The Path to God's Promise

"To be a prophet is both a distinction and an affliction." – Lyman Abbott

Editor’s Note: An excerpt from Ahuva Batya Scharff’s novel about a Jewish woman of no particular renown told by God to warn all who’ll listen—David Michael Slater

Chapter One

עורי עורי דבורה עורי עורי דברי־שיר

Awake! Awake, Devorah! Awake, awake, and sing!

Judges 5:12

Be careful what you wish for. As a child, I wished only to be near God. If I’d understood the consequences of wishing, of prayer, I probably would have wished for something else. I should start at the beginning.

My earliest memory is of God speaking to me. I was four. I climbed the thick-branched tree outside our old farmhouse in California’s San Joaquin Valley to lie on one of the limbs. It was early summer. The light breeze made the hair on my arms stand up. I smiled at the way the sun came speckled through the canopy, dappling my skin. While I was delighting in the experience of sun and wind, I heard God’s whispered voice. God said, “You belong to Me.”

My mother, more superstitious than religious, named me for greatness: Elinor Shefa Simentov. It is the perfect name for a Jewish mystic. Simentov, our family name, means “good signs” in Hebrew—as in signs and omens. Shefa, my middle name, is usually translated as “abundance,” but it can also mean “divine emanation” or “flow.” In Arabic, it means “recovery” or “healing.” Elinor translates from Hebrew as “God is my light.” You could say just from my name that I was fated for a single purpose. But prophecy is a difficult thing for a contemporary Jew. It is not a gift that is accepted in the 21^st century, not in my community. And yet I can no longer deny who and what I am.

At first, my visions were simple and comforting. Throughout my childhood, I had a dream about a wall of flowers: blue, deep red, and purple. There was no action, no conversation, just a single picture of a wall covered in a cascade of dark green leaves, vines, and flowers. It cheered me. The vision recurred every year or two until I was nineteen. While on a semester abroad in India, I walked into our classroom at a center in Pune, turned to my left, and saw through the sliding glass doors that familiar flowered wall. I was shocked. I stared at it for hours on end during our six weeks of classes at the site. Of course, after my stint in Pune, I never dreamt of that wall again. But at the time, seeing the wall encouraged me. It made me feel I was in the right place. More than déjà vu, this was an actual vision that I had recorded in the journals I kept in my youth. It was confirmation to me of my visionary capacity.

Other than a few single images like the one I had of the wall, the visions I have rarely have anything to do with me. I cannot see lottery numbers. When I try to apply my gift for personal reward, the outcomes are poor. When I know which horse is going to win the Kentucky Derby, I write the winner’s name on a piece of paper—but the instant I put a wager on the animal, I lose. I am accurate when I have nothing to gain, when the visions are a touchstone, a reassurance, or a warning. I am not a fortuneteller. I am a vessel through which visions come. I do not get to choose the channel on the TV.

I look at myself in the full-length mirror in my bedroom, contemplating who I am. The mirror is five feet tall in a dark frame and looks more expensive than it was. The room is shadowy. The only light on is on the bedside table far behind me. Though it is dark, I see myself clearly. I am a typical-looking, if heavy, Jewish woman. Three hundred pounds with all the weight in the middle—pendulous breasts and a protruding belly, no butt. I am an apple on thick legs. My stature is a little taller than the average woman, five feet seven, but I seem much taller, not only because of my weight; it’s my presence. I can dominate a room without trying. I’m in a constant battle to “pull it back”—a phrase I say to myself so often that it has almost become my mantra. My near-black hair is a tumble of curls that, instead of getting longer, gets tighter. The hair grows. I can tell because I have to dye the gray roots, but the length does not change. It stays just below my chin year after year. Everywhere I travel, especially in the Middle East, I am immediately recognized as a Jew. I look like my people.

In front of the mirror, I sigh. My hands caress the belly that hangs heavy under my cheap t-shirt. I think about losing weight. It might be possible if only I was willing to eat fewer latkes. And chimichangas. I sigh again. The effort to be thinner is daunting.

I lean closer to the mirror to examine my face. There are no lines on my skin or bags under my eyes. I do not look my forty-five years. I attribute my youthful appearance to not having had children. My peers who had children early, before twenty-five, have aged well, but my friends who had children later, especially those who waited until their late thirties or forties, for the most part, have had the life force sucked out of them. They look shriveled and old. Those who also have to work a full-time job in addition to raising their children have withered on the vine. I gaze at my reflection more closely. The fat helps, too. My facial features are plump and in place. Fat faces crease less than thin ones. Maybe latkes and chimichangas aren’t so bad after all.

“Can I really be what God wants?” I ask myself silently as I leave my place in front of the mirror to flop down on my bed. Forty-five. Fat. Barren. Not in particularly good health. No boyfriend, husband, or prospects. A spinster. An also-ran who smiles at a bris and sobs later a block down the road, alone in a parked car, because I will never, ever be that beaming mother. Oh sure, I’m flourishing in my career, but that’s the norm in my community. Successful is an adjective applied to almost every Jew I know who works. We’re successful doctors, lawyers, professors, artists, scientists, teachers, inventors, nonprofit executives, and entrepreneurs. In my community, accolades and awards are as ordinary as taxes. What I am though, is a failure in the way that most counts. I did not fulfill what some argue is the primary mitzvah. I was unable to have a child to carry on our traditions.

I think about God and the task set before me. As I lie with my eyes closed, I recall how two months earlier God approached me about doing something important and constructive with the visions I have.

