Great Lion of God (35 page)

Hillel ben Borush, weary with winter and afflictions, looked upon the spring gardens of the house of Shebua ben Abraham and stood in the dew, and he said aloud, and softly, in the words of Solomon:

“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone! The flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land. The fig tree puts forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a sweet fragrance.”

He went down the red gravel paths, winding his way around fountains brightly twinkling as if they, too, rejoiced, and he saw the buds of the white lilies rising through the leaves and the red cases of roses within their thorns, and the purple and yellow banners of blossoms opening on the walls, and the fig trees and the palms painted with bright green, and he smelled the pungent scent of the cypresses and the karobs, and the whole earth to him appeared freshly created, bright with the first dews, arched by the first peacock sky, and when he heard the birdsong he wanted to weep with pure joy.

He found his son, Saul, sitting alone on a marble bench beneath a spreading sycamore tree, and he knew at once that Saul saw nothing of the blue wings of the morning nor the black swans on their pond nor the water lilies nor the beautiful marble statues or fountains, nor the soft shadows on the paths nor the roses and the lilies. And Hillel said to himself, as an old father had said before, “My son, my son, would that I had died for you!”

Saul sat huddled in a heavy fur cloak, though it was warm, for his heart was like black frost, and he was no longer young in his soul, and he appeared ill and exhausted and emaciated, for his recovery had been slow. He heard his father approaching and he lifted a dull face without expression. The half-paralyzed blue eye gave him an arcane appearance, and his freckled face was very sallow under the gingery spots. Hillel sat next to him and said, “You can travel, my son. We leave in three days.” He paused, and sighed and smiled. “Your sister is with child, and this is an occasion for rejoicing.”

Saul did not speak. Hillel cried out in his sudden sharp pain, “Do you not see the earth about you, Saul, and its pristine glory as on the first morning of creation, and the benign sun? Do you not smell the sweetness of life, the frail fragrance of hope? Are you blind? Are you insensible? To be blind is to be pitied. To be insensible is to be blind of the spirit, and that is man’s sin and God’s affliction through man.”

He saw it was useless. Saul saw nothing. Hillel thought he was remembering only the day of those dread crucifixions. In this Hillel was wrong. Saul was pondering with a strange intensity on the feverish dream he had suffered before his collapse, and he could not shake it from his mind, nor its dread and terror, nor his own passion to reap the corn and join the laborers. He could not forget the swelling of his heart, his hopeless struggle, and, at the last, his enormous unease for the unknown man he had seen crucified, then dropped into the earth. Wherever he glanced, even this morning, he saw that man’s eyes, compelling, commanding, filled with love and recognition. But what they had compelled, what they had commanded, he did not know, and his whole spirit was wracked with the longing to know.

“I understand,” said Hillel, laying his fingers on his son’s knee, “that you have endured much, but the sorrow should not be kept before you, nor should you remember your illness. You are young. Your eye may have some deformity, the lid half fallen, but still it is not blind. Saul! The world lies before you, and you can do what you will for Israel, and for God!”

Then Saul, who rarely spoke these days, replied to his father in the words of Job, dolorous and slow and heavy:

“‘Oh, that I might knew where I might find Him, that I might come even to His seal! I would order my cause before Him and fill my mouth with arguments. I would know the words which He would answer me, and understand what He would say to me.—Behold, I go forward, and He is not there, and backward, but I cannot perceive Him! On the left hand, where He does work, but I cannot behold Him. He hides Himself on the right hand, that I cannot see Him.’”

Hillel’s mouth opened in compassion and kindred suffering, and he did not know that his tears touched his cheek. He pressed his son’s cold and unresponsive fingers. He said, “You have not completed what Job said:

“‘But He knows the way that I take. When He has tried me, I shall come forth as gold!—For He performs the thing He has appointed for me.’”

Saul looked at him fully and fiercely for the first time. He tried to speak, but only a mournful sound came from him. He seized his father’s shoulders in his hands and pushed his intensely agitated face close to his, and Hillel was afraid, for Saul’s passion seemed to presage a seizure or a return of his illness.

“Do you believe what you have said, my father?” cried the youth.

“I believe. Before God, I believe.”

