More fatherly attention. You must learn with him.

Ezra had tried. He and Noam had agreed to try Sanhedrin—a very difficult tractate of Talmud. He had his doubts but Noam had been insistent, claiming he had an interest in learning how capital crimes were punished by the rabbinical high court. But after the third session, Noam had begun to act up. Started asking questions that had no answers.

If Hashem created everything, who created Hashem?

Hashem didn’t have a creator, Ezra had explained. Hashem always was, always will be.

That doesn’t make any sense.

That’s the way it is, Noam.

But it still doesn’t make any sense.

What was the sense of arguing? So he stopped debating Noam. Another mistake. Noam started asking stupider questions. Like how much did Moses Malone make a year? He’d made learning such a miserable experience that, in desperation, Ezra had lost his temper. Yet Noam hadn’t seemed the least bit upset. In fact, he’d seemed happy.

They had stopped learning together, a big mistake. He must ask Hashem to forgive him for his failure as a father.

Without thinking, he found his lips moving in silent prayer—tehillim—the psalms of David. It was so natural, the Hebrew words just spouting from his subconscious. He had said tehillim for Breina’s mother two days before she succumbed to cancer. He had said tehillim the day his father underwent a double bypass, when his best friend was hit by a car, when his niece was born with a hole in her lung.

So many times he had said tehillim, he knew all the psalms by heart.

Decker listened as Ezra told him about the stolen money and jewelry, noticing that Ezra chose his words carefully. He emphasized that the money wasn’t important to him—as a matter of fact, he was grateful his son had something in his pockets. But the theft might mean something to Decker as a policeman, and since he’d been kind enough to help out with this dreadful business, he should know everything.

When Ezra finished the story, he thanked Decker, then immediately followed it with grateful prayer to Hashem for sending a Jewish policeman. Decker being here was Divine Intervention—basheert—fated.

To Decker’s ears, Ezra’s thinking was childlike. But he’d seen people act irrationally under stress. All logic breaks down….

Ezra asked what the next step was.

“Well…” Decker stifled a yawn. “The whole community knows that Noam is missing. That’s good, Ezra. You have hundreds of eyes working for you. Maybe someone will remember something.”

“Eem yirtzah Hashem,” Ezra said.

If God wills it…

“I want to have a personal talk with some of Noam’s friends,” Decker said. “We’ll wait until after shul—”

“We can go now,” Ezra said.