“God has felt your loss,” he said, “and He has not forgotten you, although you have turned your face away from Him. He speaks to you today as a Father. Tell me whom you have lost.”
This was no secret. Any child in the street could have told him that Qeriot had been struck by the sickness. Every person had lost something.
Iehuda said, “My wife.” It was defiant, the way he said it. Challenging the man to impress him.
“And your father?”
It was a lucky guess, Iehuda told himself, nothing more, a guess from a preacher. How many men of thirty have not lost their fathers? The man could not have known that he had lost him especially young, that he had taken it especially hard.
But still he said, “Yes.”
And the man, whose name was Yehoshuah, unfolded his long limbs and stood up from the earth and walked over to Iehuda and gave him a hand to lift him up. He put his hands on Iehuda’s shoulders and said, “You think that your Father in heaven has forgotten you. But your Father in heaven is here. Now. Guiding me to you today. Listen,” he said, “this story is for you.”
And he told a story to the crowd.
There was once a man who had two sons. And because he had business both near and far, he sent one of his sons to do all his commerce in the city and kept one by him to learn the ways of the farm. That son who was sent away burned with rage, for he was kept from those he loved, and from his father. He sent angry letters back to his father, begging him to let him return, but the father left him there for ten long years, while his brother raised a family, and lived at home, and tended the fields. At last, after many years, the father brought the son home from the city.
“Father,” said the son, “why did you keep me away so long?”
And the father said, “My beloved son, you were always on my business, every moment you were away. And now that you have come to understand all my doings, this farm and all that is in it is yours.”
“So it is,” said Yehoshuah, “with men. It is those who suffer who will inherit the kingdom of heaven, and our Father in heaven has already picked out a golden seat for you, my friend. He loves you best of all.”
The man moved on with his talking and preaching. But it was as though Iehuda had been struck by lightning through the top of his head and into the ground, because he wanted it so much to be true. Not like Job’s suffering, a test. But as this man had said, a gift.
That night the man made camp near to the brook, with a small fire and some gifts of food for his trouble and three of his friends, for few men followed him then. Iehuda, with about eight or nine others from the village, sat with them in their camp and listened to them talk.
There were things the man said that filled Iehuda with fire, as if his blood had turned to flame.
There was a beggar among the group, and when the rest of them opened up their packs and ate their barley cakes and olives or dried fish, he had no food to eat. They each gave him a little of their own to make up a meal and he ate ravenously, gratefully.
Yehoshuah sifted the dirt under his hands and said, “Why do we give charity?”
Iehuda replied quickly, “It’s written in the Torah: ‘When your brother becomes poor, extend your hand to him, and strengthen him—even the convert and the settler.’ God commanded it.”
Yehoshuah nodded slowly. “Now answer me this. Why is it written in the Torah? Why did God command it?”
Iehuda blinked. This is not a question a man can hope to answer. To ask, “Why did God do so?” is as much as to say, “I can understand the infinite mind of God.”
“For our highest good,” piped up one of the others. “All God’s commandments are for our good.”
“But why?” pressed Yehoshuah. “Why is it good for us? Why did God lay this down for us?”
There was silence around the fire. The three men who had arrived with Yehoshuah must already know the answer, or the special point he was making. The others were dumb, afraid that they would give the wrong response. Iehuda, suddenly tired of the game and of this man trying to make them feel stupid, replied.
“It’s not given to us to know why God does anything,” he said. “Our job is to listen to His commands and obey them.”
The other men nodded. This is what it means to be a pious Jew: to learn the law and to obey it.
“Like the soldiers of Caesar?” said Yehoshuah, a smile on his lips. “Like a man bought for hire? To do without knowing the reason for what you do? Our God is not a tyrant. He would not have given us sharp minds if we were not meant to use them. Think. Why did God tell us to give charity?”
At this, two of the men quietly began to pack up their things to go. Yehoshuah did not try to detain them. He had compared their belief to the blind obedience of the soldiers; he must have known this would be intolerable to some.
Iehuda felt his mind stretch after the question, though. It was a good question. If he had to make a guess at the reasoning of God—and even the thought was faintly sickening, like looking down a long drop—if he had to guess, he might say…
“Perhaps God has commanded us to help the poor because He loves them.”
Yehoshuah clapped him on the back: “This is a good answer, my friend! See, we have been reasoning for but a few moments and already we have puzzled out who God loves! And from His commandments, who else does He love?”
“The blind and the crippled…” Iehuda began, thinking of the commandment not to put a stumbling block before the blind. “The widow and the orphan? For it says in the Torah, ‘Do not mistreat widows and orphans. If you mistreat them, I will hear their cries.’”
“Yes,” said Yehoshuah, “God has a special love for women without husbands, sons without fathers. Think more. Why does God say, ‘Love your neighbor’?”
Iehuda had it now. “Because God loves…” He paused. “He loves those who are near to us?”
“Has he not taught us all to love our neighbors? Is not every person the near neighbor of some other person? Even soldiers, are they not—”
“No,” said Iehuda, extremely irritated, “soldiers are not neighbors. If you go on this way you will have us sharing our food with the men who come to burn our crops and marrying our daughters to the men who raped our wives.” He paused.
