Source

by James A. Michener

  “Preached?” Gottesmann interrupted. “Was he a rabbi?”

  Shmuel Hacohen’s son laughed. “Shmuel? A rabbi? When he died he was fed up with rabbis. There were no rabbis in this family. The Jewish state will be born when enough men like my father take enough guns and shoot down the bastards who are threatening us. When my father was fifty he organized his own little army to protect this settlement and he bought himself a donkey so that he could ride from one watch station to the next, firing his men up. The Bedouins announced to the whole countryside, ‘We’ll kill the little Jew on the donkey, and the others will run away.’ So they killed him. When we recovered his body it had nineteen bullet holes. But his faith had been so strong that no one dared run away, and after two or three battles the Bedouins left us in peace. Gottesmann, to hold this land we had to fight for it. If we want a state for the Jews we’ll have to fight for it. You did a fine thing when you blew up the lorry.”

  “I asked about the rabbi business because I saw these volumes of the Talmud,” Gottesmann said.

  “Those?” Netanel laughed. “Somebody sold them to my father and he kept them for good luck. Shmuel Hacohen … you could sell him anything. His preaching was simple, Gottesmann, and you remember it. No state is given on a silver plate. You buy with blood. Rabbis and governments and fine ideas will not win this land. Guns will. You get the guns, you’ll get Israel.”

  And then one day, as Gottesmann lay hiding, Netanel hurried into the room, explaining, “You’ve got to get out of here. My daughter’s coming home from university,” and Ilana appeared, somewhat thinner than when he had seen her in Jerusalem, lovelier when she smiled but more serious and totally dedicated to the ideal of a Jewish state. When she saw Gottesmann packing she said, “Don’t go,” and later, when he recalled that first meeting, he remembered principally the great tenseness of her mind and body. She stood forward against her toes, not back on her heels. Her chin was held forward too, like her stubborn grandfather’s in the picture, and her eyes, unlike those of girls Gottesmann had known in other countries, were marked by lines of concentration. Above all, he remembered her tough, rounded knees as they popped out from beneath her very short dress, and he recalled how delightful it had been, in his hiding, to touch those knees and to feel this vibrant girl, so eager for life and the day’s challenge, pressing against him.

  Now he laughed easily as he heard her banging about the kitchen in her last stages of preparing his evening meal. She was a dreadful cook, a typical Israeli she called herself, burning her thumbs and the meat, and she slapped food on the table as her ancestors must have slammed it on the wooden boards in their tents four thousand years ago in this very spot, when returning from their sheep in the wilderness. How excellent a human being she was, this Ilana, how strong in her resolves, and how desperately her husband wanted to stay away from the war that was engulfing him … how he longed to stay with his wife among the vineyards.

  Yet in his longing Gottesmann had to admit that not even under the humane law of Moses Rabbenu was he excused from this war, for although he did have a new house and a new vineyard, he did not actually have a wife. He and Ilana were not married. In the tempestuous fashion of the day she had simply moved in with him, announcing to the settlement, “Gottesmann and I shall live together.” He had expected some kind of protest from her father, but tough-minded Netanel had summoned two witnesses before whom the lovers recited the ancient formula: “Behold, thou art consecrated unto me according to the law of Israel,” after which Netanel boomed, “You’re married. Have lots of children.” Certain cautious neighbors had suggested that perhaps Gottesmann and his girl would like to have a rabbi from Tiberias authenticate the marriage, but Ilana had cried contemptuously, “We’re through with rabbis and all that Mickey Mouse crap.”

  The phrase had struck Gottesmann as inappropriate to the discussion at hand and he had asked Ilana, “Where did you pick up the words ‘Mickey Mouse crap’?” and she had explained, “When you go to the movies and watch the cartoons the hero gets into all kinds of trouble, but at the end, when terrible things are bound to happen, Mickey Mouse swings in from nowhere and saves the world. Gottesmann, it doesn’t happen that way. And for sure it’s not going to happen that way in Israel”—Ilana always spoke as if her new homeland already existed—“because nobody is going to come swinging in from anywhere, not God nor Moses nor some rabbi. So let them keep that Mickey Mouse crap to themselves. Fifteen thousand Arabs are going to come down out of those hills some day, and we’d better be ready.” Her eyes flashed and she repeated, “We’d better be ready. Not Mickey Mouse. Not some rabbi wringing his hands and wailing, ‘Israel is lost. Israel is being punished.’” Recalling that outburst Gottesmann looked down at his folder and smiled.

