“You did?” The fat shoemaker leaped. “Which one?”
“Athaliah. She has a better manner than the others.”
“She’s a wonderful girl!” Zaki cried impulsively. “Oh, this girl … she can cook … she can weave.” He became so excited that his words stumbled over themselves, for his daughters were getting old and this was the first time that anyone had even obliquely discussed marriage … He stopped cold. “You do want to marry her, don’t you?” he asked bluntly.
“Yes,” the muleteer mumbled. “I’ve told my mother.”
“Oh, Rachel!” the fat rabbi cried. And he summoned his family; and when the girls were lined up he announced, “This fine young man from Damascus … What’s your name?” He choked, grew red in the face and grasped Athaliah by the hand, delivering her to her suitor.
As soon as it was decently possible the muleteer led his bride away to Damascus, and that night Rabbi Zaki initiated the tradition that was to make him beloved in Safed and renowned throughout the Jewish world. He went to bed at dusk, for it was written in the Talmud that men should not be abroad after dark, but he could not sleep, for he was possessed by a great happiness at having found a husband for one of his girls; and when he thought of the way doomed Jews were living that night in Podi and Portugal and Spain, he felt driven to rise from his bed and dress and go out into the narrow streets of the town, and to walk up and down, crying, “Men of Safed! How can you sleep in your tranquillity when Jews throughout the world are unhappy and miserable? Do you appreciate the magnitude of your blessing? Jews of Safed, you happy, happy Jews, let us rise now and go to the house of God and give thanks.” And he routed out the scholars and the leaders and the men who would always know more than he and drove them to the synagogue, and there, in the light of a few candles, he recited the triumphant passages of Deuteronomy, and in his simple way brought many of the citizens of Safed closer to God than did all the Talmudic scholars and all the Kabbalists.
Two or three nights each month this sensation of absolute happiness would overcome Zaki, and he would roar through the narrow streets, summoning the Jews of Safed to praise their God for His bounty; and whereas it had been obvious to the scholars that Zaki of Italy would not attain a place of eminence in their schools—not even as a student, for he could not understand what men like the legalist Caro or the mystic Cordovero were talking about—he could, by the sheer simplicity of his faith, become one of the memorable rabbis of Safed. Although he left no writings, he so impressed his humanity upon the town that he modified subsequent religious behavior.
The keynote of his teaching, repeated again and again in his midnight discourses, was charity. “Gold does not grow out of the land,” he taught. “It is found in man’s labor. And those who profit from the gold must give a fair share back to the poor.” He used simple explanations, saying, “The mills of Rabbi Yom Tov could not run for a day if God stopped the mountain streams that feed them. If we live on God’s charity, should we not share what God gives us?” He argued that a man should distribute at least twenty per cent of his income to the needy, saying, “And if he gives less than one part in ten he may not call himself a Jew.” Again and again he pleaded with his listeners to be generous, and the joke was circulated through Safed: “Rabbi Zaki wants more than anything else in the world to give things away … especially his daughters.”
Outside the synagogue Rabbi Zaki was even more effective, for from his workbench he reviewed the homely precepts of the Jewish sages: “The great Akiba tells us: ‘Whosoever neglects the duty of visiting the sick is guilty of shedding blood.’ Have you been to see Rabbi Paltiel’s wife since she fell sick? Go now, and you can have your shoes when you return.” His round face and luxuriant beard became a trademark of humanity throughout the Jewish section of Safed, and he was the favorite Jew of the Arab quarter, too, for he offered his Muslim friends no religious argument, only laughter and mended shoes.
The young men of the town, watching his jovial passage, argued, “If his daughter Tamar has lived with him so long, she can’t be as bad as she looks,” and one day a man came to the shop and said, tentatively, “Rabbi Zaki, I’ve been thinking that I might like to marry your daughter.”
“Sarah?” he cried. “She’s a fine girl.”
“I meant Tamar.”
