György Spiró - Captivity

After the reading, the prayer leader tagged on a sort of explanation, and that did not need interpretation, as he said it in Aramaic. The young man, four or five years older than Uri at most, was not exactly an imaginative individual; he expounded on how anything that is lost is not lost forever, and what dies does not die forever. Someone in the crowd commented that his mother had died recently; he no doubt had her in mind.

Right then, on track to complete the reading of the Torah by the autumn and start once more amid the Simchat Torah festivities, they happened to be at the Book of Samuel, the bit that anyone who happened to be paying attention could hear was about the Ark in which the Lord’s covenant with His people is kept was stolen by the Philistines but subsequently sent back in fulfillment of the Lord’s will.

The Philistines stole the Ark of the Covenant from Shiloh at a time when the Jews still held the Ark in the Tabernacle, but, by a miracle, it was returned seven months later, so they retrieved this most ancient and holy box, in which the Tablets of Stone with the Ten Commandments handed down to Moses were kept, along with a few other precious articles, and on whose golden lid, in principle, the Almighty was seated and conversed with those who entered the sanctum. King David then took it to Jerusalem, and his successor Solomon built the First Temple, in the inner sanctum of which the Ark stood until it later disappeared.

Uri wondered whether others also wondered if the Ark might still be preserved somewhere. The Ark of the Covenant was not in the inner sanctum of the Second Temple, into which he had been unable to see, and that was why the Holy of Holies, the place that even the high priest could only enter once a year to testify to the Ark’s exalted absence, was empty. Uri seemed to recollect reading somewhere that Jeremiah once took the Ark and the Tabernacle and buried them in a cave on Mount Nebo, hiding the way to the place even from his own companions, and he also vaguely recalled reading that Josiah had hidden the Ark in the caves under Temple Mount. The important thing was that it had been missing ever since.

It would be an extraordinary and major event if it were to turn up; people would be greatly excited to see it.

Between “amens,” Master Jehuda joked with his friends, still speaking loudly. It was largely due to him that the prayer leader’s text was inaudible; he simply outshouted the young man, and Uri had a suspicion that this was for the purpose of showing that he, and no one else, was master around these parts, even if he was not leading the prayers.

The children ran around, with mothers trying — by occasionally rapping knuckles — to dissuade them from reaching out from under the white tablecloths and pinching wedges of the special festive bread. The dogs were not exactly respectful of the solemn occasion either, because, perhaps following the lead of the children, they raced around and barked in a manner that was quite unworthy of Jewish dogs.

When the communal service closed with the reciting of the Sh’ma, the prayer leader, accompanied by two elderly men, took the Torah back into the house of prayer, where he placed it back in its cupboard. He then came out and washed his hands in a bowl held out to him into which something was sprinkled, though Uri had no idea why he would do this and, indeed, asked.

“He was made unclean by touching the Torah scroll,” several around him said, quite at a loss to understand why anyone would ask.

“Unclean — from the Torah?”

Uri was astounded. Back home in Rome it was necessary to wash hands before picking up a Torah scroll.

It was an interesting way of looking at things, he reflected — to believe that a holy book might make a person unclean. Maybe that came from experience long forgotten by Roman Jews.

He inquired what was sprinkled in the bowl.

The answer was the ashes of a red deer doe’s remains, which are best for cleaning off fat.

Uri was staggered. Red deer does were mentioned in the Books of Moses, and symbolic ashes were used in Rome as well when they got to that point during the reading of the Torah, but here people in Judaea truly lived by the written word! Time stood still here.

The prayer leader drank a sip of wine, whereupon everyone jumped for the flasks of wine, poured some out for themselves and one another — women and children too. The flasks were drained in an instant.

That was also when the white tablecloths were taken off and everyone, whether standing or moving around, started eating. The food was barley bread, baked from the newly harvested grain, and it was dipped into vessels of vinegar and enormous dishes of salt, of which there was at least one per table. There were also greens on the tables, including some that Uri had never seen before. Once the bread was gone, the faithful resigned themselves to eating these. There was no meat because there was not much of that and it came only with the major feasts. Uri did well to grab two thick slices of bread, and he did not dunk them in vinegar but most certainly in the salt, and he took several helpings of the greens, which were not too popular.

He was left behind when it came to the wine, however, for which he did not begrudge the others. It was true that it was compulsory to drink some wine on the Sabbath, but it quickly ran out in the crush, so he did not commit a sin. He looked around all the same to check if anyone had spotted that he was not drinking, as he suspected that these nice people were nevertheless quite capable of upbraiding him for sinning and that Master Jehuda would impose the due penalty, but fortunately — thank goodness — no one was bothering about that.

The assembly, several hundred strong, that had gathered for the Sabbath from nearby villages was merry, and they were merry for the same reason Uri was: they would not have to work that day — plus they also got free food and drink. Uri noticed that freemen and slaves were eating together, with no essential difference between them on this occasion; in the end, Uri supposed, that was the main point of the holiday, and that was especially the sense of Passover, which, it was true, had passed, but on its first day the counting of the Omer, which lasted for fifty days until Shavuot, had begun and had now reached the fourteenth day. All those many tribes which eventually became the Israelites had been delivered out of slavery in Egypt, and it was no bad thing to remind oneself of that; let the slaves also enjoy being free for one single day a week, the Sabbath.

Passover was still close, and the residents of the nearby villages stood around Uri and compared their experiences on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Everyone in that part of the world was required to make the trip, as it lay within two days’ walk, and all had in fact made the trip and they could not get over relating the marvelous experiences they had two short weeks before.

On the way there, someone had gotten a thorn in their foot and was unable to get it out, so it had festered, and on the way back it had been cut open with a knife, though the festival was still going, or to be more specific it was a half-holiday, whereupon a dispute had arisen over whether it was permissible to cut the wound open on a half-holiday. What carried the argument was the notion that by the time the festival reached its very end the whole leg might go gangrenous and the individual would die. How he had screamed! It turned one’s stomach. Of course he was all right now, or rather not entirely, because last week a plow ran into his other foot, and that had festered, but he’d had it cut open too, and by the day before yesterday he was plowing again.

Another drank too much wine and fell into a cistern, and he floundered around for a long time before they were able to pull him out, because the wells in Jerusalem are very deep. He had wailed and cursed and lamented just like the prophet Jeremiah when he was cast into a cistern (or maybe it was a dungeon, because the princes were not too fond of him), and he was only hauled out much later, as had been the case with that drunk ten days ago.