Great Lion of God (7 page)

“True,” said David ben Shebua. “For so it has been prophesied.”

Hillel bent his head and pressed his hands together in prolonged thought. Then he said, slowly and quietly, “You have forgotten the prophecies of Isaias concerning the Messias, and His coming: “Who has believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? And He shall grow up as a tender plant before Him, and as a root out of a thirsty ground. There is no beauty in Him, nor comeliness, and we have seen Him and there was no sightliness that we should be desirous of Him. Despised and the most abject of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with infirmity, and His look was as if it were hidden and despised, whereupon we esteemed Him not’”

Hillel raised his eyes and looked at them. “Does that sound, from the words of Isaias, that the Messias will come in glory and splendor and all will know Him, from the ends of the earth? No! It would seem that He will come obscurely and few will know Him, and He will be rejected, the humblest of men, unproclaimed, unheralded, like a thief in the night, with no panoply, no choirs of seraphim. And who has said that He will be born of a princess of Israel?”

“The Holy One of Israel will not come unheralded!” cried Reb Isaac. “How then, would the world know, or the world heed Him? He would live as obscurely as He had been born, and I assure you, Hillel ben Borush, that He has not been born! For, has not the Lord, blessed be His Name, surely said that His Redeemer will wear government upon His shoulder, and that of His glory there would be no end? To be born as Isaias appears to you to have prophesied, would be to live and die in futility, and to be unknown to all men.”

“Then, of Whom was Isaias speaking?” asked Hillel.

“I do not possess all wisdom,” said Reb Isaac in a voice that disagreed with his words. “Possibly Isaias was referring to the birth of some obscure prophet. Let me speak of what he says concerning the birth of the Messias: ‘For a child is born to us, and a Son is given, and the government shall be upon His shoulder, and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, God the Mighty, the Father of the world to come, the Prince of Peace! His empire shall be multiplied and there shall be no end of peace. He shall sit upon the throne of David, and of His kingdom, to establish it and strengthen it with judgment and with justice, from henceforth and forever.’

“Hillel ben Borush, does that prophecy, then, not speak of the grandeur of the coming of the Messias, and that all men will know Him?”

“It is possible that they will not know Him when He first appears to them,” said Hillel, and now his heart became heavy with doubt and melancholy. “I see no contradiction in the two prophecies.”

Reb Isaac lifted his eyes to the ceiling of the room as if calling on the Almighty for patience. Then he said, “The sun is setting. It is time for our prayers.”

Young Saul had been listening to all this and there was now a deep glow in his extraordinary eyes which Aristo deplored in his heart, for he suspected zealousness and saw that the child’s whole attention had been upon Reb Isaac and not on his father. He, himself, had listened to these Hebraic controversies with boredom. Why could not the Jews be of ease and accept the birth of gods as the Greeks accepted them, and with thoughts of grace and lust and laughter, and not with proclamations of world government and castrated angels and judgments and justice and all the other dreary fantasies of gloomy men?

What the Jews needed, surely, was some of the arête of the Greeks and less of the formidable gloom of their bearded prophets and wise men. They needed lightness and joy.

Deborah had silently retired. Reb Isaac, a dark and heavy figure, was leading the way to the gardens, walking with a resounding step between the beaming white columns, and Hillel was following him, and Saul in turn followed his father. Prayer shawls had appeared, apparently from the air. Aristo was alone with David ben Shebua. The Greek, as a freedman, waited for the other to speak, for David was looking at him gravely. Then David smiled and gestured slightly and went to a distant door and opened it and closed it behind him. At the final moment a dagger of sun had lit up his one jeweled earring and for some reason Aristo thought it pathetic.

Aristo went into the portico and half stood behind a pillar, to observe. The gardens were lambent with mingled gold and scarlet light, and there was an illuminated mist caught in the branches of the trees, and the palms rattled softly in the evening wind. Beyond, started those incredible red mountains, but now the sky was coldly green behind them and in that greenness stood one single star. In the east a crescent moon revealed itself faintly, like a woman’s pared fingernail painted with pearl. Birds held their own colloquy, but Aristo doubted that they were singing their evening prayers as young Saul had once asserted. Yet, it was a pretty thought, and poesy should be encouraged in the young.

