Джеймс Миченер - The Source

And then the Biri rabbi broached the fundamental problem: “The tax collectors say they must raise more money to build churches for the new sect. My Jews cannot accept such impositions, and the soldiers cry, ‘You crucified Jesus, didn’t you?’ and tempers are inflamed.”

At this point Rabbi Asher, now one of the older members of the group, proposed the working rules which were to guide the rabbis: “God asks us to share this land with a vigorous sect of His religion. Children who are growing into manhood we treat with dignity; let us treat this new movement in the same way. Gently, gently.” And of the expositors present that day, only the Babylonian referred to Christianity as a new religion; the others saw it as a continuation of that series of Jewish particularist movements which had included the Essenes and the Ebionites. At best, they considered Christians as comparable to the Samaritans: Jews who accepted only the Torah and refused to believe in the divine inspiration of the rest of the Old Testament. As the Biri rabbi rationalized: “The Samaritans cut our holy book in half while the Christians double it with a new book of their own. At heart each remains Judaism.”

It was in this unsettled mood that Rabbi Asher said farewell for the last time to the expositors of Tverya. Unaware that he would meet with his colleagues no more, he departed without pausing for a last look at the grape arbor beneath whose protection the fence around the Torah had been built, or at the bearded faces who had argued with him so passionately during the past twenty-two years. When his white mule ascended the hill to Sephet he did not turn to inspect the autumnal splendor of Tverya, with its Roman buildings slipping silently into desuetude, but next morning as he started for Makor he did catch a final glimpse of the Sea of Galilee, and along its western shore he saw for the last time Tverya, that beautiful city, home of the Herods, haven of those who loved quiet nights, sacred to the birth pangs of two religions, where Jesus slept and rabbis argued, where Peter fished and great Akiba lay in death, the city where soft waves whispered along the shore as the Talmud was being born, Tverya, Tverya.

For some moments Rabbi Asher sat astride his mule, gazing down upon the gray-white city where he had worked for so long—how sweet those conversations had been, how elevating—and he entertained the unhappy thought that some day, since he was now sixty-nine, he must reach the point when he would be too old for this constant traveling. But he had no idea that he was to be halted neither by age nor by faltering faculties, but by the maturing of forces which as yet he only dimly perceived, and it was to the cauldron where those forces were being brewed that he now directed his mule. The animal shook his withers, then moved ahead and Tverya was no more.

As he rode that summer’s day through the quiet forests of the Galilee, Rabbi Asher ha-Garsi was the epitome of what God had intended when He called forth the rabbis to guide His people through the dark centuries that loomed ahead. He was a hard, thin man with a white beard and gentle blue eyes; as a descendant of many generations of Jews who had lived in or near Makor, he carried in his body reminiscences of Egyptian warriors who had stayed in the area, of long-nosed Hittites who had served as mercenaries, of Phoenicians who had drifted down the coastline from Tyre and Sidon, and of Romans and Greeks who had married with local girls. Rabbi Asher liked to think of himself as a pure Jew, and he was—just as seventeen hundred years later, kibbutzniks in this same area who looked like Russians or Germans or Americans or Arabs would also be pure Jews—for to be so required an inheritance of mind and not of blood. Rabbi Asher, being a descendant of the notable Family of Ur, had begun as half Canaanite, half Habiru, though what those terms meant no man had ever been able to say, but he was also all the other strains that those two vital groups had absorbed through the millennia. He was, in short, a Jew.

As his white mule wandered down the road between the encroaching trees, birds of summer darted through the shadows, saluting the bearded old man who was passing by. Asher smiled. He was thinking of the earthy saying of Akiba: “When their love was strong they could sleep on the edge of a sword, but now when they have forgotten, a bed sixty feet across is not sufficient.” He also remembered the summary of all philosophy which Akiba had offered his disciples: “My teacher Eliezer told me that only one rule was required by a Jew if he wished to live a good life. ‘Repent the day before you die.’ And since no man knows when he shall die, he is prudent if he lives each day a life of true repentance.” Rabbi Asher had tried to live as if on the morrow he were dead.

When the old man approached his little town he saw as he had anticipated that Byzantine workmen were building small homes near the olive grove, for here the thirty families to be dispossessed by the Christian basilica were to be resettled. Asher hoped that the removals were being made without incident, and he kicked the mule’s flanks to speed him up the incline leading into town.

He found Makor in ferment. When his arrival became known, representatives of the thirty families crowded into the small stone house attached to the synagogue to launch their protests. Shmuel said, “I’ve worked forty years building my shop. People won’t leave the town to buy bread.”

“We’ll have to find new quarters in town, that’s obvious,” Rabbi Asher promised.

Ezra the shoemaker had a different problem: on each flank of his old home he had built additional rooms for his two sons and their wives, but the house provided by the Byzantines at the new site lacked space for three separate families. “For our one house inside the walls we should receive three outside.”

“That’s reasonable,” the old man said. “I’m sure the Byzantines will listen.”

“Not to me,” Ezra said.

“To me they will,” the rabbi assured him, and when he had heard all the complaints he thought: There’s no problem here that men of good will cannot adjust, and he left the small house by the synagogue and walked around to the rear, to where Father Eusebius was directing his workmen as they staked out the actual lines of the basilica, and when he saw how enormous it was to be—almost twice the size of his substantial synagogue—he gasped. Was this an accurate measure of Christianity? No wonder his Jews were protesting.

But when he approached Father Eusebius to question him about the demolitions, the tall Spaniard forestalled any complaint by striding across the rubble and extending both hands. “I’m glad you’ve come back, Rabbi Asher! I want you to see what we’ve done to protect your synagogue.” And before God’s Man could reply, the black-robed Spaniard led him to the square-cut wall of the synagogue to demonstrate how the basilica was leaving an open space of nearly ten yards as protection to the Jews. “We shall exist side by side in peace,” the Spaniard said.

Then, before Rabbi Asher could comment on this gesture of conciliation, Father Eusebius led him away from the demolition area and into his office, a single lime-walled room with an earthen floor and on the spare walls a silver crucifix from Italy and a wooden icon panel from Constantinople. It was a quiet, austere room marked by a rough wood desk and two chairs, and if it did not reflect the patrician derivation of its owner it did bespeak a certain hard manliness. As soon as Rabbi Asher was seated, feeling chilly and out of place in the presence of the graven images, Father Eusebius smiled and said deprecatingly, “I’ve been remiss in one matter, Rabbi Asher. I did not keep myself informed about the removal of your Jews to their new locations outside of town. Certain injustices have developed, about which I heard only last night. I’ve directed my man Yohanan …”