The Mendelssohnian Theory: Action Adventure, Sci-Fi, Apocalyptic ,Y/A (16 page)

“Well done,” Dmitry said appreciatively and took the box from
him, “how did you do it?”

“You won’t believe me if I told you,” said Adam, he found it
difficult to understand how he had managed to succeed in his mission.

“Red lights again?” asked the smuggler with a smile. Adam
returned his smile and didn’t answer. Dmitry examined the lad once more,
reevaluating him. This wasn’t the first time he’d changed his impression of the
young man. ‘Every time you think you know him, he surprises you again,’ he said
to himself and couldn’t decide whether he liked it or not. “A quarter of the
profits from the reactor’s sale will be credited to you,” he announced and
piloted the hovercraft down. Adam nodded offhandedly. His mind was distracted
as he attempted, to no avail, to understand who had helped him while he was
alone. He decided to file his suspicions in his brain implant and in the
meanwhile concentrated silently on Mars, growing in front of him on the
hovercraft’s front window. “You’re ready,” said Dmitry Bialystok.

“Ready for what?” asked Adam.

“To get back to Earth,” answered the smuggler.

“You’re sending me back to Earth?” Adam could hardly believe
his ears. Will Dmitry disappoint and abandon him, just like everyone else had?

“We’ve got merchandise to sell and the buyers are in
Jerusalem,” explained the smuggler, and laughed when he saw the look on Adam’s
face: “you know you’re mine for at least three more months, and I always
protect my property.”

Adam realized he had no choice but to settle for this vague
promise. Dmitry had plans for him; all he needed to do was try to find out what
they were. In the meantime, he closed his eyes and tried to fall asleep, but
sleep evaded him. He was about to return to planet Earth, from which he had
escaped with the intention of never coming back. Adam was thrilled and without
noticing, opened the secure communication line in the smugglers’ commander’s
aircraft. Dmitry had managed to create an account with a false identity for
him, one that was supposed to be safe, but until now, he avoided using it for
fear he’d be discovered. He closed his eyes, hesitated for a moment and then
surfed the inner-eye screen, plunging into the river of worldwide-knowledge,
navigating his way to information about friends he had left on Earth. A
flashing banner sprung into his consciousness, on the upper part of the
screens. A message from an unidentified source. Adam considered whether he
should open the message or erase it. Elizabeth had warned him of virus spools
that snuck their way into the brain implant, disguised as seemingly innocent
messages, viruses that could disrupt the implant irreparably. People who’d
undergone such a viral attack remained disconnected from society, unable to
function. Most of them had not survived; Elizabeth had told him, but Adam
suspected it to be one of those cautionary tales told to children.

He pressed the banner on his
web-keyboard and the message immediately opened:

• Report

• Receive information that’s essential for your education,
survival, and proper functioning.

Adam was surprised. The writer of the message must have been
the same one who’d helped him just moments earlier. Someone was very much
interested in keeping him alive. He tapped the attached file and began to read:

In the year 5594 on the Jewish Calendar, a few days before his
death, while lying in his bed, covered by three layers of thick blankets yet
still shivering, the learned Jewish scholar Rabbi David Friedlander confessed
to his personal secretary, Franz Hirsch Stieglitz, about an injustice he had
knowingly caused his honorable teacher, the renowned Rabbi Moses Mendelssohn.
Friedlander had translated Mendelssohn’s writings from Hebrew to German and saw
himself as the Rabbi’s successor and an anchor for the Haskalah – the Jewish
enlightenment movement. Friedlander, a well know deist, told Franz Hirsch that
Mendelssohn had written his books in the Hebrew language because he related
them to the Bible and its interpretations, but mainly because he wanted just a
few learned people to read his writings so as not to arouse the wrath of the
Christian Church. According to Friedlander, some of Mendelssohn’s books
expressed theories and opinions about life and the creation, which contradicted
both the stern hardline dictated by the heads of the Jewish communities, and
the beliefs of the church. Moses Mendelssohn, a self-proclaimed religious man,
possessed a faith whose nature was more deterministic than was the norm in his
era, practical in its essence. He was a pluralist and in his heart was etched
the universal love of man.

David Friedlander’s confession focused on a brief essay
written in Hebrew, an essay that challenged the three monotheistic religions’
conception of creation. In his surprising composition, Mendelssohn likened the
world to a huge jigsaw puzzle, composed of chains of events related to one
another by causal and purposeful connections. Mendelssohn had also claimed that
the puzzle itself, or the creation of the Earth, had a reason, a cosmic
meaning, which he had chosen to call – Godhood, from which the creation of the
chains had begun. He also claimed that the Earth has a purpose it should
achieve at the end of its way as a planet, when all chains of events will fully
be realized. Mendelssohn called this purpose, the human leap. This conception
was related to Rabbi Eleazar’s ‘divine order’ and the teachings of Judah Loew
ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague.