“She’s a fine girl, too!” the shoemaker said enthusiastically, but after the marriage was celebrated he asked his son-in-law, “About Sarah. Do you happen to know any other men …”
“No,” the groom replied firmly, but that night Zaki again coursed through the alleys, calling for the Jews to celebrate the paradise they knew in Safed, so that the more cynical observed, “Watch! When he finally gets rid of that oldest daughter we’ll have midnight services for a month.” But Safed enjoyed the exuberance of their fat rabbi, for everyone acknowledged—even the great scholars—that from time to time someone ought to call the attention of the people to the everyday joys and triumphs of a decent life. “And there is no greater triumph imaginable,” dour Joseph Caro opined, “than finding a husband for a daughter like Tamar.”
If charity was the pragmatic heart of Rabbi Zaki’s preaching, the philosophical core was found in a passage of Maimonides which he revived for Safed: “Everyone throughout the year must regard himself as if he were half innocent and half guilty. And he should regard the whole of mankind in the same way. If then he commits one more sin, he weighs down the scale of guilt against himself and against the whole world. And he himself causes the destruction of all. But if he fulfills one commandment, he turns the scale of merit in his favor and perhaps he saves the entire world. He by himself has power to bring salvation and deliverance to all the men of the world.” He frequently recited this passage, adding, “And every man in Safed tonight, Arab and Jew alike, has this divine opportunity. The charity you do tomorrow, you, Muhammad Iqbal, may save the world.”
The gentle teaching of the little rabbi was the more impressive in that his personal life was such a shambles. In retrospect Rachel had grown positively fond of Salonica, the largest Jewish city in the world thanks to the Spanish expulsion, though when she had first landed there from Africa she had assured her daughters that it was a stinking place where the Turkish governors were despicable, the Greek citizens inhospitable and the Jews irreligious. In Safed the same people who listened with deepening respect as their humble rabbi talked of the good life, heard that same man’s, wife berate him as a fool; but the one did not seem to affect the other.
Rachel’s ill temper was understandable. She had convinced herself that if the family had remained in Salonica, Zaki would by now have found a husband for Sarah, but when the rabbi looked at that unfortunate girl, now twenty-five and with a worsening complexion and disposition, he wondered. He sympathized with Sarah. With her two younger sisters married she was bound to be miserable, but she made herself so disagreeable that Zaki had pretty well stopped offering her to the young men who came to his shop.
Then one day in 1547 he came puffing home with the titillating news that a new rabbi had come to Safed. “A tall man, very handsome. His name is Abulafia and he has been wandering through Africa and Egypt. He has no wife.”
Rachel jumped. “Speak to him right away, Zaki! It’s your fault your daughter has no husband.”
Zaki agreed to this remarkable thesis. These days he agreed to almost everything, so Rachel continued, “It’s a father’s duty to find men for his daughters, and it reflects sorely on you, Zaki, that your oldest daughter is unmarried. Look at her—a splendid woman.”
Zaki looked at her and thought: I could name six things that girl could do which would help her more than any of my efforts. Nevertheless, he looked forward to an intimate talk with the newcomer, for no rabbi should be without a wife.
Dr. Abulafia created excitement in more than the Zaki family. His years of wandering had made him thinner; his beard was gray; he wore a turban; and his constant search for the mysterious meanings of man’s relationship to God had caused his
features to assume a remote beauty that was disturbing to men and women alike. There was a sensuousness about him, manifest in all he did, a mixture of Spanish grace and Hebrew insight; and before he had been in Safed a month it was clear that the Kabbalist group had found a new teacher and possibly their leader.
To the public and to the large number of students who crowded to hear him lecture on the essence of God, Abulafia was impressive, for he taught that even the humblest Jew, by strict concentration and a longing for the infinity of God, could lift himself to levels of comprehension much higher and more complex than those which now engaged him; but it was with the select group of experts who met with him each dawn that Abulafia was radically effective, for to these trained philosophers the Spanish doctor expounded the inner mysteries of the Kabbala itself.
