by Tuvia Fogel
Shimon was about to answer, but Yohanan, the beloved disciple, preceded him.
“Yeshu wasn’t just the Messiah of David, he was God’s only Son, and he defeated death!”
“Have you lost your mind, man?” shouted Hanina. “Don’t you hear, in your own words, the idolatry that snaked its way into your heart? What speaks through you are those cursed Greek divinities, wrenching you from your people! And for what? So you can try to make a God out of a man who will be forgotten in two generations?”
Yohanan lifted his robe off his threadbare sandals, as if to walk away, and said, “There will not be two more generations, Hanina bar Hezekiah! We will return the oil, so that you and the Sanhedrin will not take our lives—but only so that we can spend them spreading the Truth, certainly not because we wouldn’t be ready to sacrifice them to witness Yeshu!”
Hanina bar Hezekiah intended to hide the oil, the page from Ezekiel, and Samuel’s horn in the niche he’d prepared at the midway point of the tunnel, precisely below the gate through which the Messiah will enter the Temple, so he would find them there. But after hearing the dangerous talk of the heretics, he’d decided to punish their vainglory; he went into the Sanhedrin’s archive and retrieved the parchment he’d signed himself, thirty years earlier, condemning to thirty-nine lashes the thieves who confessed to removing Yeshu’s body from the tomb. They clearly said that Yeshu’s followers paid them so they could claim he’d been resurrected.
Hanina added a few words on the end about the same heretics stealing the Holy Oil and, that very night, went into the tunnel dug under the Valley of Jehosaphat by his father’s namesake, King Hezekiah, almost eight hundred years before. Though the Messiah wouldn’t need documents to show heretics their error, Hanina was contributing to the realization of God’s plan, described in detail by Ezekiel: the Messiah will come from the Mount of Olives and enter the Temple from the east, to be anointed there by the high priest or by a prophet. As he descended the spiral stairway, Hanina thought to himself, “This is not the Temple reconsecrated by the Maccabees, rightful priests, and kings of Judah. This sanctuary was built by the same Herod who massacred the whole Hasmonean dynasty, an Idumean whom only the impure call king! But down here everything is as Hezekiah left it, down here the Messiah will find things in purity, waiting for him. Then Ezekiel’s prophecy can be truly fulfilled!”
He reached the midway point of the tunnel, removed a smooth triangular stone in the left wall—all other stones in the tunnel were rectangular—and placed the two parchments, the oil, and Samuel’s ivory horn inside the niche. Then he carefully replaced the stone and climbed back up to face the inevitable war.
When she came to five minutes later, Galatea smiled weakly and apologized for having worried them.
Then, secretly proud of the kabbalistic feat in front of her teacher, she grabbed the stylus and drew a —tzadiq, the eighteenth letter, which is worth 90 and means “just”—on the corridor behind the Temple.
It took Yehezkel a second. If there were 90 cubits behind the Temple, then there were 123 in front of it, and 333 plus 123 makes 456, the number of steps they would have to count to reach the hiding place.
Galatea leaned back in her chair, exhausted, and whispered, “The real radius of the map is Bereshit.”
The gematria of Bereshit, they both knew, is 913, and twice 456 is 912. In other words, Elisha was saying that the tunnel is “Bereshit” long, and between its two halves of 456 cubits is a central cubit housing the hiding place.
“HA!” cried Yehezkel. “Of course, Bereshit! That’s what you dreamed in Torcello!”
They were both too excited to spend the rest of the night at the seder table. Besides, if they found the confession, leaving Jerusalem at night would give them an advantage over the German knight that they sorely needed. All this went through their minds without their needing to exchange a word.
They stood up. “I’ll get the donkeys, you get Gudrun,” said Yehezkel, smiling at the involuntary jest.
He was so busy considering possible scenarios—including the need for some silver dinars to bribe the mamluk guarding the church against parament thieves—that it didn’t occur to him they were going to the Gethsemane in the middle of the night after eating their Passover meal; in other words, doing exactly what Jesus did on the night he was arrested.
