Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“You, stand back!” the rioters warned John as he tried to halt their sacrilege, while others with poles and gouges began ripping up the mosaic.

“Death to the Jews!” the men shouted, wrecking in minutes the work it had taken John years to execute. With a frantic thrust he leaped at the men destroying the mosaic, but one saw him coming and jabbed him in the stomach with a pole. The stonecutter fell backward and the rioters left him where he lay.

The destruction could not be halted, for the hatred of the imperial troops was directed against abstract ideas: not Jews but the places where they worshiped, the homes where they lived. After a few hours no Jewish buildings remained in Makor, and it was apparent that henceforth there would be no place in the town for Jews. The Germans made this decision inevitable when, after having been brought under control by Father Eusebius, they trooped solemnly to the old Syrian church for prayers, after which they dragged the local priest to the ruins of the synagogue, where they made him sprinkle holy water about the shattered stones, consecrating the wreckage as a Christian church. They then paraded formally to Father Eusebius and said, “We’ve erased a synagogue and given you a basilica,” after which they stormed down the road to Tverya, where the destruction would be even more complete.

Night fell, and the punished town tried to re-establish itself. In his quiet room Father Eusebius did what he could to revive Rabbi Asher and was relieved when the bearded old man recovered. The Germans had knocked out two of his teeth and cut him about the mouth, but he was able to walk, and after midnight he left Eusebius to assemble and console his Jews. He found only desolation: of his six sons-in-law four were dead; the groats mill was no more, and when he saw the synagogue, only its gaping walls remaining, he felt as if his own life had been destroyed.

There were no homes standing to which the Jews could go, so they gathered in small crowds, looking to their rabbi for guidance, but he was too overwhelmed by the tragedy to tell them anything. But then from the wadi his daughter Jael appeared, accompanied by two of her widowed sisters, and the three girls seemed so heroic in their quiet willingness to proceed with life on whatever terms remained, that he gained courage from them and prayed aloud: “God of Israel, again you have chastised us for our sins, but in the ruins we announce that it is You we love, it is You we serve.” When he ended his lamentations he consulted with the older men of the community, asking their advice as to where the Jews should now move.

At dawn there came a flurry of hope. Perhaps it would not be necessary to move after all, for Father Eusebius climbed on a trestle and announced, “As head of the Christian church in Makor I apologize to you for what happened yesterday. Our local soldiers, it is true, helped punish your rebels but they did not destroy your synagogue. My men did not burn your homes. You are welcome to live among us as before, and my workmen will build you a new synagogue.”

All who sought to avoid exile were inspired by this gesture, and an excited Jew cried, “We’ll rebuild the synagogue where it stood.”

“No,” Eusebius had to say quietly. “That site was consecrated as Christian ground. We’ll shift our basilica there, but you are welcome to the land we were going to use.”

“Consecrated?” the Jew asked. He had no home but he was worried about the synagogue.

Another protested, “A bunch of drunken soldiers forced a priest to scatter holy water …”

A Byzantine soldier struck the Jew across the mouth, and Father Eusebius explained, “Once a person or a building has been consecrated …”

“It’s not a building,” the first Jew cried. “It’s a ruin.” Again the soldier slapped him as a blasphemer.

“Ruin or not,” Eusebius said, “it was consecrated. And as I warned you when John and Mark were baptized, once the water has been placed, nothing can remove it.” He was about to speak further when Rabbi Asher, in one of those penetrating visions that sometimes reveal themselves to God’s Men, realized that it had been God’s wish that this synagogue be destroyed. It had been started in the first place only because Asher had misinterpreted the vision in the olive grove, and it had been finished by a profane man who had later turned renegade. It had been too arrogant, too beautiful with graven images to be a synagogue, and God had wiped it out; for the essential religious structure of the Jewish faith would never be an ornate or garish building. It would be the law. If ten Jews assembled in a mud hut and the law was there, then God was also there; and Rabbi Asher saw that if the Germans destroyed Tverya, too, the expositors who were collecting that law would be forced to gather in Babylonia, where the Talmud could be completed. It was not his responsibility to mourn over a lost synagogue, but to get ahead with the compilation of the law. In his extremity he remembered his own parable about God and Rab Naaman: “One shred of law administered with compassion is worth a hundred towns.”

Therefore he turned his back on Father Eusebius and to the astonishment of his Jews announced, “This day we march to Babylonia.”

Some refused to follow his leadership; they would go into exile through Ptolemais, shipping to Africa and Spain. Others would try to remain in Makor, but they would not be permitted to do so; there would be no synagogue and since they did not wish to accept Christianity, they would drift down the coast to Egypt. A few did convert, but most bundied up what clothes they could borrow from their Christian neighbors and in the afternoon of that mournful day gathered at the slope where the zigzag gate had once stood. A few stopped to weep at the shattered synagogue; a few said farewell to Christians who had befriended them; but most turned their faces resolutely toward the east—to Babylonia, where Jews would still be free to follow the teachings of the Torah.

Among those who assembled to make the long march was Jael, and when Mark saw her about to leave forever he went to her, and in view of all, said, “Jael, don’t go. Stay here with me.”

With contempt she looked at the renegade and drew away from him as if he were contaminated. He repeated his pleas, while Jewish women in small groups moved back so as to avoid contact with him. “Jael, on your wedding day you came to me,” he said. Like a child he pointed toward the ruins of the groats mill, as if to remind her of the exact location of her visit.

She scorned him, turning away with loathing, and her widowed sisters formed a circle about her, as if to provide protection although she needed none. For the third time he appealed to her, and now she spoke: “I would not touch you with my foot. When we needed your help you whined, ‘I am a Christian,’ and you allowed real men to face death alone.” She made a horrible rasping sound in her throat, an animal utterance of complete rejection. The Jews began to spit at him, old women with no teeth and young children with no fathers. With her slender hands, which had once caressed him, leaving their fingerprints on his heart, she bade him leave and he did so, with the jeers of his people echoing in his brain.

He went to the bare white room of Father Eusebius, where for some hours he prayed before the crucifix, a tortured man who had not been allowed to be a Jew and who was not accepted as a Christian; and at the end of his vigil he understood that it was his destiny to seek out the solitary ones who served God in the deserts of Syria.

At the edge of the town he had loved so much Rabbi Asher ha-Garsi mounted his white mule and led his Jews into exile. On the first night the rabble slept by the roadside, on the second in Sephet, and on the following morning the old rabbi did a remarkable thing: during all the time that the ruins of Tverya were visible from the road leading out of Sephet he refused to look at them. Hababli the dyer walked beside the white mule and said, “I can see no houses in Tverya, Rabbi,” but the old man stared ahead. If the lovely city was in ruins, he would not honor the destruction by looking, and by mid-afternoon the lake and the glory were gone, and he had not said farewell; but in the evening, when the exiles were lost in low valleys from which Tverya could no longer be seen, the old man went apart from the others and turned his face toward where the city of the Herods had once stood—that glorious site by the hot baths and the lake, where the expositors had argued under a grape arbor—and he knelt in prayer, directing his thoughts neither to God nor to his memory of Tverya, but rather to that cave which lay in the hills above the town: Rabbi Akiba, in the years ahead let me have the courage you had. In Babylonia let me have the insight into God’s love that you had. And in the morning the little old man led his Jews out of Palestine and into the long Diaspora that would extend itself through nearly sixteen hundred years.