am!”
How different my life might have been if, at that moment, I had spoken and he had heard. But Judah’s name stayed bound within me and twisted itself into a question that haunted me for a long time. Was my silence a rejection of The Holy One’s call, a “No” to His plan for me?
The priest tried unsuccessfully to stop several men from joining Judah and then he noticed us. His eyes widened as he looked at Father. “Rabbi, do you remember me? Have you returned to your position in the Temple?”
Father smiled. “Of course I remember you, Tobiah. I’ve returned, but only as a humble pilgrim.” The hinges of the trapdoor creaked again.
Tobiah embraced Father. Then, taking notice of me and Naomi, he said, “Come, you have young women to protect. Let me lead you off the Mount.” He took Father by the arm. Naomi, anxious to flee this tumult, grabbed Father’s other hand.
Father, Tobiah, and Naomi began wending through the mass of people. I lagged behind, waiting there for Judah to find me, wondering what he would do when he did. What I would do. Tobiah let go of the others and hurried back to me. “You must be Micah’s daughter.” He smiled politely with closed lips. “Please, come quickly. Your father is anxious about you. He needs you.”
Though a part of me begged to turn back towards Judah, I accepted Tobiah’s argument: my father needed me. I fell in behind him. He strode through the chaos with a calm dignity. People gave way to him. With Tobiah leading, my retreat seemed sensible, even honorable.
Tobiah brought the three of us, unharmed, to the western gate. “Leave the Mount from here,” he said. “It’s closer and not so crowded. May Adonai protect you.” He plunged back into the screaming throng though by now any effort to tamp its rage seemed impossible.
Before passing through the gate to the bridge, I turned around. No smoke ascended from the sacrificial altar. No songs of praise to Adonai emanated from the mouths of His people. All devotions had ceased, and the Temple Mount, whose stones my father had kissed just a few hours before, had been transformed from a holy ground to a battleground. A shrieking, cursing mob hurled a barrage of rocks at the Romans. As the deadly weights rained down upon them, the vastly outnumbered soldiers dropped like birds shot from the sky. I was surprised that I felt a pang of pity for those Roman soldiers.
We passed through the Temple’s western gate and onto the bridge. There I opened the basket to free the pair of doves we had planned to offer in sacrifice. One of them bit my hand before taking off, reminding me that my compassion for those Roman pagans was misplaced.
Acts of Vengeance
With hearts pounding, Father, Naomi, and I pushed through the throngs in the streets and made our way to Chuza’s house. My pale, heavily perspiring half-brother awaited us at his gate and hustled us into his courtyard. “I’m so relieved to see you unharmed! A messenger has just informed me that a mob is rioting on the Temple Mount.”
Father coughed, trying to catch his breath. “The Roman guard provoked it.”
“I told you not to go!” Chuza turned on his heel and hurried off to the Royal Palace.
Joanna brought us into the reception hall and sent a servant for water and fruit. Father rendered an account of the chaos on the Mount to Joanna while Naomi sat upright in her chair, gripping the seat as if to keep it from taking flight. I sat on a couch, but my legs shook uncontrollably.
What would the new king do? Would he understand that, by ordering the Roman guard onto the Mount, he had incited the mob? Would he restore order and round up the perpetrators and those who stoned the soldiers? Would he act justly by punishing the guilty and sparing the innocent?
We soon found out. The wind whipped through the Upper City, carrying in its lash the cries of war horses and the shrieks of their victims. The Roman cavalry was charging the Temple Mount. To block out the terrifying noises, I pushed my fingers into my ears. Judah’s words echoed in them. “Avenge this outrage! “Cleanse the Temple!” After the stoning, Judah would’ve stayed there and tried to rally more rebels to his cause, making himself a prime target for the charging cavalry. I pushed my fingers deeper into my ears and heard Tobiah’s words, “Come, your father needs you.” Tobiah’s gentle urging, though unwelcome at the time, may have saved my life. I wondered if the priest who saved us had taken his own advice and fled the Temple Mount himself.
Naomi and I ran to our bedroom, closed the door, latched the windows, and hid under a pile of blankets. When I closed my eyes, I saw the massacred: the heads of handsome young men smashed by horses’ hooves; the bare-shouldered women, now completely exposed by swords tearing at their clothing; the puppy-eyed boy, his severed head staring at his torso; heaps of hacked-off arms that would never again bathe babies or light the Sabbath candles.
The wails and screams of the cavalry’s victims punched through our barriers. Naomi’s teeth chattered. “So cold,” she said, over and over. I wrapped some blankets around her and brought her to Joanna, then huddled by myself, chanting prayers that I knew would not stop the massacre.
At nightfall, the cries ceased and Chuza returned. In a slow, controlled voice, as if he were dictating to a scribe, he described to us the merciless bloodbath on the Mount. With their swords and lances, the soldiers gored, beheaded, and disemboweled hundreds of people. With their horses, they trampled hundreds more. Panic-stricken Temple visitors stampeded to the gates, hoping to escape, but succeeded only in crushing the life from one another. No effort was made to distinguish the guilty from the innocent, or even the Jews from the Gentiles. Those who had no part in the madness were slaughtered along with those who had. The “crime” of being present on the Temple Mount this day had condemned two thousand souls to their deaths.
Sleep that night was impossible. The wailing of the innocent resounded in my ears: their pleas for mercy, their prayers to their God for deliverance, their sudden silences. Naomi called out to her mother in her restless dreams. I left the bedroom and roamed through the house touching its unfamiliar treasures. Oil lamps, left burning in the evening’s confusion, guided my footsteps. In a room next to the kitchen, four bronze thimbles lay on a long table. Joanna had needles in many lengths and thicknesses. Each one could pierce flesh as easily as a sword. Why had I been spared? I pricked my finger and imagined my blood, with the blood of so many others, oozing into the cracks between the stones on the Mount; martyr’s blood, now mortar for the stones that had not needed it.
I found a cabinet in which Chuza kept his pens and other writing materials. I dipped my pricked finger into the dried gummy powder in the inkwells and discovered that one was red. My blood mixed with the powder and made an ink. With it, I retouched the spots where Judah’s fingers had clutched my neck and considered the ink spots insignia of my revolutionary resolve.
When I heard voices in the still night air, I followed them to their source. Chuza and Father sat together on the bench in the courtyard, their backs to me as I stood in the doorway. I almost chose not to listen, fearing they would argue, and then, in addition to sleeplessness, the painful lump in my throat would return.
Chuza massaged his temples. “I promised Herod Archelaus we could find the ones responsible for the stoning, so that he could punish only the guilty. But he ordered out all the cavalry quartered in and around Jerusalem.”
“A stupid, brutal boy,” said Father. “Only twenty years old. Yet Rome thinks he can rule all of Judea, Samaria, and Idumea!”
“He wouldn’t listen to any of his advisors. He said he didn’t need our opinions, that he had his father’s example of how to control these lands.” Chuza imitated a lisping Archelaus. “‘I will teach the people
