The Judge (Part 4)

“Kol ha’olam kulo, gesher tzar me’od, Rabbi Nachman of Brezlov tells us. The whole world is a very narrow bridge,” The Judge began to read his verdict with the barest hint of a glimmer in his eye. The plaintiff, who was arguing that the bridge the defendant had constructed for him to allow access to his property was too narrow to drive a pickup truck over, sat in stony silence. The defendant tapped his hand nervously on the table. The Judge was averaging a case a week now, so he had plenty of time to study and write, and this verdict, he had decided, would be a lighter one.

It had been several years since he had been at the case-a-day pace that his fellow judges practiced. One of them had started to joke that The Judge spent more time with his whistle at the Handball court than with his gavel in the courtroom. The Judge had teamed with the legendary handball referee Abdelhakim Ifrani under the flag at the African Cup. A man from the national Handball Federation had even offered him a staff position, developing referees across Africa.

The Judge had taken a week to consider the offer. He called his brothers Yakub and Naftali on their kibbutz, and learned that they were spending their time teaching young Americans how to farm. In exchange, each was taking a private English lesson with a different American girl and, they told him, getting very good at reading. Yakub suggested The Judge make Aliyah, that there was a rabbi named Ovadia Yosef who was helping their people to be active in politics, that they could vote and lead and have influence on government and The Judge reminded him that the Gendarmerie Captain had retired him from politics.

The judge drove his car down to the valley to meet with his mother and his father and his youngest brother. His mother had prepared a goat tagine, of the kind they had imagined in his youth was served every day in the houses in the cities. The Judge was going to tell them that he was taking the Handball job, that it paid better and would allow him to retire his father from the farm once and for all. He was going to tell them that he would move them to the city, so that they could live with him and enjoy the culture and the spirit. But his father spoke first. “Harun, do you know Mohammed Abderrahman, from down low in the valley?”

“Of course, father. For how many years have you and Simo gone together to the soccer games?”

“It will be fifty-one this October when they kick off again. I have told Simo that this will be my last season watching the matches with him.”

“Do you not like soccer anymore?”

“It is time to make Aliyah, my son. Lea and I have decided to go. I have heard that there are farms to be had there. Gabi is coming with us. You should as well. I’ve arranged for Simo to manage the farm. He and his sons will live here and will run it, and every year they will send Lea and I a tenth of what they make, and when Lea and I die, if you do not want the farm, you and Gabi may sell it to him.”

“Father, our family had lived here from generation to generation.”

It was his mother who spoke this time. “Simo told your father bad things are coming for us if we stay here much longer. Simo is right.”

“Our community is here.”

“Our community is in Beit Hatikvah and on Kibbutz Hannah Senesh now, my son. All of my backgammon partners, all of your mother’s friends from synagogue, everyone I ever kept a deep friendship with except for Simo has made Aliyah now.”

“I cannot go, not now.”

His mother stared at him, and his father started to cry. His brother stood up, walked out, and started to shout at the chickens, his voice disappearing into the night as he climbed the mountainside towards the cow.

“Our people depend on me to settle the law. The only other one of us is Binzion Menendes, and he’s as old as Noah now.” Judge Menendes had decided to make Aliyah as well. The letter he had written explaining this to The Judge was on his desk, awaiting his return from the valley.

“At least you maintain the honor that we raised you with,” his mother said.

“I will visit you, all the time, as I have visited Yakub and Naftali and Sara, who is very happy living with Shulie, you never ask me about her when I come back.”

“God knows whether we will return.”

The drive back to the city the next morning, over the gleaming new highway, took an hour. The old road had been four, without snow. The Judge had barely gotten to thinking by the time he pulled up at the Hall of Justice. He walked in past the dinosaur skeleton, which he had recently learned would be relocated to the headquarters of the Ministry of Mines, Energy, and Potable Water. The Minister, a cousin of the King, was building a Royal Museum of Earth Discoveries in the lobby of its new building in the capitol. The Minister of Religious Affairs said the skeleton reflected unfavorably on the course of justice to appear so ossified in a changing world. The Judge thought it was that many of his older colleagues did not appreciate that a permanent symbol of the fallibility of religion was located in their building.

He was still thinking about the dinosaur when he opened the door to his office. The Captain was sitting on The Judge’s desk, reading the copy of Al-Haraka that had been delivered that morning.

