Great Lion of God (24 page)

“You are very eloquent, Hillel ben Borush,” said Shebua, whose pale face had a faint shadow of malevolence on it now. “I can hardly believe this of a rigid Pharisee, for Pharisees are notoriously devoid of both eloquence and subtlety. But I concede nothing of what you have spoken, nor do I admit the verity of it. You speak as a Jew—”

“And you are not a Jew!” exclaimed Hillel, and the hand he had laid on the table trembled with wrath.

Shebua glanced slowly at his sons and smiled faintly. “We are citizens of the world,” he said. “We believe in mankind, if we do not believe in God. We believe that man has infinite possibilities and potentialities, and that he will rise to them when he has abandoned superstition and relies only on himself. We are men now, not children. We need no staff of immolating idolatry and craven fear of the Invisible to sustain us. We need no commandments but our own superior minds, and the probabilities of our minds. We no longer hear God in the thunder; we understand thunder. That is not fire on Sinai. It is natural and mindless lightning. We do not dwell in tents now, nor are we barbarians. For children there are the beliefs of children, and the little fears and terrors, for they know nothing and have no knowledge. But we are men in these days, and we know what sustains a man and what hidden strengths lie in man, and we will evoke them.”

“Oh!” cried Hillel, with unusual passion. “You have embraced the folly of pride—and how dare man be proud? Of what can he be proud? His history? May God forgive us this blasphemy! You have often spoken of the future. The future is born in the womb of the present, and I see nothing in the present, or in the past, that promises glory for man, created by himself. For he cannot rid himself of his baseness by his own effort. It is written that man cannot earn merit by himself, for he is undeserving of merit. History is our witness. Man was not born for his glorification. Scripture teaches us that man was born solely to know and to love and to serve God, and nothing else, and in that knowing and loving and serving—alone—can he transcend his nature and become more than man.”

Shebua smiled at him as if at an imbecile, and shook, with a pretense of forbearing indulgence, his thin finger at Hillel. “I deny your premises, Hillel ben Borush. To me your syllogism is without validity or truth. For your premise is God. I, therefore, deny your premise. You would ‘define your terms,’ as Socrates has said, but you and I could never agree on the ‘terms.’ Therefore, the argument is futile. But I will repeat that man can transcend what you call his baseness—but which I prefer to call his piteous ignorance—by cultivating his latent powers of mind and will. This the Greeks have said. I see nothing to dispute this. We advance. We progress. Yesterday, we were savages. Today we have the Parthenon. We have the Law of the Romans. We have poetry, and a repugnance for barbarism, which, again, you would call the baseness of men. We have refinements of the mind, a love for beauty. We are inventive. One day, as the Egyptians have said, we shall stride the suns, and nothing shall be closed from us. Part of our being may be animal and we live in our flesh, as do other animals. But they do not advance. They are today what they were yesterday, but our tomorrows are filled with glorious promise.”

“They are filled with death,” said Hillel. “And ever will they be, until the Messias comes, blessed be His Name, and reveals the hidden to us, and gives our evil absolution in His Love, and makes of mankind—not through human law and human contriving and human conquest—truly of one blood and one flesh and one spirit, and we shall know war and hatred no more.”

His voice rang with absolute authority and fervor, and his whole face was kindled and exalted, so that even the still smiling Shebua and his sons were disturbed and made uneasy, and they hated him and did not know why they hated. As for Saul, it seemed to him that he was hearing words he had forgotten and he was strangely moved, and filled with pain, and he thought, This once I knew, but now He will permit me to know it no more.

Hillel was inspired. He could no longer control his unaccustomed passion, for he saw the derision and scorn of his kinsmen, and the affront against God. He shook his fist at them, and could not refrain.

