Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Eat your banana-leh.”

It was the pleading voice of the indulgent Jewish mother, coaxing her fat little boy to stuff himself one mite more. As she sang the nonsense words Ilana’s voice was like that … filled with love and the joy of having made it to Safad.

As dawn broke that Wednesday morning a surge of hope echoed through the narrow streets of Safad: “The soldiers have arrived!” And Jews who the previous afternoon had been choosing between massacre or exile were now free to weigh a third alternative, victory, and throughout the town men resolved to hold out a little longer. In all Safad there was rejoicing.

In all Safad, that is, except in the Ashkenazi synagogue controlled by Rebbe Itzik of Vodzh. In its narrow confines ten old men with long black cloaks and curls dangling beside their ears stood praying. The previous afternoon the British government had offered them safe-conduct to Acre, but they had determined not to leave Safad.

Their leader was a thin, small man, a Russian Jew who forty years before had brought his flock from Vodzh to Israel so that its members could die in the Holy Land and, when the Messiah came, escape the dark and tedious underground burrowing from Russia. He had piercing blue eyes and bushy eyebrows, long white curls and beard. His flattened hat was trimmed with fur and his drooping cloak repeated in every detail the garment decided upon by Polish Jews three hundred years before. His hands were white and wrinkled, and when a young boy came bursting into the synagogue, shouting, “Rebbe! Rebbe! Jewish soldiers have arrived. A whole army,” the little man ignored the news, merely clasping his hands more tightly and bowing his head. His nine followers did likewise, their ankles and knees pressed closely together, as the Talmud directed. They prayed that the children of Israel might be patient when the Arabs fell upon them. They prayed that God would accept their souls when the long knives flashed. And they prayed that they might soon be one with Moses our Teacher, with great Akiba and with the gentle Rabbi Zaki, who had known the meaning of God.

After a moment the boy shrugged his shoulders and ran off to cry his good news elsewhere.

… THE TELL

Excavating was interrupted, insofar as Cullinane was involved, when a team of archaeologists from Columbia University dropped down from a dig they were conducting at the ruins of Antioch in southern Turkey to check the finds at Makor. At a luncheon meeting at the kibbutz the director of the Columbia team caused considerable pleasure by stating, “Word of what you’re doing down here has circulated through the profession. What with levels reaching all the way back from Crusader times to the beginnings of agriculture, you have a good chance to make this a classic dig.”

Cullinane nodded and said, “With two assistants like Eliav and Tabari we’re not going to lose much material that could be salvaged.”

“Are you an Arab, Mr. Tabari?” one of the Columbia men asked.

Cullinane deferred to his Arab assistant, and when Tabari merely smiled, he explained, “If you understand Arab names you’ll appreciate it when I tell you that Mr. Tabari’s real name is Jemail ibn Tewfik ibn Faraj Tabari. His family gave him those names to remind the world that he was not only the son of Sir Tewfik Tabari, the top leader of the Arab community during the English occupation, but also the grandson of the great Faraj Tabari, the governor of Akko. He was famous for having rebuilt much of that city.”

“Doesn’t Tabari come from the same root as Tiberias?” one of the Columbia men asked.

“In Turkish it’s the same word,” Jemail explained.

“But you decided to stay with Israel?” the New York professor continued.

“Yes,” Tabari said abruptly. He had no objection to discussing the matter of his allegiance, but he knew that to Cullinane and Eliav it was old hat, and he himself was bored with it.

The New Yorker studied the three archaeologists in charge of the Makor dig and changed the line of conversation completely: “Don’t you men find it … Well, with fifty-five million Arabs or whatever it is breathing down your neck … Well, I’ve been reading the inflammatory pronouncements coming out of Cairo and Damascus and Baghdad. That they’re going to drive you into the sea? Massacre every Jew. If they did this, wouldn’t it go pretty hard on an Arab like you, Tabari?”

And suddenly Cullinane realized that this reasonably intelligent professor was aware that those who worked in Israel lived under the hammers of history, under the constant threat of annihilation, but he seemed not to be aware of the parallel fact that he in New York and his brother in Washington lived under precisely the same threat.

• • •

Next afternoon began the long debate that would determine the character of the state that was struggling to be born. It started because Ilana Hacohen and Isidore Gottesmann were assigned living quarters in a small house that stood next to the historic shoemaker shop that had once been used by Rabbi Zaki the Martyr. By the people of Safad this shop was regarded with affection, and by tradition it was reserved for the home of some rabbi. In 1948, when the Jewish-Arab conflict was drawing to its climax, it was occupied by the Rebbe of Vodzh.

The Yiddish word rebbe had originally signified an elementary-school teacher who taught religious classes in Hebrew in the villages of Poland and Russia; but later it had become a specialized word identifying those gifted rabbis who operated within the tradition of Rabbi Abulafia of Safad: the mystics, charismatic leaders and inspired tzaddikim of eastern European Hasidism, the unique rabbis who gathered about them devoted followings. Two men would speak: “My rebbe can uproot mountains with his interpretations.” “Yes, but my rebbe can cure all manner of sickness.” The Jews of Vodzh said, “Our rebbe understands the Talmud better than any other rebbe. He is the well that gives water without losing a drop.”

Even as a young man in Vodzh the rebbe had been recognized as one specially destined for a holy life, and word spread among the Jews of Russia and Poland that a worthy successor had finally been found to the great Rebbe of Vodzh, who had died a martyr in the pogroms of 1875. The young man’s piercing blue eyes seemed to cut through to the essential moral problems that men faced, and he became widely known as Itzik, Little Yitzhak. At twenty-four Little Isaac felt no hesitation in condemning the richest Jew in Vodzh for a miserly act which contravened the teaching of the Talmud, and it had been his energy alone that had organized the mass exodus of his loyal followers to Safad. How difficult that had been, to bring those seventy people back to Eretz Israel, except that thirty years later most of the Jews who had not followed him from Vodzh were dead in the gas chambers of Oswiecim.

In Safad, Rebbe Itzik had established a new home for his followers. Along the narrow alleys his Jews had found abandoned houses which they rebuilt into clean homes. Living on alms from America they had acquired one of the ancient Ashkenazi synagogues, not the sturdy one of Rabbi Yom Tov Gaddiel’s but an adequate refuge, and through the years they had prospered in their modest way. The Vodzher Jews they were called, and although some of the younger people had left for livelier towns, the rebbe’s group still contained some sixty people determined to worship God according to the Torah as interpreted by their Vodzher Rebbe.

His theology was simple. He believed literally the great commandment of Moses our Teacher: “Now therefore hearken, O Israel, unto the statutes and unto the judgments, which I teach you … Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you.” To Rebbe Itzik this commandment was lucid and all-embracing. It meant exactly what it said. A Jew should keep the law as handed to Moses by God. That law was found in the Torah, which contained 613 specific orders ranging from the first noble words at the beginning of Genesis, “Be fruitful, and multiply” to the last tragic commandment to Moses our Teacher as he lay dying in sight of the promised land: “Thou shalt not go over thither.” Encompassed between this nobility and tragedy lay all the law that man required, the lists in Leviticus, the repetitions in Numbers, the final summations in Deuteronomy. These laws Rebbe Itzik knew by heart and their words were sweet: “And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him.” “If a man vow a vow unto the Lord, or swear an oath to bind his soul with a bond; he shall not break his word, he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth.”