The Source

by James A. Michener

  Then one day in 1547 he came puffing home with the titillating news that a new rabbi had come to Safed. “A tall man, very handsome. His name is Abulafia and he has been wandering through Africa and Egypt. He has no wife.”

  Rachel jumped. “Speak to him right away, Zaki! It’s your fault your daughter has no husband.”

  Zaki agreed to this remarkable thesis. These days he agreed to almost everything, so Rachel continued, “It’s a father’s duty to find men for his daughters, and it reflects sorely on you, Zaki, that your oldest daughter is unmarried. Look at her—a splendid woman.”

  Zaki looked at her and thought: I could name six things that girl could do which would help her more than any of my efforts. Nevertheless, he looked forward to an intimate talk with the newcomer, for no rabbi should be without a wife.

  Dr. Abulafia created excitement in more than the Zaki family. His years of wandering had made him thinner; his beard was gray; he wore a turban; and his constant search for the mysterious meanings of man’s relationship to God had caused his features to assume a remote beauty that was disturbing to men and women alike. There was a sensuousness about him, manifest in all he did, a mixture of Spanish grace and Hebrew insight; and before he had been in Safed a month it was clear that the Kabbalist group had found a new teacher and possibly their leader.

  To the public and to the large number of students who crowded to hear him lecture on the essence of God, Abulafia was impressive, for he taught that even the humblest Jew, by strict concentration and a longing for the infinity of God, could lift himself to levels of comprehension much higher and more complex than those which now engaged him; but it was with the select group of experts who met with him each dawn that Abulafia was radically effective, for to these trained philosophers the Spanish doctor expounded the inner mysteries of the Kabbala itself.

  Abulafia’s introductory beliefs, which he expressed in words of almost flowing purity, were twofold: “To live in harmony with himself a man must labor to unite the knots which bind his soul, and this is a personal matter between man and himself; then he must seek through contemplation an understanding of the Name of God, which is the timeless relationship between man and God.”

  Abulafia’s teaching on the apprehension of God was easy to understand: “You must sit in a quiet room with a sheet of clean white paper and a brush, and you must begin to write at random the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which is the language in which God wrote the Torah; and without associating these flowing, moving letters with specific words, you must permit them to come and go of their own will, nor must your mind direct your arm to direct your fingers to direct the brush to form this letter or that or to put it either here or there. And after several hours of this march of letters, if your concentration is of sufficient intensity, the pen will fall away and the paper will move from you, and you will be in the presence of endless thought in which the letters move of themselves, free and in space, and after a while your whole body will be seized by a trembling and your breath will come in short gasps and perhaps not at all, and there will be a bursting of your chest and you will feel that you are about to die—and then an enormous peace will come, for your soul will have untied the knots that bind it and the veil will have passed from your eyes; and after some time in this state of light you will see new letters of a radiance unknown before, and from them will appear the ineffable four, and you will see them, not on the paper nor on the wall nor in the room, but in the endless fathoms of your soul, the sacred Name of God, Y H W H.”

  That was the primary level of Abulafia’s teaching, available to any scholar who took the trouble to study one of the handwritten copies of the Zohar circulating in Safed. This was a book as mystical as its teachings, for great contention had arisen as to its authorship. Perhaps because of local pride, the men of Safed believed that it had been written by the immortal Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, who for thirteen years in the second century had hidden from the Roman soldiers of Emperor Hadrian. He had lived in a cave in the nearby village of Peqiin, where Elijah had visited him, bearing the secrets of the Kabbala, which Yohai had written down in the Zohar, the Splendor.

  But as Abulafia knew, the book, which consisted of a commentary on the Torah, had been composed around 1280 by an adventurous Spaniard who had written it in ancient Aramaic to lend it credence: it was a mélange of mystical formulae, probably gathered from many original sources, plus a compelling explanation of the way a poetic mind can sometimes hypnotize itself into an apprehension of the reality of God. In secrecy, in well-thumbed copies which passed at night, the Zohar had traveled from Granada in Spain to all parts of Europe, treasured as much by mystical Christians as by Jews.

