Джеймс Миченер - The Source

What he did do was what he had done wherever he had been engaged in excavations: each Friday afternoon he climbed into his jeep, usually alone, and drove to some nearby village to participate in the Jewish sunset services which welcomed Shabbat. There he would mingle with the crowd, put an embroidered yarmulke on the back of his head, and try to penetrate the mystery of the ancient religion into which his workmen were digging. He did not do this because he was inclined toward the Jewish interpretation of life—although he found it congenial—but rather because as a man who would spend ten years excavating at Makor it behooved him to know as much as he could about the civilization that he was exhuming.

He had behaved in this way when excavating in Egypt, where he had been a faithful worshiper in the Friday mosques, and when digging in Arizona, rising before dawn to participate in the evangelical rites practiced by the Mesa people. If in the future he were called to dig in India he would there become a sympathetic Hindu, and in Japan a Buddhist. His instinct in this matter was good: a man who would later presume to write about the successive layers of life in Makor required to know as much as possible about all aspects of that life, and he had already spent a dozen years studying the languages, ceramics, metal ware and numismatics of the Holy Land, none of which was so instructive as the religion.

So as the summer passed, John Cullinane became less a Catholic and more a Jew, immersing himself in the weekly ritual that had kept the Jews together through dispersions that would have destroyed a lesser people. In fact, he grew to love the coming of Friday sunset, when Jewish men, freshly washed and dressed, walked like kings to their synagogues to go through the rites of welcoming Queen Shabbat. More sacred than any other day of the Hebrew calendar was this Shabbat, when the creation of the world and God’s compact with the Jews were remembered, and it occurred once each week, more sacred perhaps than Easter to a Christian or Ramadan to a Muslim. Inside the synagogue Cullinane waited with a kind of joy for the arrival of that moment in the ceremony when the Jews began to sing the powerful hymn composed many centuries ago in Zefat. The cantor would be chanting some quite ordinary passage whose words Cullinane could not understand, and then of a sudden the man would throw back his head and utter the joyous cry:“Come, my Beloved, let us meet the Bride.

The presence of Shabbat let us receive.”

Nine long verses followed, but after each the cry of joy would be repeated, with all the congregation joining, and Cullinane memorized the words of both the cry and the verses, singing them under his breath as the cantor intoned the mystical words which reported the love of the Jews for this sacred day:“Come, let us go to greet Shabbat,

For it is a wellspring of blessing.

From the beginning it was ordained,

Last in production, first in thought.And they that spoil thee shall be a spoil,

And all that would swallow thee shall be far away.

Thy God shall rejoice over thee

As a bridegroom rejoiceth over his bride.”

One aspect of the Shabbat hymn Cullinane could not get into focus. At the beginning of his stay he rarely went to the same synagogue twice, for he wanted to savor the full range of Jewish custom, and just as Protestants assumed that there was only one Catholic church, forgetting the rich variation that marked the east where the religion was born, so he as a Catholic had supposed that there was but one Judaism; yet here in the land where that religion was also born he had an opportunity to see the great diversity, for in six different synagogues the great Shabbat hymn would be sung in six wildly different ways: as a German march, a desert wail, a Polish burial lament, a Russian huzza, a modern syncopated melody and an ancient oriental chant. Part of the pleasure of the Shabbat service, Cullinane found, lay in trying to guess what tune would be used for the central song.

He asked Eliav about this, and the tall scholar put down his pipe to say, “They tell us that the Lecha Dodi has been fitted to more varied tunes than any other song in the world. I think a man could go to Shabbat services for a year and hear a new melody every time. Each cantor has his own version, which is right, because this is a most personal cry of joy.”

“Am I free to come up with my rendition?” Cullinane asked. “Heavy on the Irish lilt?”

“I’m sure the Jews of Ireland must have their own Lecha Dodi,” Eliav said.

It was disappointing to Cullinane that he could not get any of his staff to attend synagogue services with him: Eliav refused; Vered excused herself, “As I said before, the synagogue’s for men”; Tabari said, “I find that if I enter a local synagogue dressed in full Arab robes, bow toward Mecca and cry, ‘Allah is Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet,’ I am apt to cause resentment. You go.” And of course none of the local kibbutzniks ever attended worship, having outlawed even the building of a synagogue on their property. So Cullinane was forced to go alone.

Toward the end of the digging season, after he had visited perhaps two dozen different synagogues, he settled upon three that exemplified for him the essential spirit of Judaism, and to these he returned. Along the ridge of Mount Carmel stood an ugly, corrugated-iron building served by a cantor, a small fastidious man with a handsome silver beard, who could sing like an opera star, and worship here was especially pleasing when the cantor brought with him a choir of seven little boys, all with side curls, to sing the Lecha Dodi in piercing falsetto while he underscored them with his baritone. Often, as they sang, a cool breeze would come up the wadi from the sea and it took no effort for Cullinane to imagine that God was present at that moment. But whether the Irishman visited this synagogue for that sense of a very ancient Judaism which the mean building conveyed or for the music, he would not have wished to say.

He also enjoyed going back to Zefat to the tiny synagogue he had visited with Paul Zodman, that jumbled, noise-crammed room where the Vodzher Rebbe huddled in the corner while his handful of fur-capped Russian Jews worshiped in the undisciplined manner of the past. It was indeed—as Cullinane had once said—“like seventeen orchestras and no conductor,” but it was also a fundamental, haunting experience of the reality of God. In this synagogue, when the time came for men to chant the Lecha Dodi, they did so in seven or eight different tempos, melodies and accents, and one evening when the strange fury of the place caught him unexpectedly, Cullinane found himself bellowing at the top of his voice, to an Irish tune that he had composed while working on the dig:“Come, my Beloved,

let us meet the Bride. The presence of Shabbat let us receive.”

And the Vodzher Rebbe, so old that he seemed immortal, looked up from his corner approvingly.

But the synagogue which in the end enlisted Cullinane’s steady patronage was the small Sephardi one in Akko, into which he had stumbled that day when he joined the procession to Elijah’s Cave. It was neither spacious like the one in Haifa, nor emotionally intense like the Vodzher Rebbe’s in Zefat, but it was a warm, congenial place of worship. The Sephardi ritual, more lyric than the Ashkenazi, was to Cullinane’s liking and its tune for the Lecha Dodi became his favorite, for it moved along with a spirit that seemed the essence of Judaism: these Sephardim were actually welcoming God’s holy day, and when at the height of the song all in the congregation turned to face the entrance, as if Shabbat herself were about to join the singing, it was a moment of transcendent joy that Cullinane had not experienced in other religions.