Source

by James A. Michener

  The first tree he had seen as Major Cullinane, flying his bomber into the Atsugi air base in Japan at the end of World War II. One March morning at an inn where he had taken a charming Japanese girl he had lain in his bed after a session of exquisite love-making and had idly spotted a cherry tree which an early warm breeze had teased into sending forth the first flowers of spring. It had been a different kind of tree from those he had known in America: a huge, gnarled trunk several feet across and apparently dead, except that from it sprang one splendid branch which was vitally alive and about to be covered with flowers.

  “Why don’t they cut the old tree down?” he had asked the girl.

  “Cut?” she had echoed in disbelief. “I bring you here … the best tree in Japan … very famous.” And with gestures she had explained that the Japanese prize such a tree above all others, for it reminds the viewer that it is ancient and near death, but that one powerful strain of life still pulsates through the bark; and as he had lain there, enjoying the girl and the quiet inn and the old tree, he had caught something of the spirit of Japan and its strange values.

  “In America,” he had said, “any self-respecting farmer would cut down an old crock like that. But I see what you mean.”

  Later the same girl had taken him to the bonsai mart in Tokyo, where he had seen dwarf trees, sixteen inches tall and two hundred years old; and his pleasure in their beauty had been so evident that she had taken him to her uncle’s, and for the first time he had become aware that she was not a prostitute but a sensitive girl with a college education, caught up in the aftermath of an imperial war. And she had shown him her uncle’s bonsai, famous in Japan—a dwarf cherry tree more than three hundred years old, with a trunk even more dilapidated than the one at the inn. It was almost hollow, black and lifeless, with numerous holes worn through it where branches had once grown; and again one single bright limb flourished, covered with blossoms.

  “It’s a miracle,” the old man had said, “the foundation and the flower.”

  The second tree he had found at Makor, that very old olive, a gaunt, dismembered relic whose trunk existed only as a dead cavity surrounded by fragments of life, but like the cherry in Japan this patriarchal thing—perhaps two thousand years old—sent forth from its always-dying body persistent branches of great beauty, and they bore fruit. On first seeing this miraculous olive he had not remembered the cherry in Japan, but one day in August while sitting beneath its branches and trying to evoke the Makor of Emperor Vespasian, he happened to look at the tree in a new way, and he had snapped his fingers, crying, “It’s just like that cherry tree Tomiko showed me in Japan.” He had remembered the girl’s name, and the inn, and her uncle’s bonsai.

  Now, in the dark tent at Makor, he remained sitting in bed and saw the two ancient trees before his eyes, plus a conceptual vision as clear as the diagram in a book. He thought: I was raised to believe that the Old Testament was dead, and that whatever it contained worth saving had been transplanted into the New. In the same way I was taught that Judaism was dead, except for a few obstinate Jews, and that true religion had been handed on to the Christian church, which had produced a flowering.

  He shook his head, as if he had been knocked dizzy, but the two trees remained before him, and they represented the modified view of religion which he had been developing without having consciously verbalized it: We have the great, primitive trunk of Judaism and we also have the branch-tip flowering of Christianity, and I intuitively thought that the first was dead and that all life had passed into the second. I never really considered whether the Christian church had direct roots into the soil or not. If anyone had told me that the flowering branch had no roots except those which extended through the forbidding old trunk of Judaism, I’d not have known what he was saying. But now I see.

  He was fascinated by the persistence of his vision and was amused when he reconstructed how the trees had come to him. He had gone to sleep thinking of Vered Bar-El in Chicago and this had led to an erotic dream about Tomiko, probably the most exciting girl he had ever known—or it may have been that he was younger then—and she had passed naked into the old trunk of the cherry tree, and it in turn had become the olive tree under which Jesus could have sat; and in this way he had come to the question of God. It sneaks up on you in the damnedest places, he mused, and the trees slowly vanished, but their enigma remained.

