Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt

  "Tell me how the Lord is a carpenter," said the Old Rabbi in Aramaic.

  I thought of words Joseph had spoken to me many times:

  "Did not the Lord Himself say to Noah how many cubits the ark was to be, and of what sort of wood? And that the wood should be pitched, and did the Lord not say how many stories the ark must be, and did the Lord not say that it should have a window finished to a cubit, and did the Lord not tell Noah where he was to build the door?" I stopped.

  A smile came slowly to the face of the oldest man. I didn't look at anyone else. There was quiet again.

  "And was it not so," I went on in our tongue, "that the Lord Himself brought the Prophet Ezekial to the vision of the new Temple, setting forth the measurement of the galleries and the pillars, and the gates, and the altar, saying how all things should be done?"

  "Yes, it was," said the Old Rabbi, smiling.

  "And my lord," I went on. "Was it not Wisdom who said that when the Lord made the world, Wisdom was there like a master craftsman, and if Wisdom is not the Lord, what is Wisdom?"

  I stopped. I didn't know where I'd learned that part. But then I went on.

  "My lord Rabbi," I said. "It was the carpenters that Nebuchadrezzar took to Babylon, instead of slaying them, because they knew how to build, and when Cyrus the Persian decreed that we could return, the carpenters came home to build the Temple as the Lord had said it should be built."

  Quiet.

  The Rabbi drew back. I couldn't read the meaning of his face. I looked down. What had I said?

  I looked up again.

  "Lord Rabbi," I said, "from the time of Sinai, where there is Israel there is a carpenter—a carpenter to build the tabernacle, and it was the Lord Himself who told out the measurements of the tabernacle, and—."

  The Rabbi stopped me. He laughed and put up his hand for quiet.

  "This is a good child," he said, looking at Joseph above me. "I like this child."

  The other men nodded as the old one nodded. Again there was the laughter, not a loud laughter but a gentle laughter moving through the room.

  He pointed to the floor right in front of him.

  I sat down there on the mat.

  There was more talk, friendly and easy, as the Rabbi received James and the other boys, but I didn't really hear it. I knew only that the worst was over. I felt my heart was beating so loud others could hear it. I still didn't wipe my tears, but they'd stopped.

  At last, the men were gone. The school began.

  The Old Rabbi recited the questions and the answers, and the boys repeated, and as the doors were closed the room grew warm.

  No more was said to me that morning, and I didn't speak up, but I recited, and I sang with the others, and I looked at the Rabbi, and the Rabbi looked at me.

  When we went home at last, there was the family meal, with no chance to ask anything, but I could tell by their faces that they would never tell me why the Old Rabbi had asked so much. It was their eyes when they looked at me, the way that they were trying to make me think that there was nothing wrong.

  And my mother, my mother was very happy, and I knew she didn't know what had been said. She looked like a girl as she tended to the dishes and told us to eat more than we could.

  I was as tired as if we'd laid marble pavers all day. I went into the women's room because I didn't know I was doing it, and I lay down on my mother's mat and slept.

  When I woke, I could hear everyone talking and I smelled the porridge and the good smell of the baked bread. All the afternoon had passed and I'd slept like a baby, and it was time to eat again.

  I went to the bath and washed my face and my hands in the cold water of the basin, and then I knelt and washed my hands in the mikvah. 1 came back to sit down and eat.

  A bowl was given to me. In it were delicious curds with honey.

  "What is this?" I asked.

  "You eat it," said Cleopas. "Don't you know what it is?"

  Then Joseph gave a little laugh and then my uncles all caught the laugh as if it were a breeze moving through the trees.

  My mother looked at the bowl.

  "You should eat it if your uncle gave it to you," she said.

  Cleopas said under his breath for all to hear, " 'Butter and honey will he eat, so that he knows to refuse the evil, and choose the good.' "

  "Do you know who spoke those words?" my mother asked.

  I was eating the butter and the honey. I'd had enough and gave the bowl to James but he didn't want any. I gave it to Joseph who passed it on.

  "I know it's Isaiah," I answered my mother, "but I don't remember any more than that."

  That made them all laugh. And I laughed too.

  And I didn't remember. Or think about it much again.

  I wished for a little time, just a little, to ask a question of Cleopas alone, but the time never came. It was already evening. I'd slept too much. I hadn't done my work after school. I couldn't let that happen again.

  18

  AS THE DAYS PASSED I came to love the morning study hours. The three Rabbis were known as "The Elders" and the oldest of the three was the great teacher, himself a priest now too old to go any longer to Jerusalem, and he told us the most wonderful stories I'd ever heard. His name was Rabbi Berekhaiah bar Phineas and he was always at home in the early evening if we wanted to visit him, any of us boys, near the very top of the hill in a spacious house because his wife was rich.

  In the mornings, we repeated and learned to memory much of the holy books just as we had in Alexandria, but here it was always in Hebrew, and when we talked it was often in our tongue, and we could very often get Rabbi Berekhaiah to tell us about his adventures if we tried.

