Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“Why don’t they cut the old tree down?” he had asked the girl.

“Cut?” she had echoed in disbelief. “I bring you here … the best tree in Japan … very famous.” And with gestures she had explained that the Japanese prize such a tree above all others, for it reminds the viewer that it is ancient and near death, but that one powerful strain of life still pulsates through the bark; and as he had lain there, enjoying the girl and the quiet inn and the old tree, he had caught something of the spirit of Japan and its strange values.

“In America,” he had said, “any self-respecting farmer would cut down an old crock like that. But I see what you mean.”

Later the same girl had taken him to the bonsai mart in Tokyo, where he had seen dwarf trees, sixteen inches tall and two hundred years old; and his pleasure in their beauty had been so evident that she had taken him to her uncle’s, and for the first time he had become aware that she was not a prostitute but a sensitive girl with a college education, caught up in the aftermath of an imperial war. And she had shown him her uncle’s bonsai, famous in Japan—a dwarf cherry tree more than three hundred years old, with a trunk even more dilapidated than the one at the inn. It was almost hollow, black and lifeless, with numerous holes worn through it where branches had once grown; and again one single bright limb flourished, covered with blossoms.

“It’s a miracle,” the old man had said, “the foundation and the flower.”

The second tree he had found at Makor, that very old olive, a gaunt, dismembered relic whose trunk existed only as a dead cavity surrounded by fragments of life, but like the cherry in Japan this patriarchal thing—perhaps two thousand years old—sent forth from its always-dying body persistent branches of great beauty, and they bore fruit. On first seeing this miraculous olive he had not remembered the cherry in Japan, but one day in August while sitting beneath its branches and trying to evoke the Makor of Emperor Vespasian, he happened to look at the tree in a new way, and he had snapped his fingers, crying, “It’s just like that cherry tree Tomiko showed me in Japan.” He had remembered the girl’s name, and the inn, and her uncle’s bonsai.

Now, in the dark tent at Makor, he remained sitting in bed and saw the two ancient trees before his eyes, plus a conceptual vision as clear as the diagram in a book. He thought: I was raised to believe that the Old Testament was dead, and that whatever it contained worth saving had been transplanted into the New. In the same way I was taught that Judaism was dead, except for a few obstinate Jews, and that true religion had been handed on to the Christian church, which had produced a flowering.

He shook his head, as if he had been knocked dizzy, but the two trees remained before him, and they represented the modified view of religion which he had been developing without having consciously verbalized it: We have the great, primitive trunk of Judaism and we also have the branch-tip flowering of Christianity, and I intuitively thought that the first was dead and that all life had passed into the second. I never really considered whether the Christian church had direct roots into the soil or not. If anyone had told me that the flowering branch had no roots except those which extended through the forbidding old trunk of Judaism, I’d not have known what he was saying. But now I see.

He was fascinated by the persistence of his vision and was amused when he reconstructed how the trees had come to him. He had gone to sleep thinking of Vered Bar-El in Chicago and this had led to an erotic dream about Tomiko, probably the most exciting girl he had ever known—or it may have been that he was younger then—and she had passed naked into the old trunk of the cherry tree, and it in turn had become the olive tree under which Jesus could have sat; and in this way he had come to the question of God. It sneaks up on you in the damnedest places, he mused, and the trees slowly vanished, but their enigma remained.

Freed of the vision he tried to sleep but found this impossible, and in the dark hours before birds sang he thought of the work he was doing. Until Makor he had never seriously considered the merits of Judaism. He had not understood how anyone could find in the stalwart obstinacy of the Jews a way of life, nor had he approved the awkward procedure of the synagogue with its lack of harmony and appeal to the senses. It seemed to Cullinane—and in this he was without rancor or blind adherence to his own faith—that the Christian church had brought to the religious experience an extraordinary beauty and a personal involvement that far exceeded what he had found in Judaism. It was like comparing, he thought, a beautiful singing young woman filled with life to an old woman …

He choked. There, by God, it was! The stony, unyielding religion he had been unable to understand deserved all the unfavorable descriptions he had given it; but it was also like the old woman, knowledgeable, patient, immortal and close to God. He closed his eyes and saw again the olive tree of Makor: so terribly powerful, so close to the soil, and old, old, old, with holes through it and emptiness and a forbidding sense of time. Yet it was alive.

Remaining in a sitting position he took a hard look at himself and asked: After this digging in the heart of religion, what do I honestly think of Judaism? And because he was a bookish man his conclusions centered on three books: Judaism was an unresilient, gnarled body of primordial belief founded on the Torah; plus a Talmudic ritual equally unyielding but very efficient in providing man with specific guidance; and the Zohar. This trio of books, Torah, Talmud, Zohar, had produced a unified religion with tremendous powers for survival; in fact, the religion seemed to have a built-in determination to survive, for throughout history, whenever its contemporary form had seemed doomed, some new primitive force had evolved which had given the religion another thrust forward. Even the dates of these thrusts were significant, Cullinane thought. By the year 1100 B.C.E. the characteristics of Old Testament Judaism had been fairly well evolved, and to a surprising degree it had existed unchanged for about thirteen hundred years, when in the years following the final destruction of the Jewish state, say, around 200 C.E., the Talmud began to take shape. The period of Talmudic domination had lasted for another thirteen hundred years until around 1500 C.E., when the Kabbala of Spain was transported to the heights of Safed, where it suddenly exploded in a mystical radiance which spread throughout the Jewish world with enough vitality to keep the spirit of Judaism alive for another thirteen hundred years, say, until the year 2800 C.E. What the Jews will come up with then, Cullinane mused, is no concern of mine.

Again he lay down and tried to sleep, but he could not, so he asked himself: If I had to characterize Judaism in simple terms for someone who knew nothing about it, what words would I use? And almost against his willing it to be so, the symbolism of the olive tree returned and he replied: Ancient, gnarled, unresilient, a powerful religion which takes man back to his fundamental nature and experience. He laughed. In two thousand six hundred years Judaism had been able to accept only two changes, the Talmud and the Kabbala, whereas Christianity, with masterful resiliency, had spun off a dozen staggering modifications whenever the spirit of the times demanded: trinitarianism, transubstantiation, the infallibility of the Pope, the near-deification of Mary. There lay the difference between the two religions; there lay the explanation of why Christianity had conquered the world while Judaism remained the intransigent, primordial religion of the few.

“Hey, Eliav!” he called. “You still asleep?” There was no reply, proving that Eliav was still sleeping and would no doubt wish to remain so, but in spite of this Cullinane crossed over to Eliav’s bed and shook him.