Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“My son, too?”

“He is already free.” To demonstrate this truth the tall Spaniard placed his arm about Menahem’s shoulder, and the gesture was so honest, so without reservation, that Yohanan had to accept its veracity. He saw the radiance in his son’s face as Menahem stood free of the burden placed on him by the law, and the reality of salvation was so persuasive that Yohanan fell to his knees, crying, “Accept me, too.” In this way his feeling of guilt because of what he had done to his offspring vanished, and he was swept along to the sweet mystery of conversion. Enemies of the new church might scoff, but in that white-walled room that morning a burden of sin was actually shifted from the sloping shoulders of the stonecutter and onto the shoulders of Jesus Christ. Yohanan mumbled the formula recited by Father Eusebius and rose a new man. There was no other way to put it: when he knelt he was a man weighed down by the old law, but when he rose he was freed within the new.

The public baptism of Yohanan and Menahem was set for Friday, an unfortunate choice, for although the day had no special significance for the Christians it was for the Jews the beginning of their Shabbat and the loss of two of their members on that particular day seemed an added insult. Curiously, the very Jews who had refused Menahem a place in their synagogue now protested most vigorously against his abandoning it. “He mustn’t be allowed to do this thing,” they protested and a committee was appointed to dissuade the young man from his error, but Menahem could never have anticipated which member of that committee would be the first to plead with him.

It was Jael, and her message was simple: “You can’t leave us now, Menahem. You can’t go over to their side. There’s going to be trouble with the Byzantines and you must fight beside your own people.”

From his new-found platform of hope he smiled at her lack of comprehension. “Your father never allowed me to be a Jew. Don’t make me one now.

“But you are one of us. This is your town.”

“This is a new town,” he said accurately. “Warn your husband to make peace with the Byzantines.”

“Menahem!”

“I am now Mark. A new man, reborn in Jesus Christ.”

Jael drew away from him, as people do instinctively from things they cannot understand, and as she left she asked, “Have you placed yourself against your brothers?”

“They placed themselves against me. When I was born,” he replied. “Ask Abraham …”He was about to remind her of the ugly years when her husband and a group of his friends had chased him through the streets, shouting, “Bastard, bastard!” but in his redeemed existence as Mark he chose to forgive those memories; they no longer had authority over his life. “On Friday I become a new man,” he said, “and then I shall be a Byzantine, standing against your husband.”

Jael left the hut and walked with sickness in her heart to the groats mill, where she told her father that Menahem was obdurate in his decision; she glossed over the real reason why she had gone to see him, for she did not wish to bother the old man with problems of the growing revolt, but what she did reveal was sufficient to arouse Rabbi Asher. Leaving her he ran dusty and disheveled to the building area, where he found not Menahem but Yohanan. Grasping the stonecutter by the shoulder the little rabbi swung him around and demanded, “Have you left the synagogue?”

“I’m working here now.”

“I mean Judaism?”

“I’ll be baptized on Friday.”

“No!”

“And Menahem with me.”

“You must not!”

The stonecutter brushed away the rabbi’s hand and growled, “The synagogue could find no place for him. This church can.”

“You were born into Judaism, Yohanan. You’ll live in it forever.”

“Not if my son is kept out.”

“But we were working on a plan to save him.”

“Five years a slave?” Yohanan looked with disdain at the rabbi and pushed him away.

“But we are all saved only through the law.”

“With such a law I have no further dealings,” Yohanan said, turning to resume his work.

This time Rabbi Asher did not touch the big man; he ran in a ridiculous circle so that he could face him again, and when he did so he said forcefully, “You cannot escape the law. You’ll always be a man of the synagogue.”

The repetition of this word had a curious effect upon the stonecutter. He stood rooted among the debris and stared at the nearby synagogue which he had built with such devotion: he saw the native stone that he had chopped from the Galilean hills, the walls that he had raised tier after tier, and although the lines were not poetic like those of the Greek temple which had once stood on this spot they were the hard, true lines of a man who worshiped God in his own stubborn way. It was a building that would make any workman’s heart proud, and suddenly the torment in which he was trapped proved too much for this simple man, and with his apelike hands he covered his face. Rabbi Asher, sensing his conflict, moved toward him, but the stonecutter knocked the old man aside, shouting, “You ordered me to build it … that floor … how many pieces did we cut at night? The golden glass … Menahem paid for that with his own earnings. No, you hadn’t enough. Those walls.” He ran to the synagogue and beat upon the austere limestone rectangles; how beautiful they were, cut from the heart of the Galilee, and against them he fell weakly to his knees.

“Am I to build this synagogue and find in it no place for my own flesh and blood?” he mumbled, striking his head against the stones until it looked as if in his confusion he might kill himself, and when Rabbi Asher went to him, seeking to mitigate the law’s harsh attitude, the huge stonecutter shouted, “Do you want me to live in that sin forever?” and he grabbed a rock and would have killed his rabbi, had not Father Eusebius, who had been watching the mortal agony that overtook many converts before their moment of baptism, intervened to lead his trembling workman away.

That night Rabbi Asher delegated Abraham his son-in-law and Shmuel the baker to bring him Menahem but not his father, and when the young man stood before his judge, the groats maker asked, “Is it true that you are joining the Christians?”

“Yes.” To himself Menahem said: Tonight let him shout what he will. This is the last time he will order me.

But Rabbi Asher asked quietly, “How can you find the courage to abandon your religion?”

“You’ve given me no choice.”

“Can you not see that it is God who has punished you?”

“You still advise me to steal ten drachmas’ worth and become a slave?”

“That’s the law, and through it we find salvation.”

“Now there is a simpler way.”

“By denying God? Who personally chose us as His people?”

Menahem laughed. “No one believes that any more. Neither my father nor I nor any of them out there.”

“Then you deny God?”

“No. But I accept Him on much gentler terms,” he said. Against his resolve he was being drawn into conflict with the old man who had supervised his life, and that so stringently.

“Do you think that God established the law intending it to be followed easily?” In these words Rabbi Asher, on this quiet night when oil lamps guttered, threw down the perpetual challenge of the Jews: Did God mean life to be easy? Or compliance with His law agreeable?

And Menahem, who at twenty-five had been driven to consider truth for himself, threw back what would become the timeless answer of the Christian: “God intended salvation to be within the reach of anyone: even me. He sent Jesus Christ to die for me … a bastard … to tell me that the cruel ancient law was no more … that now mercy reigned.”