Saul followed the prayers of his father and Reb Isaac, raising his resolute boy’s voice in response. It seemed to him that a vast crystal trumpet had lifted itself to the listening heavens, sparkling in immensity, all its facets charged with a blinding light, and from it came sonorous sound as if the earth and men had come together in one Hosannah of towering music, in salutation, in praise, in thanksgiving.

Chapter 3

I
DO NOT
understand this matter of alms and charity,” said Aristo the Greek to Saul. “Certainly, Socrates recommended it but it was an astonishing thought to his countrymen and was hardly taken with seriousness. We Greeks understand justice. Aristotle loved the square, for it to him represented perfect justice, equal and balanced with all other sides.” Aristo chuckled. “The Romans love dice, too, but for an entirely different reason, and they are no philosophers.

“But let us consider alms. Mercy, though you Jews do not credit it, was not invented by you. We highly approve of mercy. I can quote you a dozen of our philosophers who esteemed it. But reckless alms, or even prudent ones, as a duty, is not to be understood. Yesterday, you gave your last drachma to a beggar near the gate of the synagogue, and he was repulsive to the eye and distinctly offensive to the nose. You gave it, I observed, with no open sadness and sympathy.”

“I have told you before,” said Saul, with all the exasperation of a youth of fourteen years. “We are commanded to give alms, and tithes. It is a holy command. It is indeed a duty. What if the object of our charity, our alms, is repulsive, perhaps even detestable? That is not to influence us.”

“In short,” said Aristo, “you give because it is a command of your God, and not because you feel sorrow for the object of your alms?”

Saul’s red thick eyebrows drew together in a scowl. Aristo had the vexing ability to drive home a point, like a cunning nettle’s sting. The youth hesitated. “I know my father gives with pity, and Reb Isaac with a blessing. If I feel no response to the beggar, it is my hardness of heart, or my youth which time will repair. In the meanwhile I obey. But that you would not comprehend, my teacher.”

Aristo considered and slowly shook his head. “It has not occurred to you, of course, that charity can destroy the receiver? If a man knew he could not beg bread and a copper for wine, he would work for it, would he not?”

“That, too, is of no importance,”

“You give because it endows you with a feeling of virtue?”

Saul almost shouted with his exasperation. “You refuse to understand!”

“I am only interested.” Aristo grinned, his lively lips spreading almost from ear to ear. “You know, of course, that in Rome, in the middle of their abominable Tiber, there is an island with a hospital upon it, for slaves and the very poor who cannot afford a physician. You know, of course, that we Greeks have hostels for the homeless and the sick, and that our great medical university in Alexandria cares for thousands every year. But it is not guilt which inspires us to aid the infirm and the despairing.” He laughed a little.

“Guilt?” cried Saul.

“Have you not told me so on many occasions, Saul ben Hillel?”

“Again you do not understand.” Saul’s eyes were snapping with angry blue fire. “You have the capacity to infuriate me, Aristo, and you do it with calculated deliberateness. Yet I have explained over and over. The guilt refers to our fallen race, to Adam and Eve—”

Aristo nodded, “We, too, have such a story. But it refers to the Flood, which is an historical event. One perfect couple survived. But they did not breed another race from their own bodies. The gods, taking pity on their lonely state, and listening to their prayers, told them to walk from the remaining little temple and throw stones after them. From those stones were born the Titans, and men. We, their descendants, if you believe the interesting tale, feel no guilt that we were born of stone, and that we are not of the race that perished except for that one perfect couple, whose descendants we are not.”

Saul waved his hand in rough dismissal of the story. “That is only a myth. I am referring to the fact that humanity is a fallen race, without merit, through our sins, and our disobedience from the beginning. That is our guilt, and only God, blessed be His Name, can erase it and lift us from the pit of it.”

“A gloomy story,” said Aristo. “Why should a man feel guilt because of the sin of his ancestors, if the story be true, which I doubt? If he is fallen, who awoke him to life, and is not the Awakener guilty if the man is guilty? Does a man ask to be born into this world? Your God seems to me perverse, the Creator of evil—if man is evil—which I deny with some reservations. Your God would seem to me to curse all mankind for a sin committed by others, which would make Him less endowed with mercy than the meanest of His creatures. A vengeful Deity, and I do not approve of Him.”

