by Tuvia Fogel
“It’s a pity your astrolabium can’t help us down here, isn’t it, Yehezkel?”
“You’ve done it again!” cried Yehezkel. “It’s as if my brain needed your thoughts to move!” He searched his pocket and pulled out the pouch with the loadstone and its calamus. “You’re right, the astrolabium can’t help us, but we will still ‘navigate’ our way into the Temple!”
In minutes, the sailor rabbi poured some of their drinking water into a hollow in a stone, floated the calamus on it and determined where west was. The last people there had been the Jerusalem rabbis who deciphered the Parchment before them, and he felt sure they had not rebuilt the wall to perfection. Galatea watched as he used a knife to carve off a twig from their torch and lit it.
“Even a weak puff of air will move a small flame,” he explained and began to run the twig along the west wall, very slowly, a finger’s breadth from the stone. It wasn’t long before the flame moved, and he found the crack through which a breath of air came.
For the next half hour, they worked up a sweat demolishing the small but well-packed pile of stones blocking the entry of the tunnel. At one point, she realized that one of his grunts was a suppressed laugh.
“Why do you laugh?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s nothing worthwhile . . . ” said he.
“Let me be the judge of that, Yehezkel.”
“It’s just that Saracen letters help me search aboveground, and Christian catacombs give me access belowground. I feel a hand over my head, if you know what I mean.”
“What I do know is that you’re starting to prophesize, too, Yehezkel, because the hand you’ll feel over your head in a minute will be mine!”
Their laughter echoed down the black gallery that had slowly opened up before them. “Now what? Do we count 395 steps?” she asked, her breath getting shorter.
“Mmh . . . we can try that, too,” said he. “But we can’t be sure this precise point is the Sacrifice of the Heart. But if the tunnel follows the viaduct above, then the Golden Gate must be above its midpoint.”
“True. But how do we find its midpoint?” she wondered.
“I thought we would come back here with a long . . . a seriously long string and unfurl it as we advance. If the tunnel, as I think, leads to a point under the Kodesh Kedoshim, I will recognize the place, and measuring half the string we unfurled would tell us where the tunnel’s midpoint is.”
“But Yehezkel, where will we find a piece of string a quarter of a league long?”
“The weavers in the market will tie thin twine together for us until the ball is big enough for the job.”
“Maybe,” said she. “But please, let’s go back up now. I’m shattered, dirty, and starting to choke. I feel the weight of earth above my head.”
“I know what you mean; it’s like being halfway to Hell. This torch is nearly out anyway. Let’s go!”
They returned with the twine two days later and found the gallery to be wider, straighter, and better finished than they expected. The smooth rectangular stones of the walls all looked the same, so if the oil was hidden behind one of them, they would have to know precisely at which point of the tunnel it would be worth looking for the right stone to dislodge.
They counted 395 steps, all the while unfurling the twine and feeling like the ancient Greek hero hunting the Minotaur. When the count was up, they examined the stones by the light of the torch. Finding nothing, they walked on. As they did, Yehezkel turned to her and said, “Galatea, do you know what we just did? We entered the Holy Temple’s courtyard through the Gate of Mercy—even if underground. And what’s more, we entered it from the east, from the Mount of Olives! We just did something prophecies are full of!”
The thought had never really left his mind since first entering it during the ride to Jerusalem, but only now, as he walked down the tunnel for a second time, unfurling twine, did he consider the outrageous idea that he, Yehezkel ben Yoseph, might unknowingly, unwillingly even, be the Messiah of David.
“Rav Pinhas’s words fifteen years ago were so precise; he said: ‘I believe your journey, like Ezekiel’s, will take you into the Temple’s courtyards.’ His prophecy is coming true. If I also find the confession, will that mean I am the one they’ve all been waiting for?”
Yehezkel turned and saw Galatea looking at him, no fear whatsoever in her eyes. He took her hand for a moment and then went back to unfurling the twine as they walked on. As he’d feared in his heart of hearts, when most of the twine was gone, the tunnel ended abruptly in a pile of rubble collapsed from above. They looked at each other wordlessly, bitter disappointment in their eyes.
