by John Smelcer
“Magnificent,” we both said at the same time and laughed.
With the momentary distraction gone, the rabbi continued.
“When I said I would not pray for the world, I also meant the world in which politicians incite fear and hatred and divisiveness in order to convince others that they will save them if only they are given the power. They make false oaths and illusory promises even as they themselves craft the threats that cause the fear in the first place. These fearmongers believe if they tell lies often enough the masses will believe them as truth. They prey on ignorance and despair. But no matter how often or how fervently you say a thing does not make it true. They say they are on the side of God, but they blaspheme the name of God. It is only for themselves they serve, for they desire to be masters of the world. Do not be fooled. Those who exert power are never innocent. Power only protects the interests of those who wield it.”
“Some things never change,” I muttered.
“The world proclaims that it is God’s wish for some to have more money and to have domination over others. In such a world money has become God. Doubtless, some arrogant kingdoms will even strike the name of God onto their coins as if to declare God’s blessing for profiteering and money-making, extolling greed and selfishness as virtues. I Want! will be their creed. Know that all this is the opposite of God’s will. This is my message to you. You cannot serve both God and money. All this scheming separates us from one another and does not unite us. It is driven by self-interest. Such things are as a dried up sea floor upon which nothing can grow for the salt. They do not fill up the empty heart. Even a gilded cup will not make you happy for long. It is the false promise of happiness . . .”
I thought of the people I knew who were never happy with what they had, who always said, ‘If I only had this or that I would finally be happy.’”
“Do not be a slave to such stirrings. Do not cling too much to anything in this world. Nothing made by people endures. Everything changes. Only God’s love is eternal and immutable. Be wary of the pitfalls of piety. Do not wear your devoutness and virtue like a garment, for God sees that as pride. It is the inward expression of love that matters. You must look into your own heart. What you adorn your body with outwardly is of no consequence and does not prove love. Any person who does so holds no special favor with God. Anyone who does these things does so out of pretense and forgetfulness.”
“What you say is true,” I replied after a silence. “But is that not all the more reason that we should pray for the world, for its healing?”
I could tell the rabbi was contemplating my question.
“Perhaps,” he finally replied. “Perhaps I have been hasty. Perhaps the world needs our prayers to redeem it.”
“I have been thinking about everything you have said to me, about our weaknesses. Are we not less than God? Is not frailty our nature?”
“That is true,” came his reply. “But humanity is strongest when armed with its frailty. The contents of your heart and your acts of kindness are all that matter. Compassion is the soul in action. Compassion triumphs because it is endless. A single act of kindness sends its ripple afar, all the way to God’s infinite memory. Every stranger and beggar is sent from God as a test.”
I thought of my neighbors, Jacob and Aliza, and of how often my sons and I helped them.
“I help others often, even when I cannot spare the time. My neighbor down the road owes me many favors,” I remarked, a bit too haughtily perhaps, for his rebuke reminded me of the way my father used to look at me when I had said or done something wrong.
“Do not boast of the kindness you do unto others, Simon, for that is pride, but forget it immediately. Yet, never forget the kindness others do unto you.”
I wished I could take back my words.
We sat for a while in contemplation, feeling the radiance of both suns and the gentle breeze that slid down from the lush, green hills.
I cannot say what he was thinking, but I was pondering the many things he had told me. I was struck by all his talk of how God loves everyone equally, for that was contrary to what other rabbis and priests had taught me. They were always talking about what not to do or what not to eat and who is reviled in the eyes of God.
Suddenly, I had a question.
“I have heard it said that God loves some more than others, that God even abominates some.”
The teacher’s reply was swift and stern.
“There is no one that God does not love. There is no one that God loves above others. Neither does God love one group above another, nor any nation above any other, for they are but constructs of humankind and are of no consequence to God whatsoever. What does God care of invisible lines drawn in the sand by violence and redrawn by violence in the blink of God’s eye? You say you hate war, yet you dash into it wholeheartedly out of obedience and arrogance, be it individual, religious, or nationalistic. Is it so hard to turn your cheek? You lie if you say you love me and yet you would hate or harm others. All the vanity in the world is not worth a single life extinguished in hatred. Hate is an immense burden to bear. Do not presume to think you know what God abhors. God abhors those who oppress the rights and freedoms of others. It is written that God knew you in the womb. Therefore, God knew who and what you would become, and loves you still. This is what matters to God: Because God loves all equally, you must not turn your back on the needs or rights of others.”
Listening to his words filled me with a sense of hope, but also of trepidation. I wondered if I had been living my life in a manner that pleased God. I wondered if Avigail’s sickness was the result of my transgressions, as Jacob had suggested.
“I try to please God,” I said. “I often deny myself pleasures that I may gain God’s favor for my suffering.”
“Do you think God revels in your self-imposed misery? Do you think you gain favor with the Everlasting One, the one Who Alone is Alone, because you deny yourself some simple joy, some sweet morsel? Did God not create those things for you?”
“But I have heard that some self-denial and austerity can be helpful,” I said.
