The Silence of Gethsemane

by Michel Benoît

  He may have been right, but all I had seen was the woman staring at me. The sight of it struck me with the force of lightning flashing across the night sky; I can still see her unequivocal, smouldering gaze: I hadn’t only saved her from a terrible death, I had opened the gates of the Kingdom for her. She knew this, had told me as much without saying a word in the fleeting moment before she vanished into the crowd who were baying for my blood.

  Here, tonight, that is why I am no longer afraid. The gaze of two different women has made me bold, and they will remain with me till the end.

  We made our way to the south gate, where we were met by my disciples. They had witnessed the events on the esplanade from a distance, horrified at the sight of the worthies from the Sanhedrin and the hate-filled crowd. My unexpected stance had unleashed a storm of questions in their minds, for which they had no answers. If we are all sinners, they said, including the highest authorities in Israel and you yourself, then where does Evil come from? Who can be held to account for their actions if everything we do is foreordained? Are we riven by sin from the moment we are born, or…

  They went up to a beggar who had been blind from birth, and used him as an example:

  “And him, Rabbi? Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

  “Neither this man nor his parents!”

  I walked over to the blind man, spat on the ground, made mud with my saliva and spread it over his unseeing eyes. Then I told him to go and wash in the nearby pool of Siloam. Mud is no different from the dust that God used to create the first man. If the blind man regained his sight, might my disciples then understand?

  When he came back he couldn’t believe his eyes, which could now see for the very first time. The whole district was soon buzzing with the news, and the people who lived nearby began saying to each other excitedly:

  “It is him!” said some of them. “No, it is someone like him!” said others.

  With a smile he told them: “It really is me!”

  “So… how were your eyes opened?”

  However many times they asked, he never tired of telling them about the man called Jesus, the mud he spread on his eyes, the pool – and that was all it took, he could see. Then they asked: “So where is he, this Jesus?” He had no idea, because at that point he was still blind, so he could only hear his voice. But he had had faith in him and did what he told him to do.

  This marvel in human form was a matter for the authorities. He was taken by the hand and dragged to the nearest synagogue. The Judaean advised me to leave the area quietly, there was a danger I might be recognized, and then I would have the Pharisees to deal with all over again. He would go after the crowd and report back to me later.

  The very next day he came to Lazarus’s house in Bethany, where I had sought sanctuary. With a smile he told me how events had turned out. The former blind man had been taken to the local Pharisees, but once they had got him to tell them what had happened they didn’t believe him. So they summoned his parents:

  “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?”

  Terrified and fearing the worst for their son and themselves, they answered:

  “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind. But we do not know how it is that he now sees, or who opened his eyes. We don’t know; ask him, he is of age. He will speak for himself and tell you what happened.”

  So they called the man in for a second time, and asked him to tell them everything again, from the beginning. Losing patience, and with the crowd on his side, he got angry and stormed out of the synagogue, slamming the door behind him under a hail of insults from the Pharisees. The story was soon all over the city, embellished by each new telling.

  After the paralysed man at Beth-zatha this was the second healing I had performed in Jerusalem, and on both occasions I was met with a hostile reaction from the authorities. The Judaean suggested that I leave the city and not come back until next Passover – in six months everything would be forgotten.

  So once again I was forced to run away. I decided to leave the next day and return to the Jordan, where everything began when I met John the Baptist. I would go back to my origins, to people for whom he was still very much alive, and where they might listen to me more than they did here, in this city blinded by power and fanatical belief.

  38

  Until Passover of the following year we spent our time roaming around the course of the Jordan, usually on the right bank, although occasionally crossing into Gentile territory on the other side. Through my healings, the Beatitudes, the law of the heart and proclaiming the Kingdom, I had taken on the mantle of Elijah. I have always refused to put forward my teaching as a formal system; until the very end I preferred to be guided by the reactions of the people who came to listen to me – although the more I whittled away at the foundations of Jewish society, the more hostile these became.

  In the first place, our nomadic life offended pious Jews who set great store by traditional family structures. Not only had my disciples left hearth and home to follow me, but wives would occasionally abandon their husbands so they could travel with us for a while. Every month these women were tainted by bleeding, as well as being obliged to visit the graves of relatives – so how, when and where could they perform the appointed and highly personal purification rites? No one dared question me on the subject, but the fact that my teaching never alluded to matters of legal impurity spoke volumes.

  But those in high places weren’t satisfied with my tacit silence. In due course a delegation of Pharisees arrived to question me:

  “In your opinion, is it lawful for a man to put away his wife?”

  They had clearly been sent from Jerusalem, where the authorities now wished to put their suspicions about me on a legal footing.

