Source

by James A. Michener

  While Rabbi Asher in Tverya taught this compassionate interpretation of the Torah, Yohanan and his son hiked back to Makor under the heavy burden of their portion of the law, and when Menahem reached home he sought consolation in hard work at the groats mill, where Jael came to talk to him, and he told his father, “I cannot go to Ptolemais”; so Yohanan went alone and after some days returned with two donkey-loads of purple glass and a small parcel of golden cubes. He was now ready to proceed with his masterwork.

  In an open-front shop not far from the new synagogue he installed six men whose job it was to take the slabs of colored limestone which had been quarried from the Galilean hills and to saw them into long strips somewhat less than half an inch square across the face. Then, with chisels, they took the lengths of stone and chopped off half-inch segments, so that at the end of the day each man had about his feet a little pile of colored cubes, and when the reds and blues and greens and browns had accumulated in sufficient quantity Yohanan began building the mosaic.

  In his fourteenth and fifteenth years Menahem helped his father place the cubes: on a bed of thin cement spread over the original floor Menahem would fill in the background spaces with ordinary gray-white cubes, while his father sketched the areas where color was required, and gradually the two would bring the large design down to a small focus where some bird or tree was indicated, and here with deft, stubby fingers Yohanan would construct from a bagful of mixed stones the gracious forms that made the pavement come alive. With a small wedged hammer he would strike off slivers of brown rock and with these would build a midsummer fern, dry and withered as it bent in the wind off the hills, and on the tip of the fern he would place a bee eater, perfectly constructed of pastel blue and yellow squares, with bits of the purple glass for wing tipping; slowly the father and son evoked in the synagogue of Makor the essence of their homeland: the sweeping hills and silvery streams, the crested hoopoe bird in mauve and white, his tail outlined in purple glass from Ptolemais. It never occurred to the two modest workmen that they were creating a masterpiece, but they did sense from time to time that they were composing a muted song to the goodness of the Galilee as they had come to know it.

  The day finally came when an olive tree was needed in one corner of the design, and Yohanan stepped aside to watch approvingly as Menahem constructed his first object: with brown and green stones, with a few touches of red and blue, he built a living tree on the floor of the synagogue and Yohanan realized that in his son he had found an artist. But with each stone the boy laid down he grew older; he was now sixteen, when Jewish youths could be betrothed, and in the mornings as he worked at the groats mill he would listen while Jael—now a striking child with flaxen hair—chattered about the wedding of such-and-such a couple. If things had been otherwise, a young fellow like Menahem with a good job and clean appearance would have been considered a catch; but no uncles with nieces of marriageable age came to discuss wedding contracts with Yohanan, and the last years of work on the mosaic were spent in deepening bitterness.

  Menahem became eighteen and nineteen and the net of the law closed more tightly about him. Now the boys his age were mostly married and some had children of their own, but no girl in the town would look at him, except young Jael, who was becoming a beautiful young woman. At fifteen she found it embarrassing to wait at the mill, but sometimes she intercepted Menahem as he walked from the mill to the synagogue, where the final stages of work were in progress. Occasionally the two would leave the town and stroll among the olive trees, and there one evening beside the ancient tree in whose cavernous interior Menahem had once slept he kissed the rabbi’s daughter for the first time. It was like the creation of a benevolent new world, the first experience of belonging he had known since childhood, and his love for Jael became the cardinal hope of his ugly life.

  The ensuing years were as painfully lovely as any that Menahem would know: he could not court Jael openly, but he could kiss her secretly; yet he knew that she was reaching the age when proper suitors must appear with attractive offers. Her marriage was delayed only because Rabbi Asher still had one older daughter to marry off before he got to Jael, and this occupied his attention when he was in Makor. Finally, in the year 350, the groats maker found an unlikely family with a son who had a slanted eye and no great prospects, and this fellow agreed to marry the rabbi’s older girl, so Menahem knew that Jael’s turn was next.

  One day as he worked in the mill filling sacks which the rabbi held open, he blurted out, “Rabbi Asher, can I marry Jael?”

  The little rabbi, now sixty-nine years old, snapped his head forward so that his beard interrupted the flow of the groats. “What did you ask?” he demanded.

  “Jael and I want to marry,” the boy said.

  Rabbi Asher let the mouth of the sack fall shut, ignoring the groats that Menahem spilled about his feet. Without speaking he left the mill and went to the synagogue, where he upbraided Yohanan. “What have you encouraged your son to do?” he asked.

  “Work hard. Save money. And leave this place.”

  “What did you tell him about my daughter?”

  “I never spoke to him …”

  “That’s not true!” the rabbi stormed.

  Getting no satisfaction from Yohanan, he ran home, where he found Jael working with her mother. Unawed by her father’s excitement the girl admitted that she loved Menahem. “He’s so much wiser than the others. He works hard, too.”