Yehoshuah looked at him, interested.
Encouraged, Iehuda went on, “You cannot know what God had in mind for us. He told us to love our neighbors, that is enough. If we start adding to the law where will we be? Like the Romans, making little gods to tell us everything we want to do is right.”
“How if I say this?” said Yehoshuah. “The Torah says, ‘Love your neighbor.’ But since everyone is someone’s neighbor, I say, ‘Love your enemy.’”
“That’s nonsense. We could love them, but it would not make them love us.”
“But imagine if everyone did so. Imagine if we spread that word. Love your enemy. From village to village and town to town. What would happen? Imagine it.”
Trying to grasp it made Iehuda’s mind stutter.
“I cannot imagine,” he said at last. And then, because he yearned to understand, “Explain it to me, teacher.”
Yehoshuah put his rough palm on the back of Iehuda’s hand.
“If the world were filled with people who listened to these few words, only these words, we would build the kingdom of heaven on earth. That is why I travel from village to village. That is the work of my life. To teach people to look into the words of God until they see the heart of everything. Imagine it: the Romans and the Greeks and the Syrians and the Babylonians and the Persians, imagine if we all learned, together, to love one another.”
Iehuda allowed his mind to follow, across the map of the wide world, across the empires and kingdoms that fought and tried to rule and subdue each other. And he imagined what might happen if these words traveled from mouth to mouth, from mind to mind, from one city to the next to the next, if this simple message—love your enemy—were the accepted creed of all the world. He did not see how it
could happen.
“If one man went against it,” he said at last, “the whole thing would be broken. In a world like that, a world of peace, a world of soft people with no knives, one man could destroy everything.”
“Then we cannot rest until every man has heard it. Think,” said Yehoshuah softly, “what shall we use up our lives for? More war, like our fathers and their fathers, more of that? Or shall we use ourselves for a better purpose? Is this not worth your life?”
And Iehuda saw it, just for a moment. In this instant, the whole world was new to him.
He could not stop thinking after that. His mind was rattling like a cart on a rock-strewn road, picking up speed, heading downhill helter-skelter, jerking and bouncing. He wondered if he were going mad.
When the other men went home, past midnight, he stayed and talked with Yehoshuah, asking each question as it came to him, sometimes sitting silently for a long time.
“What about people who come to harm you? What shall we do if they try to hurt us?”
Yehoshuah stretched out his long body on the bedding roll over the stones. He put his hands behind his head, leaned back and looked at the dark, coruscant sky.
“What do you think, Iehuda,” he said, “what does your heart tell you?”
Yehoshuah had folded one leg over another. His simple brown traveling robe was stained with dust and sweat. The skin of his face and arms and legs was sun-worn and weathered. He was still so young, though. How had he come to know so much?
“I am trying…” he said, and came to a halt. He tried to think afresh, to imagine a world entirely new, with no certainties, but he could not make himself bend. “If we must love our enemies, and our enemy is the empire of Rome, would we not have to become their slaves?”
Again and again, all he could come back to was the single alternative he knew.
“Would we be like the priests in the Temple,” he said at last, knowing it was a kind of capitulation, angry with himself for not being able to think further, “bowing and scraping to Rome? Trying to please them?”
Yehoshuah sat up a little. “Come and lie by me,” he said.
He shifted position to make room for Iehuda.
Iehuda came and lay beside him.
“Look up at the heavens,” said Yehoshuah, “look at the stars.”
Iehuda looked. The sky was crammed with stars as a pomegranate is filled with honey-sweet seeds.
“We know that God is in the heavens,” said Yehoshuah. “He looks down on us all from there as from the top of a mountain.”
Iehuda felt it. God looking down on him. He had forgotten.
“God doesn’t choose his dwelling place by accident,” said Yehoshuah. “Look at the stars. Is any one of them raised a single cubit above his fellows? Has God placed a crown upon one of them? Do they rule one another?”
Iehuda shook his head.
“So, think.”
“If we cannot fight Rome, we must become their slaves…” he began.
“Must we?”
Iehuda thought about it. His mind was so clear now, it was as if he had removed the top of his head and the starlit sky was pouring through him, into his heart.
“Could we somehow love them and continue to live as we always lived before they came…? But they would kill us.”
“Do you think so? A whole country?”
Yehoshuah moved his arm slightly, so his fingers touched Iehuda’s. Iehuda felt the touch as a burst of warmth starting in his hand and radiating up through his arm, across his chest, blooming in great sunbursts along his body.
Yehoshuah said, “It is possible to love with dignity. Listen. If a man hits you on the cheek, give him your other cheek to hit. That is what he wants—give it to him freely. If a soldier commands you to carry something for him for one mile, carry it two miles. That is love—to show you are giving it by choice as a free man, not because of a command. If they demand you give them your coat, give them your shirt too.”
Iehuda imagined it. A rainstorm. A soldier demanding he give up his coat—such things happen. And him taking off his shirt too and standing bare-chested in the rain for this ideal of love.
“They will take us for madmen.”
