Lamb (9 page)

Our families made camp outside the northern wall of the city, below the battlements of Antonia, the fortress Herod had built in tribute to his benefactor, Marc Antony. Two cohorts of Roman soldiers, some twelve
hundred strong, watched the Temple courtyard from the fortress walls. The women fed and washed the children while Joshua and I carried lambs with our fathers to the Temple.

There was something unsettling about carrying an animal to its death. It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen the sacrifices before, nor even eaten the Passover lamb, but this was the first time I’d actually participated. I could feel the animal’s breathing on my neck as I carried it slung over my shoulders, and amid all the noise and the smells and the movement around the Temple, there was, for a moment, silence, just the breath and heartbeat of the lamb. I guess I fell behind the others, because my father turned and said something to me, but I couldn’t hear the words.

We went through the gates and into the outer courtyard of the Temple where merchants sold birds for the sacrifice and moneychangers traded shekels for a hundred different coins from around the world. As we passed through the enormous courtyard, where thousands of men stood with lambs on their shoulders waiting to get into the inner temple, to the altar, to the slaughter, I could see no man’s face. I saw only the faces of the lambs, some calm and oblivious, others with their eyes rolled back, bleating in terror, still others seeming to be stunned. I swung the lamb from my own shoulders and cradled it in my arms like a child as I backed out toward the gate. I know my father and Joseph must have come after me, but I couldn’t see their faces, just emptiness where their eyes should have been, just the eyes of the lambs they carried. I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t get out of the Temple fast enough. I didn’t know where I was going, but I wasn’t going inside to the altar. I turned to run, but a hand caught my shirt and pulled me back. I spun around and looked into Joshua’s eyes.

“It’s God’s will,” he said. He laid his hands on my head and I was able to breathe again. “It’s all right, Biff. God’s will.” He smiled.

Joshua had put the lamb he’d been carrying on the ground, but it didn’t run away. I suppose I should have known right then.

I didn’t eat any of the lamb for that Passover feast. In fact, I’ve never eaten lamb since that day.

Our second day in Jerusalem we went to see the great Rabbi Hillel. (Rabbi means teacher in Hebrew—you knew that, right?) Hillel looked to be a hundred years old, his beard and hair were long and white, and his eyes were clouded over, his irises milk white. His skin was leathery-
brown from sitting in the sun and his nose was long and hooked, giving him the aspect of a great, blind eagle. He held class all morning in the outer courtyard of the Temple. We sat quietly, listening to him recite from the Torah and interpret the verses, taking questions and engaging in arguments with the Pharisees, who tried to infuse the Law into every minute detail of life.

Toward the end of Hillel’s morning lectures, Jakan, the camel-sucking husband-to-be of my beloved Maggie, asked Hillel if it would be a sin to eat an egg that had been laid on the Sabbath.

“What are you, stupid? The Lord doesn’t give a damn what a chicken does on the Sabbath, you nimrod! It’s a chicken. If a Jew lays an egg on the Sabbath, that’s probably a sin, come see me then. Otherwise don’t waste my friggin’ time with that nonsense. Now go away, I’m hungry and I need a nap. All of you, scram.”

Joshua looked at me and grinned. “He’s not what I expected,” he whispered.

“Knows a nimrod when he sees—uh—hears one, though,” I said. (Nimrod was an ancient king who died of suffocation after he wondered aloud in front of his guards what it would be like to have your own head stuck up your ass.)

A boy younger than us helped the old man to his feet and began to lead him away toward the Temple gate. I ran up and took the priest’s other arm.

“Rabbi, my friend has come from far away to talk to you. Can you help him?”

The old man stopped. “Where is your friend?”

“Right here.”

“Then why isn’t he talking for himself? Where do you come from, kid?”

“Nazareth,” Joshua said, “but I was born in Bethlehem. I am Joshua bar Joseph.”

“Oh yeah, I’ve talked to your mother.”

“You have?”

“Sure, almost every time she and your father come to Jerusalem for a feast she tries to see me. She thinks you’re the Messiah.”

Joshua swallowed hard. “Am I?”

Hillel snorted. “Do you want to be the Messiah?”

