And suddenly Cullinane realized that this reasonably intelligent professor was aware that those who worked in Israel lived under the hammers of history, under the constant threat of annihilation, but he seemed not to be aware of the parallel fact that he in New York and his brother in Washington lived under precisely the same threat.
• • •
Next afternoon began the long debate that would determine the character of the state that was struggling to be born. It started because Ilana Hacohen and Isidore Gottesmann were assigned living quarters in a small house that stood next to the historic shoemaker shop that had once been used by Rabbi Zaki the Martyr. By the people of Safad this shop was regarded with affection, and by tradition it was reserved for the home of some rabbi. In 1948, when the Jewish-Arab conflict was drawing to its climax, it was occupied by the Rebbe of Vodzh.
The Yiddish word rebbe had originally signified an elementary-school teacher who taught religious classes in Hebrew in the villages of Poland and Russia; but later it had become a specialized word identifying those gifted rabbis who operated within the tradition of Rabbi Abulafia of Safad: the mystics, charismatic leaders and inspired tzaddikim of eastern European Hasidism, the unique rabbis who gathered about them devoted followings. Two men would speak: “My rebbe can uproot mountains with his interpretations.” “Yes, but my rebbe can cure all manner of sickness.” The Jews of Vodzh said, “Our rebbe understands the Talmud better than any other rebbe. He is the well that gives water without losing a drop.”
Even as a young man in Vodzh the rebbe had been recognized as one specially destined for a holy life, and word spread among the Jews of Russia and Poland that a worthy successor had finally been found to the great Rebbe of Vodzh, who had died a martyr in the pogroms of 1875. The young man’s piercing blue eyes seemed to cut through to the essential moral problems that men faced, and he became widely known as Itzik, Little Yitzhak. At twenty-four Little Isaac felt no hesitation in condemning the richest Jew in Vodzh for a miserly act which contravened the teaching of the Talmud, and it had been his energy alone that had organized the mass exodus of his loyal followers to Safad. How difficult that had been, to bring those seventy people back to Eretz Israel, except that thirty years later most of the Jews who had not followed him from Vodzh were dead in the gas chambers of Oswiecim.
In Safad, Rebbe Itzik had established a new home for his followers. Along the narrow alleys his Jews had found abandoned houses which they rebuilt into clean homes. Living on alms from America they had acquired one of the ancient Ashkenazi synagogues, not the sturdy one of Rabbi Yom Tov Gaddiel’s but an adequate refuge, and through the years they had prospered in their modest way. The Vodzher Jews they were called, and although some of the younger people had left for livelier towns, the rebbe’s group still contained some sixty people determined to worship God according to the Torah as interpreted by their Vodzher Rebbe.
His theology was simple. He believed literally the great commandment of Moses our Teacher: “Now therefore hearken, O Israel, unto the statutes and unto the judgments, which I teach you … Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you.” To Rebbe Itzik this commandment was lucid and all-embracing. It meant exactly what it said. A Jew should keep the law as handed to Moses by God. That law was found in the Torah, which contained 613 specific orders ranging from the first noble words at the beginning of Genesis, “Be fruitful, and multiply” to the last tragic commandment to Moses our Teacher as he lay dying in sight of the promised land: “Thou shalt not go over thither.” Encompassed between this nobility and tragedy lay all the law that man required, the lists in Leviticus, the repetitions in Numbers, the final summations in Deuteronomy. These laws Rebbe Itzik knew by heart and their words were sweet: “And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him.” “If a man vow a vow unto the Lord, or swear an oath to bind his soul with a bond; he shall not break his word, he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth.”
Upon these laws of the Torah a man must build the general pattern of his life. The ritual to accompany his birth was explained and the manner of his burial was laid out. His love for a woman was hedged with decent precautions, and his relations with his son, his business and his king were set forth; and Rebbe Itzik was satisfied that a Jew must live precisely within this body of law, and he had put together a congregation of sixty people prepared to do so.
