Judas
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Shmuel looked down and examined his fingers, which were spread out in front of him on the kitchen table. They struck him as ugly, short and fat. Then he raised his eyes to Atalia and reminded her shyly that she had twice agreed to go out with him for an evening. And both times it was she who had taken the initiative.
“It’s a well-known fact,” Atalia said, “that women are sometimes attracted to lost boys.”
Then she smiled but did not look amused.
“There were three or four lodgers before you who kept Wald company and lived in your attic. They were all a bit eccentric and all loners. This job seems to attract young men who have lost their way. All of them tried more or less to flirt with me, even though they were twenty or twenty-five years younger. Like you. Loneliness causes all sorts of strange effects. Or maybe you all bring the strangeness with you.”
“And how about you?” Shmuel asked, his eyes still fixed on his ugly hands. “What does loneliness do to you?”
“Me? You’ve been staring at me for several weeks now and you still don’t know me. There seems to be something that interests or attracts you, but that something definitely isn’t me. The world is full of men who are attracted to women but aren’t really interested in them. Weak women sometimes give in to men like that. As it happens, I don’t need a man. I live alone. I work, I read books, and I listen to music. Sometimes I have a visitor in the evening. Sometimes on another evening I have a different visitor. They come and they go. I’m self-sufficient. Otherwise I would be like Wald, and hire some unemployed young man to entertain me for six hours a day.”
“And when you’re alone in your room?”
“I live there. That’s enough for me.”
“In that case, why did you suggest not once but twice that we go out together?”
“Okay,” said Atalia, standing up and taking the two empty coffee glasses to the sink, washing them, and setting them upside down on the drainer. “Maybe we’ll go out together this evening. Not this evening. Tonight. Or rather, in the early hours of the morning. I’ll give you a present—a little nighttime adventure. Can you hide?”
“No,” said Shmuel sheepishly. “Not at all.”
“We can watch the moon over Mount Zion, facing the walls of the Old City,” Atalia said, leaning against the kitchen doorpost, left hip slightly raised and five fingers resting on it. A faint scent of violets came from her, along with a hint of shampoo.
“The moon isn’t full tonight,” Shmuel said.
“So we’ll watch a defective moon. Almost everything in the world is defective. Be ready in the kitchen at three a.m. If you can get up that early. We’ll climb Mount Zion and watch the sunrise together over the Mountains of Moab. Provided it’s not cloudy. I’ve got a couple, both well educated, both quite well known in Jerusalem, both married but not to each other, and they plan to meet tonight to watch the sunrise from the top of Mount Zion. Don’t ask how I know. I need to photograph them together at sunrise without them noticing me. If we’re lucky, we’ll catch them embracing. You’ll be my cover.”
From the passage, when Shmuel could no longer see her, she added:
“And dress warmly. These winter nights are cold.”
Shmuel sat in the kitchen for another twenty minutes, staring at his fingertips. He made up his mind to cut his fingernails today, and trim his nose hair, and take a shower this evening, though he had showered that morning. He must not forget to put a new inhaler in his pocket; the present one was almost empty. He thought about the fact that he had intended to ask Atalia about her father and perhaps also about her husband, but for some reason he had felt that such questions would make her angry and distance her from him. Distance her? he said to himself. Distance her how? Distance her where? As if we were ever close. She said herself that she’s only taking me on this nocturnal excursion as her cover. She’s bound to feel uncomfortable wandering alone around Mount Zion before sunrise. And I’m not even sure. Does she like me? A little bit? Or is she just sorry for me? Is she treating me exactly the same way she treated the three or four previous lodgers? Or maybe she’s just playing with me, like the child she never had. And all of a sudden, in an instant, all these questions lost their meaning, and instead a wave of joy swept through him and filled his chest and made the blood rush in his veins. For the first time in several months, the sharp pain caused by Yardena’s leaving him and marrying Nesher Sharshevsky felt duller and weaker, and he felt calm, resilient, even virile. He said aloud to himself:
“Yes. At three a.m.”
