Great Lion of God

  “Elisheba has seen him,” said Reb Isaac in a sour voice.

  Hillel was startled. “Was that seemly?”

  Reb Isaac grinned at him savagely, and shrugged. “He fell over her several times when she was a very young child and romping at my feet. I did not confine Elisheba. She has seen your son very often, but at a distance these past two years. She declares he resembles a young Moses.”

  Hillel stared. Then he began to laugh, and there were tears in his eyes, and he held out his hand to Reb Isaac who at first ignored it, then accepted it.

  Aristo considered, looking up into Hillel’s face, for he was squatting and teaching a young servant how to weave a tender basket for ripe olives. Then he said, “Master, I am afraid you have false hopes. Saul will never marry.”

  They were in Hillel’s garden and the pond was as green as grass and the curious bridge was black against the blue autumn sky.

  “That is nonsense,” said Hillel. “I thought that you might prepare him. For my suggestion,” he added lamely.

  Aristo stood up and shook shreds of reeds from his garments.

  “There is nothing—wrong—with my son,” said Hillel, remembering that Aristo was a Greek and the Greeks had lewd minds.

  “No,” said Aristo. “But there is One, apparently, who has the power to suppress a man’s potency.” He smiled his sardonic smile. “I am happy that our gods are not so powerful, so castrating.”

  “I do not understand you.”

  “Master, let us go apace.” They walked together to a distance, and when Aristo spoke again his antic face was grave and the restless black eyes were quiet. “I know Saul,” he said. “What he has not told me of his thoughts I have divined. There have been some, even among us Greeks, who were like him, retiring to forests and to caves to contemplate divinity, but not of the human kind, such as women. We called them madmen. But Zeus frequently set them in the constellations for men to marvel, at night.”

  Hillel could not speak. Aristo continued: “Some years ago I guessed that Saul had encountered a young female who taught him the arts of love against all his convictions. No, he did not tell me. It was sufficient for me when he informed me that he had committed what he called a Vile sin,’ against all the Commandments. Now,” said Aristo, and he could not help smiling, “Saul is no thief, no coveter, no breaker of the Shabbas, nor does he envy, nor does he blaspheme his God, nor does he worship graven images, nor does he dishonor his parents, and he loves his God with all his mind and all his heart and all his soul. You will see I am now well-versed in your religion, for Saul would have converted me, in his zeal. So, what is left that he could consider a sin, in your Commandments?”

  “Adultery,” said Hillel. He found himself smiling. “I doubt the—lady—was married. Or, was she?”

  “I doubt that also. So, let us say a young female from one of the farms near these suburbs.”

  “But, that would only be fornication,” said Hillel. “Consider us gloomy, if you will, but we do not consider fornication an unpardonable sin, and we know human nature. Unless,” he went on, “the girl was a harlot from the town. We are forbidden to patronize harlots, for many reasons.”

  “Saul rarely went to Tarsus,” said Aristo. “But I do know that on many dawns on the way to Reb Isaac he encountered a damsel. I have lived long, even longer than you, Master, and I know the aspects of young love, and those aspects were on Saul in those days. He was ecstatic, glorified, handsome as Phoebus, exalted, and there was a certain trembling in his voice. Suddenly, it was gone, and he became what he is now.”

  Hillel also recalled Saul’s frequent and passionate assertions that he was “not worthy” to worship God. He had thought them the exaggerated transports of a deeply religious youth. Now he said, “Saul has not spoken like this for several years. He has not mentioned any ‘sin.’ He speaks only of entire Service to God.” In spite of his distress, his smile became broader. “We have a saying that when King David became old he wrote the Psalms, and King Solomon wrote the proverbs in his great age. Before that, they were lusty men.”

  “In short,” said Aristo, “when a man’s testes wither his wisdom flowers. It is an old story. Unfortunately for the wise old, youth now understands the reason, and that is unfortunate for youth, also, for it would be an improvement if youth would accept the wisdom without suspecting impotence.”

  “But Saul is young, and he has juices,” said Hillel.

  “He suppresses them. He believes that pleases his God, or he is making some amends to his God, or adores his God and there is no room in the temple of his heart for any other inhabitant.”

  “My son is no Zealot, no Essene!”

  Aristo gave an eloquent shrug. “Master, I have told you what I have surmised. Saul has not confided in me. But I am not his father. I can look upon him with an objective eye. I can only say that he will reject any marriage.”

