by Fast, Howard
“The Zealots come here,” Shimeon nodded. “Why not? They have no homes, many of them, no land, no rooftree, and here they can sit an hour in peace and fill their bellies. Does that hurt anyone?”
“Hurt? I don’t understand you. Your brother preaches a God of love and compassion—”
“As we all do.”
“—and decries the Torah—”
“No,” Shimeon smiled, “we honor the Torah, but we honor people more—is that mysterious?”
“But all of this”—she waved at the tables, suddenly very hungry with the hot smell of broken bread everywhere now—”what does it mean?”
“People are hungry, and they are fed. Thus it must be at the House of Hillel,” said Shimeon. “And when it cannot be this way, the House of Hillel will crumble.”
“But this? Oh, I have heard about the Essenes and their monasteries in the desert by the Dead Sea—but they are holy men, and their common table is an altar to God, and they take no wives but eat their crust of bread and their cup of water—”
“And they live in poverty and filth, and they exalt filth and worship poverty, and they hate women and fear women, and their holiness can be measured by the smell and their piousness by the shout of doom that arises from their grim and ugly nests—and the more they suffer, the larger their pride; and if a wise man or a learned man, an engineer or an architect or a doctor should come among them, they would scourge him out like a pestilence. They fear knowledge and they love ignorance; they whip each other the better to glorify the Almighty, and they go on long fasts, until they look like famine victims, and for this they ask God’s approval—oh, tell me, Berenice, do you admire them?”
“They are fanatics,” Berenice said, “but they are holy men.”
“Ha—that I should hear Berenice Basagrippa parroting phrases. Holy men indeed!”
“And how do you honor the Almighty?” Berenice asked.
“As men should, I think. There is no hatred in the House of Hillel. In the Torah, it says that the Almighty made man in His own image, so to us the body of man is holy—the superb and supreme work of God. To allow a fellow man among us to go unfed is sinful. To hate Jew or Gentile is sinful—and these things we eschew—as we do the bearing of arms, and if need be, we will die before we raise a hand against a fellow man. We hold that the love of a man for a woman and of a woman for a man is holy and perfect—and we work to understand the meaning of love and compassion, so we can practice both. We are Jews—but no Gentile has ever been turned away from the House of Hillel, and many come here. But enough of this schooling and preaching—come with me, Berenice and meet my father and mother and the others of my family.”
The torrent of words and the passion implicit amazed Berenice, and she said nothing as he took her hand and led her toward the tables. Indeed, there was nothing she could think of that must be said. The whole world was new, and this was either a madhouse or a dream—and it was more likely a madhouse, since Berenice had never been one to stumble over the difference between dreams and reality; and if it were that, its inhabitants were well chosen, for this physician had been mad in the beginning when he tore down the drapes and blinds in her chambers and roared out his intolerant theories of medicine and health. Then he had spoken around her and now he spoke to her, but his words were no more sensible in terms of the plain world of wealth and manners and ambition in which she had spent her life.
“And thieves come here,” she managed to say finally.
“Thieves, murderers, sinners, and even some saints, and devils too—and this, Berenice, is my kinblood, my father, Gamaliel the son of Hillel the Babylonian, who was the founder of our house.” He bowed, an older man than she had suspected from the distance, courtly, gentle, his twinkling blue eyes hidden under shaggy white brows. He had been watching her and now he regarded her shrewdly, as he broke a piece of bread, dipped it in salt, and offered it to her.
“Take our bread from my hand and honor me, my child,” he said. She took the bread. “Eat, please. I have hoped that my son would bring a woman to our table, but one so beautiful—”
She munched the bread. “This is my mother, Sarah,” Shimeon said, watching with pleasure the way Berenice’s strong white teeth chewed so hungrily at the salted bread.
“Welcome and peace—but I look deeper than my husband for beauty.”
“And to you, peace,” Berenice replied. “If I have beauty, it brought me no happiness. Your bread is good, and blessed is the house where the bread of the earth is savored.”
The old man chuckled with pleasure, and Shimeon introduced her to his brother, “Hillel, my brother—he teaches of wisdom and confusion, and he will make you believe that the two are identical—as perhaps they are.”
“We teach, we learn, and we practice medicine,” the old man shrugged.
“I saw her,” Hillel nodded. “As she came in through the gate. You are a tall woman, and striking—”
“Thank you.”
Shimeon was introducing his sister-in-law now. “Deborah.”
“Bas Shaba,” she named her house. “We are from across the river in the Land of Gad. I have been his wife nine years, yet I am a stranger here.”
“What nonsense,” Hillel declared.
“Will you bare your head?” Sarah, the mother asked. “Or must you keep it covered?”
“My head?” Berenice asked, confused a moment.
“You have beautiful eyes,” Deborah said. They were as simple and direct in their observations as children. “Your eyes remind me of Berenice, the queen of shame, may God spare her His anger.” And then she realized what she had said and whom she was talking to, even before Berenice untied the kerchief to reveal the red braids.
“I have eaten your bread,” she said in a hoarse whisper, and then her voice choked in her throat and she started away, the tears flowing down her cheeks. Sarah, the mother, embraced her. Not for a moment had Berenice dreamed that there would be such strength in the old woman.
