Джеймс Миченер - The Source

The presence of Shabbat let us receive.”

And then on the embroidered curtain covering the Torah he saw the flaming figures 301.

Above the voices of the singers he cried, “Oh, God, what must I do to help?” And the figures burned in fire, as if they must consume the synagogue, and to the surprise of the worshipers he prostrated himself on the floor, crying, “God, have You called me at last?”

Rabbi Eliezer heard these words and interrupted his chant to run to the fallen rabbi, and when he saw the ecstasy on the fat man’s face he sensed that some dreadful thing had come to pass through meddling with Kabbala, and he did an extraordinary thing. He slapped Zaki three times and cried, “It is not so!” But the fallen man ignored the blows and looked only at the cupboard of the Torah, where the mystical figures burned for some moments, not to disappear until Zaki cried in full submission, “I shall go.”

At the end of service he ignored Rabbi Eliezer and hurried home, where he said evening prayers with his wife and children, almost breaking down when he saw their four loved faces. He closed his doors to the habitual visitors who liked to sing with him on Shabbat evening and went instead to his room, where he prayed all night. In the morning he waited till Elisheba had fed the children, then said, “I must talk with you.”

Like an uncomplicated girl she smiled and said, “Speak.”

“Can we walk to the old fort?” he asked solemnly, and she, having feared this moment for some days, assented. Calling an old woman to mind her children she joined her husband and they climbed the narrow streets leading to the Crusaders’ fort, where they sat on old rocks and surveyed the marvelous landscape in which they lived.

Rabbi Zaki said, “It is a matter relating to the will of God.” His wife said, “I knew it must be.”

“I am not learned like your father, and I cannot pierce mysteries like Dr. Abulafia, but long ago, when I first read Talmud as a boy, I found the message which has guided my life. It was in the words of the great Akiba, who was also an uncomplicated man like me. Akiba said, ‘Everything in life is given against a pledge, and a net is cast over all the living; the shop is open, the shopkeeper extends credit, the ledger is open before you, the hand writes, and whoever wishes to borrow may come and borrow; but the collectors make their rounds continually and exact payment of every man, with his consent or without.”

There was silence. Elisheba had long known this greatest of passages from Akiba; she knew that all human beings lived under a net which bound them to certain limits of activity, and she knew also that the bill collectors circulated each day, lifting the payment of those who had borrowed against the future. These understandings were the basic morality of Judaism and she did not flinch from them. She wondered what was in her husband’s mind.

“For many months,” he said, “I have felt the number 301 summoning me, and recently it has appeared on your brow and on the brow of our children.” He trembled and drew back. “It’s there now, Elisheba.”

“What does it mean?” she asked softly.

“Fire,” he said.

For some moments she looked at the fat little saint with whom she had been allowed to live in such simple happiness, and slowly the meaning of his vision came to her and she rejected the great words of Akiba. “No!” she screamed in terrible anguish. “Zaki, no! No!”

“It means fire,” he repeated dully.

For some hours they sat peacefully among the Crusader ruins, an old man and a beautiful young wife, and finally each had to accept the fact that there was no escape, no alternative. Finally Elisheba, with an anguish greater than she had imagined could exist, turned to her husband and said, “If you must, may God strengthen you for the sanctification of His Name.”

“I must,” he said, and like ghosts, treading on unreality, they went down the hill.

Elisheba took it upon herself to notify the other rabbis, and they came running through the streets to the shoemaker’s house. “Is Zaki dying?” the neighbors inquired, seeing the sudden convergence.

The little shoemaker, then sixty years old and with a white beard, sat sternly at his bench as the leaders of Safed gathered about him. He said, “All my life I have wondered why I was made so fat. To please Rachel I tried to eat less, but God kept me fat. It was for a purpose. So then when I march to the stake for the sanctification of His Name I shall make a blaze that will burn for a long time.”

And now the spiritual solidarity of Safed manifested itself. Rabbi Eliezer, torn from his legal studies, did not remind his colleagues that such egocentricity was the end product of Kabbalism, nor did he cry that seeking out martyrdom was arrogance and a matter not approved by law. He reasoned, “Zaki, my beloved son-in-law, has God directed you to do this thing, or is it merely your own vanity?”

And Dr. Abulafia, whose encouragements to Zaki to study the Kabbala could have been responsible for the fiery message, felt himself rebuked by Zaki’s determination to compensate for his abandonment of his congregation. “Zaki,” he asked, “is it a true vision you’ve had or something you imagined because you were with others who had honest insights?”

Patiently Rabbi Zaki put each of his friends at ease. “This happened to me long before I heard of Kabbala, for on the day I fled Podi, God showed me on the faces of the friends I was deserting the mark of fire. And it is a true vision, for in a dream a voice spoke to me and said, ‘Zaki, if you try to divide this number 301 by two or three or four or five or six, which are the ordinary days of the week, there is always one left over, which is you. But if you divide it by seven, which is the number of our Shabbat, there is no remainder, and you are one with God.’ “In a whisper he added, “And if you sum the letters used in writing fire they come to 301.”

Among the Kabbalists there was serious discussion of these mystical facts, for obviously they portended something arcane, but the discussion was broken by blunt Rabbi Yom Tov, who reminded Zaki, “There is one supreme reason for not going. If your bones are buried here in Safed, on Judgment Day you will rise to greet the Messiah; but if they are buried overseas you will have to burrow underground like a mole to reach the Holy Land.” This was a belief held by many old Jews, and it was their dread of a long twisting journey in darkness which inspired them to return to the Holy Land to die.

Of equal weight was Rabbi Abulafia’s reminder: “You are not an ordinary Jew, Zaki, going to Rome on a mission to defend the Torah. Some have done so and escaped. But you are a Jew who was once baptized in the Christian Church, and like the Jews of Podi who were burned, you are in the eyes of that Church a heretic, and they believe they have a duty to burn you. If you go to Rome, you invite your own certain death.”

But what Rabbi Zaki said next was of greater weight: “We live within the net of God, and though I swam to the farthest end of the Mediterranean I could not escape. Had I stayed with the Jews of Podi, I would have burned with them. They call me and God calls me.”

The discussion was broken by the arrival of Zaki’s two oldest daughters, Sarah and Tamar, who demanded to know What the meeting was about. When they were told that their father proposed going back to Rome to argue for Judaism and to offer himself for martyrdom, they began to protest bitterly. Like their mother they had been against his leaving Podi, Africa and Salonica, and they were now against his leaving Safed. “If Mother were alive …” they shouted harshly.

“She is not alive,” Elisheba interrupted. “But I am, and I say that if Rabbi Zaki is called by God to this terrible mission, he shall go with my blessing and the blessing of our children.”