Джеймс Миченер - The Source

In a later passage that some Jews wished Dom Miguel had omitted, because of its frank discussion of sex in Safed, he wrote:Shabbat in Safed is a day of extreme joy, and after the twilight service ends on Friday evening Rabbi Zaki invites some two dozen of his friends and all travelers from far places to his home, where the food prepared that morning by the rebbetzin is laid out and where wine from the Safed hills is poured. We sing old songs of Italy and Spain till nearly midnight and if a stranger gets drunk, more from the singing than the wine, Zaki does not rebuke him. One Friday during our singing he told me, “You will have to put them out, Dom Miguel, for I must go to bed. Since I was first married in Podi I have lain with my wife every Friday night, even aboard ship when we were both seasick, and she would take it unkindly if I missed now.”On Shabbat itself three synagogue meetings are held: dawn, morning, afternoon. During this holy time all but religious life halts completely. Men are allowed to carry nothing, not even a string, lest inadvertently they work upon the Lord’s day. No food is cooked, no fire lighted, no lamp lit. Rabbi Zaki spends this day close to a window, even when in the synagogue, with his eyes fixed toward the lake below, for he tells me that when the Messiah arrives on earth he will make his appearance some Shabbat morning on those waters and then walk over the hills to Safed. “It would be a thing of error,” Rabbi Zaki says, “if we were not ready to greet him as he enters town.” It is a custom in Safed, and one I have grown to love, as Shabbat ends on Saturday at dusk—when a man can see three stars in one glance at the heavens—for the rabbis to gather as if to prolong the day, holding a feast, singing old songs and speaking of the goodness they have known. Rabbi Zaki prays almost till dawn, clutching, as it were, at the garments of the Bride as the day passes into history. How sweet Shabbat can be those last moments!But I have never seen a more doleful day than Sunday in Safed. Now Rabbi Zaki awakes with the taste of ashes in his mouth. I hear him in his bed, fearful of the messenger’s footfall. Reluctantly he dresses and we go in silence to the cold synagogue, so different in spirit from what it had been only a few short hours before. This dawn Zaki looks at no one and he prays alone, as do the rest of us. And then, when the day has well broken and the sun is upon us, the rabbis of Safed meet glumly on street corners and try to decide what went wrong last week. “If we had been truly God’s men throughout the entire week,” Rabbi Yom Tov complains, “the Messiah would surely have come. What did we do wrong?” And the rabbis discuss the errors of the past, the faults of Jews who keep barring the Messiah from his Holy Land. I have often heard Rabbi Zaki say, “Here in Safed we are so engaged in a struggle for our personal happiness that we forget our responsibility to the greater world.” And often he leaves these informal Sunday meetings to preach with new dedication his simple formula: “More charity. More love. More submission to God’s Torah.” And so, as each new week begins, the Jews of Safed again try to live such devout lives that through their example the Messiah will be lured down to earth, for as Rabbi Zaki never tires of reminding us, “It is written in the Talmud that if a single community repents, the world will be saved.” But it is my opinion that if the Messiah is ever brought down to earth it will be by the efforts of one man, and that man will be Rabbi Zaki the Shoemaker.As for the worldly government of Safed, twenty-three thousand Jews, thirty thousand Arabs and I don’t know how many Christians are ruled by Turkish pashas sent down from Constantinople. The Turks collect taxes, set rules for the wool trade and provide soldiers now and then if bandits, called bedawi, move too close in their raids. The day-to-day life of Jews rests in the hands of their rabbis, while the Arabs are governed by their qadis, or judges, and the Christians by their priests. Since the arrival of Rabbi Zaki and Rabbi Eliezer there has been no death sentence and little divorce. I heard of some adultery but of not a single pauper who failed to receive charity. If the rabbis find time they teach the children to read, but here I do not find those systematic schools which were a credit to the Jews of Germany. Nor have I heard of any offenses against the civic peace. I was pleased to see that businessmen are not allowed extravagant profits, for during my visit Rabbi Zaki publicly rebuked Rabbi Yom Tov for not increasing the pay of his women workers when profits rose, and by public demand the wage was raised. I would that all Jews lived as just lives as I lived in Safed.Curiously, now that I am removed from the city I recall only one sound as my lasting memory of that hillside paradise. It is the call of the muezzin from the Arab minarets which surround the Jewish quarters, and as I hear it echo I remember how easily Jew and Arab existed in this city and wonder at the bitterness with which the Portuguese insisted that they could not live with Jews, and at the ugliness in German towns, and especially at the hatred which Spaniards in Amsterdam feel toward their Jews. One man told me, “Arab and Jew share Safed in peace only because each is ruled with equal harshness by the Turk. If Arabs ruled they’d abuse the Jews, and if Jews ruled they’d be intolerable.” I hope the rabbis of Amsterdam will advise me on this matter.Because our Jews in Europe are forced to lead far from perfect lives, I must not leave the impression that Safed is a paradise. If we must depend upon the purity of this city to lure the Messiah back to earth we may have to wait a long time. The men of Safed like women and they like wine. The latter they import in large tuns from Damascus, and the former they arrange for in a most ingenious and satisfactory way. Along the line where the two communities meet, the Arabs keep a house where Jewish men pay to visit girls brought down from Damascus, while the Jews maintain a house in which Arabs come to visit Jewish girls from Akka and Nazareth. I myself visited the Arab house one night, and it was a credit to the city. The rabbis themselves were lusty men and I was told in secret that Dr. Abulafia, much tormented at home by a shrewish wife, kept a mistress near the yeshiva where Joseph Caro taught, and I shall never forget hearing Rabbi Zaki recount with pleasure the story of great Rabbi Akiba, who, lusting for knowledge, once followed his teacher into the privy itself, “and from what he saw him do there Akiba picked up three good habits which he used ever after.” And when I asked, “What were the tricks of hygiene that Akiba learned in the privy?” Rabbi Zaki told me bluntly, and we would not do poorly if we adopted them in Amsterdam. Many of the poems we sang in the synagogues told of passionate love, and the women of Safed like fine fabrics and get them. Jewelry we could buy from the Arabs, and any man was considered miserly who did not buy his wife some, so when I left the city I gave four presents, and they were better made and cheaper than any I could have bought in Antwerp.

Dom Miguel of Amsterdam concluded his remarks on Safed with a passage that would be quoted often in later centuries as a kind of ideal toward which Jews might aspire:I have traveled across the hills to Peqiin, and am seated in the cave where Simeon ben Yohai wrote the Zohar while hiding from the Roman soldiers, and I think I now understand Safed. If in the future men tell you that we Jews were intended to be homeless, without a land of our own, or that we cannot govern ourselves or live side by side in peace with others, send such liars to Safed, for there you will see Jew and Arab living in peace. You will see Dr. Abulafia ha-Sephard existing easily with Rabbi Eliezer bar Zadok ha-Ashkenaz, and you will see a hillside living happily under the law of Moses, and getting rich while doing so. But most of all you will see a fat little rabbi from Italy puffing up and down the steep alleys, bringing love to all men. In Jerusalem they told me, “In Safed you will find the capital of Judaism.” I did not, for to me Jerusalem will always be the capital, but I did find Rabbi Zaki, and he is the heart of Judaism.