Yohanan began to bellow. He would take his son to Rome. He would halt his work on the mosaic pavement. He contrived other threats that merely made him sound noisy, while his doomed son stood aside—a tall, slender young fellow of thirteen in that agonizing age when the passage of a bird’s feather across the hand can cut like a sharpened knife. For three days he listened to his father and Rabbi Asher brawling, and he heard for the first time in brutal clarity the details of his birth. At last he knew what bastardy was and the terrible exclusion it entailed, not for the author of the sin but for the recipient.
Other boys his age, against whom he had protected himself in the streets, put on their new clothes and made their appearances before the congregation, standing uneasily at attention as Rabbi Asher instructed them in the ways of God. Abraham, the son of Hababli the dyer, a clod of a boy who would never acquire any appreciation of Judaism, to whom the presence of God would never be a reality, stumbled his way through a section of the Torah and proclaimed that he was now a man, and this oaf was accepted into the congregation, but Menahem was not, nor would he ever be.
In despair he fled Makor and for two days no one could find him. Rabbi Asher, sensing the heavy blow that had fallen upon him, was afraid that he might have destroyed himself, as bastards in Palestine sometimes did, but Jael, knowing Menahem’s habits, went into the olive grove and found him sleeping in the hollow core of a patriarchal tree beneath which they had once played. Taking his hand she led him back to her father, who said to the outcast, “You are more of a man than the others, Menahem. On you falls the weight of the law, and the manner in which you accept that burden will determine your dignity on earth and your joy hereafter. My wife says that your work at the groats mill is exceptional. You shall have that job as long as you live, and may God grant repose to your stormy heart.”
“The synagogue?” the boy asked.
“That is forbidden,” the rabbi said, and the sternness of this verdict was so dire, delivered thus to a child of thirteen, that the bearded man wept and took Menahem in his arms, consoling him: “You shall live as the child of God … as the man of God. The sages have said, ‘The way of a bastard is cruel.’ ” He wanted to say more, but his voice broke with passion, and the two parted.
So his thirteenth year brought to Menahem confusion but also an understanding that many adult men never acquire. At the groats mill he worked intelligently, calculating what must be done to protect the trade, and establishing himself as the practical foreman of the place. It was not unusual that he, an outcast, should be working for the rabbi who had proscribed him; at the dyeing vats Abraham’s father used slaves who were not Jewish, and other Jews hired pagans who still worshiped Baal and Jupiter on the high places back of town. Menahem was happy to have work, and Rabbi Asher was pleased to have at last someone in charge whom he could trust to maintain his high standard.
At the same time the boy’s father had reached the stage in building the synagogue when he must begin laying the mosaic floor, and bitter though he was at the treatment accorded his son, he felt inspired to proceed with this work, so whenever Menahem was not busy at the rabbi’s mill he helped at the rabbi’s synagogue. In these contradictions a youth entirely outside the congregation found both his work and recreation inside Judaism, and in this ambivalent condition his thirteenth year was passed.
Construction of the mosaic had proceeded only a little way when Yohanan found it necessary to consult with Rabbi Asher, but the bearded expositor had returned to the grape arbor of Tverya, so the stonecutter and his son set out through the forest for Menahem’s first trip to the Sea of Galilee; and as they reached Sephet they climbed a steep hill and the boy saw for the first time that radiant body of water and the marble city of Tverya, and they stopped as if the great hand of beauty had halted them: mountains held the lake in a purple embrace; brown fields were as soft as the feathers of birds; gray haze rose from the Jordan; and flowers shone like flickering stars within the meadows. As the stonecutter, in appearance so unlike an artist, looked down at the shimmering lake, he finally visualized the design for his mosaic: mountains, lake, olive trees and birds fell into place and he experienced that consuming urge to create which takes precedence over all other compulsions. So far as Yohanan was concerned, the pavement was complete; now all he must do was spend five years in executing it.
