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I knew this because I knew every little move of her face, of her eyes and her lips, and I could see it. I could see her fearfulness of other women.
Of men, she had no fear, because no good man was going to look at her or talk to her or in any way disturb her. That was the way of the village. A man did not talk to a married woman unless he was her very near kin and even then, he never sought her out alone, unless he was her brother. So she had no real fear of men. But of women? She had been afraid, until the days of the loom, and the women coming to learn from her.
All this about my mother’s fearfulness I hadn’t really put together in my mind until it changed. My mother’s fearfulness was her ma
And another thought came to me, a secret thought, one of the many I couldn’t tell anyone: my mother was i
Old Sarah was far too old to do any fancy work with a needle, or anything with a needle for that matter, or a loom, but she taught the young girls how to make embroidery, and they gathered around her often, talking and laughing and telling stories with my mother very nearby.
Now with all the hammering and polishing and fitting and sewing and weaving, the courtyard was a busy place. Add to that children screaming and crying and laughing, babies crawling on the stones, and the open stable where the men tended to the donkeys who carried our loads to Sepphoris, and the older boys going in and going out with loads of hay, and a pair of us rubbing the gold into a new banquet couch, one of eight for the same man, and the cooking over the fire in the brazier, and then the mats spread out on the stones for us to eat, and all of us gathered in prayer, trying to make the little ones be quiet for just a little while as we thanked the Lord for all our blessings; add all this, and you have a picture of our lives that first year in Nazareth which engraved itself upon my mind and which stayed with me over all the many years I was to live there.
“Hidden,” Joseph had said. I was “hidden.” And from what he wouldn’t say. And I couldn’t ask. But I was happily hidden. And when I thought of that, and of Cleopas’ strange words to me, that someday I must answer the questions, I felt like I was someone else. I’d feel my skin all over and then I’d stop thinking about it.
My schooling went very well.
I learnt new words, words I’d always heard and said, but I came to know what they meant, and they were from the Psalms mostly. Let the fields be joyful, yes, joyful, and all the trees of the wood rejoice. Make a joyful song to the Lord; sing praise.
The darkness was gone; death was gone; fire was gone. And though people did talk of the boys who had run off to fight with the rebellion, and there was now and then a woman howling in her sorrow when she had news of her lost son, our life was full of sweet things.
In the long late light, I ran through groves of trees up and down the slopes until I couldn’t see Nazareth. I found flowers so sweet that I wanted to pick them and make them grow at home. And at home, there was the sweetness of the wood shavings, and the nice smell of the oil that we rubbed into the wood. There was the smell of baking bread always, and we knew when the best sauce was there for di
We had good wine from the market of Sepphoris. We had delicious melons and cucumbers from our own soil.
In the synagogue, we clapped our hands and danced and sang as we learned our Scripture. It was a little harder in school, with the teachers making us write out our letters on our wax tablets, and making us repeat what we didn’t do well. But even this was good and the time went fast.
Soon the men were harvesting the olives, batting the branches of the groves with their long sticks and gathering the berries. The olive press was busy, and I liked to pass there when I could and see the men at work, and the sweet-smelling oil pouring out.
The women of our house crushed olives in a small press for the purest oil at home.
The grapes in our gardens were ready for picking, and the figs, we had had all the figs we could want to be dried, to be made into cakes, to be eaten as they were. The later figs were so many from our courtyard and the garden that some were taken to the village market at the bottom of the hill.
The grapes we didn’t eat were put out to dry as raisins; no wine was made from them as the land around Nazareth had no vineyards, but was for wheat and barley and sheep and the forests I loved.
As the air grew cooler, the early rains came with great force. Thunder roared over the rooftop, and everyone offered prayers of thanks. The cisterns of the house filled, and the freshwater poured into the mikvah.
In the synagogue, Rabbi Jacimus, who was our strictest Pharisee, told us that now the water from the gutters flowing into the mikvah was “living water,” and that when we purified ourselves in “living water,” this is what the Lord wanted of us. We must pray that the rains were enough not only for the fields and for the streams but to keep our cisterns full and our mikvah living as well.
Rabbi Sherebiah didn’t completely agree with Rabbi Jacimus and they began to quote the sages on these points and to “dispute” in general, and finally the Old Rabbi called for us to offer our prayers of thanksgiving that the Windows of Heaven had been opened, and the fields would soon be ready for the planting to begin.
At night, over supper, as the rain came down on the roof high above, we talked about Rabbi Jacimus and this matter of “living water.” It was troubling to James and to me too.
We’d come to Nazareth after the rains. And the mikvah was empty when we came. We’d replastered it, and then filled it from the cistern in which the water had been resting a long time. But this was rainwater, was it not? Had it been living water when we filled the mikvah?
“Wasn’t this living water?” I asked.
“If it’s not living water,” said James, “then we were unclean after the mikvah.”
“We bathe often in the stream, don’t we?” Cleopas asked. “And as for the mikvah, it has a tiny hole in the very bottom, so the water continues to move always. And when the rain filled the cistern, it was living water. It’s living water. So be it.”
“But Rabbi Jacimus says that’s not good enough,” said James. “Why does he say this?”
“It is good enough,” said Joseph, “but he’s a Pharisee and Pharisees are careful. You have to understand: they think that if they take great care with each part of life, they’ll be safer from transgressing the Law.”
“But they can’t say that our mikvah is not pure,” said my uncle Alphaeus. “The women use the mikvah—.”
“Look,” said Joseph. “See two paths on a mountain ridge. One is close to the edge, the other is farther away. The one farther away is safer. That is the path of the Pharisee—to be farther from the edge of the cliff, farther from falling off the cliff and into sin, and so Rabbi Jacimus believes in his customs.”
“But they aren’t Laws,” said my uncle Alphaeus. “Pharisees say all these things are Laws.”
“The Rabbi Sherebiah said that it was the Law,” said James timidly. “That Moses was given Laws that weren’t written down, and these were passed down through the sages.”
Joseph shrugged. “We do the best we can do. And now the rains have come. And the mikvah? It’s full of freshwater!”
He threw up his hands as he said this and he smiled, and we all laughed at it, but we weren’t laughing at the Rabbi. We were laughing as we always laughed at things we talked about for which there seemed no one answer.