Wings of Refuge

by Lynn Austin

  As Abby entered the enclosure and slowly approached The Wall, she wondered what she should pray for. She hadn’t been able to forget Hannah’s story of the Six-Day War and how the Israelis had miraculously won back the Old City and the freedom to worship at this site. But Jake’s words still lingered in Abby’s heart, pricking her conscience: “Don’t hate them . . . they win if you hate.”

  Abby admitted that she hated Lindsey Cook for destroying her marriage. And she hated Mark for betraying her trust and forsaking his marriage vows. She knew it was wrong, but how did she get rid of all that enmity? What should she do with it? Forgetting what Mark had done was impossible. Her feelings couldn’t be erased like a computer file with the simple push of the Delete button. Here in Israel she was able to put him out of her mind for several hours at a time, but eventually she would have to return home. She would have to face the empty closets, the lonely dinners, the vacant side of the bed. And her hatred would still be there like a carefully banked fire, waiting to re-ignite.

  “Show me what to do, Lord,” she prayed as tears welled in her eyes. “Show me what to do with all this pain. I’m so tired of carrying it around in my heart.” As she swiped at her tears, the comment Jake had made after the war inexplicably came to Abby’s mind: “They intended to harm us, but God intended it for good.”

  If He was a God of redemption, as Jake had said, could He possibly use even the wreck of her marriage to bring about something good? Abby wondered if she would have the opportunity to meet Jake before the summer ended. She would love to ask him.

  At last she pulled a scrap of paper from her pocket and wrote simply, Lord, please show me what to do. Then, because the cracks were already stuffed with prayers, she stood on tiptoe to tuck it into the only empty space she could find between the massive stones. As she turned to leave she saw Ari standing where she had left him beside the low wall bordering the women’s enclosure. He hadn’t gone into the men’s court to pray with the others. Instead, she had the unsettling feeling that he had been watching her.

  * * *

  “This house looks quite different from Leah’s home in De-gania, doesn’t it?” Hannah asked the gathered students. They had all walked to the ruins of what had once been the wealthy Jewish Quarter during the time of Christ. It was now on display underground beneath a new building in the Old City.

  “It looks like the villas I’ve seen in books on ancient Rome or Pompeii,” one of the students replied. “Paved courtyards, mosaic floors, stuccoed walls . . . are you sure it was kosher for Jews to live like this?”

  Hannah laughed. “You’re exactly right about the Roman influence in architecture, but this is what gives it away as Jewish . . . these mikvehs, or ritual baths. Two thousand years ago, these homes sat on a hill across the Tyropoeon Valley from the Temple—with a breathtaking view of it, in fact. We believe that the occupants were temple priests—which leads to our discussion of the Sadducees.

  “Most of the Sadducees were priests, and their response to the crisis of Roman occupation was cooperation. In return, the Romans allowed the Sadducees to control the temple rituals and sacrifices, turning the priesthood into a wealthy aristocracy. The Sadducees also controlled the Jewish ruling body, the Sanhedrin. Needless to say, the Sadducees were not too popular with the common people, who resented Roman rule and the crippling taxes they were forced to pay. The Pharisees had many more followers than they did, since the Pharisees opposed any foreign rule over God’s people.

  “The Sadducees accepted only the first five books of the Bible as God’s revelation of Himself and didn’t believe in a resurrection. They taught that righteousness could only be achieved by strict adherence to the temple rituals—which they controlled, of course.”

  “How convenient,” Abby heard Ari mumble.

  “The Pharisees, on the other hand,” Hannah continued, “believed that God also revealed Himself through the prophets, the writings, and the teachings of the great rabbis and sages. They believed righteousness was achieved by carefully observing the strict day-to-day details of ‘kosher’ living—more than six hundred laws that had to be strictly followed.”

  Ari made a sound of scorn. “Leave it to religious leaders to change ten commandments into six hundred rules.”

  “Christians often forget that Yeshua—Jesus—was Jewish,” Hannah continued. “He didn’t come to start a radical new religion but to fulfill the revelation of redemption that the Jewish people had already been given. All His life, Jesus carefully followed Jewish Law. We know that He journeyed here to Jerusalem to attend all the feasts and sacrifices in keeping with the Sadducees, and He dutifully paid His temple tax. He must have angered the Sadducees when He quoted the authority of the prophets and preached about a resurrection like the Pharisees, but what they probably resented the most was His claim that ‘One greater than the temple is here.’ In other words, His God-given authority superseded theirs.”

  Abby glanced at Ari as Hannah talked, curious about his reaction to a discussion of Jesus. As she expected, his frown was skeptical, disdainful. She wondered why he would even come on this day tour to Jerusalem, knowing that the seminar topic was “The Life and Times of Jesus.” It couldn’t be simply to help Hannah get around; she seemed quite capable of doing it on her own most of the time, and she wasn’t afraid to ask the students for help when she couldn’t. Perhaps, Abby thought cynically, it was because Ari couldn’t last a day without an argument with her.

  When Hannah finished her lecture and they all began walking to the next site, Abby wasn’t surprised when Ari questioned Hannah’s conclusions.

