Great Lion of God (5 page)

Reb Isaac, the old Pharisee friend, sat munching morosely at Hillel’s right hand this evening, casting dark looks alternately at Deborah, who did not flinch but loftily ignored him, and darker looks at the perfumed David. He would flap his hand when David spoke in his musical and cultured accents—in Greek, of course—as if waving away a cloud of inconsequential gnats, and he would make rude sounds as he chewed, and would gurgle as he drank the wine. (A veritable pig, thought Deborah, without charity.) Only when Hillel spoke did the rabbi give any attentiveness to the table, and stop stuffing his mouth with large portions of bread or examining each dish with intense suspicion as if it were poisoned or unfit for the pure intestines of a pious Jew. He was bent and gnarled, though curiously fat and shaped like a turnip, and had a long black beard without a sign of whiteness in spite of his age, and his expression was black and fierce as were his eyes, and his nose was deplorably huge and predatory, resembling a Phoenician’s. His clothing was of the coarsest linen, and of a dull dark brown, and Deborah was certain that he smelled rankly, which was not true. He was rich and learned, and feared in the Temple, and was often in Jerusalem, and spoke of himself as the poorest and humblest of men, and was arrogant, opinionated and intolerant, though very eloquent and wise when it pleased him. He was also what David called a “heresy-hunter,” and devoted ferociously to the Law and the Book, and therefore an anachronism in these enlightened days. Deborah loathed him.

It enraged her to learn from her husband that Reb Isaac would not only instruct young Saul in the proper pious studies of a Pharisaical Jew—he was already instructing the lad—but would be Saul’s mentor and would choose his menial trade. He was a. weaver of goat’s hair. Surely, Deborah would protest with tears, even a Septuagint Jew no longer believed that all Jews must not only be learned but must embrace a humble trade involving the hands and sweaty labor, no matter how rich and distinguished of family. It was ridiculous. Did Hillel, himself, now practice his trade of cabinetmaking? It was true that it pleased him to carve a small chest on occasion, or a chair for the nursery, or a little table, but did he pursue it sedulously, as the Law demanded? No, indeed. “One never knows,” Hillel would say mysteriously, but he never explained what one might never know. It was infuriating.

Tonight Deborah was happy. David was her favorite brother. She was vexed that Hillel, when David was a guest, invariably invited that obnoxious old Pharisee to his table. She did not know that Hillel found both Reb Isaac and David abrasive to his temperament, and that he found himself irritably honed by them and relieved from his own amity by annoyance. (Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to be a Roman, to be filled with materialistic certitude and no doubts, and to tread the ground firmly and not to discover questions in the earth.) Between the two stones of Reb Isaac and David ben Shebua, he sometimes felt the rough grinding of an elusive answer which, he reasoned—he was always reasoning—might not be an answer at all but only his abraded sensibilities become tender and sensitive and skinless.

He looked down the table at his son, little Saul, five years old, sitting silently beside his mother. He smiled affectionately at the child, but Saul was listening to David with that strange intentness of his, which was most unchildlike. Surely not a handsome lad, but curiously dominating for all his short stature, his breadth of chest and shoulder, his muscular arms and the strong bowed legs. His eyes had become more strenuous and alive as he grew, and they resembled cold but brilliant blue enamel over iron. His audaciously red hair was cut in the short Roman fashion, like a soldier’s, and his big pink ears flared out from his round and virile skull. Deborah might deplore his Phoenician nose, and hint of wantonings in Hillel’s impeccable family in the far past—which was probable, Hillel would admit—but Hillel found that nose comfortingly manly and assured and positive, and he did not know why that should comfort him. He liked the boy’s hands, too, square and brown, with short square nails, and the brown sturdy throat and the deep rose on the broad cheekbones and the scattering of freckles on the low and pugnacious brow. Hillel was not sure about Saul’s mouth, wide and thin and mobile. It hinted of argumentation and obstinacy. All in all, the boy had a fierce and concentrated aura about him, a fierce quick way of turning his head, a rancor of temperament, which, Hillel reflected, would procure him more enemies than friends in the future.

