A s a scorching, arid wind blew across the drab valley of Hebron, Shim’on turned into the current, seeking its hot breath upon his face. He needed to be alone with his thoughts. For the first time in his life, the close quarters of the family compound made him feel as crowded as a hen in a cluster of chickens.
He walked to a slope outside the camp, glad to be away from the tumult as his brothers and their families worked to disassemble nearly three decades of their lives. A myriad of scents and sounds reached him: a meowing wail from one of the children, the ammoniac odor of the donkeys’ pen, voices raised in argument.
Yosef had told them not to bring possessions, for whatever they needed could be found in Egypt, but still the women clung to sentimental objects. Re’uven’s wife bickered with her husband, refusing to abandon the cradle in which she had laid her sons. At the edge of the clearing, Asher’s and Dan’s wives struggled to fit a bundle of sheepskins onto the back of an already-overflowing wagon.
Shim’on sighed and crossed his arms. He had no wife to argue with him, and no sentimental attachments to this place or any other. His father felt fondness for Hebron because he grew up here and Avraham had sojourned in this fertile valley. Here Yaakov had tricked Esav out of the eldest brother’s rightful blessing, and from these pleasant pasturelands he had fled from Esav’s fierce and angry hand.
Shim’on studied the distant horizon. How was his uncle Esav faring now? He and his people had moved south and westward beyond Mount Hor, and had little contact with Yaakov. Both brothers had departed from the land El Shaddai deeded to Yitzhak’s descendants; only Yaakov had returned to claim it. But now Yaakov was preparing to leave his birthplace, knowing full well that he might never return. Shim’on supposed he understood why Yaakov would leave his beloved homeland in order to be with a more-beloved son, but when his eyes had filled with the glory of his long-lost favorite, how could they ever turn with approval upon the less-than-glorious sons he merely tolerated?
Mandisa was wrong. Shim’on lifted his gaze to the burning sun, welcoming its harsh heat on his face. Mandisa said I should confront my father, that I would hear a reassurance that he loved me. But even as passionate as she is, she could never understand the depth of the love Yaakov bore Rahel or comprehend the breadth of the indifference he exhibited toward Lea. Mandisa is a loving mother, she could never conceive the constancy of the hatred and blame my father holds toward me. For I caused Rahel’s death, and that he will never forget or forgive.
A sensation of intense desolation swept over him and he rubbed his chest, massaging the stab of guilt that throbbed in his breast. A hunger for Mandisa’s company gnawed at his heart, and he clenched his fist, fortifying himself against it. He was spending too much time alone; the solitude of his Egyptian captivity had affected him more than he realized.
He turned toward the camp. Though joyous activity buzzed throughout the compound, one tent stood silent in the desert heat. It had been Lea’s tent while she lived, and Dina lived inside now.
Shim’on strode toward the tent, absorbing the sounds and smells of home: the scents of dung-fires and cooking food, the sharp clop of an ax, the sharp tang of wood shavings. He was overdue for a visit with Dina; he had not spent a moment alone with his sister since his return. Had she missed him at all during his time away?
Lea’s tent was heavier and older than the others. Shim’on lifted the flap and frowned; the air inside smelled as if it had been breathed too many times. Squinting through the darkness, he saw Dina standing by a pile of furs, tall and formidable, with a shiny smile that was the softest thing about her.
“Shim’on,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact.
She was a mature woman now, no longer a maiden. The dark hair that flew from her head in silky tangles had begun to gray at the temples. Her face was square and solid, the image of her mother’s, but for the first time Shim’on noticed a soft sag beneath the chin.
“Dina.” He made an effort to keep his greeting light. “How is my favorite sister today?”
“Your only sister,” she said, her smile as wry as ever. The gold in her eyes flickered as he moved toward her. “You are heavier. Did you eat too much at the Egyptian banquets?”
“I am not heavy. The others are too thin.” Shim’on dropped to a blanket. He waited until she sat across from him, then he spoke again. “I suppose you have heard that Yosef is alive and ruler of Egypt.”
Her face creased in a sudden smile. “I have always known he still lived.”
Shim’on stretched out on the blanket, determined to humor her. “How could you know? None of us knew what happened to him.”
“You knew. Despite the story you told Father, I read the guilt in your eyes. And though I feared you had killed him, I knew God Shaddai would protect Yosef. He was too special to die so young.”
He stroked his beard. “Why did you think we would kill him?”
“You killed my Shekhem,” she replied, lifting one shoulder in a slight shrug. There was no rancor or blame in her voice, only the clear ring of truth. “And then you took my baby and left it in the wilderness. A heart hard enough to kill my husband and expose an innocent child would not hesitate to kill my brother.”
Her words cut him, spreading an infection of remorse, but he glared at her and refused to consider them further. “The stink of this tent has softened your senses. That boy treated you like a prostitute! And the child was nothing, an illegitimate brat born of a cursed union.”
“Shekhem made me an honorable proposal of marriage,” Dina answered, speaking with quiet emphasis. “And the innocent child was as much a descendant of Avraham as you are, Shim’on. You were wrong to take it from me.”
“Father did not stop me.”
“Father.” She repeated the word in a faintly contemptuous tone and waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “Far too many times Father has done nothing while his sons committed evil. But I have prayed, Shim’on, I have agonized with the Spirit of God Shaddai. And for many years I have known that Yosef lives—just as I know my daughter lives, too.”
His shock yielded quickly to fury. “Sister, you are a fool!” He crawled to her side and grasped her shoulders, resisting the urge to shake her into gasping acknowledgment of the truth. That child couldn’t be alive; nothing could survive in the desert! Dina’s baby had been born shortly after Rahel’s death, and Yaakov had been so immersed in his grief that he had neither the time nor the willingness to consider his daughter’s daughter. Zilpa, Rahel’s maid, had been preoccupied with the care of newborn Binyamin, and Lea could not look at Dina or her child without weeping.
So Shim’on did what countless others have done throughout history. While Dina slept, he took the infant from her side, mounted a donkey and rode away from the camp. When he was certain no one had followed him, he turned toward the family burial grounds: the cave in the field of Machpelah, before the city of Mamre. Once he reached the cave Avraham had purchased from Ephron the Hittite, he dismounted and placed the baby under the shade of a sprawling terebinth tree. There, at least, the child would experience a more merciful death than if he had left it on the sun-blasted rocks.
“Listen to me,” he begged Dina now, a raw and primitive grief tearing in his soul. “You never had a child.”
“As God lives, I did!”
“But it never should have been born. You must forget it. You have dwelt on the past too long. All day you sit here in this tent, never venturing forth unless the women insist you come out. You do nothing but make clothing for other people’s little ones, but you should have married and had your own family by now.”
“I had a family, Shim’on.” She lowered her hands to her lap as her shoulders sagged. “I had a husband and a daughter. I belonged to a city. Then you and Levi came through with your bloody blades and put an end to my life.
When I felt the movement of the baby within me I thought I still had a chance at happiness, but you stole that, too. Now I have nothing.”
Her stare drilled into him. Shim’on released her shoulders and clenched his fists, furious at his vulnerability wherever she was concerned. “And you blame me for this?” He shouldn’t care what she thought, for she was a woman, and a deranged one at that, but he couldn’t banish her words from his mind. “If you must blame someone, blame our father. He was the one who cared nothing for you. I am guilty of many things, but the crime of not loving is his alone!”
“Really? Tell me, Shim’on—who have you loved?”
He stood, ignoring her challenge as he paced in reckless anger. “Our father didn’t defend you when Shekhem and Hamor came calling. He didn’t care a niggling whit for the babe when it was born. He has never cared about you, or me, or any of us, because we did not spring from Rahel.”
“Our father may not have been perfect, Shim’on, but he never killed another man,” Dina answered with easy defiance. “He may not have shown you the love you deserve, but he did not hate you. He grieved over your wrongs, he mourned when you chose to pursue the lusts of your heart instead of following El Shaddai.”
“Can you forget—” Shim’on boldly met her eyes “—how our mother wept into her pillow each night our father stayed with Rahel?”
“No,” Dina admitted. “But can you not see what has happened since Rahel’s death?”
“See what?” he yelled, choking on his own words. “I see an old man who adored Yosef and tethered Binyamin to his side like a dog.”
“No, Shim’on.” An almost imperceptible note of pleading filled Dina’s face as she leaned forward, her gaze boring into him. “Open your eyes, Shim’on the Destroyer. Open your heart.”
Shim’on found himself shrinking from the brightness of her watchful smile. Somehow she had gained the upper hand.
“Our mother named her firstborn Re’uven, ‘God has seen my misery,’” Dina went on, her voice full of strength and confidence. “You she called Shim’on, ‘the Lord hears that I am not loved.’”
“What are you prattling about?” Shim’on growled. “I know what my name means.”
“Our mother called her third son Levi, ‘my husband will now be attached to me,’” Dina continued. “And Yehuda means, ‘I will praise the Lord.’”
