Testament (16 page)

Then one evening Shimon said, You’re saying that the women are like us fishermen and peasants. No one bothers with us because they think we’re nothing, and that’s why you’ve come to us. And Yeshua agreed that Shimon had understood him.

That was an important moment for us—once Shimon had been won over the other men, who looked to him for leadership, grew more accepting. For Shimon, the evening marked the beginning of his great loyalty to Yeshua, and he always seemed to carry with him afterwards the small shame of that first doubt he had shown. As for Ribqah and me, our relief was unbounded, since every day we had feared expulsion—that would have been the worst thing, to have the door opened to us, then be turned away. Later people said that we women clung to Yeshua as we did only because he indulged us and showed us respect above our station. But that was not the case. Rather we stayed with him for this, that he let us see it was no sin to.

It seemed all of us in that first time of coming together had such moments of understanding when a difficult thing, an
impossible notion, grew suddenly simple and plain like a knot that had unravelled. In the assembly houses we heard only of laws we couldn’t keep or couldn’t understand—how we women, for instance, must bow our heads and cover our lips and spend half our lives behind closed doors, though we weren’t the princesses of Judea who could afford such luxuries but must daily work alongside the men. But Yeshua didn’t come to us citing this law or that to beat us with, or invoking our ancestors to make us feel insufficient. Rather he made it seem that we ourselves were a beginning, and could see things anew.

Not long after we had settled the controversy of the women, another arose that proved to be my own test. One evening, while we were meeting at Shimon’s house in Kefar Nahum, it happened that Yeshua’s mother and one of his brothers appeared at the gate from their town of Notzerah. Shimon’s wife Shua came to us and announced them, saying that they had heard of Yeshua’s presence in Kefar Nahum and had come to fetch him home. But Yeshua refused to see them. Shua, a timid woman, was so taken aback at this—as were we all—that she couldn’t bring herself to confront them.

Miryam, Yeshua said to me, because I was closest to him, go to the gate and send them away.

But what shall I tell them, I said.

Tell them I’m already home, and so there’s no need to fetch me.

None of us knew what to make of this. Until that moment Yeshua had never spoken to us of his family, nor had any of us thought it our place to ask after it. But I couldn’t imagine what crime they had committed to bring out such
contempt in him. I went to the gate and his mother and brother stood waiting there completely silent, his mother in a shawl so that her face was barely visible and his brother slightly behind her. The brother was perhaps a few years Yeshua’s junior, but was broad-shouldered and dark-skinned and rough and didn’t resemble him in the least. His mother, however, was clearly his flesh and blood—there was that same fineness of features, and also a bearing that they shared, as if they had descended from princes. So strong was the sense of her presence, of some force that she carried with her, that I couldn’t bring myself to address her.

We’ve come all the way from Notzerah, she said. We want only a word with him.

But I told her he wouldn’t see them. Because she didn’t reply, I felt compelled to add, He won’t give a reason. He says he’s already home.

She looked at me then and asked, Are you his wife, and I said, He has no wife, but felt a deep shame at the question, I couldn’t have said why.

We stood a long moment in silence. It was growing dark and I could hardly make out their expressions. I asked them where they would spend the night and the brother, who hadn’t spoken until then, said they had already taken a place at the caravansary at the edge of town.

If I could offer a bed, I said.

But his mother said, There’s no need. And they set off into the dusk.

The incident affected me deeply. I didn’t see them again, but later heard that they left promptly at dawn the following morning. Afterwards people said they had come for Yeshua because they’d heard he was preaching in the streets and had
assumed he’d gone mad. But that was not what I had seen in his mother. I couldn’t say what I’d seen, perhaps only a mother’s sadness. But it was more than that, it was some kind of knowledge she had, and I couldn’t look at Yeshua afterwards without seeing his mother’s face, the sense of futility in it when I’d told her he wouldn’t come.

When we questioned Yeshua about the incident he grew angry with us. Why do you trouble me over this, he said. It was the first time we had seen him this way, and many of us were frightened.

Yaqob said, But the law tells us to honour our mother and father.

