Agrippa's Daughter (20 page)

“Did you take any hurt from those swine, missy?”

Berenice smiled and shook her head, looking at them with curiosity. So these were the Zealots, of whom one heard more and more these days! You didn’t see them in the cities—at least not this kind, such tall, lean, wild-looking men, their feet bare and hardened to the road, their trousers dirty and ragged, and over their shirts, instead of a jacket or coat, the short, sleeveless vests with the long fringes, one blue thread hanging from each corner, that were like a uniform to them. They carried the curved, razor-sharp knives that had almost religious significance in their ranks, and of the seven that were here, four had bows and quivers of arrows. The bows were of laminated horn, made in Persia but sold widely and used widely in Israel, and the arrows were cedar shafts, dove-feathered and armed with businesslike iron heads. They wore their hair long and braided, as the Nazarites did, but unlike the Nazarites, they clipped their beards short in the Hasmonean fashion and wore upon their heads the jaunty cap of the Hasmoneans.

Unbathed as they were from year’s end to year’s end, Berenice could smell their strong, rank, and masculine odor. They worked intermittently as farm laborers, as tinkers and carpenters, but only intermittently, preferring, as she had heard, to take their living out of highway robbery, preying out of preference upon Arab and Syrian merchants. Berenice stared at them with such interest and delight that one of them asked,

“Have you never seen the like of us before, missy?”

Another said, “We should have sent a shaft or two after those Latin bastards.”

“Their time will come.”

“More to the point are the camels. Have you seen them, missy—loaded camels with Arab drivers? We been following their turds on the road.”

“Back half an hour from here,” Berenice nodded.

“Devil take us, they’ll be in Tiberias by now.”

“Tomorrow’s another day. Patience—there’s the virtue.”

Berenice asked them about the House of Hillel.

“Oh,” said their leader, a tall, lean man, blue-eyed and blond, his fierce, hooked nose, hatchet face, and pale coloring testifying to Kohan blood, “so that is where you’re bound, missy. Well, it’s the times, isn’t it? Find a woman with a face and bosom worth looking at, and she with Hillel. Just walk up the road and turn right.”

They left her then, striding through the dust that still hung where the Roman horses had sprayed it, their hands on their knives, their rank smell dangling behind them. Berenice went on, and a hundred paces further she turned right on a narrow path that wound through a grove of sweet-smelling cedar. For half a mile the path continued in forest, and then it crested a hill to reveal below a fertile valley, in the center of which was a large country villa surrounded by low farm walls, stone cottages, and rich fields of wheat and barley. Dividing the fields were lines of olive trees, heavy with their burden of fruit, fig trees, plum trees, and here and there a spreading and ancient live oak, the sacred terebinth, which the people of Galilee had worshiped as gods in the olden times. On the slopes of the hills around the valley, flocks of sheep and goats grazed. Men in white trousers, bare to the waist but shaded from the sun by wide-brimmed straw hats, worked the fields with hoes, chopping weeds and loosening soil—and all in all, it was as rich and peaceful and bucolic a scene as Berenice had ever witnessed. A little stream ran through the bottom of the valley, and women were washing clothes there—singing as they worked, and faintly the sound of the song came to Berenice where she stood on the lip of the valley.

“So this is the House of Hillel,” she thought, as she walked down the path toward the villa. “They do themselves well for saints. A king could hardly want more.” Yet she admitted to herself that most kings did, asking herself what she had expected—was it a monastery such as the Essenes built in the burning desert on the shores of the Dead Sea? But these people of Hillel were not Essenes, not monks, not fanatics, not Nazarites—and certainly not Zealots. Since to Berenice they were summed up in the tall, wide-shouldered person of Shimeon Bengamaliel, Berenice was certain of what they were not, but most uncertain of what they were. For his essence was not that of a Pharisee or a Sadducee, not of Roman or Greek—but of a Jew in a way that was new and different to her, a kind of Jew apart from the Jews she had known, the Latin-aping nobility, the sycophants of the king’s court and circle, the merchants and servants and slaves, the farmers and the fishermen of the lake, the professional soldiers, the sons of the good families in their burnished armor with the fancy manners copied from the Romans, the Levites, the Kohanum or priests—apart from all of these yet connected with them.

