Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“It only looks that way,” he said convincingly.

The road entering Safed led to a public square which spread out from the foot of the ruined castle, and this area served as the commercial center of the town. Here the camels were unloaded and their cargoes sorted for delivery to merchants. Turkish officials clustered about the muleteers, asking of news from Akka, and Rabbi Zaki was left alone, staring down at the heart of Safed; and whispering a prayer for his deliverance he looked beyond the limits of the town and saw between the hills to the south the sunset-colored waters of the Sea of Galilee.

His arm was grabbed by a strong hand, and he heard a rough, peremptory voice asking, “Are you intended for Safed?” He turned to find himself facing a burly, good-looking man with a stout black beard and workman’s clothes.

“I am sent here by Rabbi Jemuel of Constantinople,” Zaki replied.

“Blessed be his memory,” came the brusque reply. “That your family?”

“My wife Rachel and my daughters.”

“You’ll need a big house,” the Safed man said. “Right now we have none.”

“I told you not to come to Safed,” Rachel began to lament. “We were happy in Salonica.”

“But until we find one,” the bearded man added, ignoring the complaints, “you shall live with me. All the newcomers do at first. My name is Yom Tov ben Gaddiel.” And he led the family—they had scarcely any luggage—down a steep path and through alleys only a few feet wide until Rachel was dizzy, and she reminded Zaki: “I told you people would fall off this hillside.”

They came to a square, not a European plaza but a halting place on the hillside, perhaps twenty feet across, and here the little group rested, hemmed in by houses, and Rabbi Zaki was able to study Safed: a warm, tightly knit town where Jews were at ease. They then proceeded down the hill until they reached Yom Tov’s home, and from his door they could see the western hills and the pass they had negotiated, and extensive fields reaching to the horizon. Zaki covered his face and thought: It’s this we’ve been searching for; but his wife thought of Podi and Salonica and Izmir and all the other good places they had known, and she was disconsolate.

Next day, when the Jews of Safed learned that a rabbi from Italy was among them, they crowded Yom Tov’s house to question him, and many wanted to know why a Jew who had lived in Podi would have left such a well-regarded haven—and Rachel echoed the question: “Yes, why?” Zaki explained what his fears had been and told of how for seven years he had longed to get to Safed. He said that the fame of the hilltop town had spread throughout Jewry and that he had wished to make himself a part of the brotherhood.

His simple explanation was received in silence, as if the men of Safed knew that they did not merit such praise, and in the long moment of hesitation Zaki had a chance to inspect the faces about him: they were bearded faces, marked by deep-set eyes which seemed to express the quiet exaltation of the town. The men wore oriental-style gowns and some wore turbans as well; and there was a stateliness about them, as if they had spent many years learning to control both their emotions and their fugitive thoughts. They were men, Zaki thought, with an intellectual power far surpassing his own, and he wondered if he could hold a place amongst them.

This fear was increased when Yom Tov said, “Shall we explore the alleys?” And leaving the women behind, Zaki set out to see his new home. First he was led back to the square at which the family had stopped the evening before, and from there he moved along a narrow lane to the south, where to his surprise he was brought to a yeshiva where a man in his late fifties was expounding the Talmud to a class of nearly a hundred devotees. It was the great rabbi of Safed, Joseph Caro, who spoke in a cold, deliberate manner, interpreting the law of Judaism. Never before in his life had Zaki seen so big a yeshiva, nor had he been aware that so many Jews were interested in philosophical discussion.

Yom Tov then led him down to a lower level and back to the west, where in a large house he was introduced to an even more persuasive teacher, the learned Moses of Cordova, the man of Safed who knew most about the mysteries of the Kabbala, and he, too, had a student body of nearly a hundred, listening to intricate speculations which Zaki knew he would not be able to comprehend.

Yom Tov then led his fat guest to another level of the town, where he found in close proximity four different synagogues, each with its teacher and sixty or seventy scholars. “It’s a town of wisdom!” he cried in the Ladino which he had picked up in Izmir and which served as a lingua franca in all except the German quarters of Safed.

“It’s also a town of work,” Yom Tov reminded him, leading the way to a large building through which a mountain stream tumbled, causing devices of various kinds to operate, and here Zaki became aware that his guide was both a respected rabbi, Yom Tov ben Gaddiel, and the leading cloth manufacturer of Safed. His plant employed three hundred men who were engaged in combing, fulling, washing and dyeing processes.

“In Safed we say, ‘Without work there is no Torah,’” the rabbi explained. He spoke of one famous rabbi who kept a shop, of another who was a barber. “I’ll find jobs for your women.”

“Doing what?” Zaki asked, for in the factory he saw only men.

Yom Tov led him back to the center of town, where they stopped at several homes, and in each, women were spinning wool imported from Turkey or weaving it into the stout cloth which accounted for Safed’s fame throughout the Mediterranean. Yom Tov explained that he owned the mill, another dyeing establishment at the edge of town and the warehouses.

“You must be very rich,” Zaki observed without envy.

“No,” the local rabbi corrected. “The money we make on cloth goes into the yeshivas and the synagogues.” Zaki stared at the black-bearded man in laborer’s clothes and said nothing, for the words he had just heard were difficult to believe.

When they returned to Yom Tov’s home Zaki was perspiring, and Rachel observed, “At last! You’ll climb up and down these hills so much you’ll lose some of that fat.” And she proceeded to describe in much detail how embarrassed she had been when her husband had lost his pants in the spring races at Podi, but none of the listeners felt embarrassment, because most of them, during their lives among the Christians, had suffered equal indignities.

“I shall give you four spinning wheels,” Rabbi Yom Tov explained to the women of Zaki’s family.

“What for?” Rachel asked suspiciously.

“To work,” Yom Tov answered sharply, and before Rachel could reply that she had not come to Safed to learn spinning, he added, “Here we all work. I’ll find you a house where the women can spin in the back and the rabbi can be a shoemaker in front.” And such a house was found.

As the family settled into its new life Rabbi Zaki confided to no one the principal reason for his joy in having reached Safed, but to himself he often thought: It’s wonderful! So many young men here without wives. If I don’t get the girls their husbands here, where in the world could I?

So wherever he went, whenever men gathered together to talk religion, Rabbi Zaki could be depended upon to cite either the Torah or the Talmud regarding the desirability of marriage. “As the Talmud says,” he used to quote in his shoemaker’s shop, “‘The unmarried person lives without joy, without blessing and without good. He cannot be called a man in the full sense of the term.’” And always in the course of talking with his customers he would remind them of the pregnant words of Genesis: “male and female created he them.”