Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Upon these laws of the Torah a man must build the general pattern of his life. The ritual to accompany his birth was explained and the manner of his burial was laid out. His love for a woman was hedged with decent precautions, and his relations with his son, his business and his king were set forth; and Rebbe Itzik was satisfied that a Jew must live precisely within this body of law, and he had put together a congregation of sixty people prepared to do so.

The life that Rebbe Itzik had devised for them was somewhat different from that followed by the other Jews of Safad. In dress they were conspicuous; they looked like archaic ghosts in long black cloaks, flat fur-rimmed hats, shortened trousers and heavily ribbed stockings. They wore beards and black skullcaps and for some perverse reason preferred walking with the stoop that had characterized them when they were forced to live furtively in ghettos. Their daily life was much the same as that followed by Jews in Safad four hundred years before, with frequent synagogue attendance and strict devotion to complex dietary laws. And on Shabbat, starting on Friday afternoon, they stood especially apart from the rest of Safad, a little group of devout Jews living around Rabbi Zaki’s old shop.

No fire could be lit, no light used. No food was cooked, no vehicle moved. A man could walk only two thousand paces from his home and he could carry nothing; if he had a cold and needed a handkerchief he could tie it around his wrist and make believe it was a piece of clothing, but carry it he could not. On this day a man could not even carry his prayer shawl to the synagogue. The boy children of Rebbe Itzik’s group were especially differentiated from other young Jews by the long and often delicate curls dangling in front of their ears and by the four-cornered shawls which they dropped over their heads and wore under their shirts. The shawls bore fringes in accordance with God’s Torah: “Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments … that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the Lord, and do them.”

But powerful as he was in dictating the life of his community, Rebbe Itzik was not arrogant; he never assumed that he was wise enough, by himself, to interpret God’s Torah, and it was his constant responsibility to study the Talmud, finding therein the guidance that had kept Jews together for more than fifteen hundred years. Each day of the year, excepting only the Ninth of Ab, when they mourned the loss of Jerusalem by staying up all night to read Lamentations, the male adults of the Vodzher group assembled at the synagogue to study Talmud, and since all lived on charity contributed from abroad, the men were free to sit in circles about their rebbe as he expounded passages from the massive volumes. One of the Vodzher Jews once wrote to Brooklyn: “If I have a dream of paradise, it’s to sit in the synagogue on a wintry night in Safad, when snow is on the ground, and the lamp is flickering, while our rebbe expounds Talmud.”

Rebbe Itzik knew the great book virtually by heart, and members of his congregation liked to boast: “Our Vodzher Rebbe can do this. You take a volume of the Talmud and pierce any six pages with a pin. Our rebbe can look at the first page, close his eyes and tell you what eleven additional words your pin has gone through.” The Talmud by which he lived provided answers to any conceivable problems, although sometimes, in the middle years of the twentieth century, one had to wrench meanings a little here and there to uncover a relevant legalism, but he was not averse to doing so, for he found the great compilation surprisingly contemporary: “Rabbi bar Mehasia said in the name of Rabbi Hama ben Goria who said in the name Rab: If all the seas were ink, and all the reeds were pens, and all the skies were parchment, and all the men could write, these would not suffice to write down all the red tape of this government.”

But the most remarkable characteristic which set Rebbe Itzik and his little group apart from the other Jews of Safad was their determination never to use Hebrew except as a holy language. From the Torah and Talmud they had derived the conviction that Hebrew would be used for common speech only after the arrival of the Messiah and that until such time it was reserved for religious purposes; and in furtherance of this belief Rebbe Itzik pointed out: “Observe that in the Talmud itself, only the Mishna, the law of God, is written in Hebrew. The Gemara, the explanation of ordinary rabbis, is inscribed in Aramaic. What the Talmud refused to do, we also shall refuse to do.”

Therefore, outside the synagogue, the Vodzher Jews spoke only Yiddish and they held it to be offensive when others spoke to them in Hebrew. Occasionally Rebbe Itzik had scolded people who addressed him in that language, and he went so far as to refuse his followers permission to ride on any train run by the English government, since the tickets were printed in Hebrew as well as in Arabic and English.

As long as Palestine remained in British hands the peculiarities of Rebbe Itzik’s group occasioned no difficulty. In Jerusalem, Jews of similar persuasion in obedience to the Talmud sometimes stoned ambulances that tried to move on Shabbat, but in the Vodzher part of Safad the streets were so narrow that no car could enter, and even that cause of irritation was avoided. But in 1948, with the likelihood of an eventual Jewish state, problems developed.

Rebbe Itzik viewed with apprehension the idea of such a state in Palestine, and to imagine one bearing the name of “Israel” was repugnant. He told his associates, “The idea’s an outrage. It must not be permitted.” He became so violent in his rejection of statehood for the Jews that he threatened to become a nuisance, and when some young men of his congregation actually ran off to Kibbutz Makor to fight with the Palmach he deplored them as if they had converted to another religion. “There must be no Israel!” he protested.

To support these curious reactions Rebbe Itzik found authority in the Torah. Repeatedly God had condemned the children of Israel to exile among other nations: “And I will scatter you among the heathen … and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste.” Jerusalem was to be occupied, which meant that the Arabs, in holding the Holy Land, were acting as God’s agents, and to oppose them was sacrilegious. Furthermore, the Holy Land would revert to the Jews only when the Messiah appeared; then Hebrew could be spoken generally, and for ordinary human beings like the Palmach to try to force the coming of the Messiah was presumptuous. There must be no state of Israel, no Hebrew, no resistance to the Arabs. There must be submission, prayer and resignation; and if Arabs chose to massacre, that also was God’s will.

Fortunately for Mem-Mem Bar-El and his Palmach, only a handful of Vodzher Jews held these extreme views, for even among the little rebbe’s immediate followers about half listened when other leaders like Rav Loewe and Rabbi Goldberg advised: “The Palmach serves as an instrument of God’s will. Co-operate in every way, for this time we shall fight the Arabs.” When Rebbe Itzik was advised of what the other rabbis had said he folded his hands and looked at the ground. “They do not understand God’s will,” he whispered sorrowfully.

The argument started toward noon on Thursday, April 15, when Ilana Hacohen, refreshed from hours of victorious love-making with her husband, came into the narrow street that ran past Rebbe Itzik’s home. As she left her new quarters, a rifle slung across her shoulder, she brushed back her bobbed hair, straightened her very short skirt, and happened to see the mezuzah nailed to the doorpost in conformance with the law of the Torah. Sensing the days of trial that lay ahead she reached up and touched it. As she did so, she happened to see in the street the tense little figure of Rebbe Itzik.