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by James A. Michener

  When he entered the gracious, decaying city and led Menahem along the waterfront, he was half pleased, half irritated to notice that many girls lounging near the fishing boats turned to stare at the handsome youth, and he regretted that he had not followed his earlier instinct and taken the boy to a new life in a new land, but building the synagogue had held him captive and his conflicting obligations were tangled in his mind. Finally he found the mud-walled house where the expositors were meeting, and there he sent a messenger to advise Rabbi Asher that visitors had arrived. After an hour the little rabbi appeared, his eyes sad because of some wish of God that he had been unable to explain to his colleagues, but when he saw Menahem standing gravely in the sunlight he was reminded of the boy’s honorable acceptance of his burden, and admiration for the youth cleansed his mind of the sorrow it had been harboring.

  “I am pleased to see you, Menahem,” he said gently.

  “We’re ready to start the floor,” Yohanan interrupted.

  “All right,” he said with no enthusiasm.

  “I lack one thing.”

  “Get it”

  “I’ll have to go to Ptolemais … with money.”

  Rabbi Asher frowned. Like the rest of the great expositors he saw little money, but he was willing to listen. “What’s the problem?”

  “The design I plan …”

  “What is the design?”

  “The Galilee.”

  “What about it?”

  “It needs purple. At many points it needs purple stone. And I’ve found none.”

  “I saw some,” the rabbi said. “Beyond Sephet.”

  “I saw that too. It crumbles.”

  “In Ptolemais? Have they purple stone?”

  “No, but they have purple glass. Cut into squares.”

  Rabbi Asher considered this problem for some minutes. He was willing for Yohanan to build the floor but he wanted to spend no money for it. “What do you need purple for?” he parried.

  “Kingfisher’s feathers. The hoopoe bird, too.”

  Rabbi Asher studied this carefully. “Use other birds.”

  “I thought of that,” Yohanan replied. “But I also need purple for the mountains.”

  “I suppose so.” He turned and addressed the boy as his equal. “Is the mill making money, Menahem?” The boy nodded, and the rabbi said, “Buy the glass in Ptolemais.”

  “I’ll get some golden glass, too,” Yohanan added.

  “Gold? That sounds like adornment.”

  “It is,” the stonecutter admitted, “but it will make the pavement glisten … in just a few spots.”

  Rabbi Asher conceded and was about to dismiss his workmen when he thought of Menahem. “Wait a moment,” he said and left to consult with his associates, who were discussing whether a housewife was permitted to throw out used dishwater on Shabbat. The argument had been in process for some days, with the Sephet rabbi arguing liberally that throwing out the dishwater was a logical extension of preparing the Shabbat meal, which rabbis had always permitted, but with the Biri rabbi contending that throwing out the water was equivalent to sowing, “for from the freshly watered earth seeds might spring forth,” and this was specifically prohibited. Now Asher interrupted the expositors with a problem of different gravity.

  “The stonecutter of whom I spoke … and his bastard son. They’re outside and I thought to bring them in.”

  The Kefar Nahum rabbi protested against discussing individual cases, but an old man who had come from Babylonia for these sessions said, “Our great Rabbi Akiba would have stopped discussion even with God in order to speak with children. Fetch the boy.”

  So Rabbi Asher returned to the street and summoned Yohanan and Menahem into the cool courtyard, where the scholars saw with their own eyes what a promising youth was among them, and the old man from Babylonia cried, “With the appearance of such a youth the sun rises!”

  Menahem was made to stand facing the great expositors, while his father remained against the wall, listening, and at last the scholars reached a typical rabbinical conclusion: “A bastard may under no circumstances enter the congregation of the Lord for ten generations. But there is a way.”

  The old man from Babylonia explained: “Rabbi Tarfon, of blessed memory, and Rabbi Shammua, too, said, ‘Let the bastard boy when he is past the age of twelve steal an object worth more than ten drachmas. He is arrested and sold into slavery to a Hebrew family. Then he is married to another Hebrew slave. And after five years the owner emancipates them both and they become freedmen. And as new freedmen their children will be welcomed into the congregation of the Lord.”

