knew immediately and instinctively how vulnerable he was, and that he lay sprawled naked, his body almost entirely lathered in the lurid red-orange paint. The paint odor, thick and pinching, choked off his breathing with an overwhelming metallic odor.

“Just a bit more…just a bit more,” chanted the brush-wielding madman.

Only little dabs of Toby’s head, hair, and face remained to be painted now as his restrained body moved with the dizzying merry-go-round.

#

The villainous man in paint-streaked rainbow-colored red pants and shirt uniform dribbled orange, yellow, green, and blue from his palette, but mostly he slapped the child with a paintbrush dripping with blood-orange; Sears’s cheapest oil-base bulk buy—an exterior deck coating. He was nearly finished with his masterpiece. Just had to do the close-in work of the recesses about nostrils, the coil of the ears, and the eyelids. Usually the hardest part to deal with. Kids fought like hell during the last finishing touches, but soon after, the skin unable to breathe, they’d quit flailing.

Toby Slayter would join two other neon ‘works of human art’ in the spook house—one eye-popping chartreuse and one neon moon-glow yellow, so a blood-orange kid would just set the others off perfectly. Other of Satan’s victims didn’t get that honor or ease of passing; others—for no accountable reason that the handyman-turned-murderer could fathom—somehow invited a week-long torture session. It was satanic of him, he knew, but it was also the only way he could ever feel anything; only through the pain and suffering of a child, could he arrive at any sort of heightened sexual gratification. He understood the needs of a number of infamous child killers labeled as sociopaths, like the Red Demon of Russia who he’d seen in a film called Citizen X. Some would call him a monster. Some scientific types like those who trained under Dr. Mitchell Graham and FBI agents who understood the inner workings of DNA imprinting, or just plain old ancestral wiring in the brain, might call him a throwback to the early European Kurgans, blood-thirsty savages, survivors of the last of the ice age glaciers. Kurgans today could be found on every street corner. Such men would likely gawk and drivel and spit tobacco wads at the sight of his art, while the scientists might call his artwork the expression of the long-dormant, recessive genes of pagan ancestors. Might even say his art was an expression of primal urges.

He consoled himself that all art invariably must first pleasure the artist, perhaps more in the doing than in the final product, and he was an artist after all, however macabre the content. The children on the street and those who found their way to the carnival, and especially those who found their way to his side of the curtain, just called him Satan. They knew intuitively in their little hearts and minds and spleens that Satan always assumes on this plane a pleasing human form. The Devil made me do it had all to do with the supernatural taking on a natural shape. In this case that of a humble man doing a simple necessary job that brought a smile to the lips of a child.

But it had been proven by authorities and demonstrated by Oprah on her TV show that children did not heed warnings, and whose fault was that?

Certainly not his…and not even Satan’s. Kids gotta learn; in a sense, he dispensed a public service here. His victims brought it on themselves. All he did was put out the lure. If these damned kids were not evolved enough to avoid his simple lures, then what kind of future did they have in the first place? And if not painted and put on display here, then what else lie ahead for them? They invited him across a certain threshold when they accepted him, when they eased back on their natural instincts and their god- given fear and got comfy around him. He then took complete and swift advantage like a long-tongued frog that strikes a fly at an impossible distance. Not the frog’s fault, frog is just following its frog nature.

His close-in detail work in the eyelids of Toby Slayter was complete now. He felt confident no one had heard the boy’s cries over the music. It proved either no one cared or that the Calliope created a perfect cover for the carnival handyman and billboard poster artist.

Enough coatings and no one would recognize the child as anything but a sculpture hanging in the fun house, his body just another beacon in the darkness.

At his feet, Carnivore Man noticed the activity of fire ants that’d discovered the sticky spill from when Toby had dropped his free Coca Cola when the rufee had hit him.

“Damn bloody ants,” he muttered, stopping long enough to grab a canister of Raid. He fired off the toxic spray too close to the tiny creatures, sending them in a cascade of blown air in all directions. He cursed as the new chemical odor mingled with the paint stench. His nose twitched madly now, uncontrollably, and he feared his throat would clog as it hit him. The odors made Carnivore Man feel both nauseous and light-headed.

He left his art and the boy for the moment, found his cot in the back room and lay down to regain his bearings. It had been another all-nighter.

O N E

(a Buddhist or Japanese ideograph/pictograph or symbol as header for each chapter as per what was done with the Indian pictographs in my Edge Series—highly effective: say symbol of man, woman, rat, home, tears, etc. in Japanese lettering)

Children at play in the shadow of a wrecking ball that beats a rhythm with jackhammer screams: baparrumpf-kerrrrcrack! Baparrumpf- keycrack! Vaparrumpf-keycrack! All amid squalor and trash and discarded bottles, broken pyramids of bricks in dusky red and gray yards like a red bone factory; discards mixed with dull brown adobe crumbling to dirt…all visited by and bathed in a blinding blue light that transforms the brick yard of destroyed buildings into a lush green-carpeted park filled with stylized, rigid trees in a land where no wind blows the leaves, and no birds flirt among the branches. Within the eerie stillness, a verdant Gauguin-like green hue is cast overall, replacing all that is dirty red brick and dull adobe with a warm, glowing still life in which the children are now angels in stiff-winged pose, lifting up on tiptoe to embrace one another, some floating in the thralls of their embrace like Chagall lovers. But the children-turned-angels, like the trees, are rigid, stylized, posed as if painted onto a canvas with great care and trepidation, fear of a wrong rendering? Overall a pair of curious childlike eyes framed in a rectangle opening in the sky looks on. The eyes of God? Those of an angel, a cherub? No, Aurelia recognizes the questioning orbs as her own at perhaps age five or six. Yes, they are her own innocent eyes. She is like the artist Dali who painted himself into his own canvass, depicting himself as a child dressed in a sailor suit, holding a balloon and observing the strange life created out of his own mind, curiously wondering at its existence, purpose, and meaning-- and wondering if perhaps it came via some supernatural filter. She often felt the same way while looking on at her own visions. What did it mean, and why the dark horn-rimmed edges of a frame around her eyes, like seeing herself in a rearview mirror, only the bridge of her nose showing with her symmetrical black eyebrows, the penetrating, searching black Asian eye on the left, and the odd cerulean blue eye speckled with green that had somehow stamped her mother’s Irish indelibly upon her right.

It was as if she looked in from out if a box, some kind of trap. Caged perhaps. Only able to see from a tiny barred window in the corner of the universe of a single portion of a canvass too vast to contemplate at once. Painting, art—it was at the heart of this mystery: To all who enter this garden beware…beware its lull, its lure, its peace as mere illusion or was there more indeed than illusion here, some powerful message, some thematic counterpart, some echo of whispers, some inherent warning as when Aurelia’s mother so often said, “If it appears too good to be true…then like as not…it is too good to be true.” Some warnings go up like red flags, but the moment was shattered again by the strange music of modern construction: baparrumpf-kerrrrcrack! Baparrumpf- keycrack! Vaparrumpf-keycrack!

The new environment seems a dream, and it is just that, a dream within a dream within another dream, and from some far away place on a distant dimension, Aurelia’s Irish Wiccan mother, Loretta, reassures her in a voice deep within the coils of her cerebellum like a favored memory, a reassuring recompense—“Dear…it’s just a dream… only a dream. And a dream can’t hurt you.” Even in death her deceased mother kindly lied. “You can put your mind as ease; find pleasing sleep if you put effort into it.”

“But Mother…shouldn’t pleasing sleep come effortlessly?” she’d asked at age four, to which Mother had no answer.

“The darkness within that tells you to embrace your fears can make you strong in a dangerous world.,” had been her mother’s reply.

Now this ‘harmless’ adult dream had come repeatedly, had evolved over a series of screenings now for over a month. The children had not at first had angel wings; now the park children had angel wings, and they kissed one another in less rigid manner with each visit. Loosening up. And, they held hands and hugged and chased butterflies and sparrows streaming now through the greenery when in the early versions there were no birds. Now even the stylized trees and leaves were taken on the sheen of full-blown life.

