The Source

by James A. Michener

  SABRA: No. But you have said that you’re against the state, so why worry about its form?

  REBBE: I am always concerned about what Jews do.

  SABRA: So if we have a state, you want it to be as old-fashioned as possible?

  REBBE: I want all Jews to live within the fence of the Talmud. Have you forgotten what the great Rabbi Akiba said? The fish were having a difficult time with the nets in the stream and the fox called, “Leave the dangerous water. Come up on land,” and the fish were about to do so when their leader asked, “If we are having a difficult time in the water, which is our element, how much more dangerous will be the land, where the fox waits to eat us?” If Jews have difficulty within the Talmud, which is their element, how much worse will they be without it?

  SABRA: My real complaint against the Talmud is my father’s … and my grandfather’s. That rabbis with narrow consciences interpret it. The Torah says simply, “The seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work …” That’s straightforward. But the rabbis write whole books about what a man shall not do on Shabbat, and when Safad is about to fall to the Arabs you bring out those books to halt sensible work. If we win an Israel for you, do you expect to enforce each detail of those many books?

  REBBE: Whether I leave Safad alive or not is God’s will. If we die, we shall die as we have died in the past. But if I am to be saved, I shall insist that Israel observe every law that God gave us.

  SABRA: As interpreted by you?

  REBBE: You frighten me when you rely so arrogantly upon your personal judgment as to what will be good for the state you plan.

  SABRA: Not my judgment. The judgment of all who bring the state into being.

  REBBE: Don’t you know what has happened to Jews when they relied upon their own illumination? When they by-passed the Talmud? Up this street used to live one of the most alluring Jews of history, Dr. Abulafia. Assisted by others of similar power he developed a mystical insight into the nature of God. An insight which he made available to every man. Each man his own rabbi. God talking personally to each man as he talked to Moses our Teacher. Perhaps new commandments to be delivered direct from God without the searching analysis and intervention of the rabbis.

  SABRA: Would you as a rabbi veto what God himself has spoken?

  REBBE: Of course. God tells us what is good for the world and the rabbis study his word to determine what is good for man.

  SABRA: Then if our state has an elected parliament like England, or a congress like the United States, you would be willing for a group of rabbis to review their laws and say what should be obeyed and what should not?

  REBBE: Of course. Someone must do it, and this is what rabbis are trained to do. Because in the days following Dr. Abulafia, when each man was his own rabbi, who came upon us offering his credentials and crying that he was the Messiah but Shabbetai Zevi? A Turkish Jew from Smyrna. Given to fits of exhilaration and depression. And his movement swept through the Jews of Europe, so that men in Vodzh were convinced that in 1665 the world would enter paradise in compensation for the Czmielnicki massacres of the decades before. Those were exciting days, wonderful for Jews … and then you know what happened? Shabbetai Zevi, the savior of the Jewish people, was captured in Constantinople and before even one torture was applied he converted to Islam. Our great savior had the courage of a mouse, and the damage he did to Jews of the world cannot be calculated.

  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 Jewishness 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.

  SABRA: Seems to me your brother took a long time to say a simple thing: “Take the girls back, you fools. They fought the war in their way, you in yours.”

  REBBE: You miss the point. You could say it as simply as that, but the listener could believe you or not. When my brother said it the Jews of Vodzh had to listen and to obey. They required some higher authority, some moral authority if you wish, to remind them what the law was and then to say, “In this case it must not be obeyed.”

  SABRA: What you say applies to the ghetto. But not to Israel.

  REBBE: What I say applies to the human heart … to the continuity of Judaism.

  SABRA: There’s a famous Jewish saying which I like better than your brother’s response, Rebbe Itzik. I think it applies to us in 1948. “In the palace of the king are many rooms and for each room there is a key, but the best key of all is an axe.” We’re in the age of the axe.

  REBBE: In Jewish history each age is the age of the axe, but we seek something more permanent. I wonder if you consider what you may be doing to the man you call your husband? The Talmud has a proverb about the man who was studying Torah and came to a cool tree. In Hebrew ilana. And he cried, “How lovely is this tree,” and in pausing under it, in disrupting his study of the Torah, he had not only committed a great sin but had also put himself in danger of death itself.

  SABRA: This, of course, I do not accept. Gottesmann and I will have children, and they will inherit a noble land, which we will rule together without rabbis.

  REBBE: The rabbis you will have with you always, for your heart will call after them.

  SABRA: Not this heart.

  REBBE: Not until you come home with your arm tattooed … in Arabic.

  On the morning of Thursday, May 6, the dialogue ended. The final partition of Palestine was only nine days distant and the Arabs besieging Safad received an order from the Grand Mufti’s high command in Jerusalem:

  Safad must be immediately cleared of Jews and converted into our permanent headquarters for northern Galilee. Once we are secure there, we can move out to conquer all of northern Falastin.

