Anna nodded her head and laughed. They had an ethical dilemma teaching deaf kids to climb: in order for each kid to learn how to keep his or her peers safe when the climber was attached to the rope and climbing on the wall, the person holding the rope, known as the belayer, had to hold the rope and run it through a friction-creating belay device. Two hands had to be on the rope at all times, and in the event of a climber falling off the wall, the belayer was to crimp down the rope in the belay device so the climber’s fall would be arrested.
The trouble with deaf kids learning this was that they communicated with their hands. Usually Anna and Sal heard the soft soundings of deaf people, occasionally growing louder in excitement. But as they grew more excited and wanted to help their climbing partners, or look to an instructor for help, they would take their hands off the rope and begin conversing in American Sign Language. This was not a good thing for the safety of the climber on the rope.
Still, the instructors couldn’t exactly tell the belayers they couldn’t communicate. So it was a population-specific dilemma. Anna treasured these experiences; they made her a better instructor.
She recalled one of her tensest moments at an outdoor climbing site teaching a deaf kid, Aaron, to rappel. Rappelling was a counterintuitive activity that consisted of hooking a person up to a rope and telling him to walk backward off a cliff. One kid had actually vomited before going over the edge because he couldn’t bring himself to defy his elders and say “No! I won’t!” With Aaron, Anna had a safety rope on him for backup, and he was supposed to control his own rate of descent with the same friction device climbers used for climbing up rock. He began whimpering, “OhbyGot, OhbyGot,” his m’s voiced as b’s. His hands flailed, speaking what, she could only guess. Once she had convinced him to get his hands back on the rope and his face had changed back from ashen to pink, she had called the interpreter up and the two of them had successfully talked him backwards off the sixty-foot cliff.
Sal belayed Anna up the test routes, watching the well-toned latissimus dorsi muscles work in her back. She checked to make sure all of the holds were bolted in securely, no “spinners,” which could disconcert a climber at best, and at worst make him peel off the wall unexpectedly, usually getting scraped or banged up in the process.
“So when would this be? You going to Israel.” He lowered her off the climb.
“Probably not till the fall.”
“And you’re just here for the summer, teaching classes and working at the barn?”
“Yeah, some, and I’ll be writing the sports rag for the U.”
Between the rock climbing work and the riding lessons she taught at a stable dedicated to saving mustangs, Anna did well enough financially, but her family felt she underutilized her potential—meaning, she was too smart for what she was doing. She should have gone to Princeton for law. Jonathan saw the logic in this, and was generally on her family’s side, which didn’t sit well with her.
Jonathan wanted to marry Anna—he said. She resisted on a couple of counts. First, she wanted more from Jonathan. He made a good living, but guts to accompany the heart on his sleeve would have suited her better. He was reserved with his emotions—blocked, even, at times. Going into a relationship most women would think they could change this quality in a man, but instead Anna just observed.
Resistance came naturally to Anna, but her consistent refusal of Jonathan had more to do with evasion than obstinacy. While she could see herself being a mother, she couldn’t see herself being a wife. She had nieces and nephews she adored; she would have been loving, and an adequate disciplinarian. She knew how to keep someone safe. She could see herself being in charge of a relationship, such as mothering, or teaching a class, but she couldn’t picture herself surrendering to one. Jonathan compared her to a wrestler with all the right slippery moves. At least Jonathan was a good climbing partner.
Beyond what she intuited about the relationship she was in, Anna was hardly familiar with her deeper beliefs. She thought the popularization of Buddhism in America was a wonderful guideline for living, and was curious about Taoism, and what on earth all those people in China might believe; she admired some “New Age” concepts, or the metaphors for life presented by quantum mechanics; but she kept her nose focused very much in the culture of the present, even though technologically she was somewhat handicapped.
Her work-related travels to other countries were curios, dolls in local traditional costume collected and put in the closet of her mind. Had she been called on for any serious commitment or conviction of belief, she would have politely dodged the request. Philosophical arguments over beer held no attraction for her.
The notion of going to where people died daily for their beliefs in a land that had been fraught with strife and soaked in blood for millennia began to irritate her; she wasn’t capable of comprehending how seriously the inhabitants took religion. She supposed she should ask her friend Paula for some tips about the area, since the woman had made a couple of trips to the “Holy Land,” but she’d have to let some time pass before she sent out an e-mail. She was sick of the drama from that sector.
Sal lowered her down out of her reverie.
“All set then?”
“Looks good to me. Bring ’em on.”
She rehearsed in her head how the climbing lesson would go, but got stuck when she tried to apply the same technique to telling Jonathon that night that she intended to go to Israel in the fall.
6
Capernaum
Sabbath was imminent. Rivka underwent so much preparation for the day of rest, even with Aviel’s and Devorah’s help, that she thought it no wonder Adonai rested on the seventh day—He must have been exhausted. Especially without a woman to help him do the work. She knew that when scripture said that everyone in a man’s house was to rest on the Sabbath, including his slaves and ass and so on, the fact that his wife had been left out of the exemption from labor simply meant that she and her husband were a unit; there was no need to mention her as an individual. Nonetheless, she thought it an irony that it was the woman who did all the work in preparation and she was not, in fact, able to rest on the Sabbath. Somebody had to clean the dishes after the meal. In the beginning she had complained to Jairus but realized she was only creating a lack of rest for both of them by doing so, so with time she relented and her tongue grew less sharp. The ever-so-slight smoothing of her husband’s brow was the only indication that she had found the way to create shalom bayit, peace in the household.
Jairus had declined having servants or slaves, even though they could have afforded them. So, when it came to tasks ranging from large to small, whether slaughtering, or making bread, or tidying the house, or carrying water buckets for the animals, all of this had to be done in advance by the family in order to uphold the prohibition of doing any work on the Sabbath. If they had had a non-Jewish slave, he or she could have done the work for them—but Jairus didn’t like the idea. He had Greek notions that all people were more or less equal, and he could not bring himself to order around anyone. Fortunately, that meant he did not dictate to his wife or children, either. He was a benevolent, in fact, indulgent, head of the household.
Rivka heaved the goat’s milk bucket in her calloused hand. She had heard of wealthy women in Jerusalem dipping their hands in a special wax to soften their skin, then having their nails trimmed and shaped. What loveliness! she sighed. But then she corralled her momentarily extravagant thoughts, grateful that her daughter was alive and that she was bringing in milk rather than her daughter’s funeral linens.
It should be a special Sabbath because of their joy, but right now it was not going so well. Aviel seemed to have lost her balance in the order of the household and was having difficulty regulating her mood. When she wasn’t doing her chores obstinately, she would go into the corner of the room she shared with Devorah, and look out on the yard with the goats and the mule. She was writing furiously, her hair strewn wild and loose about her shoulders, her bare feet tucked awkwardly under her with no regard for decorum as she sat hunched and scribbling.
On this Sabbath Devorah interrupted