Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“Yes!” shouted Rachel.

“It is for him to say,” Abulafia replied, pointing to Zaki.

“He says yes!” Rachel cried joyously.

“No,” Zaki said.

“Study your heart,” Abulafia pleaded and left. As he climbed sorrowfully up the narrow street he could hear Rachel screaming at her husband.

For three days the shoemaker’s shop was a scene of hell. Sarah, who from the first had been bedazzled by the gracious rabbi from Spain, wept until her pasty face was an ugly red. She accused her father of destroying her life. Rachel was more to the point: “He’s insane. We should hire an Arab to stab him.”

Zaki bowed his head before the storm he had aroused, but the moral problem facing him he did not avoid. Abulafia, by his abandonment of his Christian wife, had put himself outside the sphere of love, and even though rabbis were supposed to marry, the handsome Spaniard had been well advised not to do so; Zaki was sorry he had raised the question that day, and he was even sorrier that he had involved his daughter.

It was Zaki’s habit, when faced by such conflict, to consult the sage whose writings he had found most helpful when guidance was required; so he went to the synagogue and took down his favorite book, turning its pages idly until he came upon the sentence in which Maimonides discussed the passage from the Talmud which summed up his philosophy: “The Torah speaks in the language of living men.” The law was given to men, not men to the law. In the abstract Abulafia’s behavior made him unfit to enter into a second marriage, but this was no longer a case of abstracts. Human beings were involved—a lonely rabbi who was doing God’s work, an unmarried woman—and common sense cried, “Let them marry.” Still unconvinced that he was doing right Zaki puffed up the hill to Abulafia’s medical office, stood in the doorway and announced in a halting voice, “The wedding can proceed.” He turned, went down the hill and told his daughter, “Rabbi Abulafia will marry you.”

On the day of the wedding the Jews of Safed joked, “Since Zaki got rid of that one, he’ll have us rejoicing in the synagogue all night,” and after the wedding feast they went home to wait for the sound of their fat rabbi running through the alleys to summon them. But nothing happened. Midnight passed and one o’clock, and finally some men came to the shoemaker’s shop and called to him, “Rabbi Zaki! Are we not going to celebrate tonight?” And he would give no answer, so the men went back and reported, “The fat old fellow was in a corner praying. And he wouldn’t look up.” So others came and cried, “Rabbi Zaki, please call us to the synagogue!” But in this marriage he found no joy and could not respond, so a third time they called, “If we summon the crowd, will you also come?” And he was about to refuse even this when Rachel came from the kitchen. It had not occurred to her before that the people of Safed actually loved her ridiculous husband, and to hear them begging him to join them gave her a new view on their marriage: in his fumbling way Zaki had found good husbands for each of his daughters, and tonight she had to admit that the girls had not been prizes. His accomplishment was not a mean one, and she looked at him with respect. Awkwardly she placed her hand upon his shoulder and said, “They want to celebrate, husband. And I want to celebrate, too.”

“You can’t go in the streets,” he said solicitously.

“I’ve poured myself a glass of wine in the kitchen.” Zaki could say nothing, so she tugged at his arm. “They’re calling for you,” she said and opened the door. This invitation he could not refuse, and when he came sore-hearted to the synagogue he saw a gaunt, bearded stranger standing at the wall next to a beautiful girl, and it was Rabbi Eliezer from Gretz, newly arrived with his daughter Elisheba.

The appearance of the German rabbi, last of the three whose work in Safed would modify subsequent Judaism, had a sobering effect upon the city. He was neither a simple good man like Zaki, nor a mercurial mystic like Abulafia. Nor was he any longer a handsome young rabbi who loved dancing and good German beer, for seven years of exile had aged him noticeably. He was now an austere man burned out by the fires of persecution and personal misery. All that remained was a vision crystal-clear as to how the Jews of the world could be salvaged from the chaos which must overtake them in the years ahead, and it was his undeviating dedication to this one concept that would make him immortal.

