Source

by James A. Michener

  Menahem swallowed and said, “My father married a woman who already had a husband.”

  “He sinned,” Father Eusebius said. “Grievously he sinned.”

  “That made me a bastard.”

  “Without question.”

  “I could not be a Jew nor take part in any services.” Menahem hesitated and said a boyish thing, recalling an old hurt, “When I was thirteen I was not allowed to read the Torah.”

  Father Eusebius made no comment, so Menahem continued, “I could not marry. I could not pray. At Tverya the rabbis told me what to do.” He could not continue.

  “Go ahead,” the Spaniard said, his face betraying neither compassion nor concern.

  “They told me … I myself could never be saved. But if I stole ten drachmas’ worth …” The words came with great pain, for they recalled the spiritual crisis he had suffered when Jael was married. “They would arrest me, sell me into slavery, marry me to another slave, later set us both free, and while we would not be restored, our children would be.”

  For some time Father Eusebius sat silent, reviewing this incredible tale which he had refused to believe the first time he heard it. He dropped his hand from his chin and gradually lowered his austere head until no part of his face was visible, and Menahem realized he was praying. Then slowly he looked up at the would-be Jew and tears of compassion stood in his eyes. As if from the depth of a great basilica he said in a whisper, “The salvation you sought, Menahem, has always been at hand.” He turned and pointed at the crucifix. “When He ascended that cross, when He gave His life for you and me, He took upon Himself the burden of sin that you have been carrying. The moment you accept Him, Menahem, you are free.”

  The priest rose, came to where the Jew was sitting and knelt beside him on the beaten earth. Placing his hand in Menahem’s he brought him to his knees also, and in this position the Spaniard prayed, “Jesus Christ, our Lord, smile upon this young man Menahem ben Yohanan, who has carried such a dreadful sin upon his shoulders. Not his sin, Jesus, but the original sin of the world. Smile upon him and transfer from his shoulders to Yours the burden which he has so manfully borne.”

  In the quiet room a miracle took place. The crushing weight under which Menahem had struggled drifted from his back, the clouds of obscurity from his mind. He felt the actual burden slipping from him, as if he had been carrying three sacks of groats, and he began to sob with joy, as if he were a child to whom something fine had happened.

  “And now, Lord Jesus,” the Spaniard continued, “invite this outcast into Your brotherhood. Tell him, now, that he is free to join us.”

  The priest turned on his knees to face Menahem, then rose and with extended hands drew the young Jew to his feet. “You need be outcast no more,” the priest cried joyfully, and he embraced Menahem as if he were his son. Seating the young man on the chair, he returned to his own, and with a countenance radiant with love, with the gray at his temples shining like silver in the light of the oil lamps, he said, “Rabbi Asher was right in all he did, Menahem. There is sin in the world, and your father created more by his willful actions. Sin was indeed upon you, too, and you were properly an outcast. But the old law that kept this sin permanently upon your soul is abrogated.” He saw that the young man did not understand this word, but he was inspired and hurried on. “The harsh old law is no more and in its place has come the new law of love and redemption. If this night you tell me that you are willing to join Christ, your sin will vanish forever.”

  Finally Menahem spoke: “I can join your church?”

  “You will build it. It will be yours.”

  “I helped build the synagogue, but it was never mine.”

  “The church of Jesus Christ is available without restraints.”

  “I can sing with you? Pray with you?” He did not see Father Eusebius nod agreement, for he was looking at the floor. In a soft whisper he asked, “Would you allow me to marry?”

  “Any girl in our church would be pleased to marry with you, Menahem,” and the priest led the young Jew to the crucifix, before which the Spaniard kneeled in the dust, drawing Menahem with him, and after the two had prayed for some moments Eusebius said, “Lord Jesus Christ, I bring You tonight Your servant Menahem ben Yohanan, who offers his soul and his life to Your care.” He nudged Menahem.

  “Lord Jesus Christ,” the outcast said in a whisper. “No longer can I bear my portion of sin. Accept me.” His voice choked and on a mighty impulse he prostrated himself full length before the crucifix. “I cannot bear it any longer … I cannot,” he repeated many times. “Oh, Jesus, help me.”