“Captain!” said the Judge, grabbing a lamppost instinctively.

“They call me General now, Harun. Or Minister.”

“Yes sir, Minister.”

“Have you decided to take the job I arranged for you at the Handball federation? I think it would be a good idea.”

“Minister, I told my mother and father yesterday that our people depend on me to settle the law.”

“So you, too, are going to Israel to study the scrolls and read the commentaries and settle the law?”

“Minister, there are thousands of us still here. I will settle the law for us until there are none of us left.”

“That is your choice.”

“This is your promise.”

“And I have substituted a more than equitable exchange.”

“I wish to settle the law. Hear me in court today, please, and think again.”

“Today?”

“Today is a good one, Minister. Why would you not use today?”

“Today only. I do not promise you a change of mind.”

The General sat in the back of the courtroom, noticing the defendant tapping his hand on the table, the plaintiff gazing off through the window in silence, the Gendarme who called the court to session with the Shahadda and then the Shemma, The Judge as he walked into the courtroom, and the small, colorful fish in an old aquarium, who had been unwanted in a Muslim divorce and had found himself (or herself, none of the judges was a biologist) under the care of all the judges together.

The Judge looked down at his verdict, gave thanks to God for his foresight in making this one especially eloquent, and read. “Kol ha’olam kulo, gesher tzar me’od, Rabbi Nachman of Brezlov tells us. The whole world is a very narrow bridge, veha'ikar lo lefached klal, and the most important thing, Reb Nachman reminds us, is not to be overwhelmed by fear.”

The Judge (Part 3)

There was one Jewish chamber in the religious court in Bousaid, the city nearest the valley that Harun Margi grew up in. The Kings had, since time immemorial, allowed the various religious communities under Their domain to settle their disputes according to their own law. With the coming of the Western legal system with the French and the Spanish, the courts that tried age-old murders and robberies and the variety of felonies that had only come about with the modern world were secularized. The Ministry of Justice even removed the Quranic verses from their statement of values and principles.

The declining religiosity of the other members of the King’s government scared Sheikh Toufik Abdelkrim, Minister of Islamic Affairs. After making his name as a member of the religious resistance to the Vichy occupation, Sheikh Abdelkrim had begun to gently push for a religious government after the war. Recognizing the potential power of his message amongst the many people who had been left destitute and homeless in the great cities of the country, Interior Minister Idrisi and the King had offered him a chance to head a new Ministry instead of a revolution. When the smoldering wreckage of his car accompanied his refusal, he realized his mind had been made up.

To placate Sheikh Abdelkrim, the Minister of Justice and Minister Idrisi allowed the new civil court system, which would hear cases of contracts and divorces and estates and other things that everyone knew had been handed down from God since time immemorial, to be maintained as religious.

There were hundreds of Islamic courtrooms up and down the mountains and the valleys all the way to the ocean or the desert. Even the smallest village had one, often in the train station or the post office, which Postes Watany had often subleased portions of for cafes. The ones in the large cities were palaces of justice the equal of any in the developed West, presided over by the most esteemed scholars of the age. A wildly popular soap opera had been made about the lives of the young judges who traversed the mountain passes, dispensing a day of justice a month in the smaller towns. The career of the actress Aisha Saadi had been launched by her star turn as a Judge struggling to help mountain villagers reject the land grabs of a Polish real estate speculator.

In a couple of the mountain towns on the border, there were animist courthouses, built on old burial mounds, where a holy man would dance himself into a trance in a smoke-filled room, and then render judgements on mineral rights worth millions of dinars to corporations and the sheepherders who eked out a survival existence in the hills. There was also a single Christian chamber in the north, in Ciudad Moros, which had been especially receptive to Spanish colonialism. In Ciudad Moros and in Bousaid and in Quart and in and in Dar Al-Aswad, the capital, were Jewish ones. The King was especially keen to demonstrate his toleration of other religions, news of his torture chambers, newspaper closures, and refusal to open to democracy was beginning to travel the long and winding road to the ears of lawmakers in nations that produced aid and arms. Freedom of religious practice was one of the few things that kept the arms flowing, he told Minister Idrisi, and Idrisi in turn reminded Sheikh Abdelkrim that his position depended on the continued power of the King, so the Ministry of Islamic Affairs continued to sanction these courts.