Saul said, “‘What is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou visiteth him?’ We are nothing. God has created us that we may be worthy of His love and His salvation, which He has promised us through the ages by the merits of His Messias, and no merit of our own. We do not understand each other’s semantics, Aristo, because we do not speak from the same frame of reference.”

“True,” said the Greek. “No man speaks with another man’s semantics, and meanings, for each man’s history is uniquely his alone and he endows words from his own life’s experience, which can be no other man’s. Yet, Socrates asked us to ‘define our terms,’ and much as I revere Socrates I feel he was either jesting or guilty of a stupidity. My terms are not yours, and never can they be.”

“You deny absolutes.”

“So does any sensible man. Yes, I know Aristotle spoke of absolutes, but he meant the only absolute, which is God. I have told you of our altars to the Unknown God, above all other Gods. But let us return to the subject of charity, of alms.

“I have heard an old story. A gentle-hearted sage of some substance was riding on his ass to the marketplace, where he would continue his study of mankind. On the road he was accosted by a beggar, who asked for a single coin to buy bread. The sage was much moved by the man’s misery, and so he emptied his whole purse into the beggar’s hand. Whereupon the beggar, recovering from his astonishment, remarked on the warmth of the sage’s cloak. The sage removed it and placed it about the beggar’s shoulders. The beggar then quickened to the subject, perceiving he had come upon either an unworldy man or a fool. He admired the girdle of the sage and its gorgeous Alexandrine dagger, and so he acquired both. Then came the sage’s boots, lined with wool, and he was soon sitting in the dust avidly putting them on his bare legs and feet.

“Rising, he complained to the sage that he was far from the city and he was desirous of visiting a tavern there where he could spend the alms on food and reviving wine. The sage hesitated then, but recalling that he had a good house in an olive grove and that he was not hungry, and that he had friends in the city who would give him food, dismounted from the ass and with a noble gesture invited the beggar to mount it. The beggar avidly obeyed and sat high on the cushion and took up the whip arrogantly. Then seeing the sage standing in the road and the dust on his bare feet, without a cloak or a drachma in his purse, the beggar gazed at him with contempt. ‘Begone, beggar!’ he cried, and he cut his whip across the sage’s face, and merrily rode away.

“Now, my Saul, could you guess at the sage’s thoughts?”

Saul blinked his red lashes. He eyed Aristo suspiciously, knowing that the Greek had him in a trap of words. Then he said, “If he were a sage, then he would console himself with the thought that the beggar now had some comfort and money, and he would be content.”

“If he thought that idiocy, then he was not a sage,” said Aristo. “Nor was he human. Saul, were you that man, what would be your thoughts?”

Saul stared at him with his strange eyes. Then his freckled, deeply colored face broke into laughter, loud rollicking laughter. “I, myself, would have pursued the beggar, dragged him from the ass, and would have thrashed him soundly!”

“Saul, Saul, I have hopes for you,” said Aristo, slapping the youth’s sun-reddened bare arm. “But what would Reb Isaac, have done?”

Saul laughed again. “He would have judiciously counted out an exact tithe from his purse and given it to the beggar, and so would my father.”

“You have me,” said the Greek. “Still, it is an interesting story, and illustrates what happens when even virtue can become excessive. A man who gives his all is as stupid as a man who gives nothing. You see, I defer to your burdened sense of guilt. I, myself, would consider I would be doing the beggar an evil by encouraging his beggary.” He paused. “There is another thing which bewilders me. I have heard your father, my master, dispute with Reb Isaac as to whether, indeed, your Moses wrote ten of your David’s Psalms, from the number ninety to one hundred. Of what importance is the author? Your father has recited the Psalms to me, and many of them are beautiful if incomprehensible in part, and beauty is all that is important. There are many who say that Homer, being blind, could not have described the burning of Ilium so magnificently, nor discoursed so tellingly of the countenances of men and women, and therefore he was only author in part of the Iliad and the Odyssey. But we do not argue so passionately on the subject as does your father, and your mentor, Reb Isaac, and of what importance is it?”