The Source

by James A. Michener

  Rabbi Asher led the group in a discussion of what might be included under the prohibition against reaping: “We learned: sheaf-binding, wire-making and cutting stone for a building are identical with reaping. Rab Naaman said they are prohibited.”

  A rabbi who worked in the building trades argued, “I had it from Rabbi Jonah from Meir from Akiba: Stonecutting is the same as plowing. It is already forbidden.”

  On and on the arguments went as the rabbis gathered up the loose ends of life and tied them into permanent packages. In the third year they summoned a sailor from Ptolemais to discuss the cryptic passage of the Mishna, “Tying and untying knots is forbidden on Shabbat.” Just what was involved in the tying of a knot, they asked, and to what other human activities might this prohibition extend? The sailor demonstrated what tying a knot consisted of, and after two months of discussion Rabbi Asher proposed the following general rule: “Any joining together of two things that are by nature the same is equal to the tying of a knot. Thus, on Shabbat a man may not place additional grapes in a press which already contains grapes, for that is tying a knot.”

  A rabbi visiting from Babylonian, where similar discussions were taking place among the Jews of that region, said, “Why not say simply, knots tied by camel drivers, donkey drivers and sailors?”

  An old rabbi said, “I heard it from Rabbi Zumzum who had it from Rabbi Meir that no man should be held culpable for a knot that could be untied with one hand.” Thus the argument progressed day after day as the great expositors laid down their specific interpretations. Their extensions would be known as the Gemara, and when their work was finished, after two and a half centuries of debate in both Tverya and Babylonia, the Mishna (Repetition) and the Gemara (Completion) would coalesce to form the Talmud (Teaching), that enormous compendium which would in turn be interpreted by the Egyptian doctor, Maimonides, and after him by others of lesser insight, so that in the end there would stand a jumbled, rambling, inspired portrait of Judaism in action. It was this Talmud that provided the fence around the Torah, protecting God’s law from unintentional trespass; God had said merely, “Remember Shabbat,” but the rabbis had staked out their fence far from the actual Shabbat, defending the sacred day behind a multitude of laws. It was on this holy work of building the fence of the Talmud that Rabbi Asher would spend the rest of his life.

  This did not mean that he lived permanently in Tverya, engaged only in legalistic discussion. Like his fellow rabbis from Kefar Nahum and Biri, he continued to supervise the spiritual life of his home community, and since he also had a wife and three unmarried daughters, it was his added responsibility to see that his groats mill made a profit. So whenever the crops were harvested he mounted his white mule to ride back through the Galilean forests to his little town in order to purchase grain, and one of his most satisfying moments came when he guided his mule up the incline into Makor to greet his family and to inspect conditions at the mill.

  It was with bursting joy that Rabbi Asher reached the privacy of his home at the end of these trips, for he would rush, tired and dusty, to greet his wife and embrace his children. Gathering his family about him he would lead them in singing either psalms or folksongs, and he would toss his youngest daughter into the air, catching her as she squealed with joy at having her father home again. At meals he would stand at the head of the table and look upon his family, praying with sheer happiness: “God, the journey is ended and I am once more with those I love.”

  But when he was alone he would stand humbly in one corner of his room and begin a serious communication with God, thanking Him gravely for having kept the family well and warm, and as he prayed a frenzy would possess him, and he would begin bowing from the waist, left and right, running forward to meet God, then retreating out of respect. At certain passages in his prayer he would throw himself full length upon the earthen floor so forcefully as to bring dust, then he would rise and the bowing would be repeated. At the end of his extended prayer he would have worked his way completely across the room and perhaps halfway back again, a little man in ecstasy, prostrating himself before his God. His attitude to prayer summarized his morality: “When I am in the synagogue praying for others, I make the prayers short lest my brothers grow tired, but when I am alone with God, I cannot prolong them sufficiently.”