  Behind him the door banged open. There was a clatter of feet. A tray was banged onto the table and a chair was squealed backward over the stone floor. “Food!” a husky-harsh voice shouted, and supper was served at the Gottesmann home.

  Ilana Hacohen was twenty-one, not tall, not plump. Her big white teeth sparkled as ever, and as usual she looked quizzical. She obviously loved the security and repose of living with a man and she took pride in her new home. With heavy yet loving hands she pushed the crockery about the table and splashed a generous helping of food onto her husband’s plate. It was meat and vegetables, cooked as if by accident, and it made him long even for the food of English restaurants. “Eat it all,” she said, “I’m saving some for Teddy Reich.” Then, on the impulse of the moment, she leaned across the table and kissed her tall, serious-browed husband.

  “You worried about Safad?” she asked.

  “For every Jew in Safad there are 11.1 Arabs,” he said glumly.

  “If they’re the right Jews,” she reflected.

  “And the Arabs hold all the favorable positions.”

  “They always do,” she said.

  “And in honest fighting strength they outnumber us forty to one.”

  When Ilana chewed she kept the food in small portions in the right side of her mouth and moved her jaws only slightly, so that she seemed unusually reflective, with her thin upper lip drawn tight and the lines about her eyes contracted. She thought of the odds, forty to one, and of the position of Safad as she had known it, now so critical to the Jews. “It looks to me,” she said slowly, “as if Teddy Reich ought to move his Palmach in there tonight.”

  Isidore Gottesmann visibly stiffened. He stopped chewing and looked down for a moment at the white boards of the table. Ilana regarded linen as ridiculous in time of war; she didn’t propose washing table covers when there was other work to do. When her husband did not speak she said quietly, “And if Teddy decides to send his men in, you and I are going too.”

  “I guessed we would,” her husband said, and they continued eating.

  Ilana Hacohen knew Safad well. Her grandfather had been killed by the Bedouins long before she was born, and she had never known him, but she remembered well the happy days when her father used to take her on horseback up the steep trail to Safad, from which they could see the Sea of Galilee and Tiberias. As they stood on the old Crusader ruins her father would explain how from this spot the Jews had looked down upon the great Roman city of Tiberias, when large fleets had stood out into the lake, and of how, in later days, a group of misguided bigots had assembled in Tiberias to write the Talmud, “thus binding the world in chains.” He said that some centuries later, around 900 CE., a much finer body of rabbis had also worked in Tiberias, “compiling the only honest text of the Bible, so that Tiberias is just as important for the Christians as it is for the Jews.” But it was his opinion that the only rabbi from these parts whom one could love was Rabbi Zaki the Martyr. “He was a great and honest man,” he said, “and all could trust him.” Of contemporary rabbis, except for Rabbi Kook, he did not know many who could be so described. He told his daughter, “Always remember, in this country we have the best rabbis that money can buy.” They were a grubby, contemptible lot and old S
hmuel Hacohen had decreed that none should be allowed in Kfar Kerem.

