Danya. Anne McGivern
Although I didn’t know what it wanted, I trusted it. It waited. It shimmered. It grew brighter and lovelier. It seemed to be inviting me in, pulling me into itself. It was so beautiful! I have no words to explain how it drew me to it. After some time—I can’t say how long—I stepped into it. I said ‘Yes.’ That was all: just ‘Yes.’ Then it filled me with its brightness, and I felt myself glowing.”
We were all silent until Naomi whispered, “Maybe the light was an angel. Did it smell? I hear angels smell like baking bread.”
Miryam laughed. “No, it didn’t smell. I don’t know what an angel looks like, but this light that swirled around inside and around me was full of color—flaming orange and bright green and deep violet and sunrise pink. And full of sound, too. Babies laughing. Water lapping the shore. Doves cooing. It was full of life and so, so lovely. Then, gently, slowly, the light swept back to the cloud it had come from and disappeared.”
“Were you sad when it left?” said Naomi.
“No, I was happy! My fears were gone. A peace settled upon my heart, a certainty that The Holy One cared for me and for all of our people, each one of us. And I knew that I was pleasing in His eyes. And I knew I should marry Yosef.”
A bitter taste, as if I had sucked on the rim of a metal pot, puckered my mouth. The dust clouds had not swept me up. They had swirled off to the caves of Arbel without me.
“I was hoping that, coming to this same spot and hearing what happened to me, maybe you two could feel the peace that settled on me here. Of course we’re all anxious, but I think that the light’s message was that Adonai loves us, each one of us. I know He will be with each of us on every step of our journeys. The psalm says, ‘I sought the Lord, and He answered me, and delivered me from all my fears.’ Pray with me, will you?”
Naomi laughed that ridiculous giggle of hers. “Delivered from all my fears sounds good. I’ll give it a try.”
To please Miryam, I prayed with them, though my prayer brought me no peace. I left the Nazareth ridge in anger and confusion. Miryam had sought answers, just as I had, and The Holy One had sent her a sign. She was pleasing to Him, even though she was a girl. He had a plan for her. She had been given the very blessing I had sought but been denied.
The Journey to Jerusalem
Another week passed as I prepared our household for our journey to Jerusalem. Father was of little help, consumed as he was by his fear of an imminent retaliatory invasion. He roamed the hilltops around Nazareth, scanning the horizon for signs of a Roman column on the march. He wandered from house to house in the village, monitoring each family’s preparedness. When one family we planned to travel with encountered difficulties selling its livestock, and another had a sick baby, he decided we could wait no longer. Instead we would set out on our own and find other countrymen to travel with once we were out on the main road. With great care, he rolled protective calfskins around his scrolls and sealed them tightly into stone jars. The old donkey bore only this precious load. The younger one carried all our other provisions.
Naomi’s parents and the few of our friends who had not yet departed walked with us to the edge of the village. Naomi and her mother wept and clung to each other, and Amos had to pry his wife and daughter apart so we could proceed. The familiar loneliness of having no mother seeped into my chest once again, but I clutched my father’s hand and didn’t look back. In my other hand I cupped some soil from our courtyard. I will return, I will return, someday I will return, I told myself with each step. Though my heart pulled backward, my feet moved forward, one regretful step at a time, throughout the whole long morning. Naomi sniffled for a long time until Father put her between the two of us and asked her sing to cheer us all up.
We traveled east, which surprised me, because Lev had told me that a good road led straight south from Sepphoris to Jerusalem. But Father explained that the southern route passed through Samaria, considered a dangerous and unclean land. We would travel east to the Jordan River and follow it south almost to Jericho, then turn back west to Jerusalem.
All across Galilee, olive trees and trellised grapevines graced every hillside. Grain crops, mostly wheat and barley, flooded the valleys. Healthy pomegranate, almond, and fig orchards clustered around the villages. But the prosperity of the land did not match that of the people. In village after village, the children, listless with hunger, did not smile or raise their hands in greeting to us. Beggars squatted along the roadside. The first one we spoke to told us a bitter story, later repeated by others we met.
“I was a farmer. Rome demanded one-fifth of my crops as tribute; King Herod imposed other taxes; the Temple and its priests required its offerings and tithes.” He stopped to gulp down the date cake we gave him, then held out his bony hand for another. “I had to borrow to meet all these obligations, and the debt crushed me. My creditors took over my land.”
“Were your creditors Romans?” Father demanded.
“No. Jews. Wealthy Jews.”
Father’s eyes narrowed. “Was your land that of your ancestors, land given to your people by The Holy One?”
“Yes.”
How strongly my father’s scowl resembled Lev’s.
We met men heading in the opposite direction, on their way out of Galilee. They, too, had been farmers, but, after losing their land, had left their families behind to migrate from estate to estate surviving on seasonal fieldwork. Others were heading to Caesarea Maritima to search for employment on the building projects there. Some were sharecroppers on the very land they used to own. They seemed to be the fortunate ones.
The afternoon sun shone harshly as we crossed our sad, beautiful land. The soles of our feet ached from the heat and the hard paving stones though only Naomi complained aloud about this. Passing carts raised a dust that lodged in our nostrils and wedged between our fingers. Dirt and perspiration clung to our clothes. We longed for shade and rest.
As we approached the town of Beit Yerah, an oak grove in the distance promised refreshment. Father said it contained a well and a space where we could spread a mat, eat some loaves and figs, and rest. However, as we drew closer to the grove, an odor of decomposition fouled the air. We slowed our steps. As we entered the grove, all was eerily silent. Women and children should have been drawing water, washing clothes, and gossiping there.
And then we saw them. Lashed to several of the smaller trees were the corpses of four crucified men. Their limbs were tied in grotesquely twisted positions, as if mocking their inability to flee their ghastly fate. One was postured against a tree trunk with his right knee raised and his left leg behind him like a runner’s. The arms of another victim were tied to a tree’s spreading branches and mimicked a bird’s wings. Rats and dogs ravaged the naked corpses. Some of the beasts slinked off as we approached, but the vultures remained, hovering above the treetops, jealously guarding their food. The flies and maggots did not stir from their hideous work.
A board proclaimed in Latin and in Greek, “REBEL BANDITS. ENEMIES OF ROME.” Lev. One of these putrefying corpses could be Lev! I closed my eyes and burrowed my head into Father’s chest. Naomi shrieked and clutched him too. “It’s not Lev,” my father whispered over and over as he pushed us past this horror.
A short distance up the road, upwind of that grove of death, another beggar squatted and reached his hands imploringly towards us. Father extracted a loaf of bread from a pack on the donkey’s back. “Why has no one from Beit Yerah buried those men?” he asked the crippled man whose eyes sank deep into their sockets
“The soldiers forbid it,” said the beggar. “The rebels must stay on the trees until their bones are picked clean by the beasts, they say. The Romans swear they will return, and, if the crucified have been cut down, they will take innocent men from the town as replacements.”
Father gave the man a loaf, and he tore into it ravenously. He looked like the starving beasts ripping into the corpses. Naomi and I fled, choking on our tears. Father hobbled along as best he could. Even the normally reluctant donkeys bolted ahead of us.
Eventually we