The life that Rebbe Itzik had devised for them was somewhat different from that followed by the other Jews of Safad. In dress they were conspicuous; they looked like archaic ghosts in long black cloaks, flat fur-rimmed hats, shortened trousers and heavily ribbed stockings. They wore beards and black skullcaps and for some perverse reason preferred walking with the stoop that had characterized them when they were forced to live furtively in ghettos. Their daily life was much the same as that followed by Jews in Safad four hundred years before, with frequent synagogue attendance and strict devotion to complex dietary laws. And on Shabbat, starting on Friday afternoon, they stood especially apart from the rest of Safad, a little group of devout Jews living around Rabbi Zaki’s old shop.
No fire could be lit, no light used. No food was cooked, no vehicle moved. A man could walk only two thousand paces from his home and he could carry nothing; if he had a cold and needed a handkerchief he could tie it around his wrist and make believe it was a piece of clothing, but carry it he could not. On this day a man could not even carry his prayer shawl to the synagogue. The boy children of Rebbe Itzik’s group were especially differentiated from other young Jews by the long and often delicate curls dangling in front of their ears and by the four-cornered shawls which they dropped over their heads and wore under their shirts. The shawls bore fringes in accordance with God’s Torah: “Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments … that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the Lord, and do them.”
But powerful as he was in dictating the life of his community, Rebbe Itzik was not arrogant; he never assumed that he was wise enough, by himself, to interpret God’s Torah, and it was his constant responsibility to study the Talmud, finding therein the guidance that had kept Jews together for more than fifteen hundred years. Each day of the year, excepting only the Ninth of Ab, when they mourned the loss of Jerusalem by staying up all night to read Lamentations, the male adults of the Vodzher group assembled at the synagogue to study Talmud, and since all lived on charity contributed from abroad, the men were free to sit in circles about their rebbe as he expounded passages from the massive volumes. One of the Vodzher Jews once wrote to Brooklyn: “If I have a dream of paradise, it’s to sit in the synagogue on a wintry night in Safad, when snow is on the ground, and the lamp is flickering, while our rebbe expounds Talmud.”
Rebbe Itzik knew the great book virtually by heart, and members of his congregation liked to boast: “Our Vodzher Rebbe can do this. You take a volume of the Talmud and pierce any six pages with a pin. Our rebbe can look at the first page, close his eyes and tell you what eleven additional words your pin has gone through.” The Talmud by which he lived provided answers to any conceivable problems, although sometimes, in the middle years of the twentieth century, one had to wrench meanings a little here and there to uncover a relevant legalism, but he was not averse to doing so, for he found the great compilation surprisingly contemporary: “Rabbi bar Mehasia said in the name of Rabbi Hama ben Goria who said in the name Rab: If all the seas were ink, and all the reeds were pens, and all the skies were parchment, and all the men could write, these would not suffice to write down all the red tape of this government.”
But the most remarkable characteristic which set Rebbe Itzik and his little group apart from the other Jews of Safad was their determination never to use Hebrew except as a holy language. From the Torah and Talmud they had derived the conviction that Hebrew would be
used for common speech only after the arrival of the Messiah and that until such time it was reserved for religious purposes; and in furtherance of this belief Rebbe Itzik pointed out: “Observe that in the Talmud itself, only the Mishna, the law of God, is written in Hebrew. The Gemara, the explanation of ordinary rabbis, is inscribed in Aramaic. What the Talmud refused to do, we also shall refuse to do.”
Therefore, outside the synagogue, the Vodzher Jews spoke only Yiddish and they held it to be offensive when others spoke to them in Hebrew. Occasionally Rebbe Itzik had scolded people who addressed him in that language, and he went so far as to refuse his followers permission to ride on any train run by the English government, since the tickets were printed in Hebrew as well as in Arabic and English.
As long as Palestine remained in British hands the peculiarities of Rebbe Itzik’s group occasioned no difficulty. In Jerusalem, Jews of similar persuasion in obedience to the Talmud sometimes stoned ambulances that tried to move on Shabbat, but in the Vodzher part of Safad the streets were so narrow that no car could enter, and even that cause of irritation was avoided. But in 1948, with the likelihood of an eventual Jewish state, problems developed.