In 1965, when he returned from Yeshiva University, Harun Margi spent a year apprenticing under Bousaid’s Jewish Judge, Yusuf Benyisroel. The old man, who had been reading and interpreting Halakha, rulings of Jewish law, for four kings, retired with the encouragement of Interior Minister Idrisi, and made Aliyah to Israel, and Harun Margi was The Judge now, and not even 30 years old.

Being The Judge gave him a respected place among the Rabbinate of North Africa, but it did not give him the wisdom of the sages. His knowledge of Torah was second-to-none, but old farmers and middle-aged businessmen and squat little housewives could all out-argue him in French, a language he never had much of in the first place. He couldn’t ask them to conduct their own proceedings in his native Tamazigt, most of the Jewry of the city was bilingual in French and Arabic, and preferred to argue in French.

He had not been a judge for a whole year in June of 1967. One morning started with a bitter divorce. The Judge reminded both parties of the verse in Deuteronomy which calls for the bird to be left alone if it is sitting on eggs in the nest, that they should remember that they are both birds sitting on nests. He was finishing the speech when a Gendarme came into the courtroom.

The Judge called the Gendarme up to the bench, and learned that war had been declared. The Gendarme told him that the court would not sit until the war was over and, holding The Judge’s hand, asked for God's mercy.

The Judge (Part 1&2)

Ten bees had already landed on the tray of fresh pastries to The Judge’s left. As they did each morning, the bees probably wondered why the honey drizzled atop the pastries was so warm, or why their fellows had been so remiss in letting it escape its hexagonal chambers, or why they were so casually disturbed in flight. Steam rose with the bees from the pastries in the wintery mountain air.  On his right, a pile of croissants sat, less picked-over by bees, hints of chocolate peeking out from under their crispy edges. The Judge raised his hand, shooed away two bees, and darted to grab one of the larger, nutty pastries. It had been over six years since his last sting.

Marouane, the baker, had a glass of warm milk already on the counter, pale pink with grenadine syrup. The Judge clinked two multicolored coins onto the counter, grabbed the milk and mumbled his thanks. Three motorcycles, piloted by young men with someplace to be early in the morning, rattled past, their two-stroke motors blackening the street. Courier services had become popular after the privatization of Postes Watany, the National Post, and many young men were bitten by the entrepreneurial bug.

An Adujatant-Chef of the Royal Gendarmerie walked up to The Judge’s table. “Sidi Harun, begging your pardon.” The Judge, as he did every morning, waved the nutty pastry in his hand at the chair to his left. “Shokran, Sidi Harun.”

“La shokran ala wajib,” The Judge said. There is no need to thank me for doing my job.

The officer pinched and twirled his ample mustache. “Judge, sir. Your Honor. You are, of course, familiar with the prophet Ayyub, peace be upon him.”

“May his memory be a blessing.”

“And you remember how he once told his wife that he would beat her a hundred times?”

“When she, as it is said, complained of the afflictions God was putting them through.”

“And when God believed Ayuub was a good man and faithful, and he restored to Ayuub his family, his wife was distraught because she thought he would have to beat her a hundred times in this, their hour of greatest happiness.” He paused.

“And God gave Ayyub the instruction to caress her back a hundred times with soft grasses instead, of course.”

“Right!” said the Gendarme, “This is my conundrum. God tells man that the beating of the wife in an hour of such happiness is forbidden, because Ayyub was his very faithful servant, and if he would not allow Ayyub to do it, it must be forbidden to all.”

“But how is this a conundrum? Are you not an upstanding man? You should not beat your wife at all!”

“I do not, Judge, sir! I have never wanted to!” Conspiratorially, he leaned towards The Judge. “When we are in bed, sometimes she asks me to beat her. I want to make her happiest, Judge, but God would not allow me to.”

“Ah, this is a conundrum!” The judge reached back with his now-spindly arms, gathering the collective knowledge of the sages, and brought his right hand to his temple, to tug the top of his ample sideburns. “I believe you will find that God makes a dispensation for those who have requested that violence be visited upon them, like the wrestler in the ring. The next time she asks, you can tell her yes.”

“Thank you, Judge.” The officer got up. His brilliant white peaked cap settled back on his head, the King’s coat of arms in polished brass caught the sun and scattered it across the Judge’s face.

