Mother's Eyes

by Woods, Karen

  “Thank you, Father,” Yehuda said, deep gratitude in his voice.

  At the end of the meal, Yehuda led them in the singing of the birkat ha-mazon. Then taking a lamp from his son’s house, Yosef, carrying Yaacov and the lamp, and Miriam, carrying a sleepy Yehoshua, walked across the courtyard and into the back door of Miriam's former house.

  Yosef placed the lamp on the table. Then, put Yaacov down on a couch before he spread out the mats for Yehoshua and Yaacov. Miriam placed her sleepy son on the dirt floor atop his sleeping mat. Yaacov woke up enough to go to his own mat.

  Yosef and she stood there, and said the bedtime blessings for the boys and for themselves.

  Then she sat down at the table. Yosef sat across from her.

  He asked, “Do you mind terribly letting Yehuda have the other house?”

  “No,” she shook her head. “We’ll be fine here. I always liked this house.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  After some initial curiosity by their neighbors, they fell rather easily back into the rhythm of life in the small village. And soon, it was as if they had never been in Egypt at all.

  Yosef’s children were busy raising their own children. Miriam and Yosef occupied themselves with making a living and raising both Yaacov and Yehoshua, who grew, as children always seem to do, all too quickly. Her son became a favorite of the neighbor women who always praised him to Miriam. And Yaacov was always a good boy who also earned much praise.

  Yehuda, serving as the local rabbi/teacher/shochet, had nothing but praise for Yehoshua in his education and was constantly pushing Yosef to send the boy to Yerushalayim to study with the teachers of halakhah there. Yet, Yosef felt Yehoshua needed to stay close to home and work to learn the trade of a carpenter. Miram was grateful for that decision. She was unwilling to give up the boy, before she had to do so. Her son seemed to her to get along well with his brothers’ and sisters’ children, who were more of his own age than most of Yosef’s children were.

  Village life was a matter of six long days of work, and a day of rest, six more days of work…in a repeating cycle, as the seasons changed. That rhythm was broken only by the halakhic obligation of the men and older boys to go to Yerushalayim three times each year for the shalosh r’galim, the pilgrim festivals.

  Each year at Pesach, Passover, the men and older boys of the village walked to Yerushalayim to celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread. The men and boys also went up to Yerushalayim for Sukkot, the Feast of Booths, and Shavu’ot, the Feast of Weeks, or Pentecost. The women weren’t required by halakhah to go on these three pilgrim festivals. Yet, some of the women, particularly those who had no younger children at home and who were still young enough to make the trip without undue hardship, also made the trips to the Temple to worship with the men, particularly at Pesach. Going through Samaria was almost safe when they travelled to Yerushalayim in a large group.

  And so, the years sped by, one day at a time, one Shabbat at a time, one festival at a time, until the spring of Yehoshua’s twelfth year. Only boys thirteen years or older, who were also counted among the minyan, the quorum for public prayers, were required to fulfill the obligation of the shalosh r’galim. Yet, it was customary to allow a boy to make his first pilgrim festivals during his twelfth year.

  On the night before they were to leave, Yehoshua was restless with anticipation.

  Hearing him stir, in the darkness of the night, Miriam said, “Rest, my son. The walk will be long and hard.”

  “Is the Temple as beautiful as people say it is?”

  Yosef answered the boy, “Yes. It’s still very much a work in progress. But, it is a beautiful place because it is where the Holy One comes to meet us.”

  “Where will we eat the Passover meal?” the boy asked.

  Yosef dismissed, “We have arranged for all of that. Now, sleep, Yehoshua. Morning will come all too quickly.”

  “Yes, Abba. I am sorry for disturbing your rest,” the boy replied, his voice contrite.

  “Just sleep, Son. Morning will be here soon,” Yosef said.

  Miriam, hearing no more sound from the direction of her son, went to sleep.

  Morning did come entirely too quickly.

