Rivka Meyers is a Messianic Jewish archaeology student on her first dig in Israel. She has resolved to take a time-out from God for the summer, a break from her self-appointed role as Supreme Defender of the Faith and First Tiger. Just for this summer, she’ll work hard, play hard, and not talk about her faith to people who don’t care. Just for this summer, God will have to take care of the universe without her help.
In Jerusalem, Rivka meets Ari Kazan, an Israeli theoretical physicist at the Hebrew University. Ari has developed a clever but untested idea for building a wormhole — a passage through spacetime. Raised in the stifling home of an ultra-orthodox step-father, Ari has no patience for religious fundamentalism of any stripe, Jewish, Muslim, or Christian. His God is the God of Einstein, a God of Truth, Beauty, and Logic.
Ari is immediately attracted to Rivka, though he’s too shy to tell her. He invites her to visit the lab of his colleague, Damien West, an American experimental physicist with the skills to build the wormhole-generator which Ari has only theorized. But the device still lies in pieces after the last experiment fried some of the components. Damien has his own intensely personal reasons for his interest in wormholes.
Soon enough, Ari learns that Rivka is a Messianic Jew. He’s infuriated, but she can’t figure out why. What’s the big deal, anyway?
Meanwhile, Damien finishes building the wormhole-generator and presses the button. If it successfully creates a wormhole, he plans to travel back to Jerusalem in the year 57 A.D. and kill the apostle Paul, thereby destroying Christianity and all of western civilization — retroactively.
Damien is armed with a gun; Rivka with a knowledge of ancient Aramaic; Ari with a strange love/hate relationship with Rivka and her religion. But none of them is prepared for the Jerusalem on the other side of the wormhole…