Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

györgy spiró

wondered? Uri raked through his childhood but could not identify a single transgression so massive that he would have to be inexorably blinded on its account; when he looked back, even with the best will in the world toward the Lord, he could find nothing in his actions. The most obvious explanation was also the boldest: the Lord did not concern himself with anyone, even his Chosen People; all that had been entrusted to him was the task of the Creation and getting the stone tablets delivered by Moses to his people. That explanation was not something that came from any original thinking on Uri’s part; the Lord Almighty was cast in the same terms collectively by the Zadokite sect of Roman Jews, also called the Sadducees, who accepted only the five books of Moses and

nothing else, nothing handed down in the oral tradition, and that was also the official position of the high priests in Jerusalem: the Creator had generously created the world, and mankind as part of it, that it should exist, but he had no further say thereafter; everyone was free to do with his life as he wished, within the bounds of the Law, though naturally anyone who broke the Law would be smitten down. Man lived as best he could, then died, and there was no hell, no heaven, the way the primitive Jews imagined over there in Palestine; there was no transmigration of souls, as the primitive Pharisees also believed, as no one rises up from the dead, or only after the coming of theMessiah, but that was still a long way off. “We have not suffered enough yet to be forcibly washed,”

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