CHAIM YANKEL ROSENBERG lived in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, roughly 5,693 miles from the remote hilltop somewhere between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv where a small group of Kabbalists had gathered to figure out the exact timing of the end of the world.
They should not have been doing that.
This was not the Kabbalah of Roseanne or Madonna. This was the mysticism of Maimonides, of the Ari Zall, of Luzzato. This was Infinite God, creation ex nihilo, Divine Providence. This was some heavy shit.
They gathered in a darkened classroom of their yeshiva, surrounded by piles of tattered books, reams of wrinkled notes and gallons of black coffee. The night before, they had stumbled on a hidden code which revealed that at the beginning of creation, God had picked A Number.
It was a deal He’d cut with Himself, nervous as he was about this new venture called Man.
A failsafe, really.
The Number the Kabbalists had discovered buried in the ancient text was the number of violent deaths that God would allow to occur in the world before He got fed up and just pulled the plug.
That’s all, folks.
Thanks for playing.
Coming this fall, version 2.0.
It seemed a wise plan at the time, and the angels, never big fans of the Mankind project to begin with, backed it heartily. Recently, though, a growing minority had begun to suggest that instead of picking a number in the high million billions, He probably should have picked a number closer to, say, twenty-two, or twelve, or seven.
According to the Kabbalists’ calculations, as of last night humanity was just one hundred deaths away from The End.
The Kabbalists were worried, and to make matters worse, they were completely out of cigarettes. Humanity’s only shot—and it was a long one—was peace. No wars, no murders, no exceptions. No gang shootings, no assaults with a deadly weapon, no strangulations.
One hundred chances.
The next morning, they issued a press release to every country, every news agency and every law enforcement organization on the planet.
They sent it to Ariel Sharon, and they sent it to Yassir Arafat. They sent it to the leaders of Hamas and to the leaders of Hezbollah and to the leaders of Al Qaeda. They sent it to Rummy, they sent it to Colin and they sent it to Condi. They sent it to Bush Forty-One, who sent it to Bush Forty-Four. They sent it to the Bloods, who sent it to the Crips. They sent it to the Yakuza who kindly forwarded it to the Italian mafia who kindly forwarded it to the Russian mafia who kindly forwarded it to the Israeli mafia.
Sunday morning, the Kabbalists appeared on Meet the Press with Tim Russert. “Will you say on this program,” said Tim, “with the eyes of the nation upon you, that if one hundred more people die of unnatural causes, the world will cease to exist?”
“Yes,” said the Kabbalists.
“One hundred?” reiterated Tim.
“One hundred,” said the Kabbalists.
“The whole world?” reiterated Tim.
“The whole world,” said the Kabbalists.
The following night on Letterman, the Number One Thing the Kabbalists Don’t Know was “Where Did I Leave That Damn Remote?” Leno opened with the Dancing Kabbalists, which everyone felt vaguely uncomfortable about, and the next morning Abraham Foxman filed a formal complaint.
The Kabbalists returned home to pray.
The first ten deaths came that very first night: six rapes and four robberies, all ending in homicide. The next five were shootings, which the D.A. swore he would prosecute as hate crimes, which wouldn’t make a difference to the final count either way.
The ten after that were all killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber in Haifa. The United States condemned the bombing, the U.N. censured it and Arafat denounced it. It wouldn’t make a difference to the final count either way.
Deaths Twenty-Five to Forty were assorted drive-bys, muggings and stabbings “by a person or persons known to the victim,” while deaths Forty to Fifty Five were unavoidable civilian casualties during a military peacekeeping mission somewhere in Africa. The next twenty were the result of a night of New York City wildings, and another ten rapes and fourteen armed liquor store robberies later, humanity was one death away from The End.
That one was named Chaim Yankel Rosenberg.
The same Chaim Yankel Rosenberg who was, at the moment, 5,693 miles away from the Kabbalists, trembling uncontrollably in a darkened Brooklyn alleyway, reaching into his coat pocket to pull out his wallet for the man holding the steel forty-five-caliber handgun to the back of his head.
Chaim Yankel began to sob.
“Please, in the name of Hashem, don’t …”
Chaim Yankel didn’t know anything about the Kabbalists. He didn’t know anything about the End of Days. He knew he was a father of three small children, and he knew he was married to a frail and frightened woman who would not be able to bear his death, let alone raise their family in his sudden absence. He knew that he wanted to see Yitzi’s bar mitzvah and he knew that he wasn’t going to, because Chaim Yankel also knew that this meshuginah shvartza was going to shoot him in the head no matter what he said or did.
The meshuginah shvartza, for his part, didn’t know anything about the Kabbalists either. He knew that if he didn’t get the money for Latrell, he was going to get shot in the head himself. He knew that his baby girl wasn’t going to have a daddy unless Daddy came up with the cash for Latrell. He knew that the odds of a black man in America living past the age of forty were something like a hundred to one. He knew for damn sure that if he let this fucking kike live, he’d go right to the fucking police with his fucking lawyer, which in his experience was just another word for a fucking kike.
There was a loud popping sound, and the last thought to cross Chaim Yankel Rosenberg’s mind was, “Son of a bitch, he shot me.”
He was hoping to say Shema.
Chaim Yankel was only partially correct. The meshuginah shvartza did shoot him in the head, but later that same night he also killed a convenience store clerk in Queens, shot a liquor store owner in the Bronx and carjacked a couple of accountants in a silver Cadillac Escalade.
All told, according to the police blotters in the next day’s Post, there were seventeen murders that night. “About normal for a Saturday night,” an officer was quoted as saying.
Three days later, the Kabbalists issued a formal apology for their regrettable mathematical error. In their haste and excitement, they had inadvertently missed a couple of decimal points. They were contrite and sincere. They begged forgiveness and announced that the new number of violent deaths left before the End of Days was exactly one thousand.
“Minus the nine murders, three drunk drivers, the serial killing in Virginia and four Islamic militants killed last night in a retaliatory strike for the previous night’s bombing in Haifa,” their press release concluded, “that makes 983 to go.”
Later that afternoon, on a shady hill in the B’nei Zion Cemetery overlooking the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Rosenbergs and a few close friends buried their beloved Chaim Yankel.
It was a quiet, respectful service. On their way out, as they passed through the cemetery gates, the Rosenbergs stopped, and took one last look at Chaim Yankel’s grave.
The children waved sadly.
Mrs. Rosenberg blew her husband a kiss.
“We shall be together soon, my love,” she whispered to her husband. “I give ’em till Monday, tops.”