The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  In this report I have spoken much of Rabbi Zaki, and perhaps you would rather hear about Dr. Abulafia or Bar Zadok, but when I tell you what Zaki does at Friday noon, before he lunches, you will understand. He leaves the synagogue where the great ones are expounding and he goes to his shoemaker shop, where he studies the box in which he keeps the money earned by mending shoes. “This week, Dom Miguel,” he tells me, “we can spare a little more,” and he takes from the box almost half of what he has earned. Hiding the coins in his long-coat he starts walking through the narrow streets, and wherever he finds a poor man, or a widow who has not with what to make Shabbat, he pauses and asks how this person is and as he talks he quietly places a few coins in some inconspicuous place. But when the meeting ends he always says, “Shmuel, you are a man who bears misfortune with dignity. You must know God better than I do. Give me on this happy Friday your blessing,” and he makes the man feel that it is he who is doing the rabbi a favor. And thus he disposes of his wealth.

  His charity completed, Rabbi Zaki goes home, where Rachel has been cleaning her house and doing much cooking, with all her pots bubbling at once. Carefully Zaki lays out fresh clothes, from stockings to robes, then walks to the ritual baths, where he cleanses himself for the moments that lie ahead. His lunch on Friday is always frugal and he grows impatient for the hours to pass, but by mid-afternoon a kind of benediction settles over him, and over the town itself, and he takes down his handsome prayer shawl, white with black stripes and knotted fringe, and he leaves his home and begins to walk sedately toward the edge of town, then out toward open fields, saying to me, “Keep up, Dom Miguel. You are going to meet your Bride.” As he moves through the narrow alleys, men join up with us until he leads as many as sixty or seventy into the countryside—a fat, round little man with a black beard, whose neighbors trust him. We are not in the fields long before we see Dr. Abulafia coming, tall and princely, his graying beard long and his manner of walking courtly. He is always attended by students of the Kabbala. Then Rabbi Yom Tov, dressed in expensive robes and with an air of command, comes marching toward us with his business assistants; and finally through the fields comes a man alone, Rabbi Eliezer bar Zadok ha-Ashkenaz, his eyes wearied from reading. Four times since I came to Safed I have been told that in Germany, Rabbi Eliezer was a man who could dance all night and drink endless amounts of German beer, but if that was ever the case, sorrow has changed him much in the intervening years.

  In the shadow of the mountains we sit upon the ground and speak of holy things. We sing hymns composed by poets of the town and study the flowers of the meadow, but as the sun drifts toward the west Rabbi Zaki feels himself gripped by an acute excitement, and he rises and returns to town, first in a slow walk, finally in a donkey-like gallop, his gown flapping about his fat legs as he calls behind, “Run faster, Dom Miguel! Your Bride is coming!” Through the narrow alleys of Safed he hurries, up and down the hills, crying, “Queen Shabbat is about to appear. Let us go forth in our finest clothes and in our sweetest breath to greet the Queen!” He knocks on doors and cries at street corners, lest any miss the Queen. Then, in a kind of ecstasy, he waits as the other rabbis return from the fields singing songs of praise to the imminent moment of our joy. Each man proceeds to his own synagogue, the Sephardim like Zaki to one of the many Spanish congregations, the Ashkenazim like Eliezer to one of the two German synagogues, and men sit upon the floor, while women give praise in the balcony masked by gauze curtains, and after the evening prayers have been chanted, all join in the great Safed hymn that we would do well to sing in Amsterdam: “Come, my Beloved, let us meet the Bride. The presence of Shabbat let us receive.” And as the sun sinks, the day of the Lord begins in Safed, that mysterious day on which the communion between God and man is reaffirmed.

  In a later passage that some Jews wished Dom Miguel had omitted, because of its frank discussion of sex in Safed, he wrote:

  Shabbat in Safed is a day of extreme joy, and after the twilight service ends on Friday evening Rabbi Zaki invites some two dozen of his friends and all travelers from far places to his home, where the food prepared that morning by the rebbetzin is laid out and where wine from the Safed hills is poured. We sing old songs of Italy and Spain till nearly midnight and if a stranger gets drunk, more from the singing than the wine, Zaki does not rebuke him. One Friday during our singing he told me, “You will have to put them out, Dom Miguel, for I must go to bed. Since I was first married in Podi I have lain with my wife every Friday night, even aboard ship when we were both seasick, and she would take it unkindly if I missed now.”