  Freed of the vision he tried to sleep but found this impossible, and in the dark hours before birds sang he thought of the work he was doing. Until Makor he had never seriously considered the merits of Judaism. He had not understood how anyone could find in the stalwart obstinacy of the Jews a way of life, nor had he approved the awkward procedure of the synagogue with its lack of harmony and appeal to the senses. It seemed to Cullinane—and in this he was without rancor or blind adherence to his own faith—that the Christian church had brought to the religious experience an extraordinary beauty and a personal involvement that far exceeded what he had found in Judaism. It was like comparing, he thought, a beautiful singing young woman filled with life to an old woman …

  He choked. There, by God, it was! The stony, unyielding religion he had been unable to understand deserved all the unfavorable descriptions he had given it; but it was also like the old woman, knowledgeable, patient, immortal and close to God. He closed his eyes and saw again the olive tree of Makor: so terribly powerful, so close to the soil, and old, old, old, with holes through it and emptiness and a forbidding sense of time. Yet it was alive.

  Remaining in a sitting position he took a hard look at himself and asked: After this digging in the heart of religion, what do I honestly think of Judaism? And because he was a bookish man his conclusions centered on three books: Judaism was an unresilient, gnarled body of primordial belief founded on the Torah; plus a Talmudic ritual equally unyielding but very efficient in providing man with specific guidance; and the Zohar. This trio of books, Torah, Talmud, Zohar, had produced a unified religion with tremendous powers for survival; in fact, the religion seemed to have a built-in determination to survive, for throughout history, whenever its contemporary form had seemed doomed, some new primitive force had evolved which had given the religion another thrust forward. Even the dates of these thrusts were significant, Cullinane thought. By the year 1100 B.C.E. the characteristics of Old Testament Judaism had been fairly well evolved, and to a surprising degree it had existed unchanged for about thirteen hundred years, when in the years following the final destruction of the Jewish state, say, around 200 C.E., the Talmud began to take shape. The period of Talmudic domination had lasted for another thirteen hundred years until around 1500 C.E., when the Kabbala of Spain was transported to the heights of Safed, where it suddenly exploded in a mystical radiance which spread throughout the Jewish world with enough vitality to keep the spirit of Judaism alive for another thirteen hundred years, say, until the year 2800 C.E. What the Jews will come up with then, Cullinane mused, is no concern of mine.

  Again he lay down and tried to sleep, but he could not, so he asked himself: If I had to characterize Judaism in simple terms for someone who knew nothing about it, what words would I use? And almost against his willing it to be so, the symbolism of the olive tree returned and he replied: Ancient, gnarled, unresilient, a powerful religion which takes man back to his fundamental nature and experience. He laughed. In two thousand six hundred years Judaism had been able to accept only two changes, the Talmud and the Kabbala, whereas Christianity, with masterful resiliency, had spun off a dozen staggering modifications whenever the spirit of the times demanded: trinitarianism, transubstantiation, the infallibility of the Pope, the near-deification of Mary. There lay the difference between the two religions; there lay the explanation of why Christianity had conquered the world while Judaism remained the intransigent, primordial religion of the few.

  “Hey, Eliav!” he called. “You still asleep?” There was no reply, proving that Eliav was still sleeping and would no doubt wish to remain so, but in spite of
this Cullinane crossed over to Eliav’s bed and shook him.

  “You asleep?”

  “Not now,” the Jew replied.

  “I can’t sleep. I’ve been hammering at some ideas and I’d like to try them out on you.”

  “Shoot.” Eliav sat up and grabbed his knees to his chest, while the Irishman sat on the foot of his bed. Only moonlight illuminated the tent, and the men spoke in low voices so as not to disturb Tabari.

  “I’ve been perplexed …” He hesitated, as if in embarrassment. “By a matter of religion.”

  “Why not? We’ve been digging in it for long enough.”

  “And I wondered what a believing Jew …”

  “Don’t look at me. I’m no orthodox rabbi, spending his time in the synagogue.”

  “I’m no priest, spending his time at mass.”

