by Amos Oz
How could Yardena not love us?
She might even have a sudden urge to leave her rainwater collector and come and join us.
But Atalia had made him sign an agreement forbidding him to bring visitors here or to tell anyone about his business in this house.
His eyes filled with tears again, and because he felt angry at himself on account of his tears and his fantasies, he decided to take off his shoes and get into bed fully dressed. There were so many free hours. And outside there was nothing but wind and rain. You wanted deep solitude, you wanted inspiration, you wanted endless expanses of silent free time, and here all your wishes have been granted. You’ve got it all. And on the ceiling of your attic room, directly over your bed, oceans and continents take shape in the cracking plaster: you can lie on your back for hours on end gazing at the archipelago of peeling plaster, islands, reefs, gulfs, volcanoes, fjords. And every now and again some little insect wriggles between them. Maybe this is the place where you can return to “Jewish Views of Jesus”? To Judas Iscariot? Or the common underlying reason for the failure of all revolutions? You could do some serious research, couldn’t you? Or else you could start to write a novel? And every night, after work, sit over a glass of tea with Gershom Wald and an astonished Atalia and read installments aloud to them?
Each afternoon, soon after four o’clock, Shmuel got out of bed, showered, dusted his thick beard with fragrant talcum powder, descended the curling iron stairs, lit the paraffin heater in the library, and sat down facing Gershom Wald’s black desk, on the wicker armchair padded with embroidered Arab cushions. Sometimes he fixed his eyes on the pair of goldfish that gaped at him almost motionless from behind the curved glass of the lit aquarium as he listened attentively to the homilies that Mr. Wald enjoyed delivering. From time to time, he stood up to serve some tea or to adjust the wick of the heater so that its flame continued to burn a soothing blue. Sometimes he opened the window a crack behind the closed shutters to let in a whiff of rain-drenched pine trees.
At five, and again at seven and nine, the old man listened to the news on the little radio on his desk. Sometimes he immersed himself in the newspaper and then explained to Shmuel what lay behind the latest news. Ben-Gurion was forming a new coalition. He might or might not include the Marxist-Zionist MAPAM Party and the Labor Union. “There’s no one like Ben-Gurion,” Wald said. “The Jewish people has never before had such a farsighted leader as Ben-Gurion. Few understand as he does that ‘the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations’ is a curse and not a blessing.”
Between news broadcasts Gershom Wald would talk to him about, for instance, the folly of Darwin and his followers:
“How is it possible even to imagine that the eye, or the optic nerve, came into being gradually, in response to the need to see, by means of what they term natural selection? Surely so long as there was no eye and no notion of sight in the world, nobody had any need or urge to see, and there was nobody and nothing that could even guess at the very need to see! It is inconceivable that within total sightlessness, an infinity of perpetual darkness that does not even have a clue that it is darkness, some cell, or some cluster of cells, suddenly appears and begins, ex nihilo, to blink and to start making out shapes, colors, and dimensions. Like a captive releasing himself from prison. Hmm. And, moreover, the theory of evolution has no shred of an explanation of the appearance of the first living cell or grain of growth amidst the eternal silence of a totally inanimate world. And who was it suddenly sprang up, ex nihilo, and began to teach some stray molecule of inanimate matter that it had to wake up all of a sudden from its perpetual inactivity and begin to convert the light of the sun into carbohydrates and to employ these carbohydrates for the purpose of growth and multiplication?
“Hmm. And surely there cannot possibly be any Darwinian explanation for the amazing fact that a cat, almost from the day of its birth, knows it has to dig a little hole to do its business in, then cover that with earth. Is it conceivable that natural selection is at work here? Were all the cats that were not capable of performing this complex hygienic operation wiped off the face of the earth without raising progeny, and only the descendants of the cats that buried their droppings succeeded in being fruitful and multiplying? And why was it specifically the cat that escaped from the cogwheels of the machinery of natural selection and was blessed with this remarkable tradition of hygiene, rather than the dog, or the cow, or the horse? Why did Darwin’s natural selection not choose to leave in the world not just a cat but also, let us say, a pig that can lick and groom itself? Hmm? And who on earth could suddenly have taught the earliest ancestor of the sanitation-fixated cats, the first cat to inter its feces, how to dig the first cesspit and how to cover it with earth? It is like the question posed by the rabbis of old: how was the first pair of blacksmith’s tongs made?”
