I

was there at the splitting of the Yarden.

Not among the people. Shevet Menasheh was given a choice — two portions, one on either side of the Yarden. My father had taken the land on this side of the river, rich with pasture for his sheep and space for his family, and my brothers would inherit it one day. I had a responsibility to stay with them, as much as I longed to see our promised land. They were still only children, Evyasar only 14 and Yosef the youngest at only ten. Our father had been among the last to die in the wilderness, in those final few years of punishment for the spies. A gift from Hashem, to have him for so long, though I did wonder sometimes if, once my mother had died, he was reluctant to marry me off because he knew that I would be needed to care for the boys one day soon.

I brought the boys up to a craggy mountain near the Yarden, and we sat together on the dusty rock, eating mealy cakes and watching with quiet awe as the rest of the nation gathered around the Aron and Yehoshua bin Nun. I couldn’t see Yehoshua from my spot — I was too far away — but I had grown up with the stories of the Yam Suf, of my mother’s wondering reports of the way that the water had risen on each side of her, of her tears as she described their escape from Mitzrayim. I would not miss seeing this.

It had been five of us back then. Ruchama was another orphan, only 13, a cousin of a neighbor who had latched on to us because her only uncle had left with Yehoshua. She had brought the cakes.

We had watched the Aron at the front of the river, the way that the people streamed around it, paused only to hear Yehoshua speak.

I cried then, gazing down at those tiny figures. It was still too raw, the loss of Moshe Rabbeinu. I was a girl who had twice lost a father, who could only cling to her Father in Heaven. Could anyone replace Moshe Rabbeinu? Would Hashem ever do the same wonders for someone else?

But then the waters split, and my breath caught in my throat. It was a reminder, a balm to my tortured, grieving soul. Hashem is still with us. He always will be.

“It’s incredible,” Ruchama whispered. “I wish I could be down there.” Our eyes, together, moved to the front of the nation, to the men from Menasheh who walked forward without turning back.

“As do I,” said Evyasar, the oldest of my little brothers. He was only 14, too young to join the army, and I didn’t dare tell him how relieved I was that he was still with me. I didn’t dare comment, either, on how Ruchama and Evyasar glanced at each other in shared understanding.

T

oday, alone in my hut with only Achinoam and her husband as my neighbors, I miss Evyasar more than ever. It has been three years since he last spoke to me. He is somewhere distant, perhaps, farming the wheat fields that he inherited. I hope so. I hope he’s happy.

Instead of Evyasar, it’s Achinoam and her husband who serve as my family. “Elihu ben Asri has expressed interest in taking you as his wife,” Achinoam tells me. “I would take it, if I were you. He is a formidable man, and he has a large holding in Ramos. You would live in splendor.” She wrinkles her nose. “I don’t know why he wouldn’t have gone for one of Tzidak’s daughters instead. Someone with an illustrious lineage. You would be a fool not to accept his offer, Sarah.”

Without my brothers or my father, the decision falls to me. But Achinoam is right, and I wouldn’t have made it this far if I weren’t practical.

I would be a fool not to accept the offer.

But I think of those thunderous eyes, and I feel a spark of fear. “He… he has a holding in Ramos?”

“Not his own inheritance, of course,” Achinoam points out. “This is a Levi city. But he is wealthy enough to rent a space as large as he likes in the city he chooses, while his farmers plow at home.” She shakes her head enviously. “What a match. If only I’d been forty years younger!”

Her husband looks only mildly offended. He shakes his head and turns to me. “Shall I accept on your behalf?” he asks gently.

I take a breath. I think of my little cottage here, my spinning wheel and the oppressive quiet. I think of family before it had all fallen apart. I think about a husband, children, a life where I want for nothing.

I can’t afford to say no, regardless of the anxiety that settles over me, imagining sharing a home with someone who caused another person’s death. Imagining this stranger I know nothing about.

“Thank you,” I murmur. “Yes, I will accept.”