And there was the angelic blue light batheing the entire scene. The angel children played lovely music, and they splashed in the fountain, giving vent to their sense of gaiety and mirth, when suddenly the blue light was replaced with a sinister darkness that blotted out the green until it became black, and now a red glow filled the sky like an angry single Cyclops eye, blotting out even her window on the scene for a flashbulb second.

The devastated landscape returned with added horror, bodies now buried in the rubble that had been the brickyard before.

Then the brickyard became fluid, the bricks dissolving into red clay and finally into a red mud and morphing into a red ocean. In this flaming ocean lay naked and helpless the angels joined by humans, male, female, child and adult alike. Now in a wreathing river of one another’s bodies, the features and limbs of the child angels all coalesced as if mixing colors in a jar—bodies spiraling fluidly--like blood dropped into water.

They were all caught below the surface of the red ocean current that had engulfed and obliterated the greenery and the blue light. They lay caught in a tangle of coral wreath that cut and bled them, and like a dancer with graceful moves, straddling the children as a giant, a Lucifer creature with a dragon’s tale like an external back bone thrashed as he stood dominating the helpless, writhing masses of children below him.

Nothing of kindness or caring, nothing but horror and mutilation filled the mind of the Hellion as he stabbed children with his scorpion’s tail, paralyzing each with its stinger. Then the red demon in the red sea devoured each helplessly paralyzed blood-orange-red child with a glee beyond joy. Repeatedly, the small angelic life of each prisoner in this strange coral nest disappeared into the demonic as if swallowed whole by the straddling giant.

Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa awoke in her night slip, nestled in her bed, her wide Oriental eyes jade green, searching the room even as her brain searched the horrible dream for useful clues, images, symbols that might make sense. But nothing of the sort readily leapt to fill in the blanks of what this vision might portend.

“Does it ever?” she audibly reminded herself.

She realized now that shivers shot through her. The images had been so powerful, so real beyond mere dream to what Jung called the Big Dream—the life-altering dream. On the nature of the dream that sent her to a divorce lawyer to alter her real life accordingly or live life in a perpetual state of suffocation. Her friend Etta scoffed once, “Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa, you are the only person I know who ever divorced a man on the say so of a little bad dream.”

“It was no little dream, it was a big-assed nightmare! A whopper of a dream and a compensatory one at that, and Carl Jung would have run screaming from that marriage long before I did.”

Now this dream. So real. So large. So much so that she prophetically guessed it related to one of her cases at FBI headquarters, but which one and how? So large this dream that her thin frame had shaken and perspired from the heat of Satan’s coral reef! A fiery bubbling cauldron red to orange reef that burned with far-reaching flamed fingers below the unnatural waters of Satan’s domain until you looked closer and realized the bloody reef was made up of bloody bodies.

“Silly,” she told herself and the silent room. “I don’t even believe in freakin’ Satan or a place called Hell.” She had learned from her Buddhist father that hell was the life many men made for themselves. Her kindly, sweet father had told her once that in a sense, planet Earth was the asylum for the universe and that this is why mankind was placed here. That the human race was a child, and one in need of much therapy. And that heaven and hell existed only in the mind; that we control the controls, and how we perceive the world and ourselves is up to us. He said one day science would catch up to mysticism and prove it right.

In any event, Hell was not a physical location where demons and devils and agents of Satan sat about contemplating attacks on mankind—much as the egocentric child wanted to believe--but such symbolism certainly floated about in the minds and genetic wiring of countless generations of Christians as well as other religious followers. So the symbolism and the sum of all such fears could certainly be counted on to have meaningful resonance.

But what were these recurrent images and sounds and that stifling, choking air filled with odors of earth and vermin and metal and decay and sweetness like the mix of flowers left too long at a gravesite?

Why did such things assail her now with these odd night sweats? Something wicked this way felt just over her horizon, coming at her with such force as to have sound and odor? And from what mysterious source? Who had now repeatedly sent these signals that held her telepathic mind in such rapt embrace? Who was it seemed bent on her receiving such horrid snapshots from the ether of an astral plane as busy and as populated with thoughts as conscious life was populated with the babble of tongues? A sea with currents filled with life’s images and symbols, and the myriad of modern new currents from electronic images. All of it bombarding every sentient creature on the planet.

Who were the angels…the children? What time frame was it? Past, present, future? Where might the green green park bathed in blue light be? Was it a real place or a figurative one? A billboard sign or a metaphor? What did these colors signify beyond hope and courage and honor and honesty? And what of the giant watery Satan and his coral hell so filled with vibrant, living fires of every shade of red? Was it an event long over or one approaching? Or was it ongoing...in the now?

She stared across at her image in the mirror across from her bed. She saw a beautiful woman with a mix of Asian and Caucasian features in a blue chemise nightgown alone in bed, seemingly destined to be alone for the rest of her life.

“Perhaps maybe the horror of the bad recurrent dream is beginning to take its toll,” she told her image and brushed back her long-flowing black hair with both hands.

The dream had begun soon after the divorce. Perhaps it was as Leslie Polkabla, her shrink, had said: “It merely reflects your inner turmoil, Aurelia—the angelic in you being overwhelmed by Tomi Yoshikani’s venomous and self-centered need to punish you.”

“Punish me? For what? He’s the one that broke our marriage vows, and became abusive!”

“All the more reason for him to hate you for divorcing him. The arrogant Japanese-American mogul some call the Japanese Donald Trump? And you sue him for divorce and child support? Get real.”

Aurelia knew she’d never see a dime of child support or alimony from the cheating bastard and consummate liar. He had an army of lawyers arrayed against her. Certainly, the horrid dream of an idyllic pasture—like her once comfortable lifestyle, like her once comfortable old Victorian bed and breakfast—the very roof over her and Nia’s heads--turned to a raging underwater fire in which she and Nia drowned while straddled by this Satan—certainly it could all pertain to the war going on within her deepest psyche, the war that had sent the demon in her life, Tomi, on the path to destroy the very person he once proclaimed his one true, undying love.

She desperately tried to piece the dream and the reality together, starting with the question of how Tomi had become first estranged, then verbally abusive and mentally cruel to graduate to open physical abuse that began with breaking and throwing things, and evolved into wanting to break or throw her. And she had not seen it coming. And she had not predicted his having gotten involved with other women. And yet she called herself a clairvoyant, a seer.

Her marriage ended one night in a spate of fighting and with her sending Tomi packing at the point of her Smith and Wesson FBI .38 special.

Sure, the children with angel wings must represent her and her daughter Nia, and these children were being destroyed by a demonic force that had somehow taken up residence in Tomi, once a loving, caring, tender man, and her dream was exactly what Dr. Polkabla said it was, a compensatory dream…a dream that compensated for what’s now going on at the in her waking life, her unconscious attempting to deal with her conscious decisions and choices—bad choices.

One of the children dying alongside her and the other children in the dream park kept pointing an accusing finger. Nia, she imagined. Her once loving daughter, so filled with an unconditional love for her in years past, now blamed Aurelia for the loss of her father. The poor child had witnessed the ugly final fight, and she had seen the gun her mother had wielded at her father.

Aurelia accepted what her mind now told her about the images that appeared relentlessly pursuing her. “It has to be what Dr. Polkabla says,” she whispered to hear herself again.

Then she heard a noise in the house. The old bed and breakfast she had purchased after the divorce--under the mistaken belief that payments would coincide with alimony installments--had its share of things that went bump in the night. But this…this was something new. She had bought the old place in a rash of “smart” investing with the nod of her financial advisor as a combination IRS write off and a future for Nia, an investment that would, in time, become a cash cow for Nia when she was old enough to take it over, and should anything happen to Aurelia, who admitted to a sense of fatalism. In her line of work, anything could happen. But the cash cow had already become the money pit instead! It was an exceptional day when the old place didn’t demand attention and repair.

