📕 The faithfulness of treachery: on Judas

Judas by Amos Oz, translated by Nicholas de Lange

A coming-of-age novel set in the wake of Israeli independence that grapples with the figure of the traitor.

Finished: 26 August 2021
Rating: ★★★★☆

Set in 1958, Judas by Amos Oz is a novel of ideas and conversations taking place a decade after Israel’s bid for independence. As many have pointed out, it centres on the figure of the traitor. But I want to shift that slightly because I think what this book is truly concerned with is faith in the deepest meaning of the word. 

The story is told from the perspective of Shmuel Ash, a scholar who abandons his MA thesis that Judas, whom the Christian tradition paints as a traitor, was the most faithful of Jesus’ disciples. Though originally sent by Jewish authorities to infiltrate Jesus’ circle in Galilee, Judas turned — he became the only one who truly believed that Jesus was as divine as he was human. He pulled many strings, so goes Shmuel’s version, in order that Jesus could be crucified, rise again, and thus be shown to be the true Messiah. And this version of Judas, upon seeing Jesus’ death take place, was so shocked at Jesus’ lack of divinity that after Jesus died, Judas hanged himself.

In the midst of his despair, Shmuel takes up a job in the house of Atalia Abravanel to be a companion and conversation partner for her aged father-in-law, Gershom Wald. Slowly, it is revealed that Atalia’s father, Shealtiel Abravanel, was a voice crying out in the wilderness, crying in opposition to David Ben-Gurion an the Zionist bid for Israeli independence. Abravanel believed that Jews and Arabs should live alongside one another in peace instead of going to war with one another — a view he was criticised and shunned for, and for which he was labelled a traitor. The connection is clear. 

While reading, I wished the two threads were tied tighter rather than just loosely explored through Shmuel’s thoughts and secondhand retellings. Shmuel’s own story, jarringly so, is more a coming-of-age tale. His girlfriend leaves him to marry someone else, and then he wallows in his indecision about what to do with his life while pining for Atalia who is aloof and solitary. Much time is spent in agony over his problems, with the bits and pieces of Judas coming through in his thoughts about his abandoned thesis, and the scraps of Abravanel coming through the memories of Gershom and Atalia. I found it hard to care about Shmuel when two such other formidable characters were there waiting but never to be fully explored, save for a curious chapter from Judas’ perspective after the crucifixion.* Ultimately, Shmuel’s stint in the house is just an episode, one winter in his life. By the end of the book he leaves, catches a bus, and is borne into the hills in spring, reborn, seeing the world anew. So what?

Traitors are typically thought of as faithless. But the fascinating part about Judas and Abravanel is that their supposed treacheries came out of great acts of faith. Faith is not just blind belief in a thing or a person. To have faith is to understand the path you’re on and how you ought to act and change and evolve in order to keep yourself on that path. To sin is to stray from that path — sinning isn’t just doing something very immoral, although it could be said that straying from the path is perhaps itself immoral. And so, the traditional understanding of Judas is that he lost “faith” in Jesus’ teachings and what Jesus was doing. and was easily bought for 30 pieces of silver — a paltry sum, Shmuel would add, for a wealthy landowning man such as Judas Iscariot. But again, faith isn’t just belief. What’s so compelling about this reframing of Judas is that it has him orchestrating Jesus’ crucifixion because of his faith and understanding of the path that he and all of humanity should be on. For Judas to have done otherwise would have been a sin in the deepest sense.

Similarly, Abravanel was unable to give up his views because to him, his vision was the path and the reality he strove to uphold. For faith is necessarily tied to your understanding of how the world is and how things should be – if you’re unable to take a stand about what is and isn’t true or right or good, then you cannot have faith. You cannot take aim and shoot. By that token, any doubt you have ends up with little depth. This is why when Shmuel goes back on forth on his MA, his love life, his future — it all feels like he’s just treading water, going nowhere. It’s how I feel when I lack purpose. It’s a luxury, even, to be able to sense that one is going off the path, for that would imply there was a path and knowledge of that path to begin with. 

The thread, therefore, that pulls Shmuel into the fold with Judas and Abravanel is the fact that Shmuel is trying to find his direction in life and the path in light of which he can begin to have faith. (Note that I don’t mean faith in the sense that we, nowadays, take it as synonymous with a religion, particularly as Shmuel declares himself an atheist.) Faith, clearly, can go wrong too. Both Judas and Abravanel stuck to their paths so doggedly and stubbornly that they failed to be properly sensitive to other aspects of reality. Judas forgot to consider Jesus the individual. Abravanel never learned to connect with his daughter Atalia. Any kind of path that encourages human flourishing, I think, has got to consider others. That’s another tangent to be had, but suffice to say that extremes are never good. In that way, blind and stubborn faith can itself be a sin. But to be so terrified of this outcome that one never begins one’s life or never chooses a path is also not an answer. 

And so, by the end, Shmuel begins. 

[*] A short note on this. I’ve written before about my skepticism of certain other biblical retellings. (And apparently, the Hebrew title of this book is “The Gospel According to Judas”.) I don’t count Oz’s novel as a retelling, but rather the putting forth of a proposition from which to consider treachery, faith, faithlessness. But if we were to take it as a recasting of the bible equivalent to Saramago’s novels, I’d prefer Oz’s approach to Saramago’s. For, as Shmuel puts it in the book, arguments against the legacy or interpretation of Jesus — whether by atheists or Jews, which derive from different motivations but unsurprisingly land in similar places — “are not convincing arguments, because they don’t contain a hint of an attempt to engage with the gospel itself, the gospel of Jesus, the gospel of universal love, and forgiveness, and grace, and compassion”. We all get caught up so much with the dogma that we lose sight of what it’s all for.