Shmuel watched the old man’s lips moving under his thick white mustache, and observed repeatedly the contrast between the cheery wit of his words and the deep anguish that clouded the graying blue of his eyes: tragic eyes set in a satyr’s face.
Sometimes the old man spoke, in his usual way, at length, with pleasure and power, about the dark fear that the image of the Wandering Jew has always inspired in the Christian imagination. “Not everybody can simply wake up one morning, brush his teeth, drink a cup of coffee, and kill a god! To murder a deity you need to be even stronger than the god, as well as infinitely malicious and evil. Whoever murdered Jesus, a warmhearted deity radiating love, must have been stronger than he and also shrewd and abominable. Those accursed god-killers were only able to kill a god on condition that they really possessed monstrous resources of strength and wickedness. And so that is indeed what the Jews possess in the deepest recesses of the Jew-hater’s imagination. We are all Judas. Even eighty generations later we are still Judas. But the truth, my young friend, the real truth we can behold before our very eyes here in the Land of Israel: the modern Jew who has sprung up here, just like his ancient predecessor, is neither strong nor malicious but hedonistic, with an ostentatious veneer of wisdom, boisterous, confused, and consumed by suspicions and fears. Yes indeed. Chaim Weizmann once said, in a moment of despair, that there can never be such a thing as a Jewish state, because it contains an inbuilt contradiction: if it is a state it will not be Jewish, and if it is Jewish it will certainly not be a state. As it is written in the Talmud, this is a nation that resembles an ass.”
At another time, he would expatiate on the migration of birds or schools of fish. Both rely on mysterious powers of navigation which scientific logic cannot begin to take the measure of. For the most part, the cripple’s hands were spread out calmly on the glass surface of his desk, hardly moving as he spoke to Shmuel, his white mane ringed with a halo of light from the desk lamp. Now and again, he emphasized his thoughts by raising his voice or lowering it almost to a whisper. Sometimes his fingers picked up a pen or a ruler, and his strong arm cut all sorts of shapes in the air. Every hour or hour and a half he rose and dragged his twisted body, using the muscles of his arms, along the edge of the desk, picked up the crutches, and limped toward the toilet or to a bookshelf. Sometimes, dispensing with the crutches, he maneuvered his body by the strength of his arms alone, from the desk to his wicker couch. He refused to allow Shmuel to help. His awkward movement now was reminiscent of a wounded insect or a gigantic moth with burnt wings struggling vainly to fly.
As for Shmuel, he made them both tea. Occasionally he glanced at his watch, so as not to be late in serving the evening porridge, which was waiting in the kitchen, ready to be warmed on the hotplate. Once or twice, he tried to interest his host in the debate aroused by Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, or by “Thoughts on Alterman’s Poetry,” a controversial article published recently by the poet Nathan Zach, in which he denounced mercilessly what appeared to him as the flamboyant artificiality that dominated the imagery of one of the leading Hebrew poets of his day. Mr. Wald, for his part, found in these debates a not insignifica
nt element of acuteness, but also a strong dose of malice, conceit, and immaturity, and so he dismissed the subject with a witticism. On the other hand, he said nothing when Shmuel read him some poems by Dahlia Ravikovitch which had recently appeared. He merely inclined his snowy head and listened in attentive silence.
Because his neck was bent at a right angle, his face as he listened to the poems was turned to the floor, so that for a fleeting moment he looked to Shmuel like a hanged man with a broken neck.
