Mary of Nazareth (13 page)

PART TWO

MIRIAM'S CHOICE

CHAPTER 9

“
M
ARIAMNE
! ” Miriam cried. “Don't swim too far out….”

It was a pointless warning, and she knew it. Rachel's daughter Mariamne's joy in living was contagious. She was also beautiful to watch, swimming with all the vigor, all the carefree eagerness, of youth. The water slid over her slender body like transparent oil, and each time she moved, there were flashes of copper in her long hair, which spread around her like living seaweed.

It was two years since Joseph of Arimathea had brought Miriam to Rachel's house in Magdala. Immediately on her arrival, Rachel had declared that the newcomer was so like her daughter Mariamne, they might almost be sisters. The women in the house had agreed. “It's really amazing,” they had cried. “You're as alike as your names: Mariamne and Miriam!”

It was meant kindly, but it wasn't true.

Of course, the two girls had certain characteristics in common, quite apart from their physical appearance. Yet Miriam could see only the differences between them: differences that were not due only to age, even though Mariamne, the younger of the two by two years, still had all the passion and fickleness of childhood.

There was nothing, not even the difficult initiation in languages and other knowledge, that Mariamne was unable to transform into pure enjoyment. This hunger for pleasure could not have been a greater contrast with Miriam's austerity. Rachel's daughter was born to love everything about the world, and Miriam envied her this power of wonderment.

When she looked back over her own life, she could find nothing similar. During the first months she had spent in the shadow of her young companion's exuberance, she had often felt her own common sense, determination, and stubbornness weighing heavily on her. But Mariamne had demonstrated that she had enough joy in her for the two of them, which had only made Miriam love her even more. A friendship had soon sprung up, which even now helped Miriam to support the somewhat prickly character the Almighty had bestowed on her.

And so the happy, peaceful, studious days had flown by on this beautiful estate whose courtyards and gardens stretched as far as the shore of the Lake of Gennesaret.

Rachel and her friends were no ordinary women. They had none of the reserve usually demanded of daughters and wives. They talked about everything, laughed over everything. Much of their time was devoted to reading and conversations that would have horrified the rabbis, convinced as they were that women were only meant for maintaining the home, weaving, or, when they were well-to-do, like Rachel, an idleness as arrogant as it was senseless.

Ten years previously, her husband, a merchant who had owned a fleet of ships plying between the great ports of the Mediterranean, had been stupidly knocked down and killed in a street in Tyre by a Roman officer's wagon. Since then, Rachel had used her considerable fortune in an unexpected way.

Refusing to live in either of the luxurious houses she had inherited from her husband, in Jerusalem and Caesarea, she had settled in Magdala, a town in Galilee two days' walk from Tarichea. Here, it was easy to forget the hustle and bustle of the great cities and ports. Even on the hottest days, a gentle breeze blew in from the lake, and all day long you could hear, through the constant birdsong, the water lapping on the shore. Depending on the season, the almond trees, the myrtles, and the caper bushes were a riot of color. At the foot of the hills, the peasants of Magdala assiduously cultivated long strips of wild mustard seed and rich vineyards lined with sycamore hedges.

Built around three courtyards, Rachel's house had the sobriety and simplicity of the Jewish buildings of bygone days. Cleared of the opulent clutter usually found in Roman-style houses, several rooms had been transformed into study rooms, their bookcases bulging with works by Greek philosophers and Roman thinkers from the time of the Republic, manuscript scrolls of the Torah in Aramaic and Greek, and texts of the prophets dating back to the Babylonian exile.

As soon as she was able to, Rachel invited the authors she admired to the lake. They would stay in Magdala for a whole season, working, teaching, and exchanging ideas.

Joseph of Arimathea, defying the traditional Essene mistrust of women, was a frequent visitor. Rachel greatly appreciated his company and always gave him a warm welcome. Miriam had learned she secretly gave financial support to the Essene community in Damascus, where Joseph not only shared his wisdom and his knowledge of the Torah, but also taught the science of medicine and relieved the sufferings of ordinary people as best he could.

Above all, though, Rachel had opened her doors to those women in Galilee who desired to educate themselves. She had to do so with a great deal of discretion; if the suspicions of Herod and the Romans—as well as their spies—were to be feared, the narrow minds of rabbis and husbands were a no less formidable threat. Many of those who crossed the threshold of the house in Magdala, mostly wives of merchants or rich landowners, did so on the sly. Sheltered from the disgust that men felt for educated women, they threw themselves with abandon into learning to read and write, very often passing on their own taste for knowledge and passion for thought to their daughters.

And so Miriam had learned the kinds of things that in Israel were normally reserved for a few men: the Greek language, political philosophy. With her fellow students, she had read and discussed the laws and rules governing justice in a republic or power in a kingdom, and had pondered the strengths and weaknesses of tyrants and sages.

Rachel and her friends suffered just as much as she did from the yoke of Herod. The moral and material humiliation, as well as the spiritual decay, of the people of Israel were growing worse every day. These misfortunes were a constant subject for debate—debate that all too often ended with the terrible admission that they were powerless. They had no weapons against the tyrant but their own intelligence and stubbornness.

If the rumors were to be believed, Herod was becoming ever more dangerously insane and seemed determined to drag the people of Israel down with him into his personal hell. Every day, his mercenaries were crueler, the Romans more contemptuous, and the Sadducees of the Sanhedrin greedier. Yet Rachel and her friends dreaded Herod's death. What was there to stop another madman, a younger one from the same degenerate line, from seizing power?

