Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“We march twenty feet,” she laughed. “Rest of the way by bus.” She told him to join the men in the synagogue proper and he said he doubted if any more could squeeze in, but she rejoined, “You’ve got muscles,” and she gave him a stout shove in the middle of his back.

There was one thing in the synagogue he would never forget. By the door of the crowded room sat an idiot, a marvelous, gentle-faced young man of perhaps twenty-four, with the fat and happy cheeks of one who has surrendered all responsibility. His face radiated holiness, and those who entered the room bowed down to kiss him on the forehead, and he looked back at them with the compassionate eyes of YHWH. It was a terrifying experience—this group of old, bearded Jews bowing down to kiss God’s vicar—and Cullinane thought: At last I know one difference between the Sephardi and the Ashkenazi. No German Jew would humble himself to do that.

The singing was delightful, an echo from the Old Testament when the Hebrews had lived in tents along the edges of the desert. It was oriental, a long-drawn wailing with kinds of sequences that Cullinane had not heard before, passionate music sung with passion. There was, so far as he could detect, no Jewishness about it but only the timeless wailing of the desert. Suddenly his ears were shattered by a different sound coming from the hallway jammed with women. It was a war cry—he could call it nothing less—in which several women uttered shrieks while vibrating their tongues rapidly against the roofs of their mouths. The effect was shattering, and he left the synagogue proper to ask the large woman what the new shouting was about, only to find that she was leading the noisemakers.

“What is it?” he asked.

She stopped the war cry and laughed. “Call me Shulamit,” she said. “It’s the cry Arab women use when they want to inspire their men at a battle or a massacre.” She put her head back and uttered a piercing rendition, which was joined by other women. Shoving a plateful of the food into his hands, Shulamit said, “This is a day of joy. Eat!” And as he did so she returned to her war cries.

“If you want to pray,” the beadle shouted in Spanish, “get inside. You kids!” he added in Hebrew. “Stop that! Let’s have some quiet here.” Six men began roaring for silence and one took to cuffing the older boys on the head, while these in turn abused the younger, who picked on the girls.

“Silence!” the beadle bellowed, wiping his steaming face. Again his call was echoed by his six helpers.

The noise increased. The singing continued and the women punctuated the bedlam with their war cries, trilling their tongues with fascinating speed. The idiot spilled a bottle of orange pop down his front, but a very old man in a long white beard cleaned the young man’s clothes with the cuff of his coat. There was more shouting for silence, and a boy struck a girl so hard that she began to cry, whereupon the two mothers involved beat their offspring heartily, after which there was muffled sobbing. An old rabbi started a speech to which no one in the hallway listened, and few in the synagogue.

“Silence!” roared the beadle, but one of the women had appeared with a large tray of cold beer and a bottle of arrack, which passed from mouth to mouth as the rabbi droned on. It seemed to Cullinane that every second sentence contained the word Sephardim , which the old man pronounced Sfaradeem , and Cullinane, picking out what Hebrew he could understand, said to himself: Eliav and Vered can say that the Sephardim have no real grievance, but they should listen to what this one is saying. It was a lament such as a rabbi might have uttered a thousand years ago, except that then the word Sephardim had scarcely been invented. “Where are our leaders?” the old man wailed. “Why do we let them abuse us as they do?” If it had not been for the gulping of beer, the shouting of children, the choking taste of the raw arrack, the cries of the women and continued bellowing of the beadle, the address would have had a kind of pathos. In its present setting it was merely a formula: “What has happened to our beloved Sfaradeem?” What, indeed.

At the end of the old man’s harangue the beadle and his helpers took from the holy place four scrolls of the Torah, encased in handsome wooden boxes ornamented with silver horns, and the procession to Elijah’s Cave formed up, with women crying, men shouting, the idiot dancing and the old men in beards walking solemnly through the classic streets of Akko, leading a chant which in time became hypnotic. “Who are the people who serve God?” a man cried. “Israel!” shouted the crowd. “Israel, Israel, Israel!” came the cry, a hundred times, a thousand.

The procession went only a few blocks to where some buses waited, whose loading was such a study in frenzy that Cullinane watched with a kind of horrified fascination. “Come along!” Shulamit cried, dragging the Irishman after her.

“I can’t leave my friend,” Cullinane protested.

“Who is he?” the big woman shouted.

“Jemail Tabari.”

“Everybody knows Jemail. You!” she shouted to a little boy. “Tell Jemail the American’s gone to Elijah’s Cave.” She threw the child a coin and Cullinane said that he would repay her. She turned around and looked at him. “Are you crazy?” she asked, grabbing a fresh bottle of beer.

It was a trip that Cullinane would often recall, a voyage to the heart of Israel. Like most Americans visiting the country he had met principally the well-bred, the sophisticated Jews of the political elite. Vered Bar-El and Eliav were typical, but more important was this powerful sub-strata, this lusty, arrack-guzzling mob, so joyous and vital. The round-faced idiot looked back through the bus and clapped his hands clumsily, whereupon a woman again started the Arab war cry and the noise began that would not cease that day. It was a trip not to Elijah’s Cave but to some point far back in history, perhaps to the time of Elijah himself, and if Cullinane had not been fortunate enough to make it he would have failed to appreciate a major aspect of Judaism.

“I cannot understand what happened to us,” Shulamit said in Spanish as she munched a huge sandwich while forcing food upon Cullinane.

“You mean the Jews?” he asked.

“No,” she replied. “The Sephardim. Since 1500 we’ve been the principal Jews in Israel. At Zefat, Tiberias, Jerusalem, we were the ones who counted. When the state started, in 1948, we were the numerous ones, but our leaders had always lacked force and by 1949 all the responsible jobs were held by Ashkenazim. Since then it gets worse, year by year.”

“Is there conscious discrimination?”

Shulamit considered this for some time, turned aside to join in a series of war cries which threatened Cullinane’s right eardrum, then said in English, “I would like to think not. But I’m worried about the future of this country.”

“You feel yourself being excluded? You Sephardim generally?”

Shulamit gave a wild cry, then asked abruptly, “You’re not a newspaperman, are you?”

“Archaeologist,” Cullinane assured her.

“Because this is an Israeli problem,” Shulamit insisted. “We don’t need advice from outside.”

“I’m giving none,” Cullinane promised, and she continued to speak of the fact that between Ashkenazi and Sephardi there was little social contact and few marriages, that good places in the medical school went always to the Ashkenazi, that business, law, newspapering, cabinet positions … all were reserved for the other group.

“I doubt it’s as bad as you say,” Cullinane argued, “but let’s suppose that it’s half true. Who’s at fault?”

“We’re not talking about fault, we’re talking about fact. And if it continues, this country is in trouble.”