  “You mean,” Eliav suggested, “that we’re both illiterates?”

  “Exactly, except that it’s people like us who keep the thing moving.”

  “Agreed.”

  “So let me ask it again. What does an average, non-orthodox Jew like you think of the parallel development of Judaism and Christianity?”

  Eliav let go his knees and leaned backward on his pillow, thought for some time, then drew himself forward and said, “I’ve always thought that classical Judaism was about ready for a new infusion sometime around the year 100 C.E. The old patterns were ready to be enlarged. For proof, look at the concepts we get from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Or the development of the Talmud. So I’ve never resented the eruption of Christianity. The world was ready for it.”

  “Why?”

  “Possibly because Judaism was a hard, tough old religion that didn’t give the individual enough free play. It could never have appealed to the world at large. The bright, quixotic religion of Christianity was ideally suited for such a proselytizing need.”

  “Is brightness the difference between the two?” Cullinane pressed.

  “Partly. Because, you see, when Judaism did reform by means of the Talmud it went backward toward its own nature. It became harder and more irresponsive to modern change, whereas the Christian church moved forward psychologically, and in a time of wild change an organism that is retracting has less chance than one which is expanding.”

  “Seems to me it was unfortunate for Judaism that in the years of decision you had the inward-looking rabbis, whereas we Christians had outward-looking church fathers.”

  “Right there you beg the question,” Eliav said slowly. “You say you were lucky that in the critical years between 100 and 800 CE. Christianity went forward, and we were unlucky that during the same years Judaism went backward. Don’t you see that the real question is forward to what, backward to what?”

  Cullinane reflected for a moment and said, “By God, I do! That’s what’s been bugging me without my knowing it, because I hadn’t even formulated the question.”

  “My thought is that in those critical years Judaism went back to the basic religious precepts by which men can live together in a society, whereas Christianity rushed forward to a magnificent personal religion which never in ten thousand years will teach men how to live together. You Christians will have beauty, passionate intercourse with God, magnificent buildings, frenzied worship and exaltation of the spirit. But you will never have that close organization of society, family life and the little community that is possible under Judaism. Cullinane, let me ask you this: Could a group of rabbis, founding their decisions on Torah and Talmud, possibly have come up with an invention like the Inquisition—an essentially anti-social concept?”

  Now it was Cullinane who rocked back and forth, and after a while he confessed, “I’m afraid that in those days we did treat you rather badly.”

  Eliav groaned. “Why do Christians always use that marvelous euphemism, ‘treated rather badly’? John, your Inquisition burned to death more than thirty thousand of our best Jews. I read the other day that a leading German had confessed that his nation had ‘treated the Jew rather badly.’ He had fallen back upon this inoffensive term to cover the destruction of a people. Judaism would simply not permit its rabbis to come up with solutions like that. Judaism can be understood, it seems to me, only if it is seen as a fundamental philosophy directed to the greatest of all problems: how can men live together in an organized society?”

  “I would have thought,” Cullinane suggested, “that the real religious problem is always ‘How can man come to know God?’”

  “There’s the difference between us,” Eliav said. “There’s the difference between Old Testament and New. The Christian discovers the spirit of God, and the reality is so blinding that you go right out, build a cathedral and kill a million people. The Jew avoids this intimacy and lives year after year in his ghetto, in a grubby little synagogue, working out the principles whereby men can live together.”

  “About the euphemism, ‘treated rather badly.’ What does a Jew like you feel about that … now?”

  Again Eliav relaxed his hold on his knees and fell back into the darkness. “I think it was very good for the world,” he said slowly, “that Martin Luther came along.”

  “What do you mean?” Cullinane asked.

