It was quiet and no one was pestering him. It was almost as if the two episodes of standing around had not happened in the same world. Maybe the episode three months ago was not even congruent with itself. Uri was certainly not the same person who had set off from Rome five months ago.
There were a few pilgrims, a couple of women accompanied by a group of men, standing atop the gate and piously watching the incineration, but most were either hanging around and chatting on the shaded, northerly side of the Temple or listening under similarly shaded arcades to the orations of prophets with bushy beards and blazing eyes. The lazy guards gave scant heed to the preaching and didn’t give the impression of wishing to censor the words of the ardent orators. That was a wise practice, Uri acknowledged; if anything could be aired, then nothing had any weight. Still, it was curious that incitement was allowed in the immediate proximity of the Temple, the very center of the Judaic faith. Uri listened to the preachers, and it was not too much to say that the word incitement was unfitting; the lamentations of Jeremiah could be heard from the lips of speakers with impassioned eyes the whole day long.
One was tenacious in his hate-filled ranting about doom, disaster, and punishment of evil, but his incandescent, repetitive, and unimaginative words, like those of the rest, were lost in the prattling of his audience and the pandemonium of the other preachers. Uri was curious as to how long the speaker would be able to keep up the tedious tide. He got hoarse by noon, but he was no hoarser by the evening; he just kept on and on and incessantly on. Uri recognized the accomplishment, but he was alone. The preacher did indeed glance at him from time to time, but he did not notice that Uri spent the whole afternoon listening to him; it was not people to whom he wished to communicate something, but the Lord.
Also idling in Temple Square were individuals of scholarly air who expounded quietly and at length, backing up their statements with arguments. They explained the law to those standing around, many of them young men. Uri was surprised at how many men of leisure were loitering about, despite it being the time of day when most people should have been working. They would have been better plowing or plucking grapes! He then came to his senses and was amused by his own neophyte peasant consciousness.
There was a surplus of priests in Jerusalem. They were easily differentiated from everyone else by the white robes and the fact that they haughtily held their noses high. There cannot have been any fewer Levites either; indeed, there had to be even more of them if only a tenth of the tithe they received went to the priests, but they had no distinguishing dress. At first Uri shuddered at the very sight of priests’ robes, just as he had in Rome, where priests were rarely to be seen, but here there were so many priestly garments that Uri’s shuddering quickly abated.
What might be going on in his head, I wonder, Uri had pondered whenever he saw a priest. The priests in Rome were menacing to look at, and Uri expected to be struck dead any time he glimpsed one. A priest’s robes also seemed to Uri to be part of the Creator’s robes, and to touch them would be fatal. He would never dare speak to them, ever. He had thought that priests were in direct contact with the Lord Almighty and might address him any time they chose and get an instant answer. But with there being as many priests as there were here in Jerusalem, the Creator could not possibly speak to each and every one at the same time. What was going on in their heads must be more interesting than that.
Priests loitered on their own or in groups all over the City, and, not being on duty, they were unhurried, bored, and talkative. Uri did not accost any of them, though he would have been quite interested to know if the portion they were entitled to from the sacrificial offerings provided enough for them and their families. He vaguely recalled someone somewhere saying that some priestly families were on the verge of starving.
He could not be very Jewish if his soul was untouched by even the slightest feeling of joy to be able to spend time in Jerusalem. The youths, his companions, had wept. Good for them.
He was tormented by misgivings; that must be the cause of his strange state of mind.
He was being kept in Jerusalem, kept in the country, fed and watered as if he were livestock marked for slaughter. People will come along one day and slaughter me, and if my carcass is found to be without blemish, I’ll be served up on the altar, my smoke will rise up to the Almighty and the priests will eat me; if my carcass is with blemish, on the other hand, I’ll be eaten by ordinary Jews. It would be more reassuring if they were to milk their cows more regularly, but they don’t do that.
What am I being kept here for?
That evening Joseph was late in getting home, and Uri had already eaten supper in the garden.
“You haven’t been assigned work yet,” Joseph said, “but they’ll make arrangements soon.”
Uri did not ask who the “they” were.
Joseph started to eat, and Uri watched. Eating was clearly not much to Joseph’s liking; he seemed tired. He must fulfill some important office in the Sanhedrin, Uri thought.
Uri made up his mind to interrogate him.
“Why is the work on the Temple taking so long? I saw from the harbor at Caesarea that the work there was completed in just a few years, yet that was a vast undertaking — much larger in scale than the construction of the Temple, yet if I’m not mistaken they were started at pretty much the same time.”
“Construction on the Temple started earlier,” said Joseph.
“Why all the fiddling about?”
“It was completed long, long ago,” said Joseph. “They’re burnishing the finishing work; it keeps on being knocked down, then relaid… It’s marble and gold, expensive.”
Uri did not understand.
“It nominally gives work to twenty-five thousand men,” said Joseph, “and that is too few. We really ought to be employing and paying a force of one hundred thousand, but that is beyond our capacity. You’ve seen how many beggars are living here, how many are dying in the streets. They lost their land so they came here; there’s no way we have of forbidding it. On what grounds? Before long we’ll be able to pave the whole city with them…”
Joseph’s voice and mien were weary; this appealed to Uri.
“Freeloaders in Rome get state support,” he said. “Me too.”
Joseph nodded.
“Rome is wealthy,” he said. “Rome has the means to support a few hundred thousand plebeians. We, on the other hand, cannot afford it, though we ought to be supporting at least that many or even more. We’re poor, and we’re breeding at a breakneck rate.”
“Still, a time has to come when the scaffolding is taken down,” Uri opined.
“We are doing the best we can to make that sublime and solemn moment fall as far into the future as possible. Before then we’ll pave the nearby hills… Then there will be stupendous celebrations; everyone will rejoice except us. What are we going to set about doing with that mass of people? Ever more of them as time goes by! Order them not to reproduce when the Creator Himself encourages them to do precisely that?”
“All the same, is it near the end?”
Joseph broke into a smile.
“At the depth of the soul every generation expects some catastrophe,” he said. “People have been preaching about this for centuries, but few fear it. They would like to believe that it will happen in their lifetime and make their period exceptional. They believe that they will avoid death by the skin of their teeth and that the moment of their death will coincide with their resurrection. For my part, I am afraid. It’s not that I don’t place infinite faith in the Lord who created me, but I’m alarmed at the naïve confidence that people have in this arrangement. It’s as if the Lord had not given us the freedom to sort out our own lives for ourselves. If we do it well, He is pleased, and if we do it badly, He is saddened, but He is not in the habit of intervening. I have read the whole of Scriptures; He has never intervened.”