  Yohanan heard the words with dumb astonishment. While the rabbis solemnly discussed where the theft must take place to make it an honest theft, and how the boy must be arrested and before what witnesses, the big stonecutter felt that a world of incomprehensibility was crashing about his ears. This was insanity, what the rabbis were saying, and it would take a man with no beard and no learning to tell them so. In bitterness he looked at his tall son as he stood self-consciously before the judges who were counseling this extraordinary course of action, and he was inspired to reach out and grab the boy by the hand and lead him from that confused company, but then he heard the old rabbi from Babylonia calling him, and he found himself moving obediently to stand beside his afflicted son.

  “Yohanan, stonecutter of Makor,” the saintly old man was saying, “you see how the irresponsible actions of a headstrong man lead him and his offspring into trouble. Rabbi Asher tells us that you were warned not to contract an illegal alliance with a married woman, but you went ahead. Now you have no wife and your son is in grave trouble …”

  Up to this point Menahem had stood calm before the judges, accepting their review of his case as a repetition of the abuse he had received since childhood; even Rabbi Asher’s talks with him in Makor had been so understood; but now as the stranger from Babylonia droned on with words of an impersonal gravity “never able to marry … an outcast forever from the Jews … only recourse is selling himself into slavery … he can never be clean, but his children can be saved …” the boy caught the full force of their meaning and uttered a convulsive sob, covering his face with his hands to mask his shame. Once he looked up to seek consolation, but the judges had none to offer. Finally Yohanan put his arm about him, saying quietly, “Come. We must go back to work,” but Menahem could not move, and his father had to drag him away.

  If the Talmud which the rabbis were compiling under the grape arbor of Tverya had consisted only of laws as remorseless as the one invoked against Menahem ben Yohanan, neither the Talmud nor Judaism could have long endured, but this was not the case; the Talmud was also a testimony to the joy of Jewish living. Its preaching on the law was hard and clear, but side by side it contained abundant passages which tempered that law to make the finished document a singing, laughing, hopeful summary. The Talmud was a literature of a people, crammed helter-skelter with songs and sayings, fables and fancy; and one of the reasons why the rabbis from Kefar Nahum, Biri and Sephet were so eager to work upon it was that their meetings were so much fun: lively argument sparked by the joy of personal clashes and a sense of being close to God.

  Only a massive work could hope to capture the vigor and fellowship of these meetings, and the Talmud became such a masterpiece. Its final size was difficult to comprehend: the Torah upon which it was built was brief; the Mishna was many times as long; the Gemara was much longer than the Mishna; and the commentaries of Maimonides and the rest were in turn much longer than the Gemara, the Mishna and the Torah together. The Torah consisted of five books, the Talmud of 523. The Torah could be printed in two hundred and fifty pages, but the finished Talmud required twenty-two volumes.

  In a major commentary on this vast, formless work the name of Rabbi Asher, God’s Man, appears eleven times, three in connection with legal decisions, eight in those frivolous, lovely passages which evoke the day-to-day life of Jews in Palestine: “Rabbi Asher ha-Garsi told us: Anti
gonus the wily seller of olive oil used three tricks. He allowed sediment to gather in the bottom of his measure so that it contained less. At the time of judging he tilted the measure sideways. And he taught himself to pour so that a large bubble of air formed in the middle of his jug. At his death God judged him according to his own measure. The sediment of his sin nearly filled the jug. It was tilted so far to one side that most of eternity slipped from him. And that day God poured with such a bubble!”

  Two quotations from the groats maker concerned the wild life of the Galilee, as he had observed it on his trips: “Rabbi Asher told us: the hoopoe bird was walking along the ground and the bee eater was flying in the sky. Cried the latter, ‘I am closer to God.’ But Elijah, peering down from heaven, warned, ‘He who works in the soil is always in the arms of God.’ From which Rabbi Bag Huna deduced, This proves that the farmer is closer to God than the merchant.’ But Rabbi Asher replied, ‘Not so, Huna. All men who work are equal.’”

