and ruthless, smart and cruel, they will win; tell me, did
Massada ever die and where are the Romans now; profiles on
coins in museums. A scholar who kills considers the long
view; will the dead survive in every tear the living shed? A
scholar knows how it will look in writing; beyond the death
count o f the moment. Regular soldiers who fight to kill don’t
stand a chance. The corpses o f all sides get maggots and turn to
dust; but some stories live forever, pristine, in the hidden
heart. They prayed, the Jew ish boys, they made forays down
the rock to fight the Romans until the military strength o f the
Romans around the rock was unassailable, they took a little
extra on the side when they could get it, like all men. I
probably had m y eye on the younger ones, twenty, virile,
new, they had no m emory o f being Jew s down on the low
ground, they had only this austere existence, they were born
here o f parents who were born here o f parents who either were
born here or came here young and lived their adult years on
this rock. Sometimes Jew s escaped the Romans and got here,
made it to the top; but they didn’t bring profane ideas; they
stripped themselves o f the foreign culture, the habits o f the
invaders; they told us stories o f Roman barbarism, which
convinced us even more; down below the Romans were pigs
rolling in shit, above we were the people o f God. N o one here
doubted it, especially not the young men; they were pure,
glow ing, vibrant animals lit up by a nationalism that enhanced
their physical beauty, it was a single-minded strength. There
were no distracting, tantalizing memories o f before, below.
We lived without the tumult o f social heterodoxy, there was
no cultural relativism as it were. The young men were hard,
cold animals, full o f self-referential pride; they had no
ambivalence, no doubt; they had true grit and were incapable
o f remorse; they lived in a small, contained world, geographically limited, flat, all the same, barren, culturally
dogmatic, they had a few facts, they learned dogma by rote, it
was a closed system, they had no need for introspection, there
were no moral dilemmas that confronted them, troubled
them, pulled them apart inside; they were strong, they fought,
they prayed but it was a form o f nationalism, they learned
racial pride, they had the thighs o f warriors, not scholars, and
they used them on women, not Romans, it was the common
kind o f killing, man on girl, as i f by being Jew s alone on this
desolate rock, isolated here, they were, finally, like everyone
else, all the other men, ordinary, like Romans, for instance;
making war on us, brutal and quick if not violent, but they
beat women too, the truth, finally, they did. The sacred was
remote from them except as a source o f national pride; pure
Je w s on a purely Jew ish rock they had a pure God o f the Jew s,
His laws, H oly Books, the artifacts o f a pure and superior
