Bembel Rudzuk was an excellent teacher. His youth had been active and adventurous and his strength and vigour seemed little diminished at his present age; he was a dashing horseman and he was expert with bow and sword. Our rides continued even after the siege began — it was months before the blockade was complete— and after not too long a time I rode well enough for Bembel Rudzuk to say that I might have made a horseman if I had come to it earlier in life; eventually I shot well enough with the Turkish bow to bring down game; our swordplay continued in Bembel Rudzuk’s courtyard long after the rides had stopped, and with the curved Turkish sword and the straight blade both I progressed to where Bembel Rudzuk was at least as eager as I for a rest at the end of our practice. Sometimes as I swung my blunted sword I seemed to see behind Bembel Rudzuk the shadowy and as yet faceless form of actuality to come.
One day followed another through months that bore different names, numbered themselves by the sun or the moon, and began and ended on different days in the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian calendars. Strange, to live again one’s life and death in three calendars! Soon after the Lailat al-Qadr of the Hijra year 490 in the month of September of the Christian year 1097 came the Jewish High Holy Days, the Days of Awe: Rosh Hashanah, the New Year’s Day of 4858, and ten days later Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Ah! then I felt my eunuchhood, my separateness from any congregation! It was no use to tell myself that God was no longer He and that accounts were no longer being kept — centuries of moral reckoning leapt up in me. It was in me; I was in it: it was like a giant wave, an impulse racing across vast expanses of time, living its motion through successive particles of mortality.
This would now be the second Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur since I had left my town. The last time these Days of Awe had come I had been on the road alone, there had been no congregation to be cut off from when the shofar was blown, when the Kol Nidrei was sung at the beginning of the fast and when the Ne’ilah Service was recited, the book and the gates closed, and the Shema, the ‘Hear, O Israel!’ heard at the end. Here in Antioch however there was a congregation and I had with words out of my own mouth cut myself off from it; I didn’t want to be part of anybody else’s traffic with God. But I wanted something; I thought perhaps that I wanted to hear the sound of the ram’s horn, the shofar. The urgent maleness of that trumpeting always lifted me and quickened my blood: it was so much a call to action, it was so utterly not the murmur of praying, swaying, weaponless victims — was it not itself the weapon of the ram that had borne it? And did it not also recall that ram that had appeared when the Lord stayed the hand of Abraham as Isaac lay bound and waiting for the knife? And more: this trumpeting of the ram’s horn was for me the summons from the dreadful mountain of the Law, a summons that could not be ignored or denied. And I see, now that my mind is no longer limited by my mortal identity, that this Law is nothing that could be limited to those commandments on the two stones: no, this Law that is so imperious is simply the law of the allness of the everything of which each of us is a particle. Quick! Now! Rise up from your sleep, from your unbeing! Be! Do! Respond!
Be! Do! What? Before Rosh Hashanah, as the end of the month of Elul and the beginning of Tishri approached, I went by night to the synagogue. It was huddled away among the houses of the Jewish quarter, it stood among the smells of various dyes, even those reds and purples flaunted by those knightly wearers of the Cross who were now approaching us. This not very large domed building, said by some to have been built on the ruin of a Roman smithy, had been chosen because of its thick walls through which the warlike sound of the shofar could not be heard. It stood among the houses and the rainbowed smells like an honest workman who, finished with the toil of the week, has cleansed himself and put on fresh clothes for the Sabbath. There were no windows facing the street, there was no light to be seen except what came through the open door from the inner court.
I put my hand on the wall that separated me from the space where the shofar had sounded that day as it had all through the month of Elul. The heat of the day had gone out of the wall, it was cool. As I stood there a man named Mordechai Salzedo, a merchant friend of Bembel Rudzuk, came to me and said, ‘From the roof of the synagogue we have seen the new moon; now the new year can begin.’
‘Good luck to it,’ I said.
At this irreverence he raised his eyebrows and tilted his head to favour, I suppose, the analytical side of his brain while he looked at me carefully. Having done this he put one hand on my shoulder and lifted the index finger of the other.’ “Where he is” eh?’ he said. ‘“Where he is.’”
What a remarkable Salzedo this was! When he said those words it was as if there came through the cool thick wall of the synagogue, through my hand and arm and into my heart the New Year’s Days of time past when our Rabbi had read those very words from Chapter 21 of Genesis, where it tells of Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness, Hagar weeping because she thinks that her son will die:
And God heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said unto her: ‘What aileth thee, Hagar? fear not; for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him fast by thy hand; for I will make him a great nation.’ And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink.
Our Rabbi had always been fond of citing the Midrash Rabbah on these verses:
WHERE HE IS connotes for his own sake, for a sick person’s prayers on his own behalf are more efficacious than those of anyone else.
WHERE HE IS. R. Simon said: The ministering angels hastened to indict him, exclaiming, ‘Sovereign of the Universe! Wilt Thou bring up a well for one who will one day slay Thy children with thirst?’ ‘What is he now?’ He demanded. ‘Righteous,’ was the answer. ‘I judge man only as he is at the moment,’ said He.
Wonderful. So WHERE WAS I? Could it be said of me that at this moment I was righteous? I couldn’t think of any harm that I was doing just then. What about my pilgrimage, my road to Jerusalem that went on now without me? At this distance I believe that I am telling the truth when I say that it was not the Mittelteufel that kept me in Antioch. I had begun my pilgrimage wanting to save the many mysterious, unseen, fragile temples of the world so that Christ would not leave us as God had done when he ceased to be He. Now as I thought about it I found that Christ as a limited identity had already departed from my perception and been absorbed into the manifold idea of himself. And what for me had been Jerusalem was equally to be found wherever I joined the motion of the hidden lion. I remembered those poor hungry death-ridden children whom I had met on the road and I heard again in my mind the voice of that boy who had said, ‘Jerusalem will be wherever we are when we come to the end.’
Salzedo was no longer standing before me, I was alone. The door through which the light had come was closed. In the darkness my hand was still touching the wall of the synagogue but now when I thought of the sound of the shofar it seemed to jar on the silence.
One day has followed another with the beating of hammers, the baking of bread, the cry of the mu’addhin. It is the winter of 1097. The walls of Antioch, those great mountain-ascending walls with their four hundred towers, those strong stones left from Justinian’s strong time, those stones that have no enemy, now they look down on the tents of the Franks. Antioch has been under siege since October but it is the besiegers who are starving. How strange they are, these scarecrow conquerors, these soldiers of Christ who refuse to learn how to fight the Turks, who at Dorylaeum won the day by their very stupidity when the half of their divided host with whom they had lost contact came out of nowhere like miraculous saviours to astonish and defeat Qilij-Arslan’s mounted bowmen. They walk, starving as they are, like victors; they walk as if they shake the ground, believing themselves to be invincible, believing that God wills it that they should win. The arrogance of those coloured tents of the Frankish knights! Through successive dawns they stand more frightening in their presumption than shouts and battlecries and the thundering of hooves, these tents in which these unturning men dare to sleep before the enemy walls, dare to sleep in their unclever and unshakable courage and the expectation of victory.