Читать книгу Jairus's Daughter - Patti Rutka - Страница 9

Jairus alternately ran and walked. The dust and grasses whispered to him while his legs tensed and his toes flexed; he moved under the burning blue of the Galilean sky but did not notice it. Nabby’s ears wiggled away flies, as Jairus’s anxieties whirled around him. Gradually, he and the animal moved into a rapid rhythm.

He had had to leave in a hurry; Aviel was dying and his further delay would only make him responsible. Thus, it was in an unclean state that Jairus sought Yeshua. “It can’t be helped,” he explained to the donkey, needing to engage with something living besides the thoughts in his head. “One small drop of blood, an entire well, who is to know? I had to leave, and even now, who knows . . .”

Aviel’s bleeding worried him from more than just a health perspective. Jairus knew thoroughly how he had violated the laws of purity these last few days, with his caresses of Aviel’s brow, his holding her hand. He should never have touched her in the first place, should have left it up to Rivka and Devorah, their youngest, to care for her. But every inch of his skin knew his touch could be life-giving to his dearest daughter, and so, in the privacy of his own house, he had done what he believed any father, Greek, Roman, Jewish, Samaritan, would have done. Pekun nefesh. Saving a life. No one would know except his family. And maybe Yeshua. Jairus decided to keep it to himself, until he could speak to Yeshua himself, take him aside.

Jairus would go to the mikvah ritual bath to cleanse himself when he returned. Back at home, Jairus’s synagogue was sizeable and did well financially, although Jairus was grateful he did not have to handle the monies. His responsibilities suited him: he led a study group for the youngest of students each day and was helping to plan the construction of a school for them. Through study God could speak to people, Jairus believed, and through prayer the people could speak to God, so he also led the daily services, kept them on time, prepared and sometimes read from the scroll, and helped the young readers be less nervous as they read. Often he would hold a calming hand on their shoulders as they pointed to the Hebrew words with the silver yad, the miniature pointer designed in the shape of a hand, intended to mark the place for the reader without the reader having to touch the sacred scroll. He made sure the scroll was put away properly with its ornamentation and coverings and took responsibility for a myriad of details that were so ingrained in him that he could not imagine not caring about ritual. Ritual, along with Rivka’s solid support, allowed him to bring into line his sometimes chaotic internal world.

Jairus reflected on the distinguishing nature of ritual. Through ritual Jews became different from the Greeks and Romans, as they sanctified the mundane tasks of life along with the voracious appetites of sex, love, power, and wealth. The holy mysteries of life and death they acknowledged through the letting of blood in animal sacrifice at the Temple. Ritual’s framework created a space in which, gradually and over time, Jairus could feel his responses to the world. He was a thoughtful, sensitive man, which others seldom guessed, and he loved his wife and daughters.

This illness of Aviel’s had no structure. It fit within no framework he knew. It was as foreign to him as working on a Sabbath would have been. In ritual he could find meaning; in this impending death, nothing. Because he allowed small but expanding room for mystery beyond the meaning provided by ritual, he sought Yeshua.

When Yeshua had come to speak at Jairus’s synagogue, it was as if, when he spoke, even when he read from the scripture, a new framework took shape, ether-like, but nonetheless real. Jairus wasn’t sure he could grasp the new inflection Yeshua placed upon the scripture, the way he seemed to make oral side-notes in the margins to the ancient teachings. His teachings were sand and water at the same time; they were baffling yet made the brokenness of life take on a wholeness that even the simplest of people could understand.

And the reaction Yeshua had caused in the synagogue! “You should have seen it, Nabby. They fell over themselves. A bunch of white-haired old men more concerned about what Yeshua picked out of his fingernails than about the heart of what he said.” The Pharisees had mumbled amongst themselves, not while he read, of course, but after, in small conspiratorial gatherings intended to be invisible. The women, who gathered in colorful, flowing groups seemingly propelled by their own chitterings, accepted Yeshua’s teachings twofold: for the draw, the power, which seemed to emanate from him, and for the comfort of the words themselves, which reminded them of the words they told their frightened children on the darkest of deep star nights. Jairus suspected that it was in fact that very power of Yeshua’s against which the men reacted, the very learned ones to whom Yeshua seemed to direct so much of his intention.

