The morning, or what was left of it, passed like a whirlwind.  Yigal woke up face down on his bed, dressed in yesterday's clothes, his mouth sour from the Chinese food and over twenty-eight hours since he had last brushed them.  At the edge of his consciousness he heard an insistent buzz but couldn't decide what it signified.  Only when the buzzing sound was accompanied by the banging of a fist on the door did he wake up enough to realize someone was trying to get his attention.

Rolling off the bed he half walked, half crab crawled to the living room where the offending noises increased in volume.  "Okay! Okay!  I'm coming!" he finally managed to cry out, and was rewarded by a sudden abatement of the noise. Opening the door he found a wide awake and bright faced Sally standing with her hands on her hips!

"I do all the work and you lie around like some sort of unemployed ...." she never finished her sentence.

Yigal cut her off with a curt, "What time is it?"

"Almost nine o'clock!  I've been up since seven, and I have a few questions for you."

Panicked that somehow he had dropped one of the many 'balls' he was trying to keep aloft, he left Sally at the door and called the security help desk at the Dead Sea Regional Council.  Other people were awake and on-the-ball.  It turned out a hand full of Arabs from Jericho tried to sneak into the site last night and the guards had to chase them away.  As a result the Army started added the site onto one of its local patrols, increasing the security of the guards and lowering the likelihood of theft. The Regional Council chairperson, hearing from Ami and Ron about the Hartford, Brand & Associates generator, contacted Saidee and arranged to provide a continuous feed of diesel fuel to keep the generator, and the flood lights on all night long.

After a quick pit-stop to the bathroom for a shower and rigorous teeth brushing, Yigal then called Professor Elon.  The Professor had also received an update from sources unknown, Saidee?, and despite the laxness of office attendance on a summer Friday morning, had arranged a temporary permit declaring the site a site of "Archaeological Significance" and hence protested from further construction until a formal survey could be completed.  That, the professor informed Yigal, was awaiting his formal application on Sunday morning in the ministry offices in Jerusalem.

By the time Yigal had received these two updates, his nostrils were tantalized by the smell of something good wafting out from his tiny kitchen.  There, Sally had organized his rather cluttered kitchen counter top and, importing her own frying pan "I wasn't sure yours was kosher!", she had prepared for the both of them a delicious mushroom cheese omelet.  While eating from paper plates with plastic forks, these she had also brought from her place, they discussed the questions on she needed clarification if she was to complete the work before Shabbat.

"I had a great idea if you're interested," suggested Sally. "A friend, well sort of acquaintance of mine creates these fabulous three-dimensional web sites where you can navigate backwards and forwards, or side to side."

"So ..." prompted Yigal between mouth fulls of her delicious breakfast.

"Well to create these sites he has to have a set of photographs from all sides.  It occurred to me as I reviewed the shots from yesterday that what we've created in exactly what he would need.  The rest is off-the-shelf modules that need to be configured, not written."

"Okay," thought Yigal out loud. "But how much does it cost?  What other involvement does he require of us?"

"I'll check it out and let you know!" answered Sally, and with that, she collected her utensils and the empty and used paper plates and retreated to her side of the roof to continue the work she was doing for Yigal's project.

No sooner had Sally left than Yigal's phone rang.  His mother was checking up on his Shabbat plans.  Did he have a surprise for her!

Late that afternoon, Yigal drove Sally in his jeep out of the city.  Navigating their way out of downtown Jerusalem was a challenge.  The city's older downtown core was a maze of one way streets with barely one lane of through way traffic, what with everybody parking on both sides of the street in anticipation of the coming day of rest.

"So can you now tell me where we are going?" Sally asked, her tone a little too petulant for her own tastes, but Yigal's 'little surprises' could wear thin fast.

"Lets just say, my mother is looking forward to making your acquaintance," answered Yigal.  His rye sense of humor at its finest, at least in his own eyes.

Breaking out of the inner city they entered the broader more modern roads toward the outlying neighborhoods of Gilo.  The closed in sense of being surrounded by man made structures gave way to the vista of the Judean Hills and in the far distance the mountains of Moav in distant Jordan.

"So where does your mother live?" Sally asked, realizing she wasn't going to get a straight answer, but committed to 'the game' till the bitter end.

"With my father of course," answered Yigal, a little laughter in his voice.  But even Yigal realized it wasn't polite to try the patience of his guest, especially when the best was yet to come. "My parents live in Shevut Ami in the Etzion block of communities just south of Jerusalem," he explained.  "They've been there forever, in fact if I'm not mistaken I believe they were one of the first families to move out there when it was first built."