David Friedlander had found the manuscript in the Rabbi’s
estate. He had secretly taken it and studied it carefully. At first, he thought
of it as another attempt by his rabbi to correspond with the doomsday prophecies
common in Europe at the time, but the more he delved into the composition, the
more authentic and reliable it appeared. He did not know when and how exactly
Mendelssohn had written the essay and had never heard his Rabbi mentioning the
theory. He decided to name it after its creator – the Mendelssohnian Theory.
For many days, Friedlander deliberated whether he should translate the
revolutionary essay into German and publish it. Like his rabbi, he was afraid
the reaction of the Church and the emperor would be harsh and because
Mendelssohn was Jewish, it may also include new and more severe decrees for the
Jewish community, which was mercilessly oppressed as it was. He decided to put
away the manuscript and hid its pages, filled with Mendelssohn’s dense handwriting,
in the small concealed drawer of a little table standing in the bedroom he and
his wife shared in Berlin.

For thirty-eight years, David Friedlander had concealed
Mendelssohn’s essay. He had read it many times and often thought of it. Being
an amateur scientist, he conducted secret experiments and found many
correlations between the Mendelssohnian theory and reality. Such proof had led
him to the conclusion there was a grain of truth in the theory. The more he had
recognized the plausibility of the essay, the greater his fear of publishing it
became. He assumed its publication would anger not only the religious but would
also raise the wrath of the new scientists and renowned experts who had thus
far attempted to provide rational explanations for the reality in which
humankind existed.

On the verge of death, Rabbi Friedlander implored his
pupil Franz Hirsch Stieglitz to take the translated German manuscript and
publish it immediately after his death. “I corresponded some time ago with the
owner of a Jewish printing house in London,” Friedlander explained, “now go to
him discreetly and conceal this important manuscript in your belongings. Always
keep it safe, do not show it to any other living soul and do not be tempted to
read it yourself, even if your soul burns with a desire to do so.” Franz Hirsch
immediately undertook the mission his teacher David Friedlander had given him.
He was thirty-four years of age when he had begun his work with Friedlander,
and for the past five years had served as the rabbi’s personal secretary. As
time passed, he became the scholar’s companion and often times his opponent, an
equal rival for philosophical debates. David, who valued Franz Hirsch and loved
him as a friend, had known that if the secret document fell into the hands of
the church’s institutions or the Jewish rabbis, Franz Hirsch would be tried
and, as he was Jewish, would probably be executed. Even the Anglican Church,
supposedly the most enlightened of the Christian sects, will not show any mercy
towards such heresy. And so he warned his messenger again and again not to
allow the composition to fall into the wrong hands.

Franz Hirsch arrived in London on the eve of a gloomy and
rainy day. Travelling on the steam ferry which had crossed the English Channel,
then continued down the gray watered Thames all the way to the great London
harbor, had served to upset his stomach and he disembarked the small steamship
swaying on his feet. After voicelessly thanking God for surviving the hardships
of the road, he stopped a black carriage and gave the coachman the address of
the printing house that David Friedlander had contacted. It was located on
Albion Boulevard, in the northern part of town. He slept so soundly throughout
the carriage ride that the coachman had to forcefully shake him in order to
wake him up, once they had arrived at the destination.

Upon disembarking, Stieglitz noticed a pillar of smoke,
rising from what was once the printing house. To his dread, he heard from one
of the neighbors that two days earlier the printing house had been burned to
the ground. Where it once stood, only the remains of charred and ashen walls
now remained. The business owner found his death when he had attempted in vain
to save the life of his assistant, the typesetter. Shocked, surprised and
without an inkling as to where he should go now, Franz Hirsch approached the
coachman and asked him to find an inexpensive, clean hotel. The latter took him
to a small family hotel in the vicinity, run by his wife’s parents.

That night, Franz Hirsch was unable to fall asleep. On the
one hand, he was saddened for not being able to keep the promise he had given
his teacher David Friedlander, on the other hand, curiosity assailed his soul,
tickled the tips of his fingers and filled him with thirst. He lay in bed,
tossing from side to side, until he finally made up his mind, got up and took
out the mysterious manuscript he had sworn to defend. He opened the thin ribbon
that bound the small notebook and in spite of what he had promised his teacher,
began to read in the candlelight. At first, he thought it was a prank, that
perhaps his teacher had jested and sent him on a false mission, perhaps he
wanted to remove his pupil from him. He read: In the beginning, there was
nothing…

When he had finished reading the opening three chapters of
Mendelssohn’s essay, he realized he had never been as fascinated by a
manuscript. He was enraptured and excited. He had never heard such words of
open heresy, now he read them in the writings of a Jewish rabbi! He began to
suspect his teacher may have lost his mind, but as he was naturally curious and
drawn by the story, he set his worries aside and returned to delve into the
book.