  Leaving Natsarat, Miriam recalled the last time she’d gone from here to Yerushalayim, then on to Bethlehem. She looked at the back of her son as he walked next to Yosef. Yehoshua had grown up so fast. He was nearly a man. She wondered if she had done everything she could do for him, to equip him to be a good man, a godly man, a man who would serve Avinu Malkeinu in the wondrous way which had been prophesied about him.

  Yerushalayim was always a long and wearying journey of many days. They would be there before the festival began. After spending the days of the festival in the city, they would make the long walk home. The city during Pesach was always crowded. Miriam remembered well the pilgrim festivals of her childhood.

  How it would be now, now that a Roman governor was in place, was more than she could say. While she had no great love for any of the Herods, either Herod the Great or Herod Archelas, at least under the rule of the Herods the Children of Yisra’el could pretend they weren’t directly under Roma’s thumb. Under the Herods, Yerushalayim had remained nominally the capital city of Yudea. Instead, now, the Roman capital city was Caesarea.

  Coponius was the procurator, the governor, of this new geographical region the Romans had formed of Samaria, Yudea, and Idumea two years ago after they had stripped Herod Archeleus of his rule. Coponius might be the nominal head of the region, but it was Quinirius, Roman governor of Syria, who was ultimately responsible for the region, and who reported to the Roman Emperor. Coponius was under Quinirius’ command. It seemed to Miriam a terrible lot of foreign governance for her people to support with tax money.

  She prayed for peace as they walked along. It had been ten years ago, the Pesach immediately before they returned to Natsarat, that Herod Archelaus had killed thousands of men in and around the Temple. Many of the men of Natsarat still told the gruesome, terrifying, tales of those days. The two years since the Romans officially took over had not been any more peaceful, although the anger hadn’t quite boiled over in quite that dramatic of a way. But, the new sect of the kenaim had kept tensions simmering.

  Of course, the Romans did their part to keep the people agitated as well. The new taxes hadn’t helped the cause of peace at all.

  She had heard the Romans now stationed hundreds, if not thousands, of soldiers in the fortress of Antonia, on the northwest corner of Temple mount, in a strong effort to intimidate the festival goers away from rebellion.

  Violence was in the air. This festival, which celebrated the freedom of the children of Yisra’el, had been on several past occasions, and would likely again be, the spur to violence. She only prayed this year would not be the occasion when anger erupted once more into bloodshed.

  It always took most of a week to walk to Yerushalayim. The journey was always long and tiresome, requiring them to sleep under the stars and to eat cold meals of bread, dried fish, and cheese along the way.

  Walking through the city gates, she watched her son look around, taking in the sights. The new tax collector who now sat at the city gate was a shock to Miriam. The Romans were taxing all goods leaving the city. She had a list of things she needed to buy while they were in the city. But if the Romans were now taxing goods taken out of the city, she wouldn’t buy goods here.

  Making their way through the city, they found the several houses where the men and boys of Natsarat normally lodged during pilgrim festivals. They would be here for the seven days of the festival.

  They settled into the upper room of a house belonging to a cousin of Yosef’s first wife, all of them who formed their haburah, the voluntary association of adults agreeing to celebrate Pesach together: Yosef; Miriam; Yaacov, Yehoshua; Yosef’s married sons, Shimon and Yehuda; Yosef’s oldest grandsons, Nathan, Lavi, and Aryeh; Yosef’s brother Halphai; his Miriam; Halphai’s sons Yoses and Yaacov, now both grown men, married and
with sons of their own, sons too young to come; Shlomit’s, Yosef’s first wife’s, brothers, Eli and Tayman; their four grown sons, Aviyah, Yareb, Mattan, and Chanan; and Eli and Tayman’s grandsons, Chever, Ehud, Gamal, and Yitzchak. They were just one big extended family.

  Yosef’s sons-in-law and his daughters’ sons were in other places with their families.

  This large upper room is where they would eat their meals and sleep while in Yerushalayim. They had plenty of space. They were blessed in this. Frequently, people would have to eat the meals of Pesach in the open air, on rooftops and in courtyards, leaving the city to sleep in the hills or in nearby towns. As big as the city was, it simply couldn’t accommodate all who came here for this great feast.