Rebbe Itzik viewed with apprehension the idea of such a state in Palestine, and to imagine one bearing the name of “Israel” was repugnant. He told his associates, “The idea’s an outrage. It must not be permitted.” He became so violent in his rejection of statehood for the Jews that he threatened to become a nuisance, and when some young men of his congregation actually ran off to Kibbutz Makor to fight with the Palmach he deplored them as if they had converted to another religion. “There must be no Israel!” he protested.
To support these curious reactions Rebbe Itzik found authority in the Torah. Repeatedly God had condemned the children of Israel to exile among other nations: “And I will scatter you among the heathen … and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste.” Jerusalem was to be occupied, which meant that the Arabs, in holding the Holy Land, were acting as God’s agents, and to oppose them was sacrilegious. Furthermore, the Holy Land would revert to the Jews only when the Messiah appeared; then Hebrew could be spoken generally, and for ordinary human beings like the Palmach to try to force the coming of the Messiah was presumptuous. There must be no state of Israel, no Hebrew, no resistance to the Arabs. There must be submission, prayer and resignation; and if Arabs chose to massacre, that also was God’s will.
Fortunately for MemMem Bar-El and his Palmach, only a handful of Vodzher Jews held these extreme views, for even among the little rebbe’s immediate followers about half listened when other leaders like Rav Loewe and Rabbi Goldberg advised: “The Palmach serves as an instrument of God’s will. Co-operate in every way, for this time we shall fight the Arabs.” When Rebbe Itzik was advised of what the other rabbis had said he folded his hands and looked at the ground. “They do not understand God’s will,” he whispered sorrowfully.
The argument started toward noon on Thursday, April 15, when Ilana Hacohen, refreshed from hours of victorious love-making with her husband, came into the narrow street that ran past Rebbe Itzik’s home. As she left her new quarters, a rifle slung across her shoulder, she brushed back her bobbed hair, straightened her very short skirt, and happened to see the mezuzah nailed to the doorpost in conformance with the law of the Torah. Sensing the days of trial that lay ahead she reached up and touched it. As she did so, she happened to see in the street the tense little figure of Rebbe Itzik.
“For good luck!” she said in Hebrew. “We’re going to need it.”
To the little rebbe, everything this brazen girl had done was an outrage. She appeared like a wanton. She carried a rifle. Obviously she was fighting for a state of Israel. She had touched the mezuzah as if it had been an ordinary Christian idol. She had referred to it as a mere good-luck omen. And she had addressed him in Hebrew. With contempt he turned his back on her and walked away.
Ilana Hacohen, reared on the fighting principles of her grandfather and her anti-rabbinical father, reacted on impulse. To the astonishment of the benevolent dictator, she grabbed him by the shoulder and wheeled him around so abruptly that his hat fell off. “Don’t you rebuke me,” she warned.
Rebbe Itzik was not accustomed to opposition, and the unprecedented action of the sabra stunned him. He stooped, tried to recover his hat but awkwardly kicked it farther from him. As he rose he found his eyes opposite the brazen bare knees, then staring up at the girl’s tanned, insolent face. Irrelevantly he cried, in Yiddish, “You’re not even married to that man in there, are you?”
“If you speak to me,” Ilana snapped, “use the language of the land.”
The infuriated rebbe started to reprimand her and she started to answer back. Her defiance attracted a group of the rebbe’s congregation, and an old man cried, “Whore! Don’t dare to address our rebbe.”
Ilana swung to face her accuser, and as she did so the butt of her rifle whipped close to the rebbe’s cheek, and he drew back. The newcomer thought his rebbe had been struck and he started to reach for Ilana. Deftly she grabbed her rifle with two hands and parried the clumsy effort.
The noise drew Gottesmann to the narrow street, and he quickly deduced what was happening. He knew Ilana’s feeling toward the ultra-orthodox, whom her grandfather and father had derided, and he could guess the rebbe’s reaction to her, a soldier of the emerging state. He caught his wife and pulled her back into the house. Then he took her place in the street and tried to mollify the outraged Jews.
Speaking Yiddish, which quietened things somewhat, he told the patriarch, “Rebbe, we’ve come to save your town—if we can.”