“You Sadducees!” he cried. “You have taken bread from men and have given them husks! You have taken the morning from them, and given them the darkness of hell, in which God is lost. You have based your hopes on the world, which will pass away and be known no more among the suns and the Pleiades, nor will Orion know her any longer. On this frail orb that pursues her star you think to establish the golden city of man’s reason and man’s aspiring alone, forever and a day. You believe that it will be by the will and design of man alone that evil will be abolished—yet evil is the very nature of man, and immutable. He is a shadow, and on the shadows you would erect eternal palaces and pleasure—ways and advance urbane conversation arid peace and what you aver are ethics. You know you are mortal, and in your shallow hearts you deny mortality, and speak of the far future as if you will be there, alive and triumphant! You do not know that future, but you have deluded yourselves that you will be there! Or is your vaunted ‘glory of man in the future’ enough for you, who will be dust tomorrow?”

He was breathing audibly. He searched each man’s coldly derisive face, and he saw the fear in them, and the terror of death. He smiled compassionately.

“How pathetic you are,” he said. “Your own deaths, in this little time, has not been believed by you. You have really hoped you will be part of the future which to me appears terrible, not beautiful. You believe in pleasure, in the day’s tranquillity and grace and conversation and the meeting of friends. You hold the power of the Temple now, and you have profaned it. You deny the resurrection of the dead, which has been promised, for you believe that when men are dead they are no more than the beasts of the field. It is evil enough that you have betrayed God. You have betrayed your people to the Roman, to his oppressive taxgatherers; you have betrayed their pride and their nation; you have plunged us into despair. You have consorted with the Roman to enslave the helpless; you have helped him gather his taxes for the support of an idle and polyglot Rome, where men live on the earnings of others and who will not toil as we are forced to toil. For peace in your time, and pleasure, and worthless harmonies, and prettinesses, and conversing, and pride, and dainty perversities, and music and Corybantes and dancing girls and money and handsome houses and villas and servants and laughter and strange women and theaters and baths and arenas and gambling and horses and evil little appetites and enjoyments, you have called upon your people not to resist, not to believe in the Promise of the Ages—to obey, to bow down their heads, to submit their necks to the yoke. You have taken God from them, and for that you will not be forgiven!”

Shebua’s face had become thin and livid, so that it resembled the blade of an ax, and he no longer pretended to conceal his hatred. It glowed in pale fire in his eyes.

He said, “What would you have us do, we leaders of our people, Hillel ben Borush? Advise them to rise—as the Zealots and the Essenes do, those madmen!—and strike at the omnipotent Roman, and so cause our country to be put to the fire and the sword? Would you urge them not to pay taxes to the Roman? Is life not better than death? Are taxes, however onerous, not better than the grave? Is not even slavery preferable to slaughter? Obedience to a conqueror, to the reasonable man, less terrible than execution, or starvation. As Solomon has said, ‘Better a live dog than a dead lion.’ The Lion of Judah is dead—”

“And we are alive, like dogs,” said Hillel, with immense bitterness.

Shebua shrugged. “We are alive,” he said. “What would you have us do?”

Hillel fixed him with his brilliant eyes. “We are a conquered little country. The Roman is all—powerful. These I admit. I do not desire my people’s death, for in them lives the Spirit of God, and of them will be born the Messias. I would not have them die on miles of crosses. I would not see their wives and their children slaughtered. No. But, it was your duty, you sons of Zadok—and how glorious is that memory!—to sustain your people with the hope of the Messias, to alleviate their hunger with your fortunes, to intercede for them, to nourish their faith in their God, blessed be His Name, to exalt them with patience in their tribulations, to turn their eyes to the sun and to the stars, to repeat to them the Promise that has been given to us, to strengthen their endurance. What man will not suffer in quietude if he knows his Redeemer is nigh, and that God has not abandoned him?

“But you are taking from your people the only sustenance that will save them! You have darkened their souls! You have delivered them to the Romans like chained slaves and have said to them, ‘This is what is, and there is nothing more, so resign yourselves.’ And why have you asked this resignation? In mercy for your people? No! Only for luxury and peace for yourselves! And you dare prate of the glorious future of mankind, you betrayers of what is noblest in man, you poisoners of wells of the water of life!”

It was unpardonable to rise before the host, but Hillel could not contain himself, so deep was his pity for his people, his anguish for their oppression, his torment for their poverty and pain and endless labor, his fury at their betrayal by their own, his torture that they had been deprived of hope—and so great was his anger. He struggled to compose himself.

