«Mi alma está muy triste hasta la muerte»

«Mi alma está muy triste hasta la muerte» is a biblical expression of profound sorrow that the novel places within both its historical account of Jesus and Shmuel Ash’s personal response to him. Its significance lies in the meeting of those two registers: Shmuel cherishes the words as part of Jesus’s humanity, while the narrative uses them to mark Jesus’s fear before his death.

The phrase in Shmuel’s account

Shmuel names the expression among the sayings of Jesus that he loves, alongside other lines from the New Testament. He does so while explaining that he is an atheist and does not believe Jesus was God or the Son of God. His attachment is instead to Jesus’s words and message. The expression therefore belongs not to a profession of Christian belief but to Shmuel’s esteem for a human figure whose language of sorrow he finds compelling.

Shmuel says that he has loved Jesus’s words since reading the New Testament at the age of fifteen. He also offers an unconventional interpretation of Judas Iscariot, whom he regards as Jesus’s most faithful disciple rather than his betrayer. In this context, the expression is part of the reading of Jesus that Shmuel hopes to explain in a later conversation with Atalia Abravanel.

Jesus’s fear before death

In Shmuel’s account of Jesus, the phrase belongs to the moment when Jesus, having gone to Jerusalem with his followers, is again overcome by doubt and fear of death. The narrative presents his anguish as thoroughly human, quoting the Gospel descriptions that he was troubled, in agony, and deeply distressed. The words give that fear its most concentrated expression.

The scene also sets Jesus’s reluctance against Judas Iscariot’s insistence that the journey to Jerusalem and the crucifixion will lead to universal recognition of Jesus’s divinity. Judas encourages him to believe that he will descend unharmed from the cross. Jesus’s appeal for the cup to be taken from him, followed by the expression of sorrow, makes the cost and uncertainty of that expectation unmistakable.

A human expression across the novel

The phrase’s recurrence joins Shmuel’s modern interpretation to the novel’s retelling of Jesus’s final days. In Shmuel’s conversation with Atalia, it is one of the sayings he loves; in his account of Jerusalem, it articulates Jesus’s vulnerability at the approach of death. The same words thus carry both personal and narrative weight: they help explain Shmuel’s attachment to Jesus and resist an account of Jesus that would obscure his fear as an ordinary human being.