Abulafia’s introductory beliefs, which he expressed in words of almost flowing purity, were twofold: “To live in harmony with himself a man must labor to unite the knots which bind his soul, and this is a personal matter between man and himself; then he must seek through contemplation an understanding of the Name of God, which is the timeless relationship between man and God.”
Abulafia’s teaching on the apprehension of God was easy to understand: “You must sit in a quiet room with a sheet of clean white paper and a brush, and you must begin to write at random the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which is the language in which God wrote the Torah; and without associating these flowing, moving letters with specific words, you must permit them to come and go of their own will, nor must your mind direct your arm to direct your fingers to direct the brush to form this letter or that or to put it either here or there. And after several hours of this march of letters, if your concentration is of sufficient intensity, the pen will fall away and the paper will move from you, and you will be in the presence of endless thought in which the letters move of themselves, free and in space, and after a while your whole body will be seized by a trembling and your breath will come in short gasps and perhaps not at all, and there will be a bursting of your chest and you will feel that you are about to die—and then an enormous peace will come, for your soul will have untied the knots that bind it and the veil will have passed from your eyes; and after some time in this state of light you will see new letters of a radiance unknown before, and from them will appear the ineffable four, and you will see them, not on the paper nor on the wall nor in the room, but in the endless fathoms of your soul, the sacred Name of God, Y H W H.”
That was the primary level of Abulafia’s teaching, available to any scholar who took the trouble to study one of the handwritten copies of the Zohar circulating in Safed. This was a book as mystical as its teachings, for great contention had arisen as to its authorship. Perhaps because of local pride, the men of Safed believed that it had been written by the immortal Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, who for thirteen years in the second century had hidden from the Roman soldiers of Emperor Hadrian. He had lived in a cave in the nearby village of Peqiin, where Elijah had visited him, bearing the secrets of the Kabbala, which Yohai had written down in the Zohar, the Splendor.
But as Abulafia knew, the book, which consisted of a commentary on the Torah, had been composed around 1280 by an adventurous Spaniard who had written it in ancient Aramaic to lend it credence: it was a mélange of mystical formulae, probably gathered from many original sources, plus a compelling explanation of the way a poetic mind can sometimes hypnotize itself into an apprehension of the reality of God. In secrecy, in well-thumbed copies which passed at night, the Zohar had traveled from Granada in Spain to all parts of Europe, treasured as much by mystical Christians as by Jews.
It was in the mountain village of Safed, however, that its power was to be most clearly demonstrated, for here had gathered, almost by accident, the half-dozen men who were to give the book its philosophical vitality, after which it would enjoy long life in Germany, Poland and Russia, forming the basis of a radical new interpretation of Judaism. It was a book which influenced all who touched it, and Dr. Abulafia, as the leader of the Safed group, expounded its first levels in lucid and seductive prose, but when he progressed to the second and third levels he became incoherent so far as logical exposition was concerned, but burning in his brilliance of metaphor and suggestion. Once, when a flood of incomprehensible words had tumbled from him like a stream issuing from the hills of Safed, he apologized, “To utter one word from the world of ultimate mystery is to break down the keystone of an arch so that no one knows from which side the next stone will fall.” He was asked by his pupils to put his words down in an orderly system, but he countered, “Where would a man start in a field that has no beginning, no end and no definition? But if you listen to me long enough you will gain a sense of what I am trying to say, and that is all that I know myself.” At other times he spoke with a clarity that was almost agonizing, and with an insight gained partly through rejection and personal tragedy, partly through an all-absorbing contemplation of God: “If seventy of us in this room study the Torah we find that it has seventy different faces to present to us, for each of us will see his own creation of beauty shining through the words of God. But I say to you that the Torah has not one face, nor seventy faces, but six hundred thousand faces, one for every Jew who was present when God gave Moses our Teacher the law; and if the cords that bind your soul are untied, you are free to find your own Torah among the six hundred thousand.”