“That is true. Fasting can be especially useful for prayer and contemplation. It is also helpful to the body. But what loving parent demands that his or her children suffer merely for the sake of proving how much they love them?”
I thought of my children. I didn’t wish any of them to suffer, least of all for me.
“It is not what you give up or deny yourself that matters to God. When I said to deny yourselves, I meant to deny your irrepressible pride so that you may love and serve others. God wants your mercy, not your sacrifice. How many times must I say this before you will hear me? Do your ears not hear?” he said, playfully tugging on my ear lobe.
“But how . . .” I said, stumbling over my thoughts, “how do I show God my love? How do I feel God’s love for me?”
“You were created with a special place inside you that can always reach God. That place resides here,” he said, touching my chest above my beating heart.
A hot tear ran down my sun-warmed cheek.
“Since we are made in the likeness of God, does God too have that same place?” I asked.
The teacher laughed.
He laughed a good deal. He seemed to embody joy.
“If I say that God is in everything and everything is in God, do you truly believe that the cosmic un-knowableness of God’s mystery is confined in a single bounded form such as yours, with arms and legs and with ears that do not hear and with eyes that do not see? Where it is said that you are made in the image of God, I say that you are made from the image in God’s mind, from the imaging of God’s will, that is, from God’s divine imagination. Creation springs from imagination. Because the image of God is Love, therefore, you are Love. That is how you are created in God’s image. As God uttered a word and created the Universe, so too a word was uttered to create you. The word
was Live and Love. You are the echo and answer of God’s divine voice uttering the Word. Through your eyes and hearts you are witness to God’s incomprehensible Glory.”
I nodded slowly, as if I had begun to understand.
“You nod as if to say you comprehend, but no concept of God held in the mind of man is sufficient to know God, no matter how considered or reverent. It is arrogant to think you know what God wants, either God’s plan or God’s will, for God is that which is unknowable, infinite, and inexpressible. God’s thoughts are not your thoughts. Therefore, it is vanity to think you must defend the honor and eternal Glory of God. No matter what name you give God, God does not need to be safeguarded. God Is, regardless of what humanity thinks or does. It is equally contradictory to say that you love me and that you are a soldier on my behalf, for I am Love not Hate. I am Peace not War. Do not impose your beliefs on others by oppressing them or by making them to suffer. You cannot compel others to love God, just as you cannot compel others to love you. There is no love without freedom. God’s message should never be used to sow divisiveness. War and hate begins when speaking and listening ends. The Eternal One does not reward those who incite violence or kill in the name of God. Those who do so act only out of selfishness and ignorance and hatred, the roots of suffering and the source of separation from God. They would burn all the world on a pyre and say how they were doing God’s work . . .”
I could tell from the way the rabbi was speaking faster and wringing his hands that the subject troubled him deeply.
“ . . . I tell you now there is no paradise awaiting those who do so. There is no place for them in the Kingdom of Heaven. Love of God and violence are incompatible. The one countervails the other. I say it again: Do not kill, for all life is given by God. And do not glorify and make idols of those who kill. Whosoever kills, kills his brother. Those who insist that they know even the smallest measure of the impenetrable mystery of God deceive themselves and are self-righteous, and by their hands scatter the seeds of hatred and intolerance, the opposite of compassion and love.”
“Surely that cannot be so,” I said.
The rabbi lowered his head and shook it piteously before he continued.
“It is . . . and more. Such hatred is like a tenacious weed that even fire cannot defeat. I fear countless of my followers, as many as there are stars in the sky, will be incapable of seeing their own faults in what I am saying. Their hearts will dwell in the abyss of ignorance and hatred. They will be too self-absorbed with thinking that they alone are righteous and all else are wicked and godless. They will be the first and the most vehement to complain about the faults in others, their fanaticism making them blind and deaf to mercy, mired in ignorance, and devoid of charity. They wrongly believe that right lies with whosoever shouts the loudest. They see the faults in others only because the faults they condemn are in themselves. Their over-attachment to blind convictions and stale rituals and lifeless words will make them oblivious to the kind of genuine love that brings us face to face with God.”
Then he sighed and uttered something that has haunted me these many years.
“Sometimes I wonder if it was all worth it.”
It troubled me greatly to hear him say such a thing. But I must admit that I too have often wondered what God finds in us.
“And though I gladly came for all this and more,” he continued after a silence, “my mortal body was too weak from the scourging to continue. But you came along and helped me.”
He put a hand on my shoulder.
I did not know what to say. I had not meant to help him at all. I just wanted to sell my wine and find a healer for Avigail. I would have gladly eschewed that duty.
“All that matters is that you were there when I needed you, Simon,” he said, as if he had heard my thoughts. “Your strength gave me strength.”
“Are you real?” I asked, touching him warily. “Am I dreaming?”
“Yes,” he replied and smiled.
Then after a pause,
“And yes.”
Seeing my confusion, he leaned close so that I could see in his eyes a kindness as radiant as the sun.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I Am.”
“But how can it be? The soldiers killed you.”
