Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Rabbi Eliezer, alone in his study, cut off from the popular rabbis by his austere nature and from the masses by his lack of a synagogue, talked mostly with his eighteen-year-old daughter Elisheba, who had her mother’s intelligence as well as her beauty. To the girl he said, “It isn’t a matter of Abulafia or me. Nor of law and mysticism. He is very right in his refusal to argue on either of those levels, but his experience has been only with Spain, where Jews lived wherever they wished and where persecution, when it did come, came to each man of himself. On the other hand, I know what happens in lands like Germany, where Jews are driven into narrow streets. And, Elisheba, most of the Jews in the world are going to live that way from now on. What can it mean to such people, freedom? We’re not concerned with the personal happiness of Uncle Gottes Mann, the honest businessman, may God preserve him wherever he is. We’re concerned with how four thousand Jews, living on topof one another, can exist. And they can exist and preserve their religion only through the most careful observance of the law.” One night he shouted in anguish, “They keep talking about Safed! I’m talking about the world. Without the law, what will bind the Jews together?”

As the argument grew keener, the rift down the middle of the community widened. The camel caravans kept hauling finished cloth to Akka and continued to bring raw wool back, so that everyone was making money, but Rabbi Zaki was worried. In his simple, clumsy way he saw more clearly than either of the main protagonists that this rupture must be healed, but neither man would make a conciliatory gesture. So he went at last and humbled himself before Rabbi Eliezer, but when the interview began he was distracted by the arrival of Elisheba, her hair drawn straight against her ears and tied at the back in a long pigtail; and like the fool his wife had claimed he was he forgot the main purpose of the meeting and said, “Rabbi Eliezer, you should be finding your daughter a husband.”

The rebuke was so honest, and so unexpected, that the austere German Jew began laughing. “You’re right,” he chuckled. “I’ve been diverted to less important things.”

“We all have been,” Zaki agreed. “The whole town’s been talking about Talmud and Zohar, Maimonides and Abulafia. Don’t you honestly think we ought to get back to work, all of us?”

“Do you understand what the argument’s about?” Eliezer asked.

“I try to. Dr. Abulafia is worried about the present. You’re worried about the future.”

Again Eliezer laughed and drew his daughter beside him. “You come awfully close to the truth,” he confessed. Then he grew grave. “But I can foresee a day not far off when the Jews of the world, distraught and each with his own vision of God, will hear some crazy man shouting, ‘I am your Messiah! I have come to save you!’ And unless at that moment the God-struck Jew is standing firmly on the law and protected by it, he is going to dance in the air and cry, The Messiah is at the gates and I am saved from the Judenstrasse.’”

“From what?” Zaki asked, and the German drew back as if the man he was talking to had not his alphabet, knew not the basic words he was speaking.

Then he said, “We Jews can be stupid people, Zaki. Only the law keeps us strong. We are a people of the Book and the day will come when only the Book will preserve us from ourselves.”

“I believe you, Rabbi Eliezer, and now can we have peace?”

“Yes. I have made my statement and I will keep silent.”

“I’ll go see my son-in-law,” Zaki said, and when he had left, Eliezer said to his daughter, “There goes a saintly rabbi. To Rabbi Zaki, Dr. Abulafia is not a man who has torn Safed apart and endangered Judaism. He is his son-in-law.”

At the home of the Kabbalist, Zaki was assured by Sarah that she “had told the rabbi a hundred times to stop writing letters.” Dr. Abulafia laughed uneasily, whereupon Rabbi Zaki suggested, “I think it’s time you leave the coolness of your library and come down the hill to my shoemaker shop.”

“Perhaps so,” Abulafia said, and he reached for his prayer shawl. As he left the house Sarah yelled at him, “And listen to what my father has to say,” and Rabbi Zaki thought: Now I’m a prophet!

He sent a boy to fetch Rabbi Eliezer, who came down the hill, and the three men sat in the shoemaker’s shop and discussed the altercation. Rabbi Zaki said, “I think we have all stated our positions clearly.”

Eliezer corrected him: “You haven’t said anything, Rabbi Zaki. What is your position?”

“That there are six hundred thousand faces to the Torah and that two of my dearest friends on earth, Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Abulafia, have each seen one of the faces and from it gained great illumination.”

“We have been arguing about fundamental differences,” Abulafia protested.

“Is there anything more fundamental than the Torah?” Zaki asked.

“No,” Eliezer replied. “I shall write no more letters.”

“Nor I,” Abulafia promised.

Rabbi Zaki asked Rachel to bring some wine, and said, “You have each wondered if I understood the argument. I do. Abulafia is fighting for the right of the individual Jew to approach the Torah on his own level and to find joy therein, and to this I agree. Eliezer is fighting for the right of Jews as a group to exist, and of this I approve. The job of a poor rabbi like me is to see that each of these desirable goals has a chance of succeeding. But the word ‘Judenstrasse’ I do not understand, and I wish someone would explain it.”

“It’s a street, hideously narrow, where Jews in Germany are forced to live,” Eliezer explained. “And soon we shall all be living there.”

“When we do, may we have the courage of Diego Ximeno,” Dr. Abulafia prayed, and the feud ended.

It would be incorrect to claim that in this critical debate the town itself had remained neutral. Safed was a place of singular beauty; from the edge of the fort crumbling on the hill down to the open fields that lay beyond the synagogue, sixteen narrow streets hung one below the other, connected by alleys which cut through at odd and inconsistent angles. In many places the streets were so narrow, scarcely three feet wide, that above them the houses joined and one walked as in a tunnel; there was an essential mystery about the place. Its location was such that frequently a cloud would drift into town and hang capriciously over some houses and not over others, and a neighbor could stand at his door and see the home of his friend mysteriously disappear—then reappear in sunlight as the cloud passed. The air of Safed was different, too—a clear, penetrating air that seemed to affect the lungs, causing one to breathe deeply with a kind of exhilaration—and through this clear air one could see unusual distances with almost ghostlike penetration. In short, Safed was a town which enhanced the mystical interpretation of life, and it is quite possible that had the Kabbalists chosen some other spot in Galilee, their success might have been limited.

It was Elisheba who first noticed this partiality of Safed. One day she said to her father, “The town fights against you.” He laughed grimly, but she added, “Here I could almost become a mystic. The alleys are just as narrow as the Judenstrasse we left in Gretz. Why, then, do they seem so lovely?”

“Because here there is no iron gate keeping you from the fields,” he replied matter-of-factly.

Elisheba was now twenty and resembled her mother more than ever; she was tall and had her father’s dignity of movement but her mother’s love of children and fantasy. She had become the object of speculation, and even Spanish-speaking Jews began attending the German synagogue to see if Elisheba was in attendance. Many young men thought of marriage with the rabbi’s daughter, and some came to Zaki’s shop to discuss the matter with him. “Ask her father,” the fat rabbi told them.