Jairus’s Daughter
A Midrash
Patti Rutka
Jairus’s Daughter A Midrash
Copyright © 2010 Patti Rutka. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Resource Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
isbn 13: 978-1-60899-092-4
eisbn 13: 978-1-4982-7205-6
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
For Tommy
This book has bones
[N]o notice at all is taken of the inner disposition of the person healed. . . .[The miracle stories] lack, as it were, a conclusion.
Rudolph Bultmann
Acknowledgements
Many people helped this book come into being. I am deeply grateful to my editor, Ulrike Guthrie, for alternately prodding and massaging my muse, sometimes through the use of painting metaphors. Thank you to Dr. Ron Baard for supporting the dream, to Dr. David Trobisch for hanging on just long enough to see the manuscript breathe on its own, and to Dr. Ann Johnston for giving body to the book’s spirit in the form of meetings and guidance during a busy time. I am grateful to my initial readers, the Rev. Dr. Gordon and Mrs. Marietta Andersen, who were so encouraging. Also, I am grateful to my sister, professor and poet Jean Greenwood, who has been editing my work since I was eight years old when we played “school” next to the train tracks in England. I appreciate that you didn’t use red ink this time. I am grateful to Mona Jerome of Ever After Mustang Rescue, whose generous heart and seemingly tireless body care for so many horses in need. Thanks to Kris Firth for her precision, and to Christian Amondson and all the professionals at Wipf and Stock who have been so helpful in the production of what was really the first novel.
1
Capernaum, Israel, evening of the 8th of Av, C.E. 34
Inside, blood leaked into the wool padding underneath Aviel as she lay, slack-bodied, on her pallet in the darkened house. What should have been an ordinary, cyclical exodus from her body was now life-threatening. Four days ago she had crawled to the bed in the heat of the day. Now, her once-lustrous brown curls had gone dull and her mother patted a cool cloth on her sweating forehead.
Outside, on a light, breezy day in the upper Galil of Palestine, more than thirty years after the reign of Herod the Brutal, Yohanon the carpenter sat outside his stone house carving minute detail into a scribe’s table. Wind tousled his white hair as a shroud of haze fingered its way across the nearby lakeshore, covering the village of Capernaum. Cedars pointed skyward and ancient gnarled-trunk olive orchards rustled in parched pastures; their slight movement was a generous sign of life in a spring that had dried from days of still air and no moisture. Only the village’s well miraculously continued to flow, even as the surrounding wadis had caked to orange-brown rock beds.
Yohanon cut into the fragrant, soft cedar to round out the table’s edges, feeling the slivers fall around him. He added an embellishment at each upper corner, scrolling in olive leaves, leaving a touch of the delicate in what was to be a sturdy work tool. Considering his wrists and hands as he worked, he saw veins meandering, small blue rivers in the powdered land of his aged skin. He thought of the table’s youthful future owner. Unlike his, her hands were petite, so the table was to be slightly reduced from the typical size used by male scribes; the inkwell and stylus receptacles had to be diminutive as well. Tables that fit more comfortably under the slender hands of female scribes had become his expertise, and while he couldn’t sell as many of them as the regular-sized ones, he had established a reputation, and his tables had become sought after by young women trained for beautiful writing. His heart went into the making of this particular table, since its future owner was his neighbor. If she recovered.
As he worked his sturdy and calloused hands into the wood, his eyes and intent turned it supple, moving it around and through his fingers. Next picking up a small cloth, he dipped it into a tiny clay vessel and spread oil over the wood, buffing it methodically. Now and then he would glance up without thinking and take in the street around him, suck his teeth, and spit out sesame seeds hidden in his gums. He spent so much time out here carving and observing that his eyes were tools themselves, penetrating the skin of his fellow townspeople to see deeper into their cares and daily incessant trials. Grief lines from years of increasing loss corralled his face, running tracks through what had been a baby face for the longest time, before his beard had grown fully.
His thoughts led him to the realization that there was respite in age, relief from the years of stupidity and the poor judgment of youthful excess. Turning from himself, concern for his young neighbor flooded him, and he wished that miracles could fall like dew this day, though he had witnessed none himself in all his life.
“Hepsabah! Some water. Please.”
His wife moved in the shadows of their house and came out silently with a clay jar holding a conservative portion of water for him.
“Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha olam . . .” he began to thank God rapidly and automatically under his breath for the water they had, then caught himself and wondered why there was no specific prayer for water. Immediately he switched to the general blessing for food and drink besides wine, finishing, “she-ha-kol nihyeh bi-d’varo,” so as to not waste an opportunity for gratitude. Indeed, he was grateful that he and his remaining loved ones were healthy, and if the denarius didn’t buy what it used to, at least he was doing all right through selling his work in order to provide for his wife and their grandson. He had their gratitude, and that was all his heart needed to feel useful at his age. It was good to have settled in as a husband and father years ago, and when the children had both moved into death, then it was good to be a grandfather to their child.
Health was the greatest currency. Now, it fled the young woman down the street. The table was to be hers, God willing. While the community was small and everyone generally knew everyone else’s business, there was a mystery about what ailed the small-boned, auburn-haired Aviel.
At first notice her beauty startled. She was a high-tempered darling with engraved, unending eyes, betraying that she could touch a world deeper than most. Yohanon could not have explained the power of her eyes, given the lack of grief in her life that was the usual reason for the fissures in the bedrock of a person’s soul. She had shown this cavernous quality of her eyes even as a child, when she would come to sit against Yohanon’s house and watch him work. They would sit silently side by side, she drawing in the dirt with a stick, he working his tools. Every once in a while she would giggle and glance up at him, and he would look into her.
“Always writing. What do you write?”
Because of his terseness, and his shock of white hair, at first when Aviel was small she had been afraid of him. She would come up close and look at all his scars—the slanted thin white line above his eyebrow, the one shaped like the lake on his forearm. His raspy questions made her pause, wide-eyed, and then she would just smile, touch one of the scars with her finger, go back to rubbing out the dust, and start writing again.
For a number of years as she grew up it was murmured that, despite her looks, she was too much like a boy, was too spirited, and that she would need to curb her tendencies to climb trees and run through the wadis with the boys, her skirts tied up around her thighs so she could throw her legs about more freely. But when she neared what should have been the time of coming