Asch’s book on Mary is, of course, a novel. It is
probably a weaving of fact and fiction. Who
but the most astute scholar of Jewish life and history would be able to
distinguish those threads one from the other. Early in the book Asch describes
a small patch of the fabric of Miriam’s spiritual life. Does it matter if it is
true? Can we assume Asch is giving us a glimpse into the spirituality of the religious
Jew at that time? Regardless of the answer to these questions, it cannot be
denied that the author provides a moving account of the Jewish people’s
reverence for Rachel and of Mary’s in particular.
“… for a long
time past, certain individual women had been mainstays of the imaginative life
of the people. Their names assumed high rank in Israel’s hierarchy and
quickened the creative fantasy of the myth makers. The Matriarchs of Israel
were canonized by the people and placed , beside their men, on the uppermost
rungs of Jacob’s heavenly ladder.
 |
| Rachel at the well |
…. ‘But of all mothers
in Israel none was loved more deeply than Rachel. Rachel, Jacob’s bride-elect.
For her the youthful Jacob had toiled twice seven years, and still she was an
outcast in the holy matriarchy. In pain and agony she had born Israel a son,
and had died bearing him another. And she alone among the Matriarchs was not
laid in the ancestral sepulcher, to share the shade of Abraham and Isaac and
her doting husband Jacob – as did her rival, Leah. She, Rachel, was hastily
interred on the road to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem, like some worthless stone
that one thrusts out of one’s way. Yet, surely, there was providence even in
this. For she was buried on the highway down which, in years to come, Nebzaradan
would lead Jewry into exile. The ruthless Babylonian would be scourging them
past Rachel’s grave, and she, a sentinel by the roadside, would arise from her
tomb and come before the Lord with bitter weeping for her children’s sake. And
God would sustain her with words of comfort, saying:
‘Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from
tears; for thy work shall be rewarded, saith the Lord, and thy children shall
return to their own borders.’
…. For the girl Miriam, Rachel had long been the chosen
patroness, a guardian angel watching over her. Many times she saw her, not only
in her dreams at night, but in broad daylight, seeing with inward eyes. The
mother Rachel would appear to her, swathed in a dusky veil. At times her
features were uncovered to reveal large dark eyes, reddened and moist, and
heavy with grief and compassion, as though the anguish of all Israel were
stored in them. And from those eyes Miriam felt the anguish radiating into her
own heart as if the mother Rachel wished to make the girl a part of her and
bind her to herself in a community of love and grief. To the girl Miriam the
thought of Rachel was like the immanence of heaven.”
At this point in Sholem’s narrative, Mary is unaware of
her coming commission as the mother of the Messiah. Yet her visions of Rachel and
Rachel’s agony over the plight of her children has instilled in Mary a prescient
sense of her impending role. Asch’s quote from Jeremiah, 31:15-16 hints at the
author’s scriptural foundations of the story he is weaving.
It is interesting to compare Mary’s innate sense of history
with today’s tendency to lay our memories at the feet of change and ignore, if
not completely forget or obliterate, our past.
All commentaries aside, our author is a master of
conjuring Jewish religious sensibilities.
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