Rae quietly slid from beneath the sheets and out of bed, and silently she found her bedside weapon of choice, a heavy Glock 9 millimeter.

She inched toward the door, down the corridor, looking in on a sleeping Nia for a moment. Knowing there were no guests in the house until tomorrow, and that the live-in maid Enriquiana had the weekend off to visit her mother in Costa Rica…Aurelia feared the worst. What was this noise?

She held the huge firearm ahead of her, prepared to fire, capable of it, trained to it. Again, more noise. The source the kitchen. Someone coming through the sliding glass doors in there.

She tentatively reached out for the light switch, an image of the satanic beast of her dreams coming through her back door, and she hesitated turning the light on. What if she were confronted with the very demon of her nightmare—Tomi Yoshikani doing some sort of O.J. number coming at her like a Ninja in the night?

Another part of her mind told her that such a fear must be faced no matter its nonsense, tantamount to a child’s night terrors.

At the instant she turned on the light, a toaster was knocked to the floor with a rattle, and she shouted, “Freeze or I shoot!”

Nia screamed in reply. “Jeeze, Ma! Don’t shoot! It’s me, Nia!”

Aurelia stared at her fully clothed daughter sneaking back into the house from a night of partying with God knows who and God knows where. Nia shook now like a leaf, terrified of the next nanosecond, certain a bullet would rip through her insides like she’d seen so many times on TV and in the movies.

“I can’t believe you were going to kill me!”

Aurelia looked at the gun in her hand and put it on the kitchen island beside the knives, pots and pans. “Damn it, Nia, I could have killed you! Are you crazy? I went by your room. Who’s in your bed?”

“Pillows McGee.”

A stuffed toy the size of a Bengal tiger beneath the sheets.

“Geeze Zeus! I might have killed you! Where in the name of heaven’ve you been? And how long’ve you been sneaking out this way?”

“I wouldn’t have to sneak out if you’d just let me be.” Nia, still shaken, pushed past her mother, going for her room.

“Stop!” Aurelia ordered.

“I just want to go to bed. Can’t we discuss this tomorrow?”

“After one thing.”

“What?”

Aurelia stepped up to her daughter and threw her arms around her, tears freely flowing now from both. The long, heartfelt, quaking, more- tears-welling-up hugged lasted an entire minute. It’d been a long time since they’d been so intimate, and it felt good. Too bad it had taken a near bloody, just-averted tragedy to come to this embrace.

“Sorrry…I’m so sorry,” Aurelia repeatedly said.

Nia took up the mantra. “Me, too. Sorry…sorry…sorry.”

“I thought you were a burglar.”

“And you’ve got to stop going for that damn gun every time you hear a board groan in this old house.”

Once more, they found refuge in the word sorry, which erupted repeatedly from each, filled as it were with meaning far greater than this incident.

Tearfully, Aurelia said, “Nia…what’s become of us?”

“Whataya mean, Ma?”

“This sneaking in and out like a stranger I don’t know. The lying.”

“Lying? I never--”

“Nia, a stuffed toy tiger beneath the sheets as your decoy? Come on…. I might well have killed you!”

“Maaaaaa…it’s all right! Nobody was killed. You’re a trained marksman.”

“All right? It’s hardly all right! I could’ve killed you!” Rae repeated.

“Sit down, Mom. You want something for your nerves?”

“Nerves? I ought to have my head examined. Should’ve sent you to that camp we talked about!”

“I’m screwed up enough, Ma. I don’t need Shrink Camp! It’d only make things worse, and you can tell your buddy Polky or whatever her name is the same!”

Aurelia gritted her teeth and found a seat. Her knees did feel weak. “All right, I want to know exactly where you’ve been and with whom?”

“I was just out with Trudy and some friends is all.”

“How long have you been sneaking out this way?”

“I wouldn’t have to sneak out if you’d treat me like an adult!”

“Do you call this adult behavior?” Rae fired back.

Nia pulled away and rushed for her room, Aurelia in pursuit, but Nia was quicker on the stair, and she slammed and locked her door before here mother could put a foot in it. A person’s room was sacrosanct in this household, a place of refuge, and a closed door stood…respected…as hard as that was at such a time.

She stared at the door as if her eyes might penetrate it, and she imagined Nia inside softly crying, leaning against the door. They had grown so far apart, and for that brief moment in the kitchen when they held onto one another, it was like she was younger again, accepting of her own vulnerability and needs. Now this. She slams a door in her mother’s face, going back to the offense-defense strategy Nia had taken for almost a year now. “Damn it,” Rae said. Her words and her groan could be heard through the door, but she got nothing in return from the other side. But from the other other side--Aurelia’s Gaelic mother’s voice wafted through her mind as if her ghost meant to continue helping raise Nia, but Mother’s advice—“She needs a good talking to from your father. Ten minutes with him’ll set anyone straight.”

“You think so, Mother? Too bad he’s no longer with us any more than you are.”

“Hey,” replied the ghostly voice from within, “life has a way of working out….and remember ‘When one door closes, another door opens.’”

“That’s cute, Mother. We did put it on your tombstone like you asked.”

“Who are you talking to?” It was Nia. She’d pulled the door open as Rae started back toward the kitchen to retrieve the Glock and go back to bed.

“Ahhh just to myself, Nia. Just talking to myself.”

“You’re so strange, Mother. No way I can ever have a normal mom is there?” Nia slammed the door closed again. Rae dropped her head. “N o, sweetheart,” she shouted at the door. “The Greenbrier High PTA would not accept me into their fold! Sorry!”

Genesis: The Untold Story

GENESIS

THE UNTOLD STORY

A Refreshing Look at Our Owner's Manual

By Lisa Aiken & Ira Michaels

First Edition MMVII

Copyright © MMVII by Lisa Aiken and Ira Michaels

Cover by Hash Marks Productions

Supervising Artist: Hillel Smith

Editing and Layout by Rossi Pub.

Supervising Editor: Rebecca Lane

Production Manager: Adam Simon

ISBN 0-9779629-1-1

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be translated,reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from both the copyright holder andthe publisher.

For information regarding bulk purchases and non-profit discounts please contact the publisher.

269 South Beverly Drive Suite 296,Beverly Hills, CA 90212

310-867-6328

www.RossiPublications.com

Foreword

Searching for spirituality?

Like many Jews, the last place you'd probably look is Genesis. Creation, Adam and Eve, The Garden of Eden, Noah and the Flood—these stories may seem uneducated and childish. It's hard to sift fact from fraud in more than 2,000 years of efforts by the Greeks through 21^st-century scientists to discredit the Bible. And muddying the waters of truth are "great" religions that rely on mistranslated Biblical passages to bolster their doctrines.

It's a jungle out there. Yet our hearts sense that somewhere in the world is a source of truth and timeless wisdom that seems to lie just beyond our grasp.

If we were to write a Bible today, how would we want it to speak to us? We would want it to tell us about God and how we can connect to Him. It would appeal to our rational, mystical, and emotional selves. We would expect it to explain why there is evil and suffering in the world. This Bible would inform us how to get the most out of life and what that life's purpose is. And of course it would help us find comfort and direction in our times of challenge and disappointment.

We already have this very Bible: The Five Books of Moses.¹ Known to Jews as the Torah ("teaching"), it has done for the Jewish people for 3,300 years what we modern people want a Bible to do today. However, some of us may have misplaced the tools that help us access this great wisdom. The first step in regaining our tools may be to learn how we lost them in the first place.

