Vicious Circle Read Online Free PDF

Efrayim persisted.
    A sixteen-wheel trailer truck roared past in the opposite direction.Apfulbaum waited until the noise subsided, and said, “My Rabbi in Brooklyn used to teach us that if the Torah didn’t instruct
     Jews to pray, he wouldn’t pray—he’d study Torah.”
    “So studying Torah is the best thing a Jew can do with his time?”
    “Studying Torah and obeying God’s commandment to settle all the land of the Torah, these are the best things a Jew can do.”
    “What if someone is already occupying the land of the Torah?”
    “Do you remember what happened to the Amalek nation when it rose up against the Israelites fleeing Egypt?”
    Efrayim, who had been studying Torah since he was a child, smiled brightly. “God instructed Moses to blot out their memory.”
    “And who has heard of an Amalek Liberation Organization today?” the Rabbi asked. He laughed under his breath at his own little
     joke.
    Efrayim thought about this. “Rabbi?”
    “What is it now?”
    “If our demented Prime Minister goes ahead and signs that peace treaty in Washington, we’ll have to give an awful lot of the
     land of the Torah back to the Palestinians. If we give back the land, how will we be able to obey God’s commandment to settle
     all of the land of the Torah?”
    “God will surely stay the Prime Minister’s hand at the last moment.”
    “The way he stayed Abraham’s hand when he was about to sacrifice his son Isaac?”
    “Something along those lines.”
    Rounding a curve near the Zohar Reservoir, the headlights of the lead car swept over a white Volkswagen camping car parked
     up ahead at the side of the road. A tall religious Jew with side curls, wearing a black ankle-length coat and a black fedora,
     waved his arms over his head to flag them down. A young woman, also a religious Jew judging from her shawl and pill box hat
     and the long skirt that plunged to her ankles, stood nearby with her eyes downcast.
    “
Haredim
,” muttered the driver in the point car, using the Hebrew word for the ultra Orthodox Jews.
    “Keep going,” the young man sitting next to him ordered, butthe driver of the Rabbi’s station wagon was already honking his horn and slowing down, so they pulled up, too. The three young
     bodyguards, their side curls and the ritual fringes of the
tallith katan
flying in the dry gusts coming off the desert, cocked their Uzis as they stepped out of the Chevrolet.
    The Rabbi’s station wagon had come to a stop next to the camping car. The Rabbi’s Russian driver, his finger curled around
     the trigger of the Uzi concealed along the seam of his trousers, opened his door and stepped out onto the road. The Rabbi
     rolled down his window. “What’s the trouble?” he called in Yiddish to the religious Jew standing next to the parked Volkswagen.
    “We ran out of benzene,” the young woman, her face disfigured by smallpox scars, replied in Hebrew.
    The tall young man in the ankle-length coat approached the Rabbi’s car. “We are on our way back to Ashqelon,” he explained,
     speaking Hebrew with an accent Apfulbaum couldn’t immediately place. “Do you have a jerry can you could lend us? We will reimburse
     you for the benzene.”
    The driver of the Chevrolet came running back along the road. “Something’s not right,” he shouted. “They’re speaking Hebrew
     instead of Yiddish—”
    The warning—
Haredim
only spoke Hebrew when studying Torah or talking to God—came too late.
    From the folds of her shawl the young woman whipped out an automatic pistol and, gripping it in both her hands, sent a hail
     of bullets plunging into the driver’s chest. Gun shots erupted from the darkness at the side of the road, cutting down the
     two body guards standing next to the Chevrolet before they could squeeze off a round. The driver of the Rabbi’s Nissan dove
     onto the asphalt and fired his Uzi in short bursts at the flashes at the side of the road until the clip ran out. He was trying
     to jam in