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blonde, Elin Zadin looked about as Jewish as Eva Braun – that was their joke on the matter – and still enjoyed showing off her figure with the skimpiest of bikinis, and sometimes only half of that. Their marriage had been passionate and fiery. He’d known that she’d always had a wandering eye, of course, and had occasionally dallied himself, but her abrupt departure to another had surprised him – more than that, the manner of it had left him too stunned to weep or beg, had merely left him alone in a home that also contained several loaded weapons whose use, he knew, might easily have ended his pain. Only his sons had stopped that. He could not betray them as he’d been betrayed, he was too much of a man for that. But the pain had been – still was – very real.
Israel is too small a country for secrets. It was immediately noticed that Elin had taken up with another man, and the word had quickly made its way to Benny’s station, where men could see from the hollow look around the eyes that their commander’s spirit had been crushed. Some wondered how and when he would bounce back, but after a week the question had changed to whether he would do so at all. At that point, one of Zadin’s squad sergeants had taken matters in hand. Appearing at his captain’s front door on a Thursday evening, he’d brought with him Rabbi Israel Kohn. On that evening, Benjamin Zadin had rediscovered God. More than that, he told himself, surveying the Street of the Chain in Old Jerusalem, he knew again what it was to be a Jew. What had happened to him was God’s punishment, no more, no less. Punishment for ignoring the words of his mother, punishment for his adultery, for the wild parties with his wife and others, for twenty years of evil thoughts and deeds while pretending to be a brave and upstanding commander of police and soldiers. But today he would change all that. Today he would break the law of man to expiate his sins against the Word of God.
It was early in the morning of what promised to be a blistering day, with a dry easterly wind blowing in from
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Arabia. He had forty men arrayed behind him, all of them armed with a mixture of automatic rifles, gas guns, and other arms that fired ‘rubber bullets,’ more accurately called missiles, made of ductile plastic that could knock a grown man down, and if the marksman were very careful, stop a heart from blunt trauma. His police were needed to allow the law to be broken – which was not the idea that Captain Zadin’s immediate superiors had in mind – and to stop the interference of others willing to break a higher law to keep him from his job. That was the argument Rabbi Kohn had used, after all. Whose law was it? It was a question of metaphysics, something far too complicated for a simple police officer. What was far simpler, as the Rabbi had explained, was the idea that the site of Solomon’s Temple was the spiritual home of Judaism and the Jews. The site on Temple Mount had been chosen by God, and if men had disputed that fact, it was of little account. It was time for Jews to reclaim what God had given them. A group of ten conservative and Hasidic rabbis would today stake out the place where the new temple would be reconstructed in precise accordance with the Holy Scriptures.