The Gospel According to Lazarus

by Richard Zimler

  Our Torah teacher, Rabbi Baruch ben Enoch, was the first to apprehend that Yeshua could explore the Hekhal ha-Melekh at the same time as he studied with us.

  If you do not accept this as possible, then we can be certain that you have never met anyone like Yeshua, and I am sorry for that, for I believe we should all have a chance to benefit from the company of someone magical – a gaon who can put wings on our assumptions and certainties and encourage them to fly from us. Need I say that such a companion makes us more aware of the infinite possibilities that remain hidden from us most of the time – of the nearly imperceptible filaments of light connecting everything we perceive to everything we do not.

  If you believe in this supernal radiance – or have been fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of it – then you also know that all we say and do can have a profound effect not only on our earthly realm but also on the Kingdom of Heaven.

  Remember this: the same laws that rule over the motions of the planets and stars also govern the shape of the human body and the flow of thoughts in our minds. All that we see and hear and touch has taken part in creation, and everything – without exception – speaks the same holy language, which is another way of saying that everything grows and develops according to fixed and definite patterns.

  It is this correspondence between our realm and God’s – their material and spiritual closeness – that makes it possible for us to influence both worlds at the same time.

  Yaphiel, I am certain that Yeshua would be heartened to learn that I am writing of him to you, just as I am convinced that he would be relieved to discover that you and your mother are well. Unless … Unless he did not put her in my path, as I have always believed. Did I find her accidentally? Is there even such a thing as pure chance?

  13

  Gephen returns from his night-time prowling as Yeshua begins to tell me about what in our past has been crying out to be heard. The exhausted little creature has soiled and matted fur and the dried blood of some unfortunate victim streaked across the pink triangle of his nose. When I pick him up, he looks at me with those scintillating topaz eyes of his as though he can’t quite remember my name or his relation to me. Would you remind me who you are?

  I sit back down with him, and after he yawns – eyes closed and fangs flaring – he rubs an itch out of his forehead against my hip, climbs up on to my belly and goes to sleep.

  Yeshua sits opposite me with his legs crossed. Now, years later, as I listen again to our conversation, all our words seem filtered through the soft warm pressure of Gephen’s chest against my flesh and the low, seductive gravel-sound of his purring. Indeed, his feathery white softness reminds me of all I once had in Zion and all that I shall never see again – my sister Mia most of all.

  ‘Sometimes I am certain that I summoned you to me,’ Yeshua begins.

  ‘Which means exactly what?’ I ask.

  ‘I imagined you before you appeared in my life.’

  Fear that I may disbelieve or criticize him makes him gaze down and recite the first words of the Shema.

  ‘No matter what you reveal to me, I won’t be angry,’ I say.

  ‘It was Marta who told me your dream of the Lord as an eagle – despite your father telling her to keep it a secret,’ he reminds me.

  ‘No, you don’t understand – it was precisely because he ordered us to keep it a secret that she told it to you!’ I exclaim, laughing with admiration at the way my sister has flouted the most sacred of rules since she was a little girl.

  Yeshua closes his eyes and takes two quick breaths, then a longer third.

  ‘You’ve been fasting, haven’t you?’ I ask on a hunch.

  ‘Yes, but just for a day.’

  ‘Before you leave me, I’ll serve you a proper meal.’

  He waves a dismissive hand in the air between us, but we both know that I shall win this battle, since he is in my home and cannot refuse my hospitality.

  ‘As Marta was telling me about your dream,’ he continues, ‘a verse from the Book of Names started repeating inside my head – and I knew that Elohim was summoning me on a new path.’

  ‘Which verse did He speak to you?’

  ‘“This thing is too heavy for you – you are not able to perform it alone.”’

  I repeat the previous words from the Book of Names so that he knows I shall follow him into the Torah of Mosheh wherever he wishes to go: ‘“You will surely exhaust yourself and the people who are with you.”’

