My thoughts were in turmoil. If he was not what we thought, then what was he? Perhaps another Simon the Magician, who, they say, had flown like a bird? What kind of Messiah was it to whom Jew and Gentile were alike? His beloved John had called him the only begotten Son of God. But when the Sadducees tried to trap him with their story of the widow wed to seven brothers, he said that in heaven all were equally children of God.
I had committed no betrayal. Anybody could see that if they only knew how it had all begun. But to whom was I to turn? My mother was always sympathetic until Rachel spoiled what had been. If only I could speak to her. And why not? She would not have returned to the house if she still resented me.
It was not a long way. And from the Gennath Gate, I ran headlong all the way, until, winded, I came to the house. It felt strange to knock on the door of my own home, but I was uneasy now about my reception, for everybody seemed to misunderstand. I was no bar-Abbas, or Cestus or Dysmas. They had not cared as I had.
A servant responded to my knock.
“Your mother will be pleased,” he said, trying not to show his surprise. “She is in her room.”
I was not prepared for the changes that little more than two and a half years had wrought. Her face was faded and worn, her eyes tired and distant, her step slow and unsure. “I am glad you have come,” she said. “I know not how long it will be before I join your father. It is all I ask now.”
I moved forward to kiss her cheek, and she stepped back. “Let me look at you first.” She seemed satisfied by what she saw. “It has not been easy for you, has it?”
I wanted to fling my arms about her, and bury my head in her lap, and weep as I had when I was a child and hurt. But there was something about her manner that restrained me. Rachel had come irrevocably between us.
I saw the table set for the Passover feast.
“Will you not take your place at the head of the table?”
I could only think of that other Passover feast, twenty-four hours earlier.
“I must go on,” I said.
“Where do you go on this Passover night? You look distraught, stay and rest.”
I could contain myself no longer. “They killed him, Mother. The Romans killed him, and he did not resist.”
“Who? Who do you speak of?”
Her voice was oddly listless.
“Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, the Lamb of God.”
She nodded vaguely. “Gamaliel has told me of him. He says he was a good and Godly man. It is too bad.” She sighed. “But then these are troubled times, and many good people perish. It is well, Judah, that we Pharisees believe in the life hereafter. It is surely sweeter than this vale of tears.”
I liked not the detachment I saw in her, it was like speaking to the door. Something seemed to have died in her since I saw her last.
I looked around the room.
“And Rachel, where is she?”
I had dreaded the thought of seeing her, but now that she was not cloying over me or giving me a sad-eyed gaze of reproach, I was content to see her.
“Rachel?” she said dimly. “I have not seen her for two years.”
“Where could she have gone?” I wondered, for she had no friends besides us.
She looked at me with glazed eyes. “She is dead.”
“Dead?” My heart skipped a beat.
“She killed herself.”
“Killed herself, but why?” I was stunned to silence, and then my mind became like a roaring maelstrom, torn apart by its very activity. In my frenzy, I felt like pounding the walls. “Why should this beautiful young girl end her life? She had everything to live for.”
Her eyes stared at me vacantly. “She died of her shame.”
“It was not that great a scandal,” I cried. “None knew of it but us.”
“And, hopefully, the God above, who will give her the pity she could not find on earth.”
“It was not my fault. Mother.”
“Nobody has blamed you.”
“Your eyes find me guilty.”
“You convict yourself, Judah.”
“But what was so shameful?” I thought of Mary Magdalen. “Others have experienced as much and gone on with their lives.”
She looked at me as if I were a stranger.
“She carried your child. How many others have had this experience?”
I looked at her incredulously, and I felt my hair rise on end. “My child? Impossible.”
“Think back and you will not find it that impossible.”
“Why did you not send for me?” I pleaded with her now.
“Why should she be twice rejected?”
“I would have come back, I would have married her, I would have done anything.”
She looked at me with a pitying expression. “And broken your sacred vows? Did you not make it plain what was important?” She shook her head. “No, she stood all that she could stand. Let us pray that God is more merciful than man.”