Thinking this and that and to no great end, she walked down into the valley toward the villa. What she would do there, what she would say, how she would introduce herself and whether she would—of this she had no clear notion; any more than she had an explanation of her own presence in her sweat-soaked shift with her dust-covered feet. But certainly this was not a place that would press for explanations—that at least she knew about the House of Hillel—and being tired, dry, and desperately eager to sit down, she walked toward the open gates of the courtyard wall that surrounded the villa.

Outside the wall, there was a well and a cistern, with dry gourds for dippers. She drank and quenched her thirst, listening meanwhile to the sound of voices—young voices that piped up for answers. It was the sound of a class in progress, and, drawn by curiosity, she walked slowly through the gates into the courtyard—which was not unlike any other courtyard or barnyard of a great country villa in Galilee, open stables to one side, an enclosed herb garden on the other, and a wall and gateway on the side where she had entered. The fourth side of the enclosure was the back of the villa itself, kitchen and workrooms where the grapes were pressed for the wine and the olives for the oil, where wheat was ground into flour, where chickens were plucked and cleaned, and where the fresh fruit was sliced and set out to dry. She could see men and women working in the sheds and kitchens, but her immediate attention was drawn to a great, spreading terebinth tree, which towered up higher than the roof of the villa and cast its great umbrella of shade over more than a third of the yard. Underneath this tree, in its cool shadows, there sat upon the ground at least forty or fifty boys between the ages of ten and sixteen—and among them, here and there, mature men, middle-aged men, and one or two very old men. A little apart from them and behind them, but still in the shelter of the tree, there was a cluster of about a dozen women and girls, some of the girls very small and nestling in the laps of their mothers.

In front of this group, a tall man paced back and forth, and in the first moment Berenice thought it was Shimeon Bengamaliel himself, so great was the likeness of movement and feature. A second glance told her it was another, a teacher here, talking and gesturing as he paced. Behind him there was a wooden table, and on it a jug of water, a cup, and an open scroll that was apparently a Torah. He gestured toward this as he talked and managed to notice Berenice out of the corner of an eye and nod at her without breaking his speech. The nod said, be welcome and sit down and stay if you wish. She stood a moment at the edge of the shade, and then sank down to the ground, her legs bent under her, the shade cool and pleasant after the morning in the hot sun. She was tired, and it was good to rest there.

“The Law,” the teacher was saying, tapping his finger on the open scroll. “Why are we called the People of the Law?”

A skinny, freckled boy of fourteen or so rose up, cleared his throat, and said it was because Jews reverenced the Law above life itself.

“That’s mighty peculiar,” the teacher said. He looked at the boy; the boy looked at him. Faintly, from the distance came the sound of the women singing at the brookside as they washed clothes. Insects hummed and danced in the hot sunlight, outside the shade of the terebinth tree. It occurred to Berenice that this was a mighty peculiar school.

“I don’t know how to reverence anything above life itself,” said the teacher, after a few moments. “I don’t mean that it isn’t a good idea. It sounds attractive. I just don’t know how. Do you, Abram?”

“I would die for the Torah,” the skinny boy persisted.

“I am sure you would—but it’s not a particularly engaging thought when there is so much to live for. Or is it? I have been thinking all morning about going fishing. You die—no more fishing. Never again. That’s bleak, don’t you agree?”

A little ripple of laughter among the others; no immediate reply from Abram; and, on Berenice’s part, an increasing conviction that this was a very strange school indeed.

“What is the Law?” the teacher asked.

“The Torah.”

“What is the Torah?”

“The Pentateuch—namely, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The five books of the Law, which were written by the hand of Moses and inspired by the breath of the Almighty Himself.”

The teacher, who continued to pace, took a deep breath and observed that he had gotten more than he had bargained for. “Sit down, Abram,” he said. He tapped the scroll now. “I only desired to elicit the fact that the Torah is a book—an excellent and singular book—but still that, a book. These are recent observations, I will admit. In the time of my grandfather Hillel, of the blessed memory, who began this school here, the Torah was considered to be much more, treated as a force of magic, as a living thing—almost as the flesh of the Almighty Himself. Hillel was impatient with that kind of thinking, as you know.” He pointed to another boy, “David—do you know the story of the pagan who came to Hillel to study the Law?”

David rose, scratched his head, and piped up that he did know the story. They all knew the story, except for Berenice; and this was very apparent to her.

