The Silence of Gethsemane

by Michel Benoît

  To live a life as unruffled as the surface of the lake, whose unchanging calm ought to have been the backdrop to my existence.

  Then came my meeting with John the Baptist, and the life that had been mapped out for me was shattered into a million pieces. Cutting me off from everyone, unexpectedly reintroducing me to myself.

  The Pharisees… among the mists of childhood, they are the only memory that stands out. In our society, the eldest son receives a good education. Not required to work in the fields or mend fishing nets like most of the boys I was friends with, I spent far more time than they did in the cramped little room that led off the synagogue, where local rabbis handed down knowledge which left me in awe.

  They taught Hebrew, a tongue similar to the Aramaic we use but which is rarely spoken. Although a dead language, it was essential if one was to read the Law, the mother and birth-giver of the Jewish people scattered throughout the Empire. “Wherever there is a Jew, there is the Law,” our masters would drum into us. “And in whatever place Adonai gives him life, a Jew will find his homeland in the Law.” I was privileged to have been born and to live in the Land of Israel, but only by diligently reading the Law would I become a real Jew. For my mother and father this justified all the sacrifices, the little gifts that were regularly given to the Pharisees, who were poorer than Job himself.

  Their thinking was ruled by the memory of the great rabbi Hillel, who died twenty years ago. People say he studied in Jerusalem for forty years before going on to teach for another forty. A mild and gentle man, his interpretation of the Law was instilled into some of my teachers, who lived among the common people, while the strictness of his rival, Shammai, was much in vogue with the nationalists who were always stirring up trouble both in the towns and countryside. It is possible that Hillel’s open-minded, tolerant approach, in which I was immersed from an early age, had a marked influence on my own teaching without my realizing it.

  Day after day I studied the faded old scrolls of the Law, trying to fathom the regular-shaped letters by which I would gain access to the inner sanctum of Jewish identity.

  Until the Sabbath day that no first-born son from a respectable family is able to avoid, when, in a packed synagogue, I stepped onto the dais facing the congregation. In the front row were the Pharisees, behind them the menfolk, and, in the shadows at the very back, the women, all wearing veils, among them my mother, who was bursting with pride. I took the gold-banded pen in my trembling hand, placed the tip on the first line of the scroll that lay open in front of me, and in my clear, high, child’s voice I read one or two lines. My father, who knew the passage off by heart, was silently enunciating each and every word to himself, shaking with fright in case I made a mistake. When I looked up, he was so filled with emotion that he couldn’t join in with the resounding Amen that made me a full member of God’s Chosen People.

  I remember the pilgrimages we used to make to the Temple for the Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles. Whichever direction you approach from, Jerusalem is the capital that you go up to with all your heart and soul. When we were met with the unforgettable sight of the city nestling round the Tower of David, surmounted – or rather crushed by the vast edifice that was still in the process of being built, we would stop for a moment. My father would put his prayer shawl on his head and we would sing the Psalms of Ascents, which had once brought hope to Jews in exile by the rivers of Babylon, helped renew their will to live.

  For a simple country boy there was too much for my eyes and ears to take in all at once. In the shade beneath the columns that run along the esplanade of Solomon, the Scribes and Pharisees would converse all day long. Even had I dared go over to where they were gathered and listen to them, I wouldn’t have understood a word of their pronouncements, they seemed to belong to a completely different race from the Pharisees in our village.

  Unbeknown to me I was hearing the voices, catching glimpses of the faces of the very people who would eventually be responsible for me being where I am tonight. An outcast, hounded by the Jewish police for the words I have spoken, the people I have healed.

  Hounded, and now finally within their clutches in the darkness of this lonely olive grove.

  4

  Reading the Law from a book is one thing, but understanding its boundless connotations is quite another. As ancient as the Jewish people itself, the Law can only give meaning and structure to our everyday lives if it is constantly adapted. This is the Pharisees’ view and they act accordingly, unlike the Sadducees, those luminaries from Jerusalem for whom the Law is sufficient unto itself. They won’t allow a single letter to be added to it, not even the smallest one in the Jewish alphabet, the yod. To them the Law is more than the image of God – it is a perfect reflection of him. Just as Adonai is immutable, the Law that proceeds from him is inviolable, the incarnation of Divine Majesty. It is the very presence of God among his people.

  In contrast, the Pharisees spend every moment of their lives commenting on it. They maintain that by constantly moving forward they remain faithful to it, following the endless twists and turns of its complex argumentation, which they interpret using a strict set of rules. A single rabbi can challenge something that a whole succession of his forebears have already laid down, as long as he refers to the teachings that have gone before. Only build on what exists already. Add a stone, yes, but beware of digging the foundations of a new house in virgin soil, however humble it may be. Like all living things, the Law grows day by day – but it never gets any older. The Pharisees seek to help a single, unique being, born long ago from the mouth of God himself while bolts of lightning flashed round Mount Sinai, to develop and mature. We are born only once: to grow is to be yourself, while becoming someone else.