  It was in the mountain village of Safed, however, that its power was to be most clearly demonstrated, for here had gathered, almost by accident, the half-dozen men who were to give the book its philosophical vitality, after which it would enjoy long life in Germany, Poland and Russia, forming the basis of a radical new interpretation of Judaism. It was a book which influenced all who touched it, and Dr. Abulafia, as the leader of the Safed group, expounded its first levels in lucid and seductive prose, but when he progressed to the second and third levels he became incoherent so far as logical exposition was concerned, but burning in his brilliance of metaphor and suggestion. Once, when a flood of incomprehensible words had tumbled from him like a stream issuing from the hills of Safed, he apologized, “To utter one word from the world of ultimate mystery is to break down the keystone of an arch so that no one knows from which side the next stone will fall.” He was asked by his pupils to put his words down in an orderly system, but he countered, “Where would a man start in a field that has no beginning, no end and no definition? But if you listen to me long enough you will gain a sense of what I am trying to say, and that is all that I know myself.” At other times he spoke with a clarity that was almost agonizing, and with an insight gained partly through rejection and personal tragedy, partly through an all-absorbing contemplation of God: “If seventy of us in this room study the Torah we find that it has seventy different faces to present to us, for each of us will see his own creation of beauty shining through the words of God. But I say to you that the Torah has not one face, nor seventy faces, but six hundred thousand faces, one for every Jew who was present when God gave Moses our Teacher the law; and if the cords that bind your soul are untied, you are free to find your own Torah among the six hundred thousand.”

  In the group of listeners influenced by Dr. Abulafia’s teaching was Rabbi Zaki, but he was affected in a different way. When the more abstruse explanations were reached he was apt to fall asleep, and occasionally he snored, for Kabbalistic flights of thought were quite beyond him; and one morning when the students were inclined to laugh at the dozing shoemaker, Rabbi Abulafia rebuked them, saying, “I think our sleeping fat man describes better than my words what I am trying to say. Rabbi Zaki has seen not the face of the Torah but through to the heart of the Torah itself, and there he found the one commandment of God upon which Torah and Talmud and Judaism rest: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ I happen to know that Rabbi Zaki spent last night sitting with the sick wife of Rabbi Paltiel and he requires to sleep, and there is no man in this room worthy to waken him.”

  The reason why Rabbi Zaki loved to attend Abulafia’s lectures, which he rarely understood, was that he could sit in the synagogue and think: A fine rabbi like Abulafia ought to have a wife. I can imagine no woman in Safed, nor in Salonica either, who would make him a better wife than my Sarah.

  So one day in 1549, after the Spanish doctor had finished a soaring exhortation, Zaki waited for the scholars to ask their last questions. Then, alone with Abulafia, he asked bluntly, “Doctor, why don’t you take my daughter Sarah as your wife?”

  Dr. Abulafia sat down. “Sarah?” he asked. “Do I know Sarah?”

  “You must have seen her. She appears often with my wife.”

  “Oh, Sarah! Yes.” There was silence.

  “T
he Talmud tells us that a rabbi must have a wife, and I assure you that Sarah is as fine a girl as her mother.”

  “I’m sure she is,” the Spaniard said.

  “And even if you cannot accept my daughter, Dr. Abulafia, you must find a wife somewhere, for many of us feel that your influence in Safed would be greater if …”

  “If I were married?”

  “Yes. For a rabbi it’s practically an obligation.”

  The handsome Spaniard sat looking at his hands for some minutes, then said quietly, “For your daughter I would be an old man. After all, I’m fifty-seven, till a hundred and twenty.” This was the Jewish way of stating an age, derived from the promise of God as given in the Torah: “Yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.”

  “I assure you Sarah would not worry about that.”

  Again there was a protracted silence which neither man knew how to break, but some heavy burden was on Abulafia’s heart, and when he looked at the simple, round face of his friend he was inspired to speak with this man as he had never spoken to another, and he suggested, “Shall we climb the hill to the old fort?” And the two bearded rabbis walked slowly through the narrow streets of Safed, those winding, wonderful streets that never ran in one direction more than a hundred feet, and after considerable climbing past seven synagogues they came to the broken rocks of the fort, and there Abulafia pointed to the distant hills and to the Sea of Galilee.

