A Mother Brings Her Son Before the Judge

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The Crowd Came to Watch a Boy Be Killed

The woman walked to the courthouse with her son beside her, and by the time she reached the door a crowd had already gathered. Word travels fast in a small town. A mother had a grievance against her own child and had brought him in to answer for it, and every idle person within reach of that news came to stand where the view was good.

They talked while they waited. "Look at her," one said. "She has brought her own son here to have him killed."

The boy heard it. So did she.

Something turned in her at the threshold. She had come in with a speech ready and she swallowed it whole.

The judge looked up when they were brought forward. "What has your son done to you?"

"When he was in my womb," she said, "he kicked me."

The room waited for the rest of it. There was no rest of it.

"Has he done anything else to you?"

"No."

The judge sat back. "Then there is no offense here at all."

The crowd came apart slowly, the way a crowd does when it has been cheated. Is that an answer, they asked each other on the way out. Is that a rebuke? She only came here to amuse herself with her son. They walked home with their faces burning.

Three Times the Nations Bought Seats

Three times God called Israel into court, and three times the nations of the world heard the summons and came running.

The first time the words were, "Come now, and let us dispute together." The nations elbowed one another. Now He will finish them off, they said. They had waited a long while for this. Then the sentence landed: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall become as white as snow. The spectators stood there with their mouths open. Is that an answer? Is that a rebuke? He has only come to amuse Himself with His children.

The second summons went out through the mountains, a claim entered against His people. The nations came back. Now, surely. And the claim opened into a memory of Balak plotting on a hillside in Moab and Balaam answering him, which is not the speech of a judge disposing of a defendant. The third summons named Judah, and the nations gathered a third time, and the charge dissolved into a recollection of a hand gripping a heel in the womb.

Three times they came for a killing. Three times they went home embarrassed.

The King Who Cleared the Matron's Name

There was a rumor once about a matron and one of the great men of the kingdom. It ran through the corridors the way those rumors do, and it reached the king, and the king looked into it. He found nothing under it. Not a witness, not a date, not a room.

So he threw a banquet. He seated the accused man at the head of the couches, in front of everyone who had repeated the story, and let them watch him eat.

The nations had a rumor of their own. You made the calf, they said to Israel, and they said it for centuries. The Holy One looked into that too. Rabbi Huna taught in the name of Rabbi Samuel bar Nahman that the strangers who had come up out of Egypt with Israel were the ones who cast it, and the words they used give them away: they said, these are your gods, O Israel. Your gods. Not ours.

Then came the seating at the head of the table. Of all the animals that could lead the offerings, the bull was placed first. The calf that had been Israel's disgrace was walked back to the altar as Israel's honor, in front of everyone who had told the story.

Ninety-Nine Screams for Death and One for Life

A woman on the birthing chair screams a hundred times. Ninety-nine of those screams belong to death and one belongs to life. That is the arithmetic, and nobody softened it.

What comes out at the end of the hundred screams is a small filthy thing, wet and slick and unlovely. And every single person in the room wants to hold it. They pass it around and kiss it, and if it is a boy they kiss it twice.

Rabbi Levi counted up everything good that heaven still intends for Israel, all of it, the whole account, and set it against one shout at the foot of a burning mountain: all that the Lord has spoken we will do and we will obey. One shout. That is the collateral.

God did not ask for the deer or the gazelle or the wild goat, the seven creatures a man would have to climb into the mountains to hunt. He asked for the bull, the sheep, the goat, the three that were already standing at the feeding trough, warm, familiar, a few steps from the door.

What the Nations Never Digest

A king once sent a proclamation into a province, and the people of that province took the covers off their heads and stood up straight and read it aloud, shaking. Nothing in the document told them to. They were simply that frightened of the man who had signed it.

The Shema (Hear O Israel) is the proclamation of the Holy One, and it comes with no such instructions. Sitting in your house. Walking on the road. Lying down. Getting up. A man reads it with his head covered, half asleep, one sandal on.

The mother is still standing in the room. That is the part the empires cannot swallow. She brought the boy in herself, she meant every word of the complaint, and when she heard what the crowd wanted she went in and told the judge that the child had kicked her before he was born and nothing else had ever happened.

The court is still open. The crowd is still outside, waiting for a verdict it has been promised for three thousand years.