Outcasts

Amos Oz, Judas

Nietzsche wrote in The Antichrist that the last Christian had died on the cross. He may have been right. Another thought, even more radical, is that the most devoted disciple of Jesus wasn't Peter or John but Judas, reviled as the agent of betrayal, but at the same time the man without whom the drama of atonement would have been unthinkable. As a boy in catechism class, and as a young man in Catholic school, I was taught to despise Iscariot (we were told to note the "scar" in his name).  Dante put Judas in the lowest pit of hell, literally in the jaws of Satan, a punishment the otherwise meek nuns who trotted me through the Baltimore Catechism would have approved had they been familiar with the great Florentine poet. But even as a child I couldn't help but wonder about the punishments of hell fire and eternal damnation that were visited upon Judas, Pontius Pilate, Herod, and the Roman soldiers for their part in a drama that was, after all, ordained from the beginning of time. How, I remember wondering in grade school, could you send a man to hell for doing what he was condemned to do?  Masaccio pictures Judas in dark shadow, makes him an outsider, but without him would the sin of Adam have been expiated? As with the horrible "hardening of Pharaoh's heart" in Exodus, so too with the Betrayal: is God playing fair with his victims by punishing them for a role that, in the scheme of things, they have no control over? Do we blame the butcher for shedding the blood of the paschal lamb?

I admit that these are sophomoric theological questions, roughly akin to wondering if God can contradict herself, but they are questions that have rich bearing on Amos Oz's new novel, a book that examines the paradoxes of fate and asks non-trivial questions about what might have been the case had certain historical actors possessed free will, or, to put the question another way, if human frailty were not so closely allied to to historical contingency. For those of us schooled in the "great man" view of the past, Oz is the perfect antidote, for his is the "average-man-as-victim" view of history. Things might have been different, but only if we were different. And that, of course, is the meaning of tragedy. 

Every great drama requires a great villain.  Without Lucifer, Milton's epic of salvation history would be the dullest poem ever written (after The Faerie Queen); no Shylock, no Portia; be honest, who do you prefer, literary wimps like Alyosha Karamazov or dastardly scoundrels like Ivan? Which is not to say that we should revel in the crimes of non-fictional criminals, psychopaths, and murderers--on the contrary, what we learn from novels is how to spot the sociopath in the crowd; empathy, after all, is not sympathy, but understanding. But Judas doesn't even rate as a run-of-the-mill sociopath: he loved Jesus; he wanted the Son of Man to be the Messiah and not just another false prophet; he wanted a miracle, the End Times, a world reborn.* Or, as Luke puts it, Satan "entered into Judas," and all questions of free will flew out the window. (See Matthew 26:23 for the ambiguity of Judas's betrayal; also the contradictory accounts found in the Gospel of John).

 Few Israeli writers have been as sensitive to the paradox of the Jewish state as Amos Oz. His novels depict not only the plight of the European Jews after the war, but treat with compassion the plight of the Palestinian and other Arabic-speaking peoples of Palestine--Muslims, Christians, and secular men and women caught in a maelstrom of historical forces--Zionism, socialism, Arab nationalism, and, above all else, the aftermath of the Holocaust. Oz has negotiated the desert ground of his beloved Israel for forty years, drawing richly textured stories out of a painful reality that most Westerners cannot imagine, or that they choose to imagine in a purely politcal way. Oz has never been above politics, but he has seldom allowed politics to undermine his humane vision of an inclusive Israel.**

"Rabbi Elbaz Lane led down the slope of Sha'arei Hesed toward the Valley of the Cross." Oz's richly imagined novel occurs, appropriately enough--given that it is a novel about Palestine--in the cramped rooms of a tiny house in Jerusalem. Three lost souls occupy the house in the winter of 1959-1960. A young man, Shmuel Ash, a young university drop-out whose heart was broken when his girlfriend left him to marry an engineer and technocrat. Gershom Wald, an old and broken man who is housebound but whose intellect and penchant for polemics is very much alive. And Atalia Abravanel, the beautiful and aloof daughter of one of Israel's founders, the widow of Misha Wald, son of Gershom, who was a brilliant mathematician killed in the fighting of 1948-1949. Three grieving souls whose lives briefly rub against one another and against a shared but by no means identical sense of the immediate past. (Whether or not the multiple views of Israel's history are commensurable is a question Oz asks in most of his novels). Wald, a Zionist and admirer of David Ben-Gurion, describes for Ash, a lukewarm socialist and cosmopolitan, a hard-headed view of Israel's founding--a small country surrounded by hostile Arab neighbors, an enclave settlement forced to fight for its survival. Ash agrees, but is intrigued by the views of Atalia's dead father Shealtiel Abravanel--Ben-Gurion's bitter enemy--who forswore the idea of a Jewish state in favor of an inclusive, bi-national, Jewish-Arab nation. Most interesting of all are the views of Atalia--a shadowy figure, sensuous and distant--whose melancholy has hardened into misanthropy, a hatred of the cant of men with their wars and politics.

Atalia's father was a noble idealist and in the Israel of 1948 his defense of Arab interests branded him a traitor; his daughter, who Oz cleverly makes a private investigator, a connoisseur of others' secrets--having lost her husband, has renounced the world and hides on Rabbi Elbaz Lane with her father-in-law.

Here are words of Gershom Wald, describing Shealtiel's political views: "'The real tragedy of human kind, Shealtiel used to say, 'is not that the persecuted and enslaved crave to be liberated and to hold thier heads high. No. The worst thing is that the enslaved secretly dream of enslaving their enslavers. The persecuted year to be persecutors. The slaves dream of being masters...' Shealtiel lived in a Manichean world. He had set up a sort of utopian paradise and portrayed the opposite as hell. Meanwhile, they had started calling him a traitor. They said he had sold himself to the Arabs for a lot of money. They said he was the bastard son of an Arab..." (226-7)

And Judas? The shadow of betrayal lingers over every page of Oz's novel. Ash has been betrayed in love; Wald's body has betrayed him; Atalia's father was thought to have betrayed his country. And, the question is implicit, Israel--has it betrayed the ideals of its founding by becoming just another belligerent nation state? Deftly, and with great compassion, Oz allows each of his three characters to appear reasonable in their assumptions about their country and themselves. There are no epiphanies in this quiet and affecting book, no resolutions, but only the glacial evolution of the self that is in accordance with real life. The wisdom of the desert feels connected to the sense of imperceptible nature of change, to the sense of the eternity that overwhelms the passage of time.

Betrayed with a kiss. 

*Such, in any case, is the view of Judas propounded by Ash in Oz's novel. I can't help but wonder if Oz had Borges's story "Three Versions of Judas" (in Ficciones, 1944) in mind as he wrote Judas.

**I am well aware of the complexity of Oz's political views, but I am content, on balance, to view him as a voice of reason in a place where reason is often in short supply. See this profile for more nuance than I can supply here: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/honest-voice-israel

George Ovitt (6/11/2017)