The Menorah and the Gun
by Philip Graubart
part 1
Rabbi Judith Adler wrapped her damp palm around the gun barrel. She was surprised at how easily the pistol fit in her hand, somehow accommodating her exact lines and fissures, as if the deadly thing had been custom manufactured for her grip. Ari leaned closer to her and gently moved her left hand so it supported her right. He kept his reassuring fingers on her knuckles for perhaps a beat too long. He nodded, his olive eyes locked on her face, his expression neutral, which Judith understood as a smile.
She took in a quick breath, focused on the target 120 feet away, and squeezed the trigger. She hopped just as the bullet exploded out of the gun, not from any recoil but maybe from the infernal noise or just the strange circumstance of her actually firing a deadly weapon. Of course she missed the target entirely.
Ari reeled in the bizarre picture of a man — Judith’s victim — and pointed at the face, chest, legs, head, arms, hands. “No bullet holes anywhere,” he said, with just a slight Israeli accent. Ari had already been in the country for seven years. “Not even a fingernail,” he said. “God knows where the bullet ended up.”
Judith studied the target as if the bullet might actually be there somewhere, hiding. “Don’t tell Charlie,” she said. Charlie Carmel was the synagogue president. He was also the most active volunteer and by far the biggest donor. This combination of roles had never happened before at Judith’s Laguna Beach synagogue. Judith always listened to Charlie, even when she disagreed. As it happened, she agreed with him that the schul needed to “up its game, security-wise.”
After several synagogue shootings all over the world, who could argue, especially since he agreed to pay for the whole project? She resisted only briefly one tiny detail in a twenty-point plan. That she learn how to shoot. But she lost that argument.
“I will certainly not tell Charlie,” Ari said, his eyes tightly squinted, as if the act of seeing caused him pain. This was his normal grimace, the face that greeted Judith not only at every shooting lesson, but, since he was the contractor, at every 8:00 a.m. Security Committee meeting. The group met each morning, Monday through Friday, after minyan. “It would embarrass me to tell him,” Ari said. “My student seems to shoot backwards. Or straight up in the air. No one can find the bullet after she shoots. Does it land on the ceiling, in the dust on the floor, in the wall, in her foot? No one can guess.”
Judith turned to him, grinning. Her finger was still on the trigger, but the barrel was pointed down, aimed at the ground. “Is it wise to mock someone who’s holding a gun?” she asked.
Ari laughed. It was a bell, three quick notes on a xylophone, a song. The first time Judith heard that sound coming from him, she was surprised, not just that he occasionally laughed — she’d never met anyone before with such a steady, severe gaze — but that the light melodic laugh was so charming, so musical. After a few weeks of committee meetings, she noticed that he reserved the laugh for her. With everyone else it was crisp corrections, quiet scolding, grunts, and the all-business scowl.
Judith shot five more bullets. She missed the target each time.
She invited Ari to her house for coffee after the lesson. He readily agreed, and taught her how to make Turkish coffee. “Water, sugar, coffee, easy,” he said lining up the ingredients, stirring them into a muddy mixture. “Then boil stop, boil stop, boil stop. See? Five times.” His hands, so skilled and formidable at the shooting range, showed equal prowess on her stove top. He flicked the gas light off, just before the brown liquid overflowed, then on, then off, staring intently at the dial, as if he were piloting a particularly sensitive vessel.
He handed Judith a cup of disconcertingly thick liquid. She tasted it, and the sweet, sharp flavor quickly overcame the obvious and unpleasant sensation of swallowing mud. They sat at the kitchen table, side by side, facing the front door, not each other. “Turkish coffee and guns,” Judith said, taking another slow sip. “You Israelis.”
Ari nodded. He sipped even shallower than Judith, savoring the microdose. “Coffee and guns. Yes, exactly, Israelis. Those are our obsessions. And also — well, for me at least, not all Israelis — Shakespeare, Bruce Springsteen, Irish folk dance. Oh, and basketball.”
“How about Judaism?”
He shrugged. “Judaism? Well, rabbis I like. I mean women rabbis. This woman rabbi.”
Judith took that in. She was in the midst of interpreting the words in dozens of different ways, when her eighteen-year old daughter Hannah burst through the door, as if there had been an emergency and she’d been locked out. It was how Hannah had moved through life since early childhood: fast, purposeful and also heedless. As she approached high school graduation and moving to Evanston, her nervous rushing only increased, both in velocity and volume. She took one look at Ari and Judith and shook her head. “Really, Mom? Really? One week after the divorce? One week?”
Ari blushed, then scowled. He apologized quickly, first in fast Hebrew, then English. He grabbed his gun holster, nodded at Judith and fled. Judith glared at her daughter. “He’s my gun instructor,” she said. “And besides—”
“Oh, come on, Mom. Your cheeks were bright red. You were drinking coffee together. It was a date.”