  ‘On the day that Elohim spoke to me,’ he continues, ‘I tracked you down in the marketplace, and I made you describe your dream. As soon as you finished, I realized I had a difficult decision to make – to remain alone or bring you with me.’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  He taps my foot with his. ‘Do you remember that my parents took me to the Temple when I was seven years old? The priests had heard that I could quote much of the Torah from memory and wanted to hear me for themselves.’

  ‘You told me that they were extremely impressed.’

  ‘Yes, they mistook my memory tricks for knowledge. I cannot blame them; it was what I wanted them to think.’ He shakes his head as though astonished that he had once performed tricks that set the eyes of a dozen elders ablaze. ‘On returning to Natzeret,’ he continues, ‘the local rabbis, who’d been informed that I was a precocious young man, convinced my parents to give me to them for a routine of daily study. Of course, I’d have preferred to have my father teach me how to polish a table top or plane a door – I was only seven, after all – but he wouldn’t hear of it. So I found myself yoked to those old scholars four days a week, from sun to sun. They were good men, most of them – and intelligent and wise. But their scowls of displeasure when I didn’t understand a reference or failed to discover the vowel in a word that was new to me … At first, their criticisms felt like brands in my flesh and made me cry. Worst of all, I hadn’t anyone my age to keep me company. I was Yaaqov at Peniel – embracing and wrestling with the spirit of my solitude. So, a few months after I started studying, I told the rabbis of your dream of the Lord as an eagle. I requested that they speak to your parents about having you study with me. That’s what I’ve needed to confess to you all these years.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand,’ I say. ‘Why exactly did you tell them my dream?’

  ‘Because of the peshar I gave it,’ he replies, using the word for interpretation that occurs in the Book of Daniel. ‘It meant that God the Father chose you to free me – and that we would become lifelong companions.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If that wasn’t His intent, why would He have spoken to me of lessening my burden? Lazar, do you remember the way you described your dream?’

  ‘No. Did I do a very bad job?’

  ‘Not at all. You told it well, and I was very excited to hear a boy my age speak so articulately and with so much emotion. And why? Because I realized you could join me in my captivity. The rabbis might scowl at you on occasion instead of me!’ He kneels before me and puts his hands in mine. ‘I’m sorry. Sometimes I think that the right thing to do was turn away from you and never speak to you again.’

  My heart tumbles inside my chest. ‘I wouldn’t want to live a world in which we did not meet.’

  ‘But I altered the course of your life without a single thought to your needs.’

  ‘Our studies opened many doors to me. I’d be an illiterate stonemason were it not for you.’

  ‘Still, what I did was wrong.’

  He wants me to censure him, but the only fault I can find in him is of a different order. ‘Wouldn’t you have travelled lighter if you’d confessed all this to me years ago?’

  ‘Yes, but when we were boys I was afraid you’d hate me, and later, after we grew into men, there seemed no need. Except … except that lately, since your resurrection, my thoughtlessness has caught up with me.’ With renewed enthusiasm, he says, ‘Do you know what struck me most about your dream?’

  ‘No.’

  �
��You’ll think I read too much into it.’

  ‘I might – but we’ll never know unless you tell me.’

  ‘What’s the meaning of my name?’ he asks invitingly.

  ‘Yeshua is a cry for rescue, of course.’

  ‘And that’s how I can be sure that the Lord chose me for you.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Don’t you see? In your dream, you were surrounded by an ocean of fire. The sky was glowing red and was about to collapse. So you made a cry for help to God – a yeshua!’

  I cannot stop myself from scoffing. ‘I’m sorry, but we both know that Aramaic is a very easy language in which to find such correspondences,’ I point out. ‘Every name means something.’ Lifting up Gephen’s forepaw, I say, ‘Every time I see a grape vine, God does not necessarily wish me to think of my cat. Or to believe that holding him in my arms will make me drunk.’

  He waves off my criticism. ‘Tell me what happened next in your dream,’ he says in a challenging voice.

  ‘A man called my name behind me and said, “I am the gate you seek.” And he pushed me through the ocean of flames to safety.’

