by Fast, Howard
In front of this group, a tall man paced back and forth, and in the first moment Berenice thought it was Shimeon Bengamaliel himself, so great was the likeness of movement and feature. A second glance told her it was another, a teacher here, talking and gesturing as he paced. Behind him there was a wooden table, and on it a jug of water, a cup, and an open scroll that was apparently a Torah. He gestured toward this as he talked and managed to notice Berenice out of the corner of an eye and nod at her without breaking his speech. The nod said, be welcome and sit down and stay if you wish. She stood a moment at the edge of the shade, and then sank down to the ground, her legs bent under her, the shade cool and pleasant after the morning in the hot sun. She was tired, and it was good to rest there.
“The Law,” the teacher was saying, tapping his finger on the open scroll. “Why are we called the People of the Law?”
A skinny, freckled boy of fourteen or so rose up, cleared his throat, and said it was because Jews reverenced the Law above life itself.
“That’s mighty peculiar,” the teacher said. He looked at the boy; the boy looked at him. Faintly, from the distance came the sound of the women singing at the brookside as they washed clothes. Insects hummed and danced in the hot sunlight, outside the shade of the terebinth tree. It occurred to Berenice that this was a mighty peculiar school.
“I don’t know how to reverence anything above life itself,” said the teacher, after a few moments. “I don’t mean that it isn’t a good idea. It sounds attractive. I just don’t know how. Do you, Abram?”
“I would die for the Torah,” the skinny boy persisted.
“I am sure you would—but it’s not a particularly engaging thought when there is so much to live for. Or is it? I have been thinking all morning about going fishing. You die—no more fishing. Never again. That’s bleak, don’t you agree?”
A little ripple of laughter among the others; no immediate reply from Abram; and, on Berenice’s part, an increasing conviction that this was a very strange school indeed.
“What is the Law?” the teacher asked.
“The Torah.”
“What is the Torah?”
“The Pentateuch—namely, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The five books of the Law, which were written by the hand of Moses and inspired by the breath of the Almighty Himself.”
The teacher, who continued to pace, took a deep breath and observed that he had gotten more than he had bargained for. “Sit down, Abram,” he said. He tapped the scroll now. “I only desired to elicit the fact that the Torah is a book—an excellent and singular book—but still that, a book. These are recent observations, I will admit. In the time of my grandfather Hillel, of the blessed memory, who began this school here, the Torah was considered to be much more, treated as a force of magic, as a living thing—almost as the flesh of the Almighty Himself. Hillel was impatient with that kind of thinking, as you know.” He pointed to another boy, “David—do you know the story of the pagan who came to Hillel to study the Law?”
David rose, scratched his head, and piped up that he did know the story. They all knew the story, except for Berenice; and this was very apparent to her.
“Tell it to us, and we’ll pick at it a bit,” the teacher said.
“From Parthia came the pagan,” David began, “a long distance—”
“How long, David?” the teacher interrupted. “Philosophy is never the worse for the injection of some of the exactitude of geography.”
“Thirty days journey?” David asked tentatively.
“On foot? On a camel? On a horse? Hardly very exact. Suppose we say three hundred parasangs, as the Persians measure it. As it is told, he was from Hecatompylos, in the heart of Parthia. Go on.”
“He traveled this long distance,” said David, “that he might become a Jew, and he sought out the Rabbi Hillel and said to him, I would study the Law, Rabbi Hillel, that I may become a Jew and know the Almighty as the one God. To this, Hillel replied, Then I will teach you the Law. This is the Law, namely, Love thy neighbor as thyself. This is the whole Law. All the rest is commentary.”
“Oh? Well,” the teacher said, “I have heard this little tale a thousand times, yet I never hear it but it puzzles me. Thus. The Law is the Torah, yet Hillel made of it a commentary on a single injunction, Love thy neighbor as thyself. If that is the Law, then surely it is more important than the commentary. The substance must precede the commentary. And the substance must exist, even without the commentary—”
A middle-aged man arose, cleared his throat several times, and apologized for his temerity as well as his presence. He was a well-dressed, well-set man—as he explained it, a dealer in mother-of-pearl and other shell products, and on his way from his home in Damascus to the shell market at Tyre. It had been a privilege—to which he had looked forward for years—to see with his own eyes the place where the saintly Hillel had spent his last years, and an honor to sit among the students of Hillel’s school, if only for an hour or two. Pardon him then for his daring to disagree; yet if you take away from a Jew his right to disagree, what is left to him?
“What, indeed?” the teacher smiled.
“So, Rabbi—” began the merchant from Damascus, but was stopped with an admonition that they in the House of Hillel used the term rabbi most sparingly. “My name is Hillel Bengamaliel,” the teacher explained, “but I am no rabbi. The title is a high one in our house—”
The Jew from Damascus spread his hands in acknowledgment and addressed the teacher with the formal Adon, or as My Lord Hillel, the son of Gamaliel—stating that as this famous tale of the first Hillel was told in the synagogues of Damascus, the instructions of Hillel to the pagan from Parthia were somewhat different.
