The Dovekeepers

Although these holy people had lost many of their own at the hands of the Romans, for they revealed that the settlement of Sechacha had been conquered and ruined even before the Temple fell, the Essenes weren’t willing to carry daggers, which they considered an affront to the greatness of God. Quickly my father made the decision not to tell them he was one of the Sicarii. These people considered the Sicarii to be on the side of darkness, snakes who defied Adonai. We merely announced that we were among those who had been expelled from Jerusalem, a poor father and daughter who had become wanderers. When we spoke of the mother and children traveling with us who had been stricken with fever, the Essene women had compassion and quickly resolved to help us. One among them, who identified herself as Tamar bat Aaron, escorted my father to a learned man, a priest whose followers called him Abba—father—a teacher of righteousness whose people did his bidding out of joy rather than duty.

Abba was so old he had to be brought everywhere in his chair, carried by four strong men; so pure Tamar whispered we must sit sixty arm spans away, the distance kept by all of the women, their heads covered, their eyes downcast yet shining, for although women were not included in the strict Essene ways, they were radiant when they heard the great man speak. Another priest of Abba’s magnitude would have turned us away, too enmeshed in prayer to be bothered with our pleas. Or perhaps such a powerful man might have agreed to hear us if we had brought silver in exchange for his favor. But Abba was convinced that every man was his brother. He was a follower of a teacher from Galilee who taught that peace was the only hope for mankind. Without it, we were like the jackals in the desert, nothing more.

Beside me, Tamar whispered that Abba had had ten wives and outlived them all; he now spent his days giving glory to God and teaching the ways of peace. The men here prayed three times a day; in the morning as they faced in the direction of Jerusalem, then again at sunset, and once more after nightfall. They carried what was holy within them, for every man was a temple, and every prayer spoken could be heard by our Father above us.

When told of our plight, Abba presented my father with a fever charm, a prayer slipped inside a metal tube that was to be attached to the arms of the afflicted. He offered a length of blessed rope, to tie into knots in the children’s tunics and bind them to good health, as well as a precious bulb of deep purple garlic to keep away demons. We were to recite the name Adonai a hundred times over a cup of water and garlic that had been boiled three times atop a hot fire, then instruct those who had sickened to drink while they prayed for grace from God.

WE WERE GIVEN pressed dates and barley cakes and allowed to spend the night. A light rain was falling, and the earth quickly flooded with puddles. My father was led to a common house to stay among the men. I tied my goat to a tamarisk tree and went with the unmarried girls, who looked at me with puzzled expressions. I must have appeared as a wild beast to them. When I uncovered my hair before them, they were shocked by the knots and set to work on them with wooden combs. They brought me to bathe in their ritual pool, where the water turned black all around me. Even I could see it was a bad omen, but the Essene girls laughed and said holy water took away all sin. Their people believed immersing themselves brought them closer to God, and they bathed several times a day. There was a double staircase into the bath; one flight of the limestone steps to enter, the other for the pure who had been cleansed so they might walk out of the water without touching those who were still unclean. Indeed, when I stepped out of the water, I felt truly cleansed for the first time since leaving Jerusalem. My hair was so red that the bees came to me, circling round. The Essene women laughed, suggesting that my hair must appear to be a field of roses. I had to run from the swarm and shout out that I was a woman, not a flower.

I was given a tunic by Tamar. It was a simple white garment, with a goat-hair rope to tie at the waist. I said it was too great a gift, but Tamar insisted. “Possessions are nothing, for they will be worthless in the World-to-Come,” she told me. “You cannot take any of it into the house of the Lord.”

The past seemed like a distant dream. We were far from the carnage we’d known in Jerusalem, several days’ walk from the caves where we’d found shelter. But what I’d done and what I’d come to know had been more than a dream. When I narrowed my eyes, I could see beyond the orchards to the pocked limestone cliffs and the path I’d marked with bits of blue. I could feel a pulse at the base of my throat, a flush of panic at having left Jachim ben Simon behind. I feared what had bound us together might disappear if I were no longer in his sight. Perhaps he would come to believe that I, too, was only a dream from which he had now awakened.