  ‘Through the Gate of Fire. And you were reborn as Ziz, the Lord of Hosts in the form of a griffin, soaring in defence of the Galilee. As I recall, you were unable to identify the man’s voice back then – the man who shoved you. But I think you must have figured out whose it was by now.’

  The mysterious tone he uses makes me realize he is going to claim the voice was his. ‘But you were only eight years old at the time,’ I say. ‘You didn’t have a man’s voice!’

  ‘But I do now.’ He whispers a verse from the Psalms in triumph: ‘“For You have been my help, and in the shadow of Your wings I sing for joy!”’

  ‘So I dreamed of the voice you would have twenty-eight years into the future? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes, though I can see you don’t believe it. In any case, what I’m sure of is that I’m the Gate of Fire in your dream.’

  ‘You’re asking me to believe something that seems … unlikely.’

  He stands up and reaches down for my hand, then bends to kiss it. ‘Blessed is he who existed before he came into being.’

  14

  At my insistence, Yeshua eats a bowl of barley gruel and a roundel of bread topped with charoset. We share several cups of posca and honey as well, since it will keep him alert. Just before he heads back to Yerushalayim, while he is finishing his meal, I take a peek at my crooked little street – only a hand’s-breadth wider than a donkey cart – and discover a carpet of pilgrims bedded down for the night. Those few who remain awake are huddled under blankets and conversing in whispers.

  At the south end of the street, near the old well, a pregnant woman who will soon give birth stands with her husband. He is pointing up, and she is bending backwards, squinting at the sky. Is he reading the date of their child’s birth in the heavens?

  When she covers her husband’s mouth with her hand and laughs, I hear her speak her thoughts in my mind: Tell me no more divinations. All I want is for the baby to be born with ten toes and fingers and a nose and eyes and everything else in its proper place.

  I bring four roundels of matzoh to Yeshua for his blessing, since I’d like to offer some sustenance to the pilgrims who recognize him as he walks through Bethany. After all, many are a long way from home and beset by hunger.

  ‘Lazar, I have come to Yerushalayim to offer much more than crumbs,’ he tells me, frowning, but he blesses the bread all the same, and I slice it into morsels with my vine-knife.

  ‘When can you visit me again?’ I ask him at my door.

  ‘I’ll try to return tomorrow at sundown.’ He pats my shoulder. ‘So you aren’t angry with me?’

  ‘No, of course not. You know, when we were small, I told your mother that I wished we’d been born in the same nest, and I haven’t changed my mind.’ I suggest that he come for supper if he can. ‘Bring Maryam and Yohanon or anyone else you want.’

  At the door, he leans towards me and rubs the stubble of his cheek against mine. It has long been his way of confirming that we have both reached manhood. You see, Yaphiel, for many years, he and his parents feared that he would die young.

  When we embrace, I think, To hold this man in my arms is to have within my grasp all that still surprises me about the way my life has gone.

  Outside my door, moonlight has turned the edges of our rooftops to burnished silver, but we have no time to study them; a woman stands up and shouts to her friends, ‘It’s him – the man who came back to life!’

  Pilgrims soon crowd around me, and, when Yeshua is recognized by a Galilean, everyone starts to demand our blessings.

  While he is laying hands on a gnarled old grandmother who tells us she walked for seven days from Beroea to Yerushalayim to offer a lamb to God, a giant carrying with a sword at his belt takes hold of my arm and starts to tell me a story of misery in halting, heavily accented Aramaic, beginning with his ill-fated birth: ‘It is forty years in the past I am born in a flax field, and it …’

  How shall Yeshua and I free ourselves from all those who want our attention?

  The moment he finishes comforting the old woman, I extricate myself from Goliath by blessing him and reminding him in a firm voice that there are others awaiting my help. I intend to tell Yeshua that I shall attend to each and every supplicant so that he can return to his inn, but a young mother with tangled hair offers him her newborn baby, folded inside a linen coverlet, before I can finish my offer.

