It was a shadow world, a place of shame and secrecy where saving face ruled lives and ruined them; a place of fear and forced conformity to rules that were the opposite of the godly ones she had learned to cherish. It was a place where human needs, compassion, and justice were sacrificed daily on the altar of pretense, appearances, and status; a hard-hearted place that rejected the stranger and convert with the utmost snobbery. A place that cowered before evil and discarded justice; a place where cowardly appeasement and conformity and dishonesty reigned; a place that made it impossible to follow the spirit and letter of the Torah to which all paid lip service, but in reality had replaced with the twisted interpretations of an arrogant, self-serving leadership.

For all its rabbinical courts and synagogues and vast study houses where thousands of students sat learning the laws of God; and despite its fanatic delineation of what people were permitted to eat and wear, somehow true piety and goodness had eluded it. It was no different from any other neighborhood in any other twenty-first-century city, she thought, rife with selfishness, lust, materialism, superficiality, and greed—everything she had thought she was leaving behind her when she had joined them.

How had this happened? How had they veered so far from their goals? How had they, possessors of God-given rules and traditions thousands of years old, ancient blueprints for purity and goodness so powerful they had inspired all three monotheistic religions and still served as their bedrock, been blown so far off course?

How had it all gone so wrong?

Because, she thought, human beings were flawed. Even the most devout were sometimes too weak to fight their demons. But instead of admitting defeat, they had institutionalized and rationalized all their failures, twisting God’s laws into something unrecognizable and intimidating all those who protested.

She didn’t belong there. She wanted no part of it.

But it wasn’t too late. It was never too late. A new community with young families, refugees from the falseness and corruption, from those continuing to go through dead motions, pantomiming with silent mockery all that had once been so holy, so revolutionary and exciting. Like the young tribes born in the desert who had heard the very voice of God Himself, seen miracles with their own eyes, listened to the prophet with their own ears, they, too, could cross the Jordan, smash the old idols, expose and uproot to the core the secret dishonesty and debauchery and child sacrifices, creating a new land to nurture those willing to accept without compromise the pure, living tradition that could never be destroyed, that was there waiting for them to rub off its tarnish until it shone with beauty once more.

“You mean never?” Yaakov asked her breathlessly, shocked.

She nodded. “Never. I just can’t. And not only for myself…”

He pulled the car over, parking, then shut off the engine.

“Then for who else?”