Joshua looked at me as if I might have the answer. I shrugged. “I don’t know,” Josh finally said. “I thought I was just supposed to do it.”

“Do you think you’re the Messiah?”

“I’m not sure I should say.”

“That’s smart,” Hillel said. “You shouldn’t say. You can think you’re the Messiah all that you want, just don’t tell anyone.”

“But if I don’t tell them, they won’t know.”

“Exactly. You can think you’re a palm tree if you want, just don’t tell anyone. You can think you’re a flock of seagulls, just don’t tell anyone. You get my meaning? Now I have to go eat. I’m old and I’m hungry and I want to go eat now, so just in case I die before supper I won’t go hungry.”

“But he really is the Messiah,” I said.

“Oh yeah,” Hillel said, grabbing my shoulder, then feeling for my head so he could scream into my ear. “What do you know? You’re an ignorant kid. How old are you? Twelve? Thirteen?”

“Thirteen.”

“How could you, at thirteen, know anything? I’m eighty-four and I don’t know shit.”

“But you’re wise,” I said.

“I’m wise enough to know that I don’t know shit. Now go away.”

“Should I ask the Holy of Holies?” Joshua said.

Hillel swung at the air, as if to slap Joshua, but missed by a foot. “It’s a box. I saw it when I could still see, and I can tell you that it’s a box. And you know what else, if there were tablets in it, they aren’t there now. So if you want to talk to a box, and probably be executed for trying to get into the chamber where it’s kept, you go right ahead.”

The breath seemed to be knocked out of Joshua’s body and I thought he would faint on the spot. How could the greatest teacher in all of Israel speak of the Ark of the Covenant in such a way? How could a man who obviously knew every word of the Torah, and all the teachings written since, how could he claim not to know anything?

Hillel seemed to sense Joshua’s distress. “Look, kid, your mother says that some very wise men came to Bethlehem to see you when you were born. They obviously knew something that no one else knew. Why don’t you go see them? Ask them about being the Messiah.”

“So you aren’t going to tell him how to be the Messiah?” I asked.

Again Hillel reached out for Joshua, but this time without any anger. He found Joshua’s cheek, and stroked it with his palsied hand. “I don’t believe there will be a Messiah, and at this point, I’m not sure it would make a difference to me. Our people have spent more time in slavery or under the heels of foreign kings than we have spent free, so who is to say that it is God’s will that we be free at all? Who is to say that God concerns himself with us in any way, beyond allowing us to be? I don’t think that he does. So know this, little one. Whether you are the Messiah, or you become a rabbi, or even if you are nothing more than a farmer, here is the sum of all I can teach you, and all that I know: treat others as you would like to be treated. Can you remember that?”

Joshua nodded and the old man smiled. “Go find your wise men, Joshua bar Joseph.”

What we did was stay in the Temple while Joshua grilled every priest, guard, even Pharisee about the Magi who had come to Jerusalem thirteen years before. Evidently it wasn’t as big an event for others as it was for Josh’s family, because no one had any idea what he was talking about.

By the time he’d been at it for a couple of hours he was literally screaming into the faces of a group of Pharisees. “Three of them. Magicians. They came because they saw a star over Bethlehem. They were carrying gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Come on, you’re all old. You’re supposed to be wise. Think!”

Needless to say, they weren’t pleased. “Who is this boy who would question our knowledge? He knows nothing of the Torah and the prophets and yet berates us for not remembering three insignificant travelers.”

It was the wrong thing to say to Joshua. No one had studied the Torah harder. No one knew scripture better. “Ask me any question, Pharisee,” Joshua said. “Ask anything.”

In retrospect, after having grown up, somewhat, and having lived, died, and been resurrected from the dust, I realize that there may be nothing more obnoxious than a teenager who knows everything. Certainly, it is a symptom of the age that they think they know everything, but now I have some sympathy for those poor men who challenged Joshua that day at the Temple. Of course, at the time, I shouted, “Smite the sons-a-bitches, Josh.”