Saul still stared at him while he slowly dropped his hands from his father’s shoulders. He still searched his face, for a kind falsehood, for false compassion. Then when he saw that Hillel believed, that he had spoken what he felt was the truth, the youth burst into silent tears and bent his head. And he shook that head over and over, and at last he whispered, “He has hidden Himself from me, for I am not worthy.”

Before Hillel could answer, Saul continued: “I do not know who that man is, though I have seen him three times, twice in reality, once in a dream. He haunts my soul. I do not know his name. I cannot flee from him in my thoughts; he pursues me like one on the heels of a deer, and would have me. When I sleep, I hear his voice. He would have me do—but I do not know what it is he would have me do!”

“Who?” asked Hillel, in consternation, and thought of the physician, for Saul was distraught.

Saul said, “I do not know. But I must leave this place, for it was only in my dream that he died, and he walks this earth and I am afraid that I may encounter him again. He is an enigma. There are times when I do not believe he exists, that he is a chimera of the Greeks, a fantasy, a nightmare, a threat.”

Hillel put his arms about his son and drew that tormented face to his breast and he thought of angels—or of demons. From both, thought the wretched father, may mere poor mortal man be delivered!

“Hush, hush, my dear one,” said Hillel, with tenderness. “We shall go home. We shall not remember enigmas nor fantasies nor chimeras, in the safety of our house, in the peace of our gardens. You shall recover your health and grow into full manhood, and then God will reveal His will to you, blessed be His Name.”

Saul said in his broken voice, “I would know God’s infinitude, for nothing else will satisfy me, and I have been denied.”

“Listen to me!” said Hillel, “for this is a story I heard in my boyhood, and it was vouched for that it was true.

“Three holy men went into the Temple to pray and contemplate and reflect, and they were pious and good men of much learning and wisdom. They sat in silence in the shadow of. the great columns, near the High Altar and gazed upon the veil that hid the Holy of Holies, and they thought of infinity.

“They let their minds roam over God’s endless universes of which the Greeks speak, and of the constellations and the galaxies, and one wheeled beyond another, and another beyond that one, and they extended into eternity, and of eternity there was no end.

“The human minds of those men pursued the universe and the constellations and the galaxies into the farthest of space and time, and roamed on and on, and there was no end and no beginning. And their minds reeled with the thought and could not understand nor comprehend nor enfold it, for surely, their human intellects told them, and their knowledge of reality, there is a beginning, there is a border beyond which there is nothing—and at the thought of nothingness, at the thought of endlessness, and even beyond that the abysses of other endlessnesses, and more universes and constellations and more nothingness and no borders, their minds were stricken, and they shrank, and they were filled with the awful cold horror of the thought of infinitude—for what man can grasp it?

“Now one of the men rose up and drove a dagger into his heart, for he could not endure infinity, for it became of unearthly horror to him. And the second man went mad, and ran roaring and raving into the street. And the third man—” Hillel hesitated. “The third man lost all his faith and he returned to his companions and said, There is no God.’”

Saul lifted his head and again stared at his father’s face. Hillel smiled sadly.

“I have told you, and the Scriptures have told you, that no man can comprehend God nor His creation, for what He sees in immediacy and in eternal noon, and near, can be conjectured by man only in terms of our feeble world reality of time and space, which is a delusion.”

He said, taking Saul’s hand again, “He who seeks God will surely find Him—and let him beware when that happens, for it is a gift which can either kill or save or drive mad! Surely it is best only to love Him and let Him reveal Himself gently, as He wills, and not to demand all. For Moses alone saw the Face of God, and of that Vision, it is said, he expired.”

“But we have been told of the Messias, and that we shall see Him with our mortal eyes, and we shall not die of it,” said Saul.

“You have forgotten,” said Hillel, and he was much cheered, for a glow had appeared on Saul’s haggard cheek, and even the sunken eye had a light in it. “The Messias will be clothed in our flesh. ‘Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given.’”

Part Two

MAN AND GOD

—For I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come to destroy.

Chapter 15

H
ILLEL BEN
B
OBUSH
said to Reb Isaac, in Tarsus: “My son is of an age to marry, and even beyond it, for he is twenty years old. He has completed his studies with you. He has learned the art of a tentmaker, and he will earn what he will, as befits a teacher, who cannot accept payment. He has distinguished himself in the University of Tarsus, in Roman law and other studies. He has learned sedulously from his Greek teacher, Aristo.”