“Perhaps when the Romans set the Temple on fire,” he said at last, “the falling stones made things collapse down here, too. But if you ask me, that’s not it. I’m sure the high priest ordered the destruction of the tunnels, so that the hiding places could not be reached.”
Their ball of twine was useless now; they dejectedly wound it up as they retraced their steps.
To make matters worse, Yehezkel couldn’t help pursuing his messianic musings. “Would a pile of rubble have blocked the real Messiah?”
CHAPTER 29
HINE NATATI LACHEM
Behold I Have Given You
JERUSALEM, MARCH 1220–NISSAN 4980
Galatea was cooking, alone in the big kitchen in the farmhouse in Marsiliana. They had been married for five years and had a son and a daughter. Yehezkel, for marrying a Christian, was no longer a rabbi, while Galatea, for marrying a Jew, was no longer a nun. Excommunicated by their respective communities, they lived on a hill in Maremma, a backwater in the south of Tuscia. He’d been in Outremer for six months, and she was doing her best to raise Moshe and Francesca as little Averroists.
A noise in the yard made her turn around. His big shoulders blocked the evening light in the doorway, and she ran to him. The vision dissolved. “I really must get a grip on myself,” mumbled Galatea.
She was standing with Gudrun, Albacara, and Marco in the Saracen cemetery just outside the Golden Gate. Albacara’s husband of a week reminded them of how the Virgin’s parents, Joachim and Anne, met at that gate when she’d just found out she was pregnant. As she listened to the story, Galatea drifted into a daydream, as she so often did in those last days before Passover 4980.
Yehezkel, too, despite the upset in the tunnel, hadn’t been able to dismiss the blasphemous thought that he might be the Messiah. In fact, he’d even found verses in Ezekiel predicting what the Ishmaelites were doing. Then He brought me back to the outer gate of the sanctuary which faces toward the east, but it was shut. And the Lord said to me, ‘This gate shall be shut; it shall not be opened, and no man shall enter by it. As for the Prince, because he is the Prince, he may sit in it to eat bread before the Lord; he shall enter by way of the vestibule of the gateway. Could the little hall at the bottom of the stairwell be Ezekiel’s “vestibule”?
He told no one but briefly considered bringing some bread to eat in the tunnel next time.
Rav Shimshon argued that if the tunnel no longer reached its destination under the Kodesh Kedoshim, they would have to calculate its total length from Scripture to find its midpoint. So they pored over the Book of Kings for Solomon’s Temple and the Talmud tractate of Middot for Herod’s.
Yehezkel drew a map of esplanade and Temple, correcting details of boundaries if they didn’t agree with Galatea’s dream, and marked the distances from Scripture: Court of the Women, 135 cubits; Court of the Israelites, 11 cubits; Court of the Priests, 127 cubits; Temple building, 60 cubits. Total distance from eastern to western wall of the Temple’s perimeter: 333 cubits. They both liked that number.
Now came the tricky part. Yehezkel knew the dimensions of the esplanade from the Waqf, and used the geometry of a trapeze to calculate its width at the point of the Golden Gate and the Dome of the Spirits: it was 546 cubits. The difference between 333 and 546 was divided between space in front of the Temple compound, between the Gate of Mercy and the entrance
, called Court of the Gentiles, and space behind the Temple, a corridor running between the rear of the building and the western edge of the esplanade.
In the end, the length of half the tunnel was determined by how that difference of 213 cubits was split between space in front and space behind the Temple, a numerical conundrum that gave them no rest in the last days before the feast. Yehezkel drew the esplanade over and over, thinking to himself that he was obeying Ezekiel to the letter. Make known to them the design of the temple and its arrangement, its exits and its entrances . . . write it down in their sight.
Feeling close to Elisha, they also didn’t neglect the kabbalistic approach, playing with numbers and letters to see if 213 could be split in a meaningful way. In this feverish state they walked around Jerusalem, both stepping in and out of private chimeras, while the city around them prepared for her messianic—nay, apocalyptic Passover.
Despite her lack of walls, hundreds of Jews were toiling back to Jerusalem, unafraid of finding death there; in fact, content if their dust might finally mingle with the soil of their native land. Galatea was happy to find that Christian Easter, to be discreetly celebrated in the Holy Sepulchre, would fall two days after Passover, so that she could accept Rav Shimshon’s invitation to attend their seder, the ritual Passover supper. Yehezkel told her of the secret seder in Torcello the night she’d fallen in the lagoon, and she found it hard to believe how much her life had changed in one year.