  Her words had to be respected, for they carried their own justification; in the five unsatisfactory marriages which Rabbi Asher had arranged for his older daughters he had not come close to locating a husband as promising as Menahem ben Yohanan. In a kind of desperation he had been forced to accept men who were lazy, or not observant Jews, or stupid, and now his youngest daughter had discovered for herself a husband who would be an adornment to any household: a young man capable of running the groats mill and likely to prove a good father. Without speaking further the little rabbi left Jael and went to the room where it was his custom to pray.

  Throwing himself on the floor he cried, “God, what must I do?” He rose, dancing here and there, bowing his body, running backward and forward, and again prostrating himself full length in the dust. He then prayed for nearly an hour, struggling with the concepts of God, of Torah and of law. Finally, a little man worn out from his wrestling with the deity, he lay humbly on the floor and accepted judgment. When he understood clearly what was required he rose, returned to where Jael waited and kissed her with a tenderness unusual even for him who had never feared to demonstrate his love for his children. Without speaking he left the house and went to the dye vats, where within a few minutes he arranged a contract for the marriage of his daughter Jael to Abraham, son of the dyer Hababli.

  With maximum speed the wedding was arranged. A canopy was erected at the rabbi’s house and jars of wine were purchased from the Greek who kept a shop near the old Christian church, but on the morning of the wedding Jael imprudently ran to the groats mill, where she stood before Menahem, sobbing, “Oh, Menahem. It was you I wanted.”

  Her father, having anticipated such rashness, quickly appeared to lead his daughter home, and Menahem spoke to her no more. That evening he watched from the edge of the crowd as Abraham, whom he had known as a graceless boy and a bully, stood with a gold cap on his head, waiting under the canopy as ashen-faced Jael was brought to him: he had not expected his father to acquire for him so lovely a bride. When the improper wedding was concluded, the prayers having been recited by Rabbi Asher himself, when the glass was broken and feet had trod the pieces, Menahem, watching in anguish, swore that he would no longer live in such pain.

  He waited until the bride had been carried off by the still befuddled groom, and the guests had drunk the wine and had departed in the night, then sought refuge in the olive grove where he hid in the darkness. When morning came he went soberly to the home of Rabbi Asher and asked to speak with him. The little guardian of the law sat in his alcove, his long beard c
overing his hands, and he asked, “What do you wish, Menahem?”

  “Am I truly sentenced to such a life?”

  Slowly Rabbi Asher took down a scroll of the Torah, unrolling it to a passage whose words he indicated with a thin forefinger: “A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord, even to his tenth generation.” He took away his hands and the scroll rewound itself, as if it had a life of its own.

  “I cannot accept it. I’ll go to Antioch.”

  To Rabbi Asher the threat was familiar: nearly a quarter of a century before in this room Yohanan had uttered those same words, but the stonecutter had found himself held fast by custom and had not gone to Antioch. Quietly the little rabbi explained, “If you did flee to some other city, you would find yourself in the arms of Jews, where the law abides.”

  “There’s no escape?”

  “None.”

  It was now that Menahem voluntarily reopened the subject which he had first heard discussed twelve years before under the grape vines of Tverya and which he had often subsequently pondered. With deliberate care he asked, “But if tonight I steal goods worth ten drachmas …”

  Eagerly Rabbi Asher replied, “We would arrest you, sell you as a slave, marry you to another slave, and after five years set you completely free.”

  “And I would be clean?”

  “Not you. But your children.” The old man paused. He was approaching his final years and was increasingly aware of his responsibilities as God’s Man, and something of the joy and love of the non-legal discussions in Tverya flooded his heart, and he confessed, “Menahem, you are my son, the keeper of my mill. Please, please steal the ten drachmas’ worth and win back your place within the law.” Leaving his parchments he ran with short steps to where Menahem stood, and throwing his arms about the young man, kissed him and cried, “At last you shall be a Jew of the congregation.”

  In this way Menahem finally submitted himself to the law. Departing from the rabbi he headed back to the synagogue to ask his father to arrange a theft and an arrest before witnesses so that he might be sold as a fictitious slave; but as he went to inform Yohanan of his submission he met coming up the hill into town a caravan of donkeys, architects, stone masons and real slaves led by the priest Eusebius, a tall, sober Spaniard who had served in Constantinople and who was now coming in his black robes and silver crucifix to build the Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene. He was a thin, solemn man of imposing stature, gray at the temples, lined in the face, and he entered Makor with the stately spirituality of one familiar with God. The first citizen he encountered was Menahem, visibly perplexed, and for a moment the two strangers stared at each other. Then, surprisingly, the Spaniard’s austere face broke into a warm, enveloping smile; the lines in his cheeks deepened and his somber eyes glowed with a promise of friendship. He bowed slightly to Menahem, who felt himself drawn to this impressive churchman who had come to modify the town.

  … THE TELL

  When John Cullinane lived in Chicago he attended Catholic mass occasionally and funerals rather often, but whenever he worked overseas he tried to attend local Catholic churches regularly in order to see their rich variation in architecture and ritual. For example, at the end of two months’ work at Makor he had prayed with the Carmelite monks on Mount Carmel, with the Salesians at Nazareth, with the Benedictines at the Galilean church of Loaves and Fishes, with the Syrian Maronites in Haifa, and with the Greek Catholics in Akko.