“Thus is it said in Damascus,” said the traveler meekly, “that Hillel said to the pagan, Do not unto others as you wouldst not have them do unto you. This is the whole Law, and all the rest is commentary.”
“Indeed,” agreed the teacher. “Yes indeed—so it is said, and that is unquestionably true.”
“And the other?”
“Also true.”
“But how can both be true?” the merchant pleaded in despair. “If one is the whole Law, then how can the other be the whole Law?”
“If they are the same?” He waited. The boy, David, sat down, and then the merchant seated himself.
“Do not unto others,” he said thoughtfully. “Thus we have the negative. Love thy neighbor—the positive; the two are contained.”
The traveler shook his head slightly. The teacher went on, “Not quickly, but brood over it somewhat. It was my notion to talk to the children about the reaction to Hillel’s action. Oh yes—some storms burst around his head, and there came to him from Jerusalem a group of learned Pharisees and scholars. They said to Hillel, ‘Do you deny that the Almighty is in the Torah?’ To which Hillel answered, ‘The Almighty is everywhere.’ But that was hardly enough, and the learned men demanded to know whether Hillel denied that God inspired the Torah? ‘There is no great book which the Almighty has not inspired,’ Hillel replied. He was not being clever. Hillel was never clever—yes, perhaps the wisest man in all the world, but never clever. He did not have the gift for that. Then the scholars demanded of him, ‘Do you deny that the Torah is from the hand of Moses, may his name be remembered forever?’ ‘Could a Jew deny this?’ Hillel asked, and then they said to him, ‘Will you admit that the Torah is sacred and holy?’ He admitted it, and then they charged him, ‘But you state that it is commentary. What is more holy than the Law?’ ‘Many things,’ Hillel replied. “The Almighty is holier—and my child, too, for if I put the Law in the flames, the Almighty would forgive me, but if I offered my child to the flames, He would never forgive me. And I will tell you something else,’ Hillel said. ‘Love is holier than the Law—’” The teacher paused, poured himself a cup of water, and drank.
“They were upset, those scholars,” he continued. “They cried, ‘What has Hillel done with God?’ ‘Is God so ine
ffectual that I could do this or that with Him?’ Hillel replied.”
“Zeno!” the merchant from Damascus snorted. “Did I come to the House of Hillel to hear the preachments of Zeno?”
“Oh no—no,” the teacher said gently. “We are no Stoics here, and neither was the Rabbi Hillel. For the Stoics said that man can only live in the grandeur of a hero, facing his own fate, his own meaningless existence, recognizing it and living without fear of it. He preached that the good man was the wise man; but Hillel preached that the good man was he who loved his fellow man; and where the Stoics said there was no God but the cold rationale of nature and substance and being, Hillel said that the Almighty Himself is the author of all of nature and being. The Greeks would like God to be reason, but without love reason has no compassion. When the Pharisees demanded that Hillel define God, he did not retreat into a philosophical hole, as does the good Philo of Alexandria, who is entranced with the unknowability of God. These are the games of clever men. The Rabbi Hillel was not clever, only wise, and he said that the nature of God was love; the being of God, compassion.”
He drank water again and then said to the traveler from Damascus, “Stay with us a little. There is so much more—and so many loopholes in what I said that we can spend hours plugging them. We talk a great deal at this school, but we also leam a little—” As he spoke, he walked toward the merchant, his voice dropping so that Berenice could no longer hear what he said. The school, meanwhile, broke up into clusters of men and boys, some in hot discussion, and then the clusters began to coalesce around Hillel Bengamaliel. For some reason, it reminded Berenice of her readings in Plato, and she found herself thinking that the school of Socrates in Athens could not have been too different from this. As the others rose from the ground, she did, too, brushing the dust off her dress. The woman with the two small children, a dark-eyed and comely woman, walked by, nodding at her and smiling slightly. No one asked her who she was or why she was there; and all in all, it appeared to be a place where any and all were welcome and where any and all came.
Now, household slaves or servants—it was difficult for Berenice to determine their status, so easy was their manner and so readily did they talk to others—were bringing tables and benches from the sheds to the shade of the great oak tree and setting them up for the midday meal. The tables consisted of planks laced onto cross-pieces and set on sawhorses, and the benches were of the simplest kind, but four long tables were set up with space enough for half a hundred people to eat. Some of the boys remained; others exploded into freedom and ran whooping from the courtyard; and still others went to the. tables with their own packages of food. Nothing seemed to be planned or ordered, yet everything took place with dispatch and organization. A stream of people were coming through the courtyard gate—field hands burnt by the sun and glistening with the sweat of their work; shepherds; the women whom Berenice had seen washing clothes in the stream, now carrying huge baskets of the wash balanced on their heads; housemaids bowed with the weight of fresh-water buckets; and, strangely enough, two of the lean, hard, and dirty bandits whom she had met in the band of Zealots earlier this day—neither swaggering nor diffident, but coming matter-of-factly to take their places at the table.
