György Spiró - Captivity

Priests loitered on their own or in groups all over the City, and, not being on duty, they were unhurried, bored, and talkative. Uri did not accost any of them, though he would have been quite interested to know if the portion they were entitled to from the sacrificial offerings provided enough for them and their families. He vaguely recalled someone somewhere saying that some priestly families were on the verge of starving.

He could not be very Jewish if his soul was untouched by even the slightest feeling of joy to be able to spend time in Jerusalem. The youths, his companions, had wept. Good for them.

He was tormented by misgivings; that must be the cause of his strange state of mind.

He was being kept in Jerusalem, kept in the country, fed and watered as if he were livestock marked for slaughter. People will come along one day and slaughter me, and if my carcass is found to be without blemish, I’ll be served up on the altar, my smoke will rise up to the Almighty and the priests will eat me; if my carcass is with blemish, on the other hand, I’ll be eaten by ordinary Jews. It would be more reassuring if they were to milk their cows more regularly, but they don’t do that.

What am I being kept here for?

That evening Joseph was late in getting home, and Uri had already eaten supper in the garden.

“You haven’t been assigned work yet,” Joseph said, “but they’ll make arrangements soon.”

Uri did not ask who the “they” were.

Joseph started to eat, and Uri watched. Eating was clearly not much to Joseph’s liking; he seemed tired. He must fulfill some important office in the Sanhedrin, Uri thought.

Uri made up his mind to interrogate him.

“Why is the work on the Temple taking so long? I saw from the harbor at Caesarea that the work there was completed in just a few years, yet that was a vast undertaking — much larger in scale than the construction of the Temple, yet if I’m not mistaken they were started at pretty much the same time.”

“Construction on the Temple started earlier,” said Joseph.

“Why all the fiddling about?”

“It was completed long, long ago,” said Joseph. “They’re burnishing the finishing work; it keeps on being knocked down, then relaid… It’s marble and gold, expensive.”

Uri did not understand.

“It nominally gives work to twenty-five thousand men,” said Joseph, “and that is too few. We really ought to be employing and paying a force of one hundred thousand, but that is beyond our capacity. You’ve seen how many beggars are living here, how many are dying in the streets. They lost their land so they came here; there’s no way we have of forbidding it. On what grounds? Before long we’ll be able to pave the whole city with them…”

Joseph’s voice and mien were weary; this appealed to Uri.

“Freeloaders in Rome get state support,” he said. “Me too.”

Joseph nodded.

“Rome is wealthy,” he said. “Rome has the means to support a few hundred thousand plebeians. We, on the other hand, cannot afford it, though we ought to be supporting at least that many or even more. We’re poor, and we’re breeding at a breakneck rate.”

“Still, a time has to come when the scaffolding is taken down,” Uri opined.

“We are doing the best we can to make that sublime and solemn moment fall as far into the future as possible. Before then we’ll pave the nearby hills… Then there will be stupendous celebrations; everyone will rejoice except us. What are we going to set about doing with that mass of people? Ever more of them as time goes by! Order them not to reproduce when the Creator Himself encourages them to do precisely that?”

“All the same, is it near the end?”

Joseph broke into a smile.

“At the depth of the soul every generation expects some catastrophe,” he said. “People have been preaching about this for centuries, but few fear it. They would like to believe that it will happen in their lifetime and make their period exceptional. They believe that they will avoid death by the skin of their teeth and that the moment of their death will coincide with their resurrection. For my part, I am afraid. It’s not that I don’t place infinite faith in the Lord who created me, but I’m alarmed at the naïve confidence that people have in this arrangement. It’s as if the Lord had not given us the freedom to sort out our own lives for ourselves. If we do it well, He is pleased, and if we do it badly, He is saddened, but He is not in the habit of intervening. I have read the whole of Scriptures; He has never intervened.”

This was when Uri came to understand that not everyone here was stupid. Not that Master Jehuda was stupid at all, but Simon the Magus and Joseph ben Nahum saw a lot more than he did.

“Not all masters speak that way,” he said.

Joseph shook his head.

“What am I master of? It so happened that in my village I was good at my craft, grinding millstones and constructing water-lifting contraptions, and others noticed that I was a better miller than what they were accustomed to and started consulting me about business. As if I were smarter than them! Well, I wasn’t, but that’s how it was. Out of sheer terror I started reading, in case books had the answers. I didn’t notice but before long I was being addressed as master, then I was expected to explain the law, and before long I was a judge… My wife was more cautious. She had married a young miller’s son with flour in his eyes and flour in his hair. She had borne children for him , not for a master. But am I supposed to turn out of my house anyone who comes seeking my advice? A wretch who is just hopefully standing there? I took speedy leave with my family to settle down in another village that did not have a miller, and there I became a glassblower. But then it all began again.”

The man really was a master.

“I wasn’t careful enough,” said Joseph. “Word about me spread… Men sent by King Antipas tracked me down and brought me before him. He wanted me as a counselor, as he did not have many trained people around him. The old elite had no liking for him, and he had done nothing to raise a new elite for himself. I wasn’t willing to accept the position and went back to my village; all I wanted was to work. But people did not let me; they thought I’d rejected the offer because I was holding out for more money. They asked, pleaded, and finally threatened. I wasn’t given any peace; they started working on my family… I wasn’t firm enough, and in the end I was unable to say no.”

Joseph looked at Uri.

“Don’t ever let slip what you know — and still less what you don’t know — because that knowledge is priceless, and people know that full well.”

Uri shivered. A similar sentence had been said to him by another Joseph — his father.

“Don’t get noticed. Don’t stand out. Don’t trust anyone,” Joseph said, and averted his eyes. “You’ll be used and then thrown away; whether you live or die, it’s all the same to them. Be suspicious. If people love you, take an interest in you, caress you, be very afraid. Be especially wary of anyone who takes you into their confidence or to whom you are attached, because that person is also a human being, a selfish, cowardly, opportunist, abject scoundrel. Your enemies are the only ones in whom you will never be disappointed.”

Uri sighed. He suspected that he would share no more suppers with Joseph.

There was, however, one more shared supper the next day.

“They approved it,” Joseph said, and he seemed to be sincerely pleased.

He told Uri that he would be able to get a job on a nearby building site in the City of David. The walls of the palace were standing and the roofing was ready, but they needed a cabinetmaker, and there was a mosaic floor to be laid. It had been started six months before, a palace for Queen Helena.