A Voice Heard in Ramah

Her son is alive and mine is dead. Benjamin tells me all about how her son excels in the yeshiva, and how quick he is to learn the Torah, and how he wishes he had more students like him. But my son is a silence between us, his short existence somehow made even shorter by our inability to speak about him.

I’ve tried, but all Benjamin says is “The Lord has blessed us with two beautiful girls.” But I want to talk about him, my little Yacov. I want to remember his proud, eight-toothed grin when he brought me sticks and flowers he liked. I want to talk about his soft baby arms and the funny way he ran, tottering along with such joy in his face.   

Instead, I hear about her son. “Far beyond the other boys in memorization,” my husband boasts.

As we women gather to get the day’s water, his mother tells me, “He learns so quickly; he’s just helped his father finish a fine table!”

“Such a helpful boy,” his grandmother says.

Sometimes my husband has some of the boys from the yeshiva stay for the midday meal. I made soup for them one day; barley and lamb. I was only half listening to their voices in the other room; my husband’s low, quiet tones, and three boys. I lifted the lid to see if I’d seasoned it properly, the steam rising up in my face, and I recognized that boy’s voice as he said something to my husband. He is a little older than the others and his voice is deepening. I ladled the soup into bowls and I thought about how my son’s voice will never crack. I reached for the pepper. Then I served the soup and listened at the door as that boy hacked and coughed and sneezed over his soup while the rest of them giggled into their hands. Some coil of anger deep inside me purred.

After that, I was always looking for opportunities. Opportunities for what, I’m not sure I really ever said to myself. It was just little things—like how I wouldn’t respond to his greeting when he walked past on his way to the yeshiva in the morning. When the boys had writing exercises, I’d sneak in afterwards and blot his work, just a little, not so Benjamin would notice, just the boy.

I thought I hid it well, until his mother cornered me one afternoon. She knocked as I was finishing putting my girls down for their midday naps, and I couldn’t very well throw her out. So I gave her a stiff little smile.

“Mary. Come in.”

I made it very clear I didn’t really want her to come in. But she listened to the meaning of my words, not my tone, and stepped inside, her shoulders a little stooped, her expression hesitant. “Rachel, I’m sorry for dropping in on you like this, but…I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Yes?” I said, still standing, not inviting her to sit.

“It seems like you…sometimes I notice the way you look at my son—Has he done something to upset you?”

“I don’t know what a child could do that would upset me.” I said, coldly.

Mary flushed. “I’m sorry, I’m bumbling around all over the place. It just seems so strange—” Her forehead knits up just like it always did when she was puzzled or upset about something and she burst out, “We were friends once, Rachel! Can’t we just sit and talk? I was so excited that we are living in the same town again but you’re so strange and cold, and it’s so strange to see you without little Yacov—”

I had to stop her.  I had to hurt her. How dare she mention my son to me, when hers hadn’t been killed?

“Mary.” I said, “My husband may talk about kindness and mercy, but we all know what the Torah says about women who conceive children before marriage. I have daughters to raise and I have to be careful about who they associate with.”

She went pale and drew back a step. For a moment, I thought she’d defend herself, as if it were defensible. But then she just said quietly, “I’m sorry you feel that way,” and left without another word.

When she was gone, I sat down and cried into my hands. We did used to be friends, close friends, back when Mary and Joseph lived in Bethlehem. We were Mary and Rachel, inseparable, going to synagogue together, talking about the readings on the way home. I had not really listened in synagogue since Herod ordered my little Yacov killed—after he ordered all the baby boys in Bethlehem killed. Mary and her husband and son had left town only two days earlier, escaping Herod’s wrath.

After it happened, Benjamin took comfort in Messianic prophecies of salvation. But a woman’s world is practical, and there is not much comfort for grief in a distant rescue for the nation of Israel. After Herod ripped my child from my arms, no Israelite king could give him back to me again.

Finally, I could not bear to live in Bethlehem anymore, so we moved to Nazareth, in the hopes of leaving behind the grief and the terror of that night. And then, then of all the insurmountable, impossible, infuriating things she comes back from Egypt and moves into Nazareth with her husband and her son. And she acts as if she’s going to be friends with me, the rabbi’s wife, again!

I stopped crying, wiping my nose and feeling my face heat with rage. I bunched up my skirts in my hands and hated her. I hated her for leaving, hated her for having a son before she was properly married even, and does the Lord punish her for her sin? No, she gets to keep him!

My anger at Mary stoked my anger towards her son even more. One day I trapped a stray dog in our courtyard, and then let it out as he passed by. I picked a hole in his prayer shawl. I let a mouse loose in his lunch box.

One day the boys were outside playing ball and the ball rolled past the house.

“Girls, stay here.” I told my daughters, and went out after the ball. I don’t know what I thought I would do with it. Knock something over and blame him, I suppose. I tiptoed into the silence of the yeshiva, into the quiet sanctuary of scrolls and ink and afternoon sunlight. The boys were a distant, muffled sound outside the walls. Except—I stopped, my breath inhaled and held. There he was, sitting over the Torah scroll, shoulders hunched in concentration, reading aloud.

My son would have been out with the other boys playing. My son would have been enjoying the lunch break and the afternoon, not reading even more like some freak. My fingers flexed around the hard, heavy weight of the ball and a dark thought entered my mind. I swear, it was something I never would have imagined I could think.

Yet in that silent place, unseen, it presented itself to me with a power that made me tremble with anticipation. Supposing—I thought—a stray ball from the boys’ game accidentally flew through the window? What if it knocked this—interloper, this cheater, this intruder on the head? It wouldn’t kill him—probably. It would just hurt him, maybe injure him for life. I imagined Mary, weeping over his limp body.

My arm raised. My breath was short, my vision narrowed to that curly, dark head bent over the Torah. I could not have listened or cared what he was reading. In that moment, there was no room for righteousness in my heart and mind.

But the Lord was good to me, even when I could barely have called myself his servant. He opened my ears, and I heard what the boy was reading, I heard it in his reedy, half-cracked teenage voice, low and sweet, as if the words he spoke were the breath of life to him.

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given;

and the government shall be upon his shoulder, 

 and his name shall be calledWonderful Counselor,

Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

And for the first time in many years, I heard what the words were saying. Isaiah was not speaking of some triumphant political takeover. I didn’t care about that. My business was with marriage, childbirth, babies and managing a household—earthly, normal things that went on no matter what political turmoil was happening.

But as I realized what these words were not saying, what they did say arrested me—a child—a son, given to us. The idea solidified inside of me and halted all other thoughts, like I had swallowed the boys’ ball and it was lodged in my chest.

The idea that the Lord would provide a son for us suddenly came close to me, put a hand in my heart and gripped it. I did not imagine a far-off princeling for the nation of Israel. I imagined a son given to rescue me, to fill the angry void of anger that was growing insatiable inside of me, speak to me in my grief, bring peace to my turmoil. And another phrase from past years of synagogue echoed in my ears, the words spoken when the Hebrews groaned under the cruel Egyptian oppression. “The Lord heard.” Could he have heard me? Heard my weeping when no one else did? Could the Lord’s Messiah heal not just Israel, but me?

The ball dropped out of my numb fingers. It fell on the floor with a crack and the boy jumped and turned to see me, tears streaming down my face, half hunched from my furtive sneaking and my shame. I had to say something.

“Those are—those are beautiful words. Thank you.”

I could say no more;. I couldn’t properly apologize. But I think, somehow, he understood me.