The Source

by James A. Michener

  “These things come up from time to time.”

  “But this time it’s serious?”

  “Could be, but don’t tell anyone I said so.”

  “Your first constituent is in my office. Woman by the name of Zipporah Zederbaum.”

  At the mention of the name Eliav stopped … cold … refused to move. “No, Cullinane. It would be most improper for me to see her. Not at this point.”

  “You won’t talk to her?”

  “Look! I know more about her problem than she does. I sympathize. But it would be highly improper for me to speak with her now when I may have to judge her case later.”

  “But goddamn it, Ilan. This girl …”

  “John!” the Jew cried with great force. “You get in there and give her what consolation you can. And don’t meddle in things that don’t concern you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cullinane apologized. He watched as his friend stomped off; then he returned to the waiting woman. “I’ll speak to Dr. Eliav later,” he fumbled.

  “He refused to seeing me, eh?” Zipporah asked.

  “Yes, and I understand why.”

  “No one seeing me,” she said. “Nothing I can do.”

  “There’s no way for you to get married in Israel?”

  “None. Here we are having only rabbi marriage, and if they refuse …”

  “Somewhere I heard that if the rabbis refused, people fly to Cyprus.”

  “Who can flying to Cyprus? The money! And if we go Cyprus … our children bastards. When they growing up they not marry neither.”

  “I don’t believe it. You honestly mean that there’s no way you … Hell, you haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “There is no way, Dr. Cullinane.”

  “Then I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d get my things together and I’d move in with Yehiam Efrati … now. And if you need help packing, I’ll come along.”

  The powerful girl, so hard-working, so robustly attractive, obviously longed for a husband, but she was forced to say, “Unless we married right, what the purpose?”

  At lunch Cullinane sought out Eliav, intending to raise hell, but whatever castigations he had in mind were quickly forestalled: “John, please don’t lecture me in this case. Because one of the reasons why I might be taken into the cabinet is to handle just such complexities.”

  “Who said complexities? Inanities.”

  “As you wish, but this is the law of Israel, and ninety-nine percent of our laws are humane.”

  “But this poor girl … marriageable age …”

  “I know.”

  “Didn’t you sympathize with the brother-in-law’s letter?”

  Ilan Eliav took a deep breath, then said slowly, “No, because I’m working to establish that Levi Zederbaum”—Cullinane was impressed by Eliav’s knowledge of the case—“wrote his letter in the way he did so the local Rumanian censors wouldn’t turn him over to the Russian authorities.”

  “Suppose you do prove duress?”

  “Zipporah can marry.”

  “If you fail?”

  “She can’t.”

  “But, my God …”

  “Shut up!” Eliav cried, and in distress he left the tell and stalked back to the dig, but apparently he was ashamed of his rudeness, for later he returned and said, “These are difficult days.” He thrust forward a sheaf of papers. “You think I’m indifferent to Zipporah’s case. Look at these.” And Cullinane studied the documents that Eliav would face if he took the cabinet position:

  Case One: Trudl Ginzberg is a Gentile German woman from the city of Gretz, along the Rhine. Brought up a Lutheran, she fell in love with Hyman Ginzberg and against her family’s predictions of disaster married him. With the coming of the Nazis she suffered grievous persecution. Inspired by some inexplicable love of humanity she volunteered to sew the Star of David on her own clothes, fought to protect her children from Storm Troopers and was kicked in the right eye. Now partially blind. By heroic efforts she saved her children and for four years hid her husband in a cellar, providing him and her family with food by working in a factory kitchen. After the war, when she could no longer believe in God, she scraped together money which enabled her to bring Hyman Ginzberg and their three children to Israel, where the rabbis proclaimed, “Trudl Ginzberg is a Gentile. Worse, she is an atheist, and we cannot permit her conversion. Therefore, neither she nor her children can be Jews.” No effort on her part, neither her offer to convert nor her willingness to live according to Jewish law, has succeeded in changing the rabbis’ minds. She is not a Jew and her children cannot be Jews, either. Can you propose a solution the rabbis would accept?