  When Menahem had lain thus for some time, Father Eusebius rose, went to him and raised him to his feet. When the handsome young man, ashen-faced like a ghost, stood before him, the Spaniard kissed him twice and said, “Tonight you are Menahem ben Yohanan. Three days from now when you receive the sacrament of baptism and the mass you shall become Mark, and your new life begins from that moment.” He gave his first local convert his blessing and sent him into the night, a man whose once unsupportable burden no longer existed.

  For some time Father Eusebius had been aware that he had a chance of winning Menahem as his first convert, but he had not anticipated what was to happen the following morning. Before work started on the basilica Menahem knocked at the priest’s door, and when the Spaniard rose from his prayers he found not only Menahem awaiting him but Yohanan as well, and on a less emotional level than he had used with Menahem he rephrased the hopeful message of his church: “You have been a grievous sinner, Yohanan, and your sin has reached down to your children and your children’s children. You are powerless to erase this sin, but He,” and he pointed to the crucifix standing out like a light from the bare wall, “He came personally to save you. Accept Him, place your burden on Him, and you shall be free.”

  “My son, too?”

  “He is already free.” To demonstrate this truth the tall Spaniard placed his arm about Menahem’s shoulder, and the gesture was so honest, so without reservation, that Yohanan had to accept its veracity. He saw the radiance in his son’s face as Menahem stood free of the burden placed on him by the law, and the reality of salvation was so persuasive that Yohanan fell to his knees, crying, “Accept me, too.” In this way his feeling of guilt because of what he had done to his offspring vanished, and he was swept along to the sweet mystery of conversion. Enemies of the new church might scoff, but in that white-walled room that morning a burden of sin was actually shifted from the sloping shoulders of the stonecutter and onto the shoulders of Jesus Christ. Yohanan mumbled the formula recited by Father Eusebius and rose a new man. There was no other way to put it: when he knelt he was a man weighed down by the old law, but when he rose he was freed within the new.

  The public baptism of Yohanan and Menahem was set for Friday, an unfortunate choice, for although the day had no special significance for the Christians it was for the Jews the beginning of their Shabbat and the loss of two of their members on that particular day seemed an added insult. Curiously, the very Jews who had refused Menahem a place in their synagogue now protested most vigorously against his abandoning it. “He mustn’t be allowed to do this thing,” they protested and a committee was appointed to dissuade the young man from his error, but Menahem could never have anticipated which member of that committee would be the first to plead with him.

  It was Jael, and her message was simple: “You can’t leave us now, Menahem. You can’t go over to their side. There’s going to be trouble with the Byzantines and you must fight beside your own people.”

  From his new-found platform of hope he smiled at her lack of comprehension. “Your father never allowed me to be a Jew. Don’t make me one now.

  “But you are one of us. This is your town.”

  “This is a new town,” he said accurately. “Warn your husband to make peace with the Byzantines.”

  “Menahem!”

  “I am now Mark. A new man, reborn in Jesus Christ.”

  Jael dre
w away from him, as people do instinctively from things they cannot understand, and as she left she asked, “Have you placed yourself against your brothers?”

  “They placed themselves against me. When I was born,” he replied. “Ask Abraham …”He was about to remind her of the ugly years when her husband and a group of his friends had chased him through the streets, shouting, “Bastard, bastard!” but in his redeemed existence as Mark he chose to forgive those memories; they no longer had authority over his life. “On Friday I become a new man,” he said, “and then I shall be a Byzantine, standing against your husband.”

  Jael left the hut and walked with sickness in her heart to the groats mill, where she told her father that Menahem was obdurate in his decision; she glossed over the real reason why she had gone to see him, for she did not wish to bother the old man with problems of the growing revolt, but what she did reveal was sufficient to arouse Rabbi Asher. Leaving her he ran dusty and disheveled to the building area, where he found not Menahem but Yohanan. Grasping the stonecutter by the shoulder the little rabbi swung him around and demanded, “Have you left the synagogue?”

  “I’m working here now.”

  “I mean Judaism?”

  “I’ll be baptized on Friday.”

  “No!”

  “And Menahem with me.”

  “You must not!”