When he entered the gracious, decaying city and led Menahem along the waterfront, he was half pleased, half irritated to notice that many girls lounging near the fishing boats turned to stare at the handsome youth, and he regretted that he had not followed his earlier instinct and taken the boy to a new life in a new land, but building the synagogue had held him captive and his conflicting obligations were tangled in his mind. Finally he found the mud-walled house where the expositors were meeting, and there he sent a messenger to advise Rabbi Asher that visitors had arrived. After an hour the little rabbi appeared, his eyes sad because of some wish of God that he had been unable to explain to his colleagues, but when he saw Menahem standing gravely in the sunlight he was reminded of the boy’s honorable acceptance of his burden, and admiration for the youth cleansed his mind of the sorrow it had been harboring.
“I am pleased to see you, Menahem,” he said gently.
“We’re ready to start the floor,” Yohanan interrupted.
“All right,” he said with no enthusiasm.
“I lack one thing.”
“Get it.”
“I’ll have to go to Ptolemais … with money.”
Rabbi Asher frowned. Like the rest of the great expositors he saw little money, but he was willing to listen. “What’s the problem?”
“The design I plan …”
“What is the design?”
“The Galilee.”
“What about it?”
“It needs purple. At many points it needs purple stone. And I’ve found none.”
“I saw some,” the rabbi said. “Beyond Sephet.”
“I saw that too. It crumbles.”
“In Ptolemais? Have they purple stone?”
“No, but they have purple glass. Cut into squares.”
Rabbi Asher considered this problem for some minutes. He was willing for Yohanan to build the floor but he wanted to spend no money for it. “What do you need purple for?” he parried.
“Kingfisher’s feathers. The hoopoe bird, too.”
Rabbi Asher studied this carefully. “Use other birds.”
“I thought of that,” Yohanan replied. “But I also need purple for the mountains.”
“I suppose so.” He turned and addressed the boy as his equal. “Is the mill making money, Menahem?” The boy nodded, and the rabbi said, “Buy the glass in Ptolemais.”
“I’ll get some golden glass, too,” Yohanan added.
“Gold? That sounds like adornment.”
“It is,” the stonecutter admitted, “but it will make the pavement glisten … in just a few spots.”
Rabbi Asher conceded and was about to dismiss his workmen when he thought of Menahem. “Wait a moment,” he said and left to consult with his associates, who were discussing whether a housewife was permitted to throw out used dishwater on Shabbat. The argument had been in process for some days, with the Sephet rabbi arguing liberally that throwing out the dishwater was a logical extension of preparing the Shabbat meal, which rabbis had always permitted, but with the Biri rabbi contending that throwing out the water was equivalent to sowing, “for from the freshly watered earth seeds might spring forth,” and this was specifically prohibited. Now Asher interrupted the expositors with a problem of different gravity.
“The stonecutter of whom I spoke … and his bastard son. They’re outside and I thought to bring them in.”
The Kefar Nahum rabbi protested against discussing individual cases, but an old man who had come from Babylonia for these sessions said, “Our great Rabbi Akiba would have stopped discussion even with God in order to speak with children. Fetch the boy.”
So Rabbi Ash
er returned to the street and summoned Yohanan and Menahem into the cool courtyard, where the scholars saw with their own eyes what a promising youth was among them, and the old man from Babylonia cried, “With the appearance of such a youth the sun rises!”
Menahem was made to stand facing the great expositors, while his father remained against the wall, listening, and at last the scholars reached a typical rabbinical conclusion: “A bastard may under no circumstances enter the congregation of the Lord for ten generations. But there is a way.”
The old man from Babylonia explained: “Rabbi Tarfon, of blessed memory, and Rabbi Shammua, too, said, ‘Let the bastard boy when he is past the age of twelve steal an object worth more than ten drachmas. He is arrested and sold into slavery to a Hebrew family. Then he is married to another Hebrew slave. And after five years the owner emancipates them both and they become freedmen. And as new freedmen their children will be welcomed into the congregation of the Lord.”
Yohanan heard the words with dumb astonishment. While the rabbis solemnly discussed where the theft must take place to make it an honest theft, and how the boy must be arrested and before what witnesses, the big stonecutter felt that a world of incomprehensibility was crashing about his ears. This was insanity, what the rabbis were saying, and it would take a man with no beard and no learning to tell them so. In bitterness he looked at his tall son as he stood self-consciously before the judges who were counseling this extraordinary course of action, and he was inspired to reach out and grab the boy by the hand and lead him from that confused company, but then he heard the old rabbi from Babylonia calling him, and he found himself moving obediently to stand beside his afflicted son.
