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should love God with your good inclinations and your evil ones too. And Ben Azzai says, with all of your soul means you should give your soul to the commandments.”
    “That’s ridiculous,” says Walter.
    “But there’s more to the story,” says Sol. “Ben Azzai was engaged to Rabbi Akiva’s daughter. He broke it off because he wanted to devote his life to studying Torah.”
    “Idiot,” says Walter. “What a waste.”
    “Not necessarily,” says Sol. “Yearning can be that deep.”
    “For a woman. Not for the words of a book.”
    “And God?”
    “What does God have to do with this? I’m not a believer, Sol. You’re wasting your time with me.” Walter stands and gathers his books.
    Sol pulls at Walter’s sleeve. “Please stay,” he says.
    “Ben Azzai was scared,” says Walter. “Just like you.”
    Sol stares at the page of Talmud and bites his lip. “Let’s move on,” he says. “Your turn to crack the Jastrow.”
    Walter perches on the table and flips through the pages of the Talmudic dictionary. “I hate looking up words,” he says. “I’m a miserable foil for a promising rabbinical student. You cursed yourself by choosing me.”
    Sol pulls the dictionary from Walter’s hands. “I’ll look up the words. Then we’ll be free to learn.”
    By the end of the week, Sol and Walter no longer study the text in any prescribed order. They open volumes of Talmud at random, choose sentences out of context, and conjure their meanings.
    “Look at this one,” says Sol. “A slave belongs to its master forever.”
    “How long is forever? How long does it last?”
    “The rabbis suggest that forever lasts until the Jubilee. That’s fifty years.”
    “But does forever refer to a unit of time or a condition of the heart?” asks Walter.
    They spend hours like this, throwing snippets of text between them like the finest baseball players, pitching and catching with playful perfection. Sol offers Walter a translation—any string of words will do—and Walter sets off on a tangent. When they learn the laws pertaining to lost objects in Bava Metzia,Walter talks about lost thoughts and how an isolated human idea can survive for generations. When they peruse the dictionary, Sol remarks how the Hebrew word zeman means time and invite and opportunity, their connotations perfectly linked like a string of pearls. They riff on how people’s lives are written into the Hebrew language, and how the ancient words are never static.
    One afternoon Sol writes out the words of the Shema and asks Walter to ponder their meaning.
    “It’s a haiku,” says Walter. “Three lines. Five syllables, then seven, then five. She-ma yis-ra-el. Five. A-do-noi El-o-hei-nu . Seven. A-do-noi Ech-ad. Five. It works out perfectly.”
    “ Nu ?”
    “A haiku asks us to reenvision the object it describes. A simple frog becomes more green, more moist, more embodied; a white butterfly becomes an acrobat, a ballet dancer, a celestial being.”
    “And the words of the Shema transform how we understand God at any given moment,” says Sol.
    “As you wish. But God is not a noun.”
    “Is God a verb?” asks Sol.
    “God is a parenthetical thought, rabbi. A commentary you add to your days; something to justify the karma of your actions.”
    “I wish I could ride on your caravan of brilliance. My mind would be so open.”
    “Your mind is beautiful just the way it is,” says Walter. “You wear your learning well. It doesn’t constrict you.”
    Sol smiles at him. In just a few weeks, Walter has morphed from a dirty-haired stranger to an intriguing friend. He still dresses in his green kurta, but his hair is clean and when heremembers to wear a yarmulke, it no longer sits awkwardly on his head.
    “You could be one of us if you wanted,” says Sol. “You would be a good rabbi.”
    “Don’t kid yourself.”
    To Sol, the refugee’s lack of faith challenges him to sharpen his own. After they learn together, Sol sits alone in the beit