  It was this Rabbi Bag Huna who offered the famous definition of a Talmudic scholar: “He should be able to concentrate so thoroughly upon the Torah that a seventeen-year-old girl could pass his desk completely naked without distracting him.” To which Rabbi Asher said, “I fear not many would pass that test.”

  Rabbi Asher made three comments upon the Torah: “Get old and get gray, get tired and get toothless, but get Torah.” “The law is like a jar filled with honey. If you pour in water, the honey will run out and after a while you will have cheapened the mixture until there is no honey left.” “At the gate of the shop a man has many friends. But at the gate of Torah he has God.”

  He is remembered principally, however, for the echo of laughter that hung over Tverya when he was present. “Rabbi Asher the groats maker said: A man who laughs is more to be cherished than one who weeps; a woman who sings, than one who wails. And God is very close to the child who dances for reasons which he cannot explain.” He argued for a God who loved even outcasts like Menahem, the stonecutter’s boy. He punctured sham, upheld the dignity of work, spoke for a happy marriage in which husband and wife shared equally, and bore constant testimony that God was a generous and a forgiving deity. “Rabbi Asher ha-Garsi said: Few have been tested as Rab Naaman of Makor was tested. When the Romans were about to destroy his town, Rab Naaman was offered safety through flight, and he deserted his friends. When he died he threw himself before God, crying, ‘The scar of that shameful act is still upon my heart,’ but God lifted him from the ground and said, ‘When you fled through the tunnel that night you took with you a new understanding of the law, and with Rabbi Akiba you saved My Torah. One shred of the law administered with compassion is more important than a hundred towns, and the scars on your heart I brush away.’”

  Rabbi Asher’s final comment on the Torah was simple: “He who knows Torah and does not teach it to others is like a single red poppy blooming in the desert.”

  His adherence to this last principle made it impossible for him to refuse when the rabbis asked him to instruct students in the yeshiva operated at Tverya for the training of young scholars. Classes convened in an old Roman building by the lake, and there Rabbi Asher would stand, a little old man in a white beard, talking at random about the joy he found in Judaism: “My guiding light has always been Rabbi Akiba. He saved the Mishna for us, and I love the memory of this man. From childhood I aspired to follow in his steps.” When students asked why he considered Akiba the greatest of the rabbis, he replied, “He cultivated a personal relationship with God, but he also directed himself to the problems of how his Jews could at the same time be faithful to God who controlled heaven and obedient to the Romans who controlled the earth. Today we could learn much from Akiba.” When his students, some of them hotheaded young men who were growing restless under Byzantine rule, brought the discussion down to the present, asking how he would behave toward the Byzantine invaders, he replied, without equivocation, “Study the final hours of Akiba. Every possible concession he made to Rome, but in the end he had to proclaim that when the will of God and the law of empire clash the former must prevail.”

  It was therefore each student’s responsibility to ascertain God’s intentions, and to help them in this task Rabbi Asher proposed certain drills: “If our desire is to uncover God’s wishes, we must develop minds that can penetrate shadows, for the mists produced by living obscure the truth and you cannot discern it unless you sharpen your wits.” At this point he would unroll a scroll of Torah and read from Leviticus: “These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind, and the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole. These are unclean to you.” Having read this, he would say, “God Himself forbids His people to eat the lizard. I want you to find one hundred reasons why the lizard should be eaten.” When his students protested that this might be blasphemous, Rabbi Asher explained, “Again and again the great rabbis have warned us that when God handed Moses the sacred law, He placed it in the hands of men so that it might exist on earth and not in heaven, to be interpreted by men. The Torah is what we say it is, you and I in all our frailty, and if God made a mistake in forbidding us to eat the lizard, we had better find out about it.” He would crash his hands upon the table and cry, “The Torah exists only on earth, in the hearts of men, and it is what we say it is.” He always told his students of the day on which the Prophet Elijah came back to earth following a great dispute among the rabbis, who asked him fearfully, “Was God angry when we changed His word?” and Elijah told them, “No! God clapped His hands gleefully and cried, ‘My children have defeated Me! They live on earth and they know the problems of earth. O, My beloved children, always be as wise as you were today.’” Sometimes students would protest, “But you speak of God as if He were a human being, and yesterday you told us He is a spirit,” and the little rabbi would thunder, “Of course He’s a spirit. He has no body nor hands either. I’m telling you a story. Accept it as that.” And he would stomp from the room, stopping at the door to shout back, “Tomorrow! A hundred reasons why Jews should eat lizards.” Then he would add softly, “Imagine, perhaps one of you, in this little room in this little city, will correct the error of God, and tomorrow night He will clap His hands again and cry, ‘Once more My children have defeated Me! That blessed city of Tverya.’”

