“It’s a street, hideously narrow, where Jews in Germany are forced to live,” Eliezer explained. “And soon we shall all be living there.”
“When we do, may we have the courage of Diego Ximeno,” Dr. Abulafia prayed, and the feud ended.
It would be incorrect to claim that in this critical debate the town itself had remained neutral. Safed was a place of singular beauty; from the edge of the fort crumbling on the hill down to the open fields that lay beyond the synagogue, sixteen narrow streets hung one below the other, connected by alleys which cut through at odd and inconsistent angles. In many places the streets were so narrow, scarcely three feet wide, that above them the houses joined and one walked as in a tunnel; there was an essential mystery about the place. Its location was such that frequently a cloud would drift into town and hang capriciously over some houses and not over others, and a neighbor could stand at his door and see the home of his friend mysteriously disappear—then reappear in sunlight as the cloud passed. The air of Safed was different, too—a clear, penetrating air that seemed to affect the lungs, causing one to breathe deeply with a kind of exhilaration—and through this clear air one could see unusual distances with almost ghostlike penetration. In short, Safed was a town which enhanced the mystical interpretation of life, and it is quite possible that had the Kabbalists chosen some other spot in Galilee, their success might have been limited.
It was Elisheba who first noticed this partiality of Safed. One day she said to her father, “The town fights against you.” He laughed grimly, but she added, “Here I could almost become a mystic. The alleys are just as narrow as the Judenstrasse we left in Gretz. Why, then, do they seem so lovely?”
“Because here there is no iron gate keeping you from the fields,” he replied matter-of-factly.
Elisheba was now twenty and resembled her mother more than ever; she was tall and had her father’s dignity of movement but her mother’s love of children and fantasy. She had become the object of speculation, and even Spanish-speaking Jews began attending the German synagogue to see if Elisheba was in attendance. Many young men thought of marriage with the rabbi’s daughter, and some came to Zaki’s shop to discuss the matter with him. “Ask her father,” the fat rabbi told them.
“I’m afraid of Rabbi Eliezer,” they explained.
“I’ll speak to him if your parents ask me,” Zaki said. But to one young man, shorter even than himself, Zaki said, “Forget Elisheba. She’s tall and you’re short, and men and women who marry should fit together in all ways.” He arranged a different marriage for this suitor, and later the man said that the fit was good.
Twice Rabbi Zaki went to Eliezer to speak on behalf of suitors, but the German Jew, reluctant to lose his memory of Leah, told him, “Elisheba can wait a little longer. Besides, I like to watch her as she brings the books.”
In the next years Rabbi Zaki was struck by two personal tragedies which diminished his ebullience; the only consolation he found was in the fact that the first took place before the second, sparing his wife additional sorrow. In early 1555 Rachel fell ill. Dr. Abulafia was called and could do nothing for his mother-in-law; and some men claimed, “She’s poisoning herself with her own bile.” For some time she had gone back to heckling her husband as to why he didn’t build a big synagogue of his own plus a yeshiva in which to teach.
“I have nothing to teach,” he replied.
“You would have if you weren’t so fat,” she said irrationally. In bitterness and unfulfillment she approached her death, for the three marriages of her daughters were not working out well, but on her last morning she whispered, “Husband, I’d like a little glass of wine,” and for a while as he sat by her bed she relaxed her animosity and said, “We should have stayed in Salonica. But I agree that Safed is better than running half-naked through the streets of Podi. It was better this way … since you insisted on being so fat.” And with her death Zaki became lost in tragedy and for half a year was little seen in Safed.
At the end of 1555 his mind was taken from his loss by the arrival of a refugee from the Jewish community in Ancona, the Italian seaport north of Podi, and this man convened a meeting in the largest synagogue to report on the disaster that had befallen his city. “For long years,” he said, “we Jews who fled from Spain lived happily in Ancona and even had grandchildren born on Italian soil. I had a weaver’s shop.” He hesitated as if recalling some insupportable sorrow, then said softly, “Of eighteen who lived on my street, only I escaped.”
“What happened?” Rabbi Zaki asked.
“Four Popes in a row had confirmed our right to live in Ancona, even though we had been forcibly baptized when passing through Portugal. But this year came a Pope who announced that the Church must now solve the Jewish problem once and for all. We believe his nephew wrote out the new rules, but he issued them.”
“Are they much different from before?” Zaki asked.
The refugee turned to study the fat rabbi and said, “Aren’t you Zaki, who fled Podi?”
“Yes.”
“The new rules are different. First, no city in the world may have more than one synagogue, and if a city does, the others are to be torn down at once. Second, every Jew in the world must wear a green hat. Men and women. Sleeping and waking. Inspectors may break into the home at any moment to see that Jews are wearing their green hats. Third, all Jews in a town must live on one street.”