“Only God will determine whether Safad stands or falls,” the rebbe replied.
“That’s true,” Gottesmann agreed.
“But we’ll help Him along,” a young passing Palmach fighter cried in Hebrew.
Gottesmann, seeking to ease this new blow, assured the rebbe in Yiddish, “The important thing is, we must work together.”
The insulted rebbe retreated to the shoemaker’s house, where his loyal supporters consoled him. At the same time Gottesmann retired to the house next door, where he told Ilana, “We’re here for one job, Lan. Don’t be sidetracked.”
“We’re here for two jobs,” she corrected. “To win a nation and to see that it gets started right. You let that old fool …”
“That’s not the word,” her husband protested. “Just stay away from him.”
“I will, if he stays away from me.”
But on the next day fresh trouble broke out. It was April 16, 1948, and the English were evacuating Safad. The captain in charge of trucks, a fed-up veteran from one of the mill towns in England who understood neither Arab nor Jew, marched wearily into the heart of the Jewish section, attended by four tough Tommies with submachine guns. He summoned Rebbe Itzik and some of the other elders, while MemMem Bar-El remained hidden behind a wall as Gottesmann translated the English for him.
The British officer shouted, “Jews of Safad, in one hour we’re leaving. Your situation is hopeless. You’re a thousand. The Arabs waiting over there are fourteen thousand. Fresh troops moved down last night from Syria. If you stay, dreadful things are going to happen. We offer you—all of you—safe-conduct to Acre.” He waited.
Rebbe Itzik moved forward. “We’ve held a meeting,” he said, indicating the ten Jews of his congregation. “And we have decided that the Vodzher Jews will stay here.” The British officer groaned and wiped his forehead. Then Itzik added, “But the people of Rabbi Goldberg and Rav Loewe are free to leave with you.”
The Englishman turned to these two rabbis and said, “You’ve made the right choice.” He started shouting orders under which all the Jews could ride his trucks into Acre, and after his instructions had been repeated in both Hebrew and Yiddish a few old men and some mothers with babies began preparing themselves to move through the Arab lines to the trucks.
“All of you!” the officer bellowed. “Get going!” He started pushi
ng the people toward the protected exit route but he was peremptorily halted by MemMem Bar-El, who appeared dramatically with a rifle, backed up by ten Palmach men.
“No Jew will leave Safad,” he announced quietly in Hebrew. There was consternation. When the British officer heard Gottesmann’s translation he showed his incredulity. As for the would-be refugees, they took the command as a death sentence, while Rebbe Itzik held it to be insulting for a man with no authority—a stranger in Safad—to contradict the decision of the rabbis that the old and young could leave.
“No Jew leaves Safad,” Bar-El repeated.
“This is highly irregular,” the Briton fumed. “Who are you?”
“MemMem Bar-El,” Gottesmann interrupted. “Palmach.”
“How’d you get in?” the Englishman asked.
“Right through your lines,” Gottesmann laughed.
“But, man! You’re overwhelmed.” The tired Englishman indicated the four compass points. “Surrounded. Outnumbered. Starving.”
“That’s right,” Gottesmann said. “All the Arabs have to do is come in a few steps and capture us.”
The officer shrugged his shoulders and pleaded, “At least let us take out the children.”
“You heard him,” Gottesmann said, indicating Bar-El.
The Englishman ignored the MemMem and asked Gottesmann, “You educated in England?”
“Norwich.”
This seemed to make a difference to the Englishman, and he pleaded, “You know they intend to kill you all? They’ve told us so.”
“We’re not evacuating.”
“Let us take the cripples and sick.”
MemMem Bar-El understood the plea and snapped, “We stay together. As we did at Massada … at Warsaw.”
The Englishman licked his dry lips and said, “I’ve been trying to prevent a massacre. Now it’s on your head.”
“It’s on all our heads,” Bar-El replied simply. “Your mother’s and my uncle’s. You English have done everything possible to destroy Palestine. When you leave … in a few minutes … you’ll turn all the installations over to the Arabs, won’t you? Arms, food, everything.”
The Source: A Novel Page 117