W

hen I lived with my brothers, it was in a small hut on our father’s land, a makeshift building that we’d never really upgraded as the years crawled by. Ruchama had filtered in, day after day, until I had finally taken pity on her and invited her to share my little corner of the hut. The soil was fertile, and the land was good, and as we managed to turn out more crops, we added a second hut for the boys, then a third once Evyasar married.

In Ramos, my home is a little less broken-down, but even smaller than that hut. I have few visitors, and I have only a bed against one wall and my work items against the other. There is no fire — the air here is cooler than the desert where I spent my first 24 years, but not enough that I am left shivering at night — and I subsist mostly on bread from Yemimah and vegetables that need no cooking.

None of it compares to the house where my new husband brings me.

Our wedding was small. Despite Elihu’s wealth, he seemed loath to create a spectacle, still a mystery to me. I had no family willing to attend.

“Here,” he says, his voice rumbling over the hoofbeats of our horses. Horses, not donkeys, another luxury. “Is this satisfactory?”

His home is two floors of polished stone and whitewashed mud-brick, nestled among the olive groves. Cedar beams hold it high, gleaming over a packed earth floor, and the entrance is framed by carved wooden doors. There are stables for the horses to one side, a veranda on the other, and a servant tends a pomegranate tree in front of it.

We pause in a large courtyard, paved and lined with palm trees, and Elihu repeats, “Is it?”

“Oh!” I startle. I have forgotten that he asked me anything, struck dumb as I’ve been by the house. “Yes, thank you. Very satisfactory.”

“I don’t know what you’re accustomed to.”

“Not this,” I confess, and my heart races with trepidation when Elihu turns to look at me. I am still very afraid of him, and what little I have seen of him has made me even more fearful. “It’s… it will take some getting used to. But I am very grateful.”

“It is your home now.” We get off our horses, and I look around instead of meeting his eyes, my chest still thumping hard. He escorts me inside, and then he pauses. “I must go to the beis medrash now. You may familiarize yourself with the house.”

I am relieved when he rides away. I wonder how he might have killed his victim, watching him ride with his head high and his shoulders so broad that he is as wide across as his warhorse. Was it truly a mistake? An ir miklat will house any murderer until trial, but I’m sure that I would have been told if my husband was awaiting trial. And once the ruling comes in, most of those murderers would have left. The murder has to be a mistake of carelessness, not a simple accident.

But there are so many who lie, especially in Gilad, where we seem to have more murderers than anywhere else. There are some who might convince a beis din successfully that it was a mistake. Hashem will punish them, I know without a doubt, but if Elihu is one of them — if his punishment has not yet come—

Perhaps he is just a man who chose to live in an ir miklat when he has fields and cattle elsewhere, when he had the distinguished privilege of escorting Yehoshua bin Nun, when he could have been anywhere else.

Perhaps, but I find it unlikely.

I

still spin, even though I no longer sell my wares. I go to the market now as a customer, fingering beautiful fabrics and buying goats that my cook will freshly slaughter and serve for dinner. When I visit my old cottage one afternoon, several weeks after my wedding, I find that it has been claimed by a young man — a boy not much older than my youngest brother — who had improperly tied an ox to a post and allowed it to gore someone else.

I don’t need it anymore, and I’m glad this young man has found a home there. He reminds me a little of Evyasar when he was younger, with those curly peyos and that thin scattering of hair on his face that isn’t quite a beard.

As I return home, I gently quiet the yearning that tugs at my heart and focus on what I do have, what I am grateful for. My mysterious husband is rarely home, which leaves me time to haunt the quiet rooms of our house, finding new hobbies in the silence. I have never had many friends, and there is peace in solitude, though I will never grow accustomed to the maids who flit in and out, asking if I need anything.

Mostly, I spin and weave.

I don’t care for spinning, but the weaving is soothing. The cutting and sewing is even better. I make dresses for the maids, tunics for the servants, a blanket for my horse. I pull the thread like it is something I can pull, a piece of belonging where I have never had it before.

