Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“Now you must not think that Jael was any ordinary wife,” Eliezer heard her saying one day as more than a dozen children listened. “Oh no! She was tall and she had red hair, and when she was no older than you she went into the Sinai Desert and tamed a lion, for she was never afraid. She knew how to weave and had many dresses of red and gold and blue, and she found colored stones to make for herself a necklace. Believe me, when Jael was married to Heber it was one of the biggest weddings you’ve ever seen. People came from villages far distant. They rode on horses and on camels, and Jael’s younger sister—she was about your age—came riding on the tame lion, and some of the guests had to walk for three days to get to the wedding.”

“Were they allowed to leave the Judenstrasse?” a boy asked.

“Moishe!” she cried. “In those days we had no locked streets or iron gates. Don’t you know how we lived then? We had beautiful villages under the open sky, and palm trees bending with dates, and men like your father had horses on which they rode for miles along green fields. Maybe your father, Rachab, would have tended bees, and wherever he went on his white mule there were flowers, and in the woods there were lions for brave men to hunt, and at the edge of the desert there were camels which you could ride—if you were clever enough to catch them. And everywhere there was beauty. The lakes … the lakes were so big you could not possibly walk around them, and a man named Nethaneel had a boat on one of the lakes, and after the wedding he took all the children on the lake for a boat ride.”

Rabbi Eliezer studied quietly in a corner of the room, and after a while one of the older girls who wore pigtails asked, “But why did Jael take a hammer and drive a nail into Captain Sisera’s head?” The rabbi leaned forward to catch his wife’s explanation, for the Talmud taught that Jael, in order to trick her enemy, engaged with him in seven acts of sexual intercourse, after which she drove a nail through his skull.

“If I explained to you now, Miriam, you could not possibly understand. So believe me when I say that Jael was one of the gentlest women of the Jews. Tell me, Miriam, do you think that a woman who could tame a lion would be other than gentle?”

“What does a camel look like?” one of the little boys asked.

“You’ve never seen a camel?” Leah cried. “It’s got fur like a lion and a tail like a tiger and four fast feet like a horse, and big teeth that tear down the tops of trees, and it sleeps in a little ball, like a kitten. You should have seen Jael and her husband Heber and their children when they rode on camels through the flowers. They would wave to people on the lake, and in the evening they would have dances in great open spaces under the stars. Did you really think that in the old days we proud Jews lived in narrow alleys like this?”

Frequently Rabbi Eliezer felt tempted to halt his wife’s storytelling, for later the children would have to unlearn most of what she told them, but he never spoke to her about it. For later when the children grew up and married and went to live in the corner of some crowded room, to have their own children who would know only the Judenstrasse, it was desirable that they had at one time known of open spaces and self-respect; and the errors did no harm, for later they would remember only that Jael was a heroic woman who had killed a man in order to save Israel.

But the day came when even Eliezer realized that he must put a stop to his rebbetzin’s wild storytelling, for as he sat on his bed one morning, apparently reading, he heard Leah telling the wide-eyed children, “The ark Moses found in the desert was as long as this house and twice as big, all covered with gold like Gottes Mann’s cane, and in it he put the tables of the law and carried them for forty years across the desert. The desert?” She paused. “It’s as big as all the land from here to the city wall, flat and with lovely grass growing out of the sand, and flowers as far as you can see. And each night it grows a loaf with dark crust beside each flower, and in this way God kept his Jews alive for forty years.”

“What happened to the ark?” a boy asked, imagining himself on the flowering desert.

“It was lost,” the rebbetzin said, smoothing her hair back from her forehead, “and we were all sorry. We wept. We tore our clothes. And then one day King David found it, tucked away in a small village, and he was so happy that he began to dance and to sing and to drink great mugs of beer. And he danced all night. And as he danced what do you suppose he did?”

“Kissed the girls?” Miriam in pigtails asked.

“Yes. He did that too. But he also composed more than a hundred psalms of joy.” It was at this point that Rabbi Eliezer felt obligated to halt his wife, but for some reason he did not do so, and Miriam asked, “Is it true, Rebbetzin, what my mother says? That on your wedding night your husband danced all night?”

“Oh yes!” the rebbetzin said. “When we Jews lived freely, under the open sky, with the flowers of the desert about us, we danced all the time. It’s only here that we’ve forgotten, Miriam, and when the rabbi danced at our wedding he was restoring the days of King David.”

And Rabbi Eliezer looked above the heads of the little children and saw his wife looking at him with love, and he said unexpectedly, “Children, you must go home now,” and when they had left he sent his son from the crowded room too, and he embraced Leah as if it were the first time he had been alone with her. “You are my lovely psalmist,” he whispered. “In your distorted and contrary way you bring me truth.” He kissed her ardently and felt her cool hair tumbling about his face, and from the crowded alley they could hear the cries of children.

In late 1533, as a result of this tender interruption, it came Leah’s turn to summon the midwife, and a girl was born named Elisheba, and now with two children of her own Leah was hardly ever seen without a cluster of young ones about her heels, and almost every day she had to tell them another story from the Hebrew past: of Samson and the far fields he had owned, where a man could ride in any direction for days without coming to the boundaries; and of Miriam, the great dancer, who had an orchestra of maybe seventy musicians and not less than sixteen different costumes; and finally of a shepherd boy named Samuel, who used to wander along paths that took him through fields and into forests and along lakes and across a land that was memorable. Whenever Leah told her stories children were able to visualize their Promised Land.

These were the happiest years that the Judenstrasse of Gretz ever knew, and none of the inhabitants had greater cause for joy than Rabbi Eliezer and his wife. His congregation was attentive to his leadership, and conflict within the quarter was scarcely known. His family constituted an almost ideal Jewish home, except that now four additional people from another family were cramped into the back room. He had no space to study, but he could always retreat to the synagogue and the rickety table with its candle and Talmud.

But in 1542 Isaac the moneylender came forth with a proposal: “I have made profits and would like to contribute a new synagogue to the Judenstrasse, one of which we could be proud.”

Rabbi Eliezer rebuked him: “The city law says we must live with the synagogue we have.”

“The new one could have benches,” Isaac argued, “and a study place for you. It would be a credit to the Lord.”

Eliezer argued against the proposal, telling the would-be donor to give his funds to the poor, but Isaac pointed out that in the present period of religious uncertainty the town burghers might be more lenient. So against his better judgment Eliezer went before them and announced, “The Jews of Gretz request permission to build a cleaner synagogue.”