  On Shabbat itself three synagogue meetings are held: dawn, morning, afternoon. During this holy time all but religious life halts completely. Men are allowed to carry nothing, not even a string, lest inadvertently they work upon the Lord’s day. No food is cooked, no fire lighted, no lamp lit. Rabbi Zaki spends this day close to a window, even when in the synagogue, with his eyes fixed toward the lake below, for he tells me that when the Messiah arrives on earth he will make his appearance some Shabbat morning on those waters and then walk over the hills to Safed. “It would be a thing of error,” Rabbi Zaki says, “if we were not ready to greet him as he enters town.” It is a custom in Safed, and one I have grown to love, as Shabbat ends on Saturday at dusk—when a man can see three stars in one glance at the heavens—for the rabbis to gather as if to prolong the day, holding a feast, singing old songs and speaking of the goodness they have known. Rabbi Zaki prays almost till dawn, clutching, as it were, at the garments of the Bride as the day passes into history. How sweet Shabbat can be those last moments!

  But I have never seen a more doleful day than Sunday in Safed. Now Rabbi Zaki awakes with the taste of ashes in his mouth. I hear him in his bed, fearful of the messenger’s footfall. Reluctantly he dresses and we go in silence to the cold synagogue, so different in spirit from what it had been only a few short hours before. This dawn Zaki looks at no one and he prays alone, as do the rest of us. And then, when the day has well broken and the sun is upon us, the rabbis of Safed meet glumly on street corners and try to decide what went wrong last week. “If we had been truly God’s men throughout the entire week,” Rabbi Yom Tov complains, “the Messiah would surely have come. What did we do wrong?” And the rabbis discuss the errors of the past, the faults of Jews who keep barring the Messiah from his Holy Land. I have often heard Rabbi Zaki say, “Here in Safed we are so engaged in a struggle for our personal happiness that we forget our responsibility to the greater world.” And often he leaves these informal Sunday meetings to preach with new dedication his simple formula: “More charity. More love. More submission to God’s Torah.” And so, as each new week begins, the Jews of Safed again try to live such devout lives that through their example the Messiah will be lured down to earth, for as Rabbi Zaki never tires of reminding us, “It is written in the Talmud that if a single community repents, the world will be saved.” But it is my opinion that if the Messiah is ever brought down to earth it will be by the efforts of one man, and that man will be Rabbi Zaki the Shoemaker.

  As for the worldly government of Safed, twenty-three thousand Jews, thirty thousand Arabs and I don’t know how many Christians are ruled by Turkish pashas sent down from Constantinople. The Turks collect taxes, set rules for the wool trade and provide soldiers now and then if bandits, called bedawi, move too close in their raids. The day-to-day life of Jews rests in the hands of their rabbis, while the Arabs are governed by their qadis, or judges, and the Christians by their priests. Since the arrival of Rabbi Zaki and Rabbi Eliezer there has been no death sentence and little divorce. I heard of some adultery but of not a single pauper who failed to receive charity. If the rabbis find time they teach the children to read, but here I do not find those systematic schools which were a credit to the Jews of Germany. Nor have I heard of any offenses against the civic peace. I was pleased to see that businessmen are not allowed extravagant profits, for during my visit Rabbi Zaki publicly rebuked Rabbi Yom Tov for not increasing
the pay of his women workers when profits rose, and by public demand the wage was raised. I would that all Jews lived as just lives as I lived in Safed.

  Curiously, now that I am removed from the city I recall only one sound as my lasting memory of that hillside paradise. It is the call of the muezzin from the Arab minarets which surround the Jewish quarters, and as I hear it echo I remember how easily Jew and Arab existed in this city and wonder at the bitterness with which the Portuguese insisted that they could not live with Jews, and at the ugliness in German towns, and especially at the hatred which Spaniards in Amsterdam feel toward their Jews. One man told me, “Arab and Jew share Safed in peace only because each is ruled with equal harshness by the Turk. If Arabs ruled they’d abuse the Jews, and if Jews ruled they’d be intolerable.” I hope the rabbis of Amsterdam will advise me on this matter.