He left the kitchen, passed Atalia’s closed door, climbed up to his attic, and stood for a while at the window. Then he dusted his beard and forehead with talcum powder, put on his duffel coat, picked up the stick with its predatory fox’s head, and went out to eat goulash soup at the Hungarian restaurant on King George Street. But as he was eating the soup, dipping pieces of white bread in it, he was struck by panic—he could not remember whether Atalia had told him to wait for her at three a.m. in his room, or in the kitchen, or in the passage, or maybe she had told him to knock on her door at three? Worse still, he did not know if they were supposed to leave the house at three or to be at Mount Zion by three, to watch the defective moon, to wait for sunrise, and to trail the pair of clandestine lovers.
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THAT NIGHT, after he had given Gershom Wald his porridge and had waited for him to finish eating it, then had eaten the leftover porridge himself, returned to the kitchen and washed the spoon and bowl, fed the goldfish, barred the library shutters, and gone up to his room, Shmuel did not get into bed. He had no alarm clock, and he knew that if he fell asleep there was no chance he would wake up in time for his nocturnal tryst. So he decided to stay awake, and to go down at half past two to wait for Atalia in the kitchen. He switched on his desk lamp, lit the paraffin heater, and waited for the flame to settle and for a blue-violet flower to appear in the concave metal panel at the back. Then he sat down at his desk and stared for a while at the darkness outside. The screaming of cats in heat in one of the neighboring yards pierced the stillness of the night. The night was clear, but the outlines of the tall cypresses hid the starry sky and the defective moon. Shmuel opened a book, then another, leafed through them, looked at his notes, and crossed out an entire paragraph from two days earlier because it seemed too literary. Then he started to write, and because his fountain pen was out of ink, he scrounged around in the drawer and found an old pen that had probably belonged to one of the previous lodgers. It was a splendid, rather heavy pen, with a gold stripe running its full length. It felt warm and pleasant in his fingers. Shmuel stroked the pen, thrust it into his curly mane and scratched himself with it, then began to write:
Rabbi Judah Arieh de Modena, who lived in Venice from the late sixteenth almost to the middle of the seventeenth century, was born into a wealthy family of bankers and merchants. He studied Judaism with various teachers, but also studied secular subjects. As he himself put it: “I also learned to play music, to sing, to dance, and a little Latin.” He displayed an interest in theater and music, and wrote some comedies and put on performances and concerts. Not only Jews but Christians, too, flocked to hear him preach, including ordinary people, nobles, and religious dignitaries. The tragedy of Rabbi Judah Arieh de Modena’s life was his addiction to games of chance, which ruined him and drove him to penury. His last years were spent in poverty and sickness.
He often debated with Christian scholars and priests, and at the end of his life he composed a work of systematic polemics against Christianity, under the title Shield and Sword (a “shield” against Christian attacks on Jews, and a “sword” in the hands of the Jews to prove the folly of the Christian faith). This work differed from all his previous writings in that it contained no apologetic undertone nor any abuse or invective against Christianity, but a consistent claim to make use of pure reason to substantiate the truth of the Jewish faith and to expose the inner contradictions in the Christian faith. To this end he read
the New Testament in a way that today, so Shmuel wrote in his notebook, would be called critical. Rabbi Judah Arieh died having completed only five of the nine chapters he had intended to include in his Shield and Sword. Rabbi Judah Arieh saw Jesus as a Pharisaic Jew in every respect, a Pharisee who disagreed with his masters only in some marginal matters of religious law, but who did not rebel against the central tenets of the Jewish faith. It never occurred to Jesus, Rabbi Judah Arieh stressed, to represent himself as divine. Nowhere in the New Testament does he claim divine status. “In the entire Gospel you will not find him ever saying of himself that he was God but only . . . a man, and less than any other man: ‘But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.’” On the contrary, in tens of places in the Gospels he calls himself a man. Moreover, “when he washed Peter’s feet (John 13:4f.) he said of himself, ‘The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister.’” And so Jesus explicitly calls himself a son of man.
