Asch (1880 – 1957) was a Polish-Jewish, dramatist, and
essayist in the Yiddish language who settled in the United States. I was introduced to his writings in his novel, The Prophet.
I've always been attracted to the Old Testament and the way it describes the
development of faith in the people of God. The revelation of God to the
Israelites is intricately entwined with their very earthy and natural
relationship with creation. The development of humanity through the centuries
has had the effect of pulling us away from the natural world. Our work lives
and our play lives are being drawn into a world of high-tech effects, rapid
changes and into a world of video fantasy. I look at my being drawn into
biblical worlds as a yearning to return to the experience of the natural.
Longing for connection between my mind and my body to the natural world around me,
connecting me to the Earth, plants, animals and my fellow human beings;
connecting all of God's creation to our past and lighting my imagination to a
picture of the road that humanity took to be where we are today. This is the
draw I feel to the Biblical world.
Asch has written a number of novels that depict the Jewish
and early Christian world. One of his more controversial novels is The Nazarene is one I’m currently
reading. His fellow Jews were not all happy about his depiction of Jesus. He
tells the story of Jesus through a narrator who is transported to Israel during
Jesus's life by a mystic Pan Viadomsky. The novel is divided into three sections
each one having a different point of view from which to experience Jesus's
life. Part one of the novel provides a picture of Palestine through the eyes of
Cornelius, a military governor of Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate. Part two
depicts Jesus’s world through the eyes of Judas Iscariot. Part three through
the life of Joseph, the son of a sheep herder who desired to have one of his
sons become a student of the Torah. At the age of 13 his father took him to a
Rabbi Nicodemus to begin his education.
The book could be considered to be three novels: the book is
698 pages in length. The beauty of the writing however carries the reader
through the stories effortlessly. The author has a way of putting flesh and mentality
on the biblical characters he's portraying. I hope to do several posts on some
of the text from the third part that I found particularly appealing.
I’ll start with the narrator's description of one aspect of the
culture in Judea during the time of the Herods.
“Thus Greek and Roman went hand-in-hand. And it was a
powerful alliance. All the measures taken by our Rabbis to halt the advance of
this demoralization were vain; the poison spread through thousand secret
channels into the heart of Jewish life. It affected the daily conduct of the
Jews; it was manifest in the meals they prepared, their clothing, their
headdress and their choice of ornaments. But there was something deeper: a
change in the attitude toward the body. This was, among many Jews, no longer
regarded primarily as the vessel the soul, but as an intrinsic treasure, a gift
of God to man. The influence of the Greeks crept into our language, too, and
the Aramaic dialect of Jerusalem began to sprout Greek words.
But it must not be thought that this influence was wholly
one-sided. Many Greeks, observing at close range the pious modesty of Jewish
life at its best, learning for the first time the nature of the Jewish faith,
with its central concept of the single and living God, were deeply affected in
turn. They were moved by the lyric expression of the desire for life beyond
death, and they meditated on the universal hope which was embodied in the
Messianic idea. The Greek mood of fatality was disturbed, the Greek mind set in
motion among unaccustomed thoughts by the measureless devotion of the Jew to
his God, by the voluntary acceptance of the strong discipline, by the tragic
struggle against the temporal and the destructive, springing from deep faith in
the divine and the timeless. It was as though a cold Greek statue had ceased to
stand in moveless indifference, but had been touched with spirit, so that the
lines trembled and the original harmony was disrupted. There was something
extraordinary in the juxtaposition of Greek and Jew; two hostile worlds felt an
inner longing for each other. They were like the complementary halves of a
single being which had long regarded each other as enemies, and which now, brought
into intimate contact on the soil of Judea, were beginning to discover in the
midst of warfare a unifying principle.
The song of that contact between the two worlds was heard in
its most harmonious form in the house of Joseph Arimathea.“
I'll close this post with a prayer from part two of the
book. It is typical of prayers that preceding sections of part two describing
Jesus’ world through the eyes of Judas Iscariot.
“Blessed art thou, O father in heaven, that thou hast chosen
our portion that we may serve thee, and that thou hast not made us as the
peoples of the world into idolaters which bow down and worship the work of
their hands. Have compassion, father in heaven, on thy creatures and open their
eyes, so all of them may see that thou alone art king of all the worlds, and
that there is none beside thee."