  Because our Jews in Europe are forced to lead far from perfect lives, I must not leave the impression that Safed is a paradise. If we must depend upon the purity of this city to lure the Messiah back to earth we may have to wait a long time. The men of Safed like women and they like wine. The latter they import in large tuns from Damascus, and the former they arrange for in a most ingenious and satisfactory way. Along the line where the two communities meet, the Arabs keep a house where Jewish men pay to visit girls brought down from Damascus, while the Jews maintain a house in which Arabs come to visit Jewish girls from Akka and Nazareth. I myself visited the Arab house one night, and it was a credit to the city. The rabbis themselves were lusty men and I was told in secret that Dr. Abulafia, much tormented at home by a shrewish wife, kept a mistress near the yeshiva where Joseph Caro taught, and I shall never forget hearing Rabbi Zaki recount with pleasure the story of great Rabbi Akiba, who, lusting for knowledge, once followed his teacher into the privy itself, “and from what he saw him do there Akiba picked up three good habits which he used ever after.” And when I asked, “What were the tricks of hygiene that Akiba learned in the privy?” Rabbi Zaki told me bluntly, and we would not do poorly if we adopted them in Amsterdam. Many of the poems we sang in the synagogues told of passionate love, and the women of Safed like fine fabrics and get them. Jewelry we could buy from the Arabs, and any man was considered miserly who did not buy his wife some, so when I left the city I gave four presents, and they were better made and Cheaper than any I could have bought in Antwerp.

  Dom Miguel of Amsterdam concluded his remarks on Safed with a passage that would be quoted often in later centuries as a kind of ideal toward which Jews might aspire:

  I have traveled across the hills to Peqiin, and am seated in the cave where Simeon ben Yohai wrote the Zohar while hiding from the Roman soldiers, and I think I now understand Safed. If in the future men tell you that we Jews were intended to be homeless, without a land of our own, or that we cannot govern ourselves or live side by side in peace with others, send such liars to Safed, for there you will see Jew and Arab living in peace. You will see Dr. Abulafia ha-Sephard existing easily with Rabbi Eliezer bar Zadok ha-Ashkenaz, and you will see a hillside living happily under the law of Moses, and getting rich while doing so. But most of all you will see a fat little rabbi from Italy puffing up and down the steep alleys, bringing love to all men. In Jerusalem they told me, “In Safed you will find the capital of Judaism.” I did not, for to me Jerusalem will always be the capital, but I did find Rabbi Zaki, and he is the heart of Judaism.

  In only one respect did Dom Miguel fall into serious error regarding Safed: though the years were golden, the city was far from finding the secret to permanent civic harmony, for in early 1551 a severe contention broke out, and between the very rabbis whose harmony Dom Miguel had praised. Before long it involved the entire Jewish community and could in time have destroyed it had not prudent steps been taken to heal the breach. It began when a Jewish woman from Damascus wanted a divorce from a man who had lived briefly in Safed and whose family antecedents were uncertain. Rabbi Abulafia, still tormented by his own sin and unhappy in his marriage with Sarah—who grew more like her mother as the years passed—was inclined to aid others who had fallen into domestic trouble. So even though the legal position of the claimant was unclear, he granted the divorce. Rabbi Eliezer, who was not involved in this case, noted with some apprehension that this was the fourth time that Dr. Abulafia had ignored a strict interpretation of the Mosaic law, and Eliezer felt that the spiritual foundations of Judaism were under attack. Accordingly, he retired to the library which the Jews of Constantinople still maintained for him with their contributions and composed a harsh letter, filled with legal citation and the kind of blunt Germanic sentences he used in his codification of the law. The essential paragraphs read:

  Does Rabbi Abulafia think that he can issue such faulty divorces without censure? Does he plan to issue others in the future? If he does, we cannot see how the rabbis of Safed can any longer place credence in his decision in these or other areas. Surely a man who cannot understand the simple law of divorce can hardly be trusted to judge graver problems. By his arrogant and intemperate decisions Rabbi Abulafia raises in all minds three serious questions: “Does he know the law? Does he respect it? Will he in future observe it?”