Rabbi Judah Arieh also writes—and Shmuel copied the words with increasing wakefulness and joy, all his tiredness having left him, his mind overflowing to the point that he almost forgot the nocturnal tryst awaiting him: “Know that at that time among the Jews there were several sects, all of them acknowledging the law of Moses but divided over its interpretation and its commandments. There were the Pharisees and the scribes, that is our sages from whom issued the Mishnah, and besides them the Sadducees and the Boethusians, the Essenes and some more in addition . . . and out of all these the Nazarene chose . . . and followed the sect of the Pharisees, our Rabbis . . . and this is seen clearly in the Gospel when he says to his disciples: ‘The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat: all therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works’ (Matthew 23:2–3). We find that Jesus acknowledges not only the written law but [also] the oral law: ‘Think not that I come to destroy the law, but to fulfill [the law]’ (Matthew 5:17). And he also says: ‘Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or tittle shall in no wise pass from the law’ (Matthew 5:18).” And, in what follows, Rabbi Judah Arieh de Modena explains how and why “by stratagems” Jesus described himself on certain occasions as the Son of God, for didactic purposes, so that the masses would follow him, and not because he saw himself as the offspring of God. All the rest, in the words of Rabbi Judah Arieh, is merely “vague inventions which those who were drawn to him introduced sometime after his death, things which [could] not occur and still do not occur to any simple, unbiased human mind in the world.”
Beneath these words, half an hour or so after midnight, in a state of great excitement, Shmuel Ash wrote in his notebook:
Judas Iscariot was the founder of the Christian religion. He was a well-to-do man from Judea, unlike the other disciples, who were simple fishermen and tillers of the soil from remote villages in Galilee. The priests in Jerusalem had heard strange rumors about some eccentric wonderworker from Galilee who was attracting a following here and there in godforsaken villages and towns on the shores of the Sea of Galilee by means of all kinds of rustic miracles, just like dozens of other self-professed prophets, seers, and wonderworkers, most of whom were charlatans or madmen or both. This Galilean, however, was attracting a few more followers than the others, and his fame was spreading. Therefore the priests in Jerusalem decided to select Judas Iscariot—Judah of Kerioth, a well-to-do, sober, intelligent man, learned in the written and the oral law, and close to the Pharisees and the priests—and send him to infiltrate the group of believers who followed the young Galilean from village to village, to pretend to be one of them, and to report to the priests in Jerusalem on the character of the eccentric and on whether he presented any particular danger. After all, the visionary from Galilee worked all his provincial miracles in remote places, before an audience of ignorant villagers, who were ready to believe in all sorts of magicians, wizards, and tricksters. So Judas Iscariot dressed himself in shabby, threadbare clothes, went to Galilee, sought out and found Jesus and his band, and attached himself to them. He quickly succeeded in winning the affection of the members of the sect, the motley company of ragamuffins who followed the prophet from village to village. Judas also gained the affection of Jesus himself. By means of his sharp mind, and by pretending to be a fervent believer, he swiftly became one of Jesus’ close companions, his confidant, one of the inner circle of his followers, the treasurer for this band of paupers, the twelfth apostle, the only one among them who was not a Galilean, and who was not a poor peasant or fisherman.
