Jephte's Daughter (37 page)

The older man squeezed his son’s broad, muscular shoulders. He was so incredibly proud of this boy. If only I could take the pain onto my own shoulders, he thought, the sharp despair on David’s face cutting deep into his own flesh. He wanted so much to stop him, but knew he couldn’t. “Well, Rome is not that far away. You will fly down a few times, won’t you?”

He gave his father a curious look. “But I am not going to Rome, Father. I am going to the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem.”

He packed his things quickly and sat down to write a note. He read it over and tore it up and wrote out another one. It was wrong, wrong. It didn’t say a hundredth of what he felt, didn’t explain a thousandth of what needed to be explained. But he put it in an envelope and addressed it to her. He could not think. I must run away, was all that went through his head. I must get out of here, away from her, now while I still have courage.

He passed her door, which was slightly ajar, and heard the fall of blocks from Akiva’s quiet, industrious playing and the child’s untroubled laughter. How he loved that little boy, he thought. That beautiful son that he already considered his own dear child. His eyes followed a shaft of light that lit up the still-dark hall and glimpsed a ruffled bedspread and the dark wave of hair spread out upon the pillow. He laid the note down gently and then leaned against the doorframe, pressing his lips to the cold, polished wood.

“Cigarette?” Jean-Paul leaned toward him politely, holding out a package.

David shook his head. The man, the only other novitiate from the seminary who would be traveling with him, was vaguely familiar to him, but basically a stranger. Still, he was grateful for the company and for the real voice that stilled the insistent, strident inner voice that had been with him since he left Batsheva’s bedroom door. “Call her,” the voice insisted loudly. “How can you leave her? It is the mistake of your life!” it proclaimed. “Call her, call her, call her…” Once or twice he had actually gotten as far as the telephone, but had dropped it with trembling fingers back into the cradle before the number connected.

“I should stop,” Jean-Paul sighed, taking a deep puff. “Ah, excuse me, do you mind?”

David shook his head with a faint smile that the other man returned with a slight touch of irony.

“I hope you will forgive me, brother, but you look as if you’ve just come out of a confessional without absolution. Or is it just plane travel that depresses you?”

“No, just tired.”

“I understand that. I haven’t slept a wink for at least two days. Excitement, eh? What do you think we will find there?” He didn’t wait for an answer, his question arousing his own imagination. “Shepherds and shepherdesses with long wooden staffs climbing the hillsides…”

David listened to the histrionic recital with disguised amusement and felt his eyelids grow heavy, until the voice survived just as a faint, slightly intrusive buzz like the impersonal noise of the airplane as it sped through the skies, putting incomprehensible distance between him and the only real connection to life he had ever known. He was so tired and defeated. He had not really slept since Friday morning. Each time he had drowsed off he suddenly became terrified of giving in to sleep, and he fought to keep control. But it was not only that. In the last month, he thought, he had gone through an incredible number of transformations. He had been at the edge of losing faith completely in his vocation. Only the long, difficult conversations with Father Craven and Father Gerhart had brought him back, and then only to the point of agreeing to put off any decision, to go away where he might look with a clear and undistracted gaze into his deepest soul.

And then had come Ian’s phone call and the invitation to join Elizabeth and Batsheva at the house. He had been startled and disbelieving at first. Had she really agreed to come, she who had made him promise to go away? What must it mean then, her agreement? He had racked his brain, afraid to hope, afraid he had misunderstood, and then, finally, he had been overcome with happiness. He had readied his soul to leave the Church to embrace her, for it seemed to him that she, with her simple goodness, her living, vital beauty and warmth, held all the real answers he had been seeking. With her and with the child he had come to cherish like his own, he would begin to build a real life, not the thin shadow of a life the Church offered him. For the life of a priest, it at once seemed to him, was a thin, vicarious existence. He would be kept apart from the cares, the joys and sorrows of ordinary men and women, experiencing them coldly, once removed, the way a reporter does. Even his relationship with God would be filtered through other priests, through the pope, through hundreds of years of canon law and official dogma.

And now, sitting in the plane that would take him to Jerusalem, he felt he had come full circle. He felt vanquished, as if his return to the Church had the desperate tread of the weary, battle-scarred soldier to any home that would offer him some shelter from the dangers of living. Still, he was grateful for the Church’s open arms, the way it took care of everything so that he would not have to think anymore, struggle anymore. The Church would care for him and he would be its child. It would save him. All he needed to do was to believe.