I hesitated, but I had to know.
“And how did she die?”
I saw now a tear in her eye. “Does it matter?”
“I know not why, but it does, very much.”
Her small voice trembled. “She hanged herself.”
I fell back as if I had been hit by a pole.
“May God have mercy on her soul.”
She did not appear to have heard me.
“Stay for the Passover,” she said, “and go in the morning, if you like. This night is not fit for any man.”
I could hear the rumble of thunder overhead, and the house shook. The night matched my mood. I felt wounded and stricken, as though my heart had been rent from my body. Where could I find the peace I sought? If only I could reach out and touch his hand. Only he could understand, and he, unbelievably, was gone.
I got to my feet, dazed, and passed my hand over my throbbing brow. “I must go, I cannot stay in this house, it is full of her.”
The tears now filled her eyes. “And he who was sent to the cross. Where can you go to forget him?”
“You knew something more about him?”
“All Israel knew about him, and many cared, but they did not care enough.” She shook her head. “Poor Rachel, some cared for her, but not enough.”
I turned on my heel and fled, I could stand no more. Never would I see my mother again, that I knew, nor could I think of Rachel, even in sorrow, for another face, sometimes gentle, sometimes stem, but always understanding, crowded everything else from my mind.
The streets were deserted, the inhabitants taking shelter from the storm and marking the holiday. In every home they were preparing the paschal feast, doubly sacred because it was joined with the Sabbath. In a hundred windows I saw the candlelights. I had meant to bear right, along the western wall, but instead turned for no reason by the Joppa Gate in an easterly direction. The sky was almost pitch black now, the thunder so close and ominous. I ran through the dark streets, stumbling in my confusion, until the Temple ramparts loomed dimly in front of me. It was so dark I could barely see the towers. There were no guards on the walls, for they, like the others, were observing the Holy Day. I raced through the Court of Gentiles, empty now of worshippers and priests alike. Even the shopkeepers had locked up and left. But the place was still alive with memories: the stones on which he trod, the tables he overturned, and in the Portico of Solomon the shady area where he had sat and meditated.
I stood alone in that vast concourse and felt an urge to cry out against those who had sent him to be slaughtered. They would be judged as they judged him, cursed till the day of the final judgment.
“Annas, Caiaphas,” I shouted to the rooftops, “this Temple shall be pulled down over your heads. You shall wander homeless until the days of retribution, for you have slain him by whom there was salvation. May God pity you and yours for the generations to come. For no others shall.”
My voice rang out in the silence, and the echo came back hauntingly in the words of the prophet Isaiah, in a v
oice like that I had heard long before on the banks of the river Kedron.
“He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from him. The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.”
There was a tremor under my feet. The stones shook, and the Temple, revealed in a brilliant flash of lightning, rocked a moment, then settled back with a groan. I drew closer to the great wall, thinking to be buried under its ruins. But the trembling of the earth stopped, the heavens opened up, and the rain fell as if the skies themselves were weeping.
There was still no life. It was almost as if the Temple priests and the soldiers cowered in their corners, to escape a just retribution. But there must be somebody there, for it was the custom for certain favored priests and Levites to take the Passover feast at the Temple. From the Court of Gentiles, passing the sign which forbade any but Israelites to proceed further, I passed into the Court of Israel, and then the Court of Priests, and there, looking up, saw a feeble light flickering in a window. I bounded up the steps, past the room where I had sat with the High Priests, and stopped before a door guarded by two soldiers. I showed my credentials. “I am expected,” I said haughtily.
They looked at me doubtfully, taking in my wet and bedraggled appearance. “It will go badly with you if you do not admit me. I bear an urgent message.”
Boldness won out.
I saw first the surprised countenance of the crafty Annas. He sat at the head of the table and was flanked by Caiaphas and, of all people, my great benefactor, Gamaliel. By this time I was incapable of surprise, though Gamaliel had the grace to blush. I could see they had not yet begun the feast. I looked around the table, thinking of another supper, and counted thirteen. It seemed a fit number for such an occasion.