"Wow, that makes you the son of real pioneers," exclaimed Sally, using the Hebrew word 'chalutzim'.  She noted that Yigal uncharacteristically self-effacingly refused to comment.

After driving over bridges and through tunnels they arrived at Gush Etzion with its dense pattern of bedroom communities on either side of the road.  The hills on either side of the highway terraced with ancient walls on which grew either grapes or olive trees.  Occasionally a local Arab could be seen doing some manner of work on the terraces.  Finally they came to an major intersection near the very end of the block of communities and Yigal turned right, slowing down as they turned onto a smaller two lane road with a steep precipice to one side.  As they crested the hill, Sally could see the entire coastal plain.  From the towering office buildings of Tell Aviv to the smoke stacks of the power plant of Ashkelon in the south - a quarter of the population of Israel lived on that dense fifty kilometer stretch of land   Between the coast and them fell the Judean Hills, and beneath those the rolling foothills that gradually lost height and curvature until they blended into the flat broad coastal plain.

"Breath taking!" Sally shared, after a moment of taking it all in.  "That's Shevut Ami beneath us?" she asked, looking at the collection of stone buildings clinging to the edge of a spur of the mountain just below them.

"Yep!" answered Yigal enigmatically.  Then he pointed to the house sitting snugly in a little valley between the rest of the community and the adjacent spur, "and that is my parent's home!"  For the rest of the journey Yigal seemed to want not to talk, and Sally respected that, steeling herself for the encounters to come.  Three minutes later they drove off the two lane road onto a single lane paved with crushed stone of various colors.  Not two hundred meters down that lane Yigal parked his jeep beside an aging Volvo station wagon parked in front of a simple stone building with red tile roof.  "Do you mind waiting a minute here?" asked Yigal, suddenly fearful his unannounced guest might generate the wrong kind of interest, might be misinterpreted to something she was not.

"Ah ..." Sally started to formulate her thoughts, trying to think her way through this absolutely surprising request, what could it mean, how to respond.  In the end she didn't have to, Shifra Ben-Ari solved the problem for her.

"Yigal, Shalom!  Welcome home!  And whom do we have here?" the older woman asked as Sally extricated herself from the jeeps passenger seat.

"My name is Sara Berkhof" Sally said, her best Hebrew diction and proud she had used her Hebrew name and not that childish 'Sally' she normally used.  Something in her wanted to be on her best behaviour, to win over this woman, or at least not lose her respect because she was some childish American brat who'd never grown up.

"Barucha Habaha!" (Blessed [are] the Coming) said Shifra, with a real warmth Sally knew could not be feigned.  Taking her out stretched hand in both of her, the older woman informed Yigal he should bring the luggage into the house, and all the while with Sally's hand encased in both of hers, she literally led Sally into the house, directly into the kitchen!  The smells were heavenly!

"I think I feel faint!" Sally said, partly in jest as she absorbed the warmth of the kitchen and breathed in deeply the rich aromas of baking and cooking and spices and ...

"You just sit down there and I'll get you something to drink and eat!" Shifra said, as she walked out the kitchen door, evidently looking to see what happened with Yigal.

Shifra found Yigal carrying his bag up the stairs toward what was once his bedroom. "I'm not certain I want you to use that room." his mother informed him in a quiet voice, but loud enough to grab his attention.

"Oh.  Yeah I guess I should have let you know before we arrived," said Yigal, suddenly deflated from discovering his little surprise wasn't as fun as he had anticipated.  He belated realized that two consecutive nights of not enough sleep were beginning to impair his thought processes, or at least his sense of propriety.  "Sally is helping me out with this very big discovery we stumbled on near the Dead Sea."  Seeing his mothers questioning look, and her willingness to hear him out he continued. "Sally is a photographer, pretty good one by the look of it and she helped us immensely in taking photographs of all the artifacts in place before we even touched anything."

"So Sarah-Sally is just somebody you work with?" asked his mother, in a quiet tone that made it clear she was accepting of any response he'd give.

"Yeah, well, she also happens to live in the apartment next door, although we haven't really had much contact till lately." Yigal added what he felt was additional information that might be pertinent.

"Well I hope you can grab your sister and explain her who your guest is, before she shows up!  Otherwise she'll start organized the bridal shower if you;re not careful," Shifra said, attempting to be funny, but both of them knew with a very large grain of truth in her joke.