  “This is paradise, Zaki, and I agree with you that any man who lives here should have a wife.”

  “Doctor, believe me! Sarah would make you a perfect wife. She’s neat, and her mother has taught her how to cook.”

  “But in Spain …” Abulafia halted, afraid to conjure up revolting memories, except that the reassuring presence of Rabbi Zaki encouraged him to do so. Laughing nervously he said, “Zaki, you want to get rid of a daughter who clutters your house. And that’s a big problem. But I must get rid of the devil who rides my soul, and that’s impossible.”

  The little rabbi looked at the Kabbalist in amazement. “But it’s you who tells us each morning that we must untie the cords that bind our souls.”

  “I do,” Abulafia said. “And I cannot unbind my own.”

  The two rabbis looked at the sweeping beauty of upper Galilee; in the days when it was wooded, say, when the great rabbis of the third and fourth centuries were meeting in Tverya to compile the Talmud, it must have been even more inspiring. And Abulafia whispered, “In Spain I was married. To a Christian woman whom I adored. We were marvelously happy, but I was afraid to tell her I was a secret Jew. We had two sons. They didn’t know I was a Jew either. When the worst of the persecutions struck …” He hesitated. He rose and walked about for some time, looking down at Tubariyeh, where the soul of Judaism had been saved by a group of dedicated rabbis much like the ones who had now gathered in Safed on a somewhat similar mission. He wondered if any of those great old men like Rabbi Asher the Groats Maker had been burdened with a sin as terrible as his. Then he looked down, and Rabbi Zaki was waiting.

  “The best friend I had in the world,” Abulafia continued, “better even than my wife, was a secret Jew named Diego Ximeno. He introduced me to the Kabbala, and anything I’ve been able to accomplish …” He thought of Ximeno looking at him through the flames. “The Inquisition trapped him. Through what trick, I don’t know. They tore his joints apart, ripped out the lining of his throat, burned holes in his feet. And on the day they dragged him through the streets to the place where he was burned alive, he passed as close to me as …” His ancient sense of sin choked him.

  “Burned?” Zaki asked. “Alive?”

  “Yes. Well, that night I decided to flee Spain, because Diego Ximeno had shamed me with a courage I could never have. He was as close to me as you are, in his mortal moment, and he looked at me but refused to betray me. So I forged papers … ”

  Abulafia’s students, who envied his gray-haired grandeur and his mastery of language, would have been surprised could they have heard him in these next moments: he was a man at the apex of his power, unable either to form words or look at a friend. He sat with his head between his hands, mumbling, “In my ignorance … well, I wanted to spare my wife … it never occurred to me …” Syllables came, but no sense; then: “I reached Tunis … circumcised myself with a pair of old scissors … shouted from the window, ‘I’m a Jew! I’m a Jew!’ ”

  For a moment Abulafia collapsed completely. Then he re-established control and forced himself to say, “Years later a Spaniard coming through Alexandria fell sick and they brought him to me. He said, ‘Abulafia? Wasn’t there a renegade Jew from Avaro named Abulafia?’ And although I was safe I began to tremble. ‘This Abulafia ran off and left his wife and children to the Inquisition.’ I clutched the man’s arm to keep from fainting and he guessed who I was. Sick though he was he fled from me in horror. I ran after him, grabbed him and threw him to the street. A crowd gathered and he fought me off. He pointed at me …”

  Remembering that day in Egypt the tall rabbi broke into uncontrollable tears, and until fat Rabbi Zaki comforted him, could not speak: “My wife was burned alive. My eldest son was burned alive. My youngest son died in the torture. They did not even know the name of Jew.”