  When it was known in Makor that the rabbi was home again, many visitors would come seeking either guidance or charity, and with the former, Asher observed the rule which he had often defended in the discussions at Tverya: “Deal leniently with others but strictly with yourself.” And he did what he could to soften the harsh blows of peasant life in a town where tax collectors were brutal and Byzantine soldiers cruel. With those who sought charity, he was guided by the unequivocal precept of Rab Naaman of Makor: “A man who will not give to the poor is an animal,” and in some years the profits of his groats mill were largely dissipated because of the cereal which he gave away. As for the manner of dispensing charity, he had formulated a rule which would be incorporated into the Talmud: “Take care of the other man’s body and your own soul.” If the worst drunkard came to him for food, Rabbi Asher first fed him, then prayed for him and sent him away. “Lecturing him about his evil ways should be postponed for another day,” he explained. “Charity and exhortation must not be mixed.”

  Wherever he moved in the community he tried to bring joy, telling mothers that their sons would become scholars, assuring young girls that they would find husbands, and encouraging farmers to hope for profitable seasons. He had always been impressed by that teaching of the Mishna which said, “In the hereafter each man will be asked to explain why he abstained from those normal pleasures of life to which he was entitled.” Songs, dancing, wine in moderation, feasts with one’s friends, games for children and young people, courtship in the spring and caressing children were occupations, Rabbi Asher said, which brought joy to life, and those who were in his presence for any time found cause for laughter.

  His principal regret came when he resumed work at the groats mill, hauling the bags of wheat, and he had to acknowledge that so far he had found no one to run the place satisfactorily in his absence. He had tried several men, but they had lacked the integrity he required, and so in his absence the place merely struggled along, watched over by his busy wife and earning only half the profit it should have done. Once he had hoped that his two sons-in-law would assume this responsibility, but they showed no inclination to do so, and now when he returned to Tverya it was with the doleful realization that he had still not found a man to make the groats.

  This deficiency was regrettable in that Asher’s ancestors had devised a special way of making the cereal: they took well-ripened wheat, boiled it in water like the other groats makers, but to their water they added salt and herbs, and when the time came for drying the grains they did not pour the water away, like the others, but allowed it to stand in the sun until the wheat absorbed it, taking back into the grains whatever nutrients would otherwise have been washed away. Asher also allowed his wheat to dry in the sun for at least a week longer than his competitors did, so that when the grains were finally cracked by his stone mill, forming pieces smaller than rice, they had a chewy, nutty flavor that all appreciated. Once when he was about to return to Tverya a Greek merchant protested, “Rabbi, why do you fool with those white beards? Any man can write down the law, but it takes a man chosen by God to make good groats.” It was a pity, Asher thought, that he had found no manager.

  Therefore, in the winter of 330, when his wife announced that she was pregnant again, well past the normal age for conceiving, he experienced a surge of joy, for he convinced himself that by this miracle God was determined to send him a son to inherit the groats mill. He went about town, a little man of forty-eight with a beard that was showing gray, telling his friends, “You can see it’s only reasonable. Five daughters in a row. The last has got to be a boy.” He decided to call the child Matthew, God’s Gift, and sometimes in the street when he spoke of his son his eyes would d
ance and only with difficulty did he keep his feet from doing the same. “He was sent me by God,” the little rabbi proclaimed, but in the autumn his wife gave birth to a sixth daughter and she was named Jael.

  Subdued, Rabbi Asher mounted his white mule and rode down the caravan road to Tverya, where under the grape arbor he was about to begin a specific chain of deliberation which would have a most permanent impact on all Jews: during the nine years from 330 through 338 the expositors would discuss principally one pregnant verse of Torah. God first stated this concept in Exodus and then, because apparently He considered it vital to His plans for the Jews, He repeated the warning twice: “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.” That was all God said; possibly He did not want a mother sheep to be abused by knowing that its offspring was to be cooked in her milk, which would double her anguish, as it were. Or the restriction might have been imposed because Canaanites to the north indulged in this practice and anything a Canaanite did was to be avoided. At any rate, God had reiterated the simple directive, and it fell to the rabbis to interpret it.

