The End of Days

As I make vegetable soup for my partner Yoav, my phone buzzes. It’s a notification from Haaretz. Breaking news. Settlers, armed with weapons and torches, are storming the Palestinian village of Hawara. One dead, many others injured — a response to the murder of two Jews outside that village earlier in the evening. 

I shove my phone back in my pocket, thankful to be distracted by a knock at the door. 

But actually, it’s not a knock. Rather, it’s the absence of a knock, and yet I’m sure there’s someone out there. The gate creaked. The cat meowed. Then, perhaps, there was the sound of footsteps. And now — a thick silence, like the air inside a bell. Yoav and I look at one another in silent concern. 

I walk to the front door and slowly pull it open, whereupon I’m startled to see a small matronly woman on the front step. I let out a gasp, trying to figure out who she might be, and why she might be here, and whether or not I should be concerned. In the near distance, just outside the gate, her companion — younger than her and unusually tall — stares out from the shadow of a palm tree. 

“Do you have time to talk about the end of days?” she asks.

I smile and let out a laugh of relief. I’ve seen this kind of door-to-door proselytizing in movies and on TV shows, but I’ve never experienced it, and so I say “yes, I have time to talk about the end of days,” because I’m curious, and because the soup needs to simmer a while longer. 

“You should know, however, that there’s no chance that you’ll convert me.”

She smiles a warm and disarming smile. “I’m not trying to convert anyone,” she says in a thick accent that I can’t identify. “We’re just here to share our testimony. You can do what you like with it.” 

She hands me a pamphlet from her purse and then begins with a quote from Isaiah. “In the end of days, the mountain of God shall stand firm … and all the nations shall gaze upon it with joy.” 

Yoav now comes to the door, and the two of us look over the woman’s shoulder, past her tall companion, in the direction of the very mountain of God now under discussion. But we can’t see it. There are things in the way — walls and valleys and mountains and people and buildings.

And beyond that, in the West Bank, terrible things are happening, but we can’t see that either.

The missionary continues: “And how do we know that the end of days is here and that the messiah is about to come? Because it is written that there will be plagues, wars, and earthquakes. And what do we see today? Plagues, wars, and earthquakes.”

“But there are always plagues, wars, and earthquakes,” I say. “And there are always people saying that the end of days is upon us and that the messiah is about to come. But they’re always wrong.“

“But there are always plagues, wars, and earthquakes,” I say. “And there are always people saying that the end of days is upon us and that the messiah is about to come. But they’re always wrong. I wish it was true — I really do, but I just don’t believe that.” 

Now that she’s given me her pitch and I’ve given her mine, she smiles once more and bids me goodnight. 

“What church was she from?” Yoav asks when the door is closed.

I look at the pamphlet. “Jehovah’s Witnesses,” I say, and as I turn back to the soup I think about how much I really do wish that it were so, that history would end — or that it would at least abate, just for an hour or two, so that the people in this land could know some peace away from death and loss and resentment. 

Outside, I hear shouting. Opening the door again, I see the two missionaries being confronted by one of my neighbors. He’s an inch from their faces, clapping his hands and barking at them to get out of the neighborhood. 

People are peeking out of their windows, wondering about the commotion. I walk over to this man, feeling suddenly defensive of my new acquaintance, and tell him to lay off. 

He then shouts at me. “I won’t lay off. What they’re doing is illegal.”

I don’t know if that’s true, but now I wonder if that was why she didn’t knock. Is it legal if I’m the one, technically, who initiates the conversation? 

“Either way,” I say, “you don’t need to be so aggressive.”

The missionaries hurry off and I turn back to my house, where Yoav is at the door looking after me. 

“What a jerk,” he says when we’re back inside. 

“Yeah, maybe,” I say. 

But maybe he’s not. After all, these things are sensitive. When it comes to Jews and missionaries — there’s history there, and I sigh with fatigue, feeling the weight of all that history, and the way it gets everywhere, distorting time and making enemies of strangers.

If only I believed that we’d ever get a break from it. Or, in lieu of that, if there was at least some kind of shelter from history where one could go every now and again. 

I suppose that’s what a home used to be, but no longer. Not now, when our technologies are like an open window, letting the outside in. 

Later, as I try to fall asleep, I think of Jerusalem’s ancient walls outside my window and all that they conceal.

Unable to make myself tired, I stare at my phone. Then I turn it off, and look instead toward the black window, straining my ears into the silent night, down to where history stands patiently on the front step and waits for someone to let it in. 

Unable to make myself tired, I stare at my phone. Then I turn it off, and look instead toward the black window, straining my ears into the silent night, down to where history stands patiently on the front step and waits for someone to let it in.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.