  He had found that when a man was driven to construct a hundred sophistical reasons for denying Leviticus, the man had to consider the ultimate nature of God. Sometimes the yeshiva students contrived ingenious answers: “In Exodus it says that after God had created all the animals and before He created man, He reviewed His work and it is written, ‘And God saw that it was good.’ Since He made this judgment after the creation of the lizard but before He created man, the lizard must have been good in the abstract, always and forever, without reference to man. And it must still be good, and can therefore be eaten.”

  Another student once argued, “God created first the earth, and as a father loves most of all his first-born, so God loves first of all His earth. Of all the animals that live upon this beloved earth, the lizard presses his belly closest to the earth and cannot live away from it. Therefore he is even closer to the earth that God loves than man, and as part of the earth he must be good, and Jews can therefore eat him.”

  One year an especially clever student advanced an argument that would be retained in the Talmud: “We often have to choose between two precepts of our Lord that appear contradictory. Now listen. In the commandments He tells us, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ yet He Himself stole a rib from Adam to give mankind its greatest blessing, woman. Now He tells us not to eat lizards, but if we did we might find them to be a blessing also.”

  Day after day Rabbi Asher encouraged his students to pursue their adroit reasonings, and when the last had been proved specious, he surprised everyone by saying, “Now bring me a hundred reasons why the lizard cannot be eaten,” and when this had been accomplished he f
elt that his students were beginning to acquire the tenacity required of anyone who presumed to study Jewish law. He loved to tell his students a story which summarized his attitudes on this matter of intellectual inspection: “A Roman came to Rabbi Gimzo the Water Carrier, and asked, ‘What is this study of the law that you Jews engage in?’ and Gimzo replied, ‘I shall explain. There were two men on a roof, and they climbed down the chimney. One’s face became sooty. The other’s not. Which one washed his face?’ The Roman said, ‘That’s easy, the sooty one, of course.’ Gimzo said, ‘No. The man without the soot looked at his friend, saw that the man’s face was dirty, assumed that his was too, and washed it.’ Cried the Roman, ‘Ah ha! So that’s the study of law. Sound reasoning.’ But Gimzo said, ‘You foolish man, you don’t understand. Let me explain again. Two men on a roof. They climb down a chimney. One’s face is sooty, the other’s not. Which one washes?’ The Roman said, ‘As you just explained, the man without the soot.’ Gimzo cried, ‘No, you foolish one! There was a mirror on the wall and the man with the dirty face saw how sooty it was and washed it.’ The Roman said, ‘Ah ha! So that’s the study of law! Conforming to the logical.’ But Rabbi Gimzo said, ‘No, you foolish one. Two men climbed down the chimney. One’s face became sooty? The other’s not? That’s impossible. You’re wasting my time with such a proposition.’ And the Roman said, ‘So that’s the law! Common sense.’ And Gimzo said, ‘You foolish man! Of course it was possible. When the first man climbed down the chimney he brushed the soot away. So the man who followed found none to mar him.’ And the Roman cried, ‘That’s brilliant, Rabbi Gimzo. Law is getting at the basic facts.’ And for the last time Gimzo said, ‘No, you foolish man. Who could brush all the soot from a chimney? Who can ever understand all the facts?’ Humbly the Roman asked, ‘Then what is the law?’ And Gimzo said quietly, ‘It’s doing the best we can to ascertain God’s intention, for there were indeed two men on a roof, and they did climb down the same chimney. The first man emerged completely clean while it was the second who was covered with soot, and neither man washed his face, because you forgot to ask me whether there was any water in the basin. There was none.’”