György Spiró - Captivity

They stood and watched the chariot creaking along.

“This year Pilate is going to Jerusalem earlier than usual,” Matthew muttered to himself. “Very early.”

There must be some trouble in Judaea after all, that suggested.

A huge crowd was now waiting at the edge of the road for the mercenaries to pass by so that they too could return to the military road.

For a long time yet legionaries in full armor strode by, their boots tramping rhythmically.

The crowd mutely watched them march past; even the children fell silent. The delegation from Rome likewise remained still.

Our people, and our allied army. Our people forced off the road by our army.

Upturned carriages were then righted; the livestock and cultivated crops were reloaded, swept together, or tossed back by the handful into intact sacks. The womenfolk sewed torn sacks with the needles and flax they kept at hand. The children picked up a few kernels of grain in their grubby little hands and proudly dropped those too into the sacks before turning back to look for more. It looks as though they will get the grain milled somewhere close to Jerusalem, Uri reflected, and they will eat it too, because grain like that is impure from a priest’s perspective.

The legs of spavined donkeys and asses were examined by elderly men, their injuries fixed with the aid of broken-off branches and cord; the animals that could not be treated were hoisted onto a cart; they could not be used as sacrificial animals, because they were not sound and the Levites would not accept such an animal, but the travelers would eat those themselves communally during the festival, and that is how they would be accounted for back home, each and every one. Their fellow pilgrims would back them in avowing that everything had happened the way they told it.

The mass reoccupied the military road, but the stillness lasted a long time, with even the small children realizing that now was not the time for their screams.

But then the singing did of course sound again, perhaps coming from tribes that were only now taking to the road and had not seen the passage of the army, though it is also possible that those who had been pushed into the ditch and onto the field had resumed their song.

Whatever might happen at any time, it was good to sing psalms.

It came about spontaneously when the mass came to a standstill to wash their hands and pray; perhaps the old sensed the time more keenly than the young. The delegates too yielded to the mass sense of time: when the crowd halted, so did they; when the crowd sprinkled themselves with water, so Matthew sprinkled the delegates; when the crowd prayed, so did they. When their own water ran out, they rinsed their hands with soil at the roadside, like the others, just as they had done once in Campania. Here, however, it was holy land, the Homeland, and therefore automatically clean from a ritual point of view.

There was about this crowd of many, many thousands something uplifting and at the same time frightening. Something impersonal. Uri felt that he had become no more than an ant-sized part of the throng, and he was unsure what to make of that. He was looking out of its head from the inside, but it was also as if he were watching from above, like an eagle. He had a bird’s eye view of himself too, and he was just as tiny as everyone else, yet it was also not like that, because the throng was not looking at itself from above. Young and old, men and women were sunk in themselves, praying and treading onward. Passover in Rome was nothing like this. There it was small and intimately domestic.

Uri caught himself looking at the vast throng through the eyes of a non-Jewish Roman, as if he were an idle traveler, gazing with interest at the peoples of far-off foreign lands but having nothing to do with what was happening. As if he were not walking among them but seated comfortably in a litter, looking in amazement and with haughty disdain at the throng of people down below. As if he were the prefect and had not curtained off the window of his carriage but were looking out with interest over those whom he ruled, gazing at the corruption, decomposition, and disgusting decay to which children and the elderly, men and women, animals and plants were subjected, and deriving a titillating pleasure from voluptuously inspecting the kinds of ulcers that covered their bodies, what sort of rags they were going around in. Not as if a large portion of Roman Jews were not gravely ill; not as if the Roman plebeians in general did not suffer from countless maladies. Disease, though, seems to be a concomitant of life, almost a fundamental condition, but Uri could not recall from his days in Rome, in either its Jewish or non-Jewish quarters, seeing quite so many seriously misshapen faces. The eyes of the Roman Jews had not gleamed, even on holidays, in such a fashion.

Uri gazed at them as if he had been sent to spy on them.

These people were enthusiastic. They were marching along, going up to the Temple in Jerusalem! In Rome no one enthused about anything, skeptical Jewish descendants of slaves least of all. To be a Jew in Rome meant objectivity: it was bad for everyone, but worst of all, hallelujah, for us, praise be to the Lord for that. One could see, from here in the Holy Land, that while to be a Jew in Rome was a hundred times better, even at times better than for the Latini, who had good reason to be terrified when power changed hands.

Uri was not boundlessly glad to be making his way to Jerusalem with his painful leg and throbbing back. I don’t believe, he now acknowledged to himself, that the Lord dwells in the most secret sanctum of the Temple in Jerusalem; He dwells nowhere, He does not have human form, He does not need to dwell anywhere, He is All, He is the Creation, who created His very self because He wanted to do so, and He sees Himself in us in moderation and indeed sometimes, no doubt, with sorrow. He dwells just as much in Rome as anywhere else.

These people, however, seemed really to believe that He dwelled in the Temple, and that by reaching Jerusalem they would be able to come into His direct presence. They would not, no one can. Perhaps one day the Anointed One, the Messiah, who will descend among us from His right hand to raise us mercifully and set us beside the Lord. The Messiah is certainly there; He belongs there by necessity. But until the Messiah comes, God is present in all places where Jews are present, indeed even in those places where there are no Jews, for, after all, He is God of all men, of all created beings; non-Jews simply do not know it. But it will become known to them. It will become known to non-Jewish servants of the post houses who, standing in front of the buildings and masking their cowardice with grins — though one would think they might have gotten used to it by now — are trembling at the great might of this throng as it wends its way, singing peacefully. They dread that the peaceful throng will all at once turn savage; that is their fear. It will become known to the whores, posted at regular distances along the road, and when the Messiah arrives they too will be relieved of their terrible service. It will become known to the soldiers posted to the sentry cabins; they likewise are afraid. They may be non-Jews, but God is also their only god, only they do not yet know it. The Messiah will free them, too, from all their troubles. One can see from their terrified eyes that they sense His immanent earthly presence, the Shechinah, this all-pervading, all-permeating female spirit, only they fear it as yet. They do not know that they should rejoice.

Uri was assailed by an uncomfortable feeling of being unable to truly rejoice. As if he were not a Jew, though he had been born one of the chosen people. It was a sin to be unable to rejoice sufficiently at this, but he felt that God had inflicted this sin as a diversion: he had become, so he felt, the eye of the Almighty, who was all-seeing. With his poor eyes, to report to Him. So that he might be a spy for the Messiah, who all at once would appear, praying, supplicating, singing to himself softly.