A date, Judith thought. Is that what it was? “It wasn’t a date,” she said. “He needed — he wanted — to teach me how to make Turkish coffee.”
“Ah,” Hannah said. “He needed to?”
“Hannah, you know your father and I have been apart for much longer than a week. It’s been months, almost a year—”
Hannah rushed up the stairs. It sounded like five running backs on a steps drill. Or a herd of elephants. “I’m spending Shabbat with Dad,” she yelled.
Judith was about to scream something back — she wasn’t sure what, just that it would be loud — when she remembered her next appointment: the bat mitzvah lesson. “I love you,” she called up the stairs, then hurried to her car.
She used her fob to open the parking lot gate, a different fob to gain access to the outer courtyard, the same fob to unlock the synagogue side entrance and, finally, her key to open her office door. Marco the security guard was off that day — it was Christmas eve — so there was no one to check her briefcase or wand her or guide her through the metal detector.
Judith insisted on enduring whatever security precautions other staff or visitors endured. She wanted everyone to feel the inconvenience, especially herself. In her office, she buzzed Sara and her mother in through the parking lot, courtyard and entrance, and opened her office door with a wide smile and equally wide arms.
Judith didn’t make it a habit of embracing her bar/bat mitzvah students, but Sara, not quite thirteen, idolized Judith, as if she were the rabid fan, and the rabbi were her personal Taylor Swift. Sara wore her blue and white ritual prayer shawl — her tallit — like Judith: tightly wrapped around her throat like a scarf. She successfully mimicked Judith’s low, nasal singing voice. She affected the same facial expression — eyes half-closed, looking up as if praying directly to the Lord of the Sky. Like Judith, she conducted her own Torah chanting with a right thumb and forefinger baton.
At each of their sessions, Sara peppered Judith with questions about the job of rabbi. “What’s your day like?” she’d ask, taking out her phone to record the answers. Judith emphasized the moments of grace — blessing new babies, solving problems for married couples, discovering magical new insights in the Torah.
She left out fights with her board, the crushing hours that had likely ruined her marriage, the impossibility of pleasing everyone or even, often, anyone. She didn’t want to discourage the budding young woman and, anyway, Judith loved her job. Guiding an enthusiastic teen leader was one of the grace notes that kept her going.
During their last session the week before, Sara had asked Judith if she could read out loud her essay for applying to rabbinical school. Judith pointed out that it would be at least ten years before she could apply to any rabbinical program.
Sara smiled — a grin that reminded Judith of her own reflection in the mirror. “I just like to be ready, all the time,” Sara said, “like you.”
Sara chanted her haftarah in an eerily familiar voice. Judith was, as always, astonished to hear her own exact adolescent warble in Sara’s cantillating.
Suddenly, Judith heard clomping footsteps from the hallway. At first, it signified nothing. Most days the office was alive with all sorts of human noises — chatting, coughing, whistling, slurping, printers and copiers humming, doors slamming. And, of course, walking. But today everyone was off. And no one could enter the campus without Judith buzzing them in. So who was striding toward them in the cadence of a military march?
Judith lightly touched Sara’s shoulder, then put her finger to her mouth. They both listened as the steps moved closer. Judith thought of her new gun, safely locked away in her bedroom safe, of no use now. Sara and Judith stared at the door, paralyzed as they watched the nob turn by itself. “They can’t get in,” Judith whispered. “Door’s locked.”
But the door slowly opened. Sara gasped and squeezed Judith’s fingers. Judith was about to holler for help. She saw the arm, then the leg. Then, the face. She exhaled forcefully and was surprised to feel sweat all over her body, particularly under her arms. It was Ari. He was scowling.
After the bat mitzva lesson, Ari took Judith through all the real and potential security lapses. He showed her how a simple credit card unlocked her office door, how he easily matched the frequency of her two fobs with his cell phone and, finally, how he’d scaled the parking lot fence and thrown a prayer shawl over the courtyard security camera.
Judith couldn’t help but admire the bulky muscles in his arms and legs as he easily hopped halfway up the outer fence, then, with legs like a gymnast’s, swung his prone body over the top. He touched down firmly on the grass, feet together, sticking the landing. From his rare grin, Judith could tell he was showing off.
“Charlie will be furious,” Judith said.
“At me. At me he will be furious. This is my job. Time to get to work, no? Go over my plans. Christmas. This is not our holiday.”
She considered carefully what she was about to say. Finally, it was just one word. “Coffee?”
He nodded his head slowly, brow scrunched, as if considering an important and complex security matter. “Not at your place,” he said.
“And not Turkish,” she said.
Copyright © 2026 by Philip Graubart