9
* * *
FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS, THE EARLIEST extant Jewish source to mention the existence of Jesus, recounts the story of the Nazarene in two different versions. In his work The Jewish Antiquities, he devotes several clearly Christian lines to “Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats . . . He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah . . . Pilate . . . condemned him to be crucified . . . On the third day he appeared to them restored to life.” Josephus—how little he knew—concludes this short account with these words: “And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.” Several contemporary scholars, however, including Professor Gustav Yomtov Eisenschloss, maintain that it is inconceivable for a Jew like Josephus to write in this way about Jesus, and it is almost certain, in Eisenschloss’s view, that the passage was entirely rewritten over the years by Christians and was spuriously interpolated later into the Antiquities.
And indeed a totally different version of Josephus’ remarks about Jesus appears in the writings of Agapius, a tenth-century Christian Arabic writer. According to Agapius, Josephus did not consider Jesus to be a messiah, and he does not report his resurrection three days after his crucifixion as a fact, but he describes objectively the belief of Jesus’ disciples.
Josephus himself was born only a few years after the crucifixion, and perhaps the most interesting thing about what he says concerning Jesus, whether in the Antiquities or in Agapius’ version, is how tiny and almost negligible the whole episode of Jesus’ advent seems to a historian who was his near contemporary. In both versions, Josephus devotes fewer than a dozen lines to the whole story of Jesus’ life, his teaching, his miracles, his crucifixion, his resurrection, and the new faith of his followers.
Even after Josephus, the figure of Jesus aroused very little interest among Jews. The body of rabbinic literature, compiled over many generations, contains only a small handful of scattered allusions, which may possibly reflect denigration of Jesus on the part of some rabbis, or else they may be totally unconnected with him, and their mockery may be directed against someone entirely different, or against a number of different people. In general, the rabbis refrain from mentioning Jesus. In later times he was alluded to, by way of a contemptuous damnatio memoriae, as “that man.”
There are a couple of passages in the rabbinic literature that contain scornful remarks that can be interpreted in various ways, such as when the early rabbi Simeon ben Azzai cites a genealogical scroll he found in Jerusalem, which said, “A certain man is the illegitimate child of a married woman.” This may reflect a cowardly taunt at the followers of the rival faith, or it may simply be a snippet of Jerusalem gossip whose subject is some unknown “certain man,” like those anonymous rumors that float around Jerusalem today, even in the corridors of the university.
In Tractate Sanhedrin of the Tosefta there is a hostile reference to someone called ben Stada, who was executed in Lydda for inciting people to idolatry, and there are scholars who insist on seeing some kind of allusion to Jesus here too. And elsewhere, in Tosefta Hullin, there is mention of a physician who could cure snakebites by uttering the name of Jesus ben Pantera. But who was that Jesus and who was Pantera? The matter is open to speculation which is no more than guesswork. Only much later, in the Yalkut Shim’oni on the book of Numbers, do we find an explicit warning against a human being “who tried to make himself into a god, and to lead the whole world astray.”
However, in the Babylonian Talmud there are three explicit allusions to Jesus, who is variously described as a young scholar who strayed from the right path, or a sorcerer who promoted idolatry, or an apostate who repented but was not accepted back into the fold. But in the course of time, these three passages were deleted from almost all the printed editions of the Babylonian Talmud, because the Jews were terrified of what their Christian neighbors would do to them if they read such things.
The synagogue poet Yannai, who lived in Palestine in the fifth or sixth century, composed an anti-Christian hymn that mocks those “Who call the villain noble / Who choose the loathsome abomination / . . . Who address the hanged one each evening,” and so forth.
When Shmuel brought his abandoned thesis to the library and began to read this convoluted hymn aloud to Gershom Wald, the old man sniggered and covered his eyes with his big ugly hand, like a man refusing to look at something disgraceful, and said:
“Stop, that’s enough. Who can listen to such tasteless sophistries? I asked you to tell me about Jewish views of Jesus, not what all sorts of idiots think of him. This tea is too weak and too sweet, and it’s also lukewarm. You are capable of compressing all the flaws of the world into a single small glass and then stirring them together. No, there’s no need to make me a fresh tea. Just bring me a glass of tap water, then we’ll sit quietly for a while. Who cares about ben Stada and ben Pantera? Let them rest in peace. As for us, we have only what our eyes can see. And even that, rarely. Now let’s listen to the news.”
