Great Lion of God (41 page)

“We have a story,” said Hillel, as if the rabbi had not spoken. “Four men went to a great feast to which they had been invited. One had come reluctantly, but he had been summoned by the king and could not refuse. He had little appetite for the rich and spicy dishes and the wine, and he would have been satisfied with mere bread and cheese and milk. For he was a man in whom the juices of life did not run strong. The second man ate heartily, but his appetites were more gross, and as he was not very intelligent he did not enjoy the erudite conversation about him. He was filled with ennui. He thought of his absent dancing girls with longing. So he was dissatisfied and felt himself offended, and yawned, and found nothing of interest surrounding him. The third man enjoyed himself and hoped that the feast would continue until morn, for the dishes were delicious and the wine heady, and he regretted that this must eventually end, and at moments he was sad at the thought of the swift passing of delight.

“And the fourth man was pleased to have been invited to the feast and was grateful to his kingly host, for all about him was beauty and music and stately vistas, which moved his soul. The meats and the fruits and the breads and the wine lay lovingly on his tongue. His reflections moved with the conversation and his mind was afire and he participated in the speaking with an exquisite pleasure. He did not regret that this must end. He knew it must, but it was sufficient for him that he now possessed it for the hour. And his gratitude to his host increased. He felt himself surrounded by the most solicitous of friends, and his heart was full.

“Now,” said Hillel, watching the old rabbi with a hidden look, “the first man who had little appetite for the good food, and did not recognize it as such, decided to beg leave to depart. The king was sad, but gave his permission. The second man was surfeited, for he I had eaten and drunk too much, and was yawning with boredom, and he had not heard the music nor cared for it, and he wished to sleep. He, too, asked permission to leave, and the king, growing more sorrowful, gave his consent. The third man lingered, still hoping the feast would not end, still gazing after new delights on the platters in the hands of the servants, though his face was showing fatigue and his hands trembled with weariness. He kept glancing through the columns, dreading to see the morning. The king, observing this, sighed, and said to him, ‘My guest, the hour is late. You must leave.’ The guest tried to protest, but the king gently indicated that he must rise and depart, and he did so, weeping, exhausted though he was.

“But the fourth man,” said Hillel, “had suddenly been stricken with a sense of sorrow and emptiness, and he no longer cared for the music, nor for the smiles of his friends, and he wished only to lie down in some dark and silent place and know no more. The food and wine had become repugnant to him. His lust for them had gone, and he did not know why. A vast loneliness overcame him, a sensation that he had been abandoned and that he desired nothing more, no, nothing more in all the world, and no pleasure, and he was bereft. A pain had come to his heart. He found it more than his strength could bear to sit on the divan; his speech left him. ‘I am surfeited. I have had enough,’ he said to himself. ‘The feast has become intolerable to me.’ The wine lay like vinegar on his tongue. The voices of his friends were painful in his ears. ‘I desire nothing more,’ he thought, and wondered if the king would think him discourteous if he should ask for dismissal. And everything had lost color and beauty and meaning.

“It was then that the king gazed upon him and said, ‘Your three friends have gone. Do you desire to leave also?’”

Hillel fell silent, and his haggard face was the color of ashes and his cheekbones showed through his beard.

The rabbi contemplated him. “I think I comprehend,” he said. “The king had invited his servants to a feast, rejoicing in their company. But one had nothing in his soul with which to respond, or he had dulled his response with dull living and a refusal to look at the beauty about him in life so that he had lost his ability to see it. So, he left the feast early. The second one had surfeited himself too soon, had devoured too much too greedily, and so when he could not eat more he did not sit in quiet and contemplate the loveliness about him, for all his appetites had been gross in his life and he believed that once surfeited there was nothing left but departure, and pleasure only of the body and not of the mind, and therefore he heard no conversation and no wit. So, why remain?

“And the third man feared the ending of pleasure, for he had relished his life heedlessly and he enjoyed the kingly feast, and he could not have enough of living and clung to existence, though he was palsied and needed rest. He feared the morning, for the morning was the end of the feast and he believed that the morning held nothing for him. So he wept when the king was compassionate and suggested that he depart, for where would he go now and to what bed and what quietude, he a man who had hated quietude and repose?”