Easter, for Latin pilgrims, was so low key as to be clandestine. Salah ad-Din’s successors treated Greek monks as more legitimate than Latins—after all, they were in the city from before the arrival of the Franks—and allowed them to run the surviving churches. The Greeks celebrated Resurrection Sunday on the same date, but their strange Holy Fire rituals made the few Latins in Jerusalem feel like they were witnessing the rites of another religion.
As for Galatea, celebrating the Resurrection while searching for the confession that denied it ever happened was no easy position to be in. Gudrun and Albacara knew that the parchment she and Yehezkel were looking for led to an object that had belonged to Jesus Christ—maybe the Holy Grail itself!—but Galatea never mentioned the confession to either woman.
One day, close to Easter, she looked at them and thought, “What if we find it? Will that be the gift I bring my sisters from the Holy Land? The denial of their faith? These are not the epochal events I was destined to be involved in! But no, I must keep faith. Brother Francesco will find a way to turn the denial of Christ’s Resurrection into its affirmation and definitive proof!”
Her theological quandary was painfully obvious to Yehezkel, who knew it would only be resolved, one way or the other, by the use that would be made of the confession. Would the real Messiah take it to Damascus, as he’d agreed to do with Alain? Would he not instead bring it back to Rav Eleazar of Worms, to use as a weapon in keeping Domingo’s paws off the Talmud?
Then, the day before the seder, Gudrun sighted Frutolf.
She’d gone to pray in the Holy Sepulchre by herself, every strand of blonde hair tucked away, as she’d learned to do among Saracens, when suddenly, in the small crowd that filled the church in the middle of Holy Week, she’d glimpsed his big, square head, a foot above those of other pilgrims, turning one way and the other as if looking for someone. She’d ducked out of sight, her heart nearly bursting through her ribs, and managed to leave before the Teuton, disguised as a devout German pilgrim, could see her. Or at least she hoped she had.
The news threw them into near panic. They hadn’t yet found the hiding place in the tunnel, and here was Bois-Guilbert’s henchman, looking for them. The Templar was Domingo’s man, and it was the end of March, so the Spaniard must know that the Old Man and Yehezkel had met. There was nothing Domingo wouldn’t do to stop them from finding the confession. The only logical conclusion was that the Teuton was there to eliminate them before they could reach the prize.
Yehezkel sought an escape route. He procured three donkeys, since Albacara had decided she would remain in Jerusalem with Marco. Then he asked Rav Shimshon for an exemption from the prohibition to travel during the Passover Holy Day, should they have to run for their lives. He also asked which direction it would be best to take. Rav Shimshon advised against the roads to the sea, whether to Jaffa or Acre. Better to go north to the Galilee, or south to Askelon and Gaza. The German knight, when he found out they had left, would almost certainly charge down to the coast.
Finally, the 27th of March arrived, Passover Eve. The Jerusalem rabbis, surrounded by families and devotees, would spend the whole night commemorating the Children of Israel’s liberation from slavery in Egypt. Eighteen people attended the seder in Rav Shimshon’s house, just as in Torcello a year earlier, and even there, on the rich table laid out before them, Yehezkel and Galatea kept a wrinkled copy of the map he’d drawn of the Temple’s courtyards.
Galatea couldn’t help thinking, several times during the meal, that this was the Jewish feast Jesus had been celebrating in the Last Supper. She followed the songs and prayers with as much concentration as she could muster, Yehezkel leaning over now and then to explain what Rav Shimshon was doing.
Late in the night, when they had finished eating and the last of the four ritual glasses of wine were poured, Galatea felt the habitual signs of a vision taking over. She pulled weakly at Yehezkel’s sleeve, and he turned, noticing immediately that she was an even whiter shade of her usual pallor.
Rav Shimshon finished the blessing, and everyone raised the fourth cup and drank from it. Yehezkel, thinking some wine would help her overcome queasiness, urged Galatea to do the same. She did, and as the cool wine entered her mouth she felt it turn into warm, dense blood. She gagged, managed to swallow, and then slowly sank into the visio secunda.
