Source

by James A. Michener

  Three times Rabbi Zaki started to speak, but no words came, so finally Eliezer said, “Little Zaki, you’re a saint. And women are more apt than men to recognize saints when they see them.” So the marriage was held in the German synagogue.

  Then came the days of heaven on earth. Rabbi Zaki, who had pleaded with so many men to marry, discovered that he had not understood the meaning of the word, for those participations, which with complaining Rachel had been a duty, became with the tall, poetic Elisheba a joy beyond imagining. Being an uncomplicated man and one not committed, like Dr. Abulafia, to wrestling with spiritual problems, Rabbi Zaki encountered no difficulty in fulfilling or even exceeding his Talmudic quota; there was in fact only one problem: one Friday afternoon in the abounding joy of his new marriage he started to say that at last he understood the invocation of the Shabbat hymn, “Come, my Beloved, let us meet the Bride,” but as soon as he had uttered the first words he dismissed them as blasphemous, for he knew that the Bride Shabbat was greater even than the Bride Elisheba, and in this radiant concept he found assurance. In the quickest possible time she was pregnant, announcing to Safed, “Rabbi Zaki and I are going to have two dozen children.” And as soon as her first son was born she became pregnant again, so that in three years she had three children. She laughed all the time, and when the young men of the town said, “We notice that Rabbi Zaki doesn’t call so many midnight meetings any more,” she shocked Safed by asking demurely, “Would you?”

  What Zaki remembered most about his faultless wife, when he was absent from her, was a silly thing. On Fridays, as Shabbat approached, she took white paint and outlined all the cracks where stones joined in the floor of their home, and out into the street as well. It was a German habit and made the home look squared-off and neat, and one day as he recalled these lovely whited squares with which his wife praised God—he saw them in his mind’s eye against the sky to the west—he first saw the figures 301. They came upon him as burning symbols, more real than the earth on which he walked, the flaming figures 301.

  That night as he sat by candlelight, moving the Hebrew alphabet about his paper, hoping that he might convoke the mystical letters YHWH, a feat he had not yet accomplished, for his mind was not disciplined enough for that ultimate of mysteries, the ordinary letters suddenly began falling away and he saw at last only the two which designated the number 301. Again the letters stood forth in flame.

  During the happiest period of his life, when Elisheba was walking proudly with her three children and when his own influence in Safed was at its height, the fat rabbi found the number 301 rushing out to confront him at unexpected places. On Friday afternoon he would go with the rabbis to the fields to sing of the coming Shabbat, and when he departed from them to announce Shabbat through the streets from one white wall after another, the burning figures 301 stood forth to terrify him. He could not escape them, and in the third month of this visitation a day came when, embracing his wife, he saw them emblazoned on her forehead and then on the heads of his children. It was a moment of terror.

  For three days he spoke to no one, and on Friday he neither took a ritual bath nor went into the fields to welcome Shabbat. Instead, he crept quietly to the German synagogue, a man unable to acknowledge the divine summons which had come to him, and as the voices of singers rose about him, he could hear Elisheba chanting behind the curtain that separated the women:

  “Come, my Beloved, let us meet the Bride.

  The presence of Shabbat let us receive.”

  And then on the embroidered curtain covering the Torah he saw the flaming figures 301.

  Above the voices of the singers he cried, “Oh, God, what must I do to help?” And the figures burned in fire, as if they must consume the synagogue, and to the surprise of the worshipers he prostrated himself on the floor, crying, “God, have You called me at last?”

  Rabbi Eliezer heard these words and interrupted his chant to run to the fallen rabbi, and when he saw the ecstasy on the fat man’s face he sensed that some dreadful thing had come to pass through meddling with Kabbala, and he did an extraordinary thing. He slapped Zaki three times and cried, “It is not so!” But the fallen man ignored the blows and looked only at the cupboard of the Torah, where the mystical figures burned for some moments, not to disappear until Zaki cried in full submission, “I shall go.”

  At the end of service he ignored Rabbi Eliezer and hurried home, where he said evening prayers with his wife and children, almost breaking down when he saw their four loved faces. He closed his doors to the habitual visitors who liked to sing with him on Shabbat evening and went instead to his room, where he prayed all night. In the morning he waited till Elisheba had fed the children, then said, “I must talk with you.”

