So this was Judea? This was where religion played too strong a part ... where parents and rabbis taught so fully to their charges the word and the comfort of God? It did not seem so to me. It seemed all hateful, smeared, repellant. And, with the question unanswered, I fled from it.
But the next morning, in the settlement playground, something happened which began the solution for me. It was an accident and I regretted it for a long while, feeling that it was my fault.
I had been teaching little Frank Cohen some tricks on the horizontal bar. Frank, the boy on parole for petty theft, was daring in this gymnastic work. No sooner was my back turned on him than he tried one of the tricks without my help. His fingers slipped, he fell heavily from the bar to the ground. When we picked him up, his arm was found to be broken.
We got him home in Mr. Richards' little run-about, and put the boy to bed. The doctor set his arm and put it into splints. I met Frank's mother here, and, later on, his father who, having heard of the accident, came rushing upstairs from his bakery shop. They were a nervous, frightened pair; and it needed all the talk my lungs were capable of to assure them that their son would soon recover the use of his arm and be out of his bandage.
As I left their stuffy little flat, they were reciting some Hebrew prayers of gratitude. Tears were on the cheeks of both of them, and their eyes were uplifted to a God I could not know. I went downstairs bitterly conscious of that.
And this was why, when Frank Cohen, pale, his arm in a sling, but the hero of his comrades, came again to the settlement, I sought him out and made an especial friend of him. Of what that friendship should become I had then no plan.