Джеймс Миченер - The Source

At last Rabbi Zaki understood what his handsome son-in-law had been teaching since his arrival in Safed. There was an evil in the world which God was powerless to combat without the help of men; a mystical partnership was being offered, stunning in concept and in its power to elicit the best in life. Like thousands of other Jews who in these years were piercing the mysteries of Zohar, Zaki discovered that he was not the kind of man to find spiritual solace through routine memorizing of Talmud or a sterile codification of law. He could find that mystical solace only through the Kabbala.

“What must I do to help rebuild the broken vessels?” Zaki asked in a spiritual daze.

“No man can tell you,” Abulafia replied. “Contemplate and pray, and He will warn you when He needs you.”

So Rabbi Zaki started to concentrate, but he found it difficult; usually he fell asleep. Nor was he the kind of man to whom God spoke, so he went back to the simple things he could do best: he prayed for the Jews of Podi, and then suddenly the world opened up for him in full mystical radiance. It began one day in November when the dignitaries of Safed came to him and blunt Rabbi Yom Tov said, “Zaki, it’s not proper for you to remain unmarried.” Zaki replied that he was then fifty-seven years old till a hundred and twenty and that his life with Rachel … “That’s no excuse,” Yom Tov reasoned. “When God finished creating man, what was the first great commandment God gave him?”

Yom Tov waited, then recited in powerful voice, “‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply …’”

At the first two meetings Zaki refused to heed his peers, but at the third meeting the force of God’s original commandment struck him when Yom Tov said, “For His first words to the human race God could have chosen any of His commandments, but He chose the simplest of all. A man must find a woman, they must enjoy themselves in each other, and they must multiply. God later said many other things to his stiff-necked Jews, and we rebelled against Him at almost every point, but on this one principle there was agreement.”

Another rabbi said, “So, Zaki, you must find a wife.”

And the little plump man surrendered: “I will look among the widows of Safed.”

Then to his shop came Rabbi Eliezer, saying, “Zaki, my daughter Elisheba wants to marry with you.”

It was like a thunderbolt that struck but one house in a village, and that house was Zaki’s. “But I’m fifty-seven till a hundred and twenty and she’s twenty-three.”

“How do you know her age?”

“Because from the day she arrived in Safed I have followed her in all she’s done.”

“Then why are you surprised?” the German rabbi asked.

“But a dozen young men have sat in that chair and asked me, ‘Speak to Rabbi Eliezer that I may have his daughter.’ You know that yourself—I’ve been to see you several times.”

“And why do you suppose Elisheba has always asked me to say no?”

Rabbi Zaki wanted to believe what his ears were hearing, buthe was afraid. Before him he saw not Rabbi Eliezer, but his own complaining daughter Sarah, who never bothered to mask her disenchantment with her courtly Spaniard, who seemed so attractive to the other women of Safed. Zaki guessed shrewdly that his daughter’s disappointment stemmed from the age-old problem which was discussed with disarming frankness in the Talmud: “The marital duty enjoined upon husbands by the Torah is as follows: every day for those that are unemployed, twice a week for laborers, once a week for donkey-drivers who lead caravans for short distances, once every thirty days for camel-drivers who lead caravans for longer distances, and once every six months for sailors, but disciples of the sages who study the Torah may stay away from their wives for thirty days.” Rabbi Zaki thought: Dr. Abulafia is an elderly man, sixty-six till a hundred and twenty, and I am an old man, too, and if he has run into trouble, why may not the same happen to me?

With compelling simplicity the fat rabbi confessed, “Rabbi Eliezer, I’m afraid to marry your daughter.”

Compassionately the German replied, “I’m sure my daughter knows your fears, but she holds that in these matters God directs us. She’s willing to take the risk. She wants to marry you.”

Three times Rabbi Zaki started to speak, but no words came, so finally Eliezer said, “Little Zaki, you’re a saint. And women are more apt than men to recognize saints when they see them.” So the marriage was held in the German synagogue.

Then came the days of heaven on earth. Rabbi Zaki, who had pleaded with so many men to marry, discovered that he had not understood the meaning of the word, for those participations, which with complaining Rachel had been a duty, became with the tall, poetic Elisheba a joy beyond imagining. Being an uncomplicated man and one not committed, like Dr. Abulafia, to wrestling with spiritual problems, Rabbi Zaki encountered no difficulty in fulfilling or even exceeding his Talmudic quota; there was in fact only one problem: one Friday afternoon in the abounding joy of his new marriage he started to say that at last he understood the invocation of the Shabbat hymn, “Come, my Beloved, let us meet the Bride,” but as soon as he had uttered the first words he dismissed them as blasphemous, for he knew that the Bride Shabbat was greater even than the Bride Elisheba, and in this radiant concept he found assurance. In the quickest possible time she was pregnant, announcing to Safed, “Rabbi Zaki and I are going to have two dozen children.” And as soon as her first son was born she became pregnant again, so that in three years she had three children. She laughed all the time, and when the young men of the town said, “We notice that Rabbi Zaki doesn’t call so many midnight meetings any more,” she shocked Safed by asking demurely, “Would you?”

What Zaki remembered most about his faultless wife, when he was absent from her, was a silly thing. On Fridays, as Shabbat approached, she took white paint and outlined all the cracks where stones joined in the floor of their home, and out into the street as well. It was a German habit and made the home look squared-off and neat, and one day as he recalled these lovely whited squares with which his wife praised God—he saw them in his mind’s eye against the sky to the west—he first saw the figures 301. They came upon him as burning symbols, more real than the earth on which he walked, the flaming figures 301.

That night as he sat by candlelight, moving the Hebrew alphabet about his paper, hoping that he might convoke the mystical letters YHWH, a feat he had not yet accomplished, for his mind was not disciplined enough for that ultimate of mysteries, the ordinary letters suddenly began falling away and he saw at last only the two which designated the number 301. Again the letters stood forth in flame.

During the happiest period of his life, when Elisheba was walking proudly with her three children and when his own influence in Safed was at its height, the fat rabbi found the number 301 rushing out to confront him at unexpected places. On Friday afternoon he would go with the rabbis to the fields to sing of the coming Shabbat, and when he departed from them to announce Shabbat through the streets from one white wall after another, the burning figures 301 stood forth to terrify him. He could not escape them, and in the third month of this visitation a day came when, embracing his wife, he saw them emblazoned on her forehead and then on the heads of his children. It was a moment of terror.

For three days he spoke to no one, and on Friday he neither took a ritual bath nor went into the fields to welcome Shabbat. Instead, he crept quietly to the German synagogue, a man unable to acknowledge the divine summons which had come to him, and as the voices of singers rose about him, he could hear Elisheba chanting behind the curtain that separated the women:“Come, my Beloved, let us meet the Bride.