I am so absorbed in my work that I don’t realize I’m being watched until I twist to spool a new thread and see the shadow in the doorway from the corner of my eye. I cry out in surprise, dropping my spool, and it rolls away from me, across the room toward the doorway.

Elihu bends down to retrieve it and holds it out to me, still on one knee. I walk gingerly to him. “I’m sorry,” I murmur. “You startled me.”

“The Levi lecturing today had to hurry out. There was an incident at the gates.” Incident is code for a new arrival who made it to Ramos just in time, the family of their victim at their heels. I swallow, imagining the confrontation at the gates to the city, the pain in every heart there.

“You weave beautifully,” Elihu says, nodding to my latest project, a half-finished apron.

“It’s not… it’s really not anything special,” I say, heat rising in my cheeks as he lifts it to examine it. “Achinoam… the wife of Oved… she taught how to weave. I was able to sell enough to buy what I needed for my brothers and — and me,” I finish, stumbling over my words. Elihu has never asked about my brothers, where they’ve gone and why they haven’t visited, and it’s too painful to talk about it.

With parents, perhaps, we would still be close. If I hadn’t been forced to mother my brothers, our relationship might be better now.

But there is no use in dwelling on it.

Elihu runs his fingers over the fabric. “You have a gift,” he says with authority. “Is it the spinning you enjoy? Or the weaving?”

“The weaving. I can’t stand the spinning.” I blurt it out without thinking, then wince. I don’t want to complain about the spinning, about the rough lines that I must pull and the hours of cleaning the wool. I still feel very much like a visitor in my husband’s house, in his life. I do not want him to resent me or see me as ungrateful.

“I see,” Elihu says, and I am sure that I have alienated him, that he is wondering why he married a cantankerous woman with nothing to offer.

B

ut the next day, he arrives early at home, and his saddlebags are full. I watch him nervously, flitting at the edges of the veranda where I’ve been supervising the servants as they pluck olives from the trees. Why is he home so early? What will he do now?

But he only waves me inside, his hands laden with bags. Then he presents me with spools and spools of threads. Threads of many colors: a strong red, a gentle blue, a rich green, the techeiles that is sold in Zevulun. Threads that are fine and delicate, worlds apart from my coarse wool. Threads that are smooth and soft in my hands. They are a weaver’s dream.

I can only stare at Elihu, awestruck, and for the first time since I met him, my husband looks uncertain. “Is this… is this what you wanted?”

“It’s more than I could have dreamed of,” I breathe, and I forget to be afraid of him. It feels out of place to fear him, this man who looks as anxious around me as I feel around him sometimes. “It’s… you didn’t have to….” I wring my hands helplessly, overwhelmed by this unexpected gift.

“A gift like yours should be nurtured,” Elihu says, recovering quickly. His shoulders tighten, his voice authoritative again, but there is something still flickering in his eyes. Something almost like warmth, and I feel myself nearly smile back.

Perhaps this man is a murderer. But he is my husband, and he has done something kind for me. He deserves something more than my fear. “I asked the cook to roast the meat tonight,” I say quickly. “The way you like it. If you’d like to eat now—”

“Of course.” We do not often eat together — Elihu is out until late, learning in the beis medrash and taking care of matters that he doesn’t share with me, and often we do not see each other at all before I retire for the night — but today, we sit together at the table like husband and wife.

There is a sense of something good sparkling in the air, making me a little less wary, and I eat my food and steal glances at my husband. He is deep in thought as he eats, and when he speaks, it’s abrupt. “Yehoshua wrote a brachah about this,” he says, turning his bread over in his hand.

“The bread?” I say dubiously.

“The land, and all that G-d gives us within it. There is nothing like the other side of the Yarden. You can feel His Presence, wherever you go. If you fight a war, it’s as though He is there, directing your arrows, putting a barrier between you and your enemies. The land seems to sprout food so swiftly you can’t deny exactly Who made it that way.” He sighs, and it’s desolate in a way that makes my breath catch, longing as acute as what I feel when I think of what I’ve lost. “How could we take our land elsewhere after all we endured to get there?”

Elihu is much older than I am, perhaps even old enough to recall Mitzrayim, and I venture to ask, “You were… were you there? At the mountain?” I don’t need to specify which one.

Elihu’s eyes are distant. “I was there. I was only six,” he admits. “But I still remember every moment of it. Everything that followed, too. The attack on our camp. Moshe Rabbeinu, his hands raised above us. The Chanukas Habayis of the Mishkan, long before Shiloh. The rebellion—”

He stops short.

“The rebellion,” I prompt. I remember that Elihu is of Shevet Reuven, of the men who followed Korach ben Yitzhar. Had he watched his cousins swallowed up by the earth? I don’t ask, but it must be written across my face, because Elihu answers the unspoken question.

“My father,” he says quietly. “He was led astray. My mother disagreed and kept me from joining him. There are so many that—”

I hadn’t known that Elihu, too, had been an orphan. “I’m sorry,” I murmur. “It must be… it must have been an honor, getting to escort Yehoshua bin Nun despite your….” My voice trails off. There’s no way to finish that sentence without being utterly out of line.

But Elihu only laughs wryly. “I saw it as atonement. A way to salvage our line. I know what G-d wants from me, and I will only strive to fulfill it, no matter my history.”

It is almost an admission, because who would think of atonement more than a killer? Who would dwell on the sins of the past more than someone trapped in an ir miklat, waiting for the day that the Kohein Gadol dies?

But I don’t press. I have pushed too far tonight. And there is a certain contentment here today, sitting with my husband, feeling as though he isn’t quite a stranger anymore.

ON

the day that marks the third year after my marriage, a missive goes out across Ramos, an enthusiastic message from a stranger of Shevet Gad that takes the city by wildfire. “We will all travel together!” a messenger calls out in the market. “We have spent almost four years settling this land and finding our places here. It is time to return to our G-d! To bring our wives and sons to see the glory of the Mishkan in Shiloh!”

People turn to whisper to each other excitedly. Others look unimpressed with the message. Still others sink to the ground, wracked with sobs, and I know that they must be killers, trapped in the ir miklat with no freedom to see the Mishkan.

My breath comes short and hard as I return home, as I gaze out into the hazy distant land that is Eretz Yisrael, that is the land where I do not live. To return to the Mishkan now would be a homecoming, a precious gift after being torn from it so painfully after the desert. It would be a dream, to reach the land that Hashem has promised to us.

But the joy I desperately crave eludes me. I sink to the ground beneath the pomegranate tree, my mind muddled with grief and loss. I think of Ruchama, suddenly, a moment when we had been cooking together, speaking of the conquest. I got word from my uncle that Yehoshua has defeated thirty-one kings now. Next, he begins to split up the land. Do you think Evyasar would consider—

It hurts, thinking of my family. Imagining what we had once dreamed of, venturing out together to see the rest of Shevet Menasheh, of our family on the other side of the Yarden. Of Shiloh in Efrayim, practically our cousins, an honor to all of Shevet Yosef.

It hurts, what could have been.

What will Elihu do? Will he want to join the others? Of course he will, unless he is a murderer trapped in this ir miklat. Unless he can’t leave. And I am crying now, tucked beneath the pomegranate tree, though I can’t pin down why I’m so emotional. Why it feels as though everything is falling apart, like every weight has landed upon me at once—

Wait.

The reason hits with resounding, incredible wonder.

W

hen Elihu finds out that I am carrying a child, he turns down the idea of us going to Shiloh. “We cannot travel, not with you in this condition. We will wait until the baby is old enough to travel.” I don’t know if he’s disappointed that we’ve lost the chance to go or if he’s relieved that he won’t have to explain to me why we can’t. Whatever it is, he dotes upon me, suddenly concerned each time I leave the house.

