György Spiró - Captivity

Master Jehuda contemplated, even farted in his efforts, before speaking.

“I’ll take you sometime to a neighboring village. There’s a man who’s blind as a bat there.”

Uri waited for Master Jehuda to go on, but something else came to Jehuda’s mind.

“Do you go to a mikveh to bathe yourselves over there in Edom?”

Uri hesitated.

Better not to lie, he thought.

“There are not many mikvehs,” he confessed. “We wash our hands and feet then sprinkle ourselves with water…”

“There are some big heathen baths, so I’ve been told,” said Master Jehuda.

“There are,” Uri admitted, “but we don’t go to them.”

This delighted the master so much that he personally, after washing his own hands, washed the phylactery in the outside cistern. He then grasped it by one thong and whirled it around in huge circles in the air, warbling benedictory phrases as he did so that it should dry. He tied it onto Uri’s forehead with his own hands, nicely arranging the straps in front and on Uri’s shoulders, thus making the three letters: the first was already written in the leather box, twice at that, and that was the letter shin; the second letter, a dalet, was formed by the knot at the back; and the two straps in front formed the third letter, a yod, with the three favored points together neatly proclaiming “ShDaY,” which is to say “Shaddai,” or “Almighty.”

It was not quite the same in Rome, where two tefillin had to be worn in principle, one attached to the forehead, the other to the upper left arm, and the yod was formed by the knot of the tefillin tied to the arm. When traveling, though, everyone had just one tefillah, but that was permissible in an emergency, which travel counted as.

That was the purpose of a phylactery: anyone wearing those three letters himself becomes almighty, just like the Eternal One.

“She needed to go to a mikveh in any case,” said Jehuda, offering excuses for his wife, “only I bundled her off a bit earlier than I had to. It’s difficult with women, who are only semi-human. Are you married yet, kid?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Be very careful whom you wed — very, very careful!”

Uri promised that he would be very careful.

They stood in front of the table. Jehuda turned toward the east — he feels he is in Jerusalem, Uri observed, and likewise turned to the east — and with repeated bows and in a chanting tone very loudly started to pray. He did not take out the piece of parchment in the tefillin, so Uri did not do so either; after all, in Judaea it was not obligatory to read the Sh’ma.

Uri also prayed, reciting the Sh’ma from memory. He again finished first, with Jehuda continuing and chanting a few benedictions that Uri recognized, as well as a few passages that he had never heard before, one being about the Messiah coming from the house of David, while the next one went “Give us this day tomorrow’s bread.”

Uri mused on that. It was not possible to eat tomorrow’s bread today, so this bread was not actual bread but food for the soul. The saying no doubt related to the End of Days, when the Messiah would arrive, and that must be connected with the former.

It was quite possible that the guards and the prisoners in the prison had recited the same sentences, only back then his ear had not yet fully adjusted to hearing Aramaic, and they had mumbled it softly.

On reaching the end of the prayer, Jehuda sat back down, and Uri sat down beside him.

“You people in Edom, that accursed, unclean place, do you only recite the Sh’ma before the arrival of the Shabbat Queen?”

“Yes.”

“May the Almighty raze Edom to the ground, and with it all the ungodly!” declared Jehuda, and he thereupon began eating the challah.

They polished off the loaf of bread, drinking wine with it, Jehuda knocking back four cups in a row, Uri just one.

“Don’t you all in Edom, may the Almighty raze it to the ground — don’t you ever drink?”

“Not a lot,” said Uri, blushing.

Jehuda scornfully looked him over.

“It shows, you puny lot!”

By the time his wife had gotten back from taking the ritual immersion, Jehuda was hungry again. She protested that the meat would have been ready long before if she had not had to break off to go early to the mikveh, but that did not stop Jehuda from reprimanding her once more.

After he stuffed himself with meat, Uri went back to lying on the couch. He burped and farted contentedly, feeling that he had never been safer since leaving Rome.

A lot of people crowded into the room as evening drew in, all Master Jehuda’s household — domestics and outdoor servants — along with guests from the village who had come together in the master’s house to greet the Sabbath, the arrival of the Sabbath Queen, in a fitting manner and, as it emerged, also to sleep there. Master Jehuda must be an important man if they came to his place on Friday evening and he didn’t have to go anywhere else.

Uri lay on the bed, squinting around at them in the lamplight. There was no menorah in the room, just ten oil lamps that smoked and gave off an unpleasant odor as they burned away. Uri secretly reviled the Lord for afflicting him with poor vision, because he could not see the faces of all the many people too well, though this would have been an excellent opportunity to scrutinize the village’s inhabitants. They were eating and drinking, but Uri was not hungry and did not get up. A few people noticed him and moved toward him and looked him over with curiosity; Uri smiled.

The hubbub and dim lighting were soporific, and he plunged into a deep sleep.

“Wake up!” Master Jehuda hollered. “Let’s get off to the house of prayer!”

Uri opened his eyes. He moved his right shoulder: it hardly hurt now.

No end of people were stirring in the master’s room; there were some two dozen men, women, and children sleeping on the floor, the air was thick with the fumes of candles and human exhalations; their reek was unfamiliar, Uri realized, as they were from nearby villages. The whiff given off by people there was different; he had become accustomed to the smell of his village.

After prayers and a snatched breakfast of a few bites, he found himself in front of the house.

Virtually the entire population of the village, several dozen men, women, and children had assembled there, some strangers having slept overnight, from Friday evening to the Sabbath holiday, at other houses, because there must have been around one hundred souls there in all.

Master Jehuda patted some cheeks, and slapped the behinds of some girls and women, then set off.

Uri trudged along in the middle of the crowd.

There were vessels sitting on the road at the village boundary. Here everyone stopped, broke off a piece of matzo, took some fresh green figs — Uri took some too — then moved on, because, while on Friday evening they could travel as far as they wished, from when the sun went down until sunset on the Sabbath they could go no more than two thousand cubits, and the house of prayer lay farther than that from their villages than it did from this village. The reason why the food had been set down at the edge of the village before the onset of the Sabbath was to mark it as their household’s boundary, so by that reasoning the synagogue must lie within a distance of two thousand cubits of this point.

It seemed there was not such a big difference between here and the Roman Far Side after all.

They went over the plowed field in single file on a scarcely noticeable track between plots. Uri noted that the heads of grain had been left standing in a row along the edges of the already harvested plots, and he even went so far as to ask why they were so sloppy in their work. The middle-aged man who was tramping in front of him, also barefoot, looked back in astonishment.