  So that afternoon the final push on the Jewish quarter began. Sniping was intensified and Jews began to die. House by house the Arabs tightened the noose, even crossing over the stairs to do so, and in the Vodzher synagogue men prayed.

  • • • THE TELL

  John Cullinane, as he retraced the ground that had been involved in the battle for Zefat, told Eliav and Tabari, “It was during the height of this battle that I just escaped making an ass of myself in Chicago. One of the newspapers discovered that I had worked in this area and knew a little Arabic. The editor asked me for an article about what was going to happen when the Arabs began throwing the Jews into the Mediterranean. I got out my maps, asked our reference library for the latest statistics, and wrote a fairly impressive article pointing out how the enormous Arab superiority in manpower, weapons, training and terrain meant that within three weeks of their initial push they would automatically succeed. I assured the paper and its readers that from my investigations on the spot—I threw in quotes from English experts and a lot of figures—thirty-seven million Arabs against six hundred thousand Jews: ‘Obviously, the war will be short, savage and for the Jews disastrous.’ ”

  “Most experts agreed with you,” Eliav reflected sardonically.

  “How was your Arab propaganda received in Chicago?” Tabari joked.

  “Fortunately for me I had the good sense … Moses or Muhammad must have been watching over me. Anyway, on a hunch I took my article around to the chaps at the British consulate to check the figures, and the two top men said they couldn’t spot any errors, but when I got home I found that the chap they call the Cultural Attaché had been phoning frantically and insisted upon seeing me right away. He came over and with no formality blurted out, ‘My God, Cullinane, you haven’t submitted that article yet, have you?’ I said no, and he fell into a chair and asked for a drink. ‘Thank God, old man. You’ve saved your neck.’ I asked him what he was talking about, and he said, ‘Well, the Jews are going to win and I don’t want you to look a bloody fool in public.’ I remember that I stopped pouring the drink and gasped, ‘What? Jews win?’ He looked at me with surprise and said, ‘Of course. Everyone knows that!’ I pointed out that his own superiors hadn’t known it, and he laughed, ‘They don’t know their bums from third base. They think that because some dotty English colonel has been teaching the Arabs how to ride camels that somehow an army has bloomed in the desert.’ He said a lot more, most of it profane, then told me something that helped make me a prophet in Chicago. He said, ‘Look at it this way, Cullinane. It’s positively impossible for the Arabs to move a motor cavalcade of petrol and ammo from Cairo to Gaza.’ I called up in my mind’s eye the map of the area … saw the roads and the various conditions and corrected him. ‘You forget. There’s a good paved road now. They’re not driving over rocky wadis any longer.’ He banged his glass down and cried, ‘You miss the whole bloody point. So do the military blokes at the office. They s
ee the figures on paper. Egyptians, eighty thousand armed troops. What the bloody hell good are they in Cairo if the fighting’s in Gaza? They see on paper, Egyptians, eight hundred heavy guns. What are they going to fire at from the pyramids? Take my convoy of essential military hardware. It’s moving up to the front under the command of two colonels. It forms up in Cairo one night, and before it leaves the city Colonel One sells to his cousin who’s operating in the Cairo black market all the spare tires. Every one. At the first inspection point Colonel Two allows his uncle to steal half the reserve supplies of gasoline. At the second inspection point Colonel One sells off two thirds of the ammo. At the first village a large operator in the black market, a nephew of Colonel Two, offers to buy half the trucks and pay in cash. And at the border the drivers of the remaining trucks decide to steal the machine guns and sell them to the Jews.’ I remember how he dropped his arms and made his fingers flutter like leaves falling from a tree in November. ‘So you see, Cullinane, it’s morally impossible for that convoy ever to leave Egypt.’ His argument was so seductive that I tore up my essay and we got stinking drunk together and collaborated on an analysis of the war that gained me some notoriety. In fact, Paul J. Zodman read it and he was so gratified to find someone who thought his Jews might win that later on he put up the money which is now paying my salary, and yours, and yours.”

  The three men walked to the flight of stairs that had once separated the Arab and Jewish quarters, and to the left they could see the deserted mosque, so marvelously proportioned and with such pleasing juxtapositions of wall and dome and minaret; it was a minor work of art gracing the hill and lending character to the deserted Arab houses that clustered about its base; while to the right they could see the blunt, squat old synagogue of the Vodzher Rebbe. It lent neither the countryside nor its encroaching mud-walled houses any artistic dignity, but it did cry out the fact that to its doors had come, through the centuries, stubborn men who believed that there was a God who was one, and who in the affairs of men played a significant role, if the men would permit Him to do so.