Galatea, instead, remembered the phrase in Mark, And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives, and once again felt she was involved, with Yehezkel and Francesco, in Christ’s Second Advent, to which this reenactment of the Gospels was a prelude.
The Passover moon was as full as it had been in Torcello, its light bathing the deserted valley as the three led their donkeys across it. Everything went smoothly, and after the mamluk took a generous baksheesh to turn his back, they descended the stairway to the little hall. Gudrun suffered noisily from the weight of earth above her, but once they started counting steps down the tunnel, its walls flat and regular, Galatea told her to think they were in the corridor of a castle, and the girl calmed down a little.
As they counted the 456th step, Galatea gave out a little cry. “Look! There, on the left, one of the stones is a triangle!”
In a minute, Yehezkel had pried out the triangular stone using the chisel he’d brought. They stepped back from the putrid, twelve-hundred-year-old puff of air that emerged from the niche, and Yehezkel carefully took out a parchment, an alabaster jar, and an ivory horn. While he read the parchment, Galatea turned the two objects in her hand by the light of the torch, still unsure of what she was holding.
From the moment she’d solved the enigma, Yehezkel considered the possibility of denying that the confession was the confession. Now, as he read Hanina’s letter, he saw the stroke of luck that would allow him to do so. What he held wasn’t the thieves’ confession, but the record of the sentence meted out to them, though it did say that the thieves confessed. The stroke of luck was that the judge who signed it was Hanina bar Hezekiah! It would never occur to Galatea that the man who hid the oil and the judge who condemned the thieves were the same man!
“As I suspected all along,” he said, trying to inject disappointment in his voice, “there has never been a confession. This parchment, written by Hanina, only describes what he was hiding here and why.”
“Mmh . . . I was afraid it would come to this,” said Galatea. “I simply have to take your word for it that this parchment is not the confession.”
“No, no, look! You know enough Hebrew by now to recognize Hanina’s name! Look at the signature at the bottom of this letter!” he said, handing her the parchment.
Galatea examined it and, in effect, recognized without much difficulty the name of the sage whom Elisha accused of hiding the page from Ezekiel—which, of course, was no longer there, having been taken to Egypt. She thought of the rabbis’ words in the letter in the geniza: they’d left “the other two things” for when the Messiah would come, so those must be the two objects she was holding.
“Why did Hanina hide the oil?” she asked, apparently mollified, in reality breathtakingly relieved. “Does he say anything about that? And what is this horn?”
Yehezkel had discussed at length with Rav Shimshon the probable nature of the oil and decided to be sincere about what Hanina wrote. “That is the Holy Oil of anointment,” he said, “compounded by Moses according to the art of the perfumer. It anointed every king of Judah and Israel. And this,” he took the horn from her hand, “is the horn of the prophet Samuel, of which it is written, Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers; and the Spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward.”
Galatea and Gudrun, certain that something hidden all the way down there could not be a fake relic, were struck dumb. The oil that anointed King David! The horn of a biblical prophet!
Yehezkel hadn’t finished his little show. “But that’s not all. Hanina writes that the Holy Oil ended up in the hands of Yeshu’s followers, who used it to a
noint him as their Messiah—which is both why he decided to hide it and, between you and me, why a Christian Elisha later drew a map to find it again.”
Only then did Galatea realize that the vial she was holding was an alabaster jar! The thought that this was the oil used by Mary Magdalene in Bethany took a moment to sink into the minds of the two nuns. Galatea was the first one to give out a gasp and fall to her knees. “Hallelujah!” she cried. “I’ve lived to hold the oil that Mary Magdalene poured on Christ’s head!”
Seeking a gesture of worship greater than anything she’d done before, Galatea placed the jar on the ground in front of her and, like she’d seen Mohammedans do, stretched out full length before it on the floor of the tunnel, her face touching the ground. As she stood up again, she said, “I can die happy now; I’ve been absolved of all my sins!”
“I would rather you didn’t, my friend, so let’s put all three things in the pouch and get out of here!”
They did as he suggested and rushed out of the tunnel.
