He ruffled the boy’s hair. It was a rare moment of affection from the man. He didn’t know how to be a father. It wasn’t that his mother, Mary, had not loved him. She had. She had loved him more than enough for any child. But he wore his father’s face. Every day he grew more and more like the man she had loved, and it reminded her more and more acutely of what she had lost. He was a living ghost. Just by being close, by sitting in her lap and looking up at her, by smiling the same smile his father had smiled, he brought it all back. He was her grief as well as her joy. How could that not damage the bond between them?
“Do as o, boy,” he said, and knelt, bowing his head in quiet reflection. He stayed that way for the longest time.
Onlookers might have thought they were offering a prayer to the betrayed Messiah like so many others who made the pilgrimage to the garden. They weren’t. Jair was remembering the father he had never known while the boy was enjoying the closeness of his. It was the simplest of all pleasures. “The others may forget, but I will remember,” Jair promised the ghosts of the garden. “Others may hate, but I will love.” The words were more than just a promise; they were the gospel of a dead man. “Others may be blind, but I shall see.” He looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed, but there were no tears. It was so strange to think that this was where love ended.
He looked at his son then, and all he felt was sadness. The boy was growing up so quickly. He was old enough now to know truth from lie. That was why he had brought him here. “Come here,” he said, opening his arms wide. The boy scurried forward and threw himself into his father’s embrace. The hug seemed to last and last, until finally the man broke away. “It’s time I told you what happened here.”
Jair reached into the folds of his road-stained robes and withdrew the battered leather pouch his mother had given him. He had been the same age as Menahem when she brought him here to tell him about his father. Until that day she had never talked about him. He felt the weight of silver in his hand. The coins had fascinated him when he was younger. Now he found them curiously comforting. He set the pouch on the ground between them. As best as he could remember they were sitting in the same corner, perhaps even under the same tree. She would have approved. She was one for symmetry, signs and circles.
“This is where my father died,” he said. “Twice.”
“I don’t understand,” the boy said.
And why should he? Jair thought, looking for the words to explain. “He died once in spirit, and then again in flesh, blood and bone. They talk about the resurrection of Jesus, they glory in the man who lived twice, but they forget my father, the man who died twice. First they broke his soul, forcing him to honor a promise, and then, when he was reduced to a shell of a man they broke that shell, battering it with stones. But we few, we remember. My father was an agent of Sophia. Do you understand what it means to say that?”
The boy shook his head.
“Sophia is Divine Wisdom, the Knowledge of God. So when I say Judas Iscariot was an agent of Sophia, I mean that he worked for the Divine Purpose.”
“He was carrying out God’s will?” the boy asked.
“Exactly. Think about the story you know, the Messiah on the cross, the resurrection-without your grandfather’s betrayal there could be no resurrection. Without the death and the resurrection the sins of man could never have been cleansed. There could be no new faith without Judas, Menahem. Don’t ever forget that truth. He gave everything, and is reviled for it.” He emptied the silver coins onto the grass and spread them out with his fingers. “All because of this.”
“Money?”
“Money given to him by the High Priest, Caiaphas, in return for the kiss that identified his friend, Jesus. They paint him as a villain now, because of these coins, but it was never so. Here, on the night before the kiss, Jesus drew my father aside and begged him to be strong, for already he was beginning to falter. You see, this betrayal, this agony thrust upon him, was not of his doing.” Jair had so much he wanted the boy to understand but it was so hard to find the words. “They were like brothers, their love thicker than blood. Your grandmother stood between them. She adored them both, these two great men. All these new lies have risen, but this is her truth, and from today it is yours to remember. Do not let the world forget, boy, and don’t let them convince you otherwise; they were friends into death. That is the only truth. Do not let the world forget it.”
“I will not, father, I promise,” the boy said solemnly.
Jair smiled gently. “I know, my son. I know.”
“Then what happened?” Menahem asked, as though it was any other story he had heard and wanted to know the end of.
“After the fighting in the temple Jesus was a marked man. The Pharisees could not abide this man who walked among the poor people, spreading a message of love without fear. Without fear, boy, that is the important thing here. Love without fear. Love without avarice. Love without stricture. He took them out of the temples, bringing them back to the earth. He was their teacher. He hated what they had done to his god, how they had taken him away from the people and hid him in their huge temples and their false idols. He wanted people to worship the natural wonder, not its manmade face.” Jair picked up one of the stones and turned it over in his hand so the boy might see. “Look at this stone, see it properly, see the miracle of time and attrition and earthly forces that had to come together to press it into this final form. That, boy, is a miracle worthy of God. Putting them two by two atop one another to make a wall, that is just sense. Do you see the difference?”
The boy thought about it for a moment. “Yes, father,” he said, eventually. “The stone was always there, whatever shape we choose for it. Like the tree. By itself it can offer comfort and shade, bear fruit and provide, or the carpenter can reshape it to match his needs.”
Jair smiled. The boy had a sharp mind. “And which is the miracle?”
“The first, the tree.”
“But they are both creations, are they not?”
“No father. One is creation, the other is recreation.”
“Very good, Menahem. Very good.” Jair’s smile widened. He wondered if he had grasped the concept so readily when he was the boy’s age. He doubted it. “The Nazarene was recreating the god of their book, taking him out of the temples and into the fields, back to his original wonders, and reminding them that they did not need stone temples to glorify him. That frightened the Pharisees. Inside the temples they had control of the people. Strip them of their temples and you strip them of their power. Worse, change the way people think of their god, make him this caring father instead of some distant wrathful deity who purged the world with flood and plague, and you take away the fear. Without power, without fear, these men were nothing. And that more than anything frightened them.”
“So they wanted Jesus dead?”
“Exactly. They wanted to strip away everything that made him special, assuming that whatever remained would prove to be as craven as they themselves were. They couldn’t grasp the notion of sacrifice. It was outside of their philosophy. So to make him suffer, they made the people who followed him suffer. After his attack on the money-lenders the Pharisees turned their anger onto the people who listened to the message of this new caring god, and they hurt them.
“So here, in this garden, Jesus turned to your grandfather and begged him to help put an end to their suffering. Even though it meant ending his own life. Judas did not want to betray his friend. What man would? But what choice did he have? The people he loved were suffering. The Pharisees were persecuting them in his name, promising that the suffering would only end when Jesus was silenced. They spread lies and hate. They used both to undermine the truth enough to have people turning back to the temple for protection. It was all about fear with them. Always fear.
“So, together these two friends conceived of a plan that would end the tyranny of the temple once and for all. And they did it here, in this arden, the same place my father would surrender his friend to the soldiers, the same place the stones of the disciples would end his life. Here, in this garden.”
Eyes wide, the boy looked around as though seeing the place for the first time. Where there had been trees and shrubs he saw ghosts. Jair remembered that sensation. He remembered thinking he had seen his father incline his head just slightly and smile as his mother gave him the coins. The mind had a way of giving you what you needed most. He wondered who the boy saw.
“That promise destroyed my father. It killed the man he had been. Killed the kindness and the humor and everything mother loved him for. For the rest of his life he was a shell, a husk, a broken man. Not that there was much life left to him. Mother met him on the road here. He knew they were waiting for him. He knew they were