  Throughout the Empire, even beyond its borders, divorce is standard practice. Jewish Law doesn’t express an opinion on this, it simply codifies it. A man can put away his wife and marry another for any reason whatsoever; his rejected wife then has to remarry so as not to be without the protection of a man. But if her second husband dies or she is divorced for a second time, she isn’t allowed to go back to her first husband, since for him (and him alone) she is now ritually impure. This point of law was unpalatable to the wider population, who took a dim view of such spurned women who were unable to marry for a third time, and who in order to live were forced into a life of prostitution – a grave state of impurity.

  I replied with a question:

  “What did Moses command?”

  “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to put away his wife.”

  By endorsing this law in their presence I would be publicly supporting the threat of abjection that hangs over every abandoned wife and thus siding with the establishment against popular sentiment. It would also be as good as admitting that the women who accompanied me ran the same risks as wives who have been rejected; by travelling with us, far away from their husbands, were they too not deprived of a natural protector? By allowing them near me, wouldn’t people say that I was encouraging them to prostitute themselves – possibly with me? Once again it warranted stoning.

  I was caught in their trap.

  Out of respect for the Sabbath and the tradition of oaths, as on previous occasions I had to answer with circumspection. No, I wasn’t rejecting the Law of Moses outright, I was calling on a higher one, which had been engraved in man’s heart from the moment God created him. It was no longer enough simply to interpret the Law, the Pharisees had to undergo a change of heart. I told them this quite plainly, then settled the matter in my usual way:

  “From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So whoever puts away his wife and marries another commits adultery!”

  For the second time I had declared one of the laws of Moses void. Even worse, I was decreeing that any Jew w
ho obeyed this law to the letter and divorced his wife in order to marry another was committing adultery. So in the presence of witnesses, I had said that following the Law could be sinful. But resorting to the story of the Creation as a means of revoking part of the legislative code wasn’t allowed: no one can use the Law against the Law. From being just a controversial rabbi, I had become a blasphemer.

  Jerusalem would draw its own conclusions from that.

  However, I had also hurt the feelings of the devout Jews in the audience. In our society, people rarely marry for love, it is chiefly a way of bearing children for the People of the Covenant. But I was claiming that if God created man and woman, it was in order to be joined in the flesh. By this I implied that his primary intention for marriage was pleasure – shared pleasure – and not procreation. My listeners were deeply unsettled by this allusion to sexual gratification, which was usually provided for them by the prostitutes who could be found anywhere.

  We meddle with sexual taboos and the deep-seated instincts they conceal at our peril. My popularity with the conservative wing of the audience began to falter. How far away it was now, that Galilean springtime!

  Deep down, the Jews have always pined for the time of the Patriarchs, when the One God was a palpable presence amid the barrenness of the wilderness, before a wall of commandments was erected between him and them.

  That era seemed to be long gone. Left destitute and divided by Roman rule, my fellow countrymen’s overriding concern was now simply to survive, they were desperate for certainties, irrefutable facts – whereas I was following the intuition that came to me in the wilderness, that of an experience which was beyond words. They were captivated by what I said, but it only raised questions when what they needed was answers.

  For me, the Beatitudes, the law of the heart and the coming Kingdom were all connected by a single, unifying theme, that of a return to the moment of creation. Did this mean a new beginning of the world, another Genesis? For those who came to listen to me this was no substitute for an organized, well-structured plan of campaign that everyone could understand.

  Increasingly I appeared to be on the fringe of a nation that was on the wane in this second decade of the century. Prompted by Israel’s evident state of decline, some people have chosen to cut themselves off from society, but I was no Essene, nor was I a Zealot, and I had distanced myself from my former Baptist friends. There was little doubt that I would be found guilty by the authorities in Jerusalem, and I ate quite openly at the houses of profiteers, associated with sinners and spoke to strange women, made no secret of my admiration for a centurion from the occupying forces. I had healed Gentile as well as Jewish children. I had replaced the purity laws with an ill-defined law of inner purity; in other words, for the traditional code of actions I had substituted one of intent. But who was able to tell what someone’s intentions were? How could they be assessed?

  In a word, I was an unknown quantity. I no longer spoke the same language as the ordinary Jewish people. And, this country being what it is, there is no place for a Jew who doesn’t fit into a category.

  Like the more conservative members of my audience, the Twelve now realized this. Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, this starry night in the silence of Gethsemane was already close at hand.

  39

  The question of boundaries was one that refused to go away. God had made a covenant with the Jews, and with them alone – so on the Last Day, what would become of the Gentiles? Shocked by what I had said to the Roman centurion, the senior Pharisees weren’t content to let matters rest. Several of their jurists, who didn’t wish to sever connections completely, came to see me on a number of occasions for a private, friendly discussion.

  One day a Scribe came down from Jerusalem, seeking to put the question in legal terms: was the Law of Moses universal, or did it only apply to God’s Chosen People?