“So?”
“Don’t you see?” Dina tipped her head back and offered him a sudden, arresting smile. “Our mother came to accept who and what she was. When she stopped striving against our father and God, her grief and jealousy ceased. But by that time you and the others had grown up and moved out to the fields. And when Rahel died, our father came to depend upon Lea. He loved her, too, not as passionately as he adored Rahel, but in a stronger, more practical way.”
Dina’s solid features softened. “When Mother died, Father mourned for her in private, then commanded that she be buried in the Cave of Machpelah with Avraham and Sarah, Yitzhak and Rebekah. In the tomb of our forefathers, she waits now for the husband who came to love her long after you left her tent. Our mother was honored, Shim’on. She was loved.”
Shim’on looked away, his mind reeling with perplexing emotions. Had he spent a lifetime hating Yaakov for his mother’s sake when Yaakov had come to love Lea after all? The loneliness and confusion of over forty years melded in one upsurge of devouring yearning—for what? For his mother? Or for the safety of his familiar bitterness? Out of regret, fear and shame he had built a fortress to defend himself against his father, but now, in one moment, Dina had breached the wall.
“This is nothing but foolishness,” Shim’on replied, more shaken than he wanted to admit. “Your good sense has left you, Dina, if you ever had any at all.”
“I did not think you would understand,” Dina whispered. “Don’t you see? I don’t hate you for what you did to my baby. I don’t even hate you for killing Shekhem. God Shaddai, the Eternal One, has given me peace in knowing that He controls my ways.”
“What kind of God would tell you to sit in your room and pout all day?”
She met his accusing eyes without flinching. “I am not pouting, I am praying. But until your stony heart changes, Shim’on, you will not understand the difference.”
Restless and irritable, Shim’on stormed out of Dina’s tent and walked toward the shed where his brothers had penned the donkeys. After fitting one of the creatures with a bridle, he mounted and kicked the miserable animal’s bony sides, hurrying it toward the Cave of Machpelah and the terebinth tree.
Above him, a vulture scrolled the hot updrafts, searching for yet another victim of the famine. The gray bones of desiccated trees had begun to show; the dry and dusty world around him was as stark and bleak as a battlefield. Billows of brown powder drifted from what should have been oases, shadows of whisper-thin clouds moved like stalking gray cats over the lifeless countryside.
Above the horizon, the blurred and bloodred sun baked the earth and everything on it with merciless heat. How could a baby survive in the wilderness? Dina had always been a dreamer, she was like Yosef in that respect. Her conviction that Yosef still lived—if she had honestly held one—had been based on nothing more than wishful thinking. But her child could not have survived the desert’s heat, the threat of jackals or the nighttime cold.
Sweating and cursing the sun, Shim’on rode for a short time, then glanced around for a familiar landmark. The land to the north was as flat as stretched cloth, marred only by the hot sun and whining wind. There were no terebinth trees in sight, no recognizable trails, no wadis to mark Shim’on’s progress into the countryside.
But at his right hand the land gathered itself into deep folds. Rocky cliffs rose above the barren landscape, and in the mountainous formation Shim’on thought he could see the vague outline of a cave.
He dismounted and pulled the brawling donkey with him toward the rocks. No trees remained to shade the place; only a few withered stumps marked the spot. Shim’on knelt at the base of the cut-off trunk nearest to the entrance of the cave. If the baby had died, wouldn’t its bones be buried here beneath the sand? Or had the vultures and jackals scattered them?
He poked a finger into the dry sand and moved aside a handful of dirt.
Nothing.
Using both hands, he scooped out a sizable hole and let the coarse powder trickle through his fingers.
Again nothing.
Crying aloud in frustration, he pushed his hands through the sand to his elbows, struggling against the weight of the earth as he thrust it upward. He pawed frantically, searching for even a tiny bone, some fragment he could show Dina to prove that her talk of dreams was as senseless as describing color to a blind man.
The claws of the wind raked at him, but still he dug, desperate for some shred of evidence. Dirt blew into his eyes and hair and between his teeth; he spat and cursed and continued flinging sand over his shoulders, scraping and burrowing around the base of the dead and withered tree. The heat, radiating from the sand, came at him like a mortal enemy, invading his mouth and nostrils as he gasped for breath. The hot sand beneath his hands and knees scalded and blistered his skin even through the fabric of his robe, but Shim’on did not care.
