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The Rabbis   As the purple light of evening descended, women sang blessings over silver candelabra, and a group of rabbis gathered in the shul to discuss the story of Abraham and Isaac One rabbi, who owned only a single shirt with a blackened collar, began a commentary: As Abraham led Isaac up to Mt Moriah for the sacrifice, the rabbi contended, the two of them suddenly heard a sound Neither could identify the sound or its source, if it were high or low, soft or shrill, coming from beneath the ground, or up in the sky Isaac asked his father, What is this sound? And Abraham replied, That is the sound of God’s justice unfolding across the earth Lo, the Lord himself infuses it with His blessing as he sits beneath a pomegranate tree Isaac disagreed, but kept silent Later, the rabbi continued, he spoke of his own interpretation of the sound, founded on an alternative view of God’s judgment as the proliferation of chaos, as an animal howl, as a disturbance beneath the street, and as the grinding of the spheres, rattling past on unequal tracks And in fact, as Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk suggested, the rabbi continued, it is not the Lord, but the mortal King Saul, Israel’s first king, who sits beneath the pomegranate tree, weeping into his hands for the kingdom he ruled so briefly and jealously, and with so much confusion In Isaac’s old age, the rabbi concluded, King David came to him to sing the psalms, which he had just composed Isaac had gone blind, but when David sang, he saw suddenly an image of his own son Jacob wrestling an angel in a parking lot Isaac had had, in his lifetime, dozens of wives, and had fathered hundreds of children, but he dreamed of only one woman, and behind his eyes he swam again between her thighs like a fluorescent eel weaving between the pink coral, breathing in again the smell of seaweed, the emanation of life