“Yes,” said Hillel, in a very low voice.

The rabbi fixed his old but still keen eyes upon him. “And the fourth man, grateful to the king for the invitation to the feast, and rejoicing in it, and enraptured with taste and smell and touch and sound and sight, at first thought the feast was delightful, and his gratitude increased, and he adored the king for his lovingkindness. But, there came a shadow over him and an anguish, and all faded from his sight. Yet, he was loath to beg the king to dismiss him, for he would not be ungrateful though all had become shadowy to him and a burden and a weariness. But the king only asked him, ‘Do you desire to leave also?’”

“Yes,” said Hillel, and bent his head as if to hide tears.

The rabbi ruminated. “What do you think should be the guest’s answer to the king?”

“I do not know,” whispered Hillel. “But the guest believed that he could remain no longer, and prayed in his heart that his king would say to him, ‘Go, and rest.’”

“Let us assume,” said the rabbi, with deep compassion in his heart, “that the king said to the guest, ‘Your company pleases me, and I would have you with me longer at this feast, so bear with me, and do not ask me to dismiss you. I know you are weary to death. I know of the sorrow in your soul, and I am the only one who knows it. But I have bidden you here, and I know why I have bidden you, so remain.’”

Hillel was silent. The rabbi stroked his beard.

“The great King,” said the rabbi, “knows why He has bidden His children to the feast, and He was saddened when the first did not enjoy it, by reason of the guest’s own fault, and He was grieved that the second could only devour and then in ingratitude desire no more, no, not even His company. And the third incontinently lingered too long, for he was afraid, and had lived only for pleasure and the gratification of self, yet his pleasure had been the pleasure only of a beast and not of a man. So, in pity the King dismissed him.

“As for the fourth man,” said the rabbi in a grave low voice, “the King wishes him to remain and keep Him company for a while longer. The King does not compel. He only asks, Is it too much to grant His request, until He is pleased to ask you to depart?”

Hillel started. “It is only a story,” he said, and his eyes seemed pits of dull suffering. “I was speaking in a parable, a fantasy.”

The rabbi shook his head. “I know all the stories, all the parables, men have already spoken. I do not know this one.”

“Why does not the King, in mercy, dismiss the last man?” asked Hillel, and now his gaze was a burning in the hollows of his cheeks.

“Perhaps because He is merciful. He is the King. He knows His feast. He has His reasons.”

“Which I do not understand,” said Hillel.

The rabbi sighed. “Have you lived this long and not discovered that it is impossible for man to understand God?”

“I have none at home,” said Hillel, as if he had not heard the rabbi’s question. “There is none awaiting me. Do not speak to me,” he said in sudden passion, “of men who have less and suffer more, of the homeless and the agonized with disease, and the lost, and all the sufferers whose name is Legion! They have their own pain, and why they still linger at the feast is nothing to me any longer! I only I know that I wish to leave, that I can no longer await the dismissal!” He clenched his hands together. “I can no longer wait!”

“For no one desires you nor loves you the most dearly nor holds you first in his heart?”

Hillel averted his head. “It is not that, perhaps. Do not ask me more, my friend. But I will tell you this: I never gave my heart lightly, and when I gave it it was despised. It was a betrayal of the soul.” He stood up. “God has abandoned me. I feel it in my very flesh, though you speak of feasts and the request of the King that I remain. He has not asked it. He has already departed and I see at the table only cold sauces and dead wine and bread eaten by mice. I can linger no longer.”

The rabbi understood that this was an old story, for he was an old man, but the intricacies of human suffering never failed to move him. Always, however, he had assumed a stern visage and an admonishing attitude, and these were usually sufficient. He said, “A man who leaves—the feast—before the King grants him departure casts degradation and despair on those who love him, for they reproach themselves thereafter, asking themselves if there was aught they had done, or not done, or what sin they had committed, or what love they had not given in full measure, or what seeming indifference they had displayed, or what neglect, which had impelled the afflicted one to turn from them in silence and enter into the everlasting darkness. What soul of compassion can endure the misery of those it has left behind it? It would be monstrous, indeed.”