“For years we did that in Germany,” Rabbi Eliezer said. His prophecy was coming true.
“Fourth, no Jew may own property. If he now owns land he must sell it within four months for whatever the Christians wish to offer. Fifth, no Jew may engage in any kind of commerce, save the resale of old clothes.” He droned on through additional proscriptions: no Christian may work for a Jew; no Jew may apply medicine to a Christian; no Jew may work on a Christian holiday; nowhere at any time, not even in synagogue, may any Jew be addressed with a title like Messer or Rabbi or Master.
Rabbi Zaki, listening to the recital, tried to find what hope he could. “These are simply the old laws made harsher,” he said.
“But now we have two new ones,” the man from Ancona said, “and it was from these I fled. Thirteenth, all previous laws which granted Jews any kind of protection are abolished, and the fathers of each town are invited to impose any additional restrictions they desire. Fourteenth,” and his voice dropped to a whisper, “if the Jew protests at any point he is to be punished physically, with great severity.”
In the silence practical-minded Yom Tov ben Gaddiel asked, “But when the laws were announced did anything happen?”
“No,” the Ancona man said, and throughout the synagogue the Safed rabbis could be heard breathing with relief. “But on my last night in the city a Christian who owed me much money came quietly to my house and said, ‘Simon ben Judah, you’ve been a good friend. Here’s half the money I owe you. Flee the city this hour because at dawn there will be many arrests.’ I asked, ‘What for?’ And he shrugged his shoulders: ‘After all, you are heretics.’ And as I hid on the hill behind Ancona I saw, toward four in the morning, torches moving out through all the streets where Jews lived.”
“So what happened?” Rabbi Yom Tov asked.
“I don’t know. I escaped to Podi.”
“Were Jews arrested there?” Zaki asked, his big face wet with perspiration.
“No. Your duke said that in Podi the new laws did not apply and in this defiance he was supported by his brother, the cardinal. Agitated messengers came from both Ancona and Rome to argue with the brothers, but they stood firm and allowed no arrests. Nevertheless, I grew frightened and took passage on a Turkish ship.”
“Tell me,” Zaki asked. “Jacopo ben Shlomo and his wife Sarah, were they well?”
“They were well,” the Ancona man reported. “They still have their red house by the fish market.”
That night Rabbi Zaki returned to his lonely shoemaker shop and prayed, but his lips moved heavily, for he could see his Jews of Podi stan
ding on the wharf that day so long ago, with signs of fire on their foreheads. And then, in the summer of 1556, Safed received, along with a shipment of wool, another of the terrifying broadsheets which cities in Europe found morbid pleasure in circulating during the middle years of the century. The new printing press in Podi had produced this one, which, with harrowing woodblock prints providing details, told the world that in 1555 and 1556 the Holy Inquisition had saved Podi by burning alive twenty-nine Jews, and the name, the description, the heresy of each was reported in detail, with twenty-nine woodcuts showing how each Jew had reacted to the fire.
Fat Jacopo, who had run in the last race with Zaki, had died praying. Thin Nethaneel had begged for mercy. And Sarah, the wife of Jacopo, had died with her hair a living torch. In horror Rabbi Zaki read the predicted history of his congregation; it was as if the Inquisition had reached across the Mediterranean, calling him back to the punishment he had escaped by flight.
It was then that Rabbi Zaki, the amusing rotund man, fell into that sense of guilt which characterized his last years. The two blows coming together affected him profoundly, for he felt that if he had been a better husband Rachel might not have grown so bitter; and in fleeing Podi he had abandoned his congregation to the stake, just as surely as Dr. Abulafia had abandoned his family to its torture. For some months he was a man partly deranged by self-recrimination, and in neither Torah nor Talmud could he find consolation. He tried sharing his sorrow with Rabbi Eliezer, who had done the same in fleeing Gretz, but the austere German was so preoccupied with the law that he had no time to offer comfort, nor did the law itself, which stated what a man must do when mourning for the dead but not what to do when those dead were hung about his neck, burning in perpetual fire, so that the smoke blurred his vision. In his extremity he found aid in an unexpected quarter. Dr. Abulafia came to him in the shoemaker shop and said, “Zaki, father-in-law and friend, the time has come in your perplexity for you to study the Kabbala,” and the devout Spaniard explained in simple terms certain concepts of the mystical world that learned Jews had been perfecting in recent years. “The mystic perceives with his heart what his mind knows to be true … but cannot prove,” Abulafia began. “And we know that prior to creation God must have been immanent in all things. Without God there could be nothing. But if a merciful God is all things and is responsible for all things, how can we experience events like the burning of the Jews of Podi? Because just before God created the world, He voluntarily withdrew to make space for the physical world we see. But to remind us of His presence He left behind the ten vessels of which you have often heard me speak. And into these ten vessels He poured His divine light so that His presence might be amongst us. But after the first three vessels had caught their portion of the light and saved it for us, the lower seven were struck with such a flood of splendor that they could not retain it, and the vessels were shattered. Thus came confusion and tragedy into the world. Today you and I stand among the shattered vessels and the memory of our betrayals in Podi and Avaro. Sin is upon us and it becomes our responsibility, through dedication, prayer and extra-human effort, to reconstruct these shattered vessels, so that the light of God can exist in its intended receptacles. Zaki, you must co-operate with all men of goodness in their task of gathering together the shattered pieces and reconstructing the vessels.”
