Oh Baruch

The year is 586 BCE.

Eleven hundred years have passed since a man named Jacob crossed the river Jabbok before dawn with a new name and a limp he would carry for the rest of his life. His twelve sons became twelve tribes. The tribes became a nation. The nation built a city on a hill in the land Abraham walked into from Ur, and on the highest point of that hill they built a Temple, and inside the Temple they placed the written covenant, the deed and the witnesses and the specific weight of silver, and they said: this is where God lives. This is the address.

It was a very Jerusalem thing to do.

Jerusalem is not a city that survives by being comfortable.

It survives by being precise.

It has been attacked before. Threatened before. Besieged before. It sits on a hill in a narrow corridor of land between larger powers and it has spent its entire existence knowing that larger powers notice it eventually and arrive with armies. This is not a city that trusts warmth or flexibility or the goodwill of strangers. This is a city that trusts documents. Deeds. Witnesses. The specific weight of silver weighed out in public so that nobody can later claim the transaction did not happen.

Walk its streets and you feel it. The architecture of a people who have learned that memory fails and bodies die and empires rewrite history in their own favour, and that the only reliable counter to all of this is the written record. The deed that says this ground belongs to these people. The covenant that says this promise was made and these were the terms and here are the names of the witnesses. The law that says this is how we live when we have nothing else.

Jerusalem trusts its documents and prays that the documents are enough.

This is not a cold way to live. It is a scarred way to live. The discipline of Jerusalem is not the discipline of people who chose it because they found it aesthetically pleasing. It is the discipline of people who found, across many centuries of being the smallest nation in the path of the largest empires, that structure is the only thing that survives everything else.

And yet.

Six hundred miles to the south, where the trade routes converge at a well that does not run dry, there is another way. Mecca carries things in mouths and memories and the warmth of objects passed from hand to hand across generations. It trusts the living voice, the story that changes shape for every listener, the pendant warm because something was placed inside it long ago and has not left. You cannot take a body’s knowing away from it even with an army.

Baruch Ben Neriah has seen the men from those trade routes. They pass through Jerusalem on their way north, carrying frankincense and myrrh and stories in equal measure, their hands empty of writing instruments, their memories full of everything that matters to them. He has always found them slightly unnerving. Not wrong. Just incomprehensible in a specific way, the way a man who trusts locks finds incomprehensible a man who trusts that nobody will try the door.

He has never said this to anyone.

He is in the lower city, returning from an errand he will not later remember, when the smoke begins to rise from the Temple Mount.

Today, Jerusalem’s locks are failing.

-----

Outside the walls the army of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, has been waiting for eighteen months. His name is already a word for catastrophe in every language spoken between here and the eastern sea. The city held longer than anyone expected. The city prayed. The city trusted the Temple on the hill would protect it.

The walls broke this morning.

The Temple is burning.

Baruch looks at the smoke.

He looks at his empty hands.

He grunts.

He runs.

The smoke is wrong in every way smoke can be wrong.

It is too large. Too present. A cooking fire gone bad produces a column that rises and disperses and is forgotten. What is rising from the Temple Mount is not a column. It is a presence. It has width and weight and it is changing the colour of the sky over the entire city the way a bruise changes the colour of skin, spreading outward from the point of impact, turning the late afternoon Jerusalem gold into something amber and sick. Baruch has lived under this sky his entire life and he knows what it is supposed to look like at this hour.

It is not this.

He starts running.

He is not built for running and his body makes this clear immediately. He is a scribe. Forty-five years of sitting have given him the permanent forward stoop of a man shaped by his work, the scholar’s curve, the slight squint. His legs are functional but unenthusiastic. He runs the way a man runs when he has decided to run despite significant reservations from multiple parts of his body.

He grunts.

This is a thing he does. A low effortful sound that comes out of him when his body is objecting or when information has arrived that he has not yet processed. Jeremiah knew this grunt. In twenty years of close proximity Jeremiah had developed a precise taxonomy of it. The this-is-worse-than-expected grunt. The I-knew-this-would-happen grunt. The I-am-doing-it-anyway grunt.

This one is all of them at once.

Twenty years with Jeremiah.

People imagine this as a spiritual arrangement. A young man drawn to wisdom, sitting at the feet of the prophet, receiving the word of God through proximity to its vessel. This is not what twenty years with Jeremiah is like.

Twenty years with Jeremiah is like living beside a man who has been set on fire and cannot be extinguished and does not want to be extinguished and would like you please to write down exactly what a man on fire looks like and what he is saying.