  In the evenings, he sat in his library, with the doors open to the court, a modest room as he always said, smiling, and it was if one compared it to Philo's great library, but it was a warm and inviting place to me. He was there for any question, and no matter how tired I was from work, I went up there at least to sit at his feet for a little while. The servants were gentle, they served us cool water, and I could have stayed there for hours listening to him tell his tales, but I had to go home.

  The youngest of the teachers, who did not speak up very much, was Rabbi Sherebiah, and he was also a priest, though no longer could he go to the Temple either, as he'd suffered a terrible mishap once on the road up from Jericho when robbers had attacked him as he went to fulfill his duties in the Temple. They had beat him and his brothers and he'd fallen from the cliff and in the fall his lower leg had been crushed, and was taken off by the physicians in Jerusalem.

  He walked on a peg, but this could not be seen for his robes, and seemed a whole man with a quick healthy manner about him. But no priest with a missing limb could go before the Lord, and so he had become a Rabbi in the village school, and was sought out for his teachings by everyone. It was said he had become a Pharisee only after he could no longer go to the Temple. His brothers were also priests, but they lived in Capernaum which wasn't very far away.

  The Rabbi between them, who made up the last of The Elders, the Rabbi who had received us in the synagogue, was Rabbi Jacimus, and he was a great Pharisee, though all three Rabbis wore blue tassels on their robes, and Rabbi Jacimus was very strict in all his habits which he tried to teach to us.

  All of the family of Rabbi Jacimus, and there were many of his uncles, brothers and sisters and their husbands and their children, were Pharisees and they dined only with each other, as was the custom with Pharisees, and the customs of Nazareth were not always what they would have. But everyone went to them for judgements. And two of the brothers of Rabbi Jacimus were village scribes who wrote letters for people, and even read letters for the very old who couldn't read so well. These men wrote up other papers which had to be done, and they were often in their courtyards very busy with such copying with a man or woman standing over them saying what had to be written. Or worse yet screaming and crying over what was being read to them.

  These three teachers we
re the judges in disputes, but there were other very old men, men who seldom left their homes due to their age, who also came together with them if something had to be done.

  In fact, sometimes people came to ask Old Justus, our uncle, his view of things. Now Old Justus couldn't speak, and I could see plainly, as could all of us, that he didn't know what was being said to him, yet people would come and pour out their woe to him and he would nod. And his eyes would bulge, and he'd smile. He loved people talking to him. And this made the people happy and they went away thanking us and thanking him.

  My mother would shake her head. Old Sarah would shake her head.

  Now I should say a lot of people came to Old Sarah. Men and women came to Old Sarah. Sometimes it seemed to me that Old Sarah was so venerable as they said, by virtue of her age and her cleverness and her quickness, that she was neither man or woman to people anymore.

  And it was by listening to some of this outpouring that I learned a lot about the village, a lot I wanted to know and some things I didn't want to know.

  I learned a lot of things from the other children of the village, from Blind Marya who was always in her father's courtyard and full of laughter and ready talk, and from the boys who came to play, Simon the Fool, who really wasn't a fool, but who laughed all the time and was very kind, and Jason the Fat, who was fat, and Round James and Tall James and Bold Michael, and Daniel the Zealot, who was called that because he went at everything "in a fury."

  But from no one did I really learn the answers to the questions that were now eating at my heart. I struggled to remember the things my mother had said to me. I did this while I was working at something, like the slow polishing of a table leg or while we were walking up the hill and down to the school. But even then we were all talking or singing, and I couldn't really think. I did remember, really, what she'd said. I remembered it in pictures. An angel had come, an angel to my mother, and no man had been my father, but what did such a thing mean?

  I thought when I could, but ours was a busy life.

  What time there was from work, I went to the Rabbis. I didn't want to leave them at all. Rabbi Berekhaiah was curious about Alexandria and asked me many questions. He liked to hear me talk, and so did his wife Miriamne, who was the rich one and not so old, and her father, whose hair was white, was often in the room listening to us talk.

  Rabbi Berekhaiah had read the scrolls of Philo given him by our family, and he had questions about Philo which I answered, saying always how kind Philo had been, and how he'd taken me to the Great Synagogue just to see it, and how Philo studied the Law and the Prophets and spoke on them as a Rabbi himself, though he was a bit too young perhaps, said some. And I told all about Philo's house and how beautiful it had been, insofar as it was proper to say so.

  A carpenter had to be careful what he said about the houses of those for whom he worked. A house was a private place. I'd always been taught that. But Philo's house had been full of young pupils, and the Rabbis of Alexandria had come and gone there, and so it seemed all right to describe the patterns of the marble floors, and the racks of scrolls to the ceiling.

  We talked too about the harbor of Alexandria, and about the Great Lighthouse which I had seen most clearly when we'd sailed away. And I told of the temples, which even a good Jewish boy couldn't help seeing as they were everywhere and very fine, and of the marketplace where one could buy almost anything in the world, and one heard people speaking Latin as well as Greek, and so many other tongues.