His voice had become hoarse. He lifted his hands like a prophet and he was not ashamed of the tears on his cheeks, though the hate and derision of his kinsmen were like a deathly fog in the room now.

He said, in the words of David:

“‘
God is our refuge and strength
,

A very present help in time of trouble
.

Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed
,

And though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea
;

Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled
,

Though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.
’”

“‘
There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God,

The holy place of the Tabernacles of the Most High
.’”

The silence in the vast room was palpable, as though a prophet had thundered within it and no sentient thing could make sound.

Then Hillel turned and began to move from the room, and after a moment Saul followed him and they did not look back.

In the atrium Hillel, shaken to the heart, was unable to speak for weeping. He put his hands on his son’s shoulders and bowed his head. And Saul put his own hands on the shoulders of his father and despised himself that he had not believed him capable of such passion and such holy anger, and such righteousness, and another woe was added to the woe he carried in his heart.

They heard a footstep and looked up, half hiding their tears, to see Clodia Flavius and three of her women moving across the atrium on a mission to be certain that the host and his kinsmen were properly served by the servants. Clodia halted and looked keenly into Hillel’s face, but her own remained calm.

The Roman woman said in a voice of understanding and consolation: “Shalom.”

It was Hillel, looking into her face who answered, and his voice broke:

“Shalom, Clodia Flavius.”

Saul could not understand. He felt affront and bafflement and left his father and went to his bedroom.

Chapter 10

H
ILLEL BEN
B
OBUSH
went to visit his kinswoman, Hannah bas Judah and her beloved husband, Aulus Platonius. Saul refused to accompany him, despite Hillel’s pleas. “I have no desire to converse with Romans, my father,” said Saul. “What are Romans to me? The oppressors and enslavers of my people. Two nights ago you berated my grandfather for his collaboration with the Romans for a shameful peace. Last night you told me that he would not remain unpunished, nor his sons with him, nor his sect. Yet today you visit Aulus Platonius, a Roman oppressor! I am astonished.”

Hillel sighed. “Aulus, no more than I, loves the imperialism of Rome, for he is an ‘old’ Roman of the stern school. Who can justly blame the Roman soldier, the Roman proconsul, even, God forgive me the Roman bureaucrat and taxgatherer? One, if one is sensible, blames government, not the servers of the government, not those entangled in their governments. Was it not Samuel the Prophet who warned the people not to set a king over them, lest they be enslaved and live in chains and die in chains? Government, it has been said, is a necessary evil, but evils should be kept in weakness. If they become strong it is the fault of ambitious men who hate their people, and the folly of the people that they permitted this enormity, and their soft smiling complacence. Aulus is not of this breed. With me, he deplores the decline of patriotism and virtue and industry and honor in the world. He weeps with me that the world of men have deliberately debased themselves. He is my friend. We love each other. I do not hate him because he is a Roman, as helpless as I am, a Jew, in the machinations of government. We are brothers together. Together, we honor God, blessed be His Name.”

“Nevertheless, his people have murdered Jews by the countless I thousands, have put them to the sword, have hung them on multitudes I of shameful crosses, have exiled them, have robbed them in taxes, have imprisoned and starved them, have slaughtered them in arenas, I have taken from them their wives and their children and their homes, have flayed them alive. Shall I love such a son of his people?”

Hillel wearily tried to make him understand, again. “He, too, is a victim of his government. Aulus is no murderer. The individual man is rarely a demon. Aulus is no demon.”

He looked at the dark and obdurate face of his son and wondered where the old lusty and joyous and exuberantly laughing Saul had gone, and what had caused that exile. Then a strange revelation came to him: Men do not change. This Saul he saw this hour was the Saul once imbedded in the flesh of a passionate youth. The youth had departed; the real man had risen from the discarded chrysalis. What Saul was now so he had been born, and all his boyhood and his youth had been but colorful and evanescent trappings. The man was ere. Hillel remembered the loud cry of the infant Saul in his nursemaid’s arms: It had been a harsh and imperative cry, proud and angry, not the cry of a child. Between the man of today and the babe of yesterday there were no barriers. They had become one.