Jeremiah feels everything at a volume ordinary people cannot access. His grief for Jerusalem is not the grief of a man who loves it from a comfortable distance. It is the grief of a man made of the same material as the city, feeling its wounds in his own body. When he weeps over Jerusalem he is not performing sorrow. He is having sorrow done to him.

Baruch has written down forty-two chapters of this.

There was a morning three years ago when the weight of it became briefly unbearable. Jeremiah was dictating and Baruch’s hand cramped and the cramp was nothing, a scribe’s ordinary complaint, but something underneath the cramp gave way and he said it out loud. Woe is me. I am weary with my groaning and I find no rest. He said it quietly, to himself more than to Jeremiah, but Jeremiah heard everything, Jeremiah always heard everything, and he stopped dictating and looked at Baruch for a long moment with the look of a man on fire looking at a man who is merely warm. Then he said: I will tell you what was said to me. And he dictated five verses addressed directly to Baruch. His name in the text. His complaint acknowledged. Your life will be spared as a prize amid the general destruction.

Baruch wrote it down.

He has thought about those five verses every day since.

He has written it in cold rooms and hot rooms and rooms where officials stood over him deciding whether to arrest him and he has written it all down, every lament, every warning, every prediction of exactly the catastrophe that is currently producing the smoke he is running toward.

He knew it was coming.

He has known it was coming for twenty years.

He has the documentation.

What he finds, running up this hill with his stoop and his ink-stained hands and his lungs making their position known, is that having the documentation is not the same as being ready. He prepared for the worst. Preparation changes nothing about what the worst actually feels like when it arrives. The smoke is in his throat now. The smell of it specific and wrong. Cedar and incense and something underneath that he has no word for because no word exists yet for this particular combination.

He grunts.

He is afraid.

He should say this plainly. He is a scribe. Not a soldier. Not a priest. Not a man of particular courage or physical capability or appetite for danger. The only bravery he has ever had is the quiet stubbornness of continuing to write when powerful men stand over him deciding whether to arrest him. The stubbornness of not erasing things simply because they are inconvenient. That is the entirety of his courage and he does not know if it is enough for what he is about to do.

He runs because the scrolls are in the room above the northern courtyard.

The northern courtyard is where the smoke is thickest.

The scrolls contain everything. The covenant from the beginning. Abraham and the cave and the four hundred shekels of silver and the witnesses. Jacob at the river with his new name and his limp. Forty-two chapters of Jeremiah’s voice, the voice that knew this was coming and said so clearly and was not heard. The laws. The accumulated written architecture of a people who believed that if you wrote it down carefully enough, with enough witnesses, with enough specificity, truth would survive anything.

He is about to find out if they were right.

He grunts.

He reaches the top of the hill.

He looks at the Temple.

-----

The gates to the Temple Mount are open.

This is wrong. The gates should be closed or guarded or anything except standing open with people streaming through them in both directions, some pushing in with the forward lean of people who have left something behind, others stumbling out with the backward-looking daze of people who have seen something they are trying to get away from.

He pushes through the crowd going out.

He gets to the top of the ramp.

He has seen this building every day for twenty years. He has oriented his life around it the way the streets of Jerusalem orient toward the hill. He knows its proportions and its smell and the specific quality of the light on its stones at every hour of the day. He knows it the way you know something that has always been there, not always consciously, not always with gratitude, but always with the peripheral awareness that we give to the things our lives are built around.

The north side is burning.

Not the whole structure. Not yet. The fire has established itself in the interior where the cedar panelling and the linen curtains and the accumulated oil of four hundred years of Temple service are burning with a ferocity that the stone exterior is containing for now but will not contain much longer. The smoke is coming from the seams of the building, from the high windows, from the gaps between stone courses that have never had smoke in them before and look wrong with it, anatomically wrong, as if the building itself is wounded.

Around him the world is coming apart in the specific way worlds come apart. Not all at once. In pieces, each piece wrong enough to be its own catastrophe, the sum of them too large for any mind to hold entire. A woman sitting on the ground in the middle of the chaos not crying exactly, making something older than crying. A priest walking slowly away from the building with his hands at his sides and nothing in them and his face the face of a man whose interior has been removed. Two soldiers moving through the courtyard with the particular purposefulness of men who have a specific task and have decided not to look at anything that is not the task.

Baruch looks at all of this.

