ESTHER
My brother Jacob did not allow the mainstream media to, as he said, infect our home. There were no newspapers, there was no television, unless it was Christian TV. We could only listen to Christian radio stations, and our computers had filters on them that prevented anyone using them from accessing MSM websites. He believed, and still does, that the mainstream media is anti-Christian and anti-family, and promotes a liberal homosexual agenda in direct conflict with the teachings of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and God Almighty.
Jacob was head of our home. My father had passed away when I was six and Jacob was sixteen, and he had stepped into my father’s role. A few months after my father’s death, Jacob was born again into the Kingdom of the Christian God. Shortly thereafter, my mother was also born again, and when I was eight, I was as well. Life changed dramatically, and very very quickly. We had been Orthodox Jews. My father had always said we were part of an ancient family, that we were Davidic, which meant we were direct descendants of King David, that we were, in a way, Jewish royalty. Life with him was tense, and he didn’t, for reasons I didn’t know until later, have a good relationship with my mother. They fought all the time, or my father didn’t speak to her. I never knew why or what she did, it was just the way it was. And when my father wasn’t at work—he was a kosher butcher—he drank, read the Torah at the kitchen table, or sat in our living room with our rabbi, and later with Jacob. When the rabbi was over, all of the children were required to go to our rooms and stay there until the rabbi left. At the synagogue, the rabbi was always happy and friendly and very welcoming. When he was with our father, he was very serious and full of intent.
I saw Ben on the front page of a newspaper. I was walking to church for Bible study and was walking past a deli. The headline said Miracle Man and there was a picture of him lying on the ground with a man in a hard hat holding his hand. There was glass sticking out of his body and his head was bleeding. There was blood everywhere. It looked like someone had taken the picture with their cell phone. I stopped and looked at the paper to make sure I was seeing it correctly. I hadn’t seen or spoken to or heard from Ben in sixteen years, since my brother had told him he had to leave. It was hard to tell exactly, so I went inside to buy the paper. I was uncomfortable. I didn’t normally go into places like that, especially if they sold any media other than newspapers, especially magazines, which Jacob often said were the books of the Devil. The man behind the counter asked me if I had read the story and I said no. He said it was pretty incredible, that the man had gotten hit by a glass plate that fell from thirty stories and had lived. He was a Muslim man. I had been taught to hate Muslims, that they were evil. I gave him fifty cents, making sure not to touch him, and left.
Outside I read the article, and it said the man’s name was Ben Jones, and that he lived in the Bronx. I knew then it was Ben, our Ben, our missing Ben, our exiled Ben. It said he was in a hospital in Manhattan in the intensive care unit. It was only a few miles away. I couldn’t believe that after all this time he was only a couple of miles away. Jacob had tried for years to find him. He never said why he sent him away or why he wanted him back, but he desperately wanted him back. He talked to our church elders, and they hired a private detective who spent a year looking for him. They didn’t find anything, not a single trace of him anywhere, and they looked all over America, and all over Canada, and even some places in Europe. So Jacob prayed and watched for signs. He hoped and believed that someday Ben might return.
I didn’t know what to do, if I should tell Jacob or go see Ben myself or just let him be. Part of me wanted to obey and honor my brother as head of our home and as a pastor at our church. Part of me thought if Ben wanted to come back he would come back, and if the Lord and Savior deemed it so, then so it would be. Part of me was just scared, really scared, and I didn’t know why, and normally I would have thought it was the work of Satan—that is what Jacob would believe and what they would have taught me at church—but for some reason it didn’t feel like that was the case this time. I put the paper in a trash can, and after Bible study I stayed at church and prayed to Jesus for some direction. I stayed all day, and I prayed all day. Normally if I stayed away from home Jacob would get angry with me and tell me my place was at home helping Mother with the cooking and cleaning. The exception was if I was at church, and especially if I was praying. Jacob believed that all things could be achieved through prayer, and at the time I believed that as well. I prayed real hard that day. I kept asking Jesus to show me the way.
I didn’t see any signs or experience any revelations, so I decided I would continue in a similar way. I bought a newspaper every day and read about what was happening with Ben and I went to church and prayed for most of the day. It was hard on Mother because she was used to having my help around the apartment. And Jacob was very curious why I was praying so hard. I told them I felt like I needed some guidance from the Lord as I moved into womanhood and was on my knees asking for it. They both approved of that and let me keep doing it. I saw it in the paper when they figured out Ben Jones was not Ben’s real name. I read about how they were trying to find someone who knew him. I saw him when they showed his driver’s license picture and I knew for sure. He looked just like he did when he left except that he was older, and I stared at the picture for a really really long time. Me and Ben had always been really close when I was little. My father and Jacob never liked Ben, and they were always mean to him. I didn’t ever know or understand why, but they blamed him for everything that went wrong and yelled at him all the time. Sometimes my father hit him, and sometimes, when it was just the kids, Jacob would hit Ben. And as he got older, they hit him more, and they hit him harder. I would hear him in his room crying, and I would go in and give him hugs and tell him I loved him. He always said I was the only person in the family who loved him, and he would tell me I was the best little sister in the world. My father and Jacob mostly ignored me, and my mother was always worried about my father, and Ben paid the most attention to me, so I was closest to him and loved him most.
