Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Nevertheless, the slight rapport increased when Ilana brought Vered with her, and the rebbe came upon them as they were eating the rebbetzin’s herbs and boiled water. “Of one thing I am proud,” the little man said.

“The barricades we’ve built?” Ilana asked.

“No,” Itzik replied. “The fact that in all Safad, when food is so scarce, no Jew operates a black market.”

“If he tried,” Vered said, “Mem-Mem would shoot him.”

“How old are you?” the rebbe asked, looking out of the corner of his eye at her almost childlike appearance.

“Seventeen,” Vered replied.

“Is your father religious?”

“Yes. He doesn’t know where I am.”

“His heart must ache,” the rebbe said, muttering a prayer over the two girls.

Then the rapport was shattered. On the evening of April 23, the beginning of their second Shabbat in Safad, Mem-Mem Bar-El felt in his bones that the Arabs were due to attack, and he feared that the attempt would be made on Saturday, when it was logical to suppose that the Jews would be at worship, so on Friday afternoon he summoned all available hands to erect an additional barrier; and the Jews were silently moving boards and rocks when Rebbe Itzik loomed out of the growing darkness.

“What are you doing on Shabbat?” he demanded in Hebrew.

“Building a wall,” Bar-El replied.

“Stop!” the little man cried.

“Rebbe, go home to your prayers!” Bar-El pleaded. The outraged rebbe sought to prevent the men from continuing their work and it became apparent that his protests might alert the Arabs, so the Mem-Mem clamped his hand over the little man’s mouth, swung him around and passed him along to Nissim Bagdadi. “Get him out of here,” Bar-El ordered.

The Iraqi Jew, weighing at least twice as much as the rebbe, easily carried him away from the urgent work and lugged him to the shoemaker shop, where he called for Ilana, telling her, “Keep him home. We’ve got to build a wall.” So Ilana went to the rebbe’s house and sat with him, grimly silent, until the emergency work was completed. Toward dawn the old man predicted in Yiddish, “God will curse that wall. God will curse any army that works on Shabbat.”

But the real crisis came with Passover, when Arab pressure was heavy and Mem-Mem insisted that two critical rows of houses be strengthened with bulwarks, even if other houses had to be torn down to provide the rocks. Work commenced on the eve of Passover, and Rebbe Itzik, hearing the hammers and the shovels, became frenzied. He ran among the bending workmen, the fringes of his shawl brushing across their eyes and reminding them of their own fathers at prayer on this holy day. He pleaded with them to desist from profaning the day, but they pointed out that Rabbi Goldberg and Rav Loewe, recognizing an hour of peril, had granted full permission to transgress either Passover or Shabbat. “So we’re working,” the men replied.

Now the decision of Rabbi Goldberg and Rav Loewe was one honored by nearly two thousand years of Jewish history, for the Greeks and the Romans, knowing of the Jews’ refusal to move on Shabbat, had always tried to select that day for their major offensives and by this tactic had won easy victories until the rabbis of Akiba’s time had pronounced the principle that when a man or a nation was in peril of its life any provision of the Torah might be put in abeyance, except those regarding murder, incest or apostasy. Mem-Mem Bar-El, relying upon that judicious precedent, had appealed to the rabbis for a declaration that the present siege was such a mortal moment and they had agreed. The soldiers could work. But to Rebbe Itzik the law was holier than the preservation of an unborn state which had no right to exist, and he stormed the streets calling down imprecations.

“Get him out of here,” Bar-El pleaded, and again Ilana was given the job of keeping the old man at home; and in these moments of tension occurred a most regrettable incident, one that Ilana would often wish had been avoided.

She and Bagdadi led the rebbe home, fending off a few of his devoted followers who wanted to know, “What are you doing with our rebbe?” Bagdadi returned to the front, where the work continued. In the shoemaker’s room, where Rabbi Zaki the Martyr had offered his common sense to the people of Safad, llana sat with the blue-eyed Rebbe of Vodzh and balked almost all he tried to do.

“I should be at the synagogue,” he protested.

“You were at the synagogue,” she said, “and you left to make trouble. Sit down.”

“Do you think that God will bless a state that works on Passover?” he threatened.

“We’ll get the state, then we’ll worry about God and His Passover,” she replied.

The blasphemy was horrible. “Unless we go back to the old ways, any Israel you get will be ashes in the mouth.”

This kind of reasoning disgusted Ilana and she asked, contemptuously, “Rebbe Itzik, do you really believe that obsolete ideas generated in Poland three hundred years ago represent the will of God?”

“What do you mean?” the old man sputtered.

“The uniform you wear. There was never anything like that in Israel. It’s straight out of the Polish ghetto.”

“The fringes …” the rebbe cried.

“That coat,” she interrupted with amused disgust. “That didn’t come from Israel and we don’t want it here. That fur hat. That blackness. That gloom. All from the ghetto.”

Rebbe Itzik stepped back, appalled. This brazen girl was challenging the symbols of his life, the honored traditions of ten generations of holy men in Vodzh. “This is the dress of God,” he began.

“Don’t tell me that!” she cried, cutting off his claim. “It’s a badge of shame forced upon us by Gentile overlords.” It was then that she lost her control for a moment, so appalled by what this frightened little man proposed doing to her impending land of Israel. Unfortunately, she chanced to look at the rebbetzin, standing by the fire—where Elisheba of Gretz had stood, caring for her three orphaned children who had later accomplished so much in Israel—and in a moment of fury Ilana brushed her hand across the old woman’s head, knocking her hair to the floor. The rebbetzin stood in shame, her bald-shaved head exposed in all its knobs and veins. Her wig lay on the stones.

“May God forgive you,” the rebbe whispered in a voice of anguish, terrified to think that any Jewish girl would do such a thing. He stooped, picked up the wig and returned it to his wife. The rebbetzin placed it clumsily on her bald head, then felt for the edges to adjust them to her temples. She looked pathetic and ridiculous and her husband gave the wig a small twist, setting it right.

“Get out of here,” he whispered hoarsely in Yiddish.

But Ilana, having done the thing, refused to move. “Where is such a custom in Talmud?” she cried. “In medieval Poland they used to shave the heads of brides so that Gentile noblemen wouldn’t demand to sleep with them on the wedding night. To make them ugly … repulsive to everyone but their husbands. So to this day you make your brides shave their heads to make them ugly—then you buy them wigs to make them beautiful. What kind of Mickey Mouse is this?”

“Get out of here,” the rebbe whispered again. “A Jewish girl who would insult an old woman. What kind of Israel are you building?” With unexpected force he pushed the Palmach girl, the bobbed-haired sabra, from his house.

Ilana stood in the dark street for some minutes and heard from nearby houses the sounds of Passover celebrations, conducted in this hour of travail. What had she done? She saw the baldheaded rebbetzin, with her wig in the dust. Suddenly she pressed her face into her hands and shivered, for she was spiritually alone.