After three hours of reading, Franz Hirsch put down the
pages. Without noticing, he was drawn into the entanglement of the story,
written from the viewpoint of God the creator, which had created the vast
puzzle – Planet Earth, an obstacle course intended to purify and refine the
human race and eventually enable it to become the equal of its God.

The next chapter of the manuscript was completely
different. The chapter, and the ones that followed, were an in-depth
philosophical analysis of human history. Rabbi Moses Mendelssohn did not
hesitate to provide surprising conclusions within the discussion he had
conducted with himself and with the Jewish religion, and therefore with
Christianity and Islam as well. God, according to Mendelssohn, was a concept
that expressed the feelings of the thinker regarding a hidden supreme creator
or creators that had created the Earth. Once they’d created it, their direct
involvement concluded, and they remained spectators, waiting to see what course
the coming events would take. God, according to Mendelssohn, had chosen to
remain passive once the act of creation had been completed, and not to interfere
in the occurrences on the planet. Thus, Mendelssohn deduced that all major
beliefs were pointless and pointed out the basic human need to continue and
evolve, without the boundaries separating religions.

Franz now realized why his teacher David Friedlander had
been so afraid. The ideas the author had expressed through the telling voice of
God were revolutionary as far as the conceptions of godhood and the world
itself were concerned. Mendelssohn presented a theory that suggested
essentially deterministic processes were the ones causing human development.
What was new in his essay was the idea that the creator of the world operated
in a ‘fire-and-forget’ way. His conclusion was that the human race was the one
that needed to do the work. Mendelssohn envisioned the Earth as a system of
springs and power switches. The accidental or intentional release of this or
that lever, releases a spring, which in turn activates another spring, and
then, in a sequence of occurrences, the process of human development takes place.

During the hours in which he had read Mendelssohn’s essay
with fervor, Franz had become paranoid. He felt haunted, even though he hadn’t
the faintest idea who was haunting him, and feared the secret of the manuscript
will be revealed. Actually, he even ascribed the fire in the printing house to
a conspiracy intended to prevent the essay’s publication. He spent the rest of
the night fully awake, the essay safely tucked beneath his clothes. In the
morning, he paid the hotel owner, thanked him and his wife and went into the
city streets. He walked aimlessly, constantly looking back, fearing the
messengers of the church or the representatives of the authorities who wanted
to prevent the publication of the innovative composition will capture him.

At noontime, Franz Hirsch encountered a skullcap-wearing
Jew, a Judaica merchant, a distant relative from his mother’s side of the
family. Isaac Kahn, the relative, told him he was about to board the ‘Black
Swan’ the next day, a ship that sailed to the city of New York in the United
States of America. Franz Hirsch, still under the influence of the book he had
read the previous night, felt he was standing at a crossroad. He needed to
determine where he would turn to next. Under the influence of Mendelssohn’s
book, it was obvious to him his meeting with a distant uncle was no mere
coincidence. It was not for nothing that the opportunity to sail to the new
world had presented itself to him. He was enraptured by the idea of a new
beginning, far from persecutions, far from the many limitations enforced upon
the Jews wherever they were, just as he had pictured it in his mind’s eye –
America! On the other hand, he feared the hand that had chased and threatened
both him and Mendelssohn’s book may have had something to do with this
invitation. But his curiosity had gotten the best of him. He thought the
chances of publishing the book in traditional Europe were slim, surely in the
United States of America, he would be able to find a publisher that will agree
to print the manuscript.

That very day, Franz Hirsch purchased a ticket and
reserved his place for the next departure. He avoided mentioning his Jewish
origins and as his visage was German and his documents affirmed Germany as his
native country, Hirsch had found himself embarking the ‘Black Swan’ the very
next morning, alongside his relatives.

Adam finished reading the document and the big question of ‘why
did the source provide him with the information and why did it think it
essential for Adam’s survival?’ flashed before his eyes. He tried to think of a
proper explanation by seeking a hidden motive, but failed and chased the
thought from his mind. He was going back home. Even though he knew it was only
for a time, following which he will return to the darkness of space, he still
felt fear mixed with excitement. He opened his eyes and examined the control
panel. “Encode new coordinates,” he instructed the hovercraft’s computer and
nodded at Dmitry to indicate everything was under control.