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Page 132
But Ilan Eliav was not in “any other country,” nor could he ever be “a typical official.” He was a Jew, aware of the unique history of his people. They had survived persecution, as the Vodzher Rebbe knew, only because their stern rabbis had kept them faithful to the law, and if now this law raised certain difficulties, that was nothing new; it had always done so. The law need not be abrogated; what was needed was some new leader to refight in the twentieth century the battles that great Akiba had fought in the second. The law must be humanized, brought up to date. Eliav felt sure that were Akiba alive today he would long since have simplified it, adjusting it to modern life as he had once adjusted it to Roman.
But the law would continue, for only it could keep Israel alive. Where were the Chaldeans and the Moabites, the Phoenicians and the Assyrians, the Hurrians and the Hittites? Each had been more powerful than the Jews, yet each had perished and the Jews remained. Where was Marduk, great god of the Babylonians, and Dagan of the Philistines; and Moloch of the Phoenicians? They had been mighty gods who struck terror in the hearts of men, but they had vanished and it was the conciliatory, sometimes awkward God of the Jews Who not only persisted but Who also vitalized two derivative religions. And God exercised His power through the law.
It was no mean thing to be a Jew and the custodian of God’s law; for if His law was exacting it was also ennobling. It demanded respect if not blind obedience. There could be no larger task, Eliav thought, than devising procedures whereby the Jews of Israel and their more numerous cousins in America could share this vital law and the responsibility for keeping it vital. He recalled a cynical joke: “The function of the American Jew is to send money to a German Jew in Jerusalem, who forwards it to a Polish Jew in the Negev, who makes it possible for the Spanish Jew in Morocco to come to Israel.” There was more to it than that.
On the day he left, John Cullinane had asked in his easy Irish manner, “Han, why do you Jews make life so difficult for yourselves?” At the time Eliav had thought of no reply, but now, having lost Vered for a Jewish reason and having been projected into the heart of Jewish responsibility, he understood: Life isn’t meant to be easy, it’s meant to be life. And no religion defended so tenaciously the ordinary dignity of living. Judaism stressed neither an after-life, an after-punishment, nor heaven; what was worthy and good was here, on this day, in Zefat. We seek God so earnestly, Eliav reflected, not to find Him but to discover ourselves.
From where he stood at that moment he could see the spot in Tiberias where he blew up the English lorry, the streets of Zefat in which he had used his machine gun, and he vowed that violence was behind him; he would try to be the kind of Jew that Akiba had been, a peasant who had passed the age of forty before learning how to read, a self-taught man who had become the legal master of his day, a man who at seventy launched a whole new way of life and who, when the Romans finally executed him by tearing away his flesh with hot pincers—a man ninety-five years old and perhaps not legally a Jew, for it was believed that he descended from Sisera, that lascivious general whom Jael had slain with a tent pin—proved himself so dedicated to God that when the Roman soldiers gripped the flesh near his heart, he forced himself to stay alive until he could finish his defiant cry, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” to die on the long, wailing pronunciation of the word “one.”
2002 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1965 by Marjay Productions, Inc.
Copyright renewed © 1993 by James A. Michener and Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This work was originally published in hardcover by Random House in 1965.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Michener, James A. (James Albert), 1907-1997.
The source: a novel / James A. Michener.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-54712-5
1. Jews—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3525.119 S57 2002
813′.54—dc21 2002021313
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
Maps and Diagrams by Jean-Paul Tremblay
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