  This did not mean that Ilana had grown up without religion. In her father’s house the reading of the Torah was exactly equivalent to the reading of Shakespeare in the home of an educated English family, or the reading of Goethe among Germans—except that because of its antiquity and historical power the Jews of the settlement felt that their great literary masterpiece was somewhat more effective than Shakespeare was for the English or Goethe for the Germans or Tolstoy for the Russians. Rarely a day passed in Ilana’s childhood when she did not hear some practical discussion of the Bible as the historical background of her people. She knew that Kfar Kerem stood where Canaanites had once ruled and that on their victorious return from Egypt the Jews had surged northward through the valleys to the west. She could imagine them still marching, just beyond the ridges back of Tiberias. To Ilana, God’s division of Canaan among the twelve tribes, which had taken place some three thousand years ago, was as real as the proposed United Nations division that would occur within a few weeks: Kfar Kerem stood at the junction of the portions given to Naphtali, Issachar and Manasseh, and it was from these lands that the citizens of Israel had been driven into captivity. Mount Tabor still stood as the perpetual beacon of the north, and the Sea of Galilee remained as Isaiah had described it. To the sabras of Ilana’s generation the Bible was real indeed. In her father’s vineyard she had found Jewish coins that had been issued by the Maccabees, and she could recall that day on which her father had taken her to see the recent excavations at Beth-shan, pointing toward familiar places on the Plain of Jezreel. “Why did he do it?” he had cried.

  “Do what?” Ilana had asked.

  “Keep his troops here at Gilboa while the enemy was camped over there at Shunem.” And he explained why the man had been a fool, a blunderer.

  “Who was?” she asked again.

  “King Saul,” her father replied. To the Jews of Kfar Kerem, Saul was a man of history, not a shadowy figure in a religious chronicle, and so with Gideon, David and Solomon.

  Like most of her friends, whose parents were either non-religious or actively anti-religious, Ilana Hacohen bore a non-Biblical name. Hers meant tree and spoke of the ancient soil. Other girls bore evocative names like Aviva (spring), or Ayelet (fawn), or Talma (furrow). Young men were apt to be called Dov (bear), or Arieh (lion), or Dagan (cereal). Ilana was determined that when she and Gottesmann had children there would be no Sarahs or Rachels among them, no Abrahams or Mendels; she wanted no part of the old Biblical names nor of the Eastern European ones either. In fact, her only disappointment with her husband was that he kept his German name of Isidore, one relating in no way, she felt, to a modern Jewish state.

  It would be difficult to say whether Ilana and her father were religious or not. On the one hand they loved the Bible as the literary textbook of their race. On the other, they despised what the rabbis had made of it. “A prison!” Netanel Hacohen cried. “And the Talmudic rabbis who worked here at Tiberias were the worst of the lot, codifying into ugly little categories all things that God intended to be free.” He also looked unkindly at the work of the later rabbis who had lived in Safad: “In their exile in Spain and Germany they picked up many bigoted ideas and came back here to force them down our throats.” There were others in Kfar Kerem who were so disgusted with rabbinical Judaism that they went much further than Netanel Hacohen. These Jews were prepared to throw out God and Moses, too.

  Ilana knew some of these latter thinkers and she found their reasoning persuasive. “We are Jews,” they argued, “and it is our job to reconquer Palestine. When we do we won’t require a lot of rabbis from Poland and Russia to tell us how to govern ourselves.” Women of this group were apt to be especially vehement in their denunciation, and it was from one of these, a girl at the university who had lived in America for some time, that Ilana picked up the phrase which seemed to her the best summary of the religious problem: “that Mickey Mouse crap.”

  Among Ilana’s friends a curious cult had developed which could be explained only as a combination of deep love for the Bible and an equally deep distrust for institutionalized religion as they had seen it operating among the Jews of Galilee. Many girls flatly refused to get married in the old rabbinical patterns. “Me take a ritual bath?” Ilana had protested. “I’d sooner jump in cattle water ten days old than step naked into that Mickey Mouse crap.” Her girl friends sought out the men they wanted to live with and in swift progression became pregnant, fine mothers and good heads of their families. They also refused to wear make-up, that being the prerogative of purposeless women in decadent countries like France and Argentina. It became an act of faith not to shave under the arms, to avoid make-up, to wear very short skirts, to bob the hair and to take advanced training in the management of machine guns and field mortars—if any were made available by the men who needed them. These girls also spoke only Hebrew, fluently and with an earthy lilt. Yiddish they deplored as an echo of the eastern European ghettos, and Ladino was as bad. Those whose parents knew no Hebrew consented to talk with the old folks in whatever language was native, Russian with the Russian immigrants, Polish with the Polish newcomers, but Yiddish was frowned upon. “It’s a ridiculous mark of servitude,” Ilana protested, “and Gentiles are correct in laughing at it.”