If he could find something here, even a shred of rotted fabric, he could assure Dina that this chapter of her life was done, forever finished. She had accused him of living in a past where Yaakov did not love Lea, but did she not live within a fantasy world of her own making? If she would accept that her child was dead, she could open her eyes to the real world. But she would have to see that God Shaddai did not work miracles, that the past could not be changed, that Shim’on was the monster who had murdered her child, so he deserved the burden of scorn he carried.…
He clutched at a white shard in the sand and pulled it out, but it was the broken bone of an animal, probably a lion. Such a large bone would not fool Dina; she would insist upon believing in hope, forgiveness, even resurrection.
“God Shaddai!” He pressed his sandy, sweaty palms to his wet forehead. “If You are Almighty, why have You never helped me? My father says You guided him, Dina says You preserved Yosef, and yet You thwart me at every turn!”
The blindingly bright sand beneath him went dark. Shim’on looked up; the sky above him churned as a mass of dark, boiling clouds blew in from behind the horizon. As the atmosphere congealed around him, the donkey brayed and rolled its eyes toward the back of its head. A sudden, inexplicable burst of thunder sent the animal cantering over the trail of its own hoofprints.
Shim’on rose to run after the animal. “Stop!” The bawling winds snatched his voice away. No match for the terrified beast, after a moment he stopped running. Above him lightning cracked the skies apart, and yet Shim’on knew the storm would not bring rain. Yaakov’s Almighty, illogical God had forsaken this land; He now loved Egypt, not Canaan. Just as Yaakov loved Rahel, not Lea, and Rahel’s sons, not Lea’s. Yaakov had even allowed his second son to be named Shim’on, “the Lord knows I am not loved…”
Shim’on’s brooding misery seemed to burgeon and spread until it mingled with the innumerable other sorrows borne by Lea, Re’uven, Levi, Yehuda, Yissakhar, Zevulun, Gad, Asher, Dan, Naftali and Dina.
“Why, Father?” Shim’on sank to the sand and pressed his hands over his face, assailed by an overwhelming sense of bitterness and regret. “Why couldn’t you love us?”
The wild wind hooted as if to mock him, but through the moving air a shaft of dull gray light broke from the dark clouds and inched across the plain. Peering through his fingers, Shim’on watched it, tired and uncomprehending, until the searching light shone upon him.
A devouring heat singed his scalp and shoulders. He gasped, panting in terror, and looked up. A whirling ball of fire hovered in the sky above him, bright as a thousand suns. Shim’on felt sweat run from his forehead and under his arms, then a voice shattered the last vestige of his composure: I love you.
Beneath the damp hair of his head his scalp tingled, and panic welled in his throat. Was he losing his mind? He choked back a cry, more frightened than he had ever imagined he could be, and the gale around him increased from its first warning blasts to a great current of roaring air.
Curling to the ground, he closed his eyes and bowed his head, trying to maintain his fragile control. The sun had burned his eyes, the sandstorm had addled his wits; men often lost their reason in gales like this…
His muscles turned to water when the Voice spoke again: I am El Shaddai, and I love all those who love Me. The God of your fathers is a righteous God, a flame that will not be touched and must be approached with care. Bow your heart, Shim’on, son of Yisrael, and know that you are kneeling upon holy ground.
Awe smote and held him, and he knew. No man could hear the voice of God unless he sought it, and Shim’on had been more willing in the last hour to hear from God than he had been in his entire forty-six years. He wasn’t losing his mind. He had sought God and found His august presence, and now he could not turn his back on God Shaddai, the Invisible and Almighty One.
He squinted up toward the burning heavens, his knees rooted to the ground. “El Shaddai?” Never had Mandisa or his father prepared him for the dominant and imperious summons of a truly Almighty being.
Be still and know that I am God.
The voice was unmistakable. Shim’on’s heart turned to stone within his chest, weighting his body so he could not move.
Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make your people a great nation there. But do not serve gods, the work of man’s hands, wood and stone, which neither see nor hear nor eat nor smell. Seek the Lord your God; you will find Him if you search for Him with all your heart and all your soul. When you are in distress, return to the Lord your God and listen to His voice. For the Lord your God is a compassionate God. He will not fail you nor destroy you nor forget the covenant that He swore to your fathers.
The Voice swallowed up the wind. When it grew silent, Shim’on lifted his eyes. The flaming sphere had disappeared, the earth was soft and still, the air sweet with the scent of impending rain. Rocks danced in the steaming heat; from some distance away Shim’on thought he heard a bird singing.
Then, like tears from heaven, luscious, blessedly cool rain fell from a widening blue sky, mingling with Shim’on’s tears and washing the dust of defeat from his face.