  As they studied the cryptic sentence, three words stood out. Seethe was probably meant to include all kinds of cooking. Kid was meant to include all kinds of meat. And milk was intended to cover all possible variations of dairy products. Under these initial interpretations the expositors began to erect those complicated dietary laws which would set the Jews apart. Extensions were made which only men of ingenuity could have deduced, and routines for kitchen and cooking were established which would enable Jews to observe every eventual sanction growing out of God’s brief commandment. The dietary ritual had a certain beauty to it and was in conformance with the sanitary laws of the time. Milk and meat must be kept forever separate, for the slightest trace of one could contaminate the other, and a drop of milk carelessly spilled into a kettle used for cooking meat might mean that the pot would have to be shattered lest the community be led unknowingly into error. At first the rules laid down by the rabbis were not intrusive: Jewish kitchens became a symbol of God’s covenant and to keep dishes separated was a trivial thing. Jewish women came to enjoy cooking in accordance with divine law, as whispered by God to Moses and conveyed by him to generation after generation of holy men. But now Rabbi Asher advanced the idea that even the cooking vapors from a pot containing beef could contaminate a whole kitchen where milk was being used, and no local housewife could contest him; when in Babylonia other rabbis began to evolve other refinements even more difficult to observe, no one could contest them, either. For what the rabbis were doing, in part consciously and in part unconsciously, was to create a body of law that would bind the Jews together as they went into exile to the Diaspora. Without a homeland the Jews would live within their law and become a nation mightier than those which had oppressed them. Without cities of their own they would as a cohesive unit help determine the destinies of cities they had not yet seen. Wherever they went—to Spain or Egypt or Argentina—they would take with them the decisions of the rabbis of Tverya, and within the limits established by these decisions they would live, a more permanent group of people than any who had surrounded them in their two thousand years in Israel. Gentiles, observing their homelessness, would construct the myth of the Wandering Jew, but in reality this phrase was meaningless, for no matter where the Jew wandered, if he took with him the Talmud he was home.

  Fraught with future meaning though these discussions of cooking were, the consultations which best exemplified the Talmudic process were those ingenious deductions whereby procedures for ritual worship were established. All Jews agreed that such worship must not be conducted by haphazard formula, but what constituted proper ritual was difficult to determine, for on this matter the written Torah was silent; it spoke of a time when worship was conducted at the temple in Jerusalem; and the oral Torah was equally deficient because the transmitters of the secret information had not foreseen the time when Jerusalem would no longer exist. And even when the Romans did finally allow the city to be rebuilt, a new temple was not permitted. Therefore the rabbis were required to legislate for a religion whose externals had changed markedly.

  The rabbi of Kefar Nahum, known to the Christians as Capernaum, where the largest of the Galilean synagogues stood, remembered that the Eighty-second Psalm said clearly, “God standeth in the congregation of the mighty …” and from this it was deduced that God was willing to convene with His faithful in a public congregation. How many were required in the forming of a congregation? No man could say. Was it three persons? Or seven? Or twelve? Each of these numbers had mystical value and it was probable that God had preferred one of them. But no one knew.