The law also tells us that a man leaves his mother and father, Yeshua said.

But that is to marry.

And so I’ve married you, Yeshua said. Now my followers are my family.

Afterwards, when the group of us spoke privately, it was clear that none of us had been able to follow Yeshua’s meaning. But most of the others had so put their trust in Yeshua by now that they ascribed their confusion to their own ignorance, even Shimon and my own father. I was very disturbed by this—I thought that if they had seen his mother as I had, they wouldn’t so easily accept his argument. Also, I couldn’t think what it meant to be his family, if I had to choose then between him and my own, which I could never do. There were my sisters, for instance, whose betrothed had forbidden them to follow Yeshua; and there was my mother. I didn’t believe Yeshua could make her abandon her ways when so many other inducements had failed, though she had never said a word against him.

So sharp was my fear that I would be called on at some moment to make a choice that for a time I ceased to attend our meetings, making one excuse or another and even trying in various ways to keep my father from them, terrified that he might one day reject us for Yeshua. My father was surely confused by this, for I didn’t explain my reasons and indeed couldn’t bring myself to say anything to him against Yeshua, since I knew his loyalty to him and still retained the greater part of my own. But one evening while I was walking on the beach Yeshua suddenly appeared beside me, saying he had spotted me from the fishing boat of Yohanan and Yaqob and come over to me, though I couldn’t see the boat near the shore.

Have you chosen to leave us, Yeshua said, and I was instantly put off balance by his candour. I began to protest, but as I couldn’t lie to him said, I’m only a woman, what difference could it make if I stayed or left. But I was at once ashamed to have said this, since it went against what he’d taught us.

He told me a story then of a shepherd who left behind ninety-nine sheep to go searching for one that was lost. Surely the ninety-nine are more important than the one, I said. But he answered, Wouldn’t the shepherd who gave up on the one also give up on the others, when the time came. I couldn’t follow his argument and fell silent, and so we kept walking along the shore until we were quite far from the village. A cloud passed across the face of the moon and for several minutes I couldn’t make him out at all in the dark, could only hear his breathing beside me and the sound of his footsteps.

He asked if it was because he’d sent his mother away
that I’d left him, and when I agreed that it was, he said I couldn’t know what had passed between him and his mother.

But you were angry with us, I said. You encourage us to question you, then grow angry when we do.

He said, You’re right to reprimand me, and then explained what he had meant when he had called us his family. He used the example of Ribqah, whose father Urijah was little better than an animal and suffered her to attend our meetings only because he was afraid she would accuse him before the elders of the abuses he had committed against her. Yeshua seemed to know these things though he could hardly have learned them from Ribqah, who even to me spoke of them only in the most veiled terms.

If Ribqah goes against her father in following me, he said, surely you don’t believe her to be sinning, and I agreed that I did not.

Her father is a godless man, I said.

But still he’s her father.

He doesn’t act like a father to her.

And so Ribqah is justified in defying him.

Yes.

And we who love her and accept her, aren’t we more her family than her father will ever be?

When the argument was put to me in this way, I saw at once that Yeshua was right. Yet still I resisted him.

Is your mother godless then like Ribqah’s father, I said.

No, not godless. But she tries to keep me from God’s work. I was silent and he added, as if he knew my thoughts, You mustn’t think I would ask the same sacrifices of my followers as I ask of myself.

My own mother is a heathen, I said. Surely one day you’ll ask me to leave her.

It’s true that sometimes we have to make a choice. But I’m not the one who’ll ask you to choose.

Who, then.

The moon was out again. We were near the outskirts of Kinneret and fishing boats were visible in the moonlight as they set out from the harbour for the night’s fishing. I wondered what the men in the boats would say, to see a man and a woman walking alone on the beach in the night as we were. I myself could hardly believe it was so.

You needn’t fear for your mother, Yeshua said. There are many ways to worship.

But there’s only one God.

Yes, but perhaps he has many faces. Don’t think it’s our mission to close people out. Our mission is to include them. To find the way to include them.