They rode north along the Kidron Valley under the full moon, and Jerusalem was soon behind them as they headed across Samaria to the Galilee, by way of Nablus. Yehezkel had told Rav Shimshon glumly that even if their destination confounded the German, a man and two women crossing the mountains with no escort were asking for trouble. In a sense, he thought, it was almost safer for them to be traveling at night.
“Don’t look so worried, Yehezkel,” she called out to him from her donkey. “The dangers are there, I know, but we carry two relics that would be enough to protect us from Salah ad-Din himself!”
“If only it were true . . .” thought Yehezkel. “Actually the third relic, the one I’ve lied to you about, which can vanquish Christianity, makes us the most sought-after little caravan in all of Outremer!”
CHAPTER 30
VAYEHI CHEN
And It Was So
NAZARETH, 2ND APRIL 1220–19TH NISSAN 4980
The power of the relics must have been great, for they were not attacked in the four days it took them to cross Samaria. They decided to pass through Nazareth, not because they knew where they were headed, but because the nuns’ yearnings were those of all Christian pilgrims. On Wednesday, they sighted the town, nestled at the foot of its green hill.
Yehezkel argued that even in the absence of the confession, they should take the oil, the horn, and the copy he’d made of Ezekiel’s prophecy to Damascus anyway, for if Domingo ever got his hands on them, he would use them in massive campaigns to convert Jews. Galatea agreed but suggested they stop in Nazareth first, since it was on their way, and Christ spent his childhood there.
Yehezkel was strangely quiet for most of the journey. As they approached the town, he said, “I was supposed to find proof of the Talmud’s antiquity, and what did I find instead? A page from a prophet plundered by the Evangelists.” He smiled wistfully. “Fine example of a Jewish hero, aren’t I?”
She was silent and then said softly, out of Gudrun’s earshot, “You’re the bravest man that ever lived.”
He drove his donkey next to hers and took her hand but said nothing.
After taking Jerusalem, the Saracens drove Christians out of towns in what had been the Latin Kingdom, including Nazareth, but in the three decades since, a few had returned. Also many Jews arrived after the Latins left, so that the town’s population was now as mixed as Jerusalem’s, but Greek and Syriac Christians there weren’t treated nearly as harshly as in the Holy City.
They rode into the market square. A big terebinth tree stood in its center, its branches forming a roof, ten feet off the ground, wide enough for twenty people to shelter from the sun. Twice that many were gathered around a figure. They hopped off their mounts and went closer. All three were surprised to see Brother Francesco preaching to the crowd as Illuminato kneeled by the tree roots, praying, but in Galatea’s case it was more than mere surprise. Here was the returning Messiah . . . and the Holy Oil of anointment was in the pouch hanging at her side!
When he saw them approach, Francesco gestured to his audience to bear with him a moment and ran to greet them. He embraced the rabbi and bowed to the nuns, without looking into Galatea’s eyes.
The crowd listening to him was a fresco depicting Ayubbid Outremer. Closest to the tree—because they understood Latin and many knew of the holy man from Assisi—were Latin Christians who had returned to Nazareth. In the next layer were a dozen Jews who had fled Jerusalem a year earlier, who also understood him and sensed the Christian preacher’s thirst for martyrdom. Milling outside the two groups was a crowd of Saracens, who understood not a word of the friar’s sermon but knew from experience that this was another infidel mystic trying to convert them to his faith. Most of them hoped it would end badly, preferably with some kafir blood being shed.
“My cherished friends! What a perfect delight it is to see you again!” beamed Francesco.
Now they were closer, they could see the toll his ailments had taken in the six months since Färiskür. His eyes and smile were still arresting, but every inch of his body exuded weariness.
Sitting under the terebinth, he told them of his pilgrimage. “I fled Damietta in November. Seeing what the two-year siege did to the city was painful, but even worse, Rabbi, was watching the Army of the Cross once they were done plundering. The greed and cruelty of supposed ‘brothers in Christ’ was too much, so we went to Acre.” The friar laughed, his way of saying that Acre hadn’t been much better.
“In the end, I chose to obey the pope and not go up to Jerusalem in time of war.”