  Like the sick man in Alexandria, Rabbi Zaki drew away. In Salonica he had met many Jews from Spain and Portugal who had undergone the tortures of the Inquisition and he was no longer affected by the horror of any narration; but he had never met a man, no matter how degraded, who had saved his own neck at the expense of his wife and children; indeed, he could not imagine, judging from his own experience in leaving Podi, how any man could abandon his family. But in spite of his automatic disgust he did not feel qualified to pass judgment on a man like Abulafia, who had done so, and he refused to make any moral comment. He was therefore unprepared for the tall rabbi’s next question: “Zaki, am I entitled to marry your daughter?”

  To his own astonishment Zaki heard himself say, “No.”

  That day they said no more. But when Zaki reached home and saw his unlovely daughter Sarah, he experienced pangs of remorse. My God! he cried to himself. I had a chance to catch her a husband and I said no! He was thrown into a world of self-recrimination and remorse. As a rabbi he could not escape taking a harsh view of Dr. Abulafia’s behavior: to desert a wife and children and to be the cause of their being tortured to death; it was a graver sin than he had ever heard of, more serious perhaps than apostasy, for this was an abdication of all human principles. Yet the more he brooded upon the matter the more confused he became.

  His perplexity was heightened when Dr. Abulafia came to his home and in an act of moral despair asked Rachel and Zaki, “May I have your daughter Sarah in marriage?”

  “Yes!” shouted Rachel.

  “It is for him to say,” Abulafia replied, pointing to Zaki.

  “He says yes!” Rachel cried joyously.

  “No,” Zaki said.

  “Study your heart,” Abulafia pleaded and left. As he climbed sorrowfully up the narrow street he could hear Rachel screaming at her husband.

  For three days the shoemaker’s shop was a scene of hell. Sarah, who from the first had been bedazzled by the gracious rabbi from Spain, wept until her pasty face was an ugly red. She accused her father of destroying her life, Rachel was more to the point: “He’s insane. We should hire an Arab to stab him.”

  Zaki bowed his head before the storm he had aroused, but the moral problem facing him he did not avoid. Abulafia, by his abandonment of his Christian wife, had put himself outside the sphere of love, and even though rabbis were supposed to marry, the handsome Spaniard had been well advised not to do so; Zaki was sorry he had raised the question that day, and he was even sorrier that he had involved his daughter.

  It was Zaki’s habit, when faced by such conflict, to consult the sage whose writings he had found most helpful when guidance was required; so he went to the synagogue and took down his favorite book, turning its pages idly until he came upon th
e sentence in which Maimonides discussed the passage from the Talmud which summed up his philosophy: “The Torah speaks in the language of living men.” The law was given to men, not men to the law. In the abstract Abulafia’s behavior made him unfit to enter into a second marriage, but this was no longer a case of abstracts. Human beings were involved—a lonely rabbi who was doing God’s work, an unmarried woman—and common sense cried, “Let them marry.” Still unconvinced that he was doing right Zaki puffed up the hill to Abulafia’s medical office, stood in the doorway and announced in a halting voice, “The wedding can proceed.” He turned, went down the hill and told his daughter, “Rabbi Abulafia will marry you.”

  On the day of the wedding the Jews of Safed joked, “Since Zaki got rid of that one, he’ll have us rejoicing in the synagogue all night,” and after the wedding feast they went home to wait for the sound of their fat rabbi running through the alleys to summon them. But nothing happened. Midnight passed and one o’clock, and finally some men came to the shoemaker’s shop and called to him, “Rabbi Zaki! Are we not going to celebrate tonight?” And he would give no answer, so the men went back and reported, “The fat old fellow was in a corner praying. And he wouldn’t look up.” So others came and cried, “Rabbi Zaki, please call us to the synagogue!” But in this marriage he found no joy and could not respond, so a third time they called, “If we summon the crowd, will you also come?” And he was about to refuse even this when Rachel came from the kitchen. It had not occurred to her before that the people of Safed actually loved her ridiculous husband, and to hear them begging him to join them gave her a new view on their marriage: in his fumbling way Zaki had found good husbands for each of his daughters, and tonight she had to admit that the girls had not been prizes. His accomplishment was not a mean one, and she looked at him with respect. Awkwardly she placed her hand upon his shoulder and said, “They want to celebrate, husband. And I want to celebrate, too.”