The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Four, five, six, seven, eight: to the right he saw the Arab mosque as he had seen it on the morning of victory, and to the left stood Rabbi Yom Tov Gaddiel’s blunt synagogue, still standing in opposition.

  Nine, ten: he stopped in pain, for this was the spot at which Ilana Hacohen had fought off the first Arab attack across the stairs. Children were playing in the area now, and he wondered if, when they grew up, they would have the courage to do the things Ilana had done, that wonderful girl: she had been so powerful in her dedication; where would her like be found again?

  Eleven, twelve, thirteen: he paused to look at the Arab homes, still painted blue to ward off danger, and the blue had protected them for thirteen hundred years—but in the end it had been powerless. How lovely the blue Arab homes were, with their unexpected arches and little gardens; how empty they seemed now, staring up without roofs toward the impartial sun. He had never hated Arabs, Eliav reflected, and he wished that they had remained to make their singing arches and their gardens part of his land as before.

  Fourteen, fifteen: he was on the small plaza where the trees grew so charmingly, flowers on each side, and grapes running up the Jewish wall, and on the Arab side the six tall evergreens which gave the plaza distinction and beauty; here Ilana and Vered had held off the enemy for three hours and in the trunks of the slim trees one could still find bullets. Beyond were morning-glories prolific in their blue loveliness; and if the stairs of Zefat contained only this one small area, they would be memorable.

  Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen: now as he neared the head of the stairs he could see the brooding gray walls of the police station, still marked with bullet holes where Teddy Reich and Nissim Bagdadi had tried so vainly to assault the fortress; he still wondered how they had managed to take this forbidding stronghold.

  Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one: he found no words, only the terrible ache of lost companionship; here Bagdadi had fallen; there Ilana and Bar-El had stood, and they were dead; what a terrible burden a man must bear if he climbs the stairs of the years, if he survives and attempts to govern as his dead companions would have wished.

  On this crisp dawn he would ascend beyond the last flight of stairs, for his mind was carried upward to the Crusader ruins, from which he had first seen the Galilee in snow, and as he climbed he saw to the east that impregnable fortress against whose capture his mind had rebelled, and he chanted, as David did when making his ascent to Jerusalem: “ ‘If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when men rose up against us: then they had swallowed us up quick, when their wrath was kindled against us.’ ” Beyond the fortress, which had fallen as miraculously as any in the Torah, he could see once more the flawless land whose sweeping hills moved in majesty and whose towering clouds still twisted in violence above the lake hallowed to so many.

  He saw the lake itself and, toward the far end, that bit of land which Shmuel Hacohen had finally purchased from the emir in Damascus, the land where Jews had proved that they could not only read Talmud but also farm their inheritance. I suppose you have to be like Shmuel, Eliav reflected. You stake out your land. You ride around it on a donkey to protect it. And if somebody shoots at you, you fight back. And if in the end you’re killed, you trust that your granddaughter Ilana will carry on where you left off. He bowed his head and whispered, “How can any man have the courage to govern a land like this?”

  Then, as he raised his head, he discovered, from an unexpected quarter, the answer to his question; for he looked down upon Tiberias, that insignificant, that precious town which had given the world both the Talmud and the Bible. Outside the old Crