His newest book published in Israel a few weeks ago is not yet available in English. It is seemingly artless A Tale of Ezra Siman Tov according to the subtitle. Chapter headings tell where we have left off and where we are heading in an apparently unsophisticated ordering of events.
Ezra is appropriately named a Jew in Jerusalem who is ready to give help – ezra – to everyone. There is a short preface to introduce an old Jerusalemite who will narrate the events in Ezra’s life; he is sad when he thinks of all that Ezra endured yet his eyes light up at the memory of this special person. Ezra loses one element of his happiness after another: a daughter who mysteriously disappears in a scandal that shocks the community his job in a laundry which is displaced by the widening of Jaffa Road the peace and quiet of his neighborhood as development overtakes it the scholar whose shiur he attended but who is also uprooted by progress.
Ezra is a simple Jew who endures all these losses while being subjected to jokes at his expense from a brilliant academic who happens to be his brother-in-law and criticism from a self-centered scholar. Each experiences a self-inflicted comeuppance; both come to realize that Ezra’s dedication surpasses theirs.
It sounds like the book of Job: the introduction; the suffering; the comments from people who think they are superior but miss the point. Ezra has total trust in God and provides a siman tov a good indication of how to live that these sophisticates appreciate only as they age. They function as Job’s friends did not understanding until the very end.
Job was perfect and upright and one who feared God and turned away from evil (1:1) all his days kol ha’yamim (1:5). There is an echo of this dependability in the person of Ezra Siman Tov who awakened day after day yom yom to his work with joy (paragraph 1 of the narrative). Unlike Job’s wife who was ready to give up in the face of their troubles Ezra’s wife Madame Sarah supports both his love of studying Torah before and after work and his passion for living in Jerusalem despite all the hardships they encounter. She is like her namesake the matriarch about whom God said In all that Sarah will say to you listen to her voice (Genesis 21:12).
The book’s title – Ke-afapei Shahar ( Like the Eyelids of the Morning ) – is a quotation of two verses in the Book of Job one at the beginning when Job wishes that the day of his birth had not seen the eyelids of the morn (3:9) and one at the end when the power of God is revealed in an enormous creature whose eyes are like the eyelids of the morning (41:10).
If this is the size of one creature kal v’homer how much more powerful is the Creator for whom this giant is only a minuscule part of His handiwork. The novel ends on the positive side of the eyelids of the morn in a scene that I will not give away; each reader must experience it.
Because this book lends itself to a second reading please look at Psalm 11 especially verse 4 and Psalm 57 especially verse 9 to catch another pattern in Rav Sabato’s design.
The name of the hero – and he is a spiritual hero – brings to mind the Book of Ezra with its account of Jews who had intermarried in Babylon separating from their non-Jewish partners. There is a parallel here in Jews who have gone away to other cultures coming back to their own and a note of hope at the end that we may witness another era of return.
