Building

Still on vacation. Here's the first chapter of another book I am working on. 

He was beautiful. His feathers, his bearing, his magnificent comb. He strutted along the stone street, pushing out his chest, stopping to flap his wings and crow, telling the world, “Look at me! I am king of this corner of the street!” Or perhaps he was saying, “Ladies! Look how handsome and virile I am! I can give you many strong chicks!” He was definitely saying, “Look out, all rivals! I will peck and shred you to pieces if you enter my territory and molest my harem!” And as if to back that up he would swing his head around, displaying his lost eye. He had suffered a grievous wound but he had won. The rooster was beautiful.

“Was” being the precise word. One-eyed Yaakov had been conspicuously absent when Yeshua and Yosef arrived at the work site. Instead there was another rooster marching around, swinging his head to and fro, surveying his new kingdom. Where was Yaakov? Yeshua looked about the building site. He did a quick circuit of the unfinished walls. He was about to give up when he heard a piteous sound from behind a bush. Yeshua stepped around to the back and found Yaakov, or what was left of him. His lovely plumage was ravaged and missing. The naked spots were bleeding, one wing seemed barely attached to his body and the once proud cock cowered before the boy. Could he help him? Yeshua asked himself. Should he? He was not a nice bird when he was in power. Yeshua remembered how he would mount the hens and how they protested when he did.

He did not seem to care about his offspring either. The hens did. Yeshua remembered the day a hawk swooped down and grabbed a chick and took off, all in one motion. And the chick's mother shrieked and suddenly launched herself into the air, 3, maybe 4 cubits up. It startled Yeshua who previously did not think chickens could fly that high. It startled the hawk, too, and it dropped the chick as quickly as it had snatched it. The tiny thing fell to the ground and the hen landed and rushed over. The chick righted itself, shook its head and was apparently okay. The hen clucked and called her brood and all the chicks ran to her. She fluffed herself up and they burrowed under her wings and body. They stayed that way a while, the hen scanning the sky for further threats.

One-eyed Yaakov had looked impressive, though that plain brown hen was more so in her actions. So did the rooster deserve mercy?

Suddenly a hand grabbed the rooster and with a practiced motion, wrung his neck. The woman looked at Yaakov's limp corpse appraisingly and walked back to her house, the body and legs swinging as she went. Yaakov's end could not be more ignominious. But at least he would nourish a family.

Yeshua returned to his father, who was rummaging around in his wooden toolbox for what he needed. Yeshua knelt at his own toolbox. Yosef had made it for him as a present at his Bar Mitzvah. “Today you are a man. You deserve a place to put a man's tools.” It was a fine piece of carpentry. Yosef had put a lot of work into it. He had even carved Yeshua's name into the side. The vav was a little higher than the other letters which bothered Yeshua at first. He was used to the careful way the letters of the Torah were written in their synagogue's scrolls. But eventually he came to love the quirky look of his father's writing. He made it for him and put his name on it. It was a delight to look at.

Or it had been at first. But it was now scratched, and the corners had been nicked and dented. That was because he used it every single day. Well, every day but Shabbat. Yeshua had tried to sand out the first scratch the box had received but it was too deep and his efforts to erase the scar just made it look worse. His father's toolbox was even more battered. Who was he to think he deserved better than his father?

“What are we doing today, Father?”

“I'm supervising laying the stones on the west side. Why don't you finish dressing this stone here that you started on yesterday,” said Yosef. Yeshua got his mallet and chisel. As tektons, the word the Greek-speaking foreman used of them, Yosef and Yeshua were jacks of all trades. If carpentry was needed, they were carpenters. If stone work was needed, they acted as masons. If the job was building, they were builders. Today they would be working on the stones, Yosef making sure they fit together when put in place.

The morning was spent chipping away at the massive building stones. It had to look good because this was the house of an important man. And he was important in Sepphoris, which was the most important city in Galilee. Ever since he began as an apprentice to his father, Yeshua had been coming to Sepphoris. He had seen it grow from a few buildings to what could justifiably be called the “ornament of Galilee,” Herod Antipas' favorite description of it. Yeshua wished he could have seen the city from the very beginning of the project. He knew it had been ruins. When Antipas' father, Herod the Great, died, a bandit named Yudah had taken over the city and declared it to be in revolt against Rome. Varus, the Roman governor of Syria, burned the city to the ground. It is said that he sold all the women and children who inhabited it into slavery and crucified all the men. All 2000 of them. That part Yeshua knew to be true. When he first began accompanying Yosef to Sepphoris, he asked his father about all the stripped trees and wooden uprights he saw along the road to the city. Yosef did not want to talk about it. So when they took lunch Yeshua asked the other men at the work site. Some remembered those days but like Yosef, they were reluctant to talk about them. One older man did eventually talk to Yeshua. He spoke quietly of all those men writhing for days on the crosses until they died. Then the birds and scavengers came. They ate the men, just as that woman and her family were going to eat Yaakov. Yeshua was silent the rest of that day.