The rabbi threw back his head and laughed. I loved it when he laughed. His laughter was so genuine, even childlike. It made me feel the way an infant must feel in the loving arms of its mother.
Then he smiled at me.
“They took nothing from me that I did not gladly give up, for God’s hand was upon me from my birth. They did not slay me, nor crucify me, but it seemed so to them.”
As I observed the man sitting beside me, his bare feet also in the brook, he shimmered like sunlight reflected on water, like a thousand sparkling diamonds. One moment he was perfect and without mark, yet in another instant, I saw the ragged holes in his hands, the crown of thorns, and the bloody lashes on his arms.
Sometimes he was both at once.
His form was like an ever-changing cloud sheared and shaped by the wind.
For a moment, we sat side by side on the boulder saying nothing, taking in the magnificent beauty of the place. My gaze fixed on the tree with the golden fruit.
“The tree is fantastic,” I said. “I have never seen anything like it.”
“I’m glad you like it. I made it especially for you, so that you would understand.”
“Understand what?” I asked.
“The message I have carried. I am the door.”
“How can one be a door? A door to what?”
“Have you heard the parable of the Wayward Calf?”
“No,” I replied after thinking for a moment.
“Then let me tell it to you. There was an old man who prayed fervently that his soul would go to Heaven. Each morning during a great drought and famine he let his bone-thin calf graze in the withered hills, and every day the wayward calf wandered into a cave beyond a thicket of thorns; on the other side was Eden from which the calf ate of the lush grasses and drank from the sweet waters. And every day, when the calf returned late in the evening the old man whipped it, saying, ‘It is wrong that I must go in search of you when I should be praying for my soul to go to Heaven.’ At the end of the harsh summer the old man slaughtered the fatted calf and made a burnt offering of its tender heart. As he prayed on his knees at the altar, ash from the key to the Gate of Heaven fell on his shoulders.”
“So . . . the old man should not have killed the calf?” I replied timidly.
“No,” replied the teacher. “Instead of beating the calf, the old man should have followed it into the cave. Some people are so stubborn and so blind they cannot see when the door to Heaven is close at hand.”
“So, you are saying that you are the door to . . . Heaven?” I replied, with a good deal of skepticism.
“Yes. I am also a light shining the way in the darkness.”
“But you were crucified. I was there. I heard them hammering the spikes. How can you be a light or a door to anything?”
“Nonetheless, it is so.”
Again, the man sitting beside me saw my failure to comprehend what he was telling me.
He took my hand in his.
“Love is a sheltering tree from the scorching sun,” he said.
Then he pointed to the cool water flowing at our feet. He dragged his toes across the surface. A hungry trout, colored as a rainbow, came to the surface to investigate.
“Like water to the parched desert wanderer, God’s love replenishes the thirsty soul. It is only by loving others that you shall be recognized as my disciples, not by memorizing and espousing scripture and obedience to laws to impress others with your piety—for that is selfish not selfless—but by the simple act of loving the world. Scripture that is recited without love is soon covered with dust.”
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sp; I thought of all the people I had known who went about quoting scriptures as if to impress others, but who did not live by the words. All too often, they were the most unloving, uncaring, and uncharitable persons I had known, as if they believed hardening their hearts was to be virtuous.
“Love is not found in your stale and empty words, but in your actions. Be patient and kind with the young; show love and concern for the aged; offer sympathy and compassion for those who suffer and for those who despair, and afford solace to those who are helpless or in desperation, for at one time or another you will be all of these things. Love is the great, good use we make of one another. Without love you are as a flower without water. But remember, Simon, it is easy to show love and compassion to those who are close to you, to friends and family. The true measure of compassion is how much you love people who can do nothing for you, even unto those who do not believe as you believe—especially to those who do not believe as you believe.”
Finally, I felt as though I understood something he said. When he said love and compassion he also meant to say charity. I would do anything for my family. I would give up my life for them.
“So love of others is the way to faith?” I asked, thinking about Avigail.
“Yes. But know, too, that the greatest faith is not by knowing how much you love others or even by knowing how much you love God, but by knowing that you are loved by God. It is by grace and mercy that God loves you, mercy within mercy within mercy. There is nothing you can do to merit such a love, and there is nothing you can do to have it withdrawn. Mercy and grace do not mean simply God’s forgiveness of wrongdoing, they imply God’s everlasting capacity for compassion. God loves you despite yourself and regardless of what you believe.”
I felt powerful emotions welling up inside me, which can best be described as exultation and fear. The feelings were at odds with one another, for knowing that God loved me terrified me at the same time it filled me with jubilation.
I swallowed hard to hold back the rising feelings.
While the rabbi was marveling at the incredible sky bursting with shooting stars, he was laughing and clapping his hands in delight the way I have seen children do. I studied his face. In his ruggedness and thoughtfulness he was beautiful. His eyes were joyful and keen, as if nothing, however small, escaped their perception. Suddenly, I remembered what I had seen in his eyes when we were carrying the cross. This man, whoever he was, wherever he came from, was Love.