Reb Isaac nodded his white head reflectively. “He is, then, a man of the world.”

“A man of the Book,” said Hillel.

“A man must be many men these days,” said Reb Isaac. “It is not enough, any longer, that he be learned in the Scriptures and the holy disciplines of our people. He must be a Roman, a Greek, an Egyptian, and others. He must move freely about the world, discovering new textures of humanity, new smells, new ideas, new thoughts, and, probably, new depravities. That is the modern world. Bah,” said Reb Isaac. “Better it is that a man in these evil days becomes an Essene or a Zealot and removes himself from the world and walks with bare feet in the wilderness and eats wild locusts and honey and the uncultivated grains of the field, and strange fruit, and lives in caves or in the mountains and does not shave his beard, and wears outlandish garments and, when he ventures into the stinking cities, shouts in the streets in contempt and condemnation and utters execrable oaths.”

“And is beaten or arrested by Roman soldiers, or the guard,” said Hillel. “Come. You would not have Saul an Essene or a Zealot, Reb Isaac?”

The old man replied gloomily, “Who knows what a young man should be these evil days? Should be withdraw totally from the world and despise it—and it is worthy to be despised—or should he become part of it, mouthing meaningless words, giving meaningless smiles, because it is not only expected of him but demanded of him? Shall he do what his parents, his teachers, his kinsmen, his neighbor, think desirable for him, or shall he say, ‘I am a man in my own right and I will do what I will, and please none but myself’?”

“You are not serious,” said Hillel, smiling. “Are you discussing chaos?”

Reb Isaac shook a gnarled finger at him. “Let that nation beware that becomes fat and complacent and the men of her cannot be distinguished by their faces or their words from their neighbors! Are we ants, beetles, flies, worms, which cannot be told apart? No. We are men. I, for one, do not denounce chaos, which is man’s last desperate rebellion against conformity in habit and in living, a last desperate striving to be himself, unique, individual—though he make a monstrous fool of himself in the process. I prefer such a fool to a man who, like a coin of the same minting, cannot be told from another coin.”

“I thought,” said Hillel, “that we were discussing a possible marriage for my son, who is not stamped, like a coin, with the self-same image on other coins, and who is individual, so individual at times that I fear for him.” He was surprised at the old man’s strange diatribe.

“I am speaking of others, and in particular some of my present students,” said Reb Isaac. “Do they want holiness? Do they want the mystery of the Scriptures? Do they wish to divine the occult words, the profound meanings, the labyrinthine thoughts? No. No. They wish to be men of this world, and woe to Israel—again—when she goes whoring after strange gods, such as the Sadducees do.”

“You know my son has always wished to be what you would have him be, not to please you, Reb Isaac, but to be a learned Jew, and to please God.”

“True,” said Reb Isaac, in a surly tone. “But I am not so certain he is pleasing God, blessed be His Name. He is sedulous and fervent enough in his prayers, but I have the thought frequently that he is like Jacob wrestling with the angels, but this time the angels are not only triumphant and will not reveal secrets to him, as they did to Jacob, but they depart. What would you know of this, Hillel?”

“Nothing,” said Hillel, with sadness. “I have discussed it with you many times. I have a stranger for a son.”

“So do we all,” said the old man, shrugging.

It seemed to Hillel that Reb Isaac had changed enormously in the past years and that he was doubtful of his former surety and certitude, and so was irascible.

As if he had divined Hillel’s thoughts Reb Isaac said, “I am an old man now, and I admit that the years, instead of enlightening me, have confused me. A man comes to me now in grief but not in repentance, and says to me, ‘I have lain with a good woman, whom I love and cherish, for the wife chosen for me against my will is a woman evil in her nature if not in her deeds and of a foul tongue and is a curse to my household and a terror to my children, who flee from her. I would divorce her save that I cannot return her dowry—which she has spent in her extravagance—and I would not have a divided household and leave my children to her vile humors. So I have violated the Commandment that I must not commit adultery and I find no sorrow in my heart, for she I love is like warm milk and pomegranates and the sweet dates of life, and enfolds me and comforts me. Condemn me if you will.’