One might have thought it was the horror of what the Romans had done that rendered Yeshua mute. And it was, but Yeshua's thoughts went even deeper into the evil of it. As a tekton, Yeshua realized that crosses didn't just happen. Someone long ago had to come up with the idea of killing people in that way. Then they or someone else had to work out the practical aspects of designing one. And someone else had to make the first one. And then someone had to carry out the first crucifixion. And it seemed like the Romans kept changing how they did it, experimenting with ways of making it even more painful or efficient. So an awful lot of people put an awful lot of thought and effort into this way of torturing a person to death. To Yeshua the horror was not only in the actual crucifixion but the mind and hearts which gave birth and assent and form to it. Just as his toolbox was the concrete expression of his father's love, the cross was the concrete expression of many people's hate.

Yeshua did not share these thoughts with his parents. They didn't understand. They tried but they did not see things as he did: all connected. His whole life he was like that. He saw the roots of things, the paths along which certain actions took folks, the odd symmetry between the visible world and the world of the Spirit revealed in the Torah, the writings and the prophets. He had a knack of seeing these things as clearly as he could see the grain in the wood he worked.

These thoughts ran through Yeshua's mind as he dressed the stone. He liked how he could concentrate on this physical task, the angle and force needed to shape the stone, and yet, as he fell into a routine, let his mind examine the facets of a moral or spiritual problem and work out how best to attack it. Each endeavor provided relief from the rigors or boredom of the other as well as hitherto unperceived insights into each other. At the end of the day, he had either built a wall or an argument for looking at the things of God in a different way.

One person who was more pleased with the walls he built rather than the arguments he constructed was Eliakim. At first, the old rabbi back in Nazareth was delighted to have such an intelligent and inquisitive boy. He loved teaching Yeshua his letters and how to read Torah. He loved to recount how the rabbis debated and brought out the meaning of the written law and by this manner discovered the oral law, applying the law of Moses to everyday matters not directly mentioned in Torah. As Yeshua got older and more articulate and more observant, Eliakim loved to debate his student as he had his teachers in Jerusalem. Until Yeshua started making arguments Eliakim couldn't counter, arguments which took notice of certain—well, he wouldn't call them contradictions in the law; let's say, paradoxes. It was disconcerting when Yeshua spotted a connection between two seemingly unrelated matters and came up with a novel insight that turned the traditional interpretation on its head. Even when Eliakim managed a good defense against Yeshua's arguments, afterwards the whole doctrine felt unreal to him for days.

Yeshua loved his discussions with his rabbi. It wasn't that he was trying to win the arguments; he was trying to understand the laws which ran their lives. There must be good reasons that God laid them down, although Yeshua was starting to doubt that the oral law was equal to the words of the Torah. He recalled the words of the one hundred third psalm: “The LORD carries out righteous acts and justice for all who are oppressed. He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the sons of Israel. Merciful and gracious is the LORD; slow to anger and rich in kindness. He will not always strive with us, nor will he stay angry forever. He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor punished us according to our guilt.” But you would never know that from the multitude of nitpicking rules God's people had to follow.

And Yeshua was beginning to suspect that not all of them had a strictly divine origin. He had seen them used in unjust and merciless ways. Like the way his neighbor Mordecai had treated his wife, Rebekah. He had fallen for that younger woman. So he found some trivial fault with his wife, said “I divorce you,” three times, and gave her a bill of divorcement. Then he married the new woman, leaving poor old Rebekah penniless. How was the woman to live? That wasn't just. That wasn't merciful. Yet because some rabbis said the law allowed it and pointed to some part of the law, it was considered in alignment with God's will. But that wasn't the God Yeshua knew, the God whom Isaiah called “our father.” The Psalm said that as a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord had compassion on his faithful followers. Well, then, what kind of father makes so heartless a rule as that? Not Yeshua's father.

Maybe Yeshua was a bit sore on the topic because of the stories he heard about his own parents. Stories the neighbors whispered behind his back, thinking that he couldn't hear them. Stories said to his face by children in Nazareth when they wanted to hurt the smart kid who showed them up in the classes they had with the rabbi. Disturbing stories: that his mother had been pregnant with him before the end of the betrothal period between her and Yosef. That Yosef was set to divorce her quietly because he wasn't the father. And what would have happened to Miriam had she been abandoned and pregnant? Would her parents dare take her in and share her shame before the village? Or would his mother have been dragged out to the town square and stoned as the law of Moses said? Yeshua didn't like to think about that. But then something changed Yosef's mind. He went ahead with the wedding, despite the fact that his neighbors no longer considered him a righteous man. But small town gossip has a long life.

Yosef and Miriam never told Yeshua those stories. Yeah, they told him how they had to go to Yosef's home town, Bethlehem, because he had inherited some family property there and had to pay taxes on it. They told him how it was at this time that Yeshua chose to be born and how the influx of relatives had filled the guest room at his brother's house and so his mother had to give birth to him in the middle of the family room. And how they had to lay Yeshua in the feeding trough that divided the upper level of the house from the lower level where they kept the animals at night. And how their donkey just kept staring at this baby in his eating place as if he was not at all happy about the situation. And they would laugh about that. Sometimes, his mother would tell him about the shepherds who came to visit. And the star, so bright, like a lighthouse in the heavens shining over their heads. She would talk of the strange foreign men who came one night much later bringing presents. And she would talk about how handy the gifts were in providing the means for them to move to Egypt. But they never really talked about why they moved there. His mother said they had to go so his father could make a living. But once he thought she said it was so they could go on living. Then she corrected herself. At least that was how Yeshua remembered it.