  “You said Yeshua challenged the priests’ authority, claiming His was greater. It sounds like a typical political power struggle to me. Why spiritualize it? So they had different beliefs—so do all the other religions around here.”

  “Because the power struggle was spiritual—and God had the final word. You know history, Ari. You know what happened to Jerusalem forty years after the priests succeeded in having an innocent man crucified so they could stay in power. The Romans destroyed it. They destroyed the Temple and the priests’ entire way of life. ‘The stones will cry out,’ Ari. The Sadducees vanished from history, yet Yeshua is alive. His kingdom remains.”

  “Excuse me,” Abby said, “but what you just said—‘The stones will cry out’—that sounds familiar, but I can’t quite place it.”

  “Jesus quoted those words on Palm Sunday,” Hannah said. “The Pharisees had demanded that He silence the people after they proclaimed Him as the Messiah, but Jesus said that if they kept quiet, the stones would cry out. Then He wept over Jerusalem because He knew that it would be destroyed. Jesus was quoting the Jewish prophet Habakkuk.”

  She stopped in the middle of the street and pulled her Bible from her pocket, paging through it until she found the passage. “Habakkuk wrote, ‘Woe to him who builds his realm by unjust gain . . . The stones of the wall will cry out, and the beams of the woodwork will echo it . . . Has not the Lord Almighty determined that the people’s labor is only fuel for the fire, that the nations exhaust themselves for nothing? For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.’ And that’s exactly what happened, Ari. The corrupt house that the Jewish leaders built was destroyed, but the Kingdom of God, which Jesus proclaimed, has spread to every corner of the globe.”

  The group arrived at the southwestern corner of what had once been the Temple Mount. All that remained of it, Hannah explained, were portions of the huge retaining walls that King Herod built when he expanded the natural platform on which the Temple once stood. The Wailing Wall was only part of this retaining wall, not part of the Temple itself.

  “Herod hoped that by rebuilding the Temple he would secure a lasting legacy for himself, but the construction work outlived him,” Hannah explained. “Begun in 20 B.C., the Temple was still incomplete forty-six years later when Jesus was asked to comment on its beauty. The work was finally finished in A.D. 64, but the c
ompleted temple stood for only six years before the Romans demolished it in A.D. 70.”

  How tragic, Abby thought as she walked past the jumbled debris. She gazed at the huge stones that had been hurled from the top of the wall, and the fury of the Roman destruction amazed her. The stones will cry out.

  “One of the ruined stones they found right here had an inscription,” Ari said suddenly. It was the first time he had contributed to Hannah’s lectures all day. “The stone was originally placed up there, on top of that wall, identifying it as the ‘place of trumpeting.’ It was where the priests stood to blow the shofar, signaling that the Sabbath or a holy day had begun.”

  Several of the college girls quickly gathered around him, hanging on his every word with adolescent infatuation. Abby saw why. Even she had to admit that Ari was quite good-looking—like her husband, Mark. She fought the urge to inform the girls that Ari was a married man.

  “This street along the western wall was lined with shops in the first century,” he continued. “They probably sold overpriced trinkets to all the tourists, just like the junk shops in the Arab market.” He almost smiled.

  “Jerusalem had tourists way back then, Dr. Bazak?” one of the girls asked.

  “They were . . . eh, how do you say? Pilgrims, not tourists. The Torah required all Jewish men to travel to Jerusalem three times a year for the three religious festivals: Pesach, which you call Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. How do you call those last two in English, Hannah?”

  “The Feast of Pentecost and the Feast of Tabernacles.”

  “Yes, thank you. Devout Jews traveled here from all over the Roman Empire three times a year. Hundreds of thousands of people. Over here,” he said, pointing, “we found the remains of forty-eight mikvehs. The people were required to bathe to purify themselves before worshiping. These stairs, over here on the south side, date from that time period. They once led to doors, which you can see are now blocked. Inside are tunneled passageways leading up to the Temple Mount. I like to picture how it must have looked, with Herod’s huge structure on the mountaintop and all the people streaming up to it with their offering baskets and sacrifices.”

  Abby could almost picture it, too, and she marveled at the depth of devotion that would inspire someone to travel so far in order to worship God. Back home, she could barely muster the energy to get out of bed once in a while on a Sunday morning and drive to church. She thought of Leah and the other villagers of Degania and the long, rugged journey they would have made to Jerusalem, probably on foot. She wondered what they would have thought of the city and the Tem-pie once they arrived . . . and if they had found the journey worthwhile.

  JERUSALEM—A. D. 47

  I’ve never seen so many people!” Leah said. She gripped her little brother Matthew’s hand tightly so he wouldn’t get lost and clung to the back of her brother Gideon’s belt with her other hand as they threaded their way through the square below the Temple Mount.

  “It’s too crowded,” Matthew whined. “I can’t even see.”

  “It’s a blessing,” Abba said, turning to them. His weathered face was stern. “The Holy One promised to make Abraham’s descendants as many as the stars in the heavens. We should not complain when the Holy One blesses us.”