At last Rabbi Zaki understood what his handsome son-in-law had been teaching since his arrival in Safed. There was an evil in the world which God was powerless to combat without the help of men; a mystical partnership was being offered, stunning in concept and in its power to elicit the best in life. Like thousands of other Jews who in these years were piercing the mysteries of Zohar, Zaki discovered that he was not the kind of man to find spiritual solace through routine memorizing of Talmud or a sterile codification of law. He could find that mystical solace only through the Kabbala.
“What must I do to help rebuild the broken vessels?” Zaki asked in a spiritual daze.
“No man can tell you,” Abulafia replied. “Contemplate and pray, and He will warn you when He needs you.”
So Rabbi Zaki started to concentrate, but he found it difficult; usually he fell asleep. Nor was he the kind of man to whom God spoke, so he went back to the simple things he could do best: he prayed for the Jews of Podi, and then suddenly the world opened up for him in full mystical radiance. It began one day in November when the dignitaries of Safed came to him and blunt Rabbi Yom Tov said, “Zaki, it’s not proper for you to remain unmarried.” Zaki replied that he was then fifty-seven years old till a hundred and twenty and that his life with Rachel … “That’s no excuse,” Yom Tov reasoned. “When God finished creating man, what was the first great commandment God gave him?”
Yom Tov waited, then recited in powerful voice, “ ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply …’ ”
At the first two meetings Zaki refused to heed his peers, but at the third meeting the force of God’s original commandment struck him when Yom Tov said, “For His first words to the human race God could have chosen any of His commandments, but He chose the simplest of all. A man must find a woman, they must enjoy themselves in each other, and they must multiply. God later said many other things to his stiff-necked Jews, and we rebelled against Him at almost every point, but on this one principle there was agreement.”
Another rabbi said, “So, Zaki, you must find a wife.”
And the little plump man surrendered: “I will look among the widows of Safed.”
Then to his shop came Rabbi Eliezer, saying, “Zaki, my daughter Elisheba wants to marry with you.”
It was like a thunderbolt that struck but one house in a village, and that house was Zaki’s. “But I’m fifty-seven till a hundred and twenty and she’s twenty-three.”
“How do you know her age?”
“Because from the day she arrived in Safed I have followed her in all she’s done.”
“Then why are you surprised?” the German rabbi asked.
“But a dozen young men have sat in that chair and asked me, ‘Speak to Rabbi Eliezer that I may have his daughter.’ You know that yourself—I’ve been to see you several times.”
“And why do you suppose Elisheba has always asked me to say no?”
Rabbi Zaki wanted to believe what his ears were hearing, but he was afraid. Before him he saw not Rabbi Eliezer, but his own complaining daughter Sarah, who never bothered to mask her disenchantment with her courtly Spaniard, who seemed so attractive to the other women of Safed. Zaki guessed shrewdly that his daughter’s disappointment stemmed from the age-old problem which was discussed with disarming frankness in the Talmud: “The marital duty enjoined upon husbands by the Torah is as follows: every day for those that are unemployed, twice a week for laborers, once a week for donkey-drivers who lead caravans for short distances, once every thirty days for camel-drivers who lead caravans for longer distances, and once every six months for sailors, but disciples of the sages who study the Torah may stay away from their wives for thirty days.” Rabbi Zaki thought: Dr. Abulafia is an elderly man, sixty-six till a hundred and twenty, and I am an old man, too, and if he has run into trouble, why may not the same happen to me?
With compelling simplicity the fat rabbi confessed, “Rabbi Eliezer, I’m afraid to marry your daughter.”
Compassionately the German replied, “I’m sure my daughter knows your fears, but she holds that in these matters God directs us. She’s willing to take the risk. She wants to marry you.”
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.
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