She resisted on a couple of counts. First, she wanted more from Jonathan. He made a good living, but guts to accompany the heart on his sleeve would have suited her better. He was reserved with his emotions—blocked, even, at times. Going into a relationship most women would think they could change this quality in a man, but instead Anna just observed.
Resistance came naturally to Anna, but her consistent refusal of Jonathan had more to do with evasion than obstinacy. While she could see herself being a mother, she couldn’t see herself being a wife. She had nieces and nephews she adored; she would have been loving, and an adequate disciplinarian. She knew how to keep someone safe. She could see herself being in charge of a relationship, such as mothering, or teaching a class, but she couldn’t picture herself surrendering to one. Jonathan compared her to a wrestler with all the right slippery moves. At least Jonathan was a good climbing partner.
Beyond what she intuited about the relationship she was in, Anna was hardly familiar with her deeper beliefs. She thought the popularization of Buddhism in America was a wonderful guideline for living, and was curious about Taoism, and what on earth all those people in China might believe; she admired some “New Age” concepts, or the metaphors for life presented by quantum mechanics; but she kept her nose focused very much in the culture of the present, even though technologically she was somewhat handicapped.
Her work-related travels to other countries were curios, dolls in local traditional costume collected and put in the closet of her mind. Had she been called on for any serious commitment or conviction of belief, she would have politely dodged the request. Philosophical arguments over beer held no attraction for her.
The notion of going to where people died daily for their beliefs in a land that had been fraught with strife and soaked in blood for millennia began to irritate her; she wasn’t capable of comprehending how seriously the inhabitants took religion. She supposed she should ask her friend Paula for some tips about the area, since the woman had made a couple of trips to the “Holy Land,” but she’d have to let some time pass before she sent out an e-mail. She was sick of the drama from that sector.
Sal lowered her down out of her reverie.
“All set then?”
“Looks good to me. Bring ’em on.”
She rehearsed in her head how the climbing lesson would go, but got stuck when she tried to apply the same technique to telling Jonathon that night that she intended to go to Israel in the fall.
6
Capernaum
Sabbath was imminent. Rivka underwent so much preparation for the day of rest, even with Aviel’s and Devorah’s help, that she thought it no wonder Adonai rested on the seventh day—He must have been exhausted. Especially without a woman to help him do the work. She knew that when scripture said that everyone in a man’s house was to rest on the Sabbath, including his slaves and ass and so on, the fact that his wife had been left out of the exemption from labor simply meant that she and her husband were a unit; there was no need to mention her as an individual. Nonetheless, she thought it an irony that it was the woman who did all the work in preparation and she was not, in fact, able to rest on the Sabbath. Somebody had to clean the dishes after the meal. In the beginning she had complained to Jairus but realized she was only creating a lack of rest for both of them by doing so, so with time she relented and her tongue grew less sharp. The ever-so-slight smoothing of her husband’s brow was the only indication that she had found the way to create shalom bayit, peace in the household.
Jairus had declined having servants or slaves, even though they could have afforded them. So, when it came to tasks ranging from large to small, whether slaughtering, or making bread, or tidying the house, or carrying water buckets for the animals, all of this had to be done in advance by the family in order to uphold the prohibition of doing any work on the Sabbath. If they had had a non-Jewish slave, he or she could have done the work for them—but Jairus didn’t like the idea. He had Greek notions that all people were more or less equal, and he could not bring himself to order around anyone. Fortunately, that meant he did not dictate to his wife or children, either. He was a benevolent, in fact, indulgent, head of the household.
Rivka heaved the goat’s milk bucket in her calloused hand. She had heard of wealthy women in Jerusalem dipping their hands in a special wax to soften their skin, then having their nails trimmed and shaped. What loveliness! she sighed. But then she corralled her momentarily extravagant thoughts, grateful that her daughter was alive and that she was bringing in milk rather than her daughter’s funeral linens.
It should be a special Sabbath because of their joy, but right now it was not going so well. Aviel seemed to have lost her balance in the order of the household and was having difficulty regulating her mood. When she wasn’t doing her chores obstinately, she would go into the corner of the room she shared with Devorah, and look out on the yard with the goats and the mule. She was writing furiously, her hair strewn wild and loose about her shoulders, her bare feet tucked awkwardly under her with no regard for decorum as she sat hunched and scribbling.
On this Sabbath Devorah interrupted her in one such moment. Devorah was more lithe than her sister, and three years younger. Because the younger had already started her cycle, Aviel sometimes felt she was the second child, but Devorah did not think any less of her sister. She was still a little too young to comprehend the change that had gone on internally for Aviel these last few days; she was simply glad she still had her sister with her.
“What are you writing now?” Devorah asked as she brushed past Aviel and glanced at the papyrus.
“I want to get out. I want to get out of here. I can barely look at people. You know I’ve wanted to go to a bigger city before this. Maybe Ephesus. Maybe Jerusalem. I need to get away from people’s scrutiny. There is no privacy in this tiny bowl of a town,” Aviel growled over her shoulder.
“Aviel! Did Yeshua make you mad? How would you live? Who would you live with, and what would you do?”
“Aunt Miriam and Uncle Mordechai. You know they would take me in. Oh, Devorah, you could come and live there with me too . . .” she turned to her sister with a desperate look, as if she would pack her things and leave that afternoon.
“Aviel! What about Eemah and Abba? How would they survive? They need us! Surely it’s not so bad for you here—people care about you, that’s all. They just don’t know how to respond. And Daniel, maybe even Nathan, are interested in you . . .”
Aviel snorted and turned back to the papyrus. She crumpled it and swept it off the writing table with her hand, then put her head in her hands. She wanted Devorah to understand, not challenge her now.
“Devorah, you mean well, but you are still young as far it goes in knowing about men. Daniel is a good man, but he is my boyhood friend. And Nathan . . . Nathan is a snake. Just give me a little time to myself, please,” she grumbled.
Devorah could see that her words could give no solace, so she came over to her sister and gently stroked her forehead and hair a few times, then left the room.
As Sabbath grew closer, the ethereal peace that regularly descended on the town continued to elude the household. Aviel’s temper again flared at her father in the close quarters later that Friday afternoon.
“I should have died! Instead I am an object of healing!” Aviel cried at her father with as much fire as she could manage, still drained from her illness. He had asked her what was troubling her. “It makes absolutely no difference how I’m supposed to respond to this, this . . . miracle,” she spat out at him as her hands flailed in the air. “All that mattered to Yeshua is that you believe