* * *

In the 18^th century, the Enlightenment movement swept across Europe. Its premise was that people didn't need religion. Scientific understanding and human logic would lead to true knowledge, peace, and social progress. For the Jews specifically, getting civil rights and secular education and assimilating into the surrounding Gentile culture became sought-after goals.² In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, Napoleon granted political equality to the Jews in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Jews were allowed to have basic rights previously denied them as long as they agreed to renounce foreign allegiance and vow allegiance to the French empire. Many French Jews raced to abandon their ties to the Land of Israel and Jewish nationalism to become French citizens. Across Western Europe, Jews who believed that traditional Judaism was outmoded and an obstacle to their social and economic advancement left the faith. More than 250,000 Jews in Central Europe alone converted to Christianity in the 19^th century.³

Although Napoleon was defeated in Russia, he brought the ideas of the French Revolution—the belief that secular education, human reason, and the abandonment of religion would bring a better world—to Poland and Russia.⁴ Eastern European Jews in the 19^th century wanted to escape from unrelenting poverty and frequent pogroms. Some believed that they could escape anti-Semitism and gain acceptance by the Czar by subscribing to a "Jewish culture" that was devoid of Jewish religious observances and beliefs. These secular Jews largely gave up their connection with their traditional knowledge and way of life, stopped studying the Torah, and stopped passing on the Torah's traditions and wisdom to successive generations.⁵

In 19^th-century Germany, Abraham Geiger invented Reform Judaism in an attempt to adapt the ancient Jewish faith to an "enlightened" world. He believed that Jews should completely reject all institutions of traditional Judaism as well as Talmudic Judaism.⁶ The first Reform temple opened in Germany in 1810 and innovated German songs, sermons, prayers, a choir with men and women, and a host of other changes in the traditional Jewish prayer services and setting. German Jews largely turned their backs on the noisy and "unenlightened" traditional synagogue in favor of these new Reform temples, or they flocked to the orderly Lutheran church.⁷

In 1819, some "intellectual" German Jews founded the Wissenschaft des Judentum school. Using secular "scholarship," they sought to deny the Divine authorship of the Bible and create a modern form of Judaism that would gain them acceptance by the non-Jewish world.⁸

In the 1870s, Julius Wellhausen, an anti-Semitic Protestant theologian,⁹ began a movement of "Higher Biblical Criticism." His view of the Torah as a man-made concoction spread to universities in Western Europe and America. Its general premises are espoused in popular books and are used to teach university students about the Jewish Bible today.¹⁰ His perspective attacks the divine origins of the Torah and dismisses it by "proving" that the Torah consists of four separate documents written by different authors at different times that were "doctored" by priestly canonizers during the Second Temple era. He claimed that these authors did this to perpetuate the "lie" that Moses authored the Torah and that the Jews had a central place of worship in the Tabernacle and later in the Temple. Wellhausen insisted that there never was a Tabernacle, nor was there a revelation of the Torah at Sinai to the Jewish people, and that Moses, if he existed, believed in a local thunder or mountain god. In summation, Wellhausen delegitimized the Jews' religion, their history, and their traditional ways of understanding the Torah by claiming that the Torah was a complete forgery and not a written account of God's words to Moses and the Jewish people.¹¹

Because of these events, most people only have shallow and literal understandings of Torah stories stripped of their deeper meaning. Although these distorted teachings have a strong voice, they have robbed Jews and the world of the great value to be found in the Five Books of Moses.

Just as our knowledge of school subjects becomes more sophisticated as we grow older, so must our understanding of the Bible. The Torah is grasped differently when we are 60 years old than when we are 6. Genesis: The Untold Story revisits the stories in Genesis—illuminated by traditional Jewish commentaries, history, science, and psychology—to present a logical and mature view of God and His plan for us.

These stories can then be used just as they were originally intended: to inform our lives as we change and grow wiser. The result is a relevant guide to living in the modern world.

Notes

1. These books are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Some people refer to all 24 books of the Jewish canon as the Torah, although they are more accurately called by the acronym Tanach (Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim)—the Five Books of Moses, the Books of the Prophets, and the Holy Writings. The term Torah can also refer to the Five Books of Moses plus their explication by the Oral Law. When this book refers to the Torah, it means the Five Books of Moses unless otherwise indicated.
2. Wein, Berel. Triumph of Survival. Shaar Press, Brooklyn, 1990, pp. 43-44.
3. Johnson, Paul. A History of the Jews. Harper and Row, New York, 1987, p. 312.
4. Wein, Berel, Triumph of Survival, Shaar Press, Brooklyn, 1990, p. 76.
5. Ibid., pp. 152-172 for a detailed description of those times.
6. Johnson, Paul. A History of the Jews. Harper and Row, New York, 1987, p. 334.
7. By the mid-19^th century, Reform leaders argued that "Berlin is our Jerusalem." Samuel Holdheim, who headed the Reform congregation in Berlin, maintained that Jews should not circumcise their sons, use Hebrew, or mention Zion, Jerusalem, or Israel in their prayers, blow the shofar on the New Year, believe in a Messiah, or wear a head covering or prayer shawl while praying; and he changed the Sabbath day to the Christian Sunday. Reform Jews described themselves as "Germans of the Mosaic persuasion," but not as Jews. See Berel Wein, Triumph of Survival, Shaar Press, Brooklyn, 1990, p. 53.
8. The society disintegrated when its members converted to Christianity. Wein, Berel. Triumph of Survival, p. 55.
9. Like nearly all Christians of the time, the proponents of "Higher Biblical Criticism" believed in the moral superiority of Christianity to Judaism, and they used their scholarly works to illustrate this. Wellhausen, for example, likened Judaism in late antiquity to a dead tree. He said of the Biblical Book of Chronicles, "Like ivy it overspreads the dead trunk with extraneous life, blending old and new in a strange combination. . . . [I]n the process it is twisted and perverted." Excerpted from Terry Gross, "'How to Read the Bible' Through History," Fresh Air from WHYY, NPR radio, January 30, 2006.
10. Wellhausen was not the first to attack belief in the Divine authorship of the Torah, but he succeeded in popularizing his beliefs. Benedictus de Spinoza, an apostate British Jew, did so in the 17^th century. Jean Astruc (1684-1766), a French physician, is considered the real founder of classical Bible Criticism. Karl Graf (1815-1869) was a German Protestant Bible scholar on whose work Wellhausen founded his theory. Wellhausen's forerunners were Karl Ilgen (1763-1834), a German Protestant philologist; Wilhelm Leberecht de Wette (1780-1849); and Wilhelm Vatke (1806-1882). Vatke laid the foundation for Wellhausen's critique, and the latter admitted that he was indebted to Vatke "for the most and the best" of his own work. Ironically, Vatke later retracted his conclusions, undermining many theories that Wellhausen later published! For a brilliant discussion of the origins and progression of Higher Biblical Criticism, see Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo, "Of Silence and Speech," 1995, reprinted on "Bible Criticism and its Counterarguments," simpletoremember.com.
11. In cases where Wellhausen needed to change the plain meaning of a Hebrew word to fit into this theory, he offered "conjectural emendation." The fact that thousands of verses contradicted his theory never disturbed him. He contended that a master forger or interpolator had anticipated Wellhausen's theory and consequently inserted passages and changed verses in bits and pieces, as was necessary, so as to refute it. Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo, "Of Silence and Speech," 1995, reprinted on "Bible Criticism and its Counterarguments," simpletoremember.com.

Preface: The Jewish Toolbox

Here are some of the tools we will use to gain a fuller appreciation of the Torah stories:

Reconnecting to the Oral Law

Our first tool is our national treasure-trove of stories, explanations, and legacies—some dating as far back as Moses—known as our Oral Law, so named because this information was to be kept in its fluid state and not written down. When Christians burned the Talmud in the Middle Ages, it was our connection to our Oral Law that they were trying to destroy. Let's understand how the Oral Law relates to Genesis.

