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I hated administrative duties. Give me an auditorium full of worshippers eager to hear me describe a passage in Scripture and how to apply its lessons to their daily lives in the here and now. Or a roomful of students anxious to learn how to someday become priests. Or, best of all, a collection of peasants on the street who had never approached the great altar at the Temple before, and who would climb the great steps with me and weep tears of joy on every step. These were the areas where I thrived! This was the reason my parents dedicated me to the Temple at my birth!
But with the Passover approaching, Gamaliel demanded that everyone pitch in. Thousands of pilgrims would pour into the city. Most of them would camp on the ground outside the gates, but huge numbers would crowd within the walls. The demands for details in preparing for something like this never ended:
Lining up assistants to police the lines of pilgrims waiting with their grain offerings and animal sacrifices.
Scheduling priests to perform the sacrifices, as well as men to cart the carcasses away and mop up the blood.
Ordering enough candles, torches, firewood, platters, cups.
Selecting which merchants would be allowed to sell sacrificial animals in the courtyard.
Even recruiting workers to keep the latrines and sewage streams unclogged; if they were to back up, the “holy city” would smell like a cesspool!
And speaking of sewage, I even had to preside over a committee for disposing of all the excrement deposited outside the campsites surrounding the city walls during the weeklong festival. Who ever thought that performing God’s holy work would include shoveling mounds of waste into carts to be moved out to the countryside?
So here I sat at a table for yet another planning session, this time with a group of men who would distribute drinking water that flowed from Hezekiah’s Tunnel to Siloam’s Pool. The tunnel was built hundreds of years ago to prepare the city for a siege by invaders. It not only diverted spring water to the pool in the city, but also denied the water to the foreigners outside the walls in the Kidron Valley. The water rose from the spring three to five times a day, filling the pool. When thousands of thirsty newcomers clogged the streets, maintaining order at the pool became a major issue.
At that moment Gamaliel appeared in the doorway. “Forgive me for interrupting your important meeting here,” he said. “Jacob, can I see you outside?”
God is good, I thought to myself with joy. I had prayed for an excuse—any excuse—to let this dreary meeting run itself without me.
“You’ll have to forgive me, but I have to leave. You can all carry on this important work without me, I hope?” I had a moment of horror, imagining that they would offer to wait until I could return. But they eagerly said they could continue without me. Perhaps they were bored too and would scramble out of the room as soon as they thought I was far enough away.
Gamaliel led me down a corridor to an empty room. When we had stepped inside the doorway and confirmed we were alone, he turned and gripped my forearms in what would ordinarily be a gesture of friendship. But I could feel tension in his grip.
“Jacob, I have bad news. First, we’ve learned that the Zealots may enter the city during the festival and mount an attack, so the Romans are stepping up their patrols. The potential for violence has grown dramatically.”
This news felt like someone had hit me in the gut with his fist. I almost grunted in reaction. “How bad is it?”
“Very. You and I both have seen how the soldiers can be. At the slightest hint of unrest, they will seize the first man they see and execute him to make an example for the rest. They will act without thinking. We could have a riot.”
I absent-mindedly handled a lock of my hair, alternately running my fingers through it as if to work out a knot, and then twisting it as if I wanted to create a knot. When I realized what my hands were doing, I snatched them away from my hair and forced them to my sides. “We will double our efforts to keep the peace.”
He fixed his eye on me intently. “The next piece of news makes that more difficult. The Sanhedrin is demanding that the merchants in the courtyard pay a higher percentage to rent space for their stalls. Half again what they were paying.”
“But that’s crazy!” I said. “The pilgrims already protest that we won’t allow them to sacrifice their own animals. If we force them to pay more for animals from the merchants, they won’t need the Romans to provoke them to riot. They’ll turn on the priests on their own.”
“It is the Romans themselves who are forcing this issue. Pilate has demanded more tribute. If we cannot pay, he may unleash his troops. So we risk possible violence if we increase the rates on the merchants, but we face certain violence if we do not.”
“Heaven help us,” I muttered.