serve my own people but not against God.”
“Your name?”
“Oppressed people have no name!”
“You are right.” With a spring the man leaped up and Menachem recovered the freedom of his chest and arms.
“Now—your name?”
“Menachem, son of Gedalia who calls himself Marcus Mercator. Now what is your name?”
“They call me Ben Nesher.”
“What, the son of the eagle? I have heard of you. You belong to the partisans of Yehuda the Galilean.”
“That is so. The idolators follow closely on my heel. I seek shelter for a day or two. Hide me. But you are free. If you will not hide me I will not slay you. If you betray me, however, then it is all over with the house of Marcus Mercator.”
“Let us go,” said Menachem.
So the two young men walked together in the direction of Nazareth, not along the main road but through a path formed by nature which crossed the slope irregularly, at intervals broken or hidden by palm groves. Now and then their steps flushed out some mountain badgers that despite their plumpness scattered swiftly before their feet. Perhaps they had prepared the path that Menachem and Ben Nesher followed.
This Ben Nesher was a great and fearful name in Israel. He was an avenger of God who had sworn never to rest until the Romans were driven from the holy soil. Woe to the Israelite who was unwilling to place his goods, chattel and livestock in the service of God and Israel. Ben Nesher was tall of stature, broad and gaunt, flat like an iron slab on which houses might be built. People who were as broad-shouldered as Ben Nesher were seldom so lean. His hair was black, unruly and bent in curls like claws upon his skull. His face was regular, his nose hooked and his chin protruding and hard like a buffer block. Justly was a man with such outward appearance called Son of the Eagle.
“Life in Judea is hard, is it not?” said Menachem.
“One rests softer on the hills there than in the beds of Jerusalem,” answered Ben Nesher, measuring Menachem with his eye.
“You belong to the runners. You have long strong fingers! Do you still sleep in your bed, do you wait at home each morning for the arrival of the tax collector? Do you wish to pay the great idolator in Rome so that you may live, and give him what you owe to God? Are you a Galilean?”
“Nay, I live in Nazareth but I am from Judea.”
“The men of Judea live best in the hills of Judea.”
“Do you believe it will last long, Ben Nesher?”
“What? The rule of the idolators? I know not. I am no prophet and no Essene. I have no future to predict. Today I must fight the idolators. The book of Daniel says that the end of the fourth kingdom of the fourth enemy of God will surely come. We shall not live so far. He who does not shun death, serves God. To him nothing can happen and he does his duty.”
“Is there a future for Israel, Ben Nesher?”
“That is for God to decide but we must change the present.”
“Should we not husband our strength then for the age to come?”
“He who spares himself commits treason. People who should have died and who perish not in battle are false coins; they have been usurers in their duty!”
Menachem remained silent a long time and Ben Nesher did not feel compelled to speak. Life among the stones had made him taciturn.
Does this man see nothing but his own vision? wondered Menachem. The field in which it grew was once tilled and irrigated. He does not yet know from which feeling his idea was born? In his head he has a nut with a hard shell but he cannot find the soil, the roots and the tree again. He turns the nut around and around. Perhaps it must be so. Perhaps one should be cut off from one’s feelings as soon as the feeling has given birth. Ben Nesher walked another way than Yeshua. Surely, the people stood at a crossroads.
And God Himself? Did he like to stand at a crossroads too? Or had God intended this for His chosen people? It hurts to stand at a crossroads forever but if that is Israel’s destiny, may a child of Israel desire a better fate than the people?
Then Menachem said: “I have thought this over, Ben Nesher. I shall conceal you and accompany you for a while afterwards.”
The dawn began to glow, caressing the distant valley and mountains of Hermon that dominated the northern horizon. A flock of cranes flew over the plain of Esdrelon. Other large birds, the pelicans from the Sea of Kinnereth, also crossed the sky.
“I know a place where you will be safe, Ben Nesher! The Romans will not seek you there!”
They reached a spot on the slope where a stair had been carved. Ascending the crude steps, they arrived at a steeply rising path protected by rocky walls on both sides. The path led to a narrow alley, a miserable little street where dogs sniffed the heaps of garbage outside the houses. The white of the walls was sulfur-yellow, stained with dingy black spots. Garbage water trickled over the stones that served as a natural pavement. At the corner of this street in a gulley called the Alley of the Jackals—these animals sometimes penetrated there at night—they reached the house of Joseph the carpenter. A wooden fence enclosing a workshop extended from the dwelling. A door had been built in the fence.
Work was already beginning in the house of the carpenter. In front of the door stood Joseph behind his bench. He did not notice the two young men approaching. In the middle of the alley they saw Yeshua standing with his arms folded across his chest. It was as though he had been awaiting them.
“Yeshua,” said Menachem, “here is Ben Nesher, the friend of Yehuda the Galilean. He seeks shelter for a day or two. Inside this enclosure is a dry hole, I know. May Ben Nesher stay here?”
Yeshua stood there as ever in his own immobility which made others, even old people, uneasy because that quiescence seemed to contain all movement. It was the immobility of momentarily folded wings. He looked at Menachem and then at Ben Nesher. The latter did not lower his eyes but was stirred by Yeshua and, turning to Menachem, said:
“Now there’s a man! Is he coming over to us?”
“I think not,” said Menachem. “We all have different paths. There are too many roads for our people.”
“There is only one way for man,” interrupted Yeshua.
“There is also only one way for our people,” said Ben Nesher. “God and our freedom!”
Menachem wished to bring this conversation to an end so he asked again:
“Yeshua, may Ben Nesher stay here?”
And now a singular thing happened. Menachem had followed Yeshua from his fourteenth to his nineteenth year but had never seen him laugh.
Now the young man smiled. His smile had a strange effect on Menachem; it was as though he had just witnessed an unusual phenomenon of nature.
“In my Father’s house there is place for all,” said Yeshua.
Menachem nodded; Yeshua had spoken of his Father’s