  Like an uncomplicated girl she smiled and said, “Speak.”

  “Can we walk to the old fort?” he asked solemnly, and she, having feared this moment for some days, assented. Calling an old woman to mind her children she joined her husband and they climbed the narrow streets leading to the Crusaders’ fort, where they sat on old rocks and surveyed the marvelous landscape in which they lived.

  Rabbi Zaki said, “It is a matter relating to the will of God.” His wife said, “I knew it must be.”

  “I am not learned like your father, and I cannot pierce mysteries like Dr. Abulafia, but long ago, when I first read Talmud as a boy, I found the message which has guided my life. It was in the words of the great Akiba, who was also an uncomplicated man like me. Akiba said, ‘Everything in life is given against a pledge, and a net is cast over all the living; the shop is open, the shopkeeper extends credit, the ledger is open before you, the hand writes, and whoever wishes to borrow may come and borrow; but the collectors make their rounds continually and exact payment of every man, with his consent or without.”

  There was silence. Elisheba had long known this greatest of passages from Akiba; she knew that all human beings lived under a net which bound them to certain limits of activity, and she knew also that the bill collectors circulated each day, lifting the payment of those who had borrowed against the future. These understandings were the basic morality of Judaism and she did not flinch from them. She wondered what was in her husband’s mind.

  “For many months,” he said, “I have felt the number 301 summoning me, and recently it has appeared on your brow and on the brow of our children.” He trembled and drew back. “It’s there now, Elisheba.”

  “What does it mean?” she asked softly.

  “Fire,” he said.

  For some moments she looked at the fat little saint with whom she had been allowed to live in such simple happiness, and slowly the meaning of his vision came to her and she rejected the great words of Akiba. “No!” she screamed in terrible anguish. “Zaki, no! No!”

  “It means fire,” he repeated dully.

  For some hours they sat peacefully among the Crusader ruins, an old man and a beautiful young wife, and finally each had to accept the fact that there was no escape, no alternative. Finally Elisheba, with an anguish greater than she had imagined could exist, turned to her husband and said, “If you must, may God strengthen you for the sanctification of His Name.”

  “I must,” he said, and like ghosts, treading on unreality, they went down the hill.

  Elisheba took it upon herself to notify the other rabbis, and they came running through the streets to the shoemaker’s house. “Is Zaki dying?” the neighbors inquired, seeing the sudden convergence.

  The little shoemaker, then sixty years old and with a white beard, sat sternly at his bench as the leaders of Safed gathered about him. He said, “All my life I have wondered why I was made so fat. To please Rachel I tried to eat less, but God kept me fat. It was for a purpose. So then when I march to the stake for the sanctification of His Name I shall make a blaze that will burn for a long time.”

  And now the spiritual solidarity of Safed manifested itself. Rabbi Eliezer, torn from his legal studies, did not remind his colleagues that such egocentricity wa
s the end product of Kabbalism, nor did he cry that seeking out martyrdom was arrogance and a matter not approved by law. He reasoned, “Zaki, my beloved son-in-law, has God directed you to do this thing, or is it merely your own vanity?”

  And Dr. Abulafia, whose encouragements to Zaki to study the Kabbala could have been responsible for the fiery message, felt himself rebuked by Zaki’s determination to compensate for his abandonment of his congregation. “Zaki,” he asked, “is it a true vision you’ve had or something you imagined because you were with others who had honest insights?”

  Patiently Rabbi Zaki put each of his friends at ease. “This happened to me long before I heard of Kabbala, for on the day I fled Podi, God showed me on the faces of the friends I was deserting the mark of fire. And it is a true vision, for in a dream a voice spoke to me and said, ‘Zaki, if you try to divide this number 301 by two or three or four or five or six, which are the ordinary days of the week, there is always one left over, which is you. But if you divide it by seven, which is the number of our Shabbat, there is no remainder, and you are one with God.’ “In a whisper he added, “And if you sum the letters used in writing fire they come to 301.”

