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.
4
Aviel let go and slid down into floating, restful dark. Peace enveloped her. Others, many others, were nearby, also at peace, a multitude surrounding her in ceaseless shadow, gliding over and around one another. She had held on tenaciously, not wanting to release her soul from her body, but now, here—wherever here was—she knew she could float forever, blessedly free of the sweat and torque, the grinding pain slicing like shattered glass inside her body in the last hours of her life. Finally, the last sinew was cut. It was all she desired. The relief was a bliss enduring, unending, a final freedom. Eternity.
But then she felt the oddest of sensations: she was sinking up, into a transparent vessel of water, daylight at the top, her body pulling her back to the light and to the pain, as if to die again. A loud pop! and again she felt the crushing in her abdomen, along with a burning in her hand. Her hand was on fire as the light grew brighter. She twisted around towards it, then heard a resounding command in the center of her chest—a man’s voice:
“Little girl, get up!”
She gasped, jolted into her body, and arched on the pallet. In the radiance of the healer’s presence, and the heat of the day, she perspired. A strand of her hair stuck to her face. His fingers moved to pull the hair from her mouth; he wiped the spit from her cheek and cradled one side of her face in his warm hand. Then he touched her abdomen. Pain seared through her body cavity again but began to subside rapidly. Miraculously. She blinked, her eyes crusted with tears, and she looked hazily toward the figure holding her hand. He was so bright!
Yeshua took her hand and placed it over her heart, pressing it to her. As he let go, she struggled up toward him, not wanting him to release her, not wanting to come back to the pain of existence. But he did, and his brilliance dimmed. Before her stood a man in a plain wool robe covered with dust, smelling lightly of sweat and earth and fish. There were others around, men she did not know, different from the beings in the floating space from which she had just returned. She recognized her father and mother, her Abba and Eemah.
Rivka crushed Jairus’s hand in hers, tears swelling her eyelids again. Jairus looked at Yeshua, but devoid of shock; he was simply and strangely vacuous, because his entire underpinning had shifted. It was as if his house had slid off to one side in an earthquake, and it was unclear if the house would remain standing with this new knowledge of belief and faith. He let go Rivka’s hand, slid down the wall to squat on the floor, and stared at his daughter in the darkened room.
Outside, the commotion of wailing and ridicule that had greeted Yeshua before he went into the house had muted, and the crowd of family and friends convened, talking about the miracle worker Jairus had gone to seek. A sweetness of figs filled the warmth of the day, and the dust under foot was somnolent, heavy with heat. The shroud of haze from the lake had receded.
Back inside, Yeshua directed Aviel, “Go cleanse yourself at the mikvah when you’ve gained more strength, and present yourself to the priests.” Then he turned also to Jairus and Rivka so that they were drawn into reminding their daughter about her obligations.
Weak, Aviel turned on her side and pushed herself up off the pallet, her lightweight woolen robe clinging to her shape from her sweat. She swallowed, and swung her feet cautiously onto the floor to test her weight on her legs. Putting her arms behind her on the bed she pushed herself up to rise, and Yeshua and John moved as one to help her, Yeshua’s hand under her arm, John’s hands awkwardly and a little too familiarly at her waist. Did they know she had dried blood sticking her legs together, pulling her skin? These men should not be touching her; she was unclean for them, she worried.
Rivka rushed to her to take over, supporting her daughter’s weight, pushing her hair off her forehead, kissing her. “Aviel! Aviel, Aviel.”
Standing alongside Rivka, John had not let go.
Yeshua spoke. “If one is forced to choose between the law and saving a life, wouldn’t you agree that it is more important to save the life?” The healer smiled at Rivka and John, then turned to Jairus. “Feed her. If your girl is to become a woman, she needs to keep up her weight, and she is to do the ritual cleansing once she is restored. Remember what I told you: do not fear. Only believe. She will find her life through words more than childbearing.”
Jairus looked at him blankly, and before he could expound his gratitude, Yeshua left with a blessing. Feeling conspicuous, John relinquished his hold on the young woman and followed Yeshua, his eyes trailing to Rivka and Jairus as he went out.
Rivka turned to watch them go, but could not release her daughter; she began laughing and crying at the same time. But Aviel wriggled out of her mother’s arms and stumbled to the door, gripping it with her hands. As she looked fuzzily out into the clearing day and towards the men departing with Yeshua, she saw John, tall, moving gracefully.
Sensing her gaze, John stopped, turned, and met her eyes. In each other they recognized a depth. While they entered each other’s souls mutually, Aviel was still in the weaker state. The intensity of his penetration spiraled up in him, moving from a spiritual depth to a hunger for human love. But Aviel was so close to her humanness, having just regained it, and at the same time so close to that world of spirit she had touched, that she did not have the strength to continue bearing his gaze. She looked down. When she looked back up, wanting more, she saw his eyes had just left hers.
He had turned back to follow Yeshua and Peter and James. She watched him go, then sank to her knees, still holding the doorway for support. Too much life flooded back into her all at once, and Rivka came over to her, frowning up into the street.
Aviel stared down at her left hand. It was tingling and burning.