After redirecting her son to guest room in a small wooden hut his father used as an office, she returned to the kitchen and prepared Sarah-Sally a cup of coffee, real perked coffee, and a thick slice of her special chocolate yeast cake.  Within the next fifteen minutes Shifra had managed to obtain the broad outline of Sally's life, and sensed the young woman was very interested in being liked by her.  It wasn't hard.  She was a very sweet girl.  Sally, or Sarah as Shifra thought of her, gave every indication of being a 'good' girl, albeit American born and raised and therefore more exposed to the general secular society.  Sarah even shared her growing interest with Jewish tradition and the fact that she attended lectures twice a week, one in easy Hebrew and the other in English, to try and learn the sort of things her family and their alienated Jewish circle would never be aware of, let alone teach their children. 

By the time Yigal had returned and entered the kitchen they were talking about Sarah's interest in building a free-lance career as a professional photographer in the hope that the flexibility would permit to juggle both a career and marry and raise a family.   Shifra was not at all certain Yigal was not involved with this young woman, but the more she heard, the more she hoped he was.

After getting Yigal's 'reader-digest' version of the events of the past forty-eight hours, with Sarah's interjections which communicated that someone else cared that he ate and slept, Shifra chased them out of the kitchen, encouraging Yigal to take Sarah for a walk in the village, or even down the road to the spring.  Once outside Yigal asked Sally what she preferred, to walk the picturesque village perched on the edge of a mountain spur with the entire south of Israel laid out at their feet, or walk to a quiet corner with a natural spring trapped and channeled through an ancient tunnel carved through living rock.  There was no contest.  Sally was as tired as Yigal, and opted to explore the quiet grassy corner, and maybe rest a few minutes before returning to face the rest of the family and all their endless asked, and unasked questions.

 Continuing along the lane of crushed stone Yigal pointed out where a small section of grape vines nestled in the middle of a much larger olive orchard.  "There's an Arab family from Tzurif, the Arab village down in the valley who own and work that plot.  No matter how much money we offer them, they refuse to sell, in principle.  We could make it difficult, but why bother."  Around another corner Sally could see the outlines of once had been buildings, and pointed them out to her impromptu your guide.  "The community of Masuot Yitzchak was there, until it's capture and destruction in the 1948 War of Independence.  People seem to forget," thought Yigal out loud, "whenever the Arabs captured a Jewish community they utterly destroyed it.  More often than not, when the Jews captured an Arab village, abandoned by its inhabitants, they eventually resettled it, but this time with Jews!"

"Arabs destroy and Jews build?" asked Sally, as if drawing out the lesson.

Yigal looked at her, recognized the rather blunt synopsis of his words, but adding nothing.  Just a little further up the lane they came to an open pool of water feed from a channel inverted 'V' shaped tunnel carved in the rock. "If you want, you're thin enough, you can go twenty meters inside the hill to the head of the spring where it bubbles out of the ground.  Against the wall just above the spring's head there is some crude letters carved in the rock in an ancient Hebrew script.  It says something like; 'Here Yoseph found the spring head and brought water to his village.'" Yigal laughed as he thought of it.  "Buried in the side of the hill our 'Yossi' wanted his two thousand years of fame!"

"And what does Yigal want?, Sally asked him, as she sat down on the patch of green grass just beyond the pool's edge.

 "Good question, I used to think I knew.  To find ancient artifacts that would shed light on modern mysteries.  To become famous and revered ..." his voice trailed off.

 "And now, you're not certain any more?" she asked.  "You're much too young to have a mid-life crisis.  The youngest you're allowed is something like thirty-five, or so I've been told!" she said mockingly but with a soft compassionate tone to her voice.

"Like we spoke last night ... was it last night?" They both smiled at each other, so much had happened in the last twenty four hours, it was hard to keep track.

"Yes Yigal, " Sally reassured him, "It was last night, lets go back its getting close to Shabbat."  The two of them walked the entire distance back to the house in total silence, Sarah soaking up the absolute quiet of a village where every single last person observed the Shabbat. 

Once back at house Shifra took Sarah-Sally by the hand and directed her the large dining room where the candles waited the women in the house.  One-by-one each woman approached the silver platter, quietly made the blessing " ... who has commanded us to light Shabbat lights" and light their respective candles.  The unmarried lit one candle, and the married one for each member in the family.  Sally was used to lighting two, so Shifra arranged a second one.  Once lit, the lights of over a dozen candles glowed brilliantly in the twilight of the early evening.  The men had disappeared, off to the synagogue for evening prayers.  Shifra took Sarah-Sally and her married daughter Deborah out to the patio to talk quietly while Deborah's children played on the Ben-Ari's lawn.

"Is it always so peaceful here?" asked Sally.

"It's always quiet, peaceful is a state of mind," Shifra responded.

Gradually the sun slipped behind the grey polluted clouds hovering over the coastal plain, and gradually sunk beneath the horizon leaving the woman in a blissful quiet of the warm summer Shabbat evening.
 

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