Until a few centuries ago, Jews were so familiar with Judaism that even children understood the written Torah, or Written Law, as the "Cliff Notes" of the Jews' history and of the laws by which they lived. For example, although the Torah tells us to keep the Sabbath, nowhere do the Five Books of Moses mention doing so by lighting Sabbath candles, saying a prayer over wine, or eating loaves of bread known as challah. It is the Oral Law that tells us how to follow the cryptic commandment "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy." Many other examples, such as definitions for mezuzah (words of the Torah written on parchment and placed on doorposts) and tefillin (black boxes containing Torah verses written on parchment that Jewish men place on their arms and heads every morning) are given short shrift in the written Torah but are explained at length in the vast Oral Law.

Jews of prior generations also knew and understood the Torah's allusions to traditions about its deepest meanings and how to apply its laws to life events. Many of these traditions and elaborations were given to Moses when he received the written Torah on Mount Sinai. Over time, legal judgments and interpretations by the Jewish nation's top judges and Torah interpreters joined the original oral transmission.

Moses taught both Written and Oral Law to the Israelites during their 40 years in the desert. Jews continued to pass down the written Torah and its growing body of Oral Law via parents and extended family, priests, and teachers from one generation to the next, as noted in Ethics of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot) and other Jewish sources. Fearing a disruption of the oral transmission due to persecution, the Jews wrote down the Oral Law (in Hebrew) as the Mishnah by the year 200. As the Mishnah was adapted to new situations and required elaboration, new material plus older laws and stories (aggadah) that were not originally included in the Mishnah were recorded (in Aramaic) as the Gemarra by the year 500. The Talmud consists of the Mishnah and its explanation and the Gemarra. For the past 1500 years, additional explanations and determinations of how to apply Talmudic law to daily life have been added by famous and learned Jewish scholars.

Today, some 80 generations later, our Oral Law still informs us of how we can best understand ourselves and how our Creator wants us to live.

Understanding PaRDeS

The second set of tools is called PaRDeS, the initials of the four main ways of understanding the Torah. They are as follows:

1. literal meaning of the text (peshat);
2. veiled textual hints that convey important ideas (remez);
3. symbolic stories that teach us (derash); and
4. mystical concepts (sod).

These four levels of commentary are often printed alongside traditional Hebrew versions of the Bible as well as in other, well-known books by outstanding and learned Torah commentators. Whenever we encounter poorly written verses, such as redundancies, inconsistencies, or ideas that don't make sense, we can use these red flags to key us into additional lessons to be learned via one or more of these four methods of interpretation. Ultimately, all of these lessons have some moral or spiritual relevance to our lives. We will draw on this treasury throughout this book.

Returning to Hebrew

Reading the Torah in the original ancient Hebrew is far superior to reading a translation. In translation, syntax, grammar, and accuracy may be lost, and many layers of meaning underlying the choice of words and even the shapes of letters will elude us. If reading Shakespeare in Chinese just isn't Shakespeare, how much more is this true of a book with a Divine Author!

Genesis: The Untold Story translates many Biblical verses literally to show why some verses invite or require elaboration or interpretation—and what we can learn from them. We include insights from several traditional Bible commentaries, Rashi (an acronym for Rabbeinu Shlomo Yitchaki) being the most prominent. This brilliant medieval French rabbi (and vintner) elucidated the Biblical text's literal meaning as well as referenced appropriate metaphorical stories (midrash) to explain hidden ideas in the verses.

Dispelling Distortion

Unfortunately, much of what we think we know today of the Hebrew Bible is based on mistranslations from the original Hebrew,¹ misinformation, and deliberate distortions of the Torah's ideas by other religions. For example, secularists lacking extensive traditional Torah knowledge take the Bible's many anthropomorphisms (describing God as having human attributes) literally and insist that the early Jews thought that God had human emotions. Yet traditional Jews at an early age are taught that God wrote the Torah in human terms to accommodate limits in human understanding, and that apparent anthropomorphisms exist throughout the Torah to help us relate to divine actions. This is but one example of how the Torah is distorted by those who don't appreciate—or aren't informed of—traditional commentary.

Deliberate distortion also occurred by other religions to justify their new tenets. For example, although Christians accept the Old Testament as holy and believe that God publicly revealed the Five Books of Moses to the entire Jewish people, they mistranslated part of Isaiah so it would appear to predict a Virgin Birth. (The Hebrew verse in Isaiah 7:14 mentions a "young woman"; the Christian version turns her into a "virgin").

Moslems accept Moses as a prophet; Mohammed based many of the Koran's teachings on stories and laws from the Torah (which preceded the Koran by some 2,000 years). He also incorporated some basic rituals and ideas, such as belief in one God, prayer, reciting a verse proclaiming God's unity, and giving to charity, that he borrowed from our Torah and/or Talmud without noting that they have their source in Judaism. Thus, some Moslems teach that Abraham brought his son Isaac as an offering in Mecca, or that he brought Ishmael as an offering on Mount Moriah, instead of teaching that he brought Isaac on Mount Moriah, as the Torah teaches. While the Torah says that Jacob lay down and dreamed of angels ascending and descending a ladder to Heaven (Jewish commentaries located that event on Mount Moriah), some Moslems replaced this incident with Mohammed's night journey to Heaven from Mount Moriah in an attempt to legitimize the Moslems' claim to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Understanding Our Raison d'être

Judaism teaches that the Almighty gave the Jews² the Torah so we could optimize our time in this material world. Without the Torah, we would not know how to use our bodies or the world to bring eternal meaning to our lives, or how to conduct the most meaningful relationships with people and our Creator. As our souls' owner's manual, it guides us to work hard to do God's will.

When life in this world is over, our souls go to a spiritual afterlife to enjoy an intimacy with Him that we spent a lifetime earning. The more we have done God's will, the more we will have earned the greatest pleasure possible—an eternal closeness with our Heavenly Parent.³

The Torah expresses our Creator's will and "mind," and studying His Guidebook should be a joyous, exciting, and intellectually stimulating treasure hunt. The prizes we get at the end are the awe we feel at its Author's wisdom, the clarity it gives us about our lives, and the resulting love we feel for the One Who gave us this tremendous gift.

Please join us on our journey through Genesis, and may its Author grant us a full, clear, and sweet understanding of His Holy Torah.

Notes

1. The Torah was first translated from its original Hebrew about 250 BCE (Before the Common Era), when King Ptolemy of Egypt forced 72 Jewish Sages to independently translate the Five Books of Moses into Greek. The rabbis deliberately mistranslated the same 15 verses (miraculously, each rabbi used the same words) so that the pagan Greeks would not get the wrong ideas from a literal translation of the text (Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 9a-b). Because translating the Torah into another language could open it up to misunderstandings and would involve missed opportunities for deeper understanding, this incident was considered a tragedy in Jewish history. The resulting Greek text is known as the Septuagint, meaning "seventy" in Greek, so named after the number of translators.

Although the Septuagint contained deliberate mistranslations, it was not a distortion, as the intent was to make the traditionally understood meanings clearer. However, the next mistranslation was very different. Jerome translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Latin in the early 5^th century CE (Common Era; Christians refer to this time as AD). This translation was called the Vulgate. Besides creating a poor translation due to a lack of Latin equivalents for many Hebrew words, Jerome was a Christian who knew little Hebrew and whose purpose was to prove that Jesus and Christianity were foretold in the Old Testament. He rearranged the order of the Old Testament books such that the Jewish canon then deceptively ended with the Book of Malachi instead of with the Book of Chronicles. Malachi's last verses predict the coming of Elijah the Prophet and the apocalypse. The New Testament immediately follows with the description of Jesus' story, as if to say that Malachi had predicted the Messiah's advent and the prediction had come true with the founder of Christianity.

Jerome deliberately falsified (and misunderstood) hundreds of verses to further mislead readers into thinking that Jesus and Christianity were foretold in the earlier books of the Jews. For example, he mistranslated Zechariah 12:10-11 to read,

I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication, and they will look onto Me whom [et asher] they have pierced and they will mourn for Him as one mourns for an only son, and they will weep for Him like the weeping over a first born. In that day there will be a great mourning in Jerusalem like the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the plain of Megiddo.