“Yohanan, stonecutter of Makor,” the saintly old man was saying, “you see how the irresponsible actions of a headstrong man lead him and his offspring into trouble. Rabbi Asher tells us that you were warned not to contract an illegal alliance with a married woman, but you went ahead. Now you have no wife and your son is in grave trouble …”
Up to this point Menahem had stood calm before the judges, accepting their review of his case as a repetition of the abuse he had received since childhood; even Rabbi Asher’s talks with him in Makor had been so understood; but now as the stranger from Babylonia droned on with words of an impersonal gravity “never able to marry … an outcast forever from the Jews … only recourse is selling himself into slavery … he can never be clean, but his children can be saved …” the boy caught the full force of their meaning and uttered a convulsive sob, covering his face with his hands to mask his shame. Once he looked up to seek consolation, but the judges had none to offer. Finally Yohanan put his arm about him, saying quietly, “Come. We must go back to work,” but Menahem could not move, and his father had to drag him away.
If the Talmud which the rabbis were compiling under the grape arbor of Tverya had consisted only of laws as remorseless as the one invoked against Menahem ben Yohanan, neither the Talmud nor Judaism could have long endured, but this was not the case; the Talmud was also a testimony to the joy of Jewish living. Its preaching on the law was hard and clear, but side by side it contained abundant passages which tempered that law to make the finished document a singing, laughing, hopeful summary. The Talmud was a literature of a people, crammed helter-skelter with songs and sayings, fables and fancy; and one of the reasons why the rabbis from Kefar Nahum, Biri and Sephet were so eager to work upon it was that their meetings were so much fun: lively argument sparked by the joy of personal clashes and a sense of being close to God.
Only a massive work could hope to capture the vigor and fellowship of these meetings, and the Talmud became such a masterpiece. Its final size was difficult to comprehend: the Torah upon which it was built was brief; the Mishna was many times as long; the Gemara was much longer than the Mishna; and the commentaries of Maimonides and the rest were in turn much longer than the Gemara, the Mishna and the Torah together. The Torah consisted of five books, the Talmud of 523. The Torah could be printed in two hundred and fifty pages, but the finished Talmud required twenty-two volumes.
In a major commentary on this vast, formless work the name of Rabbi Asher, God’s Man, appears eleven times, three in connection with legal decisions, eight in those frivolous, lovely passages which evoke the day-to-day life of Jews in Palestine: “Rabbi Asher ha-Garsi told us: Antigonus the wily seller of olive oil used three tricks. He allowed sediment to gather in the bottom of his measure so that it contained less. At the time of judging he tilted the measure sideways. And he taught himself to pour so that a large bubble of air formed in the middle of his jug. At his death God judged him according to his own measure. The sediment of his sin nearly filled the jug. It was tilted so far to one side that most of eternity slipped from him. And that day God poured with such a bubble!”
Two quotations from the groats maker concerned the wild life of the Galilee, as he had observed it on his trips: “Rabbi Asher told us: the hoopoe bird was walking along the ground and the bee eater was flying in the sky. Cried the latter, ‘I am closer to God.’ But Elijah, peering down from heaven, warned, ‘He who works in the soil is always in the arms of God.’ From which Rabbi Bag Huna deduced, ‘This proves that the farmer is closer to God than the merchant.’ But Rabbi Asher replied, ‘Not so, Huna. All men who work are equal.’ ”
It was this Rabbi Bag Huna who offered the famous definition of a Talmudic scholar: “He should be able to concentrate so thoroughly upon the Torah that a seventeen-year-old girl could pass his desk completely naked without distracting him.” To which Rabbi Asher said, “I fear not many would pass that test.”
Rabbi Asher made three comments upon the Torah: “Get old and get gray, get tired and get toothless, but get Torah.” “The law is like a jar filled with honey. If you pour in water, the honey will run out and after a while you will have cheapened the mixture until there is no honey left.” “At the gate of the shop a man has many friends. But at the gate of Torah he has God.”
