Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt Read online

  "He fainted!" Joseph slapped his legs and nodded. "The Prophet fainted in the heat and the wind. And what did he say?"

  We laughed but we waited for Joseph to throw up his hands and cry out in the voice of Jonah, "I want to die, Lord. It is better for me to die than to live!"

  We all laughed easily, and Joseph waited for a moment and then he grew solemn yet smiling still and he spoke in the gentle voice of the Lord. " 'Do you do well to be so angry over the death of a vine?'

  " 'Yes, Lord, I do well to be angry, even unto death!'

  "Then the Lord said, 'So you had pity on a vine, did you, a vine which you did not plant, a vine which you did not labor over, a vine which came up in a night and was gone in a night. And should I not spare Nineveh, that great city, sixty thousand people, and cattle without number, and all those people who don't even know their left hand from their right!' "

  We all smiled and we all nodded, and we all felt it as we always did, and the laughter warmed us as it always did.

  After that, Cleopas read a little to us from The Book of Samuel in the story of David of which we never tired.

  Some time late while the men were talking, disputing about the Law and about the Prophets, going back and forth over points I couldn't follow, I went to sleep. We all slept there in our clothes by the lamp as the lamp burned on.

  When morning came it was still the Sabbath and would be until sundown.

  And after everyone had eaten of the bread prepared before by hand, Old Sarah spoke up.

  She was pushed back against the wall on a nest of pillows, and we hadn't heard a word from her all night.

  Now she said,

  "Is there no synagogue in this town now? Has it burned to the ground without my knowing it?"

  No one spoke.

  "Ah, so it's fallen down, has it?" she said.

  No one spoke. I had not seen a synagogue. Yes, there was a synagogue but I didn't know where it was.

  "Answer me, my nephew!" Old Sarah said. "Or have I lost my wits as well as my patience?"

  "It's there," said Joseph.

  "Then take these children to it," she said. "And I will go as well."

  Joseph said nothing.

  I had never heard a woman speak this way to a man before, but this was a woman with a great many gray hairs. This was Old Sarah.

  Joseph looked at her. She looked at Joseph. She lifted her chin.

  Joseph stood up and gestured for us to do the same.

  The whole family, except for my mother, and Riba, and the littlest ones, who would be a nuisance in a House of Prayer, went up the hill, where I hadn't gone before.

  Now I had been around the edges of the town to peek at

  the spring, and thought it very beautiful, but I hadn't walked up over the hill and down.

  The houses at the top of the hill were the same from the outside, whitewashed mud plaster mostly, but the courtyards were even bigger than ours and the fig trees and olive trees were very old. In one open doorway, two beautiful women stood smiling at us, clothed in the finest linen I'd seen in Nazareth, very white with gold embroidery along the edges of their veils. I liked to look at them. I saw a horse tethered in a stable and I had not seen a horse before in Nazareth, and we passed also a man at a cross-legged writing desk, with a cross legged stool beneath him, reading his scrolls out in the fresh air. He waved a greeting to Joseph as we passed.

  People were in the street, nodding to us, some passing us because we were slow, others moving behind us. There was not a sign of work being done. All were observant of the Sabbath, but they were moving slowly about.

  When we reached the very top of the slope, I saw my cousin Levi coming out, and his father Jehiel, and for the first time I saw their great house with its wellfitted doors and windows and freshly painted lattices and remembered that they owned a great piece of the nearby land.

  They fell in behind us as we walked down the street and it now twisted and turned more than it had on the other side, and more and more people were headed the same way.

  I saw a great clump of trees spread out before us and we followed a path through the trees and there was the spring, filling its two rock-cut basins to overflowing as it gushed and tumbled down the cliff.

  The biggest of the rock-cut basins was overflowing and it was to this overflow that many went to wash their hands.

  We did the same now, washing our hands and as much of our arms as we could without getting our clothes wet. It was

  cold. Really cold. But I liked it. I looked this way and that. The stream twisted and turned as did the road behind us, and I could see much of it in either direction.