“Let me go,” Berenice cried chokingly.
“No, no,” Sarah said woefully. “Sooner would I go myself and never lay eyes on this goodly house again. No, because if you go in your grief at our cruelty and obtuseness, then this house is worthless and will soon crumble. Let it be ashes.”
Then Berenice stood still, unresisting, and Gamaliel, the son of Hillel, said to her, “Honor us and break your fast here. There is good food and good wine on our table.”
But Shimeon said nothing, only watching her through narrowed eyes; and through the cloak of self-pity that covered her the way it covers a little girl, she was aware of this.
Sitting by her side at the table a while later, the old man, the father, Gamaliel, was explaining his years and how Shimeon was the last child of his loins. There had been a bewildering array of daughters and grandchildren and great-grandchildren—so that Berenice was utterly confused—and most of them speechless anyway as they faced this strange-looking green-eyed woman with her two braided plaits of red hair, who was queen of Chalcis, but to a child’s geography, having never seen another queen, was the queen of queens, queen of the Jews and perhaps the Gentiles too, and at the same time Berenice the infamous and frightful. The father linked their houses through marriage, but the thread was very thin.
“More to the point,” he told her, “I knew your Great-grandfather Herod the Great. He came here, you know—here to our house to visit my father, Hillel, and they stood face to face, and my father Hillel welcomed him. Then a saint welcomes a devil? Herod asked. He was no fool, be sure of that, my child, but a big, handsome man of great personal beauty, and my father said to him, If I measure your deviltry by my own saintliness, my own reputation to the man I actually am—well, I can say that the reports on both sides are vastly exaggerated. Herod roared with laughter—he was a clever man, may the Almighty hold his poor twisted soul gently and kindly, but my father was a wise man, and we are great ones here to put cleverness on one side of a knife edge and wisdom on the other. So he bro
ke bread with us and took our salt right here, under this terebinth tree, did your blood ancestor—and young as I was, I felt the curse it was for a man to be a king—”
“But how can it be?” Berenice insisted. “Why did I never know? I live a few miles away, and all that I heard of the House of Hillel was mockery and distortion.”
“Because your father feared us and his father feared us—and because here was something they feared but could not destroy. And then, already in your father’s time, Berenice, he saw that neither the kingly House of Herod nor the kingly House of Mattathias nor the Romans would decide the fate of Israel and the fate of Jewry the world over—God help me, perhaps even the fate of the world itself; no, neither of these.” He paused and nodded at the Zealots, who ate silently at another table. “Them—or ourselves. There is the fate of Israel. Either the House of Shammai”—he dropped his voice—“whose tool is the sword and the spear, and whose preacher is the Zealot; or the House of Hillel, whose tool is love and whose preacher is the physician. Wherever there are Jews today, wherever there is a synagogue, from the Ganges River to the coast of Cornwall, Israel is divided between our two houses—and in all things Shammai and Hillel differ.”
Berenice resisted it; the whole flow of forces, as presented by this old man, made no sense to her. She was no stranger to politics. Still an infant, she had sucked the pap of politics and power, and all her growing years it had been in her house what talk of weather, clothes, and food is in another. The House of Herod lived and breathed the politics of cities and nations, the force of armies, the lust of princes—and she knew power. Or at least she believed that she did; and to Berenice power was money and resources, gold and iron and copper and wheat, mercenaries and ships of war and walled cities, taxes and imposts and tithes—these were the blood and substance of power, and not an old Jewish philosopher sitting under an oak tree and talking of love and compassion.
On the other side of her, Shimeon watched her. “He is comparing me with the women here,” she thought with irritation. “Why doesn’t he say anything?”
Gamaliel, the father, nodded. He understood her, strangely enough. “Ten years ago, my dear,” he said, “you were a little girl, and in all these hills there were not enough Zealots to fill a synagogue. Now they number thousands—and tomorrow?”
“They are bandits, fanatics, of no consequence. A troop of our horse guard would sweep them out of Galilee,” Berenice said.
One of the Zealots paused in his eating and glanced at her. Had he overheard her? No—he was too far away.
“I would be slow to try,” Shimeon’s brother said thoughtfully.
“What are we—how that must puzzle you,” the old man said. “But it must, my child—I mean no mockery. I am still a Jew, and I talk to the last of the Hasmoneans. Should I not venerate you?”
Berenice shook her head dumbly. She had never known people like these. When she most needed to rage and defy, they took all the wind out of her sails and left her only with the curious glow of their affection.
