Chapter Four
News traveled slowly to Natzeret, but it traveled.
A man named Yohanan—Yohanan ben Zekharyah, a kohen’s son from the hill country of Yehudah—was drawing enormous crowds to the Yarden river. He was immersing people and calling them to repentance. He was saying the kingdom of God was near.
The family had heard of Yohanan before, in the way families hear of distant relatives who take unusual paths. Miriam’s kinswoman Elisheva had borne a son late in life—miraculously late, the story went, her husband Zekharyah was struck mute in the Temple and not speaking again until the boy was named. The family spoke of it occasionally, the way families speak of things that are too strange to explain and too persistent to forget. Elisheva’s boy. Always was different. Living in the wilderness now, apparently. Wearing camel hair. Eating locusts and wild honey. Drawing crowds to the river and saying alarming things about repentance and axes laid to the roots of trees.
Miriam listened to these reports and said very little. Ya’akov noticed.
Ya’akov noticed, too, the way Yeshua listened. The stillness that came over his brother was not curiosity. It was the look of a man hearing a signal he had been waiting for.
When Yeshua left, he did not make a speech about it. He simply said that he needed to go south, to the Yarden, and that he was not sure when he would return.
Miriam packed food for the journey. She held her eldest son’s face in her hands and looked at him, and whatever passed between them required no words.
Ya’akov was less generous.
“The workshop,” he said, standing in the doorway. It was early morning. Yeshua’s traveling bag was over his shoulder. The younger children were still asleep.
“You and Yoses can manage it,” Yeshua said.
“That isn’t the point.”
Yeshua looked at him. That look—patient, gentle, and utterly immovable. Ya’akov would see it again many times in the years ahead, always from the wrong side.
“I know,” Yeshua said. “I’m sorry.”
He walked south. Ya’akov watched him until the road bent around the base of the hill and his brother’s figure merged with the dusty landscape and disappeared. Then he turned and went into the workshop and picked up the mallet and the chisel and began the day’s work.
He was perhaps twenty-five. The mallet was heavy in his hand. The stone was hard. He worked all morning without stopping, and if the blows fell harder than usual, there was no one there to remark on it.
* * *
Yeshua did not come back.
Or rather, he came back changed. The reports came first—confused, contradictory, increasingly alarming. Yeshua had been immersed by Yohanan. Yeshua had gone into the wilderness for forty days. Yeshua was teaching in the synagogues of the Galil, and people were listening. Yeshua had called followers to himself—fishermen from Kfar Nahum, ordinary men who had left their work and their families to walk with him.
Left their families.
Ya’akov absorbed that detail in the workshop, where he was now working alone most days. Yoses helped when he could, but Yoses was younger and less skilled, and the quality of work Ya’akov could produce by himself was not what two brothers had managed together. Clients noticed. A stonework contract in Tzippori went to another tekton. The income thinned. Ya’akov patched the gap by working longer hours, by taking smaller jobs he would once have declined, by stretching the household’s stores a little further each week. Miriam mended clothes that should have been replaced. The Shabbat meals grew simpler.
None of this was catastrophic. They were not starving. But Ya’akov felt the weight of it daily—the quiet, grinding unfairness of being the one who stayed, the one who kept the household running, the one who faced the clients and the creditors and the neighbors while his brother wandered the Galil with a band of fishermen and a growing reputation for saying extraordinary things.
He swung the mallet. He laid the stone. He said nothing, because saying something would have meant admitting what he felt, and what he felt was not something a dutiful son was supposed to feel about his eldest brother.
* * *
The first reports were easy to dismiss.
A merchant passing through Natzeret mentioned that a healer in Kfar Nahum had cast out an unclean spirit in the synagogue. Could be anyone. Healers and exorcists were not uncommon—the countryside was full of men who claimed powers they could not demonstrate and cures they could not replicate. Ya’akov filed it away and went back to work.
Weeks passed. The spring rains came and went. The goats needed tending. A wall in the village needed repair. The rhythm of the year continued, and Ya’akov almost relaxed.
Then a relative visited—a cousin from Kana, a woman who spoke quickly and enjoyed being the bearer of remarkable news. She mentioned Yeshua’s name specifically. The healings were real, she said. She had spoken to someone who had been there. The crowds were growing. Ya’akov pushed back. People exaggerate. You know how stories get on the road.
More time. Harvest came. The summer heat. Another Shabbat, and another, and another. The afternoon prayers facing south toward Yerushalayim. The evening Shema as the stars appeared. The rhythm held.
Then the story about the tax collector reached Natzeret, and that one Ya’akov could not file away, because the neighbor who told him was smirking. A tax collector. Yeshua had walked up to a tax collector’s booth and said follow me, and the man had stood up and left everything and gone with him. And then—the neighbor leaned in, enjoying this part—Yeshua had gone to the tax collector’s house and eaten with him. Eaten with a mokhes. Sat at his table, shared his food, in front of everyone.
Ya’akov said nothing. He finished his conversation and walked home and sat down on the bench outside the workshop and stared at nothing for a long time.
That’s not Yeshua, he thought. Yeshua wouldn’t do that. Someone is twisting the story. Someone has it wrong.
But the neighbor had not been uncertain. He had been delighted in the way that small-minded people are delighted when someone else’s family provides them with material.
* * *
Months passed. The reports came in waves, with long silences between them—silences that Ya’akov tried to fill with work and routine and the pretense that his brother’s activities were not his concern. Then another wave would arrive and undo it all.
A woman was traveling with him. A woman from Magdala. She had had seven demons cast out of her, the reports said, and now she was among his followers, traveling openly with a group of men. Ya’akov heard this from a merchant’s wife at the well, and the woman’s eyebrows told him everything about what the village was making of it. He did not ask what they were saying. He did not need to.
That can’t be right, Ya’akov told himself. He would know better. He was raised better.
He was defending his brother now—not publicly, never publicly, but inside his own mind, pushing back against the reports the way you push back against water leaking through a wall. Each report was a new crack. Each defense required more effort than the last.
He told a paralytic man his sins were forgiven. Just like that. As if the authority were his to exercise.
Someone misheard him. He was praying for the man. The story got garbled.
He healed a man’s withered hand on the Shabbat, and when the Perushim challenged him, he said the Son of Man is lord of the Shabbat.
He said what?
The cracks were widening. The water was coming through. And Ya’akov was running out of plaster.
Because the reports were coming from too many sources now—not just gossip, not just the neighbor who enjoyed bad news, but the cousin who had seen things with her own eyes, and the merchant who had been there, and the pilgrim who had spoken to a man who had been healed. And Miriam, who heard everything and said nothing, and whose silence was worse than any confirmation, because her silence meant she was not surprised.
Ya’akov sat on the roof one night and allowed himself to think the thought he had been avoiding for months. The reports are true. My brother is actually doing these things. And I don’t know what that means.