  “I would have him marry a good woman, and I know such a woman, and she is beautiful and virtuous and sweet as honey,” said Hillel. “I would have him safe.”

  Aristo stared at him with the same incredulity that Reb Isaac had shown. “Master, there is no safety in this world, no security, and men who seek such are less than men. They are women in their souls. Or eunuchs. Man is a very dangerous animal, and always will he be. I know this about Saul: He is of a nature to court danger, and to despise safety, for he is a man and not a girl in a man’s body. Let him be, I implore you. We are all called to different destinies. Let Saul seek and find his.”

  Hillel was silent. Aristo regarded him with sharp pity. Some perpetual sorrow now lay upon his master, some grief that haunted his days. Hillel turned away without speaking again. But that night he accosted Saul.

  “I would have you beget a son to say Kaddish for you, my son,” he said. “It is a terrible grief to a Jew if he has no son to do that for him.”

  Saul had listened without speaking to his father, but his somber face had expressed nothing, not even outrage. Then, as he heard Hillel’s final words that somberness softened.

  “It is said, my father, that some men are called to the field and the forest and some to the hearth and marriage, and some to labor in the vineyards, and some to tend the flocks. Each man to his season and his life. And some there are who are called to the service of God only.”

  Hillel, in his grief and despair, flew into anger. “How do you know that?” he cried. “Has God told you that in the darkness of the night? Has He whispered that in your ear? Are you not presumptuous, even perhaps blasphemous?”

  Saul half-turned away and in a low voice he answered, “I only know that it is so. Where He will lead me I do not know, but where He leads me, there shall I go. I can only speak with the surety of my inner knowledge. I have asked myself a thousand questions, doubting, and the answer is always the same, stronger and more insistent. How did the prophets know, before they heard the voice of God? How did Moses know, until he saw the burning bush? I await the call. I can only wait, certain that I will hear it.”

  “I have lost my son, my only son,” said Hillel, and struggled with his tears. “What crime have I done to merit this? Have I been an unnatural father, stern and cruel and unjust? Have I turned from my children with harsh words and rejecting gestures? I have tried to walk humbly with my God—and I have lost my son.”

  “Father,” said Saul, and there were tears in his own eyes. But I Hillel silenced him with a frantic gesture.

  “Reb Isaac is an old man, and wise, and a Teacher, and your teacher, and he has agreed to this marriage with one as fair as Bathsheba, herself, and of the tenderest soul! Is he not wiser than you, older than you, with knowledge far beyond yours? Yet, you despise MS wisdom, you repudiate his dearest treasure! Must I tell him, ‘My Son claims superior knowledge to yours, Reb Isaac, and a deeper wisdom, therefore he declines Elisheba’?”

  “Father,” said Saul, and for the first time Hillel heard a moving sorrow in his son’s voice, and a grief for him, himself, “I will tell Reb Isaac
myself.”

  “Do so! And then let him despise me as a feeble father whose son will not obey him and looks lightly upon him as a fool! Let him hold me in contempt that I have such a son, who looks for visions and not for life! Let him suspect the most unspeakable! It is all I deserve. Let him spurn me with his foot as an ingrate and a low creature, for I persuaded him to agree to this marriage, and now he will know my full degradation as a man and a father!”

  He hurried away to the house, and Saul, at first taking a step after him and then halting, looked about the bright autumn of the gardens and shivered. He put his hand to his forehead. It felt numb and chill. He was shaken to the heart and full of sorrow for his father. He wanted to weep, and could not. He had no words to tell his father of the love he bore him, and his helplessness before the fact that he must hurt him. He only knew that in some moment he could not remember, long ago, he had heard a call and knew that he dared not refuse it and that if he refused it his life would mean nothing, but in answering it he would have the only joy he would ever know. Oh, sublime and terrible joy, Oh, fire that consumed and thereby increased, Oh, bliss that tortured and replenished and healed, Oh, death to life that was the only life, Oh, love of man’s desiring and man’s hope and man’s peace and ecstasy! The grandeur and glory of the landscape he sometimes glimpsed seemed to him too ineffable and rapturous to be borne for more than an instant of time.

  The young man raised his eyes to the sky and it seemed to him that he saw a great and powerful flash, more brilliant than the sun, more terrifying than lightning. If it consume me, he thought with a rush at his heart like wings, and reduce me to ashes—so even my ashes shall praise Him and adore Him!