Each day there would be updates, and new stories. Ben was improving faster than the doctors had ever seen. He had another brain surgery. He was stable but still in a coma. There were protests at the construction site, and people were talking about lawsuits, and the developer was saying it wasn’t his fault. I couldn’t believe how much attention it was getting. I thought somebody who knew our family when we were Jewish, before we accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, would recognize him and come forward, but no one did. The papers just kept calling him the Miracle Man. It was really the first time in my life that I had ever read newspapers, and I could see why people hated them. They didn’t seem dangerous, though, just sort of silly.
I kept the same schedule and waited until the coverage slowed down. I was worried that if I went to see him before the reporters went away someone might figure out who he was and I would get into trouble with Jacob and the church. I was also waiting for some kind of sign from the Lord. I believed, at the time, that the Lord always provided those who lived by his word with signs that told them which way to go in life. One afternoon I heard one of the women in the church choir talking about how she had just gotten a letter from a brother that she didn’t see any more because he drank and slept with women other than his wife. Her brother had found Christ and had been born again and had given up his evil ways and wanted to see her. She was standing beneath a cross as she was talking, and she was holding a Bible, and there was light streaming through a window across her face. I thought for sure it was a message from above. Now I understand there is no such thing, that there is no above and no one to send us supernatural messages. There is just coincidence or our individual interpretations of what we see around us, and if we do see something it’s an accident, and it means nothing. That is truly the word of God.
At the time, though, I was convinced otherwise, and I decided to go and try to see Ben. I rarely went into Manhattan. If I did, I was with Jacob and m
y mother, and usually other members of our church. Our senior pastor preached that Manhattan was part of Satan’s Empire. An island filled with sin and devoted to greed, where homosexuals and perverts were allowed to live freely and prosper, and where the word of the Lord was defamed and blasphemed. I was scared of it. I was worried that if I went alone I would be raped or forced into sin in some way. There were temptations everywhere, on every block and in every building, bars and restaurants and banks controlled by Masons, stores that sold impure clothing, entire neighborhoods devoted to homosexual sex. Satan’s hold was strong. I know now that it’s a ridiculous way to think, but I didn’t know then. So I prayed for strength, I prayed long and hard, and when I felt strong enough I slipped out of the church and took the subway under the river. I followed the directions I had gotten from a church computer and got off the subway and went straight to the hospital. When I went in, I asked for intensive care and took an elevator to the right floor. I was very scared. I was shaking as I stepped out of the elevator and started walking down the hall. I was holding a copy of the Bible that had been printed in Israel and blessed by the head of our church. I was wearing a cross that Jacob had given me when I turned seventeen and that he said would always protect me. I stopped in the waiting room and I prayed. And when I felt the Holy Spirit strong inside me, I went into the intensive care and found Ben’s room. I stood at the door and looked inside. There was a woman, a woman dressed like a doctor, sitting by his bed reading a clipboard with some paper on it. She reached out and held his hand for a moment, and I was scared, because I believed women who weren’t either related to or married to a man should never touch him. I couldn’t do anything to stop it, though. I just stood at the door and looked at him. He was lying in a bed and there were machines all around him and there were tubes coming out of his arms and there were wires attached to his chest and his head, which also had a bandage on it. I just stood there and said his name, the name he was given when he was born: Ben Zion Avrohom, Ben Zion Avrohom, Ben Zion Avrohom.
The woman looked up and saw me and started to stand. I didn’t want to talk to her so I left as fast as I could and went straight back to Queens. I went to church and I prayed to the Lord Christ for the forgiveness of my sins because I had indeed lied to my brother Jacob, and I prayed to the Lord and gave thanks for his protection while I was in Manhattan, and I prayed to the Lord and asked him to help my other brother, Ben Zion, recover from his injuries.