“Seeing such love will change them. This is how we will bring the message.”
“You are talking about a new earth,” he said, “and then what?”
Yehoshuah smiled.
“I do not know. But I believe my Father in heaven will find an answer for us.”
“And what are we to do?”
“Now?” Yehoshuah’s voice dropped very low. “God came to me in the desert and He told me to spread this word. It is my holy duty. And you, Iehuda, He has told me that you will come with me and help me and be my friend.”
Yehoshuah patted Iehuda’s flank, like a man thanking a loyal and obedient horse, pulled his robe around him and rolled over on the blanket to sleep.
Iehuda lay down but his whole body was vibrating like the plucked string of a harp. He knew he had to join them. When they walked on from Qeriot, over the dusty yellow hills north to Hevron, he would go with them. This man, he thought, this fervent, righteous man, would change the whole world.
There were more of them soon. And more, and more. They walked from town to town and in each place there would be some men—and once or twice a woman—to whom Yehoshuah was especially drawn, for whom he seemed to have a particular message, a new parable or saying. And they would sit talking until the fire died low and in the morning one or two or three men would walk on with them.
They became something, and it was not clear precisely how it had happened. In Iehuda’s memory, one day they were walking dusty-footed into a town and the old women were spitting out their chewed-up leaves as they passed and people were only coming to hear Yehoshuah because at least he was a new thing, like a peddler or traveling musicians. And then suddenly, arriving at a new village, people came out to meet them. Young men and women, and children, tugging on their robes and saying, “Is that him, is that him?”
But when he thinks of it, it is not so strange. Because of course, there were also the cures.
He had not made any cures in Qeriot. He did not always do it. Only when there was a certain kind of person or, Iehuda noticed, an especially large crowd. He felt unkind and unworthy for noticing this, but he could not put it out of his mind once he had seen it.
In Remez, where there were five children gone blind with the same pox that had afflicted Iehuda’s wife, Yehoshuah touched them on the head and whispered that God would comfort them and make them strong, but made no cure. In Chidyon, where a girl who had lost both legs and pulled herself on a little wheeled tray by her arms begged Yehoshuah to help her, he wept tears at her suffering, and prayed with her for courage and for the blessings of God, but no new limbs sprouted where the old ones had been.
But in Kfar Nachum there was a great crowd, about two hundred people, and several had brought members of their family who had been unwell for years. From among them, Yehoshuah picked out a man who was wailing and shouting and ripping at his own hair and garments. He was possessed by a demon, they could all see it, the kind who attacks the innocent and the guilty, who will jump into a child if they can.
Iehuda had seen demons like these rip a man slowly apart, cause him to dash his own head against a wall, or to attack his wife and children or to throw himself from a high place and make an end of his life. There had been a man in Qeriot like this, so tormented by the things the demons shouted to him in his own head that he bit chunks of flesh from his arms and the wounds began to stink and so he died.
This man in Kfar Nachum was snarling like a dog when they brought him to Yehoshuah, pulling off his cloak to show his bum to the women standing in a half circle beneath the tree. He snapped and howled and made to grab the women and tear at them with his teeth, and many ran from him and Iehuda was not surprised.
But Yehoshuah was not afraid. Two of the man’s brothers held him steady. They offered to sit on his ches
t to keep him still, but Yehoshuah looked into the man’s eyes and said, “You will be peaceful for me. For you know I am your master.”
And the man stared at him like a frightened dog finally finding the leader of his pack. There was fear in his eyes but also relief and a quality of begging.
“Let his arms and legs go,” said Yehoshuah.
“But master,” said the brothers, “he will run wild and attack the women, he has done it before.”
“Let him go,” said Yehoshuah, in the same level tone, still looking into the man’s eyes.
They let go and the man did not move.
“Tell me your name,” said Yehoshuah. “Demon in this man’s soul, tell me your name.”
The man rolled his eyes back in his head, and whined and howled and gnashed his teeth, but he did not move.
“Tell me your name,” said Yehoshuah again, “in the name of God our Father I command it.”
And then the demon in the man spoke. Its voice was a growl like a wolf and a low hiss like a lizard and it said, “I am Ba’al Nakash, the Lord of Snakes, and this man is mine.”
The people were amazed, because this demon had never told them its name before, and everyone knew that a demon can be commanded by its name.
So Yehoshuah put his hand on the man’s forehead, and even though his eyes rolled and his teeth gnashed he remained still.
Yehoshuah said, “Ba’al Nakash, in the name of God our Father I command you to come out of this man!”
The man fell to the floor with a great gasp and a choking sound. His body began to shake and the people muttered to each other, “That is the demon, trying to hold on.”
Yehoshuah knelt down and put his hands on the man’s chest and shouted, “Ba’al Nakash, I command you to come out of this man!”
The man writhed and hissed and bit through his own tongue so that blood and spittle foamed from his mouth. He clawed at the ground until his fingernails broke and bled on the stones, and he writhed and threw himself against the rocks until great bruises began to show on his body. Yehoshuah took a deep breath, let it out slowly and then, with one hand on the man’s chest, he gave his order.
The Liars' Gospel: A Novel Page 9
