When Amos Oz thinks about the Jerusalem of 1959, the one he wrote about in “Judas,” his latest novel, “what I hear is the lone note of a cello on a winter night.”
So said the prolific Israeli author last week at the JCC of San Francisco, conjuring up a phrase that also could have helped describe Oz’s own performance as he sat onstage and held forth on love, betrayal, hope and the possibility of change.
The novel is set in Jerusalem during a moody winter 11 years after the founding of the State of Israel. Circumstances bring three unrelated characters together in an old Jerusalem residence, where they spend their time drinking tea and talking, offering Oz the vehicle to explore a spectrum of views on the human condition, and inevitably, on the fate of Israel itself.
But his latest book, published in Hebrew in 2014 and recently translated into English, is definitively “not a manifesto,” asserted the author, who has taken strong positions in favor of a two-state solution and against the use of force to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“It is a story about three human beings, strangers to begin with, who in the course of one winter change each other, to some extent,” the popular writer told the audience on Nov. 17.
Born in Jerusalem in 1939, the son of European refugees, Oz has written 38 books in addition to hundreds of articles and essays. His works have been translated into 42 languages and he has received numerous honors and awards, “just about everything short of the Nobel Prize in literature,” according to Stephanie Singer, senior Arts & Ideas programmer at the JCCSF.
At 77, Oz is a professorial type, comfortable in a gray sweater and the role of public intellectual. His lean frame and weathered skin, however, speak of the years he spent at Kibbutz Hulda, where he learned to work and to write.
Lara Edelman Sunshine, a board member at the JCCSF, introduced Oz as “the godfather of Israeli peaceniks” and “a steadfast opponent of Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands,” a description that aroused audience applause.
After reading aloud the opening paragraphs of “Judas,” Oz told the nearly packed house of about 400 what compelled him to revisit the story of the most reviled figure in Jewish history.
As portrayed in the Gospels, he said, Judas was “the ultimate traitor: a greedy, corrupt, cunning pretender.” This figure has formed the negative stereotype of the Jew from the earliest times of Christianity, he claimed.
“We are all god-killers in the eyes of our enemies; in the eyes of a Jew-hater, every Jew is Judas,” he said. “This ugly story has caused more suffering than any other in human history.”
This, however, is not the tale that Oz tells. The novelist diverged from that version at 16, when he studied the Gospels on his own. He had come to the realization that without that knowledge “I could not truly understand Bach cantatas, nor the architecture of cathedrals, nor even the novels of Dostoevsky.”
The result of his research was that he “fell in love with Jesus,” he said, “his sweetness, his warmth, his remarkable sense of humor, though I disagreed with him about some of his ideas.”
But he found the account illogical: “Judas was a wealthy man. Why would he sell out his master, his god, for 30 pieces of silver? Why would he need to be paid to identify Jesus when everyone in Jerusalem knew who he was?”
Oz said he sees Judas as a man who so believed in the promises of Jesus that he pushed him toward the crucifixion to demonstrate the truth of his claims. He was a fanatic, Oz said, and “Jerusalem is full of religious fanatics, then, as now.”
He explores this thesis through one of the novel’s characters, Shmuel Ash, a biblical scholar who believes that in Judas’ own mind, his kiss was not a betrayal at all but a way of moving Jesus toward his destiny.
“Sometimes a traitor is so called because he or she is just ahead of their time,” Oz said, noting that he too “belongs to that distinguished club.”
While his three characters converse and argue, Oz said his aim was not to persuade his readers of any political position.
“I see this novel as a piece of chamber music,” he said. “Does anyone ask a composer whether he’s on the side of the cello or the violin? I’m on everyone’s side, and no one’s.”
Late in the evening, Oz was asked by an audience member, “What gives you hope?”
Oz replied, “People change one another, and they change themselves. Nations change, history is open-ended. And that is as much hope as this humble storyteller can come up with, at this moment. My tiny note of optimism for November 2016.”