The Source

by James A. Michener

  When the archaeologists reached the dig the mood was autumnal: only Yusuf and his family of twelve worked at the job of closing down the installations and it was obvious that the old man was beginning to find himself isolated in Israel. Already his children were learning Hebrew and adopting kibbutz ways. His three wives were accommodating themselves to Israel, and the pregnant one was even going by herself to the Kupat Holim doctor to discover how to have a baby in a modern way. From their children the mothers were learning Hebrew, and the old patriarch was left alone, a man out of place in a world that he would never catch up with. His eleven underlings, once so subservient in Morocco, now assumed easy control of the family; no longer was he a man of authority, and as the years passed, the half-blind old man would grow in bitterness, while his new land stole from him his dignity, his language and his comprehension. On Tuesday the Air France plane took off for Cyprus and Morocco.

  Ilan Eliav did not laugh at old Yusuf in his deepening solitude, for he felt himself to be in a comparable prison. Vered was proving unpredictably difficult; she still insisted upon an immediate answer. “The last plane leaves on Friday,” she warned. Wednesday came and Thursday, and B.E.A. made its flight. On Friday morning Cullinane, watching two people whom he cherished caught in such a vise, intruded against his own best interests; waiting till he found them together in the ceramics room, he joined them casually and said, “I’m not using a phrase when I say that what you two are doing to yourselves is breaking my heart. Eliav, if you decide to chuck the cabinet business, if you do fly to Cyprus, I will personally guarantee you work for ten years here at Makor and a teaching position in the Chicago area for the rest of your life. And I’m certain we can find Vered a job teaching archaeological ceramics. I make this offer because I don’t want you to reach decisions due to economic pressure.”

  “I’ve been asked to teach at Oxford,” Eliav said dryly. “Knowing my background you must appreciate how enticing that would be.”

  “I spoke only as a gesture of honor. I don’t want to marry Vered because you couldn’t …”

  At this moment Vered was consulting her watch, and she seemed to be marking off the minutes one by one, until finally she rose and said quietly, “The last plane has gone.” Looking at Eliav she placed her hands in his and stood tiptoe to kiss him. “I wanted you so much,” she said haltingly.

  She broke down and Eliav was unable to console her, so Cullinane, moving quietly, placed his arm about her shoulder and drew her away. “We’ll come back to Makor in the summers,” he said. “When he can, Eliav will leave Jerusalem and work with us.”

  She pushed him away and looked at him as if he were a stranger. “What are you saying, John? I warned you I’d marry only a Jew.” Then, seeing the shock on his face, she muttered, “Damn, damn,” and ran from the room.

  The meaning of her behavior did not become clear until three o’clock that afternoon when Paul J. Zodman arrived unannounced in Israel, jumped into a car supplied by the U.J.A. and roared up to Makor. Bursting into an end-of-week staff meeting he said crisply, “I stayed out of this for a week. To give Dr. Eliav the time he needed to make up his mind. He hasn’t married Vered. Neither has Cullinane. So I’m going to. Sunday morning.”

  It was Cullinane who said the asinine thing. He stared at Vered, who had regained her composure and was again a little Astarte, her eyes modestly downcast, and then he looked at Zodman, expensively dressed in blue sharkskin, freshly shaved, committed and eager. “But you already have a wife!”

  “Had,” Zodman corrected.

  “Oh, my God!” Cullinane cried. “Is that why you sent me the cable ‘Come to Chicago’? You knew I couldn’t leave and you gambled that Vered could …” He saw Zodman and Vered smile, and to his surprise he cried, “Zodman, you’re a plain son of a bitch!”

  The merchant brushed this aside and said congenially, “Look, John! I came here two months ago an unmarried man. I saw two other unmarried men, you and Eliav, allowing an adorable widow … So I brought her to Chicago to see if she’d marry me.” There was silence, after which Zodman said quietly, “She said ‘No.’ Wouldn’t even let me romance her. Said she was engaged to Eliav, and that if he wouldn’t marry her because of the Cohen business, she might marry you, John, and to hell with being a Jew.”

  The group gasped, even Vered. She looked appealingly at Zodman and reminded him, “You were not to speak of that.”

  But Zodman continued, “Somewhere along the line all of you have loused things up, so on Sunday, Vered and I are getting married and flying back to Chicago.”

  Cullinane looked at the various people and said plaintively, “This dig is going to end just like Macalister at Gezer. My executive goes into the government. My pottery expert flies to Chicago. Tabari, you and I are going to dig this tell all by ourselves.”

  “We’ll find you somebody,” Zodman joked; but as Eliav had pointed out, it was never easy to be a Jew, and the Chicago millionaire was about to discover this in a most painful way. He proposed to drive Vered that night to Jerusalem to get a permit for their marriage, but Eliav reminded him that he couldn’t drive because it was Shabbat. “Who gives a damn about Shabbat?” Zodman snapped, and he roared his borrowed car southward across the Galilee.

