Джеймс Миченер - The Source

When Ilana chewed she kept the food in small portions in the right side of her mouth and moved her jaws only slightly, so that she seemed unusually reflective, with her thin upper lip drawn tight and the lines about her eyes contracted. She thought of the odds, forty to one, and of the position of Safad as she had known it, now so critical to the Jews. “It looks to me,” she said slowly, “as if Teddy Reich ought to move his Palmach in there tonight.”

Isidore Gottesmann visibly stiffened. He stopped chewing and looked down for a moment at the white boards of the table. Ilana regarded linen as ridiculous in time of war; she didn’t propose washing table covers when there was other work to do. When her husband did not speak she said quietly, “And if Teddy decides to send his men in, you and I are going too.”

“I guessed we would,” her husband said, and they continued eating.

Ilana Hacohen knew Safad well. Her grandfather had been killed by the Bedouins long before she was born, and she had never known him, but she remembered well the happy days when her father used to take her on horseback up the steep trail to Safad, from which they could see the Sea of Galilee and Tiberias. As they stood on the old Crusader ruins her father would explain how from this spot the Jews had looked down upon the great Roman city of Tiberias, when large fleets had stood out into the lake, and of how, in later days, a group of misguided bigots had assembled in Tiberias to write the Talmud, “thus binding the world in chains.” He said that some centuries later, around 900 CE., a much finer body of rabbis had also worked in Tiberias, “compiling the only honest text of the Bible, so that Tiberias is just as important for the Christians as it is for the Jews.” But it was his opinion that the only rabbi from these parts whom one could love was Rabbi Zaki the Martyr. “He was a great and honest man,” he said, “and all could trust him.” Of contemporary rabbis, except for Rabbi Kook, he did not know many who could be so described. He told his daughter, “Always remember, in this country we have the best rabbis that money can buy.” They were a grubby, contemptible lot and old Shmuel Hacohen had decreed that none should be allowed in Kfar Kerem.

This did not mean that Ilana had grown up without religion. In her father’s house the reading of the Torah was exactly equivalent to the reading of Shakespeare in the home of an educated English family, or the reading of Goethe among Germans—except that because of its antiquity and historical power the Jews of the settlement felt that their great literary masterpiece was somewhat more effective than Shakespeare was for the English or Goethe for the Germans or Tolstoy for the Russians. Rarely a day passed in Ilana’s childhood when she did not hear some practical discussion of the Bible as the historical background of her people. She knew that Kfar Kerem stood where Canaanites had once ruled and that on their victorious return from Egypt the Jews had surged northward through the valleys to the west. She could imagine them still marching, just beyond the ridges back of Tiberias. To Ilana, God’s division of Canaan among the twelve tribes, which had taken place some three thousand years ago, was as real as the proposed United Nations division that would occur within a few weeks: Kfar Kerem stood at the junction of the portions given to Naphtali, Issachar and Manasseh, and it was from these lands that the citizens of Israel had been driven into captivity. Mount Tabor still stood as the perpetual beacon of the north, and the Sea of Galilee remained as Isaiah had described it. To the sabras of Ilana’s generation the Bible was real indeed. In her father’s vineyard she had found Jewish coins that had been issued by the Maccabees, and she could recall that day on which her father had taken her to see the recent excavations at Beth-shan, pointing toward familiar places on the Plain of Jezreel. “Why did he do it?” he had cried.

“Do what?” Ilana had asked.

“Keep his troops here at Gilboa while the enemy was camped over there at Shunem.” And he explained why the man had been a fool, a blunderer.

“Who was?” she asked again.

“King Saul,” her father replied. To the Jews of Kfar Kerem, Saul was a man of history, not a shadowy figure in a religious chronicle, and so with Gideon, David and Solomon.

Like most of her friends, whose parents were either non-religious or actively anti-religious, Ilana Hacohen bore a non-Biblical name. Hers meant tree and spoke of the ancient soil. Other girls bore evocative names like Aviva (spring), or Ayelet (fawn), or Talma (furrow). Young men were apt to be called Dov (bear), or Arieh (lion), or Dagan (cereal). Ilana was determined that when she and Gottesmann had children there would be no Sarahs or Rachels among them, no Abrahams or Mendels; she wanted no part of the old Biblical names nor of the Eastern European ones either. In fact, her only disappointment with her husband was that he kept his German name of Isidore, one relating in no way, she felt, to a modern Jewish state.

It would be difficult to say whether Ilana and her father were religious or not. On the one hand they loved the Bible as the literary textbook of their race. On the other, they despised what the rabbis had made of it. “A prison!” Netanel Hacohen cried. “And the Talmudic rabbis who worked here at Tiberias were the worst of the lot, codifying into ugly little categories all things that God intended to be free.” He also looked unkindly at the work of the later rabbis who had lived in Safad: “In their exile in Spain and Germany they picked up many bigoted ideas and came back here to force them down our throats.” There were others in Kfar Kerem who were so disgusted with rabbinical Judaism that they went much further than Netanel Hacohen. These Jews were prepared to throw out God and Moses, too.

Ilana knew some of these latter thinkers and she found their reasoning persuasive. “We are Jews,” they argued, “and it is our job to reconquer Palestine. When we do we won’t require a lot of rabbis from Poland and Russia to tell us how to govern ourselves.” Women of this group were apt to be especially vehement in their denunciation, and it was from one of these, a girl at the university who had lived in America for some time, that Ilana picked up the phrase which seemed to her the best summary of the religious problem: “that Mickey Mouse crap.”

Among Ilana’s friends a curious cult had developed which could be explained only as a combination of deep love for the Bible and an equally deep distrust for institutionalized religion as they had seen it operating among the Jews of Galilee. Many girls flatly refused to get married in the old rabbinical patterns. “Me take a ritual bath?” Ilana had protested. “I’d sooner jump in cattle water ten days old than step naked into that Mickey Mouse crap.” Her girl friends sought out the men they wanted to live with and in swift progression became pregnant, fine mothers and good heads of their families. They also refused to wear make-up, that being the prerogative of purposeless women in decadent countries like France and Argentina. It became an act of faith not to shave under the arms, to avoid make-up, to wear very short skirts, to bob the hair and to take advanced training in the management of machine guns and field mortars—if any were made available by the men who needed them. These girls also spoke only Hebrew, fluently and with an earthy lilt. Yiddish they deplored as an echo of the eastern European ghettos, and Ladino was as bad. Those whose parents knew no Hebrew consented to talk with the old folks in whatever language was native, Russian with the Russian immigrants, Polish with the Polish newcomers, but Yiddish was frowned upon. “It’s a ridiculous mark of servitude,” Ilana protested, “and Gentiles are correct in laughing at it.”