Over the course of the next two weeks, I was able to see Ben Zion almost every day. Our church was going through its biannual fundraising drive, and members of the youth ministry were expected to go out and solicit funds. Our church had never been rich in money, though all of the pastors, including Jacob, said its coffers were overflowing with devotion, worship, the fervor of the Holy Spirit, and the love of the Savior Jesus Christ. Most of its parishioners were, and still are, working-class people and immigrants, mainly from Eastern Europe. While every member of the flock was expected to tithe ten percent of their income to the church, the fundraising drive was very important. It usually paid for the church’s pamphlets and books, which were used to spread the word of the Lord, and paid for expansion efforts and church renovations. The senior pastor wanted to triple the size of the congregation and find a much larger building to consecrate and use as our place of worship. The youth ministry was expected to raise a large portion of the money. I would tell Jacob that I was going out to solicit, preach, and spread the word of the Lord, and I would go to the hospital. The first couple of days, I would just stand outside the door and stare at Ben with all of his wires and tubes and listen to the noises the machines would make. I gradually moved closer, to the chair near the door, to the chair near his bed, on my knees next to his bed. I prayed for him to recover and I prayed for him to come home and I prayed for the pain I imagined he was feeling. There were cuts all over his body, these deep gashes with pink scars, and there were bandages on some of them, and I could see the little marks on others where there had been stitches, or maybe staples. His head was wrapped in a big bandage, a huge bandage, that made the back of his head almost twice as big as it was. Sometimes he would twitch a little bit or shake a little bit or make some kind of noise, like growling or crying. I assumed he was grappling with the spirits of the Devil and prayed harder for him. At the time I believed in spirits and in the Devil and that any and all things could be achieved through prayer. Now I know better.
Near the end of the two weeks, I was kneeling next to Ben’s bed. I had finished praying and I was telling him about our life since he left. Our conversion, how we moved out of Williamsburg, into a part of Queens where there were almost no Jews, Jacob’s schooling and his job as a pastor, Mother’s sickness, our devotion to the church. I told him a little bit about my own personal relationship with my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and how he was the only person I trusted and could talk to about problems in my life, how Christ was the only person who was always there for me and would always listen to me. At one point I said I love him so much, Ben Zion, I love Jesus Christ so much, and I heard someone behind me say what did you just call him? I turned around, and a doctor, the same woman doctor who had seen me before, was standing a few feet away from me. I looked at her, stood up, and tried to leave. She stopped me and said what did you call him? in a very firm voice. I was very nervous and very scared and didn’t want to tell her anything, so I said I called him Ben, the name in the newspaper. She said no, you called him something else, and I just shook my head and told her I learned his name in the paper. She seemed very angry, and I didn’t want to get into trouble. If I had to call Jacob and explain everything to him, he’d be angry, and he might hit me or lock me in my room or force me to do some form of penance that I didn’t want to do. I tried to step around the woman, but she wouldn’t let me leave. She asked who I was, and I said I was a member of the First Church of Creation in Queens and that I came to the hospital to pray for sick and injured patients. She asked me if I had permission from the hospital to be there, and I said the only authorities I answered to were God and his only Son, my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. She asked who Ben was, and I said that I only knew what I had read in the newspaper, and that I believed he was a man who might benefit from prayer. I stepped around her, and she let me go. I rushed out of the hospital and spent the subway ride home crying and shaking and asking the Lord for his forgiveness. I had lied and deceived, and though I believed I had done it for righteous reasons, I still believed it was a horrible sin and that I needed to ask the Lord in Heaven for forgiveness.
I ended up staying on the subway for a long time. I couldn’t stop crying and I couldn’t stop shaking and I kept asking for God’s forgiveness, which usually made me feel better, but it didn’t this time. I wondered if somehow I’d committed a sin that was unforgivable, and I was scared that I’d be damned to burn in Hell eternal. Eventually I calmed down enough to go back to the church. We were required to check in at the end of every day and turn in all of the donations we’d received. It was dark and getting near dinner, which I was required to help prepare every night. I knew I’d be in trouble because I didn’t have anything, and I hoped that Jacob wouldn’t be there. I would have prayed, but I was worried that praying for the absence of a pastor was some type of sin.
When I walked into the church, Jacob was waiting for me. He asked me why I was late and I said I was out spreading the word of God to sinners and trying to lead them to salvation. He asked how much I had taken in in donations, and I told him I didn’t get anything today. He stared at me for a long time and I got scared. He grabbed my arm and dragged me into the back of the church. I told him he was hurting me and he ignored me and kept pulling me. It hurt my arm and I was scared and I knew that he knew I was lying. He took me into his office and let go of my arm and pushed me into a chair and stared at me again and I was so scared and he looked so angry and he spoke to me.
Where were you?
I was out trying to get donations.
He sl
apped me.
Where were you?
I started crying.
I was out.
He yelled.
Where?
I was crying, and he yelled again.
Where?
In Manhattan.
Why?
I was so scared. I tried to wipe my face, and Jacob slapped me again.
WHY WERE YOU THERE?
And he slapped me again.
WHAT WERE YOU DOING?
And again. And again. And again.
And then he stopped and I was staring at the floor and I was crying and he grabbed my face and forced me to look at him and he was shaking he was so mad and he said it again.