Джеймс Миченер - The Source

The reason why Rabbi Zaki loved to attend Abulafia’s lectures, which he rarely understood, was that he could sit in the synagogue and think: A fine rabbi like Abulafia ought to have a wife. I can imagine no woman in Safed, nor in Salonica either, who would make him a better wife than my Sarah.

So one day in 1549, after the Spanish doctor had finished a soaring exhortation, Zaki waited for the scholars to ask their last questions. Then, alone with Abulafia, he asked bluntly, “Doctor, why don’t you take my daughter Sarah as your wife?”

Dr. Abulafia sat down. “Sarah?” he asked. “Do I know Sarah?”

“You must have seen her. She appears often with my wife.”

“Oh, Sarah! Yes.” There was silence.

“The Talmud tells us that a rabbi must have a wife, and I assure you that Sarah is as fine a girl as her mother.”

“I’m sure she is,” the Spaniard said.

“And even if you cannot accept my daughter, Dr. Abulafia, you must find a wife somewhere, for many of us feel that your influence in Safed would be greater if …”

“If I were married?”

“Yes. For a rabbi it’s practically an obligation.”

The handsome Spaniard sat looking at his hands for some minutes, then said quietly, “For your daughter I would be an old man. After all, I’m fifty-seven, till a hundred and twenty.” This was the Jewish way of stating an age, derived from the promise of God as given in the Torah: “Yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.”

“I assure you Sarah would not worry about that.”

Again there was a protracted silence which neither man knew how to break, but some heavy burden was on Abulafia’s heart, and when he looked at the simple, round face of his friend he was inspired to speak with this man as he had never spoken to another, and he suggested, “Shall we climb the hill to the old fort?” And the two bearded rabbis walked slowly through the narrow streets of Safed, those winding, wonderful streets that never ran in one direction more than a hundred feet, and after considerable climbing past seven synagogues they came to the broken rocks of the fort, and there Abulafia pointed to the distant hills and to the Sea of Galilee.

“This is paradise, Zaki, and I agree with you that any man who lives here should have a wife.”

“Doctor, believe me! Sarah would make you a perfect wife. She’s neat, and her mother has taught her how to cook.”

“But in Spain …” Abulafia halted, afraid to conjure up revolting memories, except that the reassuring presence of Rabbi Zaki encouraged him to do so. Laughing nervously he said, “Zaki, you want to get rid of a daughter who clutters your house. And that’s a big problem. But I must get rid of the devil who rides my soul, and that’s impossible.”

The little rabbi looked at the Kabbalist in amazement. “But it’s you who tells us each morning that we must untie the cords that bind our souls.”

“I do,” Abulafia said. “And I cannot unbind my own.”

The two rabbis looked at the sweeping beauty of upper Galilee; in the days when it was wooded, say, when the great rabbis of the third and fourth centuries were meeting in Tverya to compile the Talmud, it must have been even more inspiring. And Abulafia whispered, “In Spain I was married. To a Christian woman whom I adored. We were marvelously happy, but I was afraid to tell her I was a secret Jew. We had two sons. They didn’t know I was a Jew either. When the worst of the persecutions struck …” He hesitated. He rose and walked about for some time, looking down at Tubariyeh, where the soul of Judaism had been saved by a group of dedicated rabbis much like the ones who had now gathered in Safed on a somewhat similar mission. He wondered if any of those great old men like Rabbi Asher the Groats Maker had been burdened with a sin as terrible as his. Then he looked down, and Rabbi Zaki was waiting.

“The best friend I had in the world,” Abulafia continued, “better even than my wife, was a secret Jew named Diego Ximeno. He introduced me to the Kabbala, and anything I’ve been able to accomplish …” He thought of Ximeno looking at him through the flames. “The Inquisition trapped him. Through what trick, I don’t know. They tore his joints apart, ripped out the lining of his throat, burned holes in his feet. And on the day they dragged him through the streets to the place where he was burned alive, he passed as close to me as …” His ancient sense of sin choked him.

“Burned?” Zaki asked. “Alive?”

“Yes. Well, that night I decided to flee Spain, because Diego Ximeno had shamed me with a courage I could never have. He was as close to me as you are, in his mortal moment, and he looked at me but refused to betray me. So I forged papers …”

Abulafia’s students, who envied his gray-haired grandeur and his mastery of language, would have been surprised could they have heard him in these next moments: he was a man at the apex of his power, unable either to form words or look at a friend. He sat with his head between his hands, mumbling, “In my ignorance … well, I wanted to spare my wife … it never occurred to me …” Syllables came, but no sense; then: “I reached Tunis … circumcised myself with a pair of old scissors … shouted from the window, ‘I’m a Jew! I’m a Jew!’”

For a moment Abulafia collapsed completely. Then he re-established control and forced himself to say, “Years later a Spaniard coming through Alexandria fell sick and they brought him to me. He said, ‘Abulafia? Wasn’t there a renegade Jew from Avaro named Abulafia?’ And although I was safe I began to tremble. ‘This Abulafia ran off and left his wife and children to the Inquisition.’ I clutched the man’s arm to keep from fainting and he guessed who I was. Sick though he was he fled from me in horror. I ran after him, grabbed him and threw him to the street. A crowd gathered and he fought me off. He pointed at me …”

Remembering that day in Egypt the tall rabbi broke into uncontrollable tears, and until fat Rabbi Zaki comforted him, could not speak: “My wife was burned alive. My eldest son was burned alive. My youngest son died in the torture. They did not even know the name of Jew.”

Like the sick man in Alexandria, Rabbi Zaki drew away. In Salonica he had met many Jews from Spain and Portugal who had undergone the tortures of the Inquisition and he was no longer affected by the horror of any narration; but he had never met a man, no matter how degraded, who had saved his own neck at the expense of his wife and children; indeed, he could not imagine, judging from his own experience in leaving Podi, how any man could abandon his family. But in spite of his automatic disgust he did not feel qualified to pass judgment on a man like Abulafia, who had done so, and he refused to make any moral comment. He was therefore unprepared for the tall rabbi’s next question: “Zaki, am I entitled to marry your daughter?”

To his own astonishment Zaki heard himself say, “No.”

That day they said no more. But when Zaki reached home and saw his unlovely daughter Sarah, he experienced pangs of remorse. My God! he cried to himself. I had a chance to catch her a husband and I said no! He was thrown into a world of self-recrimination and remorse. As a rabbi he could not escape taking a harsh view of Dr. Abulafia’s behavior: to desert a wife and children and to be the cause of their being tortured to death; it was a graver sin than he had ever heard of, more serious perhaps than apostasy, for this was an abdication of all human principles. Yet the more he brooded upon the matter the more confused he became.

His perplexity was heightened when Dr. Abulafia came to his home and in an act of moral despair asked Rachel and Zaki, “May I have your daughter Sarah in marriage?”