Sholem Asch's Portrayal of the Young Jesus

Some descriptions of the young Yeshua taken from the book, Mary, by Sholem Asch.

p. 209

The boy, Yeshua, both at school and at home, was invariably found to dominate his immediate company. What the other boys found irresistible in him was an unquestionable, absolute sincerity. And Yeshua asserted his domination with a light hand, like a born prince – not by any display of superior scholarship, but by a natural authority of character which radiated from his least action or remark.

p. 210

The boys of the higher grades, all learners of the oral Law, found their diversion in mock trials to which they brought all the penetrating sagacity of scholastic pilpul, as taught during school hours. They would choose one of their number to act as judge, and he, after hearing the case – usually an involved contrivance of improbabilities – handed down a sentence framed in the spirit of the scribes and Pharisees. Not infrequently the sentence passed was of such astuteness that it was reported to the Rabbi, who, on occasions, had been known to pass it on to Jerusalem. The elders, therefore, encourage the game, seeing it as a welcome means for whetting a child's intellect and fortifying him in the knowledge of the Law.

Young Yeshua showed no ambition to excel in the game. The truth was that he had little relish for the oral Law with its labyrinthine technicalities. And when his friends challenged him to take part in the mock trials, he answered with finality, "I don't like to pass judgment on people."

p. 211

Yeshua lived in the world of the Prophets. He did not shine in the other studies, some of which called for great keenness and subtlety, involving as they did complex calculations concerning measures and crops. Nor was he much taken with interpretations of the Law, no matter how ingenious they might appear to others. His affinity was with the Prophets, whom he interpreted according to his own judgement.

Mosaic of the Prophet Jeremiah in the
 facade of Basilica of Saint Paul
outside the walls. Rome, Italy

In Yeshua’s grade they were studying the book of Jeremiah. They had come to the passage where the Prophet comforts his people and, in the face of the direst peril, foretells the future of radiance and joy. No man could more cruelly damn and execrate his people – and no one knew better how to console. The majestic mourner of Israel was also the sweetest minstrel of Israel's hope. Even now he had brought his fiery scourge down on their cowering backs, adding the Prophet's lash to the enemies sword, as though he gloried in his nation's wounds and had sworn to unscab their sores that they might never heal – but all at once he changes pitch and sings again of forgiveness to make the heart burst with hope. No man expressed more intimately his nearness to God than this Prophet of wrath and lamentation. Never once did he utter a plaint for his own torments, which were the wages of his exhortations. Not a drop of his personal bitterness stained the cup of comfort which he held out to his people. The spittle in his face was forgotten, his bruised body covered over, his prisoner's ditch consigned to oblivion. From the mouth of the Rachel he let poor and undying lament for his people, the mothers lament for her sons. And the voice of God itself he invoked to restrain Rachel’s tears with assurance of love and forgiveness. And finally, he stirred the deepest

Rachel

longing of his people till the end of time, when, like a messenger of love, he delivered the mystery of Israel's marriage with the Lord: "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. Not according to the covenant with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which My covenant they brake, although I was a husband to them, saith the Lord. But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel. After these days, saith the Lord, I will put My Law into their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be My people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord; for they shall all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, saith the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more." [Jer. 31-35]

By these words Yeshua was so deeply stirred that he could not hold back his tears while he recited them in class. There was laughter among some of the boys; others wept with him. All felt moved by the Prophet’s compassion, and even those who pretended to laugh did so with forced bravado as if to show their manly self-possession.

A Model for the Mother-Child Bond

Sholem Asch, in the passage that follows, provides a scene between the small child, Jesus and his mother. The child is wrestling with the story of Cain and Abel and Mary tries to answer the questions posed by Jesus. The segment in bold (my emphasis) is one that underscores Mary's role as an intercessor, even perhaps as co-redemptrix, on our behalf; and this from a Jewish writer. It is no wonder that Sholem Asch took a lot of heat from his fellow Jews.