Gamaliel stood up, and I thought for a sickening moment he was about to apologize. Instead, he said, with a quiet dignity which I found misplaced: “He had to die to save the nation, of that I became convinced.”
“How readily you change partners,” I cried. “My father would not know this double-dealer.”
Annas moved angrily to summon the guards but was stopped by an authoritative wave of Gamaliel’s hand.
“If the Sanhedrin had never raised a finger, he would still have died, because Rome willed it.”
“Rome,” I cried, “did not try him on trumped-up charges.”
“There is no room in Israel for two Gods, or two Kings. Pilate knew what he must do from the beginning.”
I tired of their duplicity. “The Roman wavered and looked for some pretext to free an innocent man, but the High Priests and their lackeys would not have it so.”
“Do you think the Pilate that massacred the guileless Galileans in the sacred precincts of the Temple cared for a moment what the Sanhedrin did about a single Jew?”
“I saw him look for another way.”
“It was but a show he put on, as you well know.”
“For whose benefit, if he cares not what we think?”
A shadow darkened Gamaliel’s long face. “For the benefit of those who come after him.” He paid no heed to the growing murmur of impatience around the table. “He knew the Nazarene was no ordinary man and came for no ordinary reason.”
“And how did this insensitive Roman know that?”
“They do not rule, Judah, because they are insensitive. Somehow they get to the heart of a matter quicker than we.” It was almost a reprimand. “In the captive eyes of his own people, he could see the future, if he let live this light to the Gentiles.”
As Gamaliel spoke, I had become calmer. “You mean,” I spoke scornfully, “if he came but for the Jews, Pilate would not have intervened?”
“Most likely not, even though it gives him pleasure to frustrate and torment us whenever he can.”
So it had seemed at the time, but just now I could not accept any of this, not with the Master gone, and they pleasantly celebrating the deliverance of an Israel now forever in chains.
My hand reached into my tunic, slid over the parchment that had slipped out of his fingers, and then found the pouch with the thirty pieces of silver.
“How dare you give me this blood money? I have sinned only in my own innocence. I will have no part of this filthy lucre.” I flung the pouch across the table to where Caiaphas sat scowling blackly. “Give it to him who deserves it,” I cried.
Some of the silver pieces flew out of the bag and rattled across the floor.
“Out with you,” shouted Caiaphas in a fury. “What is it to us how innocent you proclaim yourself? We all know what you have done, and your reasons matter not, for actions speak more than words. But this money shall never go back to the treasury. For it is blood money, and it is not lawful to keep this reminder of your perfidy.”
“My perfidy,” I shouted. “I am innocent, I swear it to the world. He wanted to die, to fulfill the prophecies of old. He said so himself.”
The guards now came and took me by the arms to drag me off. In my desperation, breaking away, I stood and cursed the priests and elders with a passion.
“May what you have done stick in your throats, not only on this feast night, but until the end of time.”
I fled down the stairs, thinking terrible thoughts. My mind was so restless that my body compulsively kept pace with it. I started running, and kept running until I came to the Golden Gate, which enters onto the Garden of Gethsemane.
The trees creaked and groaned in the wind, but otherwise nothing broke the grave-like stillness. I moved toward the abandoned warehouse where Joshua-bar-Abbas and the others had so valiantly described their plans to bedevil Rome to the death. I was irrepressibly drawn to the place where I had made my first impassioned cry for freedom. The weathered door creaked as I opened it, and the sound startled me. I strained my eyes in the darkness and saw a shadow near the front of the room. It moved ever so slightly, and I found myself jumping nervously as though at a ghost. Drawing closer, I heard a rasping noise, as if from heavy breathing, and the shadow seemed to bob up and down. It was the muffled sobbing of a man. I let out a cry: “Who sits there in this accursed spot? Rise and show yourself.” I was afraid of no man, shadow or substance, for of what import was my life now? The figure stood up, and in a burst of lightning through the gaping holes in the roof, I recognized the last man I expected to see in this forlorn place. His back was bowed, the shoulders slumped, and the strength appeared to have gone out of him.