  I stood up. I pinched and squeezed my hands to make them not be cold.

  There stood the House of Prayer, or the synagogue, to the left of the stream and back from the road, it was plain enough to see. It was a large building with a wide-open door, and even rooms above with a stair going up on one side, all very well tended with green grass clipped beside it.

  We went towards it, and had to wait our turn as others went inside.

  Something happened with us. Cleopas, Alphaeus, and Joseph and Simon and Old Sarah all moved in back of me. The others went on ahead, the women first except for Old Sarah. Cleopas took Old Sarah by the arm, and Silas and Levi went inside. James stood behind me too, with all my uncles and Joseph.

  Gently Joseph pushed me towards the open door.

  The men came up around me on either side.

  I stood on the wood threshold. The place was a great deal bigger than the small synagogue in which we'd gathered in Alexandria, a place for just our own neighbors, as there were so many synagogues. And it had benches built along the walls, rising in steps, so that people sat as they did in a theater or the Great Synagogue of Alexandria to which I'd gone once.

  The benches on the left side were filled with women. I saw my aunts and Bruria, our refugee, take their places. There were children on the floor, lots of them, all over, and on the right side in front of the men.

  There was a row of posts, and at the end there stood a place for a man to stand and read.

  I looked up as it was time to go inside now. There were

  lots of people crowding behind me to come in. And no one was blocking my way.

  But a tall man stood to the left, a man with a very long soft-looking black and gray beard and so much beard on his upper lip that I could hardly see his mouth. His eyes were dark, and his hair was long, to his shoulders, only a little gray, under his prayer shawl.

  He put his hand out in front of me.

  The man spoke in a very soft voice, looking at me as he did, but his words were for the others.

  "I know James, yes, and Silas and Levi, I remember them, but this one? Who is this one?"

  It was very quiet.

  I saw that everyone in the synagogue was looking at us. I didn't like it. I was beginning to be scared of it.

  Then Joseph spoke:

  "He is my son," said Joseph. "Jesus bar Joseph bar Jacob."

  Right when the words left Joseph's lips, I felt the men behind me draw in very close. Cleopas put his hand on my back, and so did my uncle Alphaeus. My uncle Simon stood close to me too and he put his hand on my shoulder too.

  The bearded man kept his hand in my way, but his face was kind. He stared at me and then looked up at the others.

  Then came the voice of Old Sarah, as clear as before. She stood behind all of us.

  "You know who he is, Sherebiah bar Janneus," she said. "Need I say to you that this is the Sabbath? Let him in."

  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 wer
e 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."

  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 motherin-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.

  Pushing through the crowd came our men, with a new cart and it was full of fresh wood, and sacks of nails, Joseph told me, and even roof tiles.

  In fact, the men were in a dispute over the roof tiles, with Cleopas saying they were a fine idea, and cheap enough, and Joseph saying the mud and branch roof was good enough, and Alphaeus agreeing with Joseph and saying we had far too much of a house to tile all of it. "And besides, with all this building going on, there won't be any roof tiles to be had in a day's time."

  Men came up to them, offering them work.

  "You're carpenters? I'll pay you double what you get from anyone else. Tell me. Now. I'll put you to work this minute."

  Joseph bowed and said no. "We've just come from Alexandria," he said. "We do only skilled work—."

  "But I have skilled work!" said a large well-dressed man. I have a whole house to finish for my master. Everything was burned—I've nothing left but the foundati
ons."

  "We have so much to do in our own village," Joseph said, as we tried to go our way. The men surrounded us, on to us now, wanting to buy the wood in the cart and use us as a team. Joseph promised we'd come back as soon as we could. The name of the rich steward was Jannaeus. "I'll remember you," he said. "You're the Egyptians."

  We laughed at that, and we did move on and back to the peace of the countryside.

  But that was how we became known—as the Egyptians.

  I looked back at the city from the road, where I could see all the busy people under the late sun. And my uncle Cleopas saw me looking. He said, "You ever look at an anthill?"

  "Yes."

  "Ever step in one?"