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My dear Zechariah,
Things have been strange here at the Temple since you retired. I can understand why you didn’t want to stay in Jerusalem at your age, what with having a boy to bring up after all those years without, but we really miss you here in the seminary. I hope you’re still keeping active, and are helping out at the village school!
I thought of you the other day, especially the way you always liked to encourage anyone who could spare the time to study to the best of their ability. So many of my colleagues think that you must either be a scholar, and devote your whole life to study, or be a lay person, and not get involved. And yet they would be the first to protest if we suggested that the village schools might be closed, and that kids who were going to spend their whole lives on the farm didn’t need to learn to read, let alone speak Greek or Hebrew. (OK, I know one or two who wouldn’t protest at that, actually. But you know what I mean.)
I was giving that seminar you always liked about the Book of Daniel – why the Hebrew and Greek are so different, and whether the book was written in Greek, with only portions translated to Hebrew, or written in Hebrew, with parts of it now lost after they’d been translated into Greek. I was getting the students to discuss the character of Daniel – a hero from the past who really caught the public imagination under the Seleucid and Maccabee dynasties – and asking them whether they thought that he really did all the things in the stories, or whether they thought that people were just making stories up about him.
Anyway, I had just started the seminar when I noticed a kid had come into the back of the classroom. He must have been about the same age as your son, since he told me afterwards he was in Jerusalem for his Bar Mitzvah. (John is twelve, now, isn’t he?) I thought a kid like that wouldn’t want to stay long, but he listened to the discussion, and when the students were about to conclude that the book must have been written in Greek, he piped up and said, “What about the trees?”
This killed the discussion dead, as you can imagine. I know I’ve discussed the trees with you, but I don’t get one student a year who spots it. I couldn’t imagine that a twelve-year-old kid from Galilee could have noticed! But I replied, “OK, son, what about the trees?” And would you believe he got it straight away?
“In the Susanna story. When Daniel curses the two men. If you put it into Hebrew, the fate he gives for each man sounds like the name of the tree in the lie he made up. I mean, I know it does in Greek, but it works better in Hebrew.”
“Well done,” I said, and turned back to the class. “You see how important it is to look at different possibilities? Here we have this extra story that isn’t in the Hebrew scrolls of Daniel, and so many scholars will tell you it’s a later composition, from the Seleucid period, and not part of Holy Scripture. But if you look at the details of the text, you can see that the story might have been written in Hebrew. Is that what you think?” I aimed the question back at the boy.
“Well, I think it was written in Hebrew, and translated into Greek. But why did the old rabbis keep some of the Daniel stories and not others? How did they know which ones were right?”
“All right,” I addressed the class, “who can answer this boy’s question?” You can imagine how the class erupted into discussion at that! And this lad seemed to revel in it!
When it was time to knock off, I introduced the boy to Jacob, who was giving his seminar on temple rituals, and he went off to listen to Jake’s lecture. His name turned out to be Jeshua ben David – a good name, but so many people nowadays claim to be descended from David that it didn’t exactly make it easy to find his parents. I asked him about that, and he said his parents were in town somewhere, and they’d come and find him when it was time to go home.
Come the evening, no parents had appeared, and Jake wanted to go out drinking (though he didn’t say so in as many words), so I took Jeshua home to have supper with Jemima and the girls. After supper, we offered to let him stay the night. Spare room full of junk, as usual, but the lad was happy to help clear a space. When we found stuff from the temple there, he started asking me about it – how was it used? Was it permissible to leave it lying around someone’s guest room after it was worn out? Was there a ritual to perform to deconsecrate it? Could anything really be deconsecrated at all? This kid never stopped asking questions! Most of the time, he was just the lad up from Galilee for the first time, seeing for real all the things he’d only heard about. But every so often he came out with a question that really stopped me short, usually starting with “Why”. It felt as though here was someone from the other side of the world, who’d never heard of the Jews, the chosen people of God, and who had no idea why we did all these strange things.
The next morning, Jake and I were giving one of our joint seminars. Jake is the expert on liturgy, and now that you’ve retired, I seem to be the expert on the wisdom books, so we give joint seminars on the Psalms, and we were teaching on the Exile Psalm, “By the waters of Babylon”. Jeshua tagged along. I couldn’t have kept him away even if I’d wanted to!
The Exile Psalm is another one of those texts that divides students. Every year, when I discuss the origin of the psalm, about half the class says the psalm must have been written during the exile, and the other half says it must have been written after the return. Well, you know what I think on that one! The class started the usual debates – would people living in Babylon have written about stones? Would people after the return have been lamenting about Jerusalem? Jeshua seemed to be on the exile side – he said, if it was after the return, why would the writer be worried about forgetting Jerusalem? It was a good session, and Jeshua could easily hold his own against seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds in the debate.
Jake was impressed, anyway. He takes the next part of the seminar – on how to use the psalm in worship. Here the class divides again, with some people relishing the ending, prophesying destruction for Babylon; others wanting to re-write it to say “Rome” (no, we don’t report them! I did get a spy in the class one year, who threatened to, but the students all volunteered for a “special remedial class” in an alley near the wailing wall. I chose not to ask what they taught him, but he never came back!); and a third group, who think that we ought not to sing the last few lines at all, now that we’re on better terms with the Persian Empire. Jeshua didn’t take sides, but he asked some penetrating questions about the validity of tampering with scripture on the one hand, versus the wisdom of letting historical conflicts poison relations today on the other. No, he didn’t introduce those questions out of the blue – I don’t think even he is that precocious! – but when the topics came up, he seemed quite at home with the issues.
And so it went on. He stayed with Jemima and me again that night. Our girls are too young to expect a twelve-year-old boy to take any interest, but he chatted to Jemima quite happily, and did even try and entertain the girls when Jem had to rush out to buy more food. She told me later that, of all the times when I’ve invited a student home, he was the only one she felt treated her as a person. Most of them are embarrassed around a woman – she’s only a year or two older than they are, after all – or they completely ignore her. Of course it helped that Jeshua isn’t old enough to have that sort of problem yet, but I do get the impression that here’s a boy who is interested in everything.
I had no seminars the next day, but I wanted to introduce him to some colleagues. We had a session rather like the ones we hold when a new student wants advice on a course of study. Jeshua came and sat with about six of us, and we each explained to him the sort of work we did. He then asked questions – always penetrating – and we asked him about what he already knew, and where his study might take him in future. This last question got the strangest of all the responses we’d had from him. He said “My father has a plan for me.” Since his father – from what we managed to get out of him – is a village carpenter somewhere up north, this was a very strange remark!
About half way through that day, the parents finally turned up. It seems that they had been travelling with several other families, in two groups, and each group had thought Jeshua was with the other. In fact, this was the only time I saw Jeshua at a loss: he was genuinely surprised that his parents hadn’t known where to find him. Still, I could see a lot of deep family feeling there. There was scolding, and even a discussion of punishment, but we could all see that they really cared about this boy, and wanted the best for him. After all, who wouldn’t, with a kid like that?
I think – hope – he’ll get the best education a teenager in a provincial town can expect. And from what I’ve seen, I expect I’ll see him back here in a few years to take up his studies again. Few students have such a love for learning, or for the God who gives it to us. I just wish we had more like him. And more teachers like you to inspire young people with such a love.
Your old friend,
Gamalliel.