Джеймс Миченер - The Source

SABRA: YOU believe the rabbis could have prevented the debacle?

REBBE: Only rabbis can keep Judaism pure. The rabbis of Jerusalem knew that Shabbetai was an impostor and said so. The rabbis where he first spread his poison gave the same warning. And a hundred years after Shabbetai Zevi vanished from history as a good Muslim, he was followed by another who was worse, Jacob Frank. He, too, was the Messiah and he, too, was opposed by the rabbis. But he was persuasive and gained great power. He taught that to know goodness man must first know evil, and under his spell the poor men of Vodzh initiated abominations of the body, and all in the name of the Messiah. And when Judaism was well corrupted, what did Jacob Frank do?

SABRA: I don’t know of him. What did this one do?

REBBE: He said that the-Talmud should be publicly burned, which it was. And then?

SABRA: What?

REBBE: He led his whole congregation to the Catholic cathedral, where they were baptized.

SABRA: He did?

REBBE: But even the Catholics found they didn’t want him. They discovered that when his Catholic Jews prayed to the Trinity they meant God, Shabbetai Zevi and Jacob Frank, so they locked Frank up in a monastery. Why, even Safad has produced its own false Messiah. The legendary Joseph della Reine, who followed in the footsteps of Shabbetai Zevi in that he, too, converted to Islam. So you see, we Jews cannot be trusted if we stray too far from our rabbis.

SABRA: Then you see a people permanently bound by the old laws of the Polish ghetto?

REBBE: I see, when the Messiah comes, a Jewish state. In France or America agnostics are free to build any kind of state they wish. But a Jew who believes in the one God is not. It must be a Jewish state, and it must take into account the totality of Jewish law. And that law is what the rabbis say it is.

SABRA: Ours will be a Jewish state, but it will go back to the Jewish-ness of four thousand years ago, before your eastern European corruption.

REBBE: Jews are alive today to fight for your state only because the ghettos you despise kept them alive. And they were kept alive only by the force of rabbis administering the Talmud in every tiny community, You exist today because my grandfather existed in Vodzh and fought the Poles and the Russians and the Germans before them. Without him you would not be. And what sustained him? What sustained the Jews of Vodzh against oppressions that the mind of man prefers not to recall? An unalterable faith in the laws.

SABRA: If we are to keep ghetto Judaism alive, I would sooner see the Arabs win.

REBBE: There is no other that can be kept alive. For it is the inheritor. And Jews above all people exist on their inheritance.

SABRA: We’re making a new inheritance. In Vodzh your grandfather and his good Jews waited in the synagogue and bared their throats for the pogrom. And his grandfathers waited for Czmielnicki and his gang. No more, Rebbe. If the Arabs are to kill us in Safad, they shall have to kill every goddamned Jew, and before they get to you, they’ll have to shoot me down, because I’ll be killing them to the last minute with this rifle. We are the new Jews.

REBBE: Mein tochter , you do not make a new tradition by blaspheming. You girls, so proud of your rifles and your drills. Standing side by side with your men, where you should not be. This is no brave new tradition, but a very old one, and of it Moses himself said, “When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: Then thou shalt cut off her hand.”

SABRA: I have never heard a more preposterous straining of a text to prove a point. If an Arab reach out his hand to strive with my husband, I shall shoot that Arab between the eyes. I am a daughter of Deborah, and when we win Safad I shall dance and sing as she did.

REBBE: I am distressed when you speak of power and force of arms. You forget what Moses our Teacher said: “The Lord did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people.” It is our task to illuminate the rest of the world by our allegiance to the one God.

SABRA: It’s our task right now to win a nation, and we’re going to do so.

REBBE: YOU speak with such contemporary arrogance that I have trouble in reminding you that perhaps we rabbis are the ones who best understand the world. My brother in Vodzh is more orthodox than I, more removed from life, as you might say. May I read the response he wrote in 1945? It has done more to save the lives of girls like you than anything you will ever do. Question: Two fair Jewesses of Vodzh have come to me much distraught because their husbands and their families refuse to accept them back into the bosom of their homes, and the reason is that each girl has tattooed in bold letters on her right forearm the words FIELD WHORE FOR THE GERMAN ARMY. Their husbands argue, say the girls, that their marriage bonds are dissolved because of the use to which the girls were put in the slave camps. Their families argue that the girls should have died in their shame, and an uncle says that they should have cut off their arms before allowing Jews to see the uses to which they were put. What to do? Response: The law on this matter is so clear that any man can understand it. Any married woman who becomes a prostitute shall, like the wife of Hosea, be put aside. The husbands are correct in thinking their marriages dissolved. And the law says that any daughter who becomes a prostitute shall be taken to the edge of the city by her own father and there stoned to death. The families are therefore also correct in thinking that their daughters have dissolved the family relationship, according to the law.But that cannot be the end of the matter, for in the cases of these two Jewish wives ordinary words do not apply. It is 1941 that we are talking about, and we see four young Jewish brides brought before a tribunal of the cruel ones. The judge says to the two who are not beautiful, “Go to the boxcar,” and to the other two, who are, “Have your arms tattooed and go into the whorehouse.” To defy either command means instant death. Had these girls a choice? Does a Jewish girl of good family offer her arm to be tattooed or her body to be abused? Was there one of us in this little town who did not know the terror of the evil ones? How can we forget and today say that this girl should have behaved so, and that this man’s wife should have done thus?I therefore direct that these two women return to their husbands and to their families, and that all receive them as thank offerings of the Lord, that we have been spared. To my synagogue they shall come with honor, to my house with praise. We have all come back from the brink of the grave but few with so clear a mark of God’s divine forgiveness as these girls wear. If any man in Vodzh shall speak against them, either husband or father, that man is forever excommunicated from the Jewry of this town and from any other town where this letter can reach.Now, as to the uncle who advised the girls to cut off their arms, he is right in part and wrong in part. They must wear long sleeves to hide the awful thing that was done to them and they must take no pride in their humiliation. But on the other hand they must take no step to remove this contemptible sign, for God sends signs amongst us for a purpose, and all of us in Vodzh who have survived bear some sign, but none of us a sign so hellish; and when these women move among us they are a walking testimony to the fact that God punishes us Jews terribly, yet redeems us with His love.

The point is, that we must have in society someone who can speak on such matters, and he will have the authority to do so only if he speaks from the Book and only if the Book is old and sacred.