He marveled at his boys, who, in the few months since they had returned early with Rebecca, had come to seem as though they had never lived anywhere else, never spoken another language. He wondered if they had had time to establish rituals of their own, whether they had found some of the secrets of moshav boyhood or whether those secrets die with each person’s own youth. One thing was clear and constant to Joseph above all else on that Saturday morning. He could not imagine being anywhere but the Sabbath morning Talmud study group, still led by Rabbi Crystal after nearly thirty years. Even the study room smelled the way he remembered it—the odor of books left to mold in their musty bindings—and Joseph was not at all surprised to find the three-legged chair Rabbi Crystal used for his books propped up under a window, where it had always stood. Joseph himself had broken the fourth leg while decorating the synagogue for Independence Day nearly twenty years earlier, in 1957.