  “I mean that up to then you Catholics had really treated us Jews, as you say, rather badly. If one made a simple list of all that your church did to mine it would quite destroy any moral justification for Catholicism to continue, and if a man like me felt that what your people had done to us was an essential characteristic of Catholicism, then I don’t see how we could co-exist. But fortunately for world history, Martin Luther came along to prove that Protestants could behave with equal savagery. After all, it wasn’t misguided Catholics in Germany in 1939 who fired up the furnaces. It was good, sober Protestants. It wasn’t Catholic political leaders who shrugged off the whole affair. It was Protestant prime ministers and presidents. So a man like me reasons, ‘What happened in Spain was no part of Catholicism. And what happened in Germany wasn’t Protestantism. Each was merely an expression of its times, a manifestation of the deadly sickness of Christianity.’ Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “That it’s the Christians who kill Jews, not Catholics or Protestants.”

  “Yes,” Eliav said. “The tremendously personal religion that evolved around the figure of Christ was all that He and Paul had envisaged. It was brilliant, penetrating and a path to personal salvation. It was able to construct soaring cathedrals and even more vaulted processes of thought. But it was totally incapable of teaching men to live together.”

  There was a stirring in the other bed and Tabari came over to Eliav’s cot. “Don’t believe a word of what he’s saying,” the Arab said. “The only reason the Jews haven’t behaved like the Christians is that for the last two thousand years they haven’t had anyone they can kick around. That’s primarily because whenever they form a kingdom it quickly comes apart at the seams. How long did the empire of Saul and David last? A little over one hundred years. In an area as small as Palestine they broke up into the Northern Kingdom and the Southern. John, you’ve heard what they say about Jews? Two Jews get together, they build three synagogues. ‘You go to yours, I’ll go to mine, and we’ll both boycott that son of a bitch on the hill.’”

  Eliav laughed. “You may have something there, Jemail. Historically, we’ve found it just about as difficult to get together as you Arabs have.”

  “About the same,” Jemail agreed. “But as I listened to you two fellows argue I thought: Why should I lie here silent, when I have the solution?”

  “What is it?” Cullinane asked.

  “Simple. Judaism had its day, and if the Jews had been smart, when Christianity came along they’d have joined up. Christianity has had its day, and if you were intelligent you’d both join the newest religion. Islam!” He bowed low and said, “Soon all Africa will be Islamic. And all Black America. I see India giving up Hinduism while Burma and Thailand surrender Buddhism, Gentlemen, I represent the religion of the future. I offer you salv
ation.”

  The easy nonsense of his statement pleased the men and they began to laugh, while from the other tent the photographer called, “Coffee,” and a day began, little different from the fifteen million days which had dawned over Makor since the first organized community had been established in its cave.

  4

  • • •

  In the early years of the 1500s Safed was an undistinguished village of one thousand people who lived in a collection of mud-walled houses perched along narrow alleys that climbed up and down the southwestern flank of a hill in the Galilee. At the crest of this hill, wasting in sunlight and inhabited only by eagles and crawling things, stood the gaunt remains of a Crusader fort, its once-soaring turrets fallen and its walls collapsed.

  Winds from the north had deposited upon the humbled fortress a freight of blowing silt in which trees had taken root, so that the once-proud castle was now merely a mound of earth with only here and there a rock projecting, sometimes with a bit of carving, to indicate how majestic that hilltop had once been. Of the thousand residents some two hundred were Jews, a few were Christians and the rest were Muslim, with only one or two men who remembered hearing from their grandfathers that their hill had once been a bastion of the Crusaders.

  The town, which nestled on the hillside well below the ruins, contained two mosques, a synagogue, a small church, some dark covered souks and a nest of small Jewish shops. The Turkish governor, ruling on edict from Constantinople, maintained peace among the various communities and allowed qadis to judge the Muslims, rabbis to rule the Jews and priests to govern the Christians. Once each year a small caravan straggled in from Damascus, bringing a few bales of shoddy goods in sad memory of the silks and spices of former times, and Turkey collected few taxes, for there was no substantial trade. In fact, if one had looked dispassionately at Safed in those early years he would surely have predicted, “This little village will continue sleeping forever. The only good thing here is the mountain air.”