“But what is a Jew?” he went on. “We of the House of Hillel explain ourselves in this way: that the only difference between the Jew and the Gentile is an awareness. Such is the meaning of the covenant we have with God, and for more than half a hundred years, we have taught this creed here at this house under this oak tree—and from here our teachings have traced their way all over the world. Do you know, we here estimate that since the death of my beloved father, may he rest in peace, nearly a million of the goyim have become Jews. Do you know what that means? You saw what King Polemon went through with his circumcision—think of half a million circumcisions. Such is the belief and need that we have engendered among mankind—such is the power of compassion. Have we an argument with Herod? With Rome? With Egypt? I think not. There are only two mighty forces in the Almighty’s world today—Rome and Judaism. If the House of Hillel prevails, Judaism will win. But those—”
Again, he looked at the Zealots. “Yes, our doors are open to the members of the House of Shammai. We turn no one away—but to them we are an abomination. They dare not lift a hand against us, because the people love us too much; but they preach their own creed. Every Roman must die, they cry. Every goy is accursed. No Jew must eat with a Gentile, talk to a Gentile, trade with a Gentile, shelter under the same roof as a Gentile. We must build a wall between ourselves and the world, and we must cast out those who came to us because they saw that what we have is good. Deep in the South, the House of Shammai has taken to monasteries and thrust away women. They have embraced a fanatical madness, which they call the Law, and they hide in the heat and misery of their caves and crannies. But here in the North, they live for war and dream of war—and each day there are more of them. For they offer the young man a dream of power and glory and a return to the ancient days of greatness—which were only days of sorrow—”
Abruptly, the old man finished. “I talk too much. It is a disease of the old—”
The day was a dream, unreal, an eternity of slow movement. Later, she was weary, and Deborah took her into the house. The rooms were large and simple and cooled by ceiling-high vents through which a cool breeze blew, a miracle of engineering through an analysis of air currents. The walls were limed white, and the furniture was plain, simple, and in good taste. She lay down on a bed and scarcely had closed her eyes but she was asleep. She was nursed in the bosom of a mother; she was rocked in a cradle; she was secure; she was like a lamb, and the Lord was her shepherd. She dreamed of the House of Hillel, where they had been waiting for her. In her dream, someone said, “Cometh now the queen of the Jews.” The voices all were raised in a mighty hallelujah, and she walked among throngs of people.
She was awakened by a boy’s clear, pure alto voice, ringing like a glass bell tapped, singing:
“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God! The Lord is one!”
It was the call to prayer before sundown. Rubbing her eyes, she went to the window of the shadow-full room and looked out into the courtyard. The boy was a lad of thirteen or so. He stood in the shadows on a two-wheeled cart, his hands cupped, singing again in his trilling and pure alto:
“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God—”
Had she ever heard anything so beautiful? She didn’t know, and she looked up at the deep blue sky over Galilee, the hillside hiding the sun already; and below her the courtyard was filling with people—men from the fields and men from the house and the school and travelers from the road who had paced their journey so that they might partake of the evening prayer here at the House of Hillel—a few at first and then more and more, the courtyard filling. It was full when she came down from the room and out past the kitchen. They were roasting lamb now. Were the fires never cold in these kitchens?
The old man, the father, walked through the courtyard, which was filled now with people. They opened a path for him, and he walked like some Bedouin memory, covered head to foot in a great striped prayer-shawl, and near the two-wheeled cart he stood on a platform of bricks and chanted from the Hundredth Psalm: “The Lord is good. His mercy is everlasting. His truth shall endure forever.”
Thus the service began.
Shimeon walked back to Tiberias with her. A golden moon had come up over the hills, and in its light they walked without haste and at first in silence. Berenice was thinking of a good many things, and it occurred to her that Shimeon also had one or two matters on his mind, and when finally she spoke it had to be at least in a measure of derision—“For I know something of people, too,” she said, “and the world is what it is, more or less the open gut of a stuck pig.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” he agreed.
“Is there another way? Is that the Garden of Eden back there?”
“No—only a farm.”
“No hate, jealousy, lust in the House of Hillel?”
“Yes—all the things that human beings edify themselves with. We only try not to make it admirable.”
“Then where and precisely how did thi
s house come into being? Didn’t I hear the stories of Hillel, the ragged boy from Babylon? But now poverty is forgotten, isn’t it?”
“We make no virtue of poverty,” Shimeon shrugged. “There are the sects of Shammai that do, but we see no benediction in hunger or degradation.”
“And your wealth—property, cattle, food—where does the food come from?” she demanded stridently.
“Berenice,” he said, “we are no threat to you or your house. People give us food—as they gave us land and the house—so that the school may exist and that there be a place of Hillel. My grandfather never asked, but neither did he refuse what was given. Why do you want to doubt us and hate us?”
“Why should I hate you?” she shrugged.
Shimeon made no answer to that, and they walked on in silence; but things gnawed at her and irritated her, and finally she burst out, “You know how you make me feel?—like a barbarian—and all that honey flow of sanctimonious talk of love! Oh, you make me sick with it!”
Still no answer from Shimeon, and she quickened her pace. But a while later he asked her why.
“Why what?”
“Why do we make you sick with our talk?”
“Because it’s a lie.”
“In our teachings, all lies contain an element of truth—”
“I really couldn’t care less about what you teach, and I don’t think I want to talk about it.”
So again they walked on in silence, and presently she felt his hand touching her, the back of his hand brushing the back of hers, and she began to tighten like a wild animal aware of danger. Then he took her hand. She did not draw it away, but it lay limp. She was tight and tense, and her fear had no point of origin.