But it didn’t seem right that the message the young rabbi brought them should cause so much consternation. Prophets had never been exactly welcome in his people’s history; they had always brought lessons as if to ill-behaved children, and who wanted to hear that? Yet there were the stories of healings, in addition to the teachings, that had been making it around the region. When the Bedouin sheepherders came through, passing by local wells, they would tell of the miraculous dealings this man Yeshua trailed behind him.

“If he can restore the withered hand of a man, and a paralytic, and a leper, what else can he do for Israel? Free us of Rome?” some had begun to ask when he came to teach.

Jairus had hesitated to ask Yeshua personally when he had had the chance that Sabbath in Capernaum. And even when Yeshua had agreed to come to Jairus and Rivka’s house after the service to bless the bread and wine, Jairus had remained quiet, simply listening. Aviel and her younger sister Devorah had remained so quiet, so well-behaved; Jairus was proud of their decorum. They were good girls, and yet so different. Aviel was more like a boy in the way she carried herself, while Devorah was smaller, more feminine; it would be easier to find a husband for her. Unlike Aviel, she did his and Rivka’s bidding without complaint. And she was especially devoted to Aviel. It would perhaps hit her the hardest when her sister died, and he knew there was nothing she would spare for her sister.

Jairus’s reflections receded, and as he and the donkey neared the north end of the lake Nabby’s ears picked up a crowd of people in the distance. His heart wrenching, Jairus thought of Aviel, and his mind again drove itself in circles, looping back and back again on what could be happening with his daughter. He alternated between talking out loud to the donkey and praying silently to Adonai for help.

As Jairus came closer, he saw the crowd grow larger and more colorful. People crowded around the central speaker, whose voice belled with clarity; his hands gestured as if he would press and knead every word into them. The bright sun glinted off the lake, and a wind blew in, heaping the water in white piles out farther from the shore. The air wafted a fresh green algae lake smell. A fisherman’s boat might easily be swamped and sink in these conditions. Jairus had been right about where to look for Yeshua, and it had only taken him two and a half hours to reach the spot on the lake.

As the donkey and the man closed in on the group, the speaker looked up and paused in the story he was telling the group. He seemed to recognize the synagogue leader but continued with his teaching.

Jairus fixed his eyes on Yeshua and moved through the people; he absently handed the reins of the donkey to a young boy standing at the edge of the crowd and continued on through the rest with a singleness of intent that connected him as with a cord to Yeshua. At one point he stumbled, but still he moved forward, parting the bystanders with insistent hands.

As people moved out of the path of his pressing need, he arrived a few feet from the teacher. Yeshua paused, and looked at him. A small circle in the dust had opened before Yeshua, and into this space of hope and belief Jairus prostrated himself. Jairus knew a Jew did this only once a year, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, bowing to no one the remainder of his days, worshiping only the God of Israel, so he was not surprised to hear the crowd mutter.

“Sir, I come to you to beg your help. My little daughter lies at the point of death. I . . . Please . . . come back with me and lay your hands on her. I know your hands and your words can heal her.” He looked up, his throat dry, but his eyes pools of yearning. Then he looked back down at Yeshua’s feet, his heart lolloping loudly over his scrambled thoughts. Fixed on the ground, his eyes noticed the earth and filth in Yeshua’s toenails, the length of his toes, brown at the knuckles with the dust of the day.

Yeshua knelt down before Jairus, his plain, roughly woven robe folding over and covering his toes. He contemplated the man, the leader of a synagogue, and took in the man’s desperation. How men suffer! he thought. He reached out, placing his hand on Jairus’s solid shoulder, which was clothed in the best embroidered linen of the day. Jairus felt a pull to look up, but he could only look at Yeshua’s chin as the prophet spoke.

“Do not fear. Only have faith.”

Then, Yeshua stood and turned to John. His lanky, beloved friend sat nearby and watched the exchange with quick young eyes. “We’ll go to help this man’s daughter. As we walk, I’ll continue teaching, if they follow,” gesturing toward the crowd with his head. “Be good enough to bring some of that fish.” In the early morning hours Yeshua and his disciples Peter, John, and James had taken the nets out and caught enough for a few days of meals.

Taller than Yeshua, John nodded and lifted his bronzed frame, then joined the sturdier Peter and slighter James, and the remaining disciples. They began to gather up fish, water skins, and leather pouches of figs and olives, slinging them over their shoulders. As a flickering unit they moved, flocking like waterfowl in flight, fanning out behind the one in the lead.