The Judge sighed deeply. It was so often sex. They could trust him in a way they could not trust other judges, he supposed, and so they asked him those most intimate questions. He tossed the last bit of pastry high in the air, and it fell down towards his open mouth. It had been a month since he had missed. He had allowed himself this bit of play ever since a child sweeping the ground by the Tramway told him Judges were not allowed to have fun. He had worried then that the child was right, he could not remember having fun on purpose since he refereed the third place match of the World Team Handball Championship in East Berlin. And so he had perfected it now, so that it almost seemed like a chore, so that the fun had almost left it unless he caught some tourist watching him do the preposterous thing.

This morning, a gull swooped and grabbed the pastry in mid-flight. The Judge sat with his mouth open, facing the sky. A young man in a yellow Veloia high-vis jumpsuit swept the square with a palm frond. The Judge said a silent prayer for the health of the bird. A woman began frying semolina flour pancakes on a griddle next to Marouane’s bakery, under a rack of jars of nutella and chocolate sauce and marmalades. The Judge looked absentmindedly back down and noticed his milk. The son of the newspaperman on the corner of the square dropped three newspapers on the table, grabbed the coin that the Judge had already placed for him, and ran off again. The Judge scanned the headlines of Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat, Al-Haraka, and Le Journal d’Aujourd’hui, found nothing special, and put them back down. A tourist took his picture, an old man reading a newspaper, surely a contender for photo of the month at the Florence, South Carolina Society of Oriental Explorers. Judge Harun Margi swigged the rest of his milk, placed all three papers in the crook of his arm with practiced ease, and set off toward the Hall of Justice.

---

It had been surprisingly easy, The Judge noted to himself while flipping through Al-Haraka, the party’s newspaper, to join the Haraka Shaabiya, the Popular Movement, when he was a young man. The requirements were simple: commitment to democratic change and the agricultural principles put forward by the purged Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov. All of The Judge’s friends were joining, and he had just finished his degree in agronomy and found himself without a job, so at 20 years old, Harun Margi became the Second Secretary for Haraka Shaabiya, the Popular Movement, in the valley of Ouataroucht.

The first protest against low olive prices that Harun Margi organized had 20 attendees. They mostly sat in small groups with signs and wheat-colored Haraka Shaabiya hats, playing parcheesi outside the Credit Agricole. The bank manager shooed them away, yelling about gambling to the local Gendarme Sergeant and hitting the protesters with a broom. It was the broom which was most responsible for the fact that the next protest attracted at least one member of every family in the valley and about as many donkeys. The story had spread, and groups of friends and families came down from the hills and up from the dells to yell at the bank manager, or watch him get yelled at. The theater in Ouataroucht had been the victim of the crash of a wayward Hawker Hurricane during the British campaign in North Africa and it was rare to have such a public display of inspired acting. When he was appointed to the Court, The Judge sent the bank manager’s son a letter of thanks, and a new broom.

It was Harun Margi who organized the broom-offended olive growers and pickers in the valley into a coordinated arm of Haraka Shaabiya, and Harun Margi who brought them out into the streets, first just of Ouataroucht, then other small towns across the valley, then to neighboring valleys. It was Harun Margi who surprised the fifty-strong Gendarmerie post in Ain Al-Muqit with a ten-thousand-farmer protest, and it was Harun Margi who organized twenty thousand farmers and field workers and nearly that many of their wives, so the newspaper had reported the next day, for a march up to Tarbouch to support the new constitution that would allow Haraka Shaabiya to run in the very first parliamentary election.

It was this newspaper-noted achievement which brought Harun Margi to the attention of Hicham Idrisi, the King’s Minister of the Interior. The leaders of Haraka Shaabiya called Mr. Idrisi “The Dyer,” after the way that he used the blood of the tortured to blacken the leather for the slippers he made for his wife and daughters. Mr. Idrisi’s interest took the form of a visit by a Gendarmerie Captain to the Margi family home.

Sprawling out in an architectural style that a tourist from Oklahoma or Los Angeles might describe as Ranch-like, with the open second floor as a courtyard of sorts and a home for Sambu, the family dog, the Margi home was one of the largest in the valley. Having owned half the hillside from generation to generation, and having been able to coax trees out of it to stay standing and give olives, the Margis were not as poor as some in the valley. They had, after all, been able to send Harun and his oldest sister to school. His younger brothers had shown great interest in farming, and his father Musa had taken the decision to let the groves and hillsides teach them instead.

