Why Me?

Why did he do that?

I am still holding what I could gather — less than half, I think, though I have not yet let myself count it properly. The coins are warm in my hand, which is strange. I would have thought they'd be cold from lying in the dust. But my palm has not stopped shaking long enough to feel much of anything else.

I did not steal from anyone today. I want that understood, though there is no one left to ask me to account for myself — the courtyard emptied around me the way water empties from a cracked jar, fast and noisily, and then all at once quiet, empty. I weighed every shekel honestly. I've never shaved a coin, never thumbed a scale, never told a man fresh off the road from Capernaum that the rate was higher than it was because he did not know better to ask. Reuben does that, two stalls down, nearer the gate, where the pilgrims are still dazed and will not think to question him. Reuben's table is still standing. I watched it stand while mine went over.

That is the part I cannot make hold still in my mind. If there was a reckoning today, it should have found him. I half wish it had — not only for spite, though God forgive me, there is some spite in it — but because if it had been Reuben, the whole thing would make a shape I could accept. A man cheats; a man is overturned. That is a sentence with a beginning and an end. Instead I have this. My honest scales in the dirt. My wages — not blood money, I will not call it that — wages, plainly earned, for a service that is needed.

Someone has to do this work. A man comes up from Capernaum, or down from the Galilee, with coin in his purse that bears Caesar's face on it, and he cannot put that into the treasury — everyone knows this; it is not a secret; it is not something I invented. The Law itself allows a man to turn his offering into silver for the journey, and to buy again with it when he arrives. I did not write that law. I only stand where it requires someone to stand.

So why did he look at me as though I were the thing in the Temple that needed driving out?

I have heard him teach. I will say that, even now, with my table in pieces and my hands still not steady. I went twice when he was speaking near the colonnade, because Rivka's cousin would not stop speaking of him, and because — I must be honest with myself — something in what he said reached past my ribs and took hold of a place I had not known was empty. He spoke of mercy as though it were not a thing kept only for the deserving. He spoke of the poor as though God had not forgotten them. I carried it home those nights like a coal, careful, not wanting to drop it, not wanting to be burned by it either.

So, I do not understand. I do not hate him — I want that understood too, though again, no one is asking. This is not the anger a man feels toward a thief in the night. It is something else, and I do not have the word for it. Tamar would know the word. She is five, and already cleverer with words than I am. Asher will ask tonight why my hands would not stop shaking when I came through the door, and I will have to find him something that is not a lie and is also not quite the truth — because the truth is that I do not know what happened to me today, only that it happened, and that little Noa will be hungry before the Sabbath whether or not I ever understand it.

Three children. A wife who has always trusted that I bring home what I say I will bring home. And I am standing in an empty court with half what I started the day closed in my fist, asking a question with no one left to answer it, because the man who might have answered it is already gone, and the dust he raised is still hanging in the light where my table used to stand.

Why did he do that?

I weighed every coin fairly. I want that understood.