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blood-of-the-Maccabees, in and out of the yellow jasmine of which Israelis say, “Two jasmines can drive a man crazy.”
    Then I stepped back on something thick and soft, and turned to look. It was a decapitated snake. It was no small poison adder but a wide and dark thing, mottled, like our corn snake or water snake.
    Since there is a Talmudic blessing for everything else—for seeing the first blossoms of spring, for seeing a friend after a year’s absence, for smelling spiced oil—then surely a blessing must exist for seeing or stepping on a decapitated snake. When one sees an animal for the first time in one’s life, one thanks God, “FOR ALL CAME INTO BEING BY HIS WORD.” Of course one blesses God for food. One generous Talmudistsaid a man could fulfill the obligation to bless the various foodstuffs individually by saying instead an all-purpose blessing, if he said it with devotion: “Blessed be He who created this object. HOW BEAUTIFUL IT IS.”
    The snake’s body extended, curving, over three wide flagstones. Though it had stopped jerking, it did not yet stink. Only one fly had found its red meat. Its severed neck was smooth; a blade had cut it. Not only could I not find the snake head, I also lost the hawk moth, which flew over the wall, I think, and down the slope, toward the Sea of Galilee.
    Ezekiel 3:1: Eat this scroll.
    E N C O U N T E R S              We encounter people, often tangentially. Leaving for Israel, I met a skycap at the airport. He was a hefty man in his sixties, whose face was bashed in. He imitated Elvis. It was just the two of us, standing at the curb; I was smoking a cigarette. As Elvis, he looked at me sidelong from slitty, puffed eyes, and sang,
    Love me tender, love me sweet,
    Never let me go.
    You have made my life complete,
    And I love you so.
    Then he slurred, “Thank you very much—Just kidding.”
    He began again abruptly: “This is Howard Cosell,
The Wide World of Sports
. Just kidding.”
    He told me he used to be a prizefighter. His splayed nose, ears, brow bones, and cheekbones bore him out. He ranked in the top one hundred, he said; his brother, a welterweight, ranked number nine.
    “My wife says I’m drain-bamaged,” he said, and looked at me sideways to see if I’d heard it.
    “Just kidding,” he said. “Thank you very much.”
    T H I N K E R              In 135 C.E., the Romans killed Rabbi Akiva for teaching Torah. They killed him by flaying his skin and stripping his bones with currycombs. He was eighty-five years old. A Roman currycomb in those days was an iron scraper; its blunt teeth combed mud and burrs from horsehair. To flay someone—an unusual torture—the wielder had to bear down. Perhaps the skin and muscles of an old scholar are comparatively loose.
    “All depends on the preponderance of good deeds,” Rabbi Akiva had said. The weight of good deeds bears down on the balance scales. Paul Tillich also held this view. If the man who stripped Rabbi Akiva’s bones with a currycomb boredown with a weight of, say, two hundred psi, how many pounds of good deeds would it take to tip the balance to the good?
    “Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe?” a twentieth-century novelist asked. “The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already.”
    (Since this book hails thinkers for their lights, and pays scant heed to their stripes, I should acknowledge here that Judaism and Christianity, like other great religions, have irreconcilable doctrinal differences, both within and without. Rabbi Pinhas: “The principal danger of man is religion.”)
    Akiva ben Joseph was born in the Judean lowlands in 50 C.E. He was illiterate and despised scholarship; he worked herding sheep. Then he fell in love with a rich man’s daughter. She agreed to marry him only when he vowed to devote his life to studying Torah. So he did. He learned to read along with their son.
    Rabbi Akiva systematized,