In the group of listeners influenced by Dr. Abulafia’s teaching was Rabbi Zaki, but he was affected in a different way. When the more abstruse explanations were reached he was apt to fall asleep, and occasionally he snored, for Kabbalistic flights of thought were quite beyond him; and one morning when the students were inclined to laugh at the dozing shoemaker, Rabbi Abulafia rebuked them, saying, “I think our sleeping fat man describes better than my words what I am trying to say. Rabbi Zaki has seen not the face of the Torah but through to the heart of the Torah itself, and there he found the one commandment of God upon which Torah and Talmud and Judaism rest: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ I happen to know that Rabbi Zaki spent last night sitting with the sick wife of Rabbi Paltiel and he requires to sleep, and there is no man in this room worthy to waken him.”
The reason why Rabbi Zaki loved to attend Abulafia’s lectures, which he rarely understood, was that he could sit in the synagogue and think: A fine rabbi like Abulafia ought to have a wife. I can imagine no woman in Safed, nor in Salonica either, who would make him a better wife than my Sarah.
So one day in 1549, after the Spanish doctor had finished a soaring exhortation, Zaki waited for the scholars to ask their last questions. Then, alone with Abulafia, he asked bluntly, “Doctor, why don’t you take my daughter Sarah as your wife?”
Dr. Abulafia sat down. “Sarah?” he asked. “Do I know Sarah?”
“You must have seen her. She appears often with my wife.”
“Oh, Sarah! Yes.” There was silence.
“The Talmud tells us that a rabbi must have a wife, and I assure you that Sarah is as fine a girl as her mother.”
“I’m sure she is,” the Spaniard said.
“And even if you cannot accept my daughter, Dr. Abulafia, you must find a wife somewhere, for many of us feel that your influence in Safed would be greater if …”
“If I were married?”
“Yes. For a rabbi it’s practically an obligation.”
The handsome Spaniard sat looking at his hands for some minutes, then said quietly, “For your daughter I would be an old man. After all, I’m fifty-seven, till a hundred and twenty.” This was the Jewish way of stating an age, derived from the promise of God as given in the Torah: “Yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.”
“I assure you Sarah would not worry about that.”
Again there was a protracted silence which neither man knew how to break, but some heavy burden was on Abulafia’s heart, and when he looked at the simple, round face of his friend he was inspired to speak with this man as he had never
spoken to another, and he suggested, “Shall we climb the hill to the old fort?” And the two bearded rabbis walked slowly through the narrow streets of Safed, those winding, wonderful streets that never ran in one direction more than a hundred feet, and after considerable climbing past seven synagogues they came to the broken rocks of the fort, and there Abulafia pointed to the distant hills and to the Sea of Galilee.
“This is paradise, Zaki, and I agree with you that any man who lives here should have a wife.”
“Doctor, believe me! Sarah would make you a perfect wife. She’s neat, and her mother has taught her how to cook.”
“But in Spain …” Abulafia halted, afraid to conjure up revolting memories, except that the reassuring presence of Rabbi Zaki encouraged him to do so. Laughing nervously he said, “Zaki, you want to get rid of a daughter who clutters your house. And that’s a big problem. But I must get rid of the devil who rides my soul, and that’s impossible.”
The little rabbi looked at the Kabbalist in amazement. “But it’s you who tells us each morning that we must untie the cords that bind our souls.”
“I do,” Abulafia said. “And I cannot unbind my own.”
The two rabbis looked at the sweeping beauty of upper Galilee; in the days when it was wooded, say, when the great rabbis of the third and fourth centuries were meeting in Tverya to compile the Talmud, it must have been even more inspiring. And Abulafia whispered, “In Spain I was married. To a Christian woman whom I adored. We were marvelously happy, but I was afraid to tell her I was a secret Jew. We had two sons. They didn’t know I was a Jew either. When the worst of the persecutions struck …” He hesitated. He rose and walked about for some time, looking down at Tubariyeh, where the soul of Judaism had been saved by a group of dedicated rabbis much like the ones who had now gathered in Safed on a somewhat similar mission. He wondered if any of those great old men like Rabbi Asher the Groats Maker had been burdened with a sin as terrible as his. Then he looked down, and Rabbi Zaki was waiting.
The Source: A Novel Page 101