Jerome conveniently dropped the Hebrew word et and capitalized the word him to make a point that was not conveyed in the Hebrew. The translated verse should read,

. . . the spirit of grace and supplication, and they will look toward Me because of those whom they have stabbed, they will mourn over him as one mourns for an only child. . . .

Jerome's mistranslation implies that these verses refer to Jesus instead of to the righteous King Josiah, who abolished idolatry in Israel and was killed in battle with Pharaoh Neco (II Kings 23:29-30) at Megiddo. According to the Talmud (Moed Katan 28b), these verses actually mean that all of Judah and Jerusalem mourned when Josiah, referred to in this verse as Hadadrimmon, died (II Chronicles 35:22-25). Just as Jews then mourned over King Josiah, who died in battle when he was pierced by a spear, the verse predicted that the Jewish people in the future would mourn over their war dead. These verses also allude to the Jews' mourning for King Ahab, who was killed by Hadadrimmon.

Habbakuk 3:18 says, "Yet I will rejoice in God, I will feel joy in the God of my salvation." Jerome distorted it to read, "I shall rejoice in my God Jesus." Jerome took the Hebrew word yishee, meaning "my salvation," and substituted the word yeshu, the Hebrew word for Jesus.

In 1611, the King James Version of the Old Testament resulted from translating the Vulgate into English. The American Bible Society in the 19^th century examined six editions of the King James Bible then circulating and found 24,000 variants in the text and punctuation!

2. The Torah is unique in being the only Holy Book of a religion that was revealed publicly for all to see. Those of all other religions were revealed to just a few privileged individuals. The Torah was revealed to three million or so Jews 3,319 years ago in a public place, Mount Sinai, for all to witness.
3. Non-Jews can attain closeness to, and eternal spiritual intimacy with, God by following the seven Noahide principles that encompass approximately 70 of the Torah's 613 laws.

Part I:

In the Beginning

Concepts of Creation

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was empty and chaotic and darkness [was] on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God blew on the face of the water. And God said, "Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided between the light and the dark. And God called the light "day" and the darkness He called "night." And there was evening and there was morning one day.¹

Summary: During the next five days, God created a firmament, upper and lower waters, dry land, vegetation, the sun, the moon, the stars, and various forms of animal life, plus people.

Creation vs. Eternal Universe

For millennia, many educated people rejected the Bible because these verses in Genesis seem impossible or anti-scientific. Famous philosophers as far back as Aristotle, and scientists² until the 1960s (when the Big Bang theory was substantiated), ridiculed the Torah's account of Creation. They insisted that the universe could not have been created, since it is impossible for something to be created from nothing. They were sure that matter and time existed forever, and that there was no Creator. They believed that the world was always here and would always be here. Since many educated people believe what philosophers and scientists teach about the world, they rejected the Bible's ideas about Creation.

What was behind their reasoning? The majority of Western philosophers and scientists wanted to believe that there was no Creator and no moral purpose to life. However, their assumptions about how the world is put together began to unravel in the 20^th century, thus making it reasonable that God created the world. Let's see how this happened:

In 1905, Einstein proposed his theory of relativity to explain how the universe operates. The theory revolutionized the way scientists viewed the world, because it claimed that time was not invariable, but rather is relative to how fast something is moving. This is a difficult concept for us to comprehend because that is not what we experience.

People today take for granted that gravity affects weight. We have all seen movies of astronauts leaping about the surface of the moon like ballet stars with springs on their feet. How can they do this? Because weaker gravity on the moon means that people or objects weigh only one-sixth of their Earthly weight. Although we understand that weight can vary, we assume that time doesn't vary because we don't experience time actually moving slower or faster. But time does vary, as proven by modern experiments.³

Einstein's theory of relativity opened the door to question many other fundamental assumptions about the world. For example, was the world really eternal? If not, it was possible that a Creator made the world. Einstein himself believed in a divine force, although he did not accept Biblical explanations of Creation. He opposed them so much that his feelings caused him to skew his scientific theories: He proposed equations assuming that the earth was static, but then had to use "fudge factors" to make his equations work.⁴

In 1916, drafts of Einstein's theory of general relativity were first circulated. When Danish mathematician William de Sitter reviewed it, he wrote Einstein that the theory had problems that could only be solved by proposing that the universe was expanding in all directions from a central point. This implied that the universe was not eternal, but that it had come into being at a certain point in time and was still coming into being. Einstein didn't respond to his letter.

In 1922, Soviet mathematician Alexander Friedmann independently discovered that Einstein's equations only worked if the universe were exploding away from a central point. Meanwhile, in the United States, astronomer Vesto Slipher noted a similar phenomenon: the 42 galaxies that he discovered by 1925, beginning with the Andromeda galaxy in 1913, were all rocketing away from Earth.

When these three men shared their findings with Einstein, Einstein begrudgingly admitted that they were probably right. Yet he didn't like the implications that the universe wasn't static. If it originated from nothing, that implied a Creator. He told a colleague, "I have not yet fallen in the hands of priests."⁵ He wrote de Sitter, "This circumstance [of an expanding universe, which implied a Creator and moment of Creation] irritates me."⁶ His comments remind us of how even supposedly objective scientists can be blinded to the truth when it has moral or religious implications.

Still, Einstein could reassure himself that 42 receding galaxies did not a universe make. It was still possible that most of the universe was static. But in 1929, using the world's largest telescope, Edwin Hubble showed that every galaxy within 100,000,000 light years of Earth was receding. This was pretty convincing evidence that the universe as a whole was expanding. And if that were true, and Einstein's equations were run backwards, it implied that the universe once had a beginning.

In 1946, George Gamow and his colleagues proposed that an enormous source of energy—a "primeval fireball"—appeared out of nothing and began the universe.⁷ This was the source of all the matter that now exists in the universe. Their theory predicted that all of the galaxies in the universe should be rushing away from each other at high speeds as a result of that initial explosion.

The renowned physicist Fred Hoyle derisively referred to this energy explosion as the "Big Bang," since he was sure that the universe was eternal.⁸ The Big Bang theory states that the entire physical universe, all matter, energy, and the four dimensions of time and space, burst forth from this explosion.

Scientific theories about the origins of the universe took a quantum leap in 1965 when physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson made a startling, serendipitous discovery. They were trying to calibrate a microwave detector for Bell Telephone Laboratories, but, much to their consternation, no matter where they aimed it, the detector kept picking up background noise. They tried cleaning the detector, then overhauled the electronic system, but they couldn't get rid of the noise. A series of studies indicated that this noise was filling the universe.

Professor P. J. E. Peebles at Princeton University explained to them that they had found the noise that resulted from the Big Bang. They then read an essay written by one of Friedmann's students which had predicted that remnants of the universe's explosion should be detectable in the form of weak microwave radiation of the type that Penzias and Wilson had discovered. These two men had discovered the echo of the explosion that brought the universe into being, and were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978 for their findings. Steven Weinberg, a world-renowned physicist, called their findings "one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 20^th century."⁹

By this time, scientists wanted an independent body to determine if the universe was eternal, because study after study was showing that it was not. Robert Jastrow, a great astrophysicist, was the director of NASA's Goddard Center for Space Studies. He was appointed the head of a research project that included mathematicians, astronomers, and physicists who wanted to prove the eternity of the world. After 15 years of research, Jastrow published NASA's report (1978). He shocked the public by concluding that the universe, rather than being eternal, probably came into being at a certain point in time. He wrote,

This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always accepted the word of the Bible: "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth . . . ." For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.¹⁰

Today, decades of scientific research support the idea that the universe came into being from nothing. The Big Bang theory, and no other, accounts for four main findings: the background noise found by Penzias and Wilson, the ratio of hydrogen to helium in the universe,¹¹ the expansion of the galaxies that Hubble observed, and the perfect black-body spectrum of the microwave background radiation as measured by the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) space satellite in 1989.¹² Scientific books and reams of articles have been written about the evidence that the universe came about in ways that are in harmony with the Torah's account of Creation.¹³