  The stonecutter brushed away the rabbi’s hand and growled, “The synagogue could find no place for him. This church can.”

  “You were born into Judaism, Yohanan. You’ll live in it forever.”

  “Not if my son is kept out.”

  “But we were working on a plan to save him.”

  “Five years a slave?” Yohanan looked with disdain at the rabbi and pushed him away.

  “But we are all saved only through the law.”

  “With such a law I have no further dealings,” Yohanan said, turning to resume his work.

  This time Rabbi Asher did not touch the big man; he ran in a ridiculous circle so that he could face him again, and when he did so he said forcefully, “You cannot escape the law. You’ll always be a man of the synagogue.”

  The repetition of this word had a curious effect upon the stonecutter. He stood rooted among the debris and stared at the nearby synagogue which he had built with such devotion: he saw the native stone that he had chopped from the Galilean hills, the walls that he had raised tier after tier, and although the lines were not poetic like those of the Greek temple which had once stood on this spot they were the hard, true lines of a man who worshiped God in his own stubborn way. It was a building that would make any workman’s heart proud, and suddenly the torment in which he was trapped proved too much for this simple man, and with his apelike hands he covered his face. Rabbi Asher, sensing his conflict, moved toward him, but the stonecutter knocked the old man aside, shouting, “You ordered me to build it … that floor … how many pieces did we cut at night? The golden glass … Menahem paid for that with his own earnings. No, you hadn’t enough. Those walls.” He ran to the synagogue and beat upon the austere limestone rectangles; how beautiful they were, cut from the heart of the Galilee, and against them he fell weakly to his knees.

  “Am I to build this synagogue and find in it no place for my own flesh and blood?” he mumbled, striking his head against the stones until it looked as if in his confusion he might kill himself, and when Rabbi Asher went to him, seeking to mitigate the law’s harsh attitude, the huge stonecutter shouted, “Do you want me to live in that sin forever?” and he grabbed a rock and would have killed his rabbi, had not Father Eusebius, who had been watching the mortal agony that overtook many converts before their moment of baptism, intervened to lead his trembling workman away.

  That night Rabbi Asher delegated Abraham his son-in-law and Shmuel the baker to bring him Menahem but not his father, and when the young man stood before his judge, the groats maker asked, “Is it true that you are joining the Christians?”

  “Yes.” To himself Menahem said: Tonight let him shout what he will. This is the last time he will order me.

  But Rabbi Asher asked quietly, “How can you find the courage to abandon your religion?”

  “You’ve given me no choice.”

  “Can you not see that it is God who has punished you?”

  “You still advise me to steal ten drachmas’ worth and become a slave?”

  “That’s the law, and through it we find salvation.”

  “Now there is a simpler way.”

  “By denying God? Who personally chose us as His people?”

  Menahem laughed. “No one believes that any more. Neither my father nor I nor any of them out there.”

  “Then you deny God?”

  “No. But I accept Him on much gentler terms,” he said. Against his resolve he was being drawn into conflict with the old man who had supervised his life, and that so stringently.

  “Do you think that God established the law intending it to be followed easily?” In these words Rabbi Asher, on this quiet night when oil lamps guttered, threw down the perpetual challenge of the Jews: Did God mean life to be easy? Or compliance with His law agreeable?

  And Menahem, who at twenty-five had been driven to consider truth for himself, threw back what would become the timeless answer of the Christian: “God intended salvation to be within the reach of anyone: even me. He sent Jesus Christ to die for me … a bastard … to tell me that the cruel ancient law was no more … that now mercy reigned.”

  This concept, so simply stated, stunned the rabbi, cutting at his concept of the law, and he was driven back to being simply God’s Man: “Menahem, when you were born there was none to care for you, and I saved your life. Because I loved you … because God loved you. How can you now cease being a Jew?”

  “I ceased when I was born,” he said, “because your law would not permit me to love God.”

  “You cannot break God’s law and later love Him,” the old man reasoned.

  “Christ offers us a way,” Menahem said, and he turned his back on the old rabbi, never to speak with him again.