  Leah didn’t feel blessed. She felt damp and shivery from her required dip in the mikveh before climbing the Temple Mount. And as she gazed in awe at the dazzling array of goods for sale in the Street of the Vendors, she knew that her family was much too poor to afford even the cheapest trinket. Jerusalem was a city of great contrasts; rich men were transported by slaves in covered litters, while cripples in rags crawled to busy street corners to beg. But the majority of people were pilgrims like Leah’s family, the men bearing lambs across their shoulders, the women baskets of tithes on their heads. Some of the pilgrims sang the Passover psalm as they climbed the stairs to the Temple: “The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone . . . blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” And like Leah, most of the pilgrims were gaping in wonder at the mammoth temple complex. The retaining walls alone seemed as tall as a mountain, the courtyard more vast than an entire village.

  Abba stopped suddenly, herding the family to the side of the street as a squadron of Roman soldiers swept past. Their sandals and the stiff leather breastplates they wore over their tunics creaked like a new wagon harness when they walked. Roman soldiers appeared everywhere in Jerusalem, policing the streets, standing guard to control the mob near the Temple Mount, parading in front of the royal palace and the An-tonia Fortress, clutching their spears. Leah was more than a little afraid of them. The way they strutted around with their red capes swaying behind them, their swords swinging at their sides, their contempt for Jews barely disguised reminded her of Reb Nahum’s cocky roosters strutting like bullies around the barnyard, pecking at the lowly hens. The soldiers were also an unwelcome reminder that she was a captive in an enslaved nation.

  “If the Holy One set us free from slavery in Egypt,” she wondered aloud as the soldiers passed, “why doesn’t He set us free from the Romans?”

  “Maybe He wants to,” Gideon said angrily, “but our leaders won’t act. The Torah says not to place a foreigner over you, one who is not a brother Israelite, but—”

  “Doesn’t the Torah also say to honor thy father and thy mother?” Abba’s voice was sharp-edged, like flint striking flint, making sparks. His dark eyes flashed from Gideon to Leah and back again.

  “Yes, Abba,” Gideon said.

  “Then you would both honor me by holding your thoughts and your tongues.”

  The crowd thinned slightly after Leah and her family began to climb the huge arched stairway to the top of the mount. As they paused to rest on the first landing, Leah gazed across the narrow valley to the Roman-style villas on the opposite hill, their red-tiled roofs supported by rows of white pillars. They were larger and more lavish than the villa back home in Degania where the district tax collector, Reuben ben Johanan, lived. Matthew noticed the mansions, too.

  “There must be lots and lots of tax collectors in Jerusalem,” he said.

  “No, that’s where the priests live,” Gideon said, his contempt barely disguised. “And the members of the Sanhedrin.”

  Leah compared those mansions with the house where they were staying while in Jerusalem. Abba’s cousin Samuel was a stonemason who had moved away from Degania with his family to find work in the city. His home in the squalid laborers’ district outside the city walls was dark and cramped. Samuel’s wife had swept a storage room clean to provide a place for her guests to sleep.

  Leah’s legs ached by the time she reached the top of the stairs, but the view spread out before her was well worth it. The paved mountaintop was ten times larger than the entire village of Degania, the Temple itself so huge and majestic it made her feel insignificant. There was so much going on all around her in the outer courtyard that she was certain she could stay up here for a year and still not see it all. She followed Abba as if in a dream, past a covered portico where a rabbi taught his students, past more beggars and cripples in their pitiful rags, past a knot of Jewish men in foreign dress bickering at the table of the money changers. Gideon had explained how it was against Jewish law to pay the temple tax with foreign coins bearing pagan images.

  The longest lines were composed of families like her own, who were waiting for a priest to inspect the lamb they had brought from home. Today, five days before the feast, was the day each family selected their lamb and had it declared acceptable for the Passover sacrifice. Families without lambs waited to purchase a “clean” one from the priests. Leah’s father and brothers joined the inspection line, carrying the lamb from Abba’s flock, the lamb Leah had secretly named Little One. As she joined them in line, she warned herself not to get sentimental. She knew from the time Saul first separated Little One from the flock and tethered him in the yard for Leah to feed that he would be their Passover sacrifice. She had tried not to become too attached to him, but
she hadn’t considered that the lamb would become so attached to her. He followed her around the tiny yard like her shadow, bleating piteously with his funny hoarse stutter whenever she disappeared from his sight, licking her with his scratchy pink tongue whenever she knelt to feed him.

  When it was their turn for the priest’s inspection, tears filled Leah’s eyes as Saul brought Little One forward, cradling him proudly in his huge arms. Leah was proud of their lamb, too. He was perfect—clean, healthy, uninjured, spotless. She forced back her tears, not daring to cry. Abba would rebuke such foolishness.

  As the priest set him on the table to inspect, he spread his broad hand awkwardly over Little One’s head, clumsily poking his thumb into the lamb’s eye. To Leah, the act seemed deliberate, and she nearly cried out along with the lamb. The priest frowned unpleasantly as he examined Little One, his expression that of a man who has just eaten sour grapes. He wore a white robe of very finely woven linen and a matching white turban on his bushy black hair. His fierce black eyebrows touched in the center when he frowned, and with his beaked nose, he reminded Leah of a raven. When he opened his mouth to speak, she almost expected him to crow.