Джеймс Миченер - The Source

In only one respect did Dom Miguel fall into serious error regarding Safed: though the years were golden, the city was far from finding the secret to permanent civic harmony, for in early 1551 a severe contention broke out, and between the very rabbis whose harmony Dom Miguel had praised. Before long it involved the entire Jewish community and could in time have destroyed it had not prudent steps been taken to heal the breach. It began when a Jewish woman from Damascus wanted a divorce from a man who had lived briefly in Safed and whose family antecedents were uncertain. Rabbi Abulafia, still tormented by his own sin and unhappy in his marriage with Sarah—who grew more like her mother as the years passed—was inclined to aid others who had fallen into domestic trouble. So even though the legal position of the claimant was unclear, he granted the divorce. Rabbi Eliezer, who was not involved in this case, noted with some apprehension that this was the fourth time that Dr. Abulafia had ignored a strict interpretation of the Mosaic law, and Eliezer felt that the spiritual foundations of Judaism were under attack. Accordingly, he retired to the library which the Jews of Constantinople still maintained for him with their contributions and composed a harsh letter, filled with legal citation and the kind of blunt Germanic sentences he used in his codification of the law. The essential paragraphs read:Does Rabbi Abulafia think that he can issue such faulty divorces without censure? Does he plan to issue others in the future? If he does, we cannot see how the rabbis of Safed can any longer place credence in his decision in these or other areas. Surely a man who cannot understand the simple law of divorce can hardly be trusted to judge graver problems. By his arrogant and intemperate decisions Rabbi Abulafia raises in all minds three serious questions: “Does he know the law? Does he respect it? Will he in future observe it?”These are matters which go far beyond Safed. We who have been allowed by God to see the sad state of Judaism throughout the world, know that Jews are in peril and can be saved only if they live according to the law. Any rabbi like Dr. Abulafia who abuses that law helps to destroy Judaism. In circulating this necessary but unpleasant letter we are not concerned with his faulty decision in the Damascus case. That was an error which can be forgiven. But we are concerned with the majesty of law as it operates to save Judaism. And we say to Dr. Abulafia, “If your arbitrary decision in this case becomes a precedent, the basis for Jewish family life will be destroyed.” We know he cannot intend this, so in charity we must conclude, Dr. Abulafia does not know the law. Surely he does not wish to lead the Jews of Safed into those twilight areas where each man is his own judge, where all are free to write the law according to their own desires, and where the hard, clear light of Torah and Talmud is obscured.

The letter, when it reached the alleys and synagogues, occasioned a fury of comment. It was the kind of document intended to make men take sides, and it succeeded. Rabbi Abulafia’s students were outraged and started drafting an answer which would show Rabbi Eliezer to be an idiot, but the doctor refused to be distracted by personal invective and halted his associates. He better than they understood the heart of Eliezer’s challenge, and he wished to place only the basic issue before the people. Therefore, in the weeks that followed Rabbi Eliezer’s distribution of the letter Abulafia worked quietly, saw his students each morning, prayed more than usual and spent his evenings discussing legal precedents with learned friends. Finally, when the tempers of his followers had cooled, he handed them a letter to circulate through the synagogues. It was a statesmanlike document, free of acrimony but filled with legal citation. Abulafia had dug out cases from six different countries supporting his decision in the Damascus divorce. He arranged his precedents so as to verify each procedure that Rabbi Eliezer had questioned. He showed that the practical law of divorce, as it now operated in the Jewries of Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, Egypt and Turkey, clearly supported his decision, so that any charge of arbitrariness or ignorance could not be sustained.

Yet even as he had compiled this part of the letter, he had confessed to himself that any scholar who analyzed his precedents would become aware that step by step, from Spain to Turkey, a chain of distinguished rabbis had been moving slowly and perhaps unconsciously away from a strict interpretation of Torah and Talmud. Encouraged by liberalists like Maimonides a group of rabbis had begun to evolve a tradition of their own, and Abulafia knew that it was at this revisionist tradition, and not at Abulafia himself, that Rabbi Eliezer had been striking in his letter. But this aspect of the controversy the Spaniard chose to avoid; his clear eye was focused on still another battleground existing between the two men, and it was to this fundamental topic that he addressed himself in the final pages of his letter:I deny that the argument of the learned Rabbi Eliezer bar Zadok ha-Ashkenaz concerns me personally; indeed, I believe he has done Safed and Jews of the world a favor in raising the abstract points he has. Nor does the legalistic problem of adhering too much to Maimonides or too little to the Talmud involve me. Here again I believe that Rabbi Eliezer has performed a service in pointing out these divergencies. The real problem upon which we are engaged, and upon which I shall be happy to remain engaged, is this:Can Judaism prevail if it is tied to a narrow interpretation of the law as conceived and administered by a body of older rabbis? Must we not in the years ahead revitalize our religion by infusing it with the day-to-day revelations experienced by common men? I believe in strict observance of the law, as I have shown in the preceding citations, and I would be shamed in my own eyes if I felt that I had strayed from one iota of that law as it has evolved in the lives of real men and great rabbis. I render no decision before I know what is being done in Paris, Frankfurt and Alexandria, for I am a servant of the law as it develops in the lives of men. But I also believe that Judaism, to prevail, must avoid becoming the preserve of a few men who, by their legalistic approach, stamp out the ordinary joy of life and its mystical appreciations.

With this courtly letter the battle was joined. It never became a personal brawl between Eliezer and Abulafia; the other rabbis and the good sense of the two participants prevented that. But it did become a fundamental confrontation between the two dynamic forces of Judaism in that age: Ashkenazi legality versus Sephardi mysticism; or, to put it another way, the conservative force of the rabbi versus the expanding social vision of the community; or, the great restraining tendency of Talmud versus the explosive liberation of Zohar. On these grounds the battle was fought.

The men around Dr. Abulafia—and they were the most persuasive in Safed—had a clear vision of what might happen to world Judaism if the rabbis prevailed. “It will become,” one of them predicted, “a religion much like the yolk of an egg. The meat will all be there, clean and pure at the center, but it will be protected from common understanding by the crystallized white of the egg, legalism, and by the impenetrable shell, rabbinical force. All that can save us is the lifting of this vital yolk clean out of the shell and the sharing of it with average men.”

Abulafia himself did not reason in this manner. He said, “The mysteries of the Zohar are no more understandable by the common man than is the law of the Talmud. We shall always need rabbis, in the future more than in the past. But the exhilarating beauty that is found in the Zohar must be left free to illuminate the souls of all men, and if laws prevent this, then laws must be modified.”