  To the Ten Commandments they added 613 precepts that provide a framework for every moment of a Jew’s life. My teachers, almost feverish with elation, or perhaps just out of breath, appeared to regard this number as fixed. Their every effort was dedicated to categorizing them, putting them in order of priority from the most to the least important, from the first to the last. In the Law, nothing is unimportant: for them, arranging the different levels in the pyramid of precepts is to establish order in the world and then to live by it.

  It was in this way that I learnt how to reason using a method which no other nation, no civilization apart from ours has ever been able to master. Respect for ancient traditions goes hand in hand with respect for the person with whom one is speaking. When he asks a question – which inevitably undermines the foundations of an edifice that is perfect by its very nature – it would be wrong to reply in a way which brings the discussion to a close, preventing the Law, as well as the other person, from developing. For a Pharisee, to live is constantly to challenge. To conclude the debate with an imperious assertion would be to obstruct a vital process.

  One question must always be answered with another. Greek and Roman philosophers try to throw their opponent off balance with the weight of their argument, to close the gap that has been opened up by his enquiries. The local Pharisees taught me to redress the balance by responding in kind: hence the questions meet each other halfway, and the answer appears of its own accord, clear and irrefutable, a ray of divine light illuminating the darkness of the human mind.

  Because of this process of argumentation, every Pharisee remains in constant conflict with all his fellows. Yet this doesn’t exclude any of them from the life-giving waters of the Law, that endless stream which irrigates our people, enriches them. Thanks to this, despite being small and insignificant, this people is alive – and will go on living for ever.

  Israel’s state of ceaseless and obligatory debate must always take place in public view. In a shady alleyway, in the village marketplace as much as under Solomon’s Gate, a discussion between two Jews about a point of the Law immediately draws a crowd of eager listeners who are aware that their presence represents the people as a whole, elected once and for all time. Thanks to them, Israel never stops questioning itself. At any ti
me of the day or night, any rabbi, whether he is the great Hillel himself or a humble man who teaches in a synagogue somewhere in Upper Galilee, can be stopped in the street by any Jew. Never does he regard this as a nuisance or an imposition: setting aside whatever he is doing, he addresses himself to the question at hand, and together he and the other person, be he king or beggar, open the floodgates of the Law.

  By allowing me to see them constantly engaged in it, the Pharisees in Capernaum taught me the solemn and subtle art of dispute. People say I am a past master at it. This was one of the reasons I became famous; it might also have been the cause of my downfall.

  5

  My father’s passing left not a trace, either in our village or my memory. One more Jew had departed from Eretz Israel having fulfilled his task of bringing sons into the world and teaching them to respect our traditions. I fasted on the appointed days, always carried out the ritual ablutions after going to the market, never ate without first purifying my hands, while the fragrant dish which my mother put on the table at every mealtime had first been meticulously washed inside and out by her personally. In this way nothing I put in my mouth could make me impure.

  This scrupulous observance of the purity laws wasn’t at all unusual; it was expected from a man who had assumed the mantle of Nazirite vows, more so than an ordinary Jew. They are undemanding rules, which allow us to retain our identity when living among Gentiles, where there is always a danger that our race might die out.

  These rules were taken to extremes, in a sense blown out of proportion by the Essenes whom I sometimes came across. Not the ones who live in closed communities north of the oasis at Ein Feshkha, on the barren shores of the Dead Sea, who choose to cut themselves off from the common run of humanity due to their bleak view of the world, which inspires the rest of us with a blend of admiration and disgust. With them, the requirements of ritual purity, which are regarded by ordinary Jews as beneficial, have been taken to such extremes that they seem beyond the capabilities of any human being; neither the Law nor the precepts require such severity. And if they advocate hatred for those who aren’t part of their group, it is probably because they are unable to love themselves. Witnessing their lack of moderation would help me develop the twofold commandment to love, which springs as naturally from the Law as it does from my own experience of God.

  But the Essenes whom I occasionally met were the ones who live in most towns and villages, and have jobs and families like the rest of us. The only thing that tends to set them apart is that they use a slightly different calendar to ours, and their unusually formal custom of scrupulously washing before meals. And, of course, they reject the form of worship used in the Temple in Jerusalem.

  Yet a growing number of Jews could no longer tolerate the outrageous sight of business being conducted within the Temple precincts: the grasping moneylenders, the price that had to be paid to procure God’s forgiveness by sacrificing an animal, the size and weight of which is designed above all to broadcast the wealth of the wealthy and the poverty of the poor. Because they declare themselves to be the purest of the pure, and staunchly refuse to make any concessions to that despised class, the higher clergy, the populace are well disposed towards the Essenes, a view I shared for a long time without really reflecting on it.

  It never occurred to me to join one of their desert communities, unlike some people I have never even been one to abide by their rules as part of everyday life. In any case, for me the question never arose: among the various yet distinct factions that exist within my native religion, it is the Pharisees for whom I felt the most natural affinity. They are the ones who educated me, trained me in their intellectual rigour, taught me everything I know. So eventually, by which time I had grown a short beard, I donned one of the robes they wear, edged with a fringe.