Musa Margi answered the door for the Captain, poured him some sheba tea, and then sat quietly while Harun was interrogated for six hours about his political activity. By the time it had become obvious that Harun was interested only in winning better prices for the agricultural products of the valley, (and perhaps a subsidy for fertilizer to increase yields) and not in changing the structure of the government (which should have been obvious from the outset, Haraka Shaabiya had always been a Royalist and democratic movement, but the Captain had to check) it was too late for the Captain to leave, the one-lane cliffside road was impassable in the dark.

The next morning, the Captain asked Harun to walk him out to his Jeep. Harun opened the door, and let the captain out, and fended off a charge from one of the family’s sheep, and patted the hood of the Jeep. “You know, I’ve never been in a car before,” he said to the Captain.

“I can’t take you in this one,” the Captain said. “I bet horses go faster on these old dirt tracks anyway. They can move to avoid the holes.”

“They do,” said Harun. “Our horse is the best. But I usually ride one of our donkeys.”

“You’re a smart young man. Can I pay to send you to school?”

“I’ve been to school. It’s where I learned I didn’t need to go to school anymore.”

“And when you were in school, didn’t your father suggest that you become a Rabbi? Don’t tell me he didn’t, he told me so last night. If you want, I will pay for you to go to Rabbinical School in the United States, I will care for your family here until you return, and I will secure you a job settling the law so that you can provide for anyone in this valley if you want, even when you are an old man.”

Harun stared at the Captain.

“Or I could ask Sidi Idrisi to pay a visit.”

Some Thoughts about the California Propositions

This year there are 18 propositions on the California ballot. I feel about them as follows:

51-No. Bond for school construction. This proposition would basically give bond money to rich school districts while neglecting poor ones. It is sponsored by the construction industry.

52-Meh. Something to do with Medi-Cal fees. This one is hard to figure out, and the legislators should have worked it out for themselves. They're abrogating responsibility, the bastards.

53-No. Requires voter approval on all projects over $2 Billion in cost. Tom McClintock thinks it's a good idea, which means it's a very, very bad one.

54-Yes. Requires the legislature to record themselves in public meetings, and not vote on things without putting them on the internet. This is a good idea for transparency. More transparency is ALWAYS good.

55-Yes. Tax on rich people. Rich people will not leave California. It is too beautiful. Nobody who has a choice wants to leave. It's never humid, and people are mostly nice.

56-Meh. Increase in tobacco taxes. On the one hand, tobacco taxes are regressive as fuck. On the other hand, tobacco taxes do marcinally lower tobacco consumption. Way less people smoke tobacco in California, which is one of the best things about the place.

57-Yes. Reduction in peopel sent to jail for nonviolent crime. This would basically allow more folks to get diversion programs and probation instead of jail for nonviolent crimes. This is, on balance, a good thing. It will help keep communities together, and reduce crime.

58-Yes. Bilingual education. Bilingual education is, on balance, probably good for kids whose home language is other than English.

59-Meh. Overturning Citizens United. This is an advisory question, nothing will happen, and it clogs up the ballot pointlessly. On the other hand, overturning Citizens United is probably good.

60-No. Condoms in porn. I don't know why these motherfuckers keep coming for the many good jobs on both sides of the camera in the Porn industry, but they do, and it's fucked up.

61-Yes. Drug Prices. This would make it so that the state hospitals bought drugs at the VA price or not at all. That seems good.

62-Fuck Yes. Death Penalty Repeal. This would repeal the death penalty. The only thing that should be getting the death penalty in our imperfect world today is the motherfucking Baylor football program.

63-Yes. Background checks to buy ammo. If I had my druthers, they'd also slap a $1000/bullet tax on ammo.

64-Fuck Yes. Legal Marijuana. It's embarrassing that legal marijuana lost last time. Don't let that happen again.

65-No. Grocery bag fee. This would prevent the grocery bag ban and fee from going into place. Don't do that.

66-No. Removal of due process rights. This would remove constitutionally protected Due Process rights from individuals. That is always bad.

67-Yes. Ban on plastic bags. Do this before every speck of ocean is plasticized.