I was in Pacific Palisades, a beach suburb on the Westside of Los Angeles. It’s an affluent neighborhood with multimillion-dollar homes perched on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Pali, as it is sometimes called locally, is nestled between Santa Monica and Malibu. Having lived in Los Angeles for many years and gotten sober there, I often return to the area to celebrate important recovery anniversaries with my friends in Alcoholics Anonymous. This year, I reached twenty years clean and flew to Los Angeles to get my twenty-year medallion at a big Monday night meeting in Pali.

It wasn’t my regular meeting, the home group I attended faithfully every week for more than ten years. That meeting, on a Friday, I could not make. Not only did I have a writing deadline that prevented me from traveling on Friday, but my sponsor, who has been my sponsor for all of my twenty years sober, now lives in the Palisades. With her three kids, the Pali meeting was more convenient for her than Brentwood, where we usually met when I lived in town.

After the speaker—a Hollywood A-lister more than forty years clean—had finished with his call-to-recovery, which led to a standing ovation, it was time for the “birthdays.” I was allowed to speak for three minutes about being twenty years clean. My sponsor presented my cake. I thanked her and the A-list actor. Twenty years earlier, he had found a chair for me to sit on in a different crowded room. I was only a few days sober then and too sick to get to the meeting early enough to get a seat. I stood, desperately ill, sweating, and mildly suicidal, beside a garbage can. I was fairly certain that I was going to vomit. He saw me there, ordered someone to get me a chair, and helped hold me up while we waited for the seat to arrive. Then this very famous man looked me in the eye and told me that I was the most important person in the room. He asked me as if he could read my mind, not to kill myself that day. He didn’t remember his kindness to me, but I did and thanked him. He kissed me in front of everyone as I walked back to my seat.

Two friends who had come to town for the event took me out to celebrate at dinner after that meeting. We went to a busy Italian restaurant on the Promenade in Santa Monica. Izzy and Amanda were not alcoholics but were extremely supportive of my recovery. Neither could believe that a famous movie star had kissed me in front of several hundred people. I laughed. It’s the kind of thing that happens all the time in meetings, but I didn’t tell them that. I let them enjoy the “specialness” of the occasion. And shouldn’t we do just that? I thought to myself. Being sober twenty years is special.

“I can’t believe it,” Izzy said in her thick Australian accent as the waitress refilled my water glass. I could barely hear her over the bustle and loud conversation. “I remember when you hid beer in the cattle grate at that summer camp we worked at in Montana,” she said. I smiled, recalling her look of utter revulsion when I pulled two cold beers from between the grate’s metal bars and offered her one. “I knew then,” Izzy continued to Amanda, her wife, “that we had a real problem. Anyone who hides beer like that….”

“I also used to keep whiskey in a shampoo bottle,” I said, interrupting, and making sure that the salad on my fork had just the right chicken-to-vegetable ratio. “That’s why I never let you borrow my stuff and I never, ever took a shower unless I was alone.” I put the salad into my mouth as my friends looked at me, dumbfounded.

“I had no idea,” Izzy said.

“I am a real alcoholic,” I said. “And by some miracle, I have not had a drink in twenty years and three days.”

My companions held up their water glasses. I did, too. “To twenty years of recovery from hopeless alcoholism and a kiss from you-know-who,” Amanda said. We clinked our glasses and laughed.

That night I was alone in my room, a garage converted into a guest house that my cousin generously allows me to borrow when I visit. I like staying there. It is quiet with a bed so comfortable that it’s hard to get going in the morning. If I crack the window over the door slightly, the scent of the garden, of the carefully tended roses, wafts in on the breeze that comes inland from the sea.

I sat on the bed in meditation and felt the familiar draw of God calling me. My breathing slowed in a practiced way as I opened my spirit to a consciousness beyond our everyday shared reality. As my breathing reduced to only a few breaths per minute, I loosed my soul from the bindings that keep it anchored in my body, allowing myself to be brought to the place where I most often meet God.

Our spot, as I affectionately think of it, is a fallen tree on a meadow’s edge. The meadow is expansive and seems to be in a state of perpetual spring or early summer. There are wildflowers in the verdant, ankle-high grass. The log is enormous. It’s almost too tall to sit on. The tree trunk is smooth and comfortable, the rough bark long ago stripped away by time and weather. Behind it is a forest, a mix of deciduous trees and evergreens. The scent of the place is intoxicating. It smells intensely of pine with hints of wildflower.

When I sat down on the log, God was already waiting for me. “I want to talk with you,” He said.

Bio: Ahuva Batya [Constance] Scharff, PhD, is an award-winning, bestselling author of four books. She serves as founder and director of The Human Resilience Project and is a passionate advocate for access to mental healthcare and radical social transformation to lessen the impacts of climate change. Ahuva has traveled extensively across our planet, leading expeditions to visit some of the world's most remote populations, learning how they mediate trauma at the intersection of conflict and climate change. In her fiction and poetry, she emphasizes Jewish themes related to spiritual growth, connection, and our responsibilities toward climate action. She currently resides in Northwest Washington. The Path to God's Promise is her debut novel, published by Austin Macauley.

What five tiny delights lift your spirits and make you happy?

• My cat curling up in my lap while I write

• Taking my dog for a walk in the evening

• The smell of evergreen trees after a hard rain

• Donut peaches and blackberries picked fresh and eaten in the field

• A fire on a winter's evening, a cozy blanket, and a good book

What five tiny JEWISH delights lift your spirits and make you happy?

• Wearing tefillin

• Latkes right out of the pan

• Preparing the seder plate, and the smell of the matzoh ball soup cooking as I set the table

• Hearing the shofar, especially the final tekiah gedolah

• Studying at shul, the challenge of seeing different points of view and growing in community