  They were a tough, wonderful, exciting group of young people, and if they had surrendered formal religion, they had found a substitute equally demanding: they were dedicated to the creation of a Jewish state that should be called Israel and that should be founded in social justice. There were no communists in Kfar Kerem, and there were actually those who preferred capitalism with its ever-present chance for a man to become rich, but most were like Ilana: “Our house is not really our house. It belongs to the settlement, and if we should move away the house will go to someone else just like us, which is only right. I work in the vineyard and I think of it as mine, but it really belongs to the settlement, too, and if I leave, other hands will tend the grapes. The important thing is that the land will continue.”

  This was the real mystique of the group: the land will continue. “There were Jews on this land four thousand years ago,” Ilana often said, “and I am proud to be a part of that chain. When I’m gone more Jews will live on our land, for another four thousand years. It’s the land that counts.”

  She often recalled the teachings of her grandfather, which were kept alive in Kfar Kerem in a small book which was published after his death and in which he spoke of his great difficulty in acquiring land, and of its significance to the Jews who first realized that it belonged to them:

  I met them as they came overland from Akka and the Arabs gathered at the gates of Tiberias to watch them struggle through, and everyone began to laugh, for they were thin and undernourished, and many of the men’s backs were bent from much study in the yeshivas of Berdichev. Not even the Jews of Tiberias thought that such people could live on the land, beset by drought in some years, floods in others, and Bedouins all the time, But I swore that the Jews of Kfar Kerem—as I had named the new settlement—would master the land. And to that purpose I drove them constantly to watch how the Arabs tilled the land, to remember what tricks the Russians had used on their fields; and weeks and months would go by without my ever hearing the word Talmud, but the word land was before us at every waking hour.

  Ilana explained to her husband, “After it was evident that my grandfather was going to succeed, many religious Jews tried to join the settlement, but when they saw how determined Shmuel was to keep Kfar Kerem a farm and not a countryside synagogue, they left in disgust and went up to Safad. My grandfather never allowed a synagogue in Kfar Kerem nor any merchants, and this was the first new setüement to use Hebrew. Shmuel never mastered the language … he spoke it like a little boy, some of the old people told me. But before he died he was conducting the settlement meetings in Hebrew. My own father refused me permission to speak Yiddish, and I’m thankful now. Of course, I’ve picked up the usu
al number of words and I understand it, but I’d be ashamed to speak it.”

  Land was the goal, the land of Canaan and Israel, the ancient fields awarded by God to Naphtali and Issachar and Manasseh. One day when Ilana was riding in an armed truck with her husband toward Acre she saw those once-great farm lands that had deteriorated into malaria-ridden swamps, and she broke into tears: “It’s a crime against the land. This is what happens when Eretz Israel falls into alien hands. We Jews have got to win back all this land, and in three years we’ll make it fertile again. We shall have to fight for it, foot by foot, but we shall win because I can’t believe that God intended …”

  “You confuse me when you speak of God,” Gottesmann had interrupted.

  “Why?”

  “Well, yesterday you said some pretty forceful things against religion. Today you speak as if God were going to give you the swampland.”

  “Don’t you believe that God has chosen us to tend this land?”

  “No,” Gottesmann replied.

  “I do,” she snapped, and her husband decided to drop the matter. Yet it was apparent to him that Ilana had come to identify God with the land, not differentiating between the two, and as the truck bounced along he thought: This must be the way people believed five thousand years ago when the long progression to monotheism started. “God is the land, therefore we shall worship this hill,” and almost at once they discovered that between God and His land there had to be some agent of mediation, whereupon they invented priests and the priests led to rabbis, and the rabbis led to all that Ilana hates.

  Now, in his new home, waiting for Teddy Reich and the decisions about Safad, Gottesmann acknowledged to Ilana that he had come partly around to her way of thinking. As he ate the last of the meat—it was a matter of pride among the sabra wives not to serve dessert—he confessed, “In the last few days I’ve decided that you’re right. The land comes first, and after we get it we can worry about the other problems.”