My Dearest Oldest Love,
Moses is dead. He was a full 120 and to the end, the vigor of a man one quarter his age. People say he was carried on a chariot to heaven, but he very well may have simply jumped off the cliffs of Moriah. For forty years, I saw him eat nothing, drink only water, sit in contemplation of the divine voice within him, and walk the tents of Israel at night at a speed even Joshua found exhausting. He ever spared me but a few words for every hour in his presence. And now he's made me his successor.
Because Moses, the divine instrument, died in rebellion from his god. Moses told us that Yahweh would not permit him to enter the Promised Land because he struck a rock to obtain water which the rock only gave to us in droplets when a droughted nation needed a river. But that was just another of Moses's divinely clever misdirections, imparting to his people the lesson that God believes negotiated settlement is better than war.
And yet Aaron told me, God spoke to Moses precisely the opposite. The only way forward into Israel is war: expulsion, extermination; cleansing the land and watering crops with blood. Moses wanted his people to leave Yahweh and pursue a more divine calling.
No one doubted Moses's goodness during his lifetime, yet we all doubted it - every minute. We doubted his competence, we doubted his better angels, and even after all those miracles, we doubted his god. With every new miracle we doubted Moses and Him more, not less. So seldom did Moses emerge from his tent for us that many even wondered if Aaron, not Moses, was the true medium of God. Moses was always slow of speech, even in Egypt, and he just seemed to grow taller and stronger every year. Meanwhile, Aaron, who by the last twenty years could barely hold himself up by the shepherd's rod, was three years older than Moses, and not a single Israelite doubted his mental competence for a moment.
And Yahweh knows, we had reason... there were whole years when Moses went unseen, and then he would emerge with a new draconian edict whose logic defied description and proscribed solutions to problems none of us had. Those of us who believed entirely in Yahweh worried that with every new rebellion, Yahweh would punish us, abandon us, scourge us with greater force than he scourged any Eygptian. Those of us who didn't believe rebelled still more.
But for forty years, Moses was the simple fact of Israelite/Hebrew life. How many from either tribe are even alive from the Exodus besides Joshua and me? How did an octogenarian enact such miraculous feats? How could he enact them again and again unless this was the leader who spoke to Yahweh, the leader who spoke for Yahweh? And yet he was a barely visible prophet who communicated all through his older brother until a month before his dying day.
Give or take his like, the world has not seen a leader like Moses in the thousand years since Theseus - if the scrolls are to be believed, they ruled through exactly that same mixture of vigor, patience, cunning, humility, and terror. They had the same immaculate eye for political theater, and that vision or inspiration for the future which we can only call divine. He survived forty years performing the most impossible feats within the most impossible job leading the most impossible people on earth.
I have no divine voice in me. I certainly have no calling to holiness. I have only memories of you, dear Rahab, and I must call upon you again my dear, whom I have not seen in decades and with whom my stream of endless loving correspondence got slower and less urgent every year until seventeen years ago it ceased (and I must ramishly admit that I have counted every year, month, and day), to help me prevail upon the leaders and elders of the seven nations of Canaan to give some kind of asylum to a desperate people of immigrants in this fecund and not overpopulous land.
A land without people. You can't understand the tower of privilege, that. As for me, birthed in the Nile where population is legion on every inch, and my people of the desert where all is barren, emigrating to a land where wheat and sorghum and corn ripple with the wind (you remember our promise of a land of milk and honey, fuck that, we need bread that rises!), there surely is no holier more bounteous place in all the earth.
Of course, there are people here. So many... varied people. But so much land without settlement - surely there is space for all and a negotiated accord letting us dwell among Canaanites with a place among the nations.
My dearest Rahab, you remember surely our mountain of refuge: our ascent alone to the top of Mount Hermon where Gilgamesh killed Humbaba and dwells the palace of Ba'al (and I still have multiple bones to pick with you about that my dear...), and whereupon this once youthful Caleb could devour entire the loot of the north with his eyes, while, unbidden and unpaid, you introduced me to all those things most Jewish women never do.
Twelve of us were sent to Canaan, ten prognosticated we could not take it. Everybody else went to the Negev, that disgusting dump of sand and salt where fuckall grows and everything dries and dies. But you showed me what was really there: in the North, the Golan and the Galilee, the ancient ports of Acre and Jaffa that go back to the age of your gods (again, as I said at the time... what??), and especially, oh..., that river's west bank... where all is green and life. THAT is the chosen land, if there is any such thing... fat where the South is lean, weak where the South is strong, few where the South is many.
Between me and you, my oldest and greatest love, I never understood why my people couldn't settle on the other side of Hermon. All things considered, it's been a relatively uneventful forty years and we're probably better off not crossing over to that fucking promised land... but I promised my leader I would settle Canaan, even among those ample green valleys of Galilee and Jordan, surely there is some small strip the Israelites might call our own that feeds our people. We depend on this awful thing for our diets called manna, a sugary coriander wafer which Aaron constantly told us fell from the sky, but we smell it baking for a week every month and tribal leaders like me have to pretend for our followers that we believe him. There's a week every month when the priestly class disappears and suddenly the entire nation of Israel smells as bitter as burnt molasses. Meanwhile, Moses insisted we continually walk the Sinai Peninsula - back and forth, back and forth, but after our diet switched to manna every quartogenarian's feet would swell sometimes to twice their size. So I'm sure you understand now that I am not the same Caleb. I'm certain you can still turn heads a third our venerable age, but as a man I'm too old for love now. Isn't everyone over fifty?
I still have my wife, Azubah, dutiful and loving in every way. I have ten concubines from my days of love - Israelite, Hebrew, Midianite and Edomite... and known many harlots besides, but there is only one woman whom ever I worshipped. But now, in the sterility of my dotage, premature only by Mosaic standards, I can offer only a dearest friendship to the woman who was to me most dear, and who can end her days as dreams every harlot, a concubine who rules as viceroy beside a leader in all but name. For good or ill, you and your resourceful ways determined the fate of my people once - determine it again with me as the only one among us who knows this all too promised land, so that you may save us from our certain starvation.
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