Джеймс Миченер - The Source

At first Eliav was afraid the old man might hurt himself, but as other dancers formed about the rebbe, Eliav realized that these men were in a kind of catatonic trance and if they were to be struck dead now they would die in maximum joy: they were truly children of God reveling in His goodness.

After the rebbe had continued his violent dance for some fifteen minutes, all the men of Zefat joined hands in a big circle that reached out to the four walls, and slowly this circle began to move counter-clockwise while Eliav remained in the middle, watching. An elderly Jew began singing and soon the hall throbbed with the sound of voices and feet which halted only when the rebbe stopped the dance.

“Tonight my son Eliav will dance with me,” the old man said, “that he may gain an understanding of this land he is to govern.” And the ancient rebbe left the circle, took Eliav by the hand and brought him into the group. With the old man’s hand clutching his, Eliav danced till morning.

As dawn came over the hills of Galilee the fur-hatted Hasidim began straggling out of the hall to wander home in groups of five or six, and as each group moved into the saintly streets of Zefat the rebbe gave them his benediction. When he and Eliav were alone he said quietly, “Eliav, we are depending on you to keep Israel a nation dedicated to God.” He asked the young minister to walk home with him, but Eliav said, “No, I have a mission to carry out,” and perhaps the old man guessed what it was, for he said, “Your true mission to Zefat you have completed. You’ve seen that we religious ones intend to fight for this nation. Not a single paragraph of the law may you change.” Then, as if he realized that he had not much longer to live, he reached up and kissed Eliav on both cheeks. “The dead are dead,” he whispered, “but they rely on us to fulfill their hopes.” And he followed the others through the narrow, arched streets of Zefat.

Then Eliav was alone in the city he had fought for, and he walked by twisting paths and alleys down to the foot of the English stairs to make a pilgrimage which in recent years had come to mean much in his life. Ahead lay twenty-one separate flights to be climbed, and reverently he began his ascent.

One, two, three: to the left stood the stalwart Jewish house pockmarked with bullets and unrepaired since the war; here Vered Yevneski had helped hold off three Arab assaults that would otherwise have taken the house and led to the collapse of the quarter; she had been so young, so brave.

Four, five, six, seven, eight: to the right he saw the Arab mosque as he had seen it on the morning of victory, and to the left stood Rabbi Yom Tov Gaddiel’s blunt synagogue, still standing in opposition.

Nine, ten: he stopped in pain, for this was the spot at which Ilana Hacohen had fought off the first Arab attack across the stairs. Children were playing in the area now, and he wondered if, when they grew up, they would have the courage to do the things Ilana had done, that wonderful girl: she had been so powerful in her dedication; where would her like be found again?

Eleven, twelve, thirteen: he paused to look at the Arab homes, still painted blue to ward off danger, and the blue had protected them for thirteen hundred years—but in the end it had been powerless. How lovely the blue Arab homes were, with their unexpected arches and little gardens; how empty they seemed now, staring up without roofs toward the impartial sun. He had never hated Arabs, Eliav reflected, and he wished that they had remained to make their singing arches and their gardens part of his land as before.

Fourteen, fifteen: he was on the small plaza where the trees grew so charmingly, flowers on each side, and grapes running up the Jewish wall, and on the Arab side the six tall evergreens which gave the plaza distinction and beauty; here Ilana and Vered had held off the enemy for three hours and in the trunks of the slim trees one could still find bullets. Beyond were morning-glories prolific in their blue loveliness; and if the stairs of Zefat contained only this one small area, they would be memorable.

Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen: now as he neared the head of the stairs he could see the brooding gray walls of the police station, still marked with bullet holes where Teddy Reich and Nissim Bagdadi had tried so vainly to assault the fortress; he still wondered how they had managed to take this forbidding stronghold.

Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one: he found no words, only the terrible ache of lost companionship; here Bagdadi had fallen; there Ilana and Bar-El had stood, and they were dead; what a terrible burden a man must bear if he climbs the stairs of the years, if he survives and attempts to govern as his dead companions would have wished.

On this crisp dawn he would ascend beyond the last flight of stairs, for his mind was carried upward to the Crusader ruins, from which he had first seen the Galilee in snow, and as he climbed he saw to the east that impregnable fortress against whose capture his mind had rebelled, and he chanted, as David did when making his ascent to Jerusalem: “‘If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when men rose up against us: then they had swallowed us up quick, when their wrath was kindled against us.’” Beyond the fortress, which had fallen as miraculously as any in the Torah, he could see once more the flawless land whose sweeping hills moved in majesty and whose towering clouds still twisted in violence above the lake hallowed to so many.

He saw the lake itself and, toward the far end, that bit of land which Shmuel Hacohen had finally purchased from the emir in Damascus, the land where Jews had proved that they could not only read Talmud but also farm their inheritance. I suppose you have to be like Shmuel, Eliav reflected. You stake out your land. You ride around it on a donkey to protect it. And if somebody shoots at you, you fight back. And if in the end you’re killed, you trust that your granddaughter Ilana will carry on where you left off. He bowed his head and whispered, “How can any man have the courage to govern a land like this?”

Then, as he raised his head, he discovered, from an unexpected quarter, the answer to his question; for he looked down upon Tiberias, that insignificant, that precious town which had given the world both the Talmud and the Bible. Outside the old Crusader walls he could discern the tomb of Moses Maimonides, of whom it was said, “From Moses to Moses there was no one like Moses.” Eliav thought: I hope I find one tenth the wisdom he did; and he promised himself that this afternoon, when he passed Tiberias, he would pause to light a candle at the tomb. He doubted that any part of the great philosopher’s corpse had reached this burial ground. The tomb could only be a cenotaph, for legend explained that as Maimonides lay dying in Egypt he asked to be buried in Israel, whereupon his corpse was lashed to a donkey and the beast headed north. The animal had died at Tiberias, so there the tomb stood, reminding ordinary men that even they could attain reason if they applied themselves. “I’ll light three candles,” Eliav said.

Then his eye climbed the hill back of Tiberias, toward those fatal Horns of Hittim, and he could imagine the cave in which another legend placed the grave of Rabbi Akiba, and as he paid homage to this great leader he thought: I wish we had him with us now.

For there was beginning to be an outcry, both in Israel and in the world, against the arbitrary structure of contemporary Judaism: Zipporah Zederbaum unable to marry because of an outworn law four thousand years old; Eliav forbidden to marry Vered because of the Cohen legalities; Zodman’s divorce not legal because modern-thinking American rabbis could not be trusted; the German woman, faithful to Judaism even at the cost of her eye and her life, with children who were not accepted as Jews; the Indian Jews who were disbarred; and Leon Berkes who could not work as a Jew. Eliav was particularly worried by such rigid crystallization because he had read enough history to know that if it were continued, the revolt of the kibbutzniks and people like Ilana and Vered could become damaging. In any other nation a typical official like Eliav would find himself allied against the priests who insisted upon such irrefrangible law, and even he had begun to echo the warning voiced by Ilana Hacohen: “this Mickey Mouse crap.”