How Scientists Think the Universe Began

Renowned physicists today, such as Stephen Weinberg¹⁴ and Stephen Hawking,¹⁵ concur that nothing existed at a certain point in time, and then, all of a sudden, there was a moment of creation. The universe began with the explosion of a great ball of light/energy now generally known as the Big Bang. This enormous burst of concentrated energy became the source of all matter in the universe.¹⁶ When this ball of light exploded, it brought into existence all of the laws of nature, time, space, and matter.¹⁷

This matter took the form of plasma, charged particles that trap light. A very short time after the Big Bang, there was intense light from the explosion, but it was trapped in this plasma so that although photons were given off, they were quickly reabsorbed. When this initial energy cooled very quickly, the plasma became atoms. Then the light shone through and radiation (light) dominated the early universe, as in Genesis:

And God said, "Let there be light, and there was light." ¹⁸

Resistance to Theology

If a person came to a city, he would assume that people had built it—that it didn't simply spontaneously appear one day. Yet for thousands of years, scientists and philosophers were willing to believe that the complex universe in which we live had been here forever. Einstein resisted the idea of a created universe, even after there was abundant evidence to show that the world was not eternal. Today, many scientists such as Stephen Hawking admit, "The creation [of the universe] lies outside the scope of the presently known laws of physics,"¹⁹ yet are not willing to attribute creation to God.

Chance and the Non-Created Universe

A world that has always been here has no moral plan, purpose, or meaning. If the world and people got here by chance, our job is simply to survive and do as we please. Unfortunately, history has shown that when people make their own rules about how best to live, they are prone to be self-serving. Ancient Greece and Rome, Nazi Germany, and other "enlightened" cultures had no qualms about enslaving people; killing babies, the elderly, and the sick; and glorifying sexual decadence. Most people think of ancient Greece and Rome as enlightened empires that gave us Western civilization, respect for human rights, and democracy. Yet it has been estimated that more than 25% of the people in the Roman empire and 30% in ancient Athens were enslaved. Slavery was so common in Rome that slaves far outnumbered citizens. As the Roman Republic expanded, they enslaved entire conquered populations.²⁰

Ultimate Game of Hide and Seek

Genesis is constructed to lead us from the fact of creation to why God created it, for if He deliberately created a world—especially an incredibly complex world such as ours—He must have had a purpose for it and for us.

Judaism teaches that the functions of the world's masks of nature and materialism are to obscure their Source—to induce us to look for and find their Creator.²¹ That is why the Hebrew word for world, olam, comes from the word he'elem, which means "hidden."

The rest of the Torah, and the oral traditions that have been passed down to us since the time of Moses, gives us detailed and practical answers to the questions, "Why did a Creator make this world, and how were we meant to use it?"²²

Implications for Us

The Perfect Bull's-Eye

A man wanted to find out how a renowned archer always seemed to score a bull's-eye wherever he shot his arrows. Walking past an impressive series of ten arrows stuck in the center of each of ten targets, the man caught up with the archer and asked, "How do you manage to score a perfect bull's-eye each time you shoot?"

"Oh, it's easy," the archer replied. "First I shoot an arrow at the tree, then I paint a bull's-eye around it."

Instead of constructing a worldview based on what makes us comfortable, Genesis opens by telling us that God created a purposeful world so that we will live with His plan of meaning. One of our greatest challenges is to see life from His perspective, rather than from our own.

Notes

1. Genesis 1:1-2, 4.
2. Two-thirds of scientists who were surveyed in 1959 believed that the world was eternal! (Personal communication with physicist Gerald Schroeder.)
3. Hawking, Stephen, ed. On the Shoulders of Giants: The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy. Philadelphia, Running Press Book Publishers, 2004.
4. Einstein first wrote "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" in 1905. It was reprinted in H.A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, H. Minkowski, and W. H. Weyl, "The Principles of Relativity: A Collection of Original Papers on the Special Theory of Relativity." Fortschritte der mathematischen Wissenschaften in Monographien, Heft 2. Leipzig, 1922.
5. Jaki, Stanley. "From Scientific Cosmology to a Created Universe," in Roy Varghese: Intellectuals Speak Out About God. Chicago, Regnery Gateway Inc., 1984, p. 76.
6. Jastrow, Robert. God and the Astronomers. New York, Warner Books, 2000, p. 29.
7. Gamow, George. Nature (162), 1948, p. 680.
8. Hoyle, Fred. "A New Model for the Expanding Universes," Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (108), 1948, p. 102.
9. Weinberg, Stephen. The First Three Minutes. London, Andre Deutsch and Fontana, 1977, p. 120.
10. Jastrow, Robert. ibid., p. 125.
11. The Big Bang theory predicts that the universe would have consisted almost entirely of hydrogen and helium nuclei a few minutes after the initial explosion occurred. Their ratio, by mass, would have been 70-75% hydrogen and 25-30% helium. The fact that hydrogen and helium exist in these proportions in the universe today supports the Big Bang theory.
12. The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) was launched in November 1989 to see if there were minute differences in temperature across the background radiation of the universe that would indicate that the original expanding universe was not uniform and smooth, and that it could have given rise to galaxy clusters. COBE sent back information in April 1992 showing temperature differences of ten millionths of a degree. That information was consistent with the Big Bang theory.
13. For example, George Gamow, "The Origin of Elements and the Separation of Galaxies," Physical Review (74), 1948, p. 505. Gamow's ideas laid the foundation for our present understanding of big-bang nucleosynthesis. A number of books authored by physicists describe the origins of the universe in ways that are consistent with Creation: Stephen Weinberg, The First Three Minutes. London, Andre Deutsch and Fontana, 1977; Gerald Schroeder, Genesis and the Big Bang, New York, Bantam, 1990; Andrew Goldfinger, Thinking about Creation, Northvale, NJ, Jason Aronson, 1999; Nathan Aviezer, In the Beginning: Biblical Creation and Science, Hoboken, NJ, Ktav, 1990; and Nathan Aviezer, Fossils and Faith, Hoboken, NJ, Ktav, 2001.
14. Weinberg, Stephen. op. cit.
15. Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. New York, Bantam Books, 1988. Hawking is one of the best-known physicists today; his popular book on cosmology has sold over 15 million copies!
16. This is consistent with Einstein's famous equation, E=mc², where a small amount of energy results in a huge amount of matter.
17. Wheeler, John. Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam. New York, Norton, 1998, p. 350.
18. Genesis 1:3-4.
19. Hawking, Stephen. The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time. Cambridge University Press, 1973, p. 364.
20. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery
21. This idea is beautifully discussed in Akiva Tatz, Worldmask. Jerusalem, Targum, 1995.
22. Luzzatto, Moshe Chaim, The Way of God, discusses topics such as the purpose of life and how people can fulfill their purposes here.

Willing Sacrifice by Gloria Oliver

Willing Sacrifice

Gloria Oliver

www.gloriaoliver.com

Chapter 1

The large undulating cloud spread across the fields, its hunger almost palpable. Food was near, food and entertainment. Thousands of them, all gathered directly in its path. Lightning flashed through the cloud from its eager anticipation.

Long tentacle-like appendages touched the tall city walls, as if caressing a lover, as the cloud glided upwards along its surface. The scent of prey was near.

A resounding gong filled the night as a lone foodling spotted it and called to others in alarm. Yes, make it ring. Call your brethren to the feast.

More foodlings appeared, some in their protective shells of metal and others not. It went over the wall, satisfied and reached out to begin the fun.

Screams echoed in the night as its acid touch ate through their shells to sear the flesh beneath. Ah, the smell of it. The eons it and its fellows had dreamt of this. Their time was finally here.

