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loves you.”
    â€œSimon, will your whole life be Judas? Is there anything besides Jonathan and Eleazar—and John too? What kind of guilt do you bear for them? Judas took me in his arms—and I pitied him. I don’t belong to him. I don’t belong to anyone, Simon ben Mattathias—I could only belong to one man.”
    â€œYou pitied him?” I whispered. “You pitied Judas?”
    â€œSimon, I pitied him, can’t you understand?”
    â€œNo,” I said, “no—” She sat there in the moonlight, and how can I tell you what she was and what she looked like? I took her in my arms, and then I wrapped the folds of my cloak over her, and we lay there under the olive tree…
    Afterwards, we walked in the night, hand in hand, climbing from terrace to terrace, until at last we were on the wild hilltops where the wind sighed in the evergreens and where all the air was fresh and fragrant and scented, I, Simon, and this woman who took away all fear of death, of the future, of misery and sorrow—and made me know only that I lived the way I had never lived before, young and proud and strong, the son of Mattathias, with tears and laughter mingled inside of me.
    â€œAnd I had to make love to you,” she said. “And I had to plead with you, and beg you to take me in your arms.”
    â€œNo, no.”
    â€œYes, I had to.”
    â€œOh, my darling, no, because I can remember. I can remember how I cut my knee once, and you washed it and bandaged it, and I told myself I would win the whole world for you and bring it to you—”
    â€œTo Modin?”
    â€œYes, to Modin. And when you brought wine to the Adon—”
    â€œI spilled it once.”
    â€œMy heart broke for you. And when you cried, I cried inside of, all over inside of me.”
    â€œAnd when you were beaten because Judas broke the great goblet, I cried that way for my Simon, for my beautiful, good, gentle Simon.”
    â€œDon’t say that!”
    â€œWhy? Why not? Simon, I love you. I love a man. First, I loved a little boy, and now I love a man—” Yet when I left her, I could only think, How will I tell Judas?
    ***
    There were four weeks of poignant happiness. It was no secret; in a place like Modin, where half the town is related to you in one way or another, there are no secrets, and anyone who saw Ruth when she looked at me—or me when I looked at her—knew all there was to know.
    It is hard to put anything down of those four weeks, yet I have to, if you would understand what came afterwards to me, Simon, and to my brothers—especially he who came to be called the Maccabee. I sometimes think that a Jew is a stranger on earth, someone who abides for a while and must perforce count each day as if it might be the last. We bind each other with bonds that are stronger than iron, and we make many things sacred that are not sacred among other people. But most of all is life itself sacred, our most terrible crime being an act which is matter of course with all other peoples, suicide—and because of this strange sacredness of life, love becomes almost an act of worship. We open our hearts wide, when we open them.
    It was that way with Ruth; it was that way with me. We became a part of each other. I don’t know what the Adon thought then; I was alive, and my heart was making its own song, and whether or not he condemned me, thinking, as I so often thought, that I had struck at Judas, I don’t know. I had Ruth and I had the whole world. We climbed the hills and lay in the fragrant turf under the cedars. We waded bare-legged in Tubel, the sweet brook, or stretched on the grass to watch the goats. It was the easy time; the harvest was in and we were not yet ready for the planting, so that work which might have fallen heavily on me with Judas gone could be neglected. John and Jonathan spent much time in the synagogue, a long and ancient stone building that served