A red cow named Melody chews a lot of grass in complete ignorance of the controversy she stirs up. She mainly worries about the flies. Melody, a red heifer, was born on an ordinary farm in northern Israel. Two millennia ago, the ashes of a red heifer, butchered in her third year, were mixed with water and used to purify Jews before they approach the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. Now, many devout Jews greet red heifers as a wonderful sign that the Messiah is coming at the new millennium, and would like to burn Melody to cinders in a new, third, temple. Muslims and some less observant Jews fear that extremists might take Melody as a signal to destroy the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques to clear the ground for to construct a new temple–and start a war. Journalist David Landau in the newspaper Ha’aretz recommends that someone quickly and casually kill Melody (as if this were all her fault). In the 1980s, a few Jewish militants were arrested and convicted of plotting to blow up the two mosques. Gershom Solomon founded the Temple Mount Faithful Movement thirty years ago to promote the hill’s liberation from “Muslim imperialist forces.” His followers periodically challenge the Israeli government’s longstanding rule against Jewish prayer anywhere on the Temple Mount, apart from the Western, “Wailing” Wall. Solomon says Melody is “another sign that we are very close the rebuilding of the temple.” Landau says, “The potential harm from this heifer is far greater than the destructive properties of a regular terrorist bomb,” as if killing one would prevent others from being born.

And maybe that’s the answer. Melody’s not really red, just auburn. And she’s going prematurely gray–white whiskers in the snout and white hairs in the tail and eyelashes–perhaps a trauma among women bovine as much as it is for the human variety. Her local rabbi, Shmaria Shore, doesn’t think she’ll pass inspection: “I’m very doubtful whether she is kosher. If I really thought she was, I’d send her away to an undisclosed location.” Melody, if informed about this, probably wouldn’t at first know whether to feel relieved or insulted. Then she’d probably decide on relieved. As long as everybody else knows it, too. Then she’ll have a lot more days to worry about nothing except flies.

In the midst of all this tension, Israeli tourist officials want to attract hordes of Christian tourists two years from now to Megiddo (Greek name = Armageddon), where the Tribulation ends. The Israeli National Parks Authority approved a multimedia reconstruction of Armageddon on the site of its ruins so that visitors can “contemplate the final showdown with the aid of virtual reality,” as Kendall Hamilton, Joseph Contreras and Mark Dennis said in their article, “The Strange Case…,” in Newsweek. Unwise, soon-to-be virtual visitors, perhaps, attending a Last Battle Bash.