dagger which he wore in his girdle under his cloak. Old Amitai had leaped like a monkey to the warm breast of his son and the Roman dogs had torn him away from the youth.
Menachem sneaked behind the soldiers. He stabbed them in the back one after the other. Together with Amitai’s son Barzilai he hurried down the road to escape the Romans.
The two young men did not remain together for long. Menachem darted into the smelly alley of the tanners. Leaping like a goat, he was racing across the dirt of the steeply rising alley when he heard a woman’s voice screaming from a low roof.
“They used me! Better mud in my house than their seed. Be you from Israel, man? Then catch!” A woman flung down a bundle which he caught. As Menachem ran he noticed that he was bearing a child in his arms.
2. Capernaum.
3. “Peace be upon you”—a standard Israelite greeting.
4. Jewish law; the way of life according to the rabbinic commentaries.
3
It was night over Nazareth. Where the highway curved into the Great Sea, the men that escaped the Roman marauders had called a rendezvous.
“Judgment has been cast,” said a man who expected a stark descent into Sheol. “God has sent His tempest. We must bow to its waves and billows. We find ourselves on board the shipwreck of the Lord.” Others gnashed their teeth with rage and despair as the prophets had foretold.
A full moon shone peacefully and solemnly over the men. The night wind moaned through the mountains. At the head of the large assembly stood the fully grown Yeshua, his eyes filled with compassion. His squarely trimmed beard was chestnut brown and black like his hair. The great smith Shammai towered over them like a giant, his hand gripping the handle of his hammer with its head on the ground. Among them were the young shepherd Pinchas with his curly black hair around a bronzed scalp and the itinerant merchant Andreas Philippos. Shirach the potter who had succumbed to despair strolled about aimlessly, hoping that others would give them clear instructions on what to do.
“We cannot stay and look on,” shouted the smith. “We are here because we have hidden ourselves like fugitive slaves. Slaves we were in Egypt but free men in our own land. Must we also become slaves in our own country? We are going away, men, we choose the mountains. There can be no more rest for the men of Israel. In Judea they are fighting already. Yehuda the Galilean has assembled thousands of men. They lie in wait for the idolators. Every act of resistance is a spade of earth for the place where God digs Rome’s grave. It is written: blood for blood. I have seen enough blood since the time my father showed me the first idolator.”
“Tonight I bade my wife goodbye and made her understand that from now on she must consider herself a widow. My children are orphans. Will any among you go with me? Early tomorrow morning parents will look in vain for their children and women will grope for a shadow. Otherwise are we all guilty!”
“And what say you, Yeshua?” asked Pinchas the shepherd.
Yeshua looked at him long and piercingly. Then he answered:
“The time is not yet come.”
Shammai the smith raised the hammer block gently from the ground and let it fall again.
“The time has come.”
“For you but not for me,” replied Yeshua tautly.
“And what is your counsel, Menachem? You are young but you share what stirs in us,” said Andreas Philippos.
They did not know whether Menachem had just joined the group from the darkness or whether he had been standing there a long time already. He was slimmer than ever, the young Judean, but tenacious and wiry.
“I know that Yeshua speaks with God. But each one is free and may switch his path at any moment. Woe be to man and woe be to people that each hour of their life is marked upon the crossroads. Where there is choice, there is darkness.”
“Where there is choice, there is darkness,” repeated Yeshua, adopting Menachem’s words for the first time.
“For us there is no choice!” cried Shammai the smith. “Today we saw our children dragged away as slaves. I have seen my son for the last time. There is no choice.”
“If there is no choice for you, then go,” said Menachem. “Then has your hour come.”
Yeshua stood motionless at the edge of the group. Looking at him, the others did not know whether he was sunk in thought or whether his mind was, in truth, somewhere else.
A night wind rustled softly behind the group of hopeless men.
“We give everything up, we are going,” called the shepherd, the merchant, the young wood chopper, the pottery bakers, the sons of the donkey driver. “We follow the smith.”
Menachem looked at them with compassion. But Yeshua continued to stand there as before with impassive eyes—as though this event was not of this world.
Led by the smith, the men moved off to the south towards the wild hills of Judea.
“Where to, Yeshua?” asked Menachem.
“Where my Father wills there will I go,” replied Menachem, abruptly taking over the words of his friend. For he understood that Yeshua meant God.
“Does a Father wish then that one son should go here and another one yonder?” asked Yeshua.
“Aye, Yeshua, for the sake of their Mother’s house.”
Yeshua gazed at Menachem under the still moon which hung over the mountain like a glass bell and although their eyes were compassionate and earnest too, they could not subdue one another.
Silently Yeshua turned around to take the road to Nazareth while Menachem cautiously descended the mountain slope towards a forest which rose up from the stony ground like the plume of some subterranean creature. There he lay down in order to reflect on what to do the following day.
Menachem fell into a heavy sleep in which he did not dream but when dawn approached it seemed that he saw sunlight and wished to get up but could not as he lay under a lump of rock. He tried to roll over in order to dislodge the stone. He bent his arm to the elbow, exerting all his strength to heave the boulder; it was no use.
Then he opened his eyes, sighed deeply and realized that the dream was part of this world. For a man pressed his knee on Menachem’s chest and his hands pushed Menachem’s shoulders to the ground.
“Who are you?” asked the man.
“A witness of my people!”
“Are you also a witness of your people?”
“Aye!”
“Who are your people?”
“I am a Hebrew!”
“So—you know the prophets!
