Ester would have wagered any sum that Mary had delivered this announcement with a shawl drawn piously across her bosom . . . and that beneath the shawl, the rise of her powdered breasts had been adorned with crescent-moon patches. A few hours laboring for the Mahamad was all Mary would tolerate before she moved on to sample one of the city’s gaieties. Indeed, a few hours’ sobriety seemed more than most of London would willingly endure. So thoroughly had London remade itself since the restoration of the royal court that Ester found it a strain to recall the city that had come before. Now the king and his famed lovers had made an art of raucousness, and it seemed all London followed. Not a food or song or deed or costume was left plain that might be somehow adorned. Torrents of lace and ribboned love locks festooned gentlemen everywhere but among the Puritans and Quakers; women young and old promenaded the city under the weight of expensive and brightly colored fabrics such as had been banned under the Puritans; and an overfullness seemed to strain the city’s very walls, as though each satiety had to be challenged to see if the body that was London could be made to sustain yet further pleasure.
Against this abundance the synagogue’s new Mahamad had swiftly set itself, a bulwark against all it deemed grotesque. With the elegant and austere Rabbi Sasportas—newly imported from abroad—now walking openly in his dark robes and skullcap on London’s streets, and with the wealthier members of the congregation talking of constructing a new and grand synagogue building suitable for such an esteemed rabbi, London’s Jewry daily seemed to Ester more and more like Amsterdam’s. The small ring of men who’d lately formed the Mahamad spoke up stridently from the men’s side of the synagogue, issuing warnings against praying with Tudescos and against the self-declared Messiah Sabbatai Zevi, and proclaiming new community standards for dress, dance, music, and of course attendance of the theater. Indeed, Constantina’s long-ago pronouncements about Amsterdam’s Jews now kept Ester jarring company. See how these men of the synagogue set themselves up as judges. It remained true that all had not yet submitted to the community’s new rules; a mighty argument was even now in progress, Rivka had reported, because Sasportas had threatened to expel two men of the community who refused circumcision. Indeed, many of the synagogue’s men and women nodded respectfully to his sermons and then ran their households as they pleased, and the young winked at the Mahamad’s proclamations and flung themselves at London.
Still, it was the Mahamad’s impositions that had helped set Ester on the very errand she now returned from. Only yesterday she had entered the rabbi’s room to find him seated idle beside his fire, as he was so often of late. So few pupils came now to the rabbi’s doors, choosing instead to learn under Sasportas or to join with the sons of the wealthy at the Ets Haim. As Ester had looked on at the rabbi pressing his empty hands together lightly and parting them, pressing them and parting them, a thought had seized her.
“Isn’t it time we compose your teachings into a book?” she’d said.
The rabbi had turned to her slowly—and as he did she noted yet again how the winter seemed to have sapped his strength, though he never complained. But his body was more bent, his face even paler.
“Your commentaries about the Torah,” she said. “Or the Mishnah. We’ll print them. Your words will be preserved. They’ll go out to other students, even far from here.”
A great stillness came over him. When he spoke, something had kindled in his voice. “Perhaps,” he said, “my words might indeed help students see the wisdom in the teachings of those greater than I.” He listened long to the fire. Yet a moment later the spirit animating him seemed to subside. “No, Ester,” he said softly.
“But why?”
“The learned Rabbi Sasportas’s authority is new, and tender. It would not be right for me to raise my own voice now.” The rabbi shaped his next words carefully. “Surely too the Mahamad must approve all publications issued by Jews of this synagogue, and would not allow the printing of mine without Sasportas’s approval. I should not wish him to think I were endeavoring to supplant him.”