His head was sunk in his hands, and he appeared not to care that any had arrived.
I shook him roughly.
“What brings you here, traitor?” I cried.
He looked up, and even in the gloom I could see the defeat in every line of the churlish countenance.
Joshua-bar-Abbas gave me a blank stare.
“Nobody came,” he said apathetically. “They were to have met me here, but they are all gone. Cestus and Dysmas, on the cross, the others trapped and cut down like rats. You are the only Zealot to show up, even Simon Zelotes is not here as promised.”
I shrank from him in horror. “Idiot, I came not for any meeting. The insurrection died with Christ, and you helped to kill it with your treachery.”
“Whatever else,” he said with a glimmering spark, “I resisted the Romans at every turn.”
“You betrayed all, the perfect traitor.”
“Who are you to call me traitor?” he cried. “You believed in him and still betrayed him. To me he was never more than a magician who could hypnotize the gullible with this alien gift of his. Had he been the Messiah, he would not have left us when we wanted him for our King.”
I looked at him, stunned. So that was how the world would see me, unless I corrected this misconception before the others condemned me out of their envy because of the place I held with him.
Before I left this place I had to make sure that all those who came after me would know of my love for him.
“Listen closely, bar-Abbas, for on
e day you may be called upon to testify for Judah-bar-Simon. This is my final testament, so again I say, heed me well.
“From my first memory I dreamed of a Messiah. I stood in the Holy Temple and implored God that these eyes of mine might behold his Promised. My heart was uplifted before I became a man at the age of thirteen, for in my soul I heard his assurance that I would see his Son.
“I encountered Joshua-bar-Joseph in a little town on the Jordan when I was searching for the Messiah. I had dreamt that I saw him, all glorious and beautiful, radiant with holiness and the Godhead, and when I saw him in truth I believed it was he.
“I left my house and my mother and my estates for him. I followed him and exulted in him, and his words were as sweet as the juice of a pomegranate, and as living as honey and as fulfilling as milk and manna, and as tender as the flesh of the date. I saw his miracles, and heard the resonance of his great voice, and all who saw him were amazed, even those who hated him. Yet he carried no golden rod of authority and power, no carved ivory staff, and there was no crown on his head. But my heart leapt at the sight of him, my soul rejoiced, and I said in my heart: ‘He has come!’ A poor carpenter, they said of him, a man of no consequence, a barefoot rabbi, a peasant, a humble creature. But how grand he was. How could a member of the poorest and the meanest, the despised, a Nazarene, possess such a presence? I doubted at first, for was it not promised that on his appearance Israel would be delivered, and Zion would be illuminated like the sun and the world would prostrate itself before him and cry ‘Hosanna!’
“None loved him as I loved him. None who followed him was as I, a Pharisee of a noble family, a man of wealth and gold, honored in the holy places. The others were miserable people of no learning and family. I suffered agonies of impatience when they could not understand his words, which, though apparently simple, were profound and strange and oblique. But I understood. There were times when the others bent their foolish heads and silently mouthed his words, and shook their ragged locks, but he looked at me and faintly smiled and knew that I understood what he had said. Then my soul would bum with joy at the meeting of our eyes, and I was exalted and we exchanged smile for smile, though his smile was shadowed with sadness. He would then avert his head, and a peculiar coldness would paralyze me and I wondered. What had I done to offend him, he the fiery core of my heart, the life of my soul? The glory of his face proclaimed in its radiance that here was in truth the Messiah, and he was no mere man of the street rabble, of the dusty places of Nazareth. Here, I said to myself, was the priest of all priests, the God of the universe, the King of Kings, clad in might and honor, divine and elevated to the throne.
I, Judas Page 38