In the end, even though I hadn’t understood him, I agreed that I would begin to attend our meetings again. Then somehow it came to me what he’d meant, not as a single phrase I could have put into words but as a feeling that washed over me. It occurred to me, for instance, how in all the years we had lived in Migdal, the teacher in the town, Sapphias, had never once so much as exchanged a greeting with my mother while Yeshua had joked with her and broken bread and chosen her home, whose threshold Sapphias would never deign to cross, as the seat of his mission in the town. I had never blamed Sapphias for his actions, for I’d always believed he did merely what the law required. But now I saw things differently. I understood that for Sapphias the law was a wall; while for Yeshua, it was a gateway. That was what he’d meant when
he’d said he wasn’t the one who would make us choose—it was we who had to choose, who stood before the gate and had to open it. Somehow I hadn’t understood this simple thing, that choice was exactly what couldn’t be forced on me, for whatever was forced wasn’t a choice.

These were the things that we learned from Yeshua, things that weren’t taught in the assembly house even to the men and that finally couldn’t be taught at all in the way we understood teaching, but could only be discovered in oneself. Later, when he was with the crowds, people often said his meaning was unclear, or twisted his words and held them against him. But for those who had ears to hear, as he said to us, his message was plain enough. He spoke often of God’s kingdom, and people imagined he meant to make himself king of Israel, or that the end of days was at hand, or that we must wait until death for the kingdom to come to us. But those who listened could see that the kingdom was neither one thing nor the other, not a place outside of us that we must travel to like some far province or city but rather inside us in the way we looked at things, and so always there for us to bring forth. When will the kingdom come, people asked him, and he always replied, It’s here. He said, Look at the trees or the birds or the lake. Look at the wildflowers that come up in the spring. The wildflowers don’t feed us, people said. They don’t pay our taxes. But they hadn’t understood. Even those closest to him didn’t always understand, and I among them, but that was our own hard-headedness, because no one before had ever said to us, Open your eyes and see.

From the very start we had our enemies, those who couldn’t bear that someone should come to us saying things
which they themselves hadn’t thought of or who saw the devil’s work in anything that questioned their own authority. In Migdal, Sapphias was quick to speak out against Yeshua at sabbath prayer, as was the teacher at Kefar Nahum, and in Korazin one of the leaders there, Matthias bar Qeynan, whose injustices Yeshua had often denounced, had taken up cause against him. Then Yeshua called down on himself the wrath of the elders of Tsef when he spoke out against one of their judgements. The incident involved the stoning of a woman, a rare event in our region and in this case one that I had the misfortune of seeing with my own eyes, since my father and I happened to be at the Tsef market the day it occurred.

Tsef had always been much looked to for wisdom in the region. But its elders were a hard and unforgiving group, all of them followers of the house of Shammai. On this day they had condemned a woman for sorcery and had led her out to the gates at the head of a mob. Afterwards they claimed it had been their intention only to chase the woman from the town. But my father and I saw that the crowd had been incited and was already armed, and the poor woman had hardly stepped from the gates before people began to hurl their missiles at her. They chased her through the market until a throw caught her leg and she fell. The rest was too miserable to relate—what had been human was within minutes reduced to a bloodied mass. My father tried to shield me but I was as if spellbound, unable to take my eyes from the woman though I’d had only the most fleeting glimpse of her before she’d been rendered unrecognizable.

I had never witnessed a stoning and was dumbfounded at the violence of it. Afterwards the elders said they had never given the order for the first stone, but also that they would
have been within the law to do so, since the woman, who was well known as a sorceress, had been caught in the very act of conjuring demons against them. But when Yeshua heard of the event he was quick to condemn them.

They want to make it seem that they’re both merciful and just, when they’re neither, he said.

He went to the town and spoke to the people there. Most of them, because they had been among the woman’s executioners, were ready to chase him away; but a few were willing to admit the woman had done no one any harm. So Yeshua stood at the gate and questioned the elders’ actions, and said the blood of the woman was on them for not preventing her death. The elders quickly sent their supporters to argue with him and ridicule his position. But when these were unable to defeat him by argument, they threw stones at him to silence him, seeming ready to repeat the crime they’d committed only days before.