  Case Two: The minute you see Esther Banarjee and Jaacov Jaacov you will know them to be Indian. They come from Cochin and have dark skin, limpid eyes and slim bodies. But they are also Jews. In the fifteenth century their ancestors fled from Spain to Portugal to Syria to Turkey and thence to the coast of India, where they intermarried with dark-skinned natives. In 1957 when Esther and Jaacov emigrated to Israel they were informed by the rabbis that because of some technical difficulty they could not be Jews. Their problem is this: they want to marry but since they are not Jews they cannot do so in Israel. If they were Christians, no trouble. They could marry in one of our Christian churches; but they are not Christians nor do they want to be so. They want to be Jews. In India their ancestors were Jews for more than four hundred years, sharing in the trials and triumphs of our people, but in Israel, because they are unable to provide written records reaching back four generations, they cannot be Jews. What to do?

  Case Three: Leon Berkes is the son of an orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn. He made a lot of money running a string of kosher hotels in the Catskills, and when the state of Israel was proclaimed, felt an inner compulsion to join us, but his business was prospering and required his supervision, so he lingered in America, secretly ashamed of himself and muttering to his friends, “If I had any guts I’d be over there helping the real Jews.” On his sixtieth birthday he abruptly turned his hotels over to his two sons-in-law, “fine Jewish boys,” he called them, and came to Israel to invest four million dollars in the Jewish state. Naturally he decided upon a hotel, in Akko, and as an observant Jew announced that it would be kosher. For nearly forty years he had been operating such places and he respected the ancient dietary laws of the Torah, but when he approached the Israeli rabbinate for a certificate he encountered many original problems. The Talmud stated that one could work on Shabbat only in case of dire need, which included the serving of food; but waiters were forbidden to write out meal checks, for that was not essential. Berkes complained, “It means more work, but if it’s the law, okay.” Then the rabbis warned, “All religious holidays to be strictly observed,” and Berkes assured them that in America he had done so. On holidays he did not allow his hotel band to play music, but the rabbis said, “We think it would be more respectful if you kept your band silent for nine days before the Ninth of Ab.” Berkes said, “It’s terribly expensive, but if that’s Jewish, okay.” Then the rabbis pointed out that the Torah said explicitly, “Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the Sabbath day,” and Berkes said, “I never have a fire,” but they explained that in recent years this passage had been construed to mean that no electrical switch, which might accidentally throw a spark, could be operated. They demanded that he stop all elevators throughout the hotel from Friday night through Saturday. He said, “People are going to grumble, but if it’s the law, okay.” But when the rabbis insisted that the automatic doors leading from the dining room to the kitchen must also remain inoperative lest the mechanism accidentally produce a spark, Berkes said, “This is too much.” The rabbis warned, “If one door moves, we’ll take back your certificate.” So Berkes said, “You’re making it too complicated to be a Jew,” and returned to America. The question: Can we get this good man back to Israel?

  “You’re taking everybody’s problems on your shoulders,” Cullinane said with respect.

>   “And the most complicated is my own.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember the day we went to the Vodzher Rebbe’s … with Zodman?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the attendant asked ‘Cohen or Levi’? And we all answered ‘Israel’?”

  “I still remember the Cohens putting the shawls over their heads.”

  “And I said I’d explain later.”

  “You did. Cohens are priests. Levis are temple attendants. Israels are the common herd.”

  “Every Jew is automatically one of these three, tracing back in unbroken lines to the days of the Torah. All Jews named Cohen, Katz, Kaplan, Kaganovsky … you can guess the others … they’re all priests who even today enjoy certain privileges. Now your Levys, Levins, Lewisohns, Loewes and the rest … they’re all Levis, and they also have a few privileges.”

  “But you poor Israels …” Cullinane began.

  “I’m not an Israel,” Eliav said.