He is still aloof, still disappears for many hours without explanation, but he returns each day to check on me, to see how I am doing. His face is gentler now, has lost those dangerous lines that had once marked him as a warrior. Instead, he speaks in softer tones, works with his hands to build a cradle, shares snippets of his mysterious past. He talks about crossing the Yam Suf, about the plague that wiped out Israelites during the darkness in Mitzrayim, about the grim days just after the spies returned from Canaan. The memories are young, tiny glimpses through a child’s eyes, but they are like precious stones to him, held close and treasured.

He is a warrior, I understand, but he is so much more than that, too. He has seen Hashem’s Hand, much more than even I had in my childhood beneath the Ananei Hakavod. He has fought alongside a giant in Torah, a man handpicked by Moshe Rabbeinu and Hashem, and has learned from him.

If he is a killer, I wonder, does it really matter?

We don’t speak about going to Shiloh, even as the years pass and another caravan leaves, then another. Azriel is too young at first, and Elihu is a doting father, rocking the baby whose fingers dig into his slate-gray beard. Then there is Shlomis, a bright-eyed girl named for my mother, and Menasheh. The years crawl by, and we do not leave Ramos, though I still long for Shiloh.

When Azriel turns six, another caravan is set to leave to Shiloh, and this time, Yonasan ben Amiel knocks on our door before he goes. Elihu shows him inside, the two of them seated opposite each other. Elihu has Azriel on his lap, Shlomis playing at his feet, and Yonasan glances at them, then me. “Last season, we went to Timnas-Serech,” he says, his face very serious. “To visit with Yehoshua. The soil there was hard and rough when he first claimed the land, but G-d has blessed him with an abundance of produce. We took some with us but there was so much that it was spoiling on the ground.”

I am in the shadows, rocking Menasheh as I listen to the conversation. “Of course,” Elihu says neutrally.

“He asked about you,” Yonasan persists. It’s an incredible honor, to imagine that Yehoshua bin Nun might think of my husband, might ask about him. But still, dread suffuses me. “We told him that you had young children. But your boy is growing up.”

Elihu hesitates, and I feel a surge of sudden protectiveness. “We will go to Shiloh when the time is right,” I say boldly. I will not force my husband to disclose his history, to admit to something that he’s never even admitted to me. “Please, leave that up to my husband.”

Yonasan looks irritated, but he shakes his head. “You owe it to your children,” he says sharply, gesturing to Azriel.

Elihu is silent. Yonasan lets out an irritated huff and turns for the door with a parting shot. “How much longer will you keep them from Shiloh?”

He rides away, leaving us behind. I am left unsettled, defensive, Yonasan’s words digging deeper than they should. “He has no right to tell you what to do,” I say immediately. “And it’s so… insensitive. What does he know? Our children are still young. And it’s—” I dare to say it. “It’s quite presumptuous, telling someone in an ir miklat that they can’t — I mean, he doesn’t even know if you want to go—”

Elihu cuts me off. “I would go in an instant,” he says curtly, and there’s an edge to his voice that I haven’t heard in years, a sharpness that has me recoiling.

He strides from the room, from the house, without another word to me.

E

lihu doesn’t return for dinner, which is unusual in recent years. He has told no servants where he went, has only taken a horse and ridden into the distance. I’m terrified. What if he has gone to Shiloh, has escaped the ir miklat, risking his life? What if I’ve angered him by bringing up the location of our home, and its implications?

I fret over the children, exhausted and confused, and Elihu is still not home.

I miss him. We are long past our early days, when I was relieved each time he left. We are husband and wife, raising three children together, and we are honest with each other about the things that matter.

We are—

I can’t stand around, waiting for him to return.

I ask a maid to take the children and saddle my own horse, riding quickly. I don’t go to the beis medrash, to the market, to the fields. There is something between us, a thread stretched taut between us, and a part of me knows exactly where Elihu will be.

The gates of the city are quiet, only a sentry waiting there. But I see Elihu’s horse, and I dismount, leading mine over to an outcropping just ahead of it.

