Джеймс Миченер - The Source

AMERICAN: Indeed I do! I send you every nickel the law allows.

ISRAELI: But people you won’t send? Yourself, for instance.

AMERICAN: Me? Live here?

ISRAELI: Yes. Instead of contributing manpower, you take away one of the most highly educated women we have. And next year you’ll take away half a dozen of our best-trained young Jews. As a matter of fact, you’d like to take me, wouldn’t you?

AMERICAN: Last time I said I’d be proud to have both you and Tabari.

ISRAELI: And you see nothing immoral in this? Using Israel as an intellectual quarry from which to dig the brains your system has failed to produce?

AMERICAN: I believe that a man of talent must go where he can make the best living. And when he’s done so, he must share his bounty with others. You can be sure that when Vered becomes an American we’ll send large sums of money each year to Israel.

ISRAELI: We…don’t…want…charity!

AMERICAN: You damned well ask for it hard enough. Every year the U.J.A. man perches on my desk. “We must do more for Israel! It’s a brave country, fighting our battle.”

ISRAELI: So you want to keep us a minor Montenegro? A little enclave that thrills the world because its fighters defend themselves against the Arab circle? So that Jews in America can feel pride? What would be the moral justification for such an Israel? But if we can become a beacon of pure, burning light, illuminating this entire area, forming an alliance with a prospering Arab world…making it a true fertile crescent…

AMERICAN: You sound like the U.J.A. man.

ISRAELI: There’s no other way to sound. And what I want Israel to become she cannot become if the Jews of America steal our talent and return only money.

AMERICAN: Where the hell would you be, Eliav, if we didn’t send the money? If there’s one thing you Israelis had better quit, it’s your flippant charge that the Jews of America are interested only in material things. I drove to Jerusalem to see the rabbis, God forbid, and I passed forests planted by Americans, hospitals paid for by Americans, university buildings bearing American names, rest homes paid for by Jews in Montana, kibbutz buildings paid for by Jews in Massachusetts, and, I might add, archaeological sites being excavated by Americans. If that’s materialism, you’d better hope your citizens develop some, because if you took away the gifts of our selfish, materialistic Americans this would be a shabby land.

ISRAELI: And if the gifts weren’t tax deductible, you wouldn’t send us a penny.

AMERICAN: But they are tax deductible because that’s the generous kind of country America is.

ISRAELI: Your money we appreciate. It’s your people we need.

AMERICAN: Men like me you won’t get. Life in America is too good. Besides, who would want to live in a land where rabbis have the power they have here?

ISRAELI: You better make up your mind. On your first visit you complained because our kibbutz had no synagogue. Now you complain because in marriage we follow Jewish law. What is it you American Jews expect of us?

AMERICAN: I expect Israel to preserve the old customs. I like it when your hotels are kosher. And no buses are allowed to run on Saturdays. It makes me feel like a Jew.

ISRAELI: And to keep that feeling alive—somewhere else in the world, not in America—you’re willing to send us ninety thousand dollars a year?

AMERICAN: How do you know what I send?

ISRAELI: It’s my business to know. For the money I’m grateful. For the men you don’t send, I hold you in contempt.

AMERICAN: Look here, Eliav!

ISRAELI: Contempt, I said. If you and Vered have a son, would you send him to Israel?

AMERICAN: Of course I would. I’d want him to work in a kibbutz some summer. For two weeks.

ISRAELI: You stupid…

AMERICAN: You don’t seem to understand the fundamental nature of American-Israel relations.

ISRAELI: Do you?

AMERICAN: A damned sight better than you seem to. Israel must exist. As the focus of our religion. The way the Vatican exists for Catholics. But good Catholics don’t emigrate to the Vatican. They stay in Boston, Massachusetts, and Chicago, Illinois, and Los Angeles, California, not to mention Sydney, Australia. And they work like hell and build good Catholic lives and send the money rolling back to Rome. You forget that we have more Jews in New York City than you do in all of Israel. If you take the whole United States, we have three times as many as you do. We’re the important part of the Jewish world. And our job is not to come here. Our job is to be the best damned Jews in the world, right in Chicago, and to support you with every expression of good will we can muster…with money, with tourists, with American votes at the United Nations, with arms if necessary. This country is our Vatican, and if I hadn’t seen the Vodzher Rebbe up there in the hills, I’d never give Israel another dime, because he’s what I expect of this country. Piety. Kosher restaurants. Men who keep the spirit of Judaism alive. Do I make myself clear?

ISRAELI: It would be a good day for Israel if you never returned and if you forgot us completely. Let us find our own level. Let us make peace with history and subside into a minor colony with an excellent university from which our best minds emigrate each year to Buenos Aires, Damascus, Chicago and other backward areas. Let the rabbis brood over the Torah and Talmud, but let Israel as a vital state perish, because as it is it imposes too terrible a burden. Vered can no longer sustain it in its present form, and you refuse to help. You want us to go back to the old days. When my wife’s grandfather reached Tiberias, out of a Jewish population of more than a thousand he found only two or three men at work. The rest waited for the dole from Europe, and when it came they prayed extra hard, insuring sanctity for the Jews who could not live in Israel. Are you proposing to re-establish that system?

AMERICAN: I’m proposing that Israel remain just as it is. That it be the spiritual center of Judaism. That I accept a responsibility for keeping it alive.

ISRAELI: For a man who’s made several million dollars, Zodman, you’re incredibly stupid. Don’t you see that for Israel to prosper is far more important to you and Vered, living in Chicago, than it is to Tabari and me, living here? That Israel protects you from the next Nazism? That Israel gives the Jew dignity you’ve never had before. How many Jewish taxi drivers in New York have said to me, as I rode to the United Nations, “You characters over there make me proud I’m a Jew.” You boast of your contributions. You know what I think? I think the state of Israel ought to tax men like you about forty cents on the dollar. To pay for the services we render you.

AMERICAN: How can you expect to hold the good will of a man like me if you talk like that?

ISRAELI: I don’t want your good will. I don’t want your condescension.

AMERICAN: What do you want?

ISRAELI: Immigration. Your help to stay alive.

AMERICAN: I’m an American and I owe Israel no allegiance. If you keep talking like this FU stop being a Jew.

ISRAELI: Ah, that’s not for you to decide. Cullinane can stop being an Irishman and no one cares. He can announce one morning, “I’m no longer a Catholic,” and it’s his decision. But if you shout for the next ten years, “I’m not a Jew,” it signifies nothing, for that’s a problem which your neighbor decides. Not you. No Jew can ever cease being a Jew.

AMERICAN: In America we’re writing new rules.

ISRAELI: But your new rules will be judged by old standards. In Spain hundreds of thousands of Jews said, “We’re no longer Jews. We’re Spanish Catholics,” but even after two hundred years Spain said, “Sorry, you’re still Jews.” In Germany the followers of Mendelssohn said, “We’re integrated Germans. We’re no longer Jews,” but the Germans said, “Sorry, your grandmother was a Jew, so are you, forever and ever.” But if you seek a classic application of your theory, go to the island of Mallorca. In 1391 a fearful massacre of Jews swept the place, after which those remaining converted to Catholicism. Study what happened to them. Massacred, burned alive, proscribed, jammed into a ghetto, always loyal Catholics but unable to escape being Jews. The story is too terrible to repeat, but remember this. Each Shabbat those one-time Jews used to eat pork on the public streets to prove that they were no longer Jews, but after five hundred years no real Catholic of Mallorca had ever married one of them, for they were still Jews. And it’s our burden to bear this testimony.