  “At the Vodzher Rebbe’s you said you were.”

  “I did, because I don’t take this Mickey Mouse …” He stopped. “That is, my wife … I never told you about Ilana, did I? She died over there.”

  “She what?”

  Eliav pressed the warm pipe against his chin and tried several times to speak. Finally in an offhand way he said, “I was married to a girl who could have served as the flag of Israel. She was Israel. She had a very special quality. She was shot. Right over there. Right … there.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Cullinane said. He remembered that first night when he and Tabari had seen Eliav kneeling on the tell and he was now inclined to say nothing, but intuitively he knew that silence was not wanted. “So we’ve been digging ghosts?”

  “That we have,” Eliav agreed. “And one of the ghosts has come home to roost … in a particularly mean way.”

  “How?”

  “I’m a Cohen … really. I come from a wonderful line of holy men in the city of Gretz, along the Rhine. One thing about a Cohen, he’s never permitted to marry a woman who’s been divorced …”

  “How’s that?”

  “Under Israeli law a Cohen is forbidden to marry a divorced woman. It just can’t be done.”

  “But you and Vered are engaged.”

  “That’s right. And if we want to get married we have to fly to Cyprus, get some English clergyman to marry us according to his law, then fly back to Israel and live in local sin.”

  Cullinane started to laugh. “We’ve been trying to dig up ancient history and all the time we’ve been living in it.”

  “You’re wrong,” Eliav protested. “You’ve been digging in Judaism but you haven’t tried to understand it. John, we’re a special people with special laws. Why do you suppose I asked you to read Deuteronomy five times? Damn it, you stupid Irishman! I’m not a Catholic. I’m not a Baptist. I’m a Jew, and I come from a most ancient people with most ancient laws.”

  “I’m beginning to realize that,” Cullinane apologized. “But this Cohen business …”

  “You saw Leviticus. The priests ‘shall not take a wife that is a whore, or profane; neither shall they take a woman put away from her husband …’ There it is. And there’s no way we can get married in Israel.”

  “Wait a minute! Vered’s a widow.”

  “More important, she’s a divorcee.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I knew her husband well. We fought together at many places … a handsome, dashing young lady-killer. Vered was captivated by him and on the day we broke the siege of Jerusalem she married him. But when peace came he couldn’t seem to fit in. Never understood that things had changed, so they got divorced. Then, with the Sinai campaign in 1956, came his second chance. You wouldn’t believe what he accomplished with a column of armored cars, and I suppose God was gracious, for he died in battle.” He paused to remember a gallant, undisciplined friend. “Bar-El was one of the few heroes I’ve known. An authentic hero.”

  “But if Vered’s a widow …”

  “The critical thing is she was once divorced. If I intended staying on this dig, that would be one thing. We’d fly to Cyprus, get married there, and if later on the rabbis judged our kids to be bastards, when the time came for them to marry they’d fly to Cyprus too. But I can’t join the cabinet and flout Jewish law.”

  “You’d give up Vered for a cabinet job?” Cullinane asked in astonishment. And the explosive form of his question satisfied Eliav that the romantic Irishman would face any problems to marry her. His uncle, who was a Catholic priest, his father, who still spouted nonsense, his sister, his friends could all go straight to hell if he wanted to marry Mrs. Bar-El, which he did.

  The honest shock of Cullinane’s reaction forced Eliav to reply carefully. He said, “For an Irishman, with an Irishman’s secure history, the question is the way you phrased it. But I’m a Jew, and my history is much different. We were two thousand years without a country, John. I and a few … really, we were a handful … my wife … Vered’s husband … and a marvelous Sephardi named Bagdadi, whom I think of very much these days …” He stopped, and after a long moment said, “We built a state to which the Jews of the world can repair for the next thousand years. Today that state faces critical decisions concerning its basic structure, and Teddy Reich’s convinced me that I’m needed …”

  “Where?”