Elihu stands on the outcropping. It is dark, and he is illuminated only by the full moon overhead. In the night, the fields and streams that stretch out from Gilad to Eretz Yisrael are black, and I can clearly see the few illuminated spots in the distance, in the mountains of Efrayim.

One of those dots is Shiloh.

My gait feels heavy, unsteady, as I step up onto half-hewn stones and move to stand beside him. I am afraid to say anything, to ask questions with answers that might destroy everything. I only watch the glow in the distance and wait for him to break the silence.

And he does.

“I am not here because I killed someone,” Elihu says, eyes still fixed on Eretz Yisrael. “I did not come here because it was an ir miklat. I have never killed anyone except in battle.” His voice is low, but his words are unyielding as stone. “Have you?”

I recoil. “How can you… I didn’t….” But Elihu is silent, waiting, and there is no apology on his face. I sag, my shoulders falling, tears springing to my eyes. I have been so foolish, so caught up with my suspicions of Elihu that I never thought to wonder about the suspicions he must have had of me. The ever-present question that any man or woman in an ir miklat invites, now lingering between us.

The truth, bare before us. “How did you know?”

“My niece used to write about you,” Elihu murmurs, and I take another sharp breath, another step back. “She thought… she suggested the match, actually, in her letters. We corresponded often over the years, across the Yarden. Ruchama spoke very highly of you.”

This is too much. I choke on the words, my tears burning so the mountains of Efrayim are a blur of golden light in front of me. No. No, it can’t be.

“Ruchama is… she’s your niece.”

“She was my niece.” Elihu turns to gaze at me, and I can only see a streak of olive skin, of gray beard, of an expression that is too hard to grasp. “Your brother — her husband — he wrote to me after her death. I couldn’t understand how her killer would have escaped justice. How an ir miklat could protect someone who had hurt my beloved niece. As soon as I was freed from my service, I was ready to commit the unforgivable. To assert my will over the law.”

That first day… in the market, alarmed at the man who had been looking at me… I had been right. Elihu had been dangerous, but only to my eyes. Only to me. “You came here to avenge her.”

Elihu bows his head. “I did. And then I saw you in the market, offering clothing to the poor. You weren’t the monster your brother described. You were a woman. A kind woman. And I wondered if I had gotten it all wrong. If it was truly a mistake.”

“It was. She was my sister.” My brothers might never forgive me. I still can’t forgive myself, had fled from my own brother and known that I deserved whatever punishment was meted out. Even now, the tears fall fast and hard.

It had been a playful shove, a little harder than it should have been, on a gentle, rolling hill. My friendship with Ruchama had grown more complicated after she had married my brother, and we had our arguments, but we had still loved each other like family. I had been worried about family connections. I hadn’t checked to see the rocks below, to understand what I was about to do. “I never….”

“I know. I know,” Elihu murmurs. “Ruchama wouldn’t have blamed you. I know who you are now.”

Shiloh glimmers in the distance. I think of Ruchama and Evyasar beside me, staring down at the Yarden on that first morning. At the world, bright with promise, and the darkness of the moonlit night that threatens to suffocate me, as surely as the gates of the ir miklat do.

“Come,” Elihu says quietly, and we tear our gazes from the distant lights. “Let’s go home.”

W

hen Elazar, the Kohein Gadol, dies, the whole nation mourns. He was the son of Aharon HaKohein, our greatest connection to Hashem on High. He was a holy man, a guide in our new lands.

Elihu and I mourn him for 30 days, as is proper. Elihu knew him personally, and his death hits my husband hard.

On the 31st day, we pack up the children and some of our belongings and ride down the rolling hills of Gilad to the Yarden. As I leave the gates of Ramos, something deflates inside me, a racing panic that has been there for so long, so dull and throbbing that I’d forgotten it could ever escape me.

In the mountains, growing closer, Shiloh awaits.

We reach the Yarden in a place where it is narrow enough that our horses can walk across easily.

And finally, decades after I first glimpsed it, I enter Eretz Yisrael at last, my husband by my side.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 965)