He was there for days. Joshua wouldn’t even leave to eat, and I went out into the city to bring him back food. First the Pharisees, but later even some of the priests came to quiz Joshua, to try to throw him some question about some obscure Hebrew king or general. They made him recite the lineages from all the books of the Bible, yet he did not waver. Myself, I left him there to argue while I wandered through the holy city looking for Maggie, then, when I couldn’t find her, for girls in general. I slept at the camp of my parents, assuming all the time that Joshua was returning each night to his own family, but I was wrong. When the Passover feast was over and we were packing up to leave, Mary, Joshua’s mother, came to me in a panic.

“Biff. Have you seen Joshua?”

The poor woman was distraught. I wanted to comfort her so I held my arms out to give her a comforting embrace. “Poor Mary, calm down. Joshua is fine. Come, let me give you a comforting embrace.”

“Biff!” I thought she might slap me.

“He’s at the Temple. Jeez, a guy tries to be compassionate and what does he get?”

She had already taken off. I caught up to her as she was dragging Joshua out of the Temple by the arm. “You worried us half to death.”

“You should have known you would find me in my father’s house,” Joshua said.

“Don’t you pull that ‘my father’ stuff on me, Joshua bar Joseph. The commandment says honor thy father
and thy mother
. I’m not feeling honored right now, young man. You could have sent a message, you could have stopped by the camp.”

Joshua looked at me, his eyes pleading for me to help him out.

“I tried to comfort her, Josh, but she wouldn’t have it.”

Later I found the two of them on the road to Nazareth and Joshua motioned for me to walk with them.

“Mother thinks we may be able to find at least one of the Magi, and if we find that one, he may know where the others are.”

Mary nodded, “The one named Balthasar, the black one, he said he came from a village north of Antioch. He was the only one of the three that spoke any Hebrew.”

I didn’t feel confident. Although I’d never seen a map, “north of Antioch” sounded like a large, unspecific, and scary place. “Is there more?”

“Yes, the other two had come from the East by the Silk Road. Their names were Melchior and Gaspar.”

“So it’s off to Antioch,” Joshua said. He seemed completely satisfied with the information his mother had given him, as if all he needed were the three Magi’s names and he’d as much as found them.

I said, “You’re going to go to Antioch assuming that someone there will remember a man who may have lived north of there thirteen years ago?”

“A magician,” Mary said. “A rich, Ethiopian magician. How many can there be?”

“Well, there might not be any, did you think of that? He might have died. He might have moved to another city.”

“In that case, I will be in Antioch,” Joshua said. “From there I can travel the Silk Road until I find the other two.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “You’re not going alone.”

“Of course.”

“But Josh, you’re helpless out in the world. You only know Nazareth, where people are stupid and poor. No offense, Mary. You’ll be like—uh—like a lamb among wolves. You need me along to watch out for you.”

“And what do you know that I don’t? Your Latin is horrible, your Greek is barely passable, and your Hebrew is atrocious.”

“Yeah. If a stranger comes up to you on the road to Antioch and asks you how much money you are carrying, what do you tell him?”

“That will depend on how much I am carrying.”

“No it won’t. You haven’t enough for a crust of bread. You are a poor beggar.”

“But that’s not true.”

“Exactly.”

Mary put her arm around her son’s shoulders. “He has a point, Joshua.”

Joshua wrinkled his brow as if he had to think about it, but I could tell that he was relieved that I wanted to go along. “When do you want to leave?”

“When did Maggie say she was getting married?”

“In a month.”

“Before then. I don’t want to be here when it happens.”

“Me either,” Joshua said.

And so we spent the next few weeks preparing for our journey. My father thought I was crazy, but my mother seemed happy to have the extra space in the house and pleased that the family wouldn’t have to put up a bride price to marry me off right away.

“So you’ll be gone how long?” Mother asked.

“I don’t know. It’s not a terribly long journey to Antioch, but I don’t know how long we’ll be there. Then we’ll be traveling the Silk Road. I’m guessing that that’s a long journey. I’ve never seen any silk growing around here.”

“Well, take a wool tunic in case it gets cold.”

And that was all I heard from my mother. Not “Why are you going?” Not “Who are you looking for?” Just “Take a wool tunic.” Jeez. My father was more supportive.