Джеймс Миченер - The Source

A fool despises his father’s teaching, Jehubabel brooded mournfully as he passed the empty synagogue on his way to his home, which stood next door, but at the entrance to the synagogue his sleeve was caught by a small man with protruding eyes who said, “Jehubabel, I must speak with you.” It was Paltiel, a farmer with few sheep and a man from whom courage would hardly be expected, but now the scrawny fellow pulled at Jehubabel’s sleeve and said the frightening words which made the revolution of the Jews unavoidable: “My son was born eight days ago.”

Jehubabel trembled. In the gymnasium he had promised Tarphon that there would be no trouble, but now the fatal words were being said directly to him.

The fat dyer began to sweat and asked, “Paltiel, were you at the execution today?”

“I stood two cubits from the old man, and before he died he looked at me with one eye. He looked into my very heart, and I am determined.”

Jehubabel thought: At how many others did the old man look today? To Paltiel he said, “Then you are committed?”

“Aren’t you?” the little farmer asked. “The old man looked at you, also.”

“You saw?”

“Jehubabel, he looked at us all.”

The trembling dyer’s whole inclination was to tell Paltiel to be gone, but the small man could not be dismissed, so Jehubabel said, “Wait here,” and he walked dumbly to his home where his wife had supper waiting; but he went past her to an inner room, where he took from a chest a small cloth in which he kept a sharpened knife, and this knife he placed on the floor, sitting before it and staring at it, wondering what to do. And after a while his wife came to call him to supper, but when she saw the knife she lost her appetite and sat on the floor beside him.

“It is a terrible thing you contemplate,” she said.

They remained silent for some minutes, staring at the knife, grasping for any solution to the problem of which they had become an unwilling part, and Jehubabel quoted evasively, “‘The thoughts of the righteous are right: but the counsels of the wicked are deceit.’” To this impeccable statement his wife nodded, and he felt encouraged to add, “‘A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband: but she that maketh ashamed is as rottenness in his bones.’” She smiled wanly, as if to thank him for his confidence, but refrained from saying anything that might help guide him, so he added, “‘The integrity of the upright shall guide them: but the perverseness of transgressors shall destroy them.’”

Having insulated themselves with these comforting saws, Jehubabel and his wife were about to dismiss the temptation and put away the knife when Jehubabel saw, looming out of the darkness, the monitoring eye of the dead man, and he cried, “A man already dead mustn’t tell us what to do.” His wife asked what he was saying, but a knocking came at the door and the urgent voice of Paltiel: “Jehubabel, we are waiting!”

In despair the spiritual leader of the Jews looked at his wife, then threw himself full length on the floor, crying, “Adonai, Adonai, what shall I do?” No instructions came from YHWH and he confided to his wife, “I don’t know what to do. Tarphon suspects my complicity. I saw him smiling at me. If his soldiers catch me in this act I shall be lashed to death.” He shuddered, for he could feel the lead-tipped thongs as they cut into his body.

Then came a rush of hope. He sat up and caught his wife’s hands. “Tarphon assured me that Antiochus was a sensible man. He sings and dances like any Greek. Wants people to love him. Now, when you see that great stone head in the temple you mustn’t think …”

“Jehubabel!” came the ghostly voice of Paltiel, summoning him to inescapable reality.

And so in that inner room, Jehubabel, one of the first persons in world history to do so, had to face the mystery of the Jew: “Why does he seek out martyrdom? An insignificant man like Paltiel? Why does he combat the empire?” And Jehubabel felt it wrong that vital decisions should be forced by the eye of a dead martyr and the voice of a man willing to become one.

“Jehubabel!” came the demanding voice. “Must I, alone, sanctify my son? Tell me now if you are afraid.” And to the listening couple the voice outside had become the voice of Adonai.

Slowly, driven by forces which he did not comprehend but which would rule Judaism for the ensuing centuries, Jehubabel picked up the knife, wrapped it in its cloth and tucked it in his belt. “I must go,” he told his wife. “The old man is looking at me.” And she accompanied him to the door, where she gave him her blessing, for in his final agony the old man had looked at her, too.

The sweating, dumpy man and the scrawny little farmer hurried past the synagogue and down a dark alley which led toward the main gate, but halfway along that passageway they stopped to dodge quickly into a small house, occupied by Paltiel, and there four Jews were gathered with an eight-day-old baby boy who had been prepared for circumcision. As if it were a routine ritual Jehubabel asked, “Are we prepared to enter into the covenant of Abraham?” but when the assembled Jews gave their routine replies he looked at them with quivering eyes and asked passionately, “Neighbors, are we aware of what this means?” And upon interrogation he found that the old man had looked at each face in that room, handing on a commitment that would never die. Each man knew what was involved and was prepared for the consequences.

Jehubabel, trembling with the gravity of what he was doing, stood aside to utter a short prayer, after which he presented his sharp knife and circumcised the infant, who began to howl at the unaccustomed pain, but little Paltiel jammed a wine-soaked cloth into the child’s mouth and the crying ceased. “His name is Itzhak,” the farmer said, “for Itzhak was the son of Abraham who was offered as a sacrifice to …” Here the father reached a difficult impasse. He was not allowed to speak the name YHWH; indeed, he did not know how the sacred name was pronounced, for it had been some centuries since the word had been spoken in Makor. But since any deity must be referred to in some manner the custom had grown up of calling YHWH by the arbitrary Hebrew word Adonai , which would later be translated into other languages as Lord. When the vowel indications for Adonai were added to the letters YHWH, a curious symbol developed which German scholars many centuries later would mistakenly read as Jehovah, a word that had never existed and that had never in any way been applied to the austere Hebrew deity. Thus the greatest of gods was called YHWH, which had no pronunciation; he was known to ordinary Jews as Adonai, which was purely arbitrary; and he would conquer the world as Jehovah, a name which had never belonged to him or to anything else. Perhaps only this vague and contradictory nomenclature could indicate the wonder of the concept involved, or explain why a group of Jews in Makor were willing to risk being flayed alive because of their devotion to the god who had sustained them.

Paltiel, the man with few sheep, who was taking the greatest risk—for the Greeks could examine his son at any time and see proof of guilt—held his son aloft and said, “He is Itzhak, who was offered as a sacrifice to Adonai. But he lived. Tonight all of us offer our lives to Adonai, and may we also live.”

One by one the conspirators, aware that their lives were forfeit if the child Itzhak were inspected by Greek officials, slipped out of the house, but as Jehubabel picked his way back to the synagogue he heard boisterous voices coming along the main street and he thought it might be a group of soldiers who would question him, and he hid. But the noisy ones were the seven athletes in their blue capes returning from an evening at Tarphon’s palace, and they marched toward the synagogue to bid his son Benjamin good night. In the fraternity of athletes they brought him to his door, making him swear that he would be at the gymnasium early next day. An ordinary father seeing how welcome his son was among the boys whose fathers ran the town would have felt pride in his acceptance, but Jehubabel, watching from the shadows as his Greek son called farewell to his Greek friends, felt only shame that the boy should have drifted so far from the spirit that had driven Paltiel to the circumcision of his son.