He grunts.

He moves toward the building.

-----

The room is on the north side.

He knows this as he knows everything about this building, thoroughly and unhelpfully. The north side is where the fire is. He goes anyway. Not because he has stopped being afraid. The fear is still entirely present, his stomach still hollow, his hands still cold despite the running. He goes because the alternative is to stop and think about what he is doing and if he stops and thinks about what he is doing he will not do it.

The door to the northern courtyard is intact.

He gets through it.

The air inside is wrong in a new way. The smoke is not drifting here. It is inhabiting. It fills the space with the focused intention of something that has arrived and intends to stay, and it finds his eyes immediately and his lungs immediately and he bends his head and goes forward and does not stop.

He gets to the stairs.

The wall beside the staircase is hot. Not warm. Hot. He touches it once without meaning to and pulls his hand back and keeps climbing. His legs are making sounds he has not heard his legs make before. His back is reporting from multiple locations. He grunts on every step, rhythmically, involuntarily, the sound his body makes when it is being asked to do something it did not sign up for and is doing anyway.

He gets to the top.

He gets to the door.

He gets through it.

The room is hot but not yet burning.

He stands in it for a moment.

The writing surface where he has spent the last three days working is still there. The lamp knocked sideways. Someone else’s draft half completed on the surface, whoever was here before him left in a hurry, the reed pen still lying across the unfinished sentence. He looks at this for a second without meaning to. The abandoned draft of someone who was in the middle of a sentence when the smoke appeared.

He knows the feeling.

He looks at the jars.

Eleven of them. Clay. Sealed. Arranged along the inner wall in the order he placed them. He knows what is in each one. He has been the hand that filled them, the hand that sealed them, the hand that arranged them in this specific order against this specific wall.

He has perhaps two minutes.

Perhaps less.

The heat is already wrong. It is not the heat of a room in summer. It is the heat of a wall that has something catastrophic happening on the other side of it, a directional heat, pressing through the stone with the focused intention of something that is coming regardless of what he decides.

Eleven jars.

A man can carry three.

He knows this immediately and he knows it is the worst piece of arithmetic he has ever done and he stands in the middle of the room with the smoke thickening and the wall cracking and the heat spiking and he cannot move because moving means choosing and choosing means leaving eight jars in a burning building and he is not ready to do that, he will never be ready to do that, and yet he has approximately ninety seconds before the question becomes academic.

He looks at the jars.

The first four. The compilation. The covenant from Abraham. The cave. The silver. The witnesses. Isaac at his writing surface the morning after the burial, writing his mother’s name easily and stopping at his brother. Jacob at the river, the limp, the new name. Three years of his work and the work of those before him. The whole story from the beginning.

The next three. Jeremiah’s words. Forty-two chapters of a voice he has been pressing into clay for twenty years.

The last four. The laws. The liturgy. The oldest layer. The instructions for how to live when the covenant seems very far away.

The wall cracks. A sound like something enormous giving way. The heat spikes sharply and he flinches and the flinch breaks the paralysis and he reaches for the first jar.

Wait.

He stops.

Because in the third jar, the second of Jeremiah’s, there are five verses that contain his own name. Five verses addressed directly to him. The only place in the entire written tradition where Baruch Ben Neriah appears as something other than the hand that held the pen. His complaint recorded. His exhaustion acknowledged. God speaking to him through Jeremiah: you said, woe is me, for the Lord has added grief to my pain. I am weary with my groaning and I find no rest.

He said that. On a bad morning three years ago. Jeremiah heard it and told God and God apparently found it worth recording.

The smoke is in his eyes. His lungs are filing a formal complaint. The wall to his left is making a sound that walls should not make.

He grabs the first jar. The covenant. Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the limp and the name.

He grabs the second jar. The first half of Jeremiah.

He holds both against his chest and he looks at the remaining nine and he has perhaps thirty seconds and he knows what Jeremiah would say and he knows what the right answer is and he reaches for the third jar anyway.

Not the laws.

The second half of Jeremiah. His own name. The five verses. The prize of a life amid the general destruction.

He is not proud of this.

He goes to the door.

He does not look back at the eight.

He cannot afford to look back at the eight.

He goes.

He gets down the stairs.

He does not know how. His legs report each step as a separate emergency and he ignores each report and keeps going, the three jars pressed against his chest, his arms locked around them, the smoke so thick now that he is navigating by memory rather than sight, this many steps, this turn, this door, his body knowing the building the way his body knows things that have been true for twenty years.