Yeshua did vaguely remember Egypt. He was very small then. But he remembers the Jewish community they lived in while there. It was the same as Nazareth in many ways and yet somehow different. And then they moved again. They returned to Nazareth. That move Yeshua remembered clearly. He remembered being the new boy with the strange accent. He remembered working hard to lose that accent. But he could do nothing to eliminate the strange rumors surrounding his conception.

He tried asking his parents but they didn't really want to talk about them. And he stopped asking about them. Maybe one day he would ask his parents about those stories. But not yet. Maybe when the time seemed right.

And like that, he was done with the stone. And he was hungry. Where was Yosef? He had to see and approve Yeshua's work. And Yosef had the bag with the lunch mother had packed them. Yeshua thought of the bread she baked, and the cheese she had made from their goat's milk, and the figs she had traded a nearby farmer for and his stomach told him it couldn't wait. So he set off to look for his father.

That's when he heard the commotion. Men were shouting and screaming. He turned the corner of the house they were working on and saw a group of men working agitatedly to shift something. A stone. A big one. Yeshua's stomach dropped. He sensed something was wrong. He looked for Yosef. He wasn't one of the men trying to get their hands under the edge of the stone. He wasn't one of the men trying to reattach the ropes and lift the stone. Yeshua pushed through the knot of frantic men surrounding the stone. And then he saw it. Yosef's hand.

He knew that hand well. He knew every scar and tendon and vein. He had watched that hand as it showed him over and over how to chip wood and smooth stone and assemble tables. He had watched that hand as it was raised in prayer in the synagogue. He had seen that hand as it held each of his brothers and sisters when they were babies. He had felt that hand when it laid itself on his shoulders and made him get up from his studies and go to bed.

Yeshua's eyes went from that hand, up the sinewy arm that had embraced him, and up to the stone. And Yeshua couldn't put it together. There was Yosef's arm and there was the stone; where was the rest of his father? A niggling thought started to bloom in the back of his mind but his heart quashed it. Part of him knew the truth; part of him didn't want to know.

And as his heart caught up with his mind, Yeshua suddenly found it hard to breathe. He was surrounded by air, and yet it seemed like he could not take it in. He began to pant. He started to get lightheaded and one of the men saw him and forced him to his knees and forced his head between his knees. Yeshua kneeled, head bent to the ground, gasping for air. And suddenly men were all around him, telling him to breathe, saying prayers for Yosef, crying. One man kept saying, “I'm sorry! I'm sorry!” And he got down on his knees and thrust his face at Yeshua's and kept saying, “I'm sorry! I'm sorry!”

“Did...you...?” Yeshua squeezed out between pants.

“No. No. No, I didn't drop the stone on him. I didn't even see it. I was joking with Boaz when Yosef yelled, 'Look out!' and shoved me out of the way. If I had seen it I would have moved and he wouldn't have pushed me out of the way and the stone wouldn't have...” And seeing the growing horror on Yeshua's face the man's words died on his lips and he burst into tears.

Yeshua stared at the man. Who was he? Yeshua didn't remember seeing him before? Was he new? Did Yosef even know him? Did his father die to save some random guy who wasn't even paying attention?

Yeshua turned to what was left of his father. He scooted on his knees, scraping them raw, not caring. He crawled to that hand. He clasped it with his own. It was warm. Yeshua wept.

It took a while for the men to hook up the rig to the stone again and move it off of Yosef's body. They tried to shield Yeshua's eyes from the sight but he pushed them away and looked. It was horrible. And yet the ruined body filled Yeshua with a conviction: this was not Yosef. The man he knew and loved was not there anymore. His humor, his practical mind, his delight in children, both his own and others, were not here anymore. This was like the discarded clothing of the man who raised him, taught him, admonished him, marveled at him and showed pride in him. The essence of Yosef was gone.

The men improvised a stretcher, a sturdy one, as you would expect builders to do. Some were reluctant to touch the body. One pleaded that it would make them ritually unclean. An older man showed disgust for them and knelt to shift the body. The man Yosef saved knelt as well and then a few others. Carefully, almost delicately, they picked up the body of Yosef and put him on the stretcher. The man who'd been saved stripped off his outer tunic and covered as much of the body as he could. Then, Yeshua leading the way, they carried it to Nazareth.

Yeshua was no longer crying. He felt empty. He felt almost as hollow as Yosef's body was. That day he had seen the death of a rooster and the death of his father. In both cases what was left both was and was not the being who had a moment before been alive. Are a dead chicken and a dead man ultimately the same? One is food for a family, the other for flies.

He could not accept that. There must be a difference. There must be a meaning. But was there? What gives a death meaning?

The silent procession left the city, under the shadows of the old crosses.