“That’s why we didn’t see you,” said Galatea. “We spent two months in the Holy City.” She paused. “I’m . . . sincerely sorry you could not complete your pilgrimage.”
“On the contrary, Mother, I am about to complete my earthly pilgrimage!” said the little friar. “A week ago, in Acre, I received news that in the faraway lands of the Maghreb, five mendicants of our order won the palm of martyrdom. Now I can claim with certainty that we have at least five true friars minor!”
Yehezkel and Galatea didn’t like what those words implied. Yehezkel thought, “If he insults the Prophet again to ‘win the palm of martyrdom,’ I won’t be able to pull off the trick in the sultan’s tent with this crowd!”
Galatea said, “I hope I’ve misunderstood the intent behind your words, Brother Francesco piccolo. In any case, you and Brother Illuminato look like you haven’t eaten in days, so if you’ll excuse us, Gudrun and I will just go over to those stalls and buy some bread.”
Yehezkel caught her eye and discreetly pointed to the pouch. She smiled reassuringly, stood up, took Gudrun’s hand and walked off.
When they were gone, Francesco said to Yehezkel, a new hint of desperation in his voice, “There was also a letter from Chiara waiting in Acre, Yehezkel. Apart from the turmoil letters from that saintly woman always cause in my soul, she writes of worrying developments in the order. Satan has sneaked his way in there, Rabbi, and I’m too weak to face him down. It will be a greater help to them if I offer up my life for Christ here, trying to convert the Saracens.”
Yehezkel considered his friend’s position from as many angles as he could and then said, “No, Francesco. I can feel how tired you are, but martyrdom, how can I put it . . . is also a ‘saintly’ way of quitting! If you really want to imitate Christ”—it was the first time Yehezkel had ever used the word—“well, in my opinion, what he would do is bow his head in humble submission, go home, and save the order.”
Francesco looked at him like the spiritual teacher he’d always had to do without. “And when they force me to ‘correct brothers who err,’ like the ones who want to stay married to Lady Poverty, what will I do then?”
“Ah, Domingo tried that one on me! He used Ezekiel’s verse on the wicked man’s blood being on my hands if I don’t correct his ways. Not that he was looking for Cathars to burn—not that night, anyway—but he would have liked a rabbi’s endorsement of his interpretation of the prophet.”
“I’m sure he didn’t get it,” smiled Francesco. “How did you pull Ezekiel to your side . . . Ezekiel?”
“Simply by reciting the next verse to him. But if you do warn the wicked person to turn from his ways and he does not do so, he will die for his sin, but you will be saved. The prophet makes it clear that a good example is sufficient to absolve one from responsibility in the wicked man’s conduct.”
“An inspired exegesis, my brother. But I already know they’ll find a way to blame me. All they do is keep asking me for a Rule the pope will approve. A Rule, a Rule . . . ” The shabby little monk threw his arms in the air, discouraged. “As if the light my friars must spread in this world could be spelled out in the third subsection of the second paragraph of a Rule.”
As the two mystics under the tree discussed Francesco’s quandary, the third one, with her younger sister, had already bought a large pita, still warm and fragrant. But before going back, Galatea wandered in the square for a while, reflecting on the real reason she decided to buy this bread. It was because the Gospels said that when Mary poured the oil over him, Jesus was eating in a Pharisee’s house in Bethany, while Ezekiel’s hidden page specified, And the Son of man sat down to eat bread.
In those twelve months—unbeknownst to her—Yehezkel’s Talmudic debating style had rubbed off on the abbess, and she started arguing for and against the crazy idea that had entered her head the minute she’d seen Francesco under the tree: to anoint the New Christ with the same Holy Oil that once anointed Jesus!
“No one deserves to be anointed with this oil more than he does!” she thought. “Besides, it may be the opportunity Divine Providence is giving me to use it. And what of the choir-like repetition of Gospel circumstances? I ran out from my Passover meal in the night, and to the Gethsemane! Jesus was anointed before entering Jerusalem to seek the palm of martyrdom, which Francesco so clearly yearns for.”