  Among the Kabbalists there was serious discussion of these mystical facts, for obviously they portended something arcane, but the discussion was broken by blunt Rabbi Yom Tov, who reminded Zaki, “There is one supreme reason for not going. If your bones are buried here in Safed, on Judgment Day you will rise to greet the Messiah; but if they are buried overseas you will have to burrow underground like a mole to reach the Holy Land.” This was a belief held by many old Jews, and it was their dread of a long twisting journey in darkness which inspired them to return to the Holy Land to die.

  Of equal weight was Rabbi Abulafia’s reminder: “You are not an ordinary Jew, Zaki, going to Rome on a mission to defend the Torah. Some have done so and escaped. But you are a Jew who was once baptized in the Christian Church, and like the Jews of Podi who were burned, you are in the eyes of that Church a heretic, and they believe they have a duty to burn you. If you go to Rome, you invite your own certain death.”

  But what Rabbi Zaki said next was of greater weight: “We live within the net of God, and though I swam to the farthest end of the Mediterranean I could not escape. Had I stayed with the Jews of Podi, I would have burned with them. They call me and God calls me.”

  The discussion was broken by the arrival of Zaki’s two oldest daughters, Sarah and Tamar, who demanded to know What the meeting was about. When they were told that their father proposed going back to Rome to argue for Judaism and to offer himself for martyrdom, they began to protest bitterly. Like their mother they had been against his leaving Podi, Africa and Salonica, and they were now against his leaving Safed. “If Mother were alive …” they shouted harshly.

  “She is not alive,” Elisheba interrupted. “But I am, and I say that if Rabbi Zaki is called by God to this terrible mission, he shall go with my blessing and the blessing of our children.”

  “They’re not old enough to know anything,” the sisters whined.

  “I know what they will believe on such matters,” Elisheba said, “because they are the children of a saint.”

  “If our mother were here …” Sarah wailed.

  “Order your wife out of here,” one of the rabbis told Abulafia, but he said resignedly, “She is his daughter. She is allowed to stay.” And the matter was put up to Zaki, who said, “You may stay, Sarah, but do not speak so loudly.”

  The discussion went on and on, but nothing could shake Rabbi Zaki from his determination to go to Rome, and it was at last agreed that he should do so. He spent two weeks in finishing his affairs and selling his shoemaker shop to a young man he hoped would marry Elisheba when he was dead. He held long conversations with his children, trusting that they might remember something of the old, white-bearded man who had been their father.

  From one synagogue to the other he went, praying with the people who had grown to love him, and on the last Friday he went to the fields with the rabbis and sang joyously at the approach of Shabbat, Then he left them and marched slowly through the streets, calling the Jews to their duty of greeting Queen Shabbat, and it was supposed that he would go to the German synagogue, which his wife attended; but he went instead to that of Rabbi Abulafia, a man who also carried a burden of sin, and the two old rabbis looked at each other across the heads of the congregation.

  On Sunday he said farewell to his wife. No more would he embrace those lovely breasts or know her enchanting thighs. Her womb would grow no more with his seed and at night he would not feel her white leg creeping across his. The exact structure of her marvelous face framed in black hair would slowly recede from his memory, except that in the last moment, through the flames, he would see not YHWH, but Elisheba, the daughter of Eliezer bar Zadok.

  Early Monday morning the people of Safed, led by their rabbis, walked into the countryside after Rabbi Zaki as he started on his pilgrimage. They gave him money and prayers. He kissed his wife and his children, then kissed his wife again, but the last citizen of Safed with whom he spoke was Dr. Abulafia, who came bearing a small parcel. “You know the sin under which I live,” the Spaniard said. “Help me. When I fled I brought with me this menorah. Take it back to the land of persecution. Someone may cherish it.”

  Rabbi Zaki looked at the turbaned man and said with humility, “I judged you harshly. Now God forces me to behave in the same way. Forgive me.” But when he camped that night at the mound of Makor he argued with himself: Taking Rabbi Abulafia’s menorah back to Europe is an act of arrogance, if not of idolatry. He therefore buried it deep in the earth, trusting that at some later date a Jew of the region would find it and consider it a miracle.

