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
