He chuckled aloud, and pretended not to notice when Helen’s head jerked up from her work.
Opening a new file on his laptop, he began the translation. Upon the Death of the Learned Menasseh ben Israel, the sermon was titled. Below that: by Rabbi Moseh HaCoen Mendes, to be read aloud to the congregation. The sermon was several pages long, and where some words had been crossed out and rewritten the ink damage was heavy. Nonetheless, Aaron found he could make his way through the text. The people of Israel gather in sorrow today . . . God will comfort the mourners . . . Slowly he typed the words into his computer, platitudes he recognized from his own father’s sermons. There was more substance here, of course, including a heartfelt tribute to Menasseh: The learned Menasseh ben Israel was a man who carried in his soul the knowledge of his father’s torment in Lisbon at the hands of the wicked . . .
Following this prelude, the sermon turned from praise to careful persuasion—true to the form, Aaron noted. He’d heard enough sermons in his life to consider himself a bit of a specialist in the genre. As a boy he’d even whispered made-up bits of sermons before the bathroom mirror, emulating his father’s measured delivery and envisioning the day when he’d surprise his father with the information that he too (in Aaron’s youthful imaginings he’d be grown, a university student, magically transformed, every awkwardness vanquished) was going to take a pulpit. That vision had lasted until one Sunday morning when Aaron had come upon his father sitting at the breakfast table, already clean-shaven and reading the news—a sight Aaron had seen every week of his life, yet this time he understood it in a sudden fever of adolescent indignation: his father, shaking the spread newspaper into amiable submission before reaching for his coffee, wasn’t sifting the day’s news for any fresh truth, but simply for material that confirmed his own stance. The congregation—suburban, Reform—expected sermons that sampled the world and revealed threats worthy of a frisson—worthy perhaps of an uptick in charitable giving, perhaps a few evenings’ volunteer work. But not panic. Sermons that revealed the world as perhaps arduous, but never without mercy.
Read the newspaper, Aaron’s father liked to say, you’ll grow to be an educated man. Aaron had taken the advice to heart. And had read enough, by age fourteen, to see that his father’s safe sermons bore no resemblance to the sheer bloody courage the world required.
Neither, to be honest, did Aaron’s own petty teenage cowardice; his tendency to split hairs when what was required was action; his tendency to inflate personal slights—in the classroom, on the playing field, with the girls he dazzled and then bewildered. Not that any of that seemed to hinder him: he was the high school smartass goading teachers while his classmates guffawed. He was the college freshman who didn’t miss a beat when his Modern American History TA took him aside with the air of one delivering a painful but necessary blow: I understand no one offered to partner with you for your research project. It might help, Aaron, if you’d “get rid of that smirk”—the TA making air-quotes on pronouncing the last words, to show Aaron that he was only repeating a complaint made by fellow students. (It might have helped, Aaron had thought, if he’d actually wanted a partner.) An ex-girlfriend, in a bitter outburst she obviously hoped would wound Aaron, had even called him Teflon Man.
But sometimes when he talked about history his voice cracked.
He gave himself credit for not waging war in his father’s home—if only because his father’s cheerleading brand of Judaism never seemed worth the melodrama of a fight. Instead he’d quietly turned his back on the version of manhood he’d been groomed for. And in the place of religion and all that went with it—community, party line, family—he’d set history: the one thing that struck Aaron Levy as worth being humble for.
He made his way slowly now through the dense Portuguese of Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s sermon. As he translated, he could feel the words attempting to corral the listeners into considering their own priorities.
The labor Menasseh ben Israel gave his life to, as surely as the martyrs still give their lives in the flames of the Inquisition, is of a breadth and depth that will sustain the most weary soul. Do not consider then, however learned you are, that your knowledge is complete. For learning is the river of G-d and we drink of it throughout our lives.
Though the vocabulary and substance could not have been further from the sermons Aaron’s own father delivered, this one was clearly heading for a familiar destination. Educate your children. Join the Temple Brotherhood. Donate.
Ignorance is now your great enemy, and I do none any favor by flattering you that you are not ignorant.
Now there was a sentence Aaron’s own father would never have dared speak to his own self-satisfied congregants.
Being Jews now in the light of day, you may wish a rapid remedy for your ignorance. Glimpsing the void in your souls, you will by nature wish for that which will fill it at once. It is from this wish that you must be on your guard, and discern the light of true learning from the false. There will be those who would sell you false knowledge and promise ready redemption. Yet it is only G-d who chooses the time of His revelations, and when He brings us to the world to come it will be sudden and not of our planning. It is not G-d’s will, nor was it that of Menasseh ben Israel, may his memory be a blessing, that Jews should wager on the Messiah as dicers will, but rather that we labor steadily and humbly all our days.
The sermon ended there. No phrases to soften the message, no consolation. Only this stark warning.
Aaron reread, impressed. Was HaCoen Mendes trying to inoculate his listeners, as early as 1657, against the quickening spread of false-messiah hysteria? At that date Sabbatai Zevi, the most devastating of the messiah-imposters, whose delusional claims would roil Jewish communities throughout Europe, had yet to build his enormous following. But perhaps HaCoen Mendes had already heard rumor of Sabbatai Zevi’s rise and was beginning to develop the counterarguments that he’d later lay out in more sophisticated form.
It would interest the scholarly community, this one.
He saved the file in which he’d translated the sermon and turned to the next document in his pile. The ink damage was heavy, the English handwriting halting, with some strike-outs where the writer had reconsidered his spelling. At the bottom of the last page, the initial aleph. Clearly Aleph was less comfortable in English. Stood to reason, if Aleph, like the rabbi, had arrived in England only a few months before writing this.
Aaron began reading from the beginning.
Upon the Death of the Learned Menasseh ben Israel, it began. He read the first lines and saw that it was merely a translation of the Portuguese sermon. Good—he could compare it to his own translation later, see how his Portuguese scored against Aleph’s English. Me and you, Aleph, he thought. A friendly translation-smackdown across three and a half centuries. Relieved and suddenly hungry, he stood, pushed his chair far from the table, and stretched for the ceiling with an ostentatious yawn.
Helen looked up.
“Lunch break,” he said. He took his sandwich from his bag and settled on a chair in a corner, away from the table where the documents were spread.
Dropping her glasses to her breastbone, Helen blew out a long breath.
“What did you find?” she said.
He unwrapped his sandwich. “First, two letters in Portuguese, addressed to HaCoen Mendes. One regarding books he’d asked to have sent to him from a bookseller in Amsterdam. The other telling HaCoen Mendes about a student who will be coming to study with him and proposing a weekly fee. After that, something in English, a bill for a purchase of candles.” He bit into his sandwich and chewed.