  He picked up his cloak and made his way to the house of Reb Isaac.

  Father and son did not speak for two days and then Reb Isaac visited Hillel ben Borush and they retired to Hillel’s chamber. The old rabbi put his hands on his friend’s shoulders and looked deeply into his eyes, and his own were no longer irascible and glinting but soft and compassionate as a woman’s.

  “Saul has come to me,” he said. “Do not grieve, my dear friend. Saul has spoken to me. I listened not to his words but that which was behind them.”

  Hillel groaned, and turned away. “I only know that God, Himself, has said that it is not good for man to live alone, without a helpmate. For Adam He created Eve. Moses had a wife. The prophets had wives. How dare, then, my son say that he will not marry, that he will only devote his life to God? Has he not violated the very Words of God in his decision? A man who serves God is also human, and God has not only provided for his needs but has commanded them as a duty.”

  “There are some,” Reb Isaac reminded him, “who can only serve God, and cannot be distracted even by a loving wife and children. There are not many, but they are known to us, and we revere not denounce them. Are they weaker than us? Or are they stronger? That we do not know. We rabbis marry; we do not serve God the less because we have wives and children. Often, our wives hearten us, for it is a lonely road that a man travels without a woman, and a bleak and bitter and silent one. A good woman often brings us closer to God.

  “But there are some whose souls are so filled with God that there is no place for a human love. They are rare. But they are also known. We dare not reproach them.”

  “And you believe Saul is such?” said the distracted and disbelieving father, who now looked at Reb Isaac as at an enemy.

  “I believe so. Yes, I believe so. Send him to Rabban Gamaliel, the wisest of the wise. The time has come. Rejoice, Hillel ben Borush, for it is possible that you have been greatly blessed in having this son.”

  But Hillel could not be comforted. However, he resumed conversation with his son and he was so kind that he did not wish Saul to detect, any longer, his profound disappointment and despair. If Saul saw them, and he did, he knew he was helpless.

  On the day of his departure for Israel he wrote to Reb Isaac:

  “I must go. But I fear for when I go. I have heard my father’s wandering in the night, and I do not believe that it is only I who has caused him such misery. There is a grief of which he never speaks, but which has been with him a long time. Comfort him, dear teacher, for I have no comfort to give him. I go, but I know not where. I only know I must go.”

  Chapter 16

  “SHALOM. Greetings to my father, Hillel ben Borush, from his son, Saul ben Hillel:

  “I trust that your silence, dear father, has not been due to illness but from mere care and the preparation for the High Holy Days. I have not heard from you since early in the spring, though Aristo writes me that he visits you often from his olive and pomegranate and date groves and that he finds you well, thanks be to God, blessed be His Name. However, his last letter troubled me, for he hinted that you appeared melancholy and that he heard from the gossiping servants that you spend more and more time at my mother’s tomb, though she has been dead some ten years! (I still remember her in my prayers.)

  “I have heeded your admonitions, given frequently, to betray less impatience in my manner and speech, and to quell it in my thoughts. But my temper is a thorn in my flesh, and I fear, alas, that it will always be so. We have not seen each other for two years, when you last visited Jerusalem, and, as I have written you, matters do not improve here but rather deteriorate. I have visited the provinces recently, notably Galilee, and the lot of the peasants and farmers and artisans becomes daily more onerous. It is bad enough in the cities, where at least one-third of a man’s labor is devoured by the taxgatherers—those evil and detestable and accursed men!—but it is far worse in the provinces. I am told that if a man earns the worth of two loaves of bread a day he is permitted to keep but the worth of half a loaf! The people of the provinces, therefore, live in the most appalling poverty, squalid and desperate, yet the taxgatherers, with their Roman guards, constantly seize their small belongings, even their copper Menorahs and their little store of holy oil, or even take their children from them to be sold into slavery, if the amount of taxes does not meet with the approval of the taxgatherer and does not match his books. It is quite customary for a hungry and hopeless man to be thrown into the filthiest of prisons for ‘failing to meet his legal and proper taxes,’ as defined by the taxgatherer, and who can gainsay the word of these vilenesses that walk in the shape of a man? Truly, it has been said that God holds the taxgatherer as more debased and less worthy of forgiveness than a murderer or a harlot, a thief or a pederast, a liar and an adulterer, for does he not combine in his one person the traits and despicable qualities of all of these? It is incredible to me that any Jew, however ha has sunken below the standard of humanity, can agree to be a publican.