Hillel recalled his daughter, Sephorah—whom Deborah had wished to name Flavia or Daphne or Iris and not some offensive Jewish name. (Hillel had threatened her with Leah or Sarah or Rebecca or Miriam and so had quieted her. Sephorah was at least not unmusical.) Hillel thought of his little daughter, now almost four years, with fond passion: A beautiful golden child, with golden eyes, and affectionate manners and a humorous dimple in her cheek. She laughed at Saul and teased him. Saul, who rarely tolerated anyone, including his parents, tolerated Sephorah and “played with her during the rare intervals of his leisure, and reprimanded her, but could never reduce her to tears. She mocked him. Sephorah was not at this table, but in her nursery. Deborah delighted in her beauty, and wondered at the large golden eyes, and curled the child’s yellow hair and smeared her delicate complexion with cosmetics against the sun, and debated earnestly with her on the correct costumes to be worn at certain hours of the day, and taught her to sing. It was one of Hillel’s few joys to listen to the young voices at evening singing, first some grave song of David’s, and then the newest light song which Hillel suspected came from the noisy gutters of Tarsus, carefully rendered innocent. Hillel did not know who was the more childish and naive, his wife or his daughter. At scarcely four, Sephorah would sometimes look at her mother with sudden seriousness, her gilded eyelashes rapidly blinking, and once Hillel was positive that the little one was pitying Deborah.

Saul, naturally, wore the white Roman tunic of preadolescence bordered with purple, on which Deborah insisted. “We are citizens of the Roman world,” Deborah said. “We are citizens of the Kingdom of,” Hillel said. Deborah thought this absurd. There was but one world, dreamed of by the ancients, ruled by peace and law, and therefore secure. “Ruled by the Roman short-sword,” Hillel would say, with rare bitterness. But to Deborah it was a safe world for her family, and that was all that was important. It did not harm, though she did this secretly for fear of Hillel, to make a quiet sacrifice in the temple of Juno, the mother of the gods and men. Juno was an exemplary mother.

Reb Isaac always insisted that he desired and could relish “only the simplest of foods” when visiting friends, but it was well known that his wife, Leah, was a miraculous cook and had due regard for her husband’s discriminating stomach and supervised the kitchen. No one knew what Leah thought of her husband, but she had humor and her table was popular with Greek and Roman and Jew alike, and so all forgave Reb Isaac’s hypocrisy. But Deborah literally believed that he was a man of simple and austere appetite and so, when he was a guest at her husband’s table she invariably ordered the plainest of food. This delighted Hillel, who could be guilty of a gentle malice. So tonight there was only a broiled river fish unadorned by herbs, a cold boiled lamb saddle, some stewed artichokes innocent of oil and garlic and vinegar, a lank cabbage, cold bread, wilted fruit and cheap cheese and a most ordinary wine.

As for David—the little pucker between his brows testified to his pain, and in this, too, Hillel felt some naughty satisfaction. He did not know which was the more offensive, the effeminate delicacy of David ben Shebua or the grim hypocrisy of Reb Isaac, but it pleased him that both were being punished even while he deplored his own human malevolence.

It was the conviction of Reb Isaac that Hillel ben Borush while an estimable Jew of considerable piety and faith, and a Pharisee, had not that dedication to the Book desirable in one of his birth and education in the Scriptures, and therefore not entirely without worldliness and triviality. He suspected Hillel of some timidity in this modern society of materialism and brute force and atheism and cynical expediency and the disregard of the individual, not to mention the lascivious and unspeakable Roman conquerors of the world who were at once mighty and barbaric, and the corrupt Greek and his hedonist philosophies, who had—no doubt to the wrath of the Creator, blessed be His Name—invaded the very heart of Holy Israel with his mores and his manners. He thought Hillel one of those gentle souls who preferred peace to controversy, and complaisance to struggle.

On the other hand, David ben Shebua was convinced that Hillel was, in spite of his amiability and wit and kindness, a harsh Pharisee at heart, ready to denounce and direct the stoning of any heretic, with the sure knowledge that he had the approval of his God.

David was no more correct in his assumptions concerning Hillel than was Reb Isaac.

Once he had said to his sister after one of these deplorable dinners, “Why is it that my esteemed brother-in-law invariably invites that miasmic old rabbi to my first dinner in his house?”

Deborah, who was always more vexed than pleased with her husband, said, not out of any intellectual perception but out of deep female intuitiveness and petulance, “It is to annoy you both.”

As David tried to converse tonight in a civilized fashion with Reb Isaac it was like tossing pretty feathers against a battering ram. Reb Isaac despised him. David continued to converse, and watched Hillel out of the corner of his eye. Hillel was enjoying himself, as he lightly partook of the atrocious dinner.