He gets through the door.

He gets through the courtyard.

He gets through the gate.

Outside the air hits him and he stops walking and stands with his mouth open breathing it in great ragged pulls, his lungs doing what lungs do when they have been waiting for permission. His eyes are streaming. His back is a single sustained complaint from the base of the spine to the shoulder blades. His arms are shaking from the weight of the jars and the locked position he has held them in since the room.

He does not put the jars down.

He stands in the Temple courtyard with Jerusalem burning around him and three clay jars pressed against his chest and he breathes.

Around him the world continues its coming apart. The sounds of a city being unmade, which is not one sound but everything at once, the particular composite of violence and loss and the specific human noise of people losing what they thought was permanent. He has written about this. He has written about it in Jeremiah’s voice for twenty years. The lamentations. The warnings. The specific inventory of what a city loses when it loses.

He knew.

He wrote it down.

He did not know.

Nobody knows until they are standing in it with three jars in their arms and smoke in their eyes and eight jars burning behind them in a room they cannot go back to.

He looks at what he is holding.

Three clay jars. Sealed. Intact. The covenant from Abraham. Jeremiah’s voice. His own name in five verses at the back of the second jar, his complaint and his promised prize, the only proof that Baruch Ben Neriah existed as something other than a function.

He thinks about the eight he left.

He will think about the eight for the rest of his life. He knows this already. He knows the specific texture of the guilt that is forming even now in the place underneath his back where he keeps the things he cannot say. The laws. The liturgy. The older texts. The things the community will need when it is in Babylon with nothing else.

He left them.

He grunts.

It is the smallest sound he has made all night. Not the I-am-doing-it-anyway grunt. Something quieter and more private. The sound a person makes when they have done something they cannot undo and have begun the long process of living with it.

He does not go back to his house that night.

His house is in the lower city and he does not know what the lower city is anymore. He walks. The direction is down and away from the fire and his feet choose the path without his mind directing them, the way feet move through a city they have known for forty-five years.

He walks through the night with his three jars.

By dawn he is outside the walls.

He sits on the ground at the side of the road with the jars in his lap and the city behind him and the first light coming up over the hills to the east, Jerusalem light, the specific quality of it that he has woken to his entire life, and he watches it fall on the smoke that is still rising from the Temple Mount and he thinks about Jeremiah.

Jeremiah is somewhere in that city. Old now. Worn through by forty years of being on fire. He will want to know what Baruch saved. He will receive the accounting with the face of a man who has been receiving bad news his whole life and has learned to absorb it. He will say something. Baruch will write it down. That is how it works between them. That is how it has always worked.

He puts his hand on the first jar.

Inside it, pressed into clay by his own hand over three years of early mornings and late evenings and the specific quality of concentration that writing requires, is the story that started all of this. A man who heard a voice in a city in Mesopotamia and walked out of it. Two sons. A cave purchased with witnessed silver. A gap in the record that became a wound in the world. A man at a river who held on past the point of sense and received a name he could not have taken for himself.

He thinks about Jacob.

Jacob held on at the ford of the Jabbok until dawn, past the point where any sensible man would have let go, and came out the other side with a limp and a new name. Baruch held on in the only way available to a man like him, not with his body at a river ford but with his arms around three clay jars on a burning staircase.

He got something out.

Not everything.

Something.

He puts his hand on the second jar.

Jeremiah’s voice. The laments and the warnings and the love. The forty-two chapters of a man on fire.

He puts his hand on the third jar.

His own name. Five verses. The complaint and the prize.

He is still here.

That is the prize. Not comfort. Not ease. Not the city intact on its hill. Just this: he is still here, on the road outside the broken walls, with three jars and stained hands and the particular exhaustion of a man who has just carried the most important thing he will ever carry through the worst night of his life.

He is still here.

He grunts.

He gets up.

He picks up the jars.

He walks.

Oh Baruch.

You went back into the burning building.

Not because you were brave.

Because you could not think of anything else to do.

You saved three jars.

You left eight.

You took your own name.

You took the covenant.

You left the laws behind.

But the three traveled.

Through Babylon.

Through Ezra’s hands.

Into the mouths of a people

who had lost the building

and found, finally,

that the story could live

somewhere the fire cannot reach.

You only knew the weight of the jars

and the orange thread of fire

widening in the wall

as you walked out the door.

That is enough.

It is more than enough.

It is everything.