The foodlings’ attempts to foil its progress sent ripples of amusement through it. Their puny metal weapons bounced off its tentacles without effect. Those foolish enough to enter it screeched in agony and then were abruptly silenced—tasty snacks before the main meal.

The cloud did not slow, but flowed down the other side of the wall, expanding as it went. Like a wave, lights flickered on across the city as it engulfed the nearest homes, the horrified cries of those within waking those without who were still asleep. It could feel the panic rolling before it, frightened foodlings leaving their homes in a vain attempt to avoid its advance.

A lamp fell and shattered inside a shop and flames attacked the wood within reach. The cloud was not bothered by heat or cold and enjoyed the extra fear the fire inspired in its fleeing meal.

The blaze and the hunger closed in about the city until soon there was nothing left but the taste of death.

“No!”

La’tiera sat up, her eyes wide with horror. The green luminous aura surrounding her dimmed, shrinking back unnoticed to outline the birthmark of a closed eye on her chest. Her damp golden hair falling about her like a veil, she leaned forward, shaking, trying to catch her breath.

She’d had another horrid vision—this one more vivid, more terrible than the last. Feeling cold at the memory, she quickly reminded herself it wouldn’t be long now—it wouldn’t be long before she would never have one of these troubling dreams again.

Grabbing her robe from the end of the lavish bed, she stood and wrapped it around her. She doubted she would be sleeping again this night.

She silently crossed the fur rugs strewn over the cold stone floor and made her way to one of the small stained-glass windows, her heart gradually slowing within her breast. Opening it, she stared out into the darkness toward the east.

Beyond the low wall at the edge of the manor’s back garden, past the large stone ramparts encircling the estate and the hidden city beyond it, she could see the lightening of the sky proclaiming the coming of the dawn. Wistfully, she turned her gaze upwards, looking for any signs of the Herald. The comet was there, barely visible but growing larger each day, its tail not yet noticeable. But it would be soon, that much she was sure of. And then the nightmares would stop.

La’tiera retreated from the window, a sudden desire not to be alone welling through her. Knowing her uncle was usually up before the sun, she left her rooms to go searching for him.

The high, long hallway was quiet except for the padding of her naked feet. It was a familiar silence, one she was used to whether it be the height of day or at night, for little to no sound of the outside world ever reached here. Hugging herself for warmth, the terror of her dreams still lying within, she passed the doors to her library, the dining area, the sewing room, the stairs leading down into the garden and finally reached her uncle’s study.

Stopping before the domineering double doors, she tied her robe on straight, brushed her thick hair with her hands and straightened her shoulders. At this stage of things, she had no intention of rushing into his room like a frightened child. Not when her nineteenth birthday was so close at hand.

Feeling slightly more dignified, she raised her hand and rapped on the closest door.

“It’s open.”

Smiling for a moment in relief at the sound of her uncle’s voice, La’tiera eagerly reached to open the door.

Within was a broad room jammed with books, papers and shelves of curios from around the world. A dark ironwood desk resided on the far side, an ample leather chair behind it. She loved this room. It, more than anything else, encapsulated her uncle’s personality for her, yet it was more than that. In some ways it was as if the room and its contents encapsulated the world as well. Fertility statues from the Barbarian Reaches, masks from the hunter tribes in Gaya, purported demon skulls, strange insects trapped in amber, prayer wheels, curved knives, stuffed animals from faraway jungles—she never tired of looking at these things, of touching them. Gathered over her uncle’s lifetime and some by his ancestors before him, these things gave her a glance at the people and places she would never see.

In the corner, facing a tall shelf of books, she found the one she sought. Though taller than she was, her uncle was not a large man but rather thin and wiry. His white hair thickly ringed the sides of his head, which was otherwise bald. Age spots covered much of his exposed skin and a slight stoop hunched his shoulders. He leaned heavily on a thick cane with a silver head while holding an open book in his free hand.

Yet all his age was belied by the bright energy and intensity of his gaze.

She saw the familiar brightness now as he finished the passage in the book he was holding and glanced toward her.

“La’tiera?” He let the book close and set it back on the shelf. “You’re not normally up this early. Is something amiss?”

Seeing his welcomed concern, she suddenly found it hard to keep her previously contrived calm. “I…”

“You’ve had another nightmare.”

Her thin veneer suffered another crack. “Yes, I did.” Her voice shook. “It was awful.”

Her uncle’s lined face softened and he held his arms out to her. “Come, child.”

As if it were a blow rather than an offer of comfort, her veneer shattered and tears sprang to her eyes as she quickly crossed the room to fall into the offered embrace. She felt his thin arms wrap around her.

“It was terrible. A whole city was destroyed. So many people died!” She hid her face in his thick robe, trying not to sob.

“Shush, it’s all right.” He held her, softly caressing her hair as he sometimes had when she was a child. “Everything is all right now.”

La’tiera tried to pull herself together but was having a hard time of it.

“Here, wipe your face.”

From a pocket, he produced a handkerchief and handed it to her. She took it, not meeting his eyes as he moved away from her to settle gingerly in the large chair. Wiping her face, she sat down on the cold floor beside him and laid her head on his knees.

“I’m sorry. I really don’t mean to be a bother to you.”

With a slight smile, he caressed her cheek, his right hand appearing like a talon so wracked it was by age. She thought it wonderful.

“Nonsense, you’re my treasure and could never bother me. I’m only sorry the Eye burdens you with such visions—especially since you already know how important your mission is.”

Yes, her mission, her whole reason for existence.

“You won’t have to put up with them much longer.”

Though she already knew this, it was comforting to hear him say so.

“I’ll try not to let them bother me,” she said, looking up. “As long as they’re only visions and don’t come true, it’ll be worth it.”

“Yes and it will all be thanks to you.” He lifted her head so she could sit up, a soft smile on his face until he looked down at her. “La’tiera…”

She stiffened slightly, familiar with the chastising tone. “What is it?”

“What have I spoken to you about before?”

She pulled back for a moment, not sure what he meant, until she noticed her robe had come slightly apart near the collar.

“The Eye!” Unbidden, her delicate hand shot up to her chest to cover the strange birthmark housed there. It was what set her aside from all others and gave her a purpose in life. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.” She quickly stood and arranged her robe to keep it from view.

“You know how important it is for no one to know you who you are. It’s why I had your necklace made.” His voice turned very serious. “And why it is important that you never take it off.”

La’tiera bowed her head in apology. If only the necklace weren’t so heavy. It made it very difficult to sleep at times.

“I’ll try to do better.”

“I’m sure you will.” His expression lightened. “By the way, it seems we will have entertainment this evening. A traveling troupe arrived in town yesterday afternoon. If nothing untoward is learned about them today, they will be allowed into the manor.” He shot her a sly look. “Unless you’d rather not see them, of course.”

La’tiera felt a bolt of excitement shoot through her. “No! I mean, I would welcome the distraction, if you would permit it, Your Excellency.”

She gave him a small curtsy. Her uncle was the viscount of the area and in all things he held the final say. And she so hungered for things from the outside.

He laughed at her sudden formality. “Yes, of course, pending their approval. Now, run along so an old man can get back to his studies.”

“Thank you, Uncle.” She curtsied to him again, her excitement growing by the moment. Still, she managed to take ladylike steps to the door and let herself out.

Once in the hallway, however, she let out a small squeal of pleasure and took off for her suite. Her bare feet slapped against the floor, echoing off the stone walls.

Out of breath by the time she got there, she crossed her spacious bedroom and jumped into her bed, snuggling into the thick covers. A performing troupe would be coming by tonight! It was too delicious. New music, new faces—it would be wonderful. It would also be a sweet pain to have to wait for it until the evening. She’d have to make as much of it as she could. She wouldn’t have much longer to take advantage of such opportunities.

A smile on her face, she didn’t mind too much as she reached to her nightstand for the necklace bearing the viscount’s family crest and placed the heavy thing around her neck, hiding from view her reason for being.

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