True, Herod seemed to be trying to assassinate his entire family. Already, his wife's relatives had been decimated. But the king had distributed his seed generously throughout his life, and there were many who could lay claim to his lineage. So there was a strong likelihood that even when the tyrant finally got his just deserts, the people of Israel would not be delivered from his evil.

Miriam had recounted how Barabbas had hoped, but failed, to start a rebellion that would not only overthrow the tyrant, but also liberate Israel from the Romans and wipe the Temple clean of Sadducee corruption.

Even though the stupid quarrels among the Zealots, the Pharisees, and the Essenes saddened the women of Magdala, they still could not resign themselves to the idea of violence as a means to attain peace. Did not Socrates and Plato, whom they admired, teach that wars led to more injustice, more suffering for nations, and the ephemeral rise of conquerors blinded by their own strength?

But did that mean that they simply had to wait for God to intervene? If the men and women of Israel could not deliver themselves from misfortune, did they have to bide their time until the Lord, through the intermediary of the Messiah, was able to free them?

Most of the women thought so. Others, including Rachel, believed that only a new justice, born of the human mind and the human will, a justice founded on love and respect, could save them.

“The justice taught by the law of Moses is great and even admirable,” Rachel would say, provocatively. “But we women are well placed to see its weaknesses. Why does it lay down that men and women are unequal? How could Abraham have given his wife Sarah to Pharaoh without being condemned for such a sin? Why is a wife always dust in her husband's hands? Why do we women count for less than men? There are as many of us as there are of them, and we work as hard. Moses chose a black woman to be the mother of his children. So why does his justice not treat all men and women on earth as equals?”

To those who objected that this was an ungodly idea, that the justice of Moses could only apply to the nation chosen by Yahweh in his covenant, Rachel would reply, “Do you think the Almighty wants happiness and justice for one nation only? No! That's impossible. That would reduce him to the level of those grotesque divinities worshipped by the Romans or those perverse idols venerated by the Egyptians, the Persians, and the northern barbarians.”

This would be greeted with protests. How could Rachel dare to think such a thing? Had not the history of Israel, from its beginnings, demonstrated the bond between God Almighty and his people? Had not Yahweh said to Abraham, “I have chosen you and I will establish a Covenant with your descendants…”?

“But did Yahweh say that he would grant his justice, his strength, and his love to no other nation?”

“Do you want us to stop being Jews?” a woman from Tarichea said, in a shocked voice. “I'd never be able to follow you. It's inconceivable….”

Rachel shook her head. “Has it never occurred to you that the Lord might have made a covenant with us only as a first stage? So that we could then reach out our hands to all men and women? That's what I think. Yes, I believe Yahweh expects us to love all the men and women in this world, without exception.”

Arguing long into the night, until there was no more oil in the lamps, Rachel would try to demonstrate that the obsession of the rabbis and the prophets with preserving their wisdom and justice purely for the benefit of the people of Israel might well be the reason for their misfortunes.

“So what you want,” another woman mocked, “is for the whole universe to become Jewish?”

“Why not?” Rachel retorted. “When a few sheep break away from the flock, they become weaker and risk being devoured by wild beasts. It's the same with us. The Romans have understood that. They want to impose their laws on all the nations of the world in order to remain strong. Our ambition, too, should be to convince the world that our laws are more just than those of Rome.”

“That's quite a contradiction! Didn't you just say that our justice is not just enough, since it leaves aside us women? If that's the case, why should we want to impose it on the rest of the world?”

“You're right,” Rachel admitted. “Before anything else, we need to change our laws….”

“Well, you certainly don't lack imagination!” a laughing woman cried, easing the tension. “Changing the brains of our husbands and our rabbis, now that's something harder to bring about than the fall of Herod, I can tell you.”

F
OR
days, Miriam had listened to them debate like this, their moods alternating between the greatest seriousness and riotous laughter. She rarely intervened, preferring to leave to other, more-experienced women the pleasure of confronting Rachel's sharp mind.

But the debates never deteriorated into quarrels or sterile squabbles. On the contrary, the clash of opposing views was a lesson in freedom and tolerance. Rachel, modeling herself on the practice of the Greek schools, had decreed that no woman was to suppress her opinions, nor to condemn the words, the ideas, or even the silence of her companions.

Nevertheless, having first filled Miriam with enthusiasm, these lively exchanges had been saddening her irreparably. The more passionate and brilliant they were, the less they could conceal an insistent, nagging truth: Neither Rachel nor her friends had a solution to the problem of Herod's tyranny. They did not know any way to unite the people of Israel into a single force. On the contrary, month after month, the news that reached Magdala indicated that the most defenseless—the peasants, the fishermen, those whose work barely ensured their survival—were the most apprehensive about the future.

Without any other way out, despised by the rich people of Jerusalem and the priests of the Temple, they put their faith in orators and false prophets, who proliferated in the towns and villages. Bellowing their alarming speeches, in which threats alternated with the promise of supernatural happenings, these men claimed to be the prophets of a new era. Alas, there was little to choose among their prophecies. They all consisted of hate-filled harangues against humanity and unrestrained, apocalyptic visions full of the most hideous punishments. It seemed as if the only thing these prophets, with their pretensions to being pure, pious, and exemplary, really wanted was to add terror to the despair already felt by the people. They all denounced the ills afflicting Israel, but they appeared to have no interest in suggesting any remedies for those ills.

In spite of the sweetness of life in Magdala, in spite of Mariamne's infectious joy and Rachel's tenderness, the more time passed, the more Miriam's thoughts dwelled on the chaos and destruction abroad in the land. Her silences grew longer, and her nights were restless, spent endlessly going over the same ideas. The debates led by Rachel began to seem pointless to her, and her companions' laughter unthinking.