Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt

“You know who he is, Sherebiah bar Ja

The Rabbi must have been looking at her. But I was not going to turn around to see. I looked ahead, and I saw nothing. Maybe I saw the dirt floor. Maybe I saw the light coming through the lattices. Maybe I saw all the faces turned towards us.

No matter where I looked, I knew that the Rabbi turned around. I knew that one of the other Rabbis, and there were two of them on the bench, whispered something to him.

And next I knew we were going into the synagogue.

My uncles took the very end of the bench, with Cleopas sitting on the floor, and gesturing for me to do it too. James, who’d already been in, came and sat down by Cleopas. Then the other two boys got up and came over and sat with us. We had the inside corner.

Old Sarah made her way slowly with the help of Aunt Salome and Aunt Mary to the bench where the women sat. And for the first time I thought: my mother didn’t come. She could have come. She could have left the children with Riba. But she didn’t come.

The Rabbi greeted many other people, until the room was very full.

I didn’t look up when the talking began. I knew the Rabbi was reciting from memory as he sang out in Hebrew:

“This is Solomon who speaks,” he said, “the great King. ‘Lord, Lord of our fathers, Lord of mercy, in wisdom you made man to rule over all creation, a steward to the world …to administer justice with a righteous heart. Give me wisdom, O Lord, wisdom who sits right by your throne, and don’t refuse me a place with your servants.” As he spoke these words, slowly the men and the boys began to repeat the words he was saying, and he slowed, so that we could repeat each phrase as he went on.

My fear was gone. The people had forgotten us. But I couldn’t forget that the Rabbi had questioned us, that the Rabbi had wanted to stop us. I remembered my mother’s strange words to me in Jerusalem. I remember her warnings. I knew that something was wrong.

We stayed for hours in the synagogue. There was reading. There was talk. Some of the children went to sleep. After a while people left. Others came. It was warm there.

The Rabbi walked up and down asking questions and inviting answers. At times people were all laughing. We sang. Then came talk again, talk about the Law, and even arguments with the men raising their voices. But I grew sleepy and fell asleep against Joseph’s knee.

When I woke up later, everyone was singing. It was full and pretty and not like the broken songs of the people at the River Jordan.

I slept.

I woke when Joseph told me we were going home.

“I can’t carry you on the Sabbath!” he whispered. “Stand up.”

And so I did. I walked out with my head down. I had not looked in the eye of anyone in the synagogue.

We came into the house. My mother looked up from where she sat against the wall, near to the brazier, with her blankets around her. She looked at Joseph and I saw the question in her eyes.

I went to her and went to sleep with my head on her knee.

Several times I woke up before sunset. We were never alone.

My uncles whispered in the light of the lamps that would never go out on the Sabbath.

Even if there had been a time when I could ask Joseph a question, what would I ask him? What would I ask him that he didn’t want to tell me, that he had forbidden me to ask? I didn’t want my mother to know that the Rabbi had stopped me at the door of the synagogue.

My memories became links in a chain. The death of Eleazer in the street in Alexandria, and from all that happened after, link by link. What had they said that night in Alexandria about Bethlehem? What had happened in Bethlehem? I’d been born there but what had they been saying?

I saw the man dying in the Temple, the crowds frightened and trying to escape, the long journey, fire leaping against the sky. I heard the bandits. I shivered. I felt things to which I wouldn’t attach words.

I thought of Cleopas, thinking he was going to die in Jerusalem and then my mother on the rooftop in Jerusalem. No matter what they say to you in Nazareth …an angel came …there was no man …a child who wove the fabric for the Temple until she was too old …an angel came.

Joseph said,

“Come now, Yeshua, how long am I to look at this troubled face? Tomorrow, we go into Sepphoris.”

Chapter 16

The road to Sepphoris was crowded all the way from Nazareth, and other smaller villages lay along that way. And we bowed our heads when we passed the crosses, though all the bodies were gone from them. Blood had been shed in the land and we were sorrowful. We passed houses that were burnt, and even burnt stands of trees, and there were people begging, telling how they’d lost everything to the bandits, or to the soldiers who had “pillaged” their houses.

Over and over, we stopped and Joseph gave them money from the family purse. And my mother told them what words of comfort she had to give.

My teeth were chattering and my mother thought I was cold, but I wasn’t. It was the sight of the burnt-out buildings of Sepphoris that I saw—even though most of the city was not burnt, and people were buying and selling in the market.

At once, my aunts sold the gold embroidered linen they’d brought from Egypt just for the purpose of selling, and pocketed more than they expected for it, and the same with all the bracelets and fine cups they’d brought to sell. The purse was bulging.

We went to the mourners who sat in the middle of the burnt wooden beams and ashes, crying for those who were gone, or to those who were begging: “Did you see this one, or that one?” We gave to the widows from our purse. And for a while we were all crying—that is, I was and so was Little Salome and so were the women. The men had gone off and left us.

It was the very center of the city that had been burnt, people told us—the palace of Herod, the arsenal, and also the houses nearest it where the rebels had stayed with their men.

There were men already clearing the way for rebuilding at the top of the hill. There were soldiers of King Herod everywhere, looking people up and down, but the weepers and the mourners took no notice of them.

It was a sight, the weeping and the working, the howling and mourning, and the buying and selling. My teeth weren’t chattering anymore. The sky was bright blue and the air was chilly but it felt clean.

I saw in one house nearby a few Roman soldiers who looked very ready to leave this place if they could, leaning against the door frames and staring off at nothing. The sun was shining on their helmets.

“Oh, yes,” said a woman who saw me look at them. Her eyes were red, and her clothes covered with ashes and dust. “And days ago they massacred us, I tell you, and sold off anyone in sight to the filthy slave merchants who descended on us to put our loved ones in chains. They took my son, my only son, he’s gone! And what had he done, but gone out to try to find his sister, and she too for what? That she was trying to go from my house to the house of her mother-in-law?”

Bruria began to sob for her lost son. She went off with her slave girl to write on a wall where others were writing a message to the lost ones. But she had little hope she’d ever see him again.

“Be careful in what you write on that wall,” said my aunt Salome. The other women nodded.

Down out of the ruins came men asking people to work: “You want to stand here and weep all day? I’ll pay you to come haul away the rubbage!” And another: “I need hands now to carry the buckets of dirt, who?” He held out coins to catch the light of the sun.

People cursed as they wept. They cursed the King; they cursed the bandits; they cursed the Roman soldiers. Some went to work and some didn’t.