  He found the strange services exciting, not only from the spiritual point of view but also from the historical; there were some liturgies he could scarcely understand, while others seemed rather close to the Irish church he had known as a boy, but common to all was evidence of Catholicism’s ability to accommodate itself to many cultures, relying upon a central core of authority to insure the continuity. The more Cullinane saw of his ancient church in the Holy Land the more impressed he became with its vitality, for although the state of Israel was predominantly Jewish, Cullinane discovered everywhere this vigorous Catholic continuum based upon Arab Christians who, sometimes against formidable tyranny from either Rome or Constantinople, had retained their special rites since the early centuries.

  By no means had Cullinane visited all the types of Catholic church available in the Galilee; he hoped especially to see those mysterious branches which had broken off from Rome: the Greek Orthodox in Kefar Nahum, the Russian Orthodox in Tiberias. And he was interested in the Monophysite groups that had rejected both Rome and Constantinople: the Abyssinians, the Armenian Gregorians, the Egyptian Copts. But the nature of his work halted Sunday excursions, for at Friday noon each week all digging at Makor stopped, and none of course was permitted on Saturday, which was the Jewish Shabbat. Then on Sunday digging resumed, and since this was the first workday of the week, he felt that he must be present. He was thus kept from exploring further into the local life of his own church, and although this irritated him somewhat as an archaeologist, he felt no loss as a worshiper, for had he been at home with a free American-style Sunday he would rarely have gone to the local cathedral.

  What he did do was what he had done wherever he had been engaged in excavations: each Friday afternoon he climbed into his jeep, usually alone, and drove to some nearby village to participate in the Jewish sunset services which welcomed Shabbat. There he would mingle with the crowd, put an embroidered yarmulke on the back of his head, and try to penetrate the mystery of the ancient religion into which his workmen were digging. He did not do this because he was inclined toward the Jewish interpretation of life—although he found it congenial—but rather because as a man who would spend ten years excavating at Makor it behooved him to know as much as he could about the civilization that he was exhuming.

  He had behaved in this way when excavating in Egypt, where he had been a faithful worshiper in the Friday mosques, and when digging in Arizona, rising before dawn to participate in the evangelical rites practiced by the Mesa people. If in the future he were called to dig in India he would there become a sympathetic Hindu, and in Japan a Buddhist. His instinct in this matter was good: a man who would later presume to write about the successive layers of life in Makor required to know as much as possible about all aspects of that life, and he had already spent a dozen years studying the languages, ceramics, metal ware and numismatics of the Holy Land, none of which was so instructive as the religion.

  So as the summer passed, John Cullinane became less a Catholic and more a Jew, immersing himself in the weekly ritual that had kept the Jews together through dispersions that would have destroyed a lesser people. In fact, he grew to love the coming of Friday sunset, when Jewish men, freshly washed and dressed, walked like kings to their synagogues to go through the rites of welcoming Queen Shabbat. More sacred than any other day of the Hebrew calendar was this Shabbat, when the creation of the world and God’s compact with the Jews were remembered, and it occurred once each week, more sacred perhaps than Easter to a Christian or Ramadan to a Muslim. Inside the synagogue Cullinane waited with a kind of joy for the arrival of that moment in the ceremony when the Jews began to sing the powerful hymn composed many centuries ago in Zefat. The cantor would be chanting some quite ordinary passage whose words Cullinane could not understand, and then of a sudden the man would throw back his head and utter the joyous cry:

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

  The presence of Shabbat let us receive.”

  Nine long verses followed, but after each the cry of joy would be repeated, with all the congregation joining, and Cullinane memorized the words of both the cry and the verses, singing them under his breath as the cantor intoned the mystical words which reported the love of the Jews for this sacred day:

  “Come, let us go to greet Shabbat,

  For it is a wellspring of blessing.

  From the beginning it was ordained,

  Last in production, first in thought.

  And they that spoil thee shall be a spoil,

  And all that would swallow thee shall
be far away.

  Thy God shall rejoice over thee

  As a bridegroom rejoiceth over his bride.”

  One aspect of the Shabbat hymn Cullinane could not get into focus. At the beginning of his stay he rarely went to the same synagogue twice, for he wanted to savor the full range of Jewish custom, and just as Protestants assumed that there was only one Catholic church, forgetting the rich variation that marked the east where the religion was born, so he as a Catholic had supposed that there was but one Judaism; yet here in the land where that religion was also born he had an opportunity to see the great diversity, for in six different synagogues the great Shabbat hymn would be sung in six wildly different ways: as a German march, a desert wail, a Polish burial lament, a Russian huzza, a modern syncopated melody and an ancient oriental chant. Part of the pleasure of the Shabbat service, Cullinane found, lay in trying to guess what tune would be used for the central song.