Suddenly, a man in the moving crowd shouted, “Why this man’s daughter?” He was too young to have a face as sour as he did. “Why not my uncle, a leper whose flesh rots off him and stinks up the linens and salve wrapped around his face? Why not the neighbor boy, who stutters so badly the children mock him and pelt him with stones? Is this man special because he runs the synagogue?”

Peter and James began to shoulder their way through the crowd towards the man, though Yeshua kept walking.

Looming large in the bitter man’s direction, Peter snarled, “Yeshua blesses whom he chooses! Would you place yourself in the position of being the one to choose, the one to decide who receives God’s forgiveness of sins? Be grateful you don’t have the responsibility! Who are you? Where are you from?” Peter was imposing, and he wanted the man to feel his presence.

“If his message is so very important, why doesn’t he take it to Sepphoris, or Tiberius, ten times the size of miserable Capernaum!” harassed the man in a last attempt. But the crowd buzzed around his bile and he slunk off.

Yeshua simply kept moving, now with Nabby and Jairus alongside him. Who chose to be in the following group came along.

They moved quickly, death pressing them through the dry land. After a short while, Yeshua abruptly stopped and looked down.

“I feel—odd.” Light played across his face. Peter came alongside him, and Yeshua looked at him and asked, “Who touched me? Who touched my garments?” He wasn’t angry, just puzzled. He turned and scanned the faces of the people around him.

“You see all this crowd around you, and yet you’re asking who touched you?” At times Yeshua’s quirks frustrated Peter, and it was hard for him to reconcile the otherworldliness of the prophet with some very real annoyances about a person many said was simply odd.

Yeshua stood, still looking about him. A woman a few layers back in the crowd came and knelt before him, afraid to look at him directly.

“It was I, rabbi! I’m sorry! Please forgive.” She wrung out her words. “I knew if I reached out to you I would be well. For twelve years my life has drained. I know I am forbidden from touching you. I know. But I thought, I said to my companion, I thought, if only I could touch even the hem of his garments, I would be healed. I knew this. In my heart. Right here.” She thumped the center of her chest with her fingers. Then she flung out her arm and pointed. “I have paid out money to every physician and every wizard in this area and beyond, and I am destitute. But I knew you could heal me. I’ve heard the reports.”

She had been miserable for years, but she’d had enough life in her to seek out the healer. Her words had taken on a growing intensity. Then the flow of her words ceased, and she reached down and pressed her hand against her dress, between her legs, and began to cry at the new dryness she felt there. People were again still, marveling at the brazenness of the woman coming to touch Yeshua while she was in such a state of ritual impurity. Would he have to go to the Temple for cleansing, or could he himself forgive her?

Yeshua reached down to her arm and pulled her square to face him. The crowd moved back a little and again hummed among itself, then was silent as the man and the woman stood looking at each other.

“How do you feel now?”

“Alive,” she offered, a deep peace welling up from within her.

“Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go, peace to you, be healed of your dis-ease.”

She began to recede in the crowd, laughing and raising her arms in the air in praise, looking back in Yeshua’s direction, knowing she was not only healed but also forgiven and purified.

Peter frowned and shook his head again, knowing that this kind of display carried farther in the word-of-mouth circles than the deed itself. Here was another one that would continue spreading Yeshua’s already sizeable following, and his fame. It wasn’t as if there was anything he could do to prevent Yeshua from acting this way, and of course he wouldn’t, but it seemed as if Yeshua was usually oblivious to the consequences. More irritated than amazed, the disciple turned to the fellow with whom he had been talking and asked, “Do you know this woman? Is she typically so bold?”

“I have heard she’s indeed been bleeding for twelve years, nearly constantly, and that her deceased husband left her enough money to live on. But she exhausted her wealth—and the patience of all the physicians around, as well as some outlandish practitioners from away. You know, east of us. Damascus, even. What and whom she has not consulted I certainly don’t know. Her family abandoned her, and I think, perhaps, she’s been more nearly dying of loss of love—and someone to talk to—than loss of blood.” He looked around him and continued in an undertone, “Women especially come to seek out your Yeshua. Me, I think it’s a lot of charisma he has, no disrespect intended to you.” He shrugged, not sure if he had spoken too honestly.