  Even with this room for their use, much of the time, they would be in the Temple, or visiting with either other relatives or some of the other people who gathered here for the feast. They’d be here to eat and sleep.

  Shlomit’s cousin, Adlai, made them welcome and told them he had secured a male yearling lamb for their Pesach dinner and that it was penned, along with his own family’s lamb, waiting to be taken to the Temple to be offered. Yosef’s brother-in-law, Tayman, reimbursed Adlai for the cost of the lamb from the funds he’d collected in advance from members of the haburah at the time they all had subscribed.

  The men and boys left their things here and went to the mikveh to purify themselves before going to the Temple.

  Miriam took the opportunity to go to the market to sell the linens she had brought with her from Natsarat. She then purchased, from haburah funds, specially certified fine wheat flour, which would be proper for Pesach as it had been guarded from the time of harvest, and barley meal for tonight’s unleavened bread, as well as wine, fruit, nuts, eggs, dried fish, dairy, and other necessities to keep the crowd fed.

  They hadn’t had a hot meal in the nearly week they’d been walking to Yerushalayim. First on the agenda, before the feast began in earnest, they needed a hot meal in their bellies and a full night’s sleep with a roof over their heads.

  Before Miriam went after supplies, her sister-in-law began cooking a lentil and vegetable stew for the crowd. Both women would eat their meals before the men did, then serve them. At home, she could sit with the guests and enjoy the meal. But here, things were different. There were too many men and boys in the group and too few women to do the cooking and serving. The women would have no leisure. It would be different if there were the money to hire servants. But none of the men had wanted to incur the additional expense.

  As soon as she returned from shopping, Miriam set about making unleavened bread to accompany the stew, and enough for the men to eat for breakfast before they went out in the morning. Only enough bread could be mixed at one time such that all of the dough could be completely cooked within just a few moments of mixing to insure that it didn’t begin to rise due to wild yeasts. Three parts flour, one part water was the basic recipe. This was the rule for Pesach. So, she knew she would have to mix and bake many batches.

  Her sister-in-law looked up from where she sat with her hands in a crockery dish. “Sister, did you get everything we need?”

  “Everything for tonight. We’ll need to buy greens and onions tomorrow, of course.”

  “I always miss my garden at home when I come to Yerushalayim for the feast.”

  As she mixed water with barley meal and a little salt for tonight’s bread, Miriam asked her sister-in-law, “I understand that, entirely. Did you draw the water for tomorrow’s bread?”

  “Of course. It’s in the covered crock there,” Halphai’s Miriam replied as she continued working. “It will be ready for tomorrow’s baking.”

  “What are you doing?” Miriam asked, quickly kneading the bread.

  “Preparing the horseradish. I thought there would be less odor if I chopped it, then pounded the smaller pieces into fine bits with the root submerged in water.”

  “That’s a good idea. It seems to be working,” Miriam said as she made balls of the bread dough and began working one of the balls into a flat circle.

  “The baking stones should be hot, Sister.”

  She tested the heat of the stones by flicking a drop of water on them. It danced, sizzled, and disappeared. “Yes. Perfect. Thank you, my sister,” she said before she put down one circle of bread after another, as soon as they were formed. By the time they were all down, it was time to turn the first.

  Every day of the festival, she would be spending several hours doing this, sitting on the ground and making bread. Tomorrow, she’d have to dock the bread, prick it all over with holes, to keep it flat. Tonight, it could be a little puffy.

  After dinner, the women cleared away while the men sat and talked. Tomorrow, the men would take the lamb to the temple to be sacrificed, and then deliver the carcass to the baker to be roasted in his oven. Some of the men would go retrieve it when it had cooked.

  Still, both Miriams would be working most of the day to prepare the other foods for the festive meal of the first day of the feast. Aside from the bread, the charoset, a sweet dish to remind them of the mortar used in Egypt before the first Pesach, would have to be prepared. That dish would consist of finely chopped fruits and nuts; dates, raisins, almonds, pine nuts, mixed with red wine and honey. Many people only made small quantities of this for this one night, but the members of this haburah liked this dish so well they would eat it throughout the week of Pesach. To prevent any possibility of wild yeast fermenting in it, she would make this fresh daily throughout the feast. The charoset balanced out the maror.