  I could speak some Latin, but not much.

  They were happy to hear about the ships, too, and we had seen so many in Alexandria because it had not only the seafaring ships that went to Greece and Rome and Antioch and the Holy Land, but also the riverboats coming in from the Nile.

  Sometimes I thought that I saw Alexandria more clearly than ever in these talks because in answers to the questions of Miriamne and the Old Rabbi, the fatherin-law of Bere-khaiah, I had to remember so much. I spoke of the library, which had been rebuilt after Julius Caesar had been so foolish as to burn it. And I spoke about the special Festival of the Jews when we had celebrated the translation of the Law and the Prophets and all the sacred books into Greek.

  Now here in Nazareth, no one was going to teach in Greek, but many spoke Greek, especially in Sepphoris where all the soldiers of the King spoke it, and most of the craftsmen, and these Rabbis spoke it and read it. They knew the Scripture in Greek. They had copies of it. They said so. But Hebrew was the language of our learning here, and our tongue, Aramaic, was the daily tongue. In the synagogue, the Scripture was read out in Hebrew, and then the Rabbi explained it in the common tongue. That way, if someone didn't know the sacred language, he or she could still understand.

  I could have spent all my time with my Rabbi Bere-khaiah. But it was not to be.

  Very shortly after we started work on the house, Joseph and I had to go into Sepphoris because there was so much work to be had there, and people were in need of shelter due to the terrible war, and they had the means to pay. Joseph would not take the double wages they offered him, one after another, but held to what we had made for a day's work in Alexandria, and took those jobs where he thought what we knew would be used for the best.

  He and his brothers, and my uncle Cleopas, could walk through the ruins of a house, talk to the owners about it, and then put it back the way it had been, even going to the painters and the plasterers and the masons, and taking care of all of it as they'd done in Egypt with ease. James and I knew how to go to the marketplace and pick the laborers from the men who stood around.

  But no matter what we did, there was a lot of lifting and holding and carrying, and coughing in the dust and the ashes, and I was frightened by the talk of the trouble in Jerusalem where men said that in the Temple a full rebellion was going on. The land of Judea was full of fighting, and there were bandits hiding in the Galilean hills.

  There was talk even of some young men, in spite of all that had happened in Galilee, going up to Jerusalem to fight in this war, that it was a holy cause.

  Meanwhile the Romans tried everywhere in Judea to put down the rebellion, and they still had the Arabs marching with them, and the Arabs burned Judean villages. And the whole family of King Herod was still in Rome fighting and disputing before Augustus, as to who should be King.

  My teeth no longer chattered in fear no matter what I heard, and our family didn't talk of it very much. All around us buildings for a King Herod, whoever he might be, were rising up. Men came from everywhere too, to mend rooftops, to fetch fresh water for those who worked, to mix and daub paint and lay mortar for stones, and our clan had many friends among those who had so much work they did not know how to say yes to all of it.

  My uncle Cleopas looked around and said: "Now Sep-phoris will be bigger than ever."

  "But who will be King?" I asked.

  He made a sound which showed his disgust for the family of Herod. But Joseph looked at him and he didn't say the words he wanted to say.

  The Romans were still in the city, moving about to keep the peace, on the watch for the rebels out of the hills, and hearing the constant complaints of the people—their woes as to this son who was missing, or that house that should not have been burned, and sometimes the soldiers threw up their hands and cried for silence because they didn't know what to do about it.

  The soldiers drank in open taverns, and at the street corners where they bought their food. They watched us at our work. The scribes were busy writing letters for them to their womenfolk and their children.

  This was a Jewish city. I saw it by and by. There were no pagan temples here at all. There were few public women to hang around with soldiers, only the older tavern keeper women, and sometimes they had their own men. The soldiers yawned and threw a glance at our women as they came and went, but what could they see? Our women were always in their proper robes, and with their shawls and their veils.

  Very different from Alexandria where there had been so many Greek and Rom
an women always in the crowds. They were veiled many of them, too, and modest, but there was another sort that hung about the public houses. We were never supposed to look at them, but we could not help it sometimes.

  Here it was a different story.

  When bad news came in of fighting in Jerusalem, people gathered in groups to talk about it, and they stared at the soldiers, and the soldiers became hard and they stopped being friendly and stood in bands on the streets. But nothing happened.

  As for our family, and many many others, we went right on working no matter what the news. We prayed as we worked, under our breath. As we gathered to eat our little meal mid-day, we blessed the Lord and we blessed our food and drink. Then back to work we went.

  I didn't mind all those times. But studying in Nazareth was better.

  What I loved the most besides studying were our walks to and from Sepphoris because the air was warm and the harvest was almost finished, and the trees were full everywhere I looked. The blossoms were gone from the almond trees, but so many other trees were full of beautiful leaves. On every walk I saw new things.