In Safed he did not teach, nor did he build his own synagogue, as did many of the other leading rabbis. When wealthy Rabbi Yom Tov offered to erect one for him he refused. Instead, he gathered all the books available in the Galilee and applied himself to them, day after day, year after year. Anyone who wished could consult with him, and as the years passed, practically the whole of Safed did so, even the Arabs, for he was acknowledged the leading legalist of the Galilee. The Kabbala he refused to investigate, saying, “That is Dr. Abulafia’s field. He has the mystic vision and I do not.” Nor did he concern himself with the daily ministry of a man like Rabbi Zaki, of whom he said, “He is the greatest of the rabbis, and I hope that in the future every community finds one like him. But I must tend my books.”

Eliezer’s self-appointed task was the codification of Jewish law: he would put down in simple terms those things a Jew must do in order to remain a Jew. The Torah contained 613 laws, the Talmud scores of thousands, and the decisions of later rabbis like Maimonides and Rashi hundreds of thousands. On any given topic, say, marriage, no Jew could any longer know what the law was and this confusion Rabbi Eliezer proposed to remedy. Furthermore, in his travels through Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey he had seen many communities where knowledge of even the Torah law was dying out and where the Talmud was not known, let alone Maimonides. The legal structure of Judaism was vanishing, and if this continued, the Jewish people must perish. For all such Jews, Eliezer would provide one massive book containing a summary of all law. His ambition was to save Judaism, no less.

He had started his work in Constantinople in 1546, but that city was not conducive to systematic thought; the Jews had few books and the Turkish government put men of obvious talent like Eliezer under considerable pressure to accept administrative posts. Three times the gaunt rabbi had been invited to become a counselor at court, and doubtless his talents would have insured him advancement, but he felt called to serve in a different capacity. “In Safed,” his friends had told him, “you’ll find both books and a spirit of scholarship.” And they had collected a purse of gold which would last him for many years, and promised him more if he needed it, so that he was free to concentrate his whole energy on the question: “What must a Jew do to remain a Jew?”

On the question of marriage alone he had already filled two notebooks, and his researches had reminded him that each man must have a wife, so in Constantinople he had married a Jewish widow who found her fulfillment in looking after his books and his attractive daughter. He was now codifying the laws of inheritance, adoption and divorce, and this would require another two books. After that would come land tenure, the clean and the unclean, business practice and each intimate detail of human life. For every conceivable human action there could be found a law, and the Jew must know what that law was.

In later years certain liberal philosophers of Judaism would deplore the fact that the iron-willed German ever reached Safed, for after he completed his codification the Jews of the world were hemmed in by a body of law so specific and rigid that any normal growth seemed impossible; harsh critiques were written of Eliezer bar Zadok’s deadening influence on Jewish thought, but in the end even his censurers had to acknowledge that only his iron will had brought order into chaos; if it was true that he had forged chains of bondage, it was also true that he had built those sturdy bridges on which Jews marched from past to present and on into the future. It was not forgotten that the first problem to which Eliezer bar Zadok addressed himself was one of the most permanent in world history: “How can a man and woman live together in harmony?” And his second problem had been: “What are the duties and privileges of children?” If Jewish family life grew constantly stronger while that of its surrounding neighbors weakened, it was because Eliezer the German Jew had spelled out the most intimate laws regarding these matters: “There is no aspect of sexual relationship between husband and wife that may not be discussed, but we have found that there are four things which a man ought not ask his wife to do, and there are three which no wife must ask of her husband.” And in simple language he stated what those seven restrictions were. He also gave the most succinct reason for abandoning plural marriage: “Torah and Talmud agree that a man may have more than one wife, but the law says that if a man does have three wives, each has a right to sleep with him one night in turn, and if he begins to show favoritism either sexually or emotionally to one at the expense of the other two, the latter have a right to complain that they are being neglected, and if he cannot serve each properly and in her regular turn, which few men can do, then let him have one wife only.”