  On the next morning he rose early and resumed his march toward Rome.

  LEVEL

  II

  Twilight of an Empire

  Schematic sketch of a gold coin issued by the Fatimid Dynasty of Egypt. Original reads in part—Obverse: “In the name of God, this dinar was struck at Tiberias 395 A.H. (1004 CE.). Ali al-Mansur Abu Ali being Imam. Al-Hakim hi-Amr-Allah being Commander of the Faithful.” Reverse: “There is no God except Allah alone. He has no partner. [This phrase was included to irritate Christians.] Muhammad is the Apostle of God, sent with instructions to demonstrate the true faith in its entirety, even though the pagans hated this. Ali is the friend of Allah” It was this Caliph al-Hakim who ordered the destruction of the Christian Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 100g, thus initiating the series of events that culminated in the Crusades. Deposited at Makor August 21, 1880 C.E., sometime after six o’clock in the afternoon.

  It was hot in Tiberias, both within the city and without. A blazing sun beat down upon the molten surface of the lake and hammered at the barren hills like a great torch seeking to set the world afire. Inside the massive black walls of the town the heat was more than a man could bear, so that during the suffocating hours of midday few could be seen in the narrow alleys, down which ran open sewers throwing a hideous stench.

  Tiberias was the earth’s lowest settlement, cowering more than six hundred and eighty feet below the level of the sea, and in this torrid summer of 1880 it was also one of the world’s most miserable communities, a somnolent, cramped and dirty little town overburdened with filth and fleas. In the remorseless sun it dozed as if ashamed to show its face to the world.

  Legend of the countryside claimed that the king of insects held court in Tiberias and hither summoned his subjects each summer to devise new means of tormenting human beings, their shrewd inventions being first tried out on the citizens of this wretched town. Certainly something in the hot, low place was conducive to the breeding of insects, for each house was alive with fleas and scorpions and bedbugs.

  For nearly a thousand years Tiberias had been the butt of jokes, because as early as 985 an Arab traveler, forced against his will to spend some time in the town, reported to his friends: “For two months in the year the citizens g
orge themselves upon the fruit of the jujube bush, which grows wild and costs them nothing. For two months they struggle with the numerous flies that are rife there. For two months they go about naked because of the fierce heat. For two months they play the flute, for they suck pieces of sugar cane which resemble flutes. For two months they wallow in mud, for the rains soak their streets, and for the last two months they dance in their beds because of the legions of fleas with which they are infested.” The people of Tiberias enjoyed a reputation no more favorable than that of their insects. A drowsy, undistinguished lot, they drifted through the years with no accomplishments, and a stranger, looking at their town in its present condition, could not have recognized the once-proud city of the Herods nor the center of learning from which the Talmud and the written Bible were given to the world. It would have been impossible to imagine that within these walls a Crusader court had once held sway, for now only a few Arabs huddled in their district, a few Jews in theirs, the Sephardim remaining strictly aloof from the Ashkenazim while a handful of Christians clung to the southern edge of the town, and on stifling days like this, when the thermometer on the kaimakam’s balcony stood at 124 degrees and when no breeze came from any quarter, the citizens of Tiberias lay panting in their beds, hoping that the night would bring relief.

  In this flea-bitten town only one man was cool. In an underground room perched over a cellar which had been packed during the winter with ice lugged down from the mountains, a handsome, portly man in his early forties reclined in a bamboo chair, his fat feet higher than his belly and a wet towel about his head. He was naked except for a small breech-clout and he was drinking grape juice into which had been placed chips of ice from the cellar below.

  Even so, this amiable man with the long mustaches was sweating, not because of the heat, but because of intricate and dangerous plans in which he was involved. Two different groups of plaintiffs had petitioned him for exactly contrary decisions regarding a matter of land: the white-robed qadi and the red-faced mufti had joined forces to plead for one solution, while Shmuel Hacohen, a sway-backed Jew from Russia, sought an opposing judgment. And Faraj ibn Ahmed Tabari, the kaimakam of Tubariyeh, as Tiberias was now called, had devised a trick whereby he could extort baksheesh from each side while appeasing neither, and such a solution appealed to his sense of administration.