Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“I am pleased to see you, Menahem,” he said gently.

“We’re ready to start the floor,” Yohanan interrupted.

“All right,” he said with no enthusiasm.

“I lack one thing.”

“Get it”

“I’ll have to go to Ptolemais … with money.”

Rabbi Asher frowned. Like the rest of the great expositors he saw little money, but he was willing to listen. “What’s the problem?”

“The design I plan …”

“What is the design?”

“The Galilee.”

“What about it?”

“It needs purple. At many points it needs purple stone. And I’ve found none.”

“I saw some,” the rabbi said. “Beyond Sephet.”

“I saw that too. It crumbles.”

“In Ptolemais? Have they purple stone?”

“No, but they have purple glass. Cut into squares.”

Rabbi Asher considered this problem for some minutes. He was willing for Yohanan to build the floor but he wanted to spend no money for it. “What do you need purple for?” he parried.

“Kingfisher’s feathers. The hoopoe bird, too.”

Rabbi Asher studied this carefully. “Use other birds.”

“I thought of that,” Yohanan replied. “But I also need purple for the mountains.”

“I suppose so.” He turned and addressed the boy as his equal. “Is the mill making money, Menahem?” The boy nodded, and the rabbi said, “Buy the glass in Ptolemais.”

“I’ll get some golden glass, too,” Yohanan added.

“Gold? That sounds like adornment.”

“It is,” the stonecutter admitted, “but it will make the pavement glisten … in just a few spots.”

Rabbi Asher conceded and was about to dismiss his workmen when he thought of Menahem. “Wait a moment,” he said and left to consult with his associates, who were discussing whether a housewife was permitted to throw out used dishwater on Shabbat. The argument had been in process for some days, with the Sephet rabbi arguing liberally that throwing out the dishwater was a logical extension of preparing the Shabbat meal, which rabbis had always permitted, but with the Biri rabbi contending that throwing out the water was equivalent to sowing, “for from the freshly watered earth seeds might spring forth,” and this was specifically prohibited. Now Asher interrupted the expositors with a problem of different gravity.

“The stonecutter of whom I spoke … and his bastard son. They’re outside and I thought to bring them in.”

The Kefar Nahum rabbi protested against discussing individual cases, but an old man who had come from Babylonia for these sessions said, “Our great Rabbi Akiba would have stopped discussion even with God in order to speak with children. Fetch the boy.”

So Rabbi Asher returned to the street and summoned Yohanan and Menahem into the cool courtyard, where the scholars saw with their own eyes what a promising youth was among them, and the old man from Babylonia cried, “With the appearance of such a youth the sun rises!”

Menahem was made to stand facing the great expositors, while his father remained against the wall, listening, and at last the scholars reached a typical rabbinical conclusion: “A bastard may under no circumstances enter the congregation of the Lord for ten generations. But there is a way.”

The old man from Babylonia explained: “Rabbi Tarfon, of blessed memory, and Rabbi Shammua, too, said, ‘Let the bastard boy when he is past the age of twelve steal an object worth more than ten drachmas. He is arrested and sold into slavery to a Hebrew family. Then he is married to another Hebrew slave. And after five years the owner emancipates them both and they become freedmen. And as new freedmen their children will be welcomed into the congregation of the Lord.”

Yohanan heard the words with dumb astonishment. While the rabbis solemnly discussed where the theft must take place to make it an honest theft, and how the boy must be arrested and before what witnesses, the big stonecutter felt that a world of incomprehensibility was crashing about his ears. This was insanity, what the rabbis were saying, and it would take a man with no beard and no learning to tell them so. In bitterness he looked at his tall son as he stood self-consciously before the judges who were counseling this extraordinary course of action, and he was inspired to reach out and grab the boy by the hand and lead him from that confused company, but then he heard the old rabbi from Babylonia calling him, and he found himself moving obediently to stand beside his afflicted son.

“Yohanan, stonecutter of Makor,” the saintly old man was saying, “you see how the irresponsible actions of a headstrong man lead him and his offspring into trouble. Rabbi Asher tells us that you were warned not to contract an illegal alliance with a married woman, but you went ahead. Now you have no wife and your son is in grave trouble …”

Up to this point Menahem had stood calm before the judges, accepting their review of his case as a repetition of the abuse he had received since childhood; even Rabbi Asher’s talks with him in Makor had been so understood; but now as the stranger from Babylonia droned on with words of an impersonal gravity “never able to marry … an outcast forever from the Jews … only recourse is selling himself into slavery … he can never be clean, but his children can be saved …” the boy caught the full force of their meaning and uttered a convulsive sob, covering his face with his hands to mask his shame. Once he looked up to seek consolation, but the judges had none to offer. Finally Yohanan put his arm about him, saying quietly, “Come. We must go back to work,” but Menahem could not move, and his father had to drag him away.

If the Talmud which the rabbis were compiling under the grape arbor of Tverya had consisted only of laws as remorseless as the one invoked against Menahem ben Yohanan, neither the Talmud nor Judaism could have long endured, but this was not the case; the Talmud was also a testimony to the joy of Jewish living. Its preaching on the law was hard and clear, but side by side it contained abundant passages which tempered that law to make the finished document a singing, laughing, hopeful summary. The Talmud was a literature of a people, crammed helter-skelter with songs and sayings, fables and fancy; and one of the reasons why the rabbis from Kefar Nahum, Biri and Sephet were so eager to work upon it was that their meetings were so much fun: lively argument sparked by the joy of personal clashes and a sense of being close to God.

Only a massive work could hope to capture the vigor and fellowship of these meetings, and the Talmud became such a masterpiece. Its final size was difficult to comprehend: the Torah upon which it was built was brief; the Mishna was many times as long; the Gemara was much longer than the Mishna; and the commentaries of Maimonides and the rest were in turn much longer than the Gemara, the Mishna and the Torah together. The Torah consisted of five books, the Talmud of 523. The Torah could be printed in two hundred and fifty pages, but the finished Talmud required twenty-two volumes.

In a major commentary on this vast, formless work the name of Rabbi Asher, God’s Man, appears eleven times, three in connection with legal decisions, eight in those frivolous, lovely passages which evoke the day-to-day life of Jews in Palestine: “Rabbi Asher ha-Garsi told us: Antigonus the wily seller of olive oil used three tricks. He allowed sediment to gather in the bottom of his measure so that it contained less. At the time of judging he tilted the measure sideways. And he taught himself to pour so that a large bubble of air formed in the middle of his jug. At his death God judged him according to his own measure. The sediment of his sin nearly filled the jug. It was tilted so far to one side that most of eternity slipped from him. And that day God poured with such a bubble!”