The Hunted Teacher Who Sang a Messiah Out of the Storm

He had not slept. Outside the cave the salt sea lay flat and dead under the stars. Somewhere behind him, across the marl and the dry wadis, the men who wanted him dead were still moving. They had a name for the one who led them. The scrolls called him the Liar. Some nights the Teacher called him the Scoffer, and spat into the dark.

Click for full size

The Cave Above the Salt Sea

The Teacher of Righteousness, Moreh HaTzedek (מורה הצדק), crouched over a scrap of skin and wrote by the last of his lamp. His own community had turned him out. Friends who once ate at his table had gone over to the Liar and now recited slander against him in the assemblies. He was a leader with no one left to lead, a man who had built a house of study and been driven from its door. Out of that dryness, he sang.

The lamp smoked. Ink thickened. He did not stop, because stopping would have left the hunters as the last voices in his head. He wrote himself a banner for the elect and a reader of hidden things, not as a boast a man makes in a full hall, but as the only claim that still stood between him and the salt plain.

Clay Holding a Fountain

He believed God had opened a fountain of knowledge inside him, a spring that ran with the hidden plan of creation, the fixed course of every age, the shape of the heavenly world. No other man alive held what he held. The secrets had been whispered to him and to no one else. He wrote that down with a hand that shook from cold as much as from fear.

The same hand wrote the opposite in the next breath. What is flesh, that it should understand these things? What is a creature of dust, that it should be granted such insight? He knew the answer to his own question. He was clay. He was mud pinched into a shape and left to dry. He was food already promised to the worm. The wonder was not that he suffered. The wonder was that eternal truth had been poured into a cracked vessel, and the vessel had not shattered.

A Woman at the Gates of Sheol

Then the vision took him, and the cave seemed to shake with it. The gates of Sheol (שאול), the underworld of the dead, swung open. The snares of the Pit spread wide across the ground like nets thrown by unseen hands. The earth shuddered. Deep in its footings the foundations of the wall cracked and groaned. In the middle of that ruin stood a woman, and she was in labor.

She writhed at the very lip of death. Waves of destruction beat against her like the sea against a breaking hull. Mazzikim crowded close to the birth, drawn to the blood and the screaming, waiting to swallow whatever came out of her. The whole created order convulsed around one woman's body straining to give something up. This was no gentle deliverance. Redemption, in the world the Teacher saw, did not arrive soft. It clawed its way in through agony.

The child came. He named the child the way the old prophet had named him. A Wonderful Counselor, Pele Yoetz (פלא יועץ), a child of power delivered at the gates of death while the earth broke apart (Isaiah 9:5). He did not stop to explain whether the laboring woman was the community itself, groaning the age of redemption out of its own suffering, or a mother of heaven bearing a deliverer into the storm. He only saw the shape wrenched free of the pangs, alive, wonderful, born into catastrophe and not undone by it. The gates of Sheol had opened to devour. Instead they gave up a child. He sang the child out of the storm because the hymn was the only midwife he had left.

Dust Among the Holy Ones

When the storm passed, the Teacher was still crouched in the cave, still clay, still hunted. The vision had turned on him too. He wrote the strangest claim of all. God had purified a perverse spirit of great transgression, to stand in the station with the host of the holy ones, and to enter into community with the congregation of the sons of heaven. He, the creature of mud, had been raised to an eternal height. Not after death. Not in some far age past the horizon. Now, this night, in this cave, he stood among the angels.

He had added nothing to it, and he knew that too. Who is like You among the gods, O Lord? Moses had sung those words at the edge of the split sea (Exodus 15:11). The Teacher sang them at the edge of a different split, the boundary torn open between the human and the divine, dust admitted to stand with the sons of heaven. The lamp guttered. Beyond the cave the Angel of Darkness still held his dominion over the salt plain and the men hunting across it. The Teacher had already walked out of that dominion. He walked, in the vision, in everlasting light, clay that would not stay clay, a worm lifted into the assembly of the holy ones while the enemies at his back never knew what he had become.