Chapter 2

When I tell Michael that I am obsessed by the number 18 and the wolf symbol throughout their random appearances in my life, Michael laughs and asks me to follow him to a small town outside Jerusalem.

It’s September and it’s hot. My hand is squeezing the handle on the public bus while we’re speeding and raising columns of dust. I can see through the tinted windows the sun burning the desert sand. I close my eyes as Michael speaks to me. He whispers to me the name of the place where we are going: "The Hill of the Wolf."

Agassi reads and translates, "In the Beginning E(o)him created ET the heavens ET the earth." 
I am sitting in his study in front of a photo of Bob Dylan and a painting inscribed with the first sentence of the Bible turned over twice, first on the vertical axis and then on the horizontal axis. Agassi is a Kabbalist, son of Kabbalists, and a former military judge. 
He wrote a 22,000-page book to prove that the entire Torah (the Hebrew Bible) is interpretable and traceable to the number 18. Agassi repeats the reading of the Hebrew text for me, a foreigner: "Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'arets."  

Reshit, Principle, is the first word in the Bible. It is translated "In the Beginning," but also "through the beginning." In the first major translation of the Torah made by the Seventy for the famous library of Alexandria, the Divine is put first, at the beginning of the narrative. For Respect. 
"Why then did our teacher Moses not put the Divine first?" I struggle to follow Agassi. 

I stare incessantly at the large silver ring he wears. Engraved on it are two small circles that touch. They are two worlds, one of which is reversed twice, it's the spiritual world touching the real world only at one point in the world, Mt. Zion. Reshit, principle, is also the name of the Torah.
Agassi continues and the words flow out of his mouth like a river: 
"Because of the Torah, god created, creates and will create the world. 
God looks at himself and makes a plan. This plan is the Torah. 
But God creates the world through himself, so God is the Torah."

Agassi tells me that it is already 5 p.m. and he has to leave me to go to work. Since his retirement he has in fact opened a new business. I go with him. We go up the stairs. He disappears inside what looks to me like an orange tent. After a second I can see it opening up like a spaceship. From a small window Agassi reappears with a big fat smile and a purple velveteen kippah. In his hand is a lot of tickets, and the tent has become a Lottery booth.

I don’t have the time to laugh at the inherent humor of life, a Kabbalah enthusiast selling lottery tickets, that Agassi freezes me for the last time:
"God creates from nothing, nothing is a name for God."
Haim comments, "Of the divine plan we know nothing. We are as if blocked by the immeasurable. The Creator created a strictly atheistic world."