  “Our cousin’s husband, Aulus Platonius, informs me that the great I Marcus Tullius Cicero frequently warned the Roman Republic that I when one-third of a nation’s income is devoured in taxes that nation is at the edge of the abyss. Today, Aulus tells me, over half a man’s sustenance in Rome, herself, is taken by taxes, and the Empire groans in bankruptcy, venality, crime, despair, the luxury of politicians and their schemes and wars, the hopelessness of the dying Roman middle-class, the power of wicked men fattened by the people’s labor, and the licentiousness of the Augustales and Tiberius’ court. If Rome suffers, despite the purloined wealth of her conquered nations, think of the sufferings of Israel, where the people are taxed by the Romans for more than two-thirds of their labor! Jews do not even have the government alms of free housing, bread, beans, meat, clothing and circuses, as do the Roman mobs. But, would we not spurn them in our pride, as unworthy of men? Truly. We are not to be bought through our stomachs nor through our senses, nor by depravities and gifts.

  “There is something fervid transpiring in the deserts and the barrens and the desolate places beyond the cities, and Joseph of Arimathaea has promised to conduct me to one of the lairs of the Essenes in the lost caves beyond Jerusalem. In my heart I have often begged for forgiveness for my earlier scornful judgment of him as a wordsayer and a compliant man
, fearful of the Roman and one willing to compromise with evil. I see, in this large and gentle man something mysterious, such as you discovered, for he does not speak all he knows and his kindness to me is baffling, for I have done nothing to deserve it. But what it is that is transpiring in the hot and lonely spots, haunted only by goats and their herdsmen, is known only to Joseph and he will take me there within a few days. I remember the condemnations freely heaped upon the Zealots and the Essenes by the men of the cities, the accusations that they will bring destruction upon Israel by inciting the Romans against us, but when I consider the state of Israel today I believe nothing can be more evil, more crushing.

  “If the Messias, blessed be His Name, tarry much longer there will be no Israel for Him to rescue, no stone left upon the holy hill of Sion, no voice to speak His Name, no eye to rejoice and behold Him, no Temple, but only abandoned stones and lifeless arches and empty marketplaces, and rubble, and fallen houses and buildings, for my people can endure no more. He will find but a desert, burning in the sun, and marked only by dead groves and fruitless terraces. When a nation totally despairs she must die, for her heart and soul have suspired. Let the Roman and his loathsome taxgatherers rejoice then in a universal desert!

  “But, alas. The Sadducees wax fat and contented still and serenely engage in their various pursuits and speak Greek and visit Rome and Athens and Alexandria and dress elegantly in silks from the Orient and begem themselves and live in corrupt fashion with concubines and are entertained in the arenas the Romans have built beyond the gates, and gamble, and join the Romans in Pompeii and Herculaneum and Caprae during the fashionable seasons, and live luxuriously in the Roman style, and are as depraved. If one complains to them—as I do in my grandfather’s house—of taxes and the despair of the people, one is regarded sternly and contemptuously as a barbarian who does not understand, as they say, ‘the responsibilities of modern governments to gather taxes for the general welfare of all.’ It is useless to remind them that empires and nations have died in dust and ashes in the past because of taxation and the profligacy of governments who buy the people with their own money. They merely reply, with superb smiles, that this is another age and that what is past is past. Too, they remind me, a certain portion of the revenues collected by the taxgatherers goes to the support of the Temple, and, they ask, is that not a worthy cause? I think of the High Priest and his cohorts in their gold and purple and gilded litters surrounded by slaves, and I know the Temple is profaned by their presence and that God is outraged by their very existence. These too, the venal priests, oppress our people. Many of them smile when one speaks of the Messias, and they murmur a faint word concerning ‘myths’ and ‘ancient tales,’ and the need of modern man to deal with his certain reality and not with fantasies. Are these priests, the shepherds of the people, the conservers of vulnerable flocks, the tender guardians of ewes and lambs, the lifter of hearts, the sustainers of souls? No! They have betrayed both God and man. They have made desolate the holy places, have removed sanctity from the Ark of the Covenant, have smeared the flaming words of the Torah, have subverted the natural laws of God, have dismissed, with an arched eyebrow, the Statutes and Judgments and Ordinances, have defamed, with soft amusement, I the meaning of the Commandments, saying that they were valid for I an earlier age but not for today.