  The public baptism of Yohanan and his tall son provided Father Eusebius with his first opportunity for a religious celebration, so on Friday morning a canopy was erected over the spot where El and El-Shaddai and Antiochus Epiphanes had once been worshiped, and there the tall Spaniard in robes of purple silk stood to receive the supplicant Jews while a chorus chanted Byzantine rituals and Rabbi Asher learned the hard facts of life. Certain faithful Jews had come to him with plans for disrupting the baptism of the renegades and he had counseled them to abandon such ideas, but when these hotheads saw the two Jews actually move forward to join the new church their tempers were inflamed and they began to murmur in protest. From nowhere, it seemed, Byzantine soldiers stationed for that purpose moved in and with silent efficiency muffled the would-be troublemakers. When Rabbi Asher stepped forward to intervene two Byzantines who had been detailed to watch him grabbed him as if he were a sack of groats and tossed him back into the rear ranks.

  “You behave, old goat, or …” They jabbed him in the belly with their spears. He tried to protest this too, but a coarse hand smothered his mouth and the soldier growled, “Shut up, damn you!” And the solemn ritual of baptism began.

  Father Eusebius, refusing to acknowledge the commotion, approached the kneeling Jews with a phial of holy water, and as the choir sang in Greek, dipped his fingers in the water and touched father and son on the head, telling them first in Latin and then in broken Hebrew certain religious facts which would later become important: “With this water you are joined to the holy Christian church of west and east. You are forever a part of that seamless robe and nothing can wash away this sacred baptism. It cannot be burned away, nor cut away. Neither punishment nor threat of death can reverse this decision, for you are now full members in the brotherhood of Christ. You are set free from the old law and you embrace the new.” He raised the two former Jews to their feet and kissed each on the cheek, presenting t
hem to the congregation, to whom he said, “John the stonecutter, who is helping us to build our basilica, now belongs to that basilica. His son Mark, who was an outcast among you, is outcast no more. Accept these two as your brothers,” and Christians cheered as Rabbi Asher and his Jews stood silent.

  It was now the eve of Shabbat, and no further protest was made, for all who might have caused trouble were in synagogue. But on Saturday when nightfall ended Shabbat, young Jews led by Abraham and Jael gathered and decided on a gesture of defiance. Creeping silently past Byzantine guards they drenched a tax collector’s home with oil and set it afire. As stars appeared over the sea the beacon of Jewish resistance flamed in the sky and was noticed by the night watch in Ptolemais, whose governor dispatched a ship to Antioch, requesting the German army to march south with all speed.

  In Makor relative peace descended upon the troubled community, thanks principally to Father Eusebius, who showed Christian forbearance as his response to the disturbances. Masking any bitterness he might have felt he did not summon Rabbi Asher but went to him at the groats mill, saying, “I was told this morning that the German troops are on their way to Ptolemais, and unless I halt them there, they’ll come here to punish the troublemakers. Now neither you nor I want those hard-handed Germans in Makor. So I will order them to stay away if you will order your Jews to end these disturbances.”

  Rabbi Asher, already distressed by the brazen behavior of his Jews, could visualize the German army leaving Antioch for the march to Ptolemais, from which like their Roman predecessors they would fan out across the Galilee—as if history, like a folksong, never tired of repetitions—and he promised Father Eusebius, “I will do my best to discipline the Jews.” So he explained to his younger members how they should react to the sudden ascendancy of the Christian church: “We must exist in harmony, and this we cannot do if there is misunderstanding or envy. In Makor today we see two daughters of God, the old Jewish religion and the young Christian church, and for a while there may be contention, but the two religions remind me of old Rabbi Eliezer and his young pupil Akiba. ‘There was a drought and the old man prayed nine times for rain without success. So Rabbi Akiba prayed once, and with his first words came rain. The Jews hailed him as the true prophet and this deeply wounded Eliezer, but Akiba went to him and said, There was a king who had two daughters, one old and wise, the other young and headstrong. When the gentle sister came before him with some request the king would be reluctant to grant it, hoping to keep his daughter near him, for her voice was pleasant to his ears. But when the harsh and noisy younger child screamed for something, the king gave it to her right away, for he wanted to get her out of the palace.’ God has by no means forgotten you merely because He grants the requests of your younger sister.”