Eden Read Online Free PDF Page B

young master refused to part with her, shunning the room of scholars.
    Instead, he sat with her by the open door, listening as the old, dry voice recited the laws and ancient tales. For the young master did not wish to learn alone without his hand upon her head and her head upon his lap, and feared nothing of what the others said when he sat among the women. As ever the dog and man shared his mat, and to anyone who cast a suspicious eye, he told them he could listen just as well in the shadow of the temple wall as inside a bare, dark room.
    On more than one occasion, another teacher joined them. This new teacher came from a settlement deep in the wilderness, an outsider, a man of the desert cliffs that overlooked the Dead Sea. On his garments Eden saw the dust of limestone and smelled the scent of caves where men and women lived, staring out over blue saltwater.
    The stranger brought his wife and was unlike the people of the village. For though he came out of a harsh place by the lifeless water, his words were softer than those of the rabbi of the town’s. And he seemed to smile a little as he left his woman outside with Eden, her master and the others.
    Then in the dark, bare temple the Outsider told of his life in the empty desert. “Where we live one cannot separate one grain of sand from the other, and in time we have come to see that any rock can be a temple. Would you sit and not ask your wife to sit beside you? Has she not come as far as you, has she not toiled as you have toiled? Has she not tended you when you were sick, as you tended her with child? Would you not wish her to pray with you as we pray now? Does not God hear those who whisper as well as those who shout? Does he not see those outside the room as those within?”
    And then as the students began to murmur in confusion and objection, the teacher from the Dead Sea raised his hand to quiet them—and told the same tale as the old rabbi told, but in a different way:
    â€œTo every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
    A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
    A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
    A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
    A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
    A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
    A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
    A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”
    The teacher from the Dead Sea paused as he left the bare room of the temple and looked down at Eden’s master and his dog. The young man rose and bid the man of the desert come under the shop roof for the night before returning with his wife to the settlement of sky and bare rocks. In the house of the carpenter the two spoke long into the night. Eden lay at her master’s feet in her soft pile of shavings. She raised her head only once when the man of the desert showed the younger man two small stones he took from his purse. The stones were each of equal weight and size. One stone white, the other black. And the man of the desert asked, “Can you really tell the difference between the two?”
    And thereupon he struck one stone against the other and behold, the dark stone was white within and the pale stone black.
    â€œJudge not in haste,” the man of the Dead Sea told her master, letting the broken stones fall from his fingers, “unless you know the hidden center of every stone.” And he took from his small pouch two more stones, one white, one black, and put them in her master’s hands. “The trick is how to find out without breaking them.”
    Eden sniffed the broken stones that lay on the floor.
    Just stones, nothing more.
    â€œSomething to think