“Tell it to us, and we’ll pick at it a bit,” the teacher said.

“From Parthia came the pagan,” David began, “a long distance—”

“How long, David?” the teacher interrupted. “Philosophy is never the worse for the injection of some of the exactitude of geography.”

“Thirty days journey?” David asked tentatively.

“On foot? On a camel? On a horse? Hardly very exact. Suppose we say three hundred parasangs, as the Persians measure it. As it is told, he was from Hecatompylos, in the heart of Parthia. Go on.”

“He traveled this long distance,” said David, “that he might become a Jew, and he sought out the Rabbi Hillel and said to him, I would study the Law, Rabbi Hillel, that I may become a Jew and know the Almighty as the one God. To this, Hillel replied, Then I will teach you the Law. This is the Law, namely, Love thy neighbor as thyself. This is the whole Law. All the rest is commentary.”

“Oh? Well,” the teacher said, “I have heard this little tale a thousand times, yet I never hear it but it puzzles me. Thus. The Law is the Torah, yet Hillel made of it a commentary on a single injunction, Love thy neighbor as thyself. If that is the Law, then surely it is more important than the commentary. The substance must precede the commentary. And the substance must exist, even without the commentary—”

A middle-aged man arose, cleared his throat several times, and apologized for his temerity as well as his presence. He was a well-dressed, well-set man—as he explained it, a dealer in mother-of-pearl and other shell products, and on his way from his home in Damascus to the shell market at Tyre. It had been a privilege—to which he had looked forward for years—to see with his own eyes the place where the saintly Hillel had spent his last years, and an honor to sit among the students of Hillel’s school, if only for an hour or two. Pardon him then for his daring to disagree; yet if you take away from a Jew his right to disagree, what is left to him?

“What, indeed?” the teacher smiled.

“So, Rabbi—” began the merchant from Damascus, but was stopped with an admonition that they in the House of Hillel used the term rabbi most sparingly. “My name is Hillel Bengamaliel,” the teacher explained, “but I am no rabbi. The title is a high one in our house—”

The Jew from Damascus spread his hands in acknowledgment and addressed the teacher with the formal
Adon,
or as My Lord Hillel, the son of Gamaliel—stating that as this famous tale of the first Hillel was told in the synagogues of Damascus, the instructions of Hillel to the pagan from Parthia were somewhat different.

“Thus is it said in Damascus,” said the traveler meekly, “that Hillel said to the pagan, Do not unto others as you wouldst not have them do unto you. This is the whole Law, and all the rest is commentary.”

“Indeed,” agreed the teacher. “Yes indeed—so it is said, and that is unquestionably true.”

“And the other?”

“Also true.”

“But how can both be true?” the merchant pleaded in despair. “If one is the whole Law, then how can the other be the whole Law?”

“If they are the same?” He waited. The boy, David, sat down, and then the merchant seated himself.

“Do not unto others,” he said thoughtfully. “Thus we have the negative. Love thy neighbor—the positive; the two are contained.”

The traveler shook his head slightly. The teacher went on, “Not quickly, but brood over it somewhat. It was my notion to talk to the children about the reaction to Hillel’s action. Oh yes—some storms burst around his head, and there came to him from Jerusalem a group of learned Pharisees and scholars. They said to Hillel, ‘Do you deny that the Almighty is in the Torah?’ To which Hillel answered, ‘The Almighty is everywhere.’ But that was hardly enough, and the learned men demanded to know whether Hillel denied that God inspired the Torah? ‘There is no great book which the Almighty has not inspired,’ Hillel replied. He was not being clever. Hillel was never clever—yes, perhaps the wisest man in all the world, but never clever. He did not have the gift for that. Then the scholars demanded of him, ‘Do you deny that the Torah is from the hand of Moses, may his name be remembered forever?’ ‘Could a Jew deny this?’ Hillel asked, and then they said to him, ‘Will you admit that the Torah is sacred and holy?’ He admitted it, and then they charged him, ‘But you state that it is commentary. What is more holy than the Law?’ ‘Many things,’ Hillel replied. “The Almighty is holier—and my child, too, for if I put the Law in the flames, the Almighty would forgive me, but if I offered my child to the flames, He would never forgive me. And I will tell you something else,’ Hillel said. ‘Love is holier than the Law—’” The teacher paused, poured himself a cup of water, and drank.