  The rest of the maror, bitter herbs, would have to be prepared tomorrow. Miriam was so glad her sister-in-law had already prepared the finely minced horseradish and put that in vinegar to save it for tomorrow. She had not looked forward to dealing with the horseradish. It always made her cry and took her breath away. She’d remember her sister-in-law’s trick of cutting it underwater.

  Miriam always thought it was strange that they were so careful to clean all houses of all yeasts before the feast, and not to eat things made with yeast during the week of the feast, and yet, there would be several cups of wine with the festive dinner on the first and last nights of the festival, at least. Probably wine every night. Wine ferments with yeast. It made little sense to her, but this was the way things were.

  Wine hadn’t been drunk at that first Pesach in Egypt. That had been a meal of haste. The first Pesach was eaten with the participants ready to travel, their heads covered, their shoes on, walking sticks in their hands. That had been a meal of pilgrims, a meal of haste. Now, they had a meal of great leisure. Or at least, it was a meal of great leisure for the men.

  Chapter Fifteen

  At the end of the week of the festival, Miriam was delighted with the prospect of going home. It had been good to see people, to be in the Temple again, and to visit the tomb of her parents with Yehoshua, but she was ready to be back in Natsarat, in her own little home, to the quiet of her village, and to get life back to normal.

  They waited to leave Yerushalayim until after the Shabbat, to avoid spending the day of rest on the road. Then all of them headed out for home, after making a final visit to the Temple for morning prayers before going home on the first day of the week.

  Miriam and Yosef walked with his brother, Halphai and Halphai’s wife, Miriam, as they left Yerushalayim.

  Stopping that evening for rest, Miriam was filled with terror as she realized Yehoshua was not anywhere to be found among their relatives and fellow villagers.

  “Yosef,” she said, coming to her husband. “Our son did not come with us.”

  The expression on his face expressed to her exactly the panic she felt. Then he nodded. “We will have to go back and get him, then.”

  “We can’t ask everyone to go back, or hold them up here waiting for us,” Miriam said.

  Halphai’s wife said, “Halphai and our sons and I will go with you, Sister, to look for Yehoshua. The rest can return home. Seven of us walking home sh
ould be a large enough group that we won’t be bothered by robbers.”

  Yosef said, “It is nearly dark, now. We’ll set off at first light. Everyone rest. It will be a long day tomorrow.”

  “How can I rest?” Miriam wrung her hands.

  “Wife, we’ll find him.”

  “What if he’s hurt?”

  “We can’t worry about things we don’t know about, Miriam. We need to rest now. We’ll go back to the city tomorrow and we’ll find him.”

  Sighing raggedly, she admitted, “I’m frightened.”

  He wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly. It was good to be able to rely on his strength. “I know you are. I am, too. But we’ll find him, Miriam. I’m sure of it.”

  She rested her head on his shoulder. “How could we have left him behind?”

  “He was with us when we left Adlai’s home. He was with us in the Temple. How many hundreds of us are walking north on this road today? It is impossible to watch everyone.”

  “My job is to watch and protect Yehoshua. And I failed. What if he is hurt? What if he is lost to us?” She felt herself become increasingly agitated.

  “I don’t believe that will be,” Yosef said. “Now, rest, my dear.”

  “Rest?” she asked, her words as shaky as she was.

  Yosef quoted to her the mashal, the proverb, “’A courageous wife is a crown to her husband.’”

  Miriam drew a ragged breath. She stepped back from him and straightened herself. “Very well, I will have courage, for your sake. I will rest for his sake.”

  “Good. Come, rest. Morning will come early. If we start off at first light, we should be able to be back at Adlai’s home well before dark. We should have some time to go out looking for Yehoshua.”

  “Father,” Shimon said, “Yehuda, Yaacov, and I shall go with you as well. He is our brother. We will go with you to look for him. Besides, the larger group of us who walks home through Samaria, the safer we will be.”