“You still do not comprehend, Reb Isaac,” said Hillel, standing at a distance and half-averted. His posture was that of a man too feeble to bear a burden any longer. “I am unable to exert myself to feel anything now, or to experience any emotion. I only know that to see another day, another noon, another night, is an insufferable weariness and anguish to me. To bathe, to breathe, to dine, to drink, to assume garments and shoes, to speak, to give commands, to decide on the merest matter, to smile when a smile is expected, and even to sleep knowing that I will awake, have become too oppressive to me. Habit is no longer done without thought; each accustomed task, however trivial, demands an onerous attention I can give no more.”

He turned now and his gaunt and tormented face was horrifying to the old rabbi.

“Do not speak to me of forfeiting my seat in the world hereafter, of being cast into the darkness, of insulting the King! I have lost my faith. I have lost what illumined my life, and it left many years ago. I blame no one but my own weakness, that I trusted in love. It is possible it is not even that, which now afflicts me. Once I had hope.

“Yes?” said Reb Isaac.

Hillel spread out his hands mutely. After a moment or two he said, “I have no hope. It was a dream from the beginning. I have told you of the Star my cousin, Hannah bas Judah’s husband, saw on a certain winter night over Bethlehem, some years before my own son was born. I had dreams. I dreamed the Star signaled the birth of the Messias, but it was not true. At this time He would be some thirty years in the flesh, and some there would be in that little land who would know Him, and He would surely visit His city, Jerusalem. But my son, Saul, writes me nothing of this and seems bewildered at my written questions. My friends, Rabban Gamaliel and Joseph of Arimathaea, would certainly know if He were here. They tell me nothing, but only have smiled at me strangely when I have seen them in Jerusalem. I fear they consider me a fool, and I am in agreement. The thought of the Messias sustained me through much sorrow and loneliness, but the sustenance was false and I have eaten of bread filled with wind and have drunk of briny waters which could not quench my thirst.”

“You are not the only one whose soul yearns for the tardy Messias, blessed be His Name,”

said the rabbi, frowning. “When I was younger I was certain that I would live when He lived on this earth. I am disappointed. I only know that He will come, if not tomorrow, then another tomorrow. He will surely come!”

“Is it not written that hope deferred makes the heart sick?” asked Hillel, in the fainting voice of a dying man. “But now I no longer desire even to hope. I care no more.”

Without even a farewell, he left his old friend. The rabbi sat in a turmoil of distressed thoughts for a considerable time. All men despair, he told himself. All men of intelligence sometimes curse the day they were born, as did Job, and long for death. Yet they endured. It is possible that Hillel ben Borush has some physical affliction which is draining his hope, unknown to himself. I must consult his friends.

Then the rabbi suddenly remembered that Hillel’s friends had frequently complained to him that they saw Hillel with less and less frequency, and that when encountering him they were struck by his air of remoteness and uninterest. He had not been seen in the synagogue for a long time. He accepted no invitations. The leaders of the Jewish community remarked that his tithes were as prompt and as generous as always. But they did not see the man, himself, but only I his messengers. “Dear Father!” said Reb Isaac aloud, in consternation. “A man dies of his longing and his despair before one’s very eyes, land one does not see! How blind we are! It should have been plain to me, when I visited Hillel, that none was present in his house though once his friends thronged there—and his only company was that rascally Greek former slave of his—Aristo? Aristo. He is a rich man now, I have heard, and his produce moves in caravans afar, thanks to Hillel who freed and recompensed him according to the Law. I must write to him and ask his assistance.”

It galled the proud old man that he must write to a former slave, and a Gentile, to implore his help to save a noble member of a Jewish family. But he wrote the letter at once and dispatched it by a servant, and sat and ruminated and prayed and reproached himself, then poured a goblet of wine and made grimaces as he drank it—though it was excellent—and assured himself over and over that Hillel was at heart too pious a Jew to cause his own death, and that some ill of the body was responsible, or the time of his life. By sunset some tranquillity returned to him, for he believed that men at heart were sensible and shrank from death, even the most desperate, and he enjoyed his dinner.