Yehezkel sensed something was wrong. He and another medicus among the guests fussed over her, but though she breathed regularly and sat upright, staring ahead, Galatea was no longer with them.
MOUNT OF OLIVES, MARCH A.D. 66
Some of the trials conducted by the Sanhedrin’s judges shortly before the revolt against Rome concerned accusations of blasphemy and heresy. Not surprisingly, some of the alleged heretics were followers of Yeshu ha-Nozri. These fiery preachers, mostly Galileans, claimed for years after Yeshu’s death that he was the real Messiah of David and had not died but was resurrected.
Many claimants to messiahood filled the streets in those times of oppression and martyrdom, and the Sanhedrin viewed them as harmless exponents of a mild heresy. But lately some of them, influenced by the converted pagan Saul of Tarsus, started preaching that Yeshu was the Son of God, and that his blood had been a salvific sacrifice. This new notion was too much for Sadducees and Pharisees, and the trials began.
That cool spring day, with skirmishes between those zealous for the Law and Roman troops already spreading like fire on the mountains around Jerusalem, Hanina bar Hezekiah, a senior judge and respected sage, with five of his seventy colleagues, was passing judgment on three such paganizers. For political reasons, the trial was being held in the open air, in a meadow on the Mount of Olives, instead of in the Chamber of Hewn Stones in the Temple, the Sanhedrin’s courtroom.
Standing before the six judges was Shimon bar Cleophas, Yeshu’s first cousin and leader of a group that had recently started calling themselves Christians. On his left stood Yohanan ben Zebadyah, known among the heretics as Yeshu’s beloved disciple, while on his right was Mattityahu, an acolyte who’d only joined the group after the Romans executed Yeshu.
Unfurled on the table before Hanina was a Greek parchment, a life of Yeshu that the heretics called a Gospel, redacted by one Luke of Antioch, a pagan disciple of Saul. The parchment had been confiscated from Shimon, and Hanina read it. He immediately recognized Ezekiel’s touching prophecy of the Messiah’s anointing, lifted straight out of the prophet’s book and, in the heretical Greek writing, fulfilled in the person of Yeshu, their Messiah.
In the last few months, Hanina h
ad saved Ezekiel’s book from becoming apocryphal by reconciling certain statements the wayward prophet made with the dictates of Torah. A week earlier, after reading the heretical Gospel, he and other sages felt forced to remove from the canonical version of the book the page the heretics used, lest it help them gain converts to their Greek “salvation.”
But the fanatics did something else, too, something much worse than stealing a passage from a prophet, or even calling a man Son of God, something for which Hanina was about to emit, for the first time in his life, a death sentence. He stood up. “Are you really in possession of the vial of Holy Oil that was stolen from the Temple thirty years ago?” he asked Shimon. “Do you realize that in order to anoint your poor sacrificial lamb, you rendered impure the oil that is meant to anoint the true Messiah?”
Bar Cleophas looked at him with a forgiving, almost paternal smile. “Yes, we have the alabaster jar, but we did not steal it.”
Hanina sat down heavily, his mind searching for a way to enforce the Law yet save the heretics’ lives. “By anointing an ordinary Jew with that oil,” he said at last, “you’ve condemned yourselves to be cut off from the Children of Israel in eternity, as it is written. But tell me, if you want your lives to be spared, do you still have the oil?”
“Rabbi, your hatred of Rome prevents you from seeing God’s will. The Holy Oil has already anointed the true Messiah, and he has already come back from the dead and risen to Heaven, just like Eliyahu did.”
Hanina sized him up from head to toe as if he would have to wrestle him to the ground. “Shimon bar Cleophas,” he said then, at once angry and sad. “I am seventy years old, and in this short life I have already seen six of these ‘saviors’ come down from the Galilee. Six, do you hear? Each one of them lived in poverty and condemned wealth, spoke in riddles, chased away evil spirits, healed the maimed, and loved to argue with priests in the Temple! Guess what, Shimon: half of them met a grisly end, and the other half were never heard of again. Tell me, what was so special about this Yeshu ha-Nozri that you decided he was the real Messiah of David?”