  The rabbi of Biri, the town with the loveliest synagogue—a gemlike building with many columns constructed of white limestone—recalled that in the Book of Numbers, God had asked Moses directly, “How long shall I bear with this evil congregation, which murmur against me?” and although this referred to an evil group, it was nevertheless one that God had recognized as an officially constituted congregation. The rabbis tracked the reference backward and found that it related to the twelve men whom Moses had dispatched into Canaan to spy out the land: “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Send thou men, that they may search the land of Canaan, which I give unto the children of Israel: of every tribe of their fathers shall ye send a man …” So putting the two texts together they deduced that when God spoke of a congregation He was referring to at least twelve men. But the rabbi of Kefar Nahum pointed out that of the twelve evil men who spoke against the Lord, one should be excused, for Caleb of the tribe of Judah had spoken on behalf of the Lord: “And Caleb stilled the people before Moses, and said, Let us go up at once, and possess it …” So this made eleven the proper number for a congregation. But then Rabbi Asher discovered that of these eleven still another, Joshua of the tribe of Ephraim, had also spoken in defense of the Lord: “The land, which we passed through to search it, is an exceeding good land. If the Lord delight in us, then he will bring us into this land, and give it us; a land which floweth with milk and honey.” Thus, in the congregation, evil though it was, there had been twelve men less Caleb and Joshua, so ten was the required number, and the famous summary was evolved: “God is willing to meet with ten street sweepers but not with nine rabbis.” The question then arose as to what constituted a man, and after years of discussion it was determined that a man was any male child who had reached the age of thirteen; henceforth no public worship was possible without the presence of ten Jewish men above the age of twelve.

  In this patient, involuted and often arbitrary manner the great rabbis wove that net in which God would hold His chosen people. Every word of the Torah—even the punctuation mark—was analyzed. A single concept of the Mishna might occupy the rabbis for a year, and their Gemara, when completed, would be further dissected for fifteen centuries. As a result the Talmud would constitute an inexhaustible source of wisdom which men could study all the days of their lives, still finding rewards even if they lived, like Moses, to be a hundred and twenty.

  One day in the year 335 Rabbi Asher rode home to find that Yohanan, on his own initiative, had taken a step which altered the appearance of the Makor synagogue. The little rabbi, unprepared for what the surly stonecutter had done, went as usual to the door to inspect progress and found running down the length of the interior two rows of marble columns whose antique beauty gave the heavy room a distinct touch of paganism. “Where did you get them?” the rabbi asked suspiciously.

  Afraid of being rebuked, Yohanan growled, “My son Menahem … he heard the old people saying … mysteries hidden in the earth.” He hesitated, unsure of himself. “Columns of gold, they said.”

  “Your son? Found these?”

  Uneasily the big stonecutter mumbled, “The other children won’t play with Menahem. He went digging … out there. Uncovered the end of one column. It wasn’t gold.” He waited apprehensively.

  Rabbi Asher could see that the pillars were pagan and their shimmering colors could onl
y be interpreted as adornment and he was tempted to order them thrown out, but reflection assured him that at least they were not graven images. “Who made them originally?” he temporized, but Yohanan could not guess. He was unable to imagine that a Makor citizen like Timon Myrmex had once spent several years selecting these eight choice columns from the thousands that were piling into Herod’s Caesarea in order to adorn the Roman forum. How beautiful they were to Yohanan and how earnestly he hoped that Rabbi Asher would allow them to remain.

  “They can stay,” the groats maker snapped. “But don’t do things like this again.”

  When this approval was granted, Rabbi Asher found that Yohanan wanted to discuss a problem which the rabbi had long anticipated, so with some apprehension God’s Man said, “We can’t discuss it here. Stop work and come to my house.” The two men left the synagogue and moved to the cool stone house from which the rabbi’s wife managed the groats mill while he was absent. Asher led the way to the alcove where he kept his volumes, and there, surrounded by visual evidence of the law, he sat in a large chair, placed his hands on his table and said, “Now what do you wish to tell me about your son?”

  “How did you know?”

  “We will discuss him many times.”

  “He’s nine. He’s growing up.”

  “I know.” Rabbi Asher could visualize the boy Menahem as he played in the streets, a vagrant child who seemed likely to become a handsome young man. The rabbi sighed with regret over what he must now say, and postponed his judgment by asking, “You’re wondering what to do with Menahem?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m wondering, too,” the rabbi said.

  “In what way?”

  Rabbi Asher retreated a little, like a legalist seeking protection in documents. Clasping his knuckles firmly, until the tips of his fingers were white, he said, “Now come the difficult years, when those who break the law begin to reap their rewards.”