  I quoted the golden rule of the Greeks: “Do as you would be done by.” Although this was known the world over, I told him that I preferred the Jewish version, as used by Rabbi Hillel: “That which you do not wish others to do to you, do not to your neighbour: this is all of the Law, the rest is just commentary.” I added that I liked to express it in more positive terms: “That which you would like others to do to you, do the same to them: this is the Law and the teaching of the prophets.”

  “So in the Law,” he answered, “which commandment is the first of all?”

  A small crowd had gathered and was listening closely to our discussion. The Scribe appeared to be unusually receptive towards me, but he didn’t want to leave without hearing my reply. For isn’t putting the commandments in order of priority the chief activity of every learned Jew?

  So I said: “The first is…” and then, closing my eyes, I chanted the Shema Yisrael, the verse from the Law with which every prayer in the synagogue begins:

  “…the first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’”

  On hearing the familiar chant, the Scribe and all the people immediately joined in, swaying back and forth. Anyone who hasn’t seen Jews praying spontaneously in the street will never understand the Jewish soul, and where this ravaged and divided nation gets its remarkable strength.

  I went on:

  “And the second is similar: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

  I could see that the Scribe was surprised, but he soon collected himself:

  “You are right, Rabbi! You have truly said that he is One, and besides him there is no other, and to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself, this is much more important than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices in the Temple!”

  It was my turn to be surprised. There was nothing unusual about a Pharisee maligning the Sadducees, who as a caste make a handsome living out of the Temple and its trade in animals. But for one of the intellectuals among them to agree that love should come before the study of and obedience to the commandments was unexpected. I replied:

  “You are not far from the Kingdom of God…”

  My words were almost drowned out by the muttering of the crowd that had gathered. Love of God and love of one’s neighbour are two quite separate commandments that are never combined into a single rule of life. Our rabbis always refer to and comment on them individually, but to my audience, amalgamating them into one commandment that was greater than all the rest was unheard of as well as scandalous.

  Sensing their discomfiture, the Scribe returned to the attack:

  “So… who is my neighbour?”

  Hadn’t he heard about what I had said to the centurion in Capernaum? As there were so many people present, I decided to express it differently this time, using a parable. I told the story of the man who was set upon by Zealots along the way, who left him for dead at the roadside. First a priest, and then a Jew who was an acolyte in the Temple passed by on the other side without stopping. Then a Samaritan – a foreign heretic – came along, saw the man lying on the ground, took pity on him, helped him to his feet, tended to his wounds and took him to an inn, where he paid his board and lodging for as long as it would take him to recover. So which of these three was a neighbour to the injured man?

  “The one who showed him mercy,” answered the Scribe.

  “Go and do likewise!”

  After he had left I wondered if I had won him over. And had I won over the crowd? They just stood there around me, not moving, not saying a word. Among the many eyes I sought out those of my disciples – but they were nowhere to be seen.

  Until now they had always been with me whenever I was teaching, pondering on what I said for a long time afterwards. So had they found something better to do with their time? Had they lost interest in the issue of boundaries, something that has preyed on Jewish minds since t
he world began?

  Or… were they now drifting away from a rabbi who hadn’t lived up to their expectations?

  Because my definition of what constitutes a “neighbour” must have left them deeply troubled. For a Jew, a neighbour can only be a fellow Jew – never a Gentile. For the Essenes, a neighbour is someone who belongs to their sect – never another Jew. To the Zealots, a neighbour is someone who is involved in the same political struggle as they are. And even if some of my disciples had spent time with the Essenes, and others with the Zealots, they still had the archetypal characteristics of ordinary Jews, who set store by the traditional, hierarchical world of the precepts.

  Nonetheless, I had been careful to rank these two love commandments in first and second place. Love of God wasn’t diminished by association with love of our neighbour; love of our neighbour always has its origins in God. I was simply saying that we can’t know or love God (who is invisible to our eyes) if we disregard or spurn our neighbour – a neighbour who isn’t a brother in arms or a member of the same religion, race or political party, but just a man, woman or child whom we happen to meet along the way.

  This new thinking flew in the face of everything they had been taught. Our rabbis don’t turn love into a law: love doesn’t issue commands, it exists by scrupulously obeying the rules. You would no more comment on it than you would on the air you breathe.

  I wanted our neighbour to become the oxygen that breathes life into love.

  I realized that with this I was putting the finishing touches to my teaching, and that I had helped bring out the best in Judaism. Yet when it came to those around me, it seemed to fall on deaf ears. I saw the Twelve rebuffing children whose mothers innocently brought them to the rabbis so they could give them their blessing – was it fitting for the future King of Israel to stoop to such childish behaviour, which was unworthy of him and his aides? They brushed them aside with a wave of the hand, which made me angry: