The Tale of the Scribe
As
I climb the steps of Temple Mount, my heart is filled with a song of ascents: “I
lift up my eyes to the hills—from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven
and earth.” And as I climb to the Temple
platform, where the holiest of holies awaits, I thank the Lord that I am part
of God’s order, part of God’s apparatus,
enshrined in the sacred place to which I ascend, where the will of the Lord is
interpreted and implemented here on earth.
I am truly humbled before God
that I have been chosen, even among a chosen people, to interpret God’s holy law and oversee its implementation. Although I know that it is a gift, I am
nevertheless proud that it has been given to me.
I
feel the Law, the Torah, coursing through
my body. It is a song of hope, a song of
order, a song given by the divine, by that which we do not even name, that
which we call ha-shem, the Name, or
simply Lord, Adonai. And the Law has been spoken by the breath of
God, by the ruach of God, and the
words burned into our lives by that Spirit’s living flame. And as I climb, other songs of David come to
me . . . “O Lord, how I love your law!
It is my meditation all day long” and “The law of the Lord is perfect,
reviving the soul.” And I am humbled and
grateful and proud, at one and the same time, to be your vessel, O Adonai, and as I proudly walk through
the marketplace, it shows in my countenance, it shines out through every pore
and I know that I am aglow.
But
the Law is often easier in the saying, more beautiful in its form, than it is in application. Often, it is not easily seen how it applies
in everyday life, as it surely must be for pious Jews everywhere. And that is part of my job as Scribe: not
only am I keeper of the Law as given,
in all its symmetry and beauty, but I am its interpreter as well, I take a
stricture and determine how it applies, I spin it out to its logical extent,
showing its beauty in every situation.
What does the Law say about touching the unclean? How long of a touch does it take? Can the clean eat with the unclean? Should
they? I and my fellow scribes do the
hard and, frankly, thankless work of
bringing the Law to the people, in the everyday.
So
as I ascend to the Temple Mount, the abode of the Lord, I thank God for who I
am, who God has made me, and I reflect on the governor’s feast just the night
before, and think with pride of the honor given me to sit at the right hand of
the host, the place of honor . . . It shows to me that even our Roman overlords
fear the Lord, and respect those who labor in God’s vineyard, for the greater
glory of Adonai . . .
And
when I get to the platform, and stand outside the women’s court, I cannot help
but break aloud into glorious, spontaneous prayer, my fine robes – as befit a
servant of the Lord –shining in the morning sun. And as my prayer rings out it expresses all
the beauty, all the theological depth that my training in the Law has afforded
me, and I cannot help but notice how it impresses not only the simple women who
are about, but their menfolk as well, as they go in and out on temple business.
Which,
of course, is what I have on this beautiful morning, after last night’s rain
has washed the stink of the burnt offerings out of the air. Indeed, it is the same business I have every morning at the Roman hour of Terce—and what a fine order the Romans
have brought to Jerusalem, oppressors though they are . . . Anyway, my business
this morning is to sit in judgment in the Temple gate, to hear the pleas of the
people, and to interpret the Law of Moses, which is perfect and our delight, to
insure that God’s justice is done for God’s people. And the first to appear is a landlord and his
tenant, a woman who has recently lost her husband, and cannot work the fields
and thus cannot pay the percentage due the landlord. And as much as it pains me to do so, as much
as I am personally sympathetic to the plight of the widow—who has three young
children—I have to side with the landowner who does own the land . . . after all, the Law is perfect, it is our delight.
The Tale of the Widow
I
am not an old woman, having seen barely twenty five years, yet I have been a widow
nearly half of them. Married at twelve
to a Temple carpenter, a year later he died when a scaffold collapsed on the
Western Wall. And although he left no
brother to take my hand, and thus fulfill the Levirate duties of the dead, I
was fortunate that my father still lived, and was able to take in my child and
me. Still, it was hard: my father had little enough to live on, and
two more mouths stretched it to the breaking point. But though we were often hungry, we did not
lack a warm, dry place to live.
Until,
of course, my father passed in turn, and the landlord had no choice but to turn
us out. He had been generous enough
toward the end—as my father’s health sank toward death, he was prevented from working,
and could not pay his portion. The
landlord nevertheless let us stay, for which I am grateful, and of course the
Lord, but when father died, he had no choice.
He had a living to make, he had mouths to feed himself, and I understood
when he turned us out. What could he do?
With
no other male relative to take us in, we went into the streets, where I was to
beg for our daily bread. That first
winter, my child died of a terrible, rattling cough. She had been sick for weeks, hacking through
the cold, winter nights, until finally, her body just gave out. I suppose it is a mercy, because living on
the Jerusalem streets is not easy, even within a stone’s throw of the Temple,
where people tend to be more generous with their alms. Still, I managed to survive these past years
on the small amount that I was able to beg, a few pennies here, a few there. Some days, I received several, some days none
at all, the begging was as variable as the Palestine climate: beneficial the
one day, and the next . . . not.
On
this day, I come to the women’s court of the temple to make an offering to the
Lord, through God’s priests and scribes and other learned men who bring God to the
people, without whom we would surely be at our enemies’ mercy . . . the priests
who intercede for us with burnt offerings and the scribes who apply God’s Holy
Law equally, and though their judgments are sometimes harsh, they are
invariably fair. And as I throw into the
jar the morning's take of two pennies—praise be to God I have the afternoon
still to beg—I see the man Jesus, who we on the street all know, and he’s gesticulating toward me and speaking to his
followers, though I cannot hear the words.
Then he turns away, trailing his disciples behind.
A Prediction
We disciples have a hard time
understanding exactly what Jesus means by his words, or at least I do.
“Truly I tell you,” he says, “this poor widow has put in more than all
those who are contributing to the treasury.” Which, of course, is patently false: she’s put
in a grand total of a penny, and there are those we’ve seen, just in the few minutes we’ve been here, who’ve put in many times more. There’s no way she’s contributed more than all of them put together . . . And
his explanation is not much better, that they’ve contributed out of their
abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had . . . and
to that I say . . . so?? They’ve still put in a far greater amount than
the widow, intentions or not.
But maybe that’s the point . . . maybe Jesus can see that her
intentions are better than all the
others. Maybe her heart is purer or
something, cleaner, though I can’t
believe it could be any more so than those of the Temple scribes . . . Or maybe
it’s a relative thing, that what she
has given is greater than all the others because she has given a greater percentage of what she has. After all, 100% is certainly more than 10%,
or 50%, and he did say they gave out
of their abundance . . . It seems kind of a trivial point to make, but so be
it. I’m sure we’ll come to understand it
one day, just as I’m sure we’ll understand all those predictions of his own
death . . . How is it that the Messiah, born to lead us back to glory, could
die? Perhaps he meant that metaphorically, or symbolically,
too.
Well.
As we leave the Temple, Peter—irritating, distractible Peter—says “Look,
Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” and I’m thinking, sure
they are, but a pretty skin hides a rotten core . . . Haven’t the minions of
that place persecuted us since the beginning?
Hadn’t we just heard a vivid description of that rot, in the tale of the
scribes’ overweening pride and hypocrisy?
And as if to put a seal on it all,
Jesus tells us one more thing: “Not one stone will be left here upon another;
all will be thrown down.” And we don’t
have to guess by whom it will be thrown: it is God who decides what lives or
dies, what persists or is destroyed, and it is obvious that the Temple has
outlived its usefulness, that it is so degenerate, so rotten, so riddled with
corruption and vice, that it will be destroyed.
And doesn’t this shed a new light upon
the widow’s mite? Doesn’t it offer a
different perspective on the act of sacrifice we just saw? The widow gives all she has, her whole life for
something that is worthless, corrupt . . . Does Jesus really mean to commend
that act to us, does he mean to glorify it? This poor widow, duped into giving her all to an institution riddled with sin, she
must not be aware that what she has just given her life to does not deserve
it. After all, who in their right mind
would do that willingly?
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