  Yeshua cradles the child. On pressing his lips to its brow, however, he flinches.

  And then something unexpected: the mother drops to her knees and holds up a small cup she had hidden in her robe, asking for Yeshua’s tears.

  ‘They will raise him from the dead!’ she exclaims.

  Yeshua kisses the lifeless infant again and hands him back to his mother, but she pushes the child away. ‘I redeemed him with two doves at the Temple, exactly as the priests told me to do.’

  Her unasked question is one that plagues all parents who outlive their children: Why did the Lord take him from me so soon?

  Yeshua kneels and lays the baby next to her. ‘Have you no kin in Yerushalayim who can help you?’ he asks, but she has begun to weep and does not answer.

  ‘Do you have any friends who live near by?’ I ask.

  She looks between me and Yeshua. ‘Would you have me leave my child in the valley of Ge Hinnom for the jackals to feed on?’

  By way of an answer, Yeshua places his hand on her head and presses his whispered prayers for her as deeply into her as he can. I can see from the way she shakes her head, however, that his gesture is not nearly enough. In years hence, will she think of Yeshua with bitter resentment – of the day he failed to raise her son from the dead and restore justice to the world?

  Yeshua stands and calls out to the crowd. ‘You may all come to the Father through me. I shall bless you all.’ He puts his hand on my shoulder. ‘But I would ask you to let this dear friend of mine go back inside his home. A great mystery has changed his life this day, and he needs to be by himself for a time.’

  Goliath is now telling the story of his miserable childhood to Yeshua, but my friend interrupts him with a blessing and tells him to go in peace.

  ‘Return to your room,’ he tells me.

  ‘I can’t leave you,’ I reply.

  ‘It’s the life I’ve chosen,’ he says, though his resigned smile tells me that he, too, sometimes walks beside other men whom he might have become. Is there a Yeshua who remained an unknown woodworker in some hidden and cherished corner of his mind?

  There is so much that even he will never be able to mend.

  He makes his way slowly down my street, praying over everyone whom he passes. He stops only once, to hug a boy with stumps for legs, dressed in rags, sitting in a basket being dragged along by an older brother. Just before turning the corner of our central street – the one that will take him back
to Yerushalayim – he looks back at me and raises two fingers of his right hand, so that I shall be certain he is all right. I join my hands together above my head to show that we are together in spirit.

  Back behind my locked door, I whisper a prayer of my own authorship that I have said to myself since the day I left him for my apprenticeship in Alexandria: ‘Turn Yeshua’s soul to light so that he may always see the dangers before him even though they be made of darkness.’

  I awake in the morning dry-mouthed and bleary eyed, as though I have been asleep for ages. Loneliness sits heavy in my gut.

  After eating some bread soaked in olive oil and a handful of dried apricots, I make ready to work, though my right leg is still frail and wooden. Marta often gives voice to what I dare not say – as though she is the part of me that can never be stifled – and she tells me I am still too death-weakened to work. When I reply that I have no choice, she says that she forbids me from limping off to Yerushalayim ‘like a wounded tortoise’, as she puts it, which makes me laugh and kiss her hands.

  ‘Make light of it if you want,’ she tells me in a haughty voice, ‘but, if you must go, then take Yirmi to help you up the hills.’

  It seems sound advice, and, when I summon my son to me, he assures me that Rabbi Elad will not scold him if he arrives a little late to his studies. Mia accompanies the two of us as far as Bethany’s dungheap, since she is part of a group of local women who have made it their job to search every morning for the unwanted infants often left amongst the refuse.

  Although I bless everyone who has been waiting for me, three meddlesome strangers – two men and a woman carrying a hen ready for cooking – find that insufficient and insist on questioning me about my revival as we make our way through Bethany’s crowded streets. In exchange for the incantations that they presume to have brought about my revival, they offer me copper and silver coinage. When that fails to work, one of the men tempts me with a tiny bronze amulet of Sobek, the crocodile-headed Egyptian god, and the woman tries to hand me her hen.