  In Jerusalem no one would speak to him on Shabbat and on Sunday he was advised by the rabbinical board, “Sorry, Mr. Zodman, but you can’t get married in Israel.”

  Without raising his voice he asked, “And why not?”

  “Because we have decided that no divorce granted by an ordinary American rabbi can be trusted.”

  “Rabbi Hirsch Bromberg is scarcely average.” Zodman had been on the committee that selected Bromberg.

  “He’s not on the approved list,” a secretary reported.

  Still keeping his voice low Zodman said, “I also have a perfectly good civil divorce from the state of Illinois.”

  “Israel recognizes no civil divorce,” the rabbis replied.

  “You mean to say that from this little room you’re going to judge all the Jews of the world?”

  “In Israel it is our responsibility to say who can get married and who cannot,” the rabbis insisted.

  In a very low voice Zodman asked, “And I can’t?”

  “No.”

  “I’m a large contributor to the Republican party,” Zodman said ominously. “I know Senator Dirksen and Paul Douglas.” His voice rose to a roar. “And I will not accept this insult.”

  He stormed down to Tel Aviv to see the American ambassador—the state of Israel claimed Jerusalem as its capital and governed the country from there, but foreign powers, still holding that under the United Nations agreement all of Jerusalem was internationalized, insisted upon keeping their embassies in Tel Aviv and recognizing only it as the capital—but the legal aide to the ambassador assured him that the situation in Israel was precisely as the rabbis had explained it: there was no civil marriage; the local rabbis refused to recognize divorces issued by most American rabbis; and there was no conceivable way by which Zodman could marry Vered Bar-El. “Of course,” the young man suggested, “what many do is to fly to Cyprus. Such a wedding does leave the status of the children to be born of the marriage uncertain, insofar as Israel is concerned, but if you don’t plan to live in Israel …”

  “Me? Live in Israel? Are you kidding?” And Zodman drove Vered back to Makor, cursing most of the way.

  There it was agreed that Zodman and Vered must fly to Cyprus, as so many other Jewish couples were doing, and in the days required for Vered to clean up her work on the first year’s dig, the five leaders of the expedition had repeated opportunities for extended cross-questioning, during which Vered made her position clear: she was leaving Israel not because she liked large cars and air-conditioning, which her friends would charge, saying that she had sold out to the fleshpots of Egypt; not because she was afraid of the future, for she had given ample proof of her courage; not because her allegiance to a Jewish state had flagged, for she knew Israel to be
the only tenable solution in a world where other sovereign states had been unable to protect the Jew or give him any honorable alternative to a homeland of his own; but rather because she felt that as a human being aged thirty-three she could no longer bear the burdens of a religion in the throes of becoming a state, with its military problems, social problems, economic problems and especially its complex religious problems. “I’ve done my part for Judaism,” she said without bravado. “I risked my life in more than a dozen battles, lost my husband, lost most of my friends, and I really do believe that I’m entitled to say, ‘Rachel, from now on you be the Jewess. Little Vered is just too damned tired.’ ”

  Her words had such a startling effect on Eliav that Cullinane thought the new cabinet minister might strike her, but he clenched his hands and asked coldly, “How can you turn your back on all we fought for? Can’t you remember Safad?”

  And Vered, speaking softly as one who has discovered her portion of truth, however meager, said, “Do I remember? Eliav, it seems to me we Jews spend our lives remembering, and I’ve suddenly discovered that I’m sick and tired of living in a land of remembrance. My year in Jerusalem begins with Rosh Hashana when I remember Abraham, four thousand years ago. Then comes Yom Kippur, and we remember everything. The Feast of the Booths and we remember the desert years. Like a great bronze bell tolling over the churches of Jerusalem, we tick off our days and remember our grief. Of course, there are a few happy days. Simhat Torah, Hanukkah, when we remember the victory of the Maccabees, Arbor Day for remembering trees. At Purim we remember Persia three thousand years ago and at Passover we remember Egypt even longer ago. Lag Ba Omer, Shavuot. And on the Ninth of Ab we mourn the loss of Jerusalem. When did we lose it? Two thousand years ago. We have special days to remember Herzl, students, socialists, the United Nations, the brave men who fell defending Jerusalem in 1948, and Independence Day. For years I dutifully remembered and thought it was natural to spend one’s life weeping over the dead past, uttering lamentations for things that happened so terribly long ago. It was a burden, but it was our special, inescapable Jewish burden and I accepted it.

  “And then I went to Chicago. And I lugged that lousy Candlestick of Death up and down Illinois making speeches to Jewish women’s clubs, the kind Israelis like to joke about, and do you know what I discovered? That some of the finest people this world has produced are the Jewish women of Illinois. They live wonderful, satisfying lives without remembering Persia and Egypt and the Maccabees and the Sinai Desert and Jerusalem. They work for the local art museum and build new wings for the hospital and serve on the board of education and pay the deficit for the symphony orchestra and do all they can to make their world a better place to live in. Take away from Illinois what the Jewish women do, and that state would be a dump. And the only thing those women are required to remember is when to make the next payment on the television set. And you may be surprised to hear it, but I can hardly wait to become one of them.”