“Ah. It is so very much more than charisma.” Peter smiled, and reflected on the phenomenon of the man to whom he had bound himself. He trusted that Yeshua knew what he was doing. “You watch. You wait. You’ll see. Yeshua is—Yeshua is Messiah,” and he turned back to make sure the woman had cleared her way through the crowd to leave. He often thought of himself as Yeshua’s bodyguard, and again shook his head. Even though Yeshua might be the Savior, he was a little stupid sometimes, in a practical sense.

Jairus had both marveled and grown impatient with the woman’s interruption. He was relieved when she left and the group had continued on.

Every breath of movement they made might make a difference to Aviel, and if Jairus had had a whip, he might even have used it to drive the entourage forward faster. Ever steady in the distance, the lake sparkled as they came closer to Capernaum. It was all Jairus could do to keep from breaking away from the group and running into the village, to his house.

Just then Daniel and Nathan, the two shepherds from Capernaum, came sweating and running up to the group. Jairus felt his throat constrict, and he looked warily at Nathan, whose flat expression he had never been able to fathom.

“Jairus, sir! Sir . . .” Daniel, the elder of the two, his face so plain it was beautiful, came up to the father and grasped his wrist as he went down on one knee. “Sir. Sir. Your daughter has died. There is no need for the healer. Your wife has brought in the mourners. I am—so very sorry.” He barely got out his words because he had loved Aviel since they were children and they had played together, running the sheepdogs into frenzies in the pastures. He looked pleadingly at Jairus, tears in his eyes.

A raw blade cut Jairus’s breath. He stood in silence, working his jaw, looking at no one.

Yeshua came over to Jairus. He didn’t have to muster force or power behind his words; he was simply, impossibly, directing the scene. “As I said to you before: do not fear. Only believe. There is love, and there is fear. You love your daughter.”

Jairus’s face contorted and he could only nod once, his frame turned as if to straw and dust.

Yeshua again put his hand on Jairus’s shoulder and waited for him to follow along, then turned to Peter and said, “Only you and James and John. Make the others wait here.” Peter followed Yeshua’s orders and took charge.

They were only half a mile out of the village, and, as they drew nearer, Yeshua propped up Jairus as he stumbled along. Already they could hear the lamentations of the wailers.

A circle of women who were barefoot and had their hair down moved first left, then right, wailing in antiphony around one older woman in the center. Two flute players stood off to the side, piping the dirge tunes that announced a death. Only one of the women cried in earnest, Hepsabah, Yohanon’s wife, while the others were simply somber-faced, performing their duty. The weight of grief hung heavy in the air.

Yohanon sat on his stool outside his house, his tools on the ground. Tears glittered in his eyes, and his hands lay flat on his lap, as if dead themselves.

Yeshua stopped outside Jairus’s house and the weepers.

“Why do you weep?” he said quietly enough so that it undercut the lamentation. “Why the tumult? This child—” and here he looked at Jairus, who was frozen outside his own door, and Rivka, who clung both to the doorway and her husband’s face—“this child is not dead. She is only sleeping.” He pronounced each word with emphasis. Aviel was beyond the age of being a child, and Yeshua knew it.

Rivka looked at Yeshua and blinked, her eyes swollen. Tears welled up again as the cruelty of Yeshua’s words hit her. Silently she shook her head, her mouth twisting as she began crying harder. Why would he say what was not true? Her daughter was dead!

But one of the dancing women in the circle, young, and with little in her head, started laughing at Yeshua. Next the flute players joined in, and soon the whole group of supposed mourners was ridiculing Yeshua as he stood in his light linen robe and scuffed sandals, his hair obviously unwashed and unoiled. They would have laughed at any miracle worker without his reputation, of which they were unaware.

Turning from them, the healer stepped into the doorway, coming so close to Rivka that she could smell his pleasant and mild, earthy body odor. Overwhelmed by both her grief and now his magnetic presence, she briefly remembered that she should offer him the fragranced oil to daub on his forehead and a clay bowl of water to rinse off his feet. Instead, she stepped aside. He looked in, told the other women and the young girl already in the house to go out and leave them, then he turned back to Jairus. Taking Jairus’s hand, he placed it in Rivka’s.

“Come in with me. Peter, James, John, come in here,” he called out the door to the three. John looked at his brother, and Peter cleared his throat.

They all entered the darkened house.