Nor, Ester knew, would the rabbi wish to give the famed Sasportas an opportunity to step into the path of sin by blocking a rival’s publication. Never did an ill word regarding Sasportas escape the rabbi’s lips, though Sasportas, in all his months in London, had not called on the rabbi. Neither did the rabbi make judgment of Sasportas’s teachings—though on more than one Sabbath, peering through a gap in the curtain, Ester had watched the rabbi’s face tighten as Sasportas, with his thin nose and high forehead and mellifluous voice, recited a magnificent sermon that praised, condemned, and promised, yet gave no warmth.
The silence muffling the room was impenetrable, London’s din a distant memory. Palm to palm the rabbi raised his hands, and lightly pressed them together.
“Perhaps,” Ester ventured, “the press in Amsterdam might print it? I’ll write to Rabbi Aboab.”
A ripple of longing disturbed the rabbi’s expression. She could feel his wish moving in the still room: To teach. To be heard.
“Thank you,” he said.
He’d permit it. She blushed at his simple gratitude. “All your pupils will be pleased,” she said. “They wish your words to spread.”
A pained smile lit the rabbi’s face. “Not all, Ester. But I thank you nonetheless.”
She waited. The rabbi didn’t speak. “You refer to de Spinoza?” she said.
The rabbi nodded.
Would he rebuff her curiosity? “What sort,” she said slowly, “was he?”
Rivka entered with the rabbi’s coffee. He waited until she had departed to answer—then spoke slowly. “I knew always, even when de Spinoza was a boy, that he exceeded me in intelligence. Yet could I only have imparted to him more of the beauty of our learning, I might have saved him from the path he chose. I failed to do so.” The rabbi paused, then continued with conviction. “But what a sage he could have become, Ester . . . and still might become, if only he wished it. Had they not banished him, he might yet be one of our great lights.” The rabbi turned his face intently toward Ester. “He visited me once, just before the ban. I’d sent word I wished to speak with him. I felt he might yet remain among us, if he only mastered his desire to so sharply rebuke those he thought in error. Yet though he addressed his former teacher with extraordinary politeness, he heeded naught I said. To my face he even carried his heresies further than I’d feared, further than I believe the other rabbis knew. Deus sive Natura: God or Nature. This was the spike with which he would pierce our tradition. God and Nature, he claimed, were indistinguishable—and he went even beyond this, he took pains to explain to me that we therefore are creatures determined by nature, lacking will of our own. In one breath he denied miracles, the holiness of the Torah, the soul’s endurance, heavenly reward or punishment. I believe, Ester, that in speaking to me thus he felt himself to be offering me a gift of truth.” A stain of regret on the rabbi’s face. “I could not persuade him.”
The sounds from the kitchen had died, creating a fragile lull.
“It is a shame upon the Amsterdam community,” the rabbi said, “that they could not hold one of their own sons. They would not bear his views of God. I endeavored to dissuade them. I went to the synagogue and said to all those assembled, the rabbis and the men of the Mahamad, ‘God himself has not struck de Spinoza down. Indeed, God countenances his rebellion, allowing de Spinoza to continue to walk this earth—for God knows truth always defeats misunderstanding. So must we welcome even a heretic in the byways of our own congregation until he sees truth.’ Yet even without knowledge of the new heresies de Spinoza had confessed to me, they closed him out from life. They said, ‘God’s jealousy will smoke against him.’”
Ester’s heart beat strangely. She spoke, her voice too avid. “Which of de Spinoza’s heresies so enraged the rabbis?”
The rabbi raised a hand as though to deflect the question. Then his hand fell to his lap. Quietly he pronounced the blasphemy. “That God does not intervene on our behalf.”
Yet in the same instant, something within Ester said, That God is afraid. She barely understood her own thought—yet it pinioned her.
In a rush she said, “I wish it could come to pass that you might speak with de Spinoza further. To impart more of your thinking.”
A faint smile crossed the rabbi’s pale lips. “I do not believe, Ester, that my arguments could win him. But I would dearly like to hear my old pupil’s voice. I would like to tell him, at the least, that I endeavored to persuade the others to let him stay.”
She understood that he’d say no more.