And all the while, and equally incompatible, was Abdul’s reaction to the war of words. He listened to both warriors, but he ratified nothing, serving not as a judge but as an aloof and lofty deity who refused to intervene in the affairs of men, letting them find their own solutions or, as in most cases, dig their own graves. Indeed he simply sat there, the visible, inaccessible incarnation of the tutelary deity Regat Punbela, whose name meant “God of Those Who Trip Over Their Own Pricks.”

I’d come away from those meetings in something of a state of shock, stunned and shuddered by Qazwini’s bloodcurdling rhetoric and intransigent, hell-for-leather diplomacy.

“He’s a hundred and ten percenter,” I’d say to my father as we rehashed the day’s entanglements or shaped the morrow’s strategies. “He wants his own way in everything.”

“Even the angels want their own way,” the Colonel said imperturbably.

“He wears me out. I don’t like people who think they’re right when they’re merely unruly.”

My father shrugged. “In the military business, even in Israel, you sometimes have to deal with dinosaurs. The important thing,” he went on, “is to keep the channels open.”

“I may be clogging them.”

“You?”

“He dislikes me. Intensely.”

“Can you think of anyone he doesn’t dislike?”

“No.”

“If you were to disengage, wouldn’t he consider it at least a partial victory, a strengthening of his position, one less adversary to contend with? Stick around,” he said. “Don’t let your hatred be self-defeating.”

“I loathe the son of a bitch and the things he says. Like yesterday when he said he’d sit on your face till it turned blue.”

My father smiled. “Ma’asim, lo diburim. That’s what’s important.”

“What’s it mean?”

“‘Deeds, not dialogue.’ Anyway, it’s the Divine Will.”

“How could that be?”

“God allotted loud mouths to those who have them. Perhaps to test the righteous.”

God figured prominently in both my father’s deeds and his dialogue. Gradually, as we conferred, his attitude of disinterest and remoteness toward me changed. Imperceptibly at first, but it was I suppose inevitable, in spending so much time together, that something of himself would infiltrate our discussions. Slowly a personal history emerged.

Morton Breslau had become Menachem ben Ish-Chayl, warrior of God, forsaking secular scholarship to embrace a born-again faith. His was the commitment of a mystic who had overcome apostasy to find something fresh and fulfilling, an old untrodden path of hope and promise. Israel gave him the opportunity of exercising a potential he never suspected he possessed. What he gave in return was a deep and unqualified devotion so boundless it could more accurately be called love. Thus he learned that God works indeed in mysterious ways, and that there is good in everything.