Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (epub ebook reader .txt) 📗
- Author: Cynthia Ozick
Book online «Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (epub ebook reader .txt) 📗». Author Cynthia Ozick
These were the beliefs and writings and precepts of the heritage I received from my father and my mother, who had received the very same from their predecessors, as they in turn had received them from our distant progenitors who raised up the Temple at Elephantine. Since then, we have been as a people scattered and few, and worse: forgotten, as if we never were. We live on as if in hiding. Even when our Temple stood, how humble it was, and how it disdained grandeur! It was built low to the earth, and constructed of earth, with a modest courtyard and fine tiles on its floor, and never a pillar blooming with crests of stone flora. We were, after all, stragglers. It was not our fate to go up to Jerusalem, or to set eyes on the stream that is called Jordan. Our companionate river was the Nile, once divinely bloodied so that we as a wretched people could escape our condition as slaves. It was through our proximity to the watery site of these memories that the Passover remains precious to us—and still we are expelled from the Books of the Jews!
And then, in a turn of our fortune, it was revealed to us by certain travelers that on a summit in the town of Jerusalem there was still another Temple, this one very grand, and peopled by Priests and Levites, to whom letters were sent, and from whom letters arrived. They too spoke and wrote our language, as who among the nations did not? In their inquiries we saw that though we may have been acknowledged as fellow Israelites, we were also regarded as improbable curiosities: they wished to know how we lived, how our families and neighbors were constituted, what our usages were, what plants and beasts and fowl there were on our island, and much else. We told them of the rich moisture of our reddish clay, how sheep and cattle were few while birds were many, especially the storks that thrived in colonies in the shallows of the Nile; and at first they made no murmurings against our Temple. And little by little, as we informed them of our beginnings and our ways, we learned theirs: the history of how their Temple was ruined, and how they were exiled to Babylon, and how they returned to rebuild it, all under the rule of the very Persians for whom we were supposedly abject hirelings! They told us of their commandments and ordinances, written in the books we stragglers did not possess, they told us of the Book of their teachers Ezra and Nehemiah, and their Book of holy instructions called Dvarim. And according to the wisdom of these books, they believed that only their Temple on the heights of Jerusalem permitted worship of the Creator of All, and that all other sanctums were forbidden, inclined as they were to the ludicrous and fantastical gods of the nations, and to false icons of gold and licentious figurines. And so it was according to the wisdom of these books that our riverine Temple, so contagiously close to the delusionary shrine of Khnum, was soon deemed illicit. But was not our Temple, like theirs, adorned by a seven-branched menorah, and a shulchan for the shewbread, and did not our kohanim, like theirs, honor the rites of sacrifice, were not birds brought by our people as burnt-offerings, all the birds that were pure, and none, like the stork, that were not? And was not our Temple
Comments (0)