At this point, however, the story takes a surprising turn. The man who had been sent by the priests in Jerusalem, to spy on the Galilean visionary and his adherents and to unmask them, turned into a fervent believer. Jesus’ humanity, the warm, infectious love that he radiated all around him, that mixture of simplicity, humility, endearing humor, and intimacy with everyone—together with the moral insight, the elevated vision, the poignant beauty of his parables, and the charm of his glorious gospel—converted the rational, sober skeptic from the town of Kerioth into a follower committed with all his being to the savior and his teaching. Judas Iscariot became the outstanding and devoted disciple of the man from Nazareth. Did this happen overnight, or was it the result of a long process of rebirth? We cannot know the answer, Shmuel wrote, and the question has no particular importance. Judah of Kerioth became Judas the Christian. The most enthusiastic of all the apostles. More than that: he was the first man who believed with total faith in Jesus’ divinity. He believed that Jesus was all-powerful. He believed that very soon the eyes of all men, from sea to sea, would be opened, that they would see the light, and that redemption would come to the world. But for this to happen, Judas thought, being a man of the world and understanding a great deal about public relations, it was necessary for Jesus to leave Galilee and go to Jerusalem. He had to perform in Jerusalem, in the presence of the whole nation and before the entire world, a miracle such as had never been seen since the day God created heaven and earth. Jesus, who had walked on the water of the Sea of Galilee; Jesus, who had brought the dead girl and Lazarus back from the dead; Jesus, who had turned water into wine and driven out demons and healed the sick by the touch of his hand or even by the touch of the hem of his garment, had to be crucified in the sight of all Jerusalem. And in the sight of all Jerusalem he would drag himself down from the cross and stand whole and healthy at the foot of the cross. The whole world—priests and simple people, Romans, Idumeans, and Hellenizers, Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, Samaritans, rich and poor, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who had come to Jerusalem from all over the land and from the neighboring countries for the feast of Passover—would fall to their knees to dust themselves with the dust of his feet. And so the Kingdom of Heaven would begin. In Jerusalem. In the sight of the people and the world. And moreover, on the Friday before the Passover, the greatest of all the gatherings of the Jewish people, Shmuel wrote in his notebook.
But Jesus hesitated about accepting Judas’ advice and going to Jerusalem. Deep down in his child’s heart a worm of doubt had been gnawing: Am I the man? Am I really the man? Maybe I am not up to the task. What if the voices are leading me astray? And what if my Father in heaven is only testing me? Playing with me? Using me for some purpose whose secret is hidden from me? Suppose what he had managed to do here he was unable to do in Jerusalem, so down-to-earth, so secular, so assimilated, so Hellenized, Jerusalem of little faith, which had already seen and heard everything and was not impressed by anything? Perhaps Jesus himself was waiting for some sign from above, some revelation or illumination, some divine answer to his doubts: Am I the man?
Judas was relentless: You are the man. You are the Savior. You are the Son of God. You are God. You are destined to save all men. Heaven has laid this charge upon you, to go to Jerusalem and to work your wonders there. You will perform the greatest miracle of all in Jerusalem, you will come down from the cross safe and sound, and the whole of Jerusalem will fall at your feet. Rome itself will fal
l at your feet. The day of your crucifixion will be the day of the redemption of the world. This is the last trial to which your Father in heaven is subjecting you, and you will endure it because you are our Savior. After this trial the age of the redemption of mankind will commence. On that day the Kingdom of Heaven will begin.
After many tribulations Jesus went up to Jerusalem with his disciples. But there he was again beset by doubts. And not only by doubts but by the fear of death pure and simple, like any mortal man. Human, all too human fear of death filled his heart. “And he was affrighted in his spirit,” “And the pangs of death came upon him,” “Then he began to curse and to swear, saying, ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death.’”
“If thou be willing,” Jesus prayed to God in Jerusalem at the time of the Last Supper, “remove this cup from me.” But Judas strengthened and encouraged his spirit: would he who walked on water and turned water into wine and healed lepers and drove out demons and raised the dead be unable to come down from the cross and so make the whole world believe in his divinity? And because Jesus continued to fear and to doubt, Judas Iscariot took it upon himself to manage the crucifixion. It was not an easy thing to do. The Romans took no interest in Jesus, because the land was full of prophets and wonderworkers and crazy dreamers like him. It was not easy for Judas to persuade his priestly colleagues to bring Jesus to trial: they did not consider him any more dangerous than dozens of his doubles in Galilee and other out-of-the-way regions. Judas Iscariot had to pull strings, to exploit his connections among the Pharisees and the priests, to win over hearts and minds, perhaps to pay some bribes, to arrange for Jesus to be crucified between two petty criminals on the eve of the sacred festival. As for the thirty pieces of silver, they were invented by Jew-haters in later generations. Or maybe Judas himself invented them so as to complete the story. For what did a well-to-do estate owner from the town of Kerioth need with thirty pieces of silver? In those days thirty pieces of silver was no more than the price of a single slave of medium quality. And who would have paid so much as three pieces of silver for the betrayal of a man whom everyone knew? A man who never tried for a single moment to hide, or to conceal his identity?