The plane dipped and righted itself as the sky around it grew dark and the clouds disappeared. Below, surrounded by endless water, the lights of unknown millions blinked questioningly, as if conversing with the dark universe that covered them like a blanket. Always this feeling of dustlike insignificance overcame him in the air. His problems, his personal happiness and griefs, seemed to dwindle until he was ashamed of them, and of himself for not recognizing their ridiculous pettiness. It is the old trick of Adam, he thought. His overweening pride, his forgetfulness. One minute one did not exist, and the next one did, and then again, one did not. An endless cycle. It was only false pride that made one man believe he was any different from or better than another. There was an equality conferred by birth and death that nothing could change.

He looked around him, studying the faces of the men and women on the plane. His eyes settled on an old, white-bearded Hassidic man deep in study, or prayer—which, he could not tell. His mouth, hidden by the beard, moved in silent speech and he stroked his beard and swayed slightly to and fro. And what was the difference between himself and such a man? he asked himself. Were they not both flesh and blood? Would they not both feel pain when they were hit, feel hungry without food and cold without clothing and shelter? He took it a step further. And if the plane should crash and their bodies should not survive, would not their souls return to their Creator and go on living? Would a Jewish soul, because it did not believe in Christ, because it believed only in one God, a God that could have no son, no immaculate intercourse with a human woman, was that soul without salvation, lost? Was it condemned, then, despite all its fineness, its purity, its faithfulness, to eternal hellfire?

He was shocked, as if he had realized this for the first time. If the answer was yes, that meant Batsheva, too. Akiva, too. And the old man who sat piously reading and praying. He, too, was damned. I don’t believe that, he thought suddenly. Really, I don’t believe it at all.

The first thing that he noticed when he got off the plane was the sun. Politely aloof in England, it came alarmingly close in Israel. It was almost a companion, a living presence. It seemed lower down in the sky, and its heat, pervasive and intimately close, reached almost inside of you to warm your heart, your lungs. The old man, a few passengers ahead of him going down the stairs from the plane to the waiting bus, stepped over to the side, knelt, and, putting his face flat upon the ground, kissed the dry, ancient earth. He rose up with dignity, wiping the dark grains of soil from his lips.

“Holy Land,” David thought, feeling the term infused now with a new meaning.

Jean-Paul snickered. “Wonder how it tastes. I guess after all that kosher food they served on the plane, it must be an improvement.”

David did not see his companion look at him with a face full of the expectation of comradely laughter, for he was thinking: Soon I will be there. Soon I will see Jerusalem, her Jerusalem. The thought distracted him to the extent that he was hardly civil to Father Quinn, who had come to meet them and take them back to the dormitory. He hardly felt the curious glance of the father and Jean-Paul as they questioned him and he didn’t reply. He was not with them, but off somewhere, hovering, waiting for the moment that the city would come into view.

The highway from the airport was flat and smooth and newly tarred. He felt somewhat disappointed at the level ride. Where were the hills she had spoken so much about? Then, gradually, the car began to climb. It went through a forest and a mountain that had been sliced in half. He examined the white-pink layers of ancient sedimentary rock. Layer after layer, generation after generation, people after people, had cherished this place, fought over it, died for it. He could feel the car straining now, putting all its mechanical strength into the steep climb, and he felt himself straining with it, almost exhausted with the effort. And then all at once it seemed to rest. He held his breath. Was he imagining it? Or could it be? A white city, purely white, nestled between hills and valleys, shining brilliant and unreal in the white gold of the afternoon sunlight. There was no majesty here. The hills were modest and low, nothing like in Switzerland, where the very height suggested frightening power. No, this was almost villagelike in its plainness and lack of pretension. The houses seemed a mere backdrop to the magnificent breadth and height of the sky. There was more heaven in the view than earth. It was just as she had said.

For some reason this thought made him happy. It was almost as if she was with him, seeing it together with him. His mood changed and he became talkative and friendly, joking with his companions. But underneath he felt he was not the same. Something was changing; doors long closed were opening up and he was fearful and enchanted at what was behind them. But he did not yet know what it all meant, where it would all lead.