  These are matters which go far beyond Safed. We who have been allowed by God to see the sad state of Judaism throughout the world, know that Jews are in peril and can be saved only if they live according to the law. Any rabbi like Dr. Abulafia who abuses that law helps to destroy Judaism. In circulating this necessary but unpleasant letter we are not concerned with his faulty decision in the Damascus case. That was an error which can be forgiven. But we are concerned with the majesty of law as it operates to save Judaism. And we say to Dr. Abulafia, “If your arbitrary decision in this case becomes a precedent, the basis for Jewish family life will be destroyed.” We know he cannot intend this, so in charity we must conclude, Dr. Abulafia does not know the law. Surely he does not wish to lead the Jews of Safed into those twilight areas where each man is his own judge, where all are free to write the law according to their own desires, and where the hard, clear light of Torah and Talmud is obscured.

  The letter, when it reached the alleys and synagogues, occasioned a fury of comment. It was the kind of document intended to make men take sides, and it succeeded. Rabbi Abulafia’s students were outraged and started drafting an answer which would show Rabbi Eliezer to be an idiot, but the doctor refused to be distracted by personal invective and halted his associates. He better than they understood the heart of Eliezer’s challenge, and he wished to place only the basic issue before the people. Therefore, in the weeks that followed Rabbi Eliezer’s distribution of the letter Abulafia worked quietly, saw his students each morning, prayed more than usual and spent his evenings discussing legal precedents with learned friends. Finally, when the tempers of his followers had cooled, he handed them a letter to circulate through the synagogues. It was a statesmanlike document, free of acrimony but filled with legal citation. Abulafia had dug out cases from six different countries supporting his decision in the Damascus divorce. He arranged his precedents so as to verify each procedure that Rabbi Eliezer had questioned. He showed that the practical law of divorce, as it now operated in the Jewries of Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, Egypt and Turkey, clearly supported his decision, so that any charge of arbitrariness or ignorance could not be sustained.

  Yet even as he had compiled this part of the letter, he had confessed to himself that any scholar who analyzed his precedents would become aware that step by step, from Spain to Turkey, a chain of distinguished rabbis had been moving slowly and perhaps unconsciously away from a strict interpretation of Torah and Talmud. Encouraged by liberalists like Maimonides a group of rabbis had begun to evolve a tradition of their own, and Abulafia knew that it was at this revisionist tradition, and not at Abulafia himself, that Rabbi Eliezer had been striking in his letter. But this aspect of the controversy the Spaniard chose to avoid; his clear eye was focused on still another battleground existing between the two men, and it w
as to this fundamental topic that he addressed himself in the final pages of his letter:

  I deny that the argument of the learned Rabbi Eliezer bar Zadok ha-Ashkenaz concerns me personally; indeed, I believe he has done Safed and Jews of the world a favor in raising the abstract points he has. Nor does the legalistic problem of adhering too much to Maimonides or too little to the Talmud involve me. Here again I believe that Rabbi Eliezer has performed a service in pointing out these divergencies. The real problem upon which we are engaged, and upon which I shall be happy to remain engaged, is this:

  Can Judaism prevail if it is tied to a narrow interpretation of the law as conceived and administered by a body of older rabbis? Must we not in the years ahead revitalize our religion by infusing it with the day-to-day revelations experienced by common men? I believe in strict observance of the law, as I have shown in the preceding citations, and I would be shamed in my own eyes if I felt that I had strayed from one iota of that law as it has evolved in the lives of real men and great rabbis. I render no decision before I know what is being done in Paris, Frankfurt and Alexandria, for I am a servant of the law as it develops in the lives of men. But I also believe that Judaism, to prevail, must avoid becoming the preserve of a few men who, by their legalistic approach, stamp out the ordinary joy of life and its mystical appreciations.