  “In the most critical areas. The question you just asked would make sense if you posed it to an Irishman. But the question to ask me as a Jew is this: Would you, in conformance to Jewish law, surrender Vered Bar-El to help preserve the concept of Israel?”

  “Would you?”

  Eliav evaded the question: “The night my wife was killed on this tell our detachment was on its way to Akko. Vered and her man took care of me, because I was pretty much out of my mind. We stormed into Akko, which Tabari held with his Arabs, and about thirty of us Jews went up against … well, God knows how many Arabs. And somehow I got far ahead of the line and I would surely have been killed, except that this little seventeen-year-old girl came blazing up with a submachine gun. She cleared the street and led me back as if I were her idiot child. I can feel her hand in mine now.”

  “Why didn’t you marry her?”

  “She’s a lot more primitive than you think. She was fascinated by the gallantry of Bar-El. When he was gone there was the Cohen business. Who wants to flee to Cyprus? And I was never the dashing buccaneer type.”

  The two archaeologists stood silent for a moment, looking at the minarets of Akko, where Vered Bar-El had fought her way to save Eliav, and finally the Irishman said, “You’ve taught me a certain humility this afternoon. I withdraw my question.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But I pick up yours. Do you intend to marry Vered or to serve Israel?” There was no reply, and after a while Cullinane added, “Because I’m giving notice right now, Eliav. You marry that girl … before I leave for America … or I’m taking her with me. And so help me God, that’s it.”

  “Vered fought for this country,” Eliav said quietly. “She’d never leave Israel. She’d never marry a non-Jew,” and by their separate paths the two men left the tell.

  Next morning the first of two disruptive visitors arrived, Professor Thomas Brooks, traveling through the Holy Land on one of his regular photographic trips, and since he was an influential board member at the Biblical Museum, Cullinane was obligated to care for him while he was in the Galilee. This was not an unpleasant task, for Professor Brooks was an amiable man, teacher of church history in a small Protestant college in Davenport, Iowa, who made additional income by lecturing through the west on “Old Testament Times” and “Scenes from the Life of Christ.” He illustrated his lectures with color slides, which, accompanied by his careful explanations, served better than motion pictures. He was a good scholar, tried to keep au courant with the latest archaeological research, and imparted to his audiences a vivid sense of that tiny area of the world from which the great religions had sprung.
He was not allowed, of course, to lecture in Catholic churches, but he suspected that when his screenings were held in public halls rather than Protestant churches many Catholics attended, and he took pains to include in his slides scenes that would have special interest for them.

  He was in his late fifties, a fleshy man to whom life had been good, and he traveled with his wife, some years younger than himself, who managed the cameras and the checkbooks. They were a congenial pair, as beloved in the Holy Land as they were back home, and often they had helped rich widows write wills that bequeathed inheritances to the Biblical Museum for its excavations. They were honest people, the Brookses, and they believed in a simple, honest God; but as they finished their photographing tour in 1964 they were disturbed, and they conveyed their apprehension to Cullinane.

  “John, I can’t approve what’s been going on here in Palestine,” Brooks said. As an older man, and as a member of the board that employed Cullinane, he always referred to the director as John, while as a fundamentalist he continued to refer to the new state of Israel as Palestine. “I don’t like it at all.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Who wants to see a great gaping ditch running smack down the middle of the Holy Land?”

  “They’ve got to have water,” Cullinane said.

  “Granted, but Grace and I reflected many times that all these factories … these macadamed roads. Really, they destroy the feeling we used to get from this land.”

  “They do, John,” Mrs. Brooks agreed. “I remember when we first came here … the British administered it then, and it looked just as it must have in Bible times.”

  “We took some of our greatest photographs in those happy days,” Brooks sighed. “I only wish Kodak had had a better color film in those years. The reds have faded from our best slides and we can’t use them any more.”

  “But today,” Mrs. Brooks continued, “you can hardly take a photograph anywhere that tells an audience clearly that you’re in the Holy Land. Now it’s all towns and building developments.”