  On that day the child of the synagogue, the orphan with a family to look after, the respected craftsman whose services everyone needed, the ordinary young Jew from an ordinary Galilean village became one of those small, nameless Pharisees who travel round the countryside and the shores of the lake, passing on their love of the Law and the custom of contemplating it without ceasing.

  From that day on, everyone referred to me informally as Rabbi.

  6

  There now began the most anonymous period of my life, no longer lit by childhood grace, nor as yet by any sense of a calling.

  My brothers helped me in the workshop, but it was I who dealt with the clients. Some of them, especially those from Sepphoris, were clearly from a higher social class than me. These Hellenized Jews were very different from the ordinary people with whom I always felt comfortable and whose language I spoke. It wasn’t only the use of Greek, and the pride they took in using it, in which the barriers between us manifested themselves. They were from a different world, one to which the prospect of hard times was unknown, having avoided the difficulties faced by other Jews, first by becoming assimilated with the occupying forces and then their values.

  Yet is it really possible to talk of values, whether moral or spiritual? A sense of being master of all they survey, as well as the arrogance that comes from having a high opinion of oneself seems, for these social climbers, to have made unnecessary the disquiet that results from the constant questioning which gives structure to a Jew’s inner life. Blinded by the glittering prizes of wealth and power, the members of this elite behave disdainfully towards their fellow countrymen, who are still bound by the Law, and who as far as they are concerned don’t exist. The Zealots, who are constantly plotting to wipe them off the face of the earth, no longer regard them as patriots. While for the vast majority of people, who stand aside to let them pass by in their litters with the curtains closed, they are Jews only in name. Most of them collaborate quite overtly with the occupiers, collecting the taxes that burden us or running private estates belonging to wealthy landowners.

  Had I not been a small businessman, nothing would have brought me into contact with these people. Is it my provincial upbringing, which sets store by observing proprieties and good manners, or that I felt duty-bound to do so for commercial reasons? Outside our business relationship, I struck up friendships with some of these individuals who lived in a different world to mine, and who supported me materially when I began to travel around preaching. In their company I lost that reticence which simple people tend to show towards those from higher up the social scale, either out of shyness or to be ingratiating. I even lost much of my self-consciousness, which would later help me feel as much at ease with influential people as with ordinary working folk. These acquaintances of mine dazzled my companions, who thanks to me were invited to feasts where they stuffed themselves with food and drink the like of which they had never seen in their lives – which earned me a reputation, quite unfairly, as a glutton and a winebibber.

  I also managed to acquire a basic knowledge of Greek, which enabled me to make myself more or less understood to a Roman centurion whom I met somewhere on the road, as well as a Syrian woman whom I came across on the other side of our northern border.

  Because of the tricks played by my memory, I am now unable to see a direct connection between this admittedly long period of my life and the abrupt change of heart that might have led me here, to the night of my arrest.

  At the time, none of the directions I took seemed to lead anywhere. My self-knowledge was still hazy and ill defined, often as a result of a stereotypically Jewish way of life. I had already exceeded the age for starting a family as laid down by the Pharisees – every Jewish male knows that he was born incomplete, and that only by a union of the flesh with a woman can he achieve union with himself, with other people and with God.

  Women were never a matter of indifference to me, and I could see quite clearly that they weren’t just looking at me: they felt drawn to me, something that would eventually grow into the incredible devotion that some of them showed towards me. Erotic love, elevated by the Greeks and Romans to the level of the divine, is for the Jew simply a reflection �
�� although the most meaningful of all – of what his relationship with God will be at the end of time. A synthesis of one into the other, without commingling yet without impediment, a total communion that words cannot express, a happiness that to our bodies is inevitably fleeting yet which is never-ending. Inspired by the Psalms and the Song of Solomon, our most well-known rabbis speak without reservation about this sexual union, which they hold up as an example to young people and a duty for adults.

  But the years went by and still I didn’t marry. Of course, a voluntary and lifelong state of celibacy isn’t unknown among our people – although rare, it has always been both the concomitant and the crowning glory of the prophetic calling. Or occasionally – and equally rarely – a deliberate choice made by members of extremist sects, such as the desert Essenes. Yet I wasn’t an Essene. Nor at that stage did I sense any calling to follow in the footsteps of Elijah and the prophets who came after him.

  Because she had to defer to me as head of the family, my mother never dared put the question which she must have been dying to ask: “When are you going to ask me to choose a nice young girl with whom you will fulfil the obligation of every Jewish man, and start a family?”

  As for my brothers, they were already riddled with the jealousy that would eventually burst out when I set off on my life of wandering. The fact that they never spoke when I was present was a symptom of the same lack of understanding from which I was to suffer so much later on. James, who like me was a Nazirite, would wear out his knees making prostrations every time we went on a pilgrimage to the Temple. These formal devotions, which even then were not my way, have probably made him blind – or indifferent – to what fate held for his elder brother.