Aristo with his pupil, Saul, at the foot of the table, was addressed by no other one, not even the disdainful slaves, for he was only a freedman, but he thought himself the superior of any at the table, for he was an Athenian and brilliantly educated. His clever black eyes, small and restless as beetles, moved from one face to another, and he listened, and he smiled in himself. Only he believed that Hillel ben Borush was the only intellectual man present, and he had the greatest respect for his master, and a sort of humorous love. In two years he would be free, Hillel had told him, according to the Jewish law which demanded that a slave be loosed after seven years of servitude. Aristo had considered this with disquiet, and had consulted with Hillel. “I am free, Master,” he said, “in two years. Where, thence, shall I go?”

Hillel had reflected, with sympathy. A freed slave was open to all the vicissitudes of the free. It was evil enough to be born a freeman and to face all the wicked contingencies of life, responsible for one’s actions to God and man, responsible even for one’s thoughts. (But then, did that not make man almost equal to the angels?) How much worse it was to have been sheltered and fed all one’s life, accountable to no other but to one master, and then to be thrown out into the icy regions where one was accountable to all! So Hillel had said, You were purchased for my son, and according to the Law you must be free in two more years. But, will you desert us? Are you not needful, in this world of multiple peoples and philosophies, to continue to teach my son when he is of an age? Therefore, before the time is ended, we will visit the praetor together, and you shall be free as soon as possible, and henceforth you will receive a monthly payment on which we shall mutually agree, and you will be an honored member of the household.”

So Aristo had become a freedman with a handsome salary, and he was, at this time, purchasing some juicy olive groves for the day when he would be old. But he never forgot that on the moment the Roman praetor had declared his freedom Hillel had looked at him with the soft sorrow of a brother, and had vaguely shaken his head. Later Hillel had said to him, “It is a fearful thing to be free before the Face of God, for the Lord, blessed be His Name, mercilessly demands all things of the free, but is merciful to the enslaved and asks nothing.” He added, “God is very whimsical. But do not the Greeks declare that also?”

Aristo sometimes watched Hillel ben Borush at his prayers in the garden and he would wonder. How stern and terrible was the God of Israel! He often discussed the gods of Greece with his master, discoursing on their grace, laughter, gaiety, merriment, feasts and foibles, and their elegant adulteries, and their blithe and capricious interference in the affairs of men. Once Hillel had said, “To each people God manifests Himself in a unique form—though with this thought of mine you will not find agreement among the majority of devoted believers. He is protean. As the prophets have greatly tried to teach us, but to no avail, alas, God is a Spirit, without form and without body, omnipresent, omniscient, circumambient, in all things which live. He presents one Face to one man, and a different Face to another. We need but say, all men together, that the Lord our God, the Lord is One, though His manifestations are multitudinous and myriad, and who are we to declare, with anger and certitude, that only our pale vision is correct?”

“The Unknown God,” Aristo had replied. “We Greeks speak of Him.”

“Forever unknown,” Hillel had answered, with a peculiar sadness. “Yet—” He hesitated, and did not continue. But suddenly his heart had lifted as a leaf lifts and he experienced, momentarily, that strange wind of ecstasy he had infrequently known from childhood. Had it come to him first when he had been told of the Messias?

“No,” David ben Shebua was saying tolerantly to Reb Isaac, “I do not call myself a Stoic, but like Zeno I prefer the Cynic school, though he, certainly, formulated the Stoic philosophy. I prefer to call myself an Academic.”

“Hah!” said Reb Isaac, squinting at him. He tore a piece of cold bread apart and stuffed it into his mouth and chewed noisily. (Where was the accursed baker of this house? The bread had a flat and insipid taste. The old man scowled.) He well understood that David was now baiting him as he had baited David, and he rose with some interior enjoyment to the battle. So, this smallness, this perfumed banality, thought him an ignorant man, did he? “You are not even an Academic. You are a nothingness, for you have no real opinions of our own but those you have stolen like flowers in the gardens of your masters. You have no learning of intensity and deepness, for you have denied and abandoned the roots from which you have sprung. You are like a bird with a slit tongue, which repeats all it incontinently hears and renders it again, without comprehension. You are not a Greek, with serpentine philosophies, or a Roman with brutish hubris, and you are not a Jew with a knowledge of God and of man. What are you, then?”