10
* * *
HIS ATTIC ROOM was low-ceilinged and cozy, like a winter den. It was an elongated space, and the ceiling sloped like the sides of a tent. The single window looked out over the front of the house, the garden wall and the screen of cypresses beyond it, and the stone-paved courtyard shaded by the grapevine and the old fig tree. A charcoal-black cat, no doubt a tom, sometimes crossed the yard, slowly, imperiously, his tail erect, padding and gliding on velvety feet, as if each of his delicate paws did not step on the ground but languorously licked the polished paving stones that shone and glittered in the rain.
The window was set deep because the walls of the house were thick. Shmuel would drag his quilt over to the window ledge and make himself a kind of upholstered seat in which he liked to nestle for half an hour or so, looking into the empty courtyard. From this vantage point he discovered in a corner of the yard a cistern with a rusting iron lid. Such cisterns, he knew, were dug in the courtyards of old Jerusalem and served to collect rainwater before the British came and brought water from Solomon’s Pools and the springs of Rosh Ha’ayin, spreading a web of pipes through the city. These old cisterns had saved the Jews of Jerusalem from serious drought in 1948, when the Arab Legion of the Kingdom of Transjordan besieged the city and blew up all the water pumps in Latrun and Rosh Ha’ayin so as to subdue the populace. Was Atalia’s father, Shealtiel Abravanel, one of the leaders of the Jewish community at the time of the invasion of the Arab forces, or had he already been stripped by Ben-Gurion of the offices he had previously held? And why was he dismissed? And what did he do afterward? And, in fact, when did Shealtiel Abravanel die?
One day, Shmuel decided, I shall spend a few hours in the National Library and try to get to the bottom of this story.
But what good will it do you to know? Will the knowledge bring you closer to Atalia? Or, on the contrary, will you only make her shut herself away more than ever inside the shell of her secrets?
Shmuel’s bed stood between the corner where he made his coffee, and the toilet and shower, which were hidden behind a curtain. Beside his bed were a table, chair, and lamp, and facing it was a heater and a bookcase, on which were arrayed an English–Hebrew dictionary, an Aramaic–Hebrew dictionary, a Bible (including the New Testament) bound in black cloth embossed with a gilded pattern, an atlas in a foreign language, a history of the Haganah, and the volumes of Parchments of Fire, in memory of the soldiers who fell in the War of Independence. Next to
these stood a dozen books of advanced mathematics and mathematical logic in English. Shmuel took one of them down, peered at it, and failed to understand so much as the opening lines of the introduction. On the shelf below these books, which belonged to the house, Shmuel had arranged the few books he had brought with him, as well as the record player and his records. There were some metal hooks on the back of the door on which he hung his clothes. And on the wall he put up with tape the poster of the heroes of the Cuban Revolution: the brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro, with their friend the Argentinean doctor Ernesto “Che” Guevara, surrounded by a crowd of other men, all with bushy beards almost like Shmuel’s own, all of them in battle fatigues and looking like a group of poets and visionaries who had put on battle dress and fastened pistols to their hips. Shmuel’s clumsy, disheveled image could have fit easily into this group. Each of them also had a submachine gun slung from his shoulder. Some of these dusty weapons hung by a rough length of rope rather than a leather strap.
Shmuel had also found in a corner of this attic room a metal trolley like the one he had seen downstairs in the library. Only up here, on his trolley, were carefully arranged in serried ranks, like soldiers on parade, pens, pencils, notebooks, folders, empty box files, a set of staplers and a heap of rubber bands, two erasers, and a gleaming pencil sharpener. Did they expect him to settle down here to copy sacred scriptures like a monk in his cell in the olden days? Or that he would plunge himself into research? About Jesus? Or Judas Iscariot? Or both of them? Or perhaps about the shady details of the rift between Ben-Gurion and Shealtiel Abravanel?