  Eliav clenched his hands and pulled them against his stomach. In pain he asked, “For this emptiness you’d sacrifice Judaism? For the fleshpots of Egypt, stainless-steel version?”

  “Stop it!” Vered cried, beating her palms against the table. “Stop throwing those old clichés at me. I raise a clear, well-defined issue and you mumble what sententious Jews have been mumbling since the time of Moses. The fleshpots of Egypt. I refuse to accept that any longer.” She waved her hands and placed them over her ears. “I refuse to spend the rest of my life remembering. I will not remember.”

  Eliav, again in control of his bitterness, said quietly, “Your Gentile neighbors in Illinois will do your remembering for you,” and it was on this point that Eliav and Zodman initiated their acrimonious debate.

  ISRAELI: Does Vered think that by going to America she escapes being a Jew?

  AMERICAN: She certainly does.

  ISRAELI: She escapes until that moment on her honeymoon when the hotel clerk says, “No Jews allowed.”

  AMERICAN: We learn how to avoid such hotels.

  ISRAELI: Or until the medical school tells her son, “Our Jewish quota is filled.”

  AMERICAN: They don’t put it that way any more.

  ISRAELI: Or until a new Senator McCarthy comes along. And fails in his economic promises. And has to use you Jews as his scapegoat.

  AMERICAN: Now we have safeguards against that sort of thing.

  ISRAELI: Or until some new international tragedy like Nazi Germany …

  AMERICAN: The world will never again allow a thing like that to happen.

  ISRAELI: It will happen before your first son is born. South America? South Africa? Quebec?

  AMERICAN: Something will be worked out, I’m sure.

  ISRAELI: You sound just like my uncle in Gretz, 1933. And he was right. Something was indeed worked out. And they hung Adolf Eichmann for having worked it out.

  AMERICAN: You can’t go on scaring the Jews of America, Eliav.

  ISRAELI: I don’t do the scaring. History does.

  AMERICAN: In America we have guarantees that protect us from history. Besides, you overlook one important fact. In America that natural hatred which exists in all people is directed not against the Jew but the Negro.

  ISRAELI: If he perishes, you perish.

  AMERICAN: You can’t apply European experience to America. It’s the greatest error I hear Israelis make, and you make it all the time. We Americans are different. Of my non-Jewish neighbors more than half have come from outside countries. We’re all minority groups.

  ISRAELI: And they brought their anti-Jewish prejudice with them. You say you’re different, but it’s not because you’re an American. It’s because you’re a Jew, and America will never let you forget that difference. Neither you nor your children.

  AMERICAN: Years go by without my experiencing a shred of anti-Semitism.

  ISRAELI: You experience it every day, but have become hardened to it.

  AMERICAN: Seems to me you’re angry with us American Jews for two reasons. We’ve built a new way of life that’s the best the Jew has ever known in this world. And we refuse to emigrate to Israel.

  ISRAELI: Let’s take your reasons one at a time. As for your new way of life, it’s a false old dream in a golden ghetto. A religion that isn’t Judaism. A synagogue that’s a mere social center and a third generation that thinks it’s been accepted by the majority if it names its son Bryan. It’s a shallow, ugly, materialistic pattern of life, and it leads to one clear goal: assimilation. The rate of intermarriage among young Jews in America is over ten per cent and climbing toward twenty-five. A new way of life? No, an old delusion leading to oblivion, when there will be no more Jews.

  AMERICAN: That doesn’t frighten me. If following Moses for four thousand years has got us where we are, a people totally apart, I think it’s time we tried the American pattern. I’ll be a good Jew. Vered will be. But if my son Bryan, as you call him, wants to lose himself in the main stream, I say let him do it.

  ISRAELI: In that case Israel is really needed to preserve Judaism, and you’ve been very remiss about sending us immigration to help save the Jewish state.

  AMERICAN: Our job is to stay in America and make it the safest home in the world for Jews. And then to share our goodness with our fellow Jews in Israel. And if I may be forgiven a personal reference, I have been careful to share that goodness and have advised my rich neighbors in Chicago to do the same.

  ISRAELI: You’ve been generous with everything but human beings. Have you ever watched an immigrant ship arrive? Mostly uneducated people from Africa. People call them Arab-Jews. Strong-minded Ashkenazim fear that if such immigration dominates for the next hundred years, Israel can only become another Levantine state. A Middle East backward country in which a handful of European Jews ran things for a while before submerging their state in some kind of honorable alliance with Lebanon or Egypt. And so the vision of a Jewish homeland perishes once more. I’m not so pessimistic. I’m dedicating my life to the proposal that we can
establish some kind of Jewish-Arab federation in this area, to the benefit of both. But to do this we must have more highly educated western Jews. And men like you accept no responsibility.

  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.