The tables were no longer empty. A stream of slaves brought an unending stream of edibles from the kitchen—platters of cucumbers and leeks, great bowls of fruit, trays piled high with smoked fish, bowls of dates and figs and grapes and olives and onions, and warm, sweet-smelling stacks of the round, pancakelike bread—and wine and water.
Standing, watching, Berenice told herself that not even a king, not even her brother could set such a table as a matter of routine, probably day in and day out. What then, she wondered, was this strange House of Hillel, nestling here in this fruitful valley only a few miles from Tiberias?
As if to answer Berenice’s question, a man appeared whom she recognized, Shimeon, standing at a door to the house across the yard and looking at the people clustered around the tree. At his left there was a middle-aged woman, her gray hair piled upon her head, giving the impression of even more height than was actually hers. At his right, a thin man coming into his older years, gray beard streaked with white, the man himself clad in an ankle-length gown of blue linen, cut fully and belted in the Babylonian manner; and this man was talking to Shimeon as they walked out of the house and across the yard to the tree. Almost at the tree and already in the shade, Shimeon looked up from the commanding position of his height and saw her. Then he whispered something to the man and woman, left them, walked around the cluster of tables, where people were already eating, and directly over to Berenice—the surprise and disbelief on his face replaced now by very real delight; yet he did not take her hand or reach out to her. He stood before her with diffidence, no longer the doctor at his patient’s bed; and it was more than this difference in him that Berenice felt, rather a difference that pervaded him, his manner, his being. He examined her with his eyes as a man examines a woman, her dusty feet, her stained clothes, and the kerchief wrapped tightly to conceal her torrent of auburn hair.
“How long have you been here, my lady?” he asked her.
“Perhaps an hour.”
“Then forgive me for my failings as a host.”
“It was a good hour. I sat at the edge of the school and I listened.”
“There’s a fate, for there’s nothing in the world charms my brother Hillel like the sound of his own voice. Come—please.” He led her to one side, where there was an old mounting bench, and then he motioned to a slave and told him to bring a basin and water. He knelt in front of Berenice as he unbuckled her sandals.
“Shouldn’t you be there?” Berenice asked, nodding at the tables.
“There—you mean to eat? No, no—I hold with my blessed mentor, Hippocrates, that three quarters of the physical evils that beset mankind flow from eating too much, not too little. But they will be at it for a while, and there is food enough. When the House of Hillel dines, the world stands still.” The slaves returned with the water now, and Shimeon poured it into the basin and began to wash Berenice’s feet.
More times than she could count she had had her feet washed, but never exactly like this, so easily and spontaneously and with hands that rippled the whole fiber of her body whenever they touched her. She could have closed her eyes and said—as she thought—go on like this and wash them for ever and ever, and wash away everything that hurts and exacerbates and torments and shames, and leave them clean and leave me clean—but these were thoughts out of the strangeness of the occasion, and to feel something one has never felt before can be more disquieting than anything else. As he washed her feet, Shimeon told her of his amazement when he first saw her, yet he had recognized her immediately—
“Which,” he added, “is rather strange, because you look different.”
“Because my hair is covered?”
“No. No—I think—will you be angry if I say it?” He had to talk loudly to be heard over the babble of voices from the tables.
“Nothing could make me angry here.”
“Well, that’s it,” Shimeon nodded.
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s no hate, no anger. You were always angry. Such anger! If it were not blasphemous to think of the Almighty as a woman, I would say it reminded me of the stories in the Torah—when God explodes in anger at Moses.”
He added, grinning, “That was very regal anger—if you know what I mean?”
“I don’t know whether you’re mocking me or praising me or scolding me.”
“Not scolding you—” He dried her feet with linen napkins. “Mockery and praise—yes, that’s the due of a queen—”
“And yet you’re not surprised to find me here?” Berenice said.
“Surprised? No. Perhaps in our ego, we have come to believe that the whole world will come to the House of Hillel—sooner or later. And there is some truth in that. Here have come kings and procurators and proconsuls and tetrarchs and alaba
rchs and princes and priests—and heaven knows what other titles. And most go away disappointed that what they have heard so much of is merely a Galilean farmhouse, a country villa, and far from the largest in Galilee. Are you disappointed, Queen Berenice—no, I did not mean to call you that.”
“I don’t understand this place,” she replied. “Will you call me Berenice? I will call you Shimeon, and we will be friends. I never had a friend. Will you be my friend, Shimeon?”
“If you wish—and what is not to be understood here, Berenice?”
“Just”—her sandals buckled on, her feet cool and clean, she dipped a linen napkin into the water and washed her face and hands—”all of this,” she said. “What is it? What are you? You are not a sect—not a party. In one breath you will link yourselves with the Pharisees, and in the next breath you denounce them. You appear to be without weapon and without rancor, and I see no soldiers anywhere, no arms; yet those two Zealots who came in here to your table as if it were at their heart and home and under their own rooftree—they’re as hard-bitten and bloody-minded a pair of bandits as I have ever seen, and I saw them on the road this morning, where they and their comrades were cursing the fate that led them to miss an Arab caravan—which they would have looted, and murdered too—”