***************************************************** 

   “Why,” he asked suddenly, “why did God accept Abel’s sacrifice and reject Cain’s?”

   “God reads the inward thoughts of men,” said Miriam, “and knows His servitors who are pure and contrite of heart and bring their offerings in love and goodwill. And He knows such as sacrifice in greed and hope of preferment. For there are men who have the grace of God and others who walk in darkness, destitute of grace.”

   The boy weighed the words and asked at last: “And what shall they do who have not God’s grace? Are they not to be pitied?”

   “Have you not learned,” Miriam asked in reply, “what the Lord said to Cain? – ‘If thou doest well, Shall you not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door and unto it shall be your desire, but thou shalt rule over it.’ God said this not to Cain alone, tinoki, but to all his descendants who envy their brothers, and, like Cain, wear a wroth and fallen countenance. God says to them – why art thou wroth and why is your countenance fallen? You can counter the sin at your door, for the choice is yours. You can choose the good or the evil. Punish then the evil that lies in your heart and seek to do well.”

   Yeshua pondered this in silence, sighing with finality, said: Emi, do you know what I think? I think God should appoint a helper for those who do not have the Lord’s grace, to take their part before God. These men more than the righteous need a helper, for the righteous have father and mother to take care of them.”

   Then Miriam’s eyes grew moist, and she said, “Tinoki, tinoki, when you grow up you shall be their helper.”

   “No, Emi, not I but you!”

   “Why I tinoki?”

   “Because you have pity for whosoever stands on your threshold, and there is no one can prevail against your tears. When your tears fall God will have compassion for them.”

   “Please, tinoki, I can bear it no more,” She turned her head away so that he would not see her tears.

(from Mary,part 2, chapter V, p.170-171)

A Spiritual Insight into Mary

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.

The Genesis of the New Covenant

   EVERY dawn renews the Beginning, and to behold the earth struggling out of the formless void, out of the night, is to witness the act of creation.

   The night hung low over the chine of the hills; but the concave of heaven, inlaid with innumerable brightness, diffused a shower of starlight that lent transparency to the night air. In the limpid darkness of the valley small houses nestled against one another in drowsy hamlets, where cypresses and olive groves shielded them on all sides. And on the hills each leaf of grass could be distinguished as it trembled under the fresh dew, swaying in the breeze as in mute prayer, and irradiated by the selfsame glow with which it had been charged in the first hours of Genesis.

   Over the dew-blown hills rode a young traveler, clothed in a white mantle to protect him from the damp of night.

 *******************************************************************************

   THE first breath a Jew draws on awakening from a night’s sleep belongs to God; thus, too, in the house of Hannah. Stepping out of their separate chambers after the first cry of the cock, mother and daughter washed their hands and eyes and pronounced the morning blessing.

   The second daily duty in a Jewish home, after due praise had been offered to God, was to provide feed and water for the animals. Man must not sit down to his morning meal before the hunger of his animals is stilled. Thus, as the mother attended to the work indoors, the daughter went forth to cater to the herd.

   Outside, the mist that weighted the atmosphere was beginning to lift. Loose shreds of cloud, like floating veils, stole through the air, catching on branches and roofs. The mist was decomposing into drops of dew that shone again from every leaf and petal. The girl’s feet soaked up the damp, and pearly drops settled on the thick black locks that strayed from her kerchief. Her frail throat, showing above a homespun tunic, shivered at the freshness of the early morning.

*********************************************************************************

What you've read above is taken from the opening chapters of  Sholem Asch's novel, Mary. It tells of the journey of Joseph to Nazareth to meet and acknowledge Mary as his betrothed. It provides a sample of the eloquence with which the author portrays his vision of this momentous occasion in our salvation history.

Intrinsic Good

The Catholic Church lays out for us the concept of intrinsic evil. 

In Pope John Paul II's Encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, he offers the following definition.

80. Reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature "incapable of being ordered" to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image. These are the acts which, in the Church's moral tradition, have been termed "intrinsically evil" ("intrinsece malum"): they are such "always and per se," in other words, on account of their very object, and quite apart from the ulterior intentions of the one acting and the circumstances. Consequently, without in the least denying the influence on morality exercised by circumstances and especially by intentions, the Church teaches that "there exist acts which "per se" and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object".

One might ask,"What then is 'intrinsic good'?" In the first volume of Theo-Logic Balthasar offers an idea of intrinsic goodness.

p.35 – “Thus, there may be people who … have become used to doubting the existence of intrinsic goodness.”

“If, however, such people come face to face with the evidence of a selfless act that another … performs for its own sake, and they realize by their own inward experience that the naked overcoming of self is a really attainable possibility, they … bow before the simple fact of goodness.”

Luke 17:5-6

Luke 17:5-6

The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith."

The Lord replied,
"If you have faith the size of a mustard seed,
you would say to this mulberry tree,
'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it would obey you.

Some thoughts to contemplate:

Jesus compared an amount of faith to a mustard seed – something very small.

He could have compared faith to a single atom or a muon or a quark

for that matter.

So we might say:

It doesn’t take much faith to do something seemingly impossible. Why ask

for more if only a little will do the job?

Or, faith does not come in sizes and can’t be increased or decreased. You

either have faith or you don’t.

Did the apostles mean to say, “Lord help me to believe.”?

Can faith be equated to belief? Heb 11:1 equates faith to assurance and conviction.

If I cannot do the seemingly impossible does that mean I do not have faith?

Did Jesus mean that if you have faith God will give you all you ask?

Was Jesus just using hyperbole to make a point?

James 2:18

Indeed someone may say, “You have faith and I have works.”

Demonstrate your faith to me without works,

and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works.

Here it’s said that faith can be exhibited by seeing one’s actions.

Can the apostle’s request of Jesus “increase our faith” be rephrased to

“Lord give us the assurance and the conviction to be able to follow your way”?

Balthasar' Theo-Logic

The following quote of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus is from the April 2006 edition of First Things and was the motivation for my interest in Balthasar.

"He went in for heavy-duty intellection that is sometimes ponderous and exhaustingly discursive, but always adorned with dazzling erudition and rewarding one's effort with scintillating insights of a frequently counter-intuitive nature. One spends pleasurable hours reading Balthasar not so much in an analytical mode as in surrendering oneself to the beauty of how his mind works and its adventurous probings of theological imagination. Reading Balthasar is in large part a meditative exercise bordering on the contemplative."

Once again I've gathered the fortitude to wade through more of Balthasar's "heavy duty intellection" in search of some "scintillating insights".

I don't know how scintillating one may find the quotes that follow. One may say, "Oh, yea, I knew that." But, have you ever attempted to put the ideas presented into your own words? Thanks to Hans Urs von Balthasar I am able to articulate some thing that I was previously able only to intuit.

From Theo-Logic Volume 1:Truth of the World

P.12 – “… the supernatural takes root in the deepest structures of being, leavens them through and through, and permeates them like a breath or an omnipresent fragrance.”

p.16-17 – “All of the perversions that human freedom can inflict upon being and its qualities always aim at one thing: the annihilation of the depth dimension of being, thanks to which being remains a mystery, even, indeed, precisely in its unveiling. The formula “A is nothing other than …” typifies this perversion, whatever the transcendental it affects. It is much rather the case that A is always “something other than …” Neither goodness nor beauty nor truth is exhausted by any definition; the multi-dimensional reality of the transcendentals can ever be flattened out by any kind of reduction, and there is no way to capture the mystery either of their existence or of their essence in a formula. Of course, the ultimate ground of the mysterious character inherent in the knowable is disclosed only when we recognize that every possible object of knowledge is creaturely, in other words, that its ultimate truth lies hidden in the mind of the Creator, who alone can speak the eternal name of things. …. It is God, then, who secures the transcendentals against all the assaults of human freedom – however much ruin this freedom might cause.