In the morning there were matins and a healthy breakfast of wonderful fruits and vegetables, the best he had ever tasted. They seemed freshly picked—the oranges still bursting with the fresh, pungent perfume of the branches that had held them such a short while before, the tomatoes swelling with ripe, juicy tartness that made them a rare delicacy. Fruits of the promised land. They really were special, he thought. Then the classes began. Some were in the Pontifical Biblical Institute, a large stone building with enormous old trees behind the King David Hotel, while others were given at Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. He found himself fidgeting through classes in theology. It seemed to him the same, tired, fantastic story apologized for and made palatable to the intellect. He could find nothing worthwhile in it.

He sought a closeness to the ineffable, and yet all their efforts were to make one believe that God could be at once both Godlike and manlike. It seemed to him a terrible reduction, a road that carried him in the opposite direction from where he felt he wanted to go. Then also, he began to question the whole concept of Original Sin. How could it be that God held the child responsible for the father’s sin?

The Jews, he learned, believed the opposite. Each child was born pure, with no taint of sin. And even sinners, he learned, could do penance by recognizing their sins, renouncing them, and acting differently in identical circumstances. They needed no one as intermediary, but each had his own direct connection to God.

This idea, that we are born pure with nothing to atone for but our own very personal sins, appealed to him deeply. He found himself looking forward to two classes: Hebrew and the Old Testament. The teacher was a Jew, a black-velvet skullcap, and he was introduced to the class by Father Quinn with affection as Reb Gershon. He had learned the Old Testament before, but always as an adjunct to the New. Now he felt he was seeing it for the first time. At first he felt surprise and curiosity, which soon grew into a profound amazement that bordered on shock. All the things he had sought most, admired most in his faith, the love for one’s fellow, the need for loving-kindness and charity, for justice and for mercy, he found had their origins in the Books of Moses. It contained the whole blueprint for a human society at its most civilized. Even “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” that which he had always believed the most Christian of ideas, that, too, was written plainly in the Hebrew texts given Moses. In many ways, its words seemed to bring him closer to the goodness and holiness he had always searched for than the harsh words of the New: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” “Think not I have come to bring peace. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

Why had he not understood this before? Why had he dismissed the whole contribution of the Jews as insignificant and wrong? He had been taught, had he not, that Jesus said, “I come not to change the Law, but to strengthen and verify it.” But it had never occurred to him, never seemed important to him, that Jesus himself came of Jewish parents, and the Law he spoke of was this same law of the Jews. He realized with a deep shame that although he had loved Batsheva, he had belittled her beliefs, considering them in the same light in which an indulgent parent considers the unsophisticated thoughts of a favorite child: with love and pity and hope for the future. He had, in fact, not looked at them at all so much as the opposite. He had overlooked them, as if they were a kind of defect, which in his love he was bound to accept, like a deformed hand or foot.

This in general, he thought suddenly, was the way Christians looked at the Jews. Some hated them, hated their beliefs, while others were prepared to love them in spite of their beliefs. That seemed to him totally absurd, like hating or ignoring the crust of the earth that forms the whole foundation for one’s firm existence on solid ground. It is simply this, he told himself: Without the Jews, there would have been no Christians. The idea that the Christians had taken over the role of the children of Israel, had usurped the position of the Chosen People because the Jews had sinned, not only seemed to him wrong, but positively galling and ungrateful.

He felt himself exhilarated and frightened by his thoughts. He took to walking through the city for long hours, trying to calm himself, to make sense of it all. The Jews fascinated him: the blond, blue-eyed schoolgirls, the dark, almost black-complexioned young soldiers. They did not seem to be from the same people physically. In fact, it seemed like a small international community, a blending of the physical features and colorings from every nation on earth. Were they a people? Or did they just share a religion unrelated to race? How was it that they had survived all these centuries at all? He became obsessed with these questions, with a single-minded concentration that shut everything else out. He found himself spending long hours after class talking to Reb Gershon, haunting the reading rooms at the National and University Library at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which contains the greatest collection of Judaic manuscripts in the world. He began simply, with Cecil Roth’s
History of the Jews
. He read with surprise and then with discomfort, and finally with almost an agony of shame, the matchless history that began with an intelligent, unsatisfied boy in Ur of Chaldea who questioned the blind beliefs of his parents and his time in gods of wood and stone; a boy, he thought, with a sense of revelation, not unlike himself.