He is remembered principally, however, for the echo of laughter that hung over Tverya when he was present. “Rabbi Asher the groats maker said: A man who laughs is more to be cherished than one who weeps; a woman who sings, than one who wails. And God is very close to the child who dances for reasons which he cannot explain.” He argued for a God who loved even outcasts like Menahem, the stonecutter’s boy. He punctured sham, upheld the dignity of work, spoke for a happy marriage in which husband and wife shared equally, and bore constant testimony that God was a generous and a forgiving deity. “Rabbi Asher ha-Garsi said: Few have been tested as Rab Naaman of Makor was tested. When the Romans were about to destroy his town, Rab Naaman was offered safety through flight, and he deserted his friends. When he died he threw himself before God, crying, ‘The scar of that shameful act is still upon my heart,’ but God lifted him from the ground and said, ‘When you fled through the tunnel that night you took with you a new understanding of the law, and with Rabbi Akiba you saved My Torah. One shred of the law administered with compassion is more important than a hundred towns, and the scars on your heart I brush away.’ ”
Rabbi Asher’s final comment on the Torah was simple: “He who knows Torah and does not teach it to others is like a single red poppy blooming in the desert.”
His adherence to this last principle made it impossible for him to refuse when the rabbis asked him to instruct students in the yeshiva operated at Tverya for the training of young scholars. Classes convened in an old Roman building by the lake, and there Rabbi Asher would stand, a little old man in a white beard, talking at random about the joy he found in Judaism: “My guiding light has always been Rabbi Akiba. He saved the Mishna for us, and I love the memory of this man. From childhood I aspired to follow in his steps.” When students asked why he considered Akiba the greatest of the rabbis, he replied, “He cultivated a personal relationship with God, but he also directed himself to the problems of how his Jews could at the same time be faithful to God who controlled heaven and obedient to the Romans wh
o controlled the earth. Today we could learn much from Akiba.” When his students, some of them hotheaded young men who were growing restless under Byzantine rule, brought the discussion down to the present, asking how he would behave toward the Byzantine invaders, he replied, without equivocation, “Study the final hours of Akiba. Every possible concession he made to Rome, but in the end he had to proclaim that when the will of God and the law of empire clash the former must prevail.”
It was therefore each student’s responsibility to ascertain God’s intentions, and to help them in this task Rabbi Asher proposed certain drills: “If our desire is to uncover God’s wishes, we must develop minds that can penetrate shadows, for the mists produced by living obscure the truth and you cannot discern it unless you sharpen your wits.” At this point he would unroll a scroll of Torah and read from Leviticus: “These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind, and the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole. These are unclean to you.” Having read this, he would say, “God Himself forbids His people to eat the lizard. I want you to find one hundred reasons why the lizard should be eaten.” When his students protested that this might be blasphemous, Rabbi Asher explained, “Again and again the great rabbis have warned us that when God handed Moses the sacred law, He placed it in the hands of men so that it might exist on earth and not in heaven, to be interpreted by men. The Torah is what we say it is, you and I in all our frailty, and if God made a mistake in forbidding us to eat the lizard, we had better find out about it.” He would crash his hands upon the table and cry, “The Torah exists only on earth, in the hearts of men, and it is what we say it is.” He always told his students of the day on which the Prophet Elijah came back to earth following a great dispute among the rabbis, who asked him fearfully, “Was God angry when we changed His word?” and Elijah told them, “No! God clapped His hands gleefully and cried, ‘My children have defeated Me! They live on earth and they know the problems of earth. O, My beloved children, always be as wise as you were today.’ ” Sometimes students would protest, “But you speak of God as if He were a human being, and yesterday you told us He is a spirit,” and the little rabbi would thunder, “Of course He’s a spirit. He has no body nor hands either. I’m telling you a story. Accept it as that.” And he would stomp from the room, stopping at the door to shout back, “Tomorrow! A hundred reasons why Jews should eat lizards.” Then he would add softly, “Imagine, perhaps one of you, in this little room in this little city, will correct the error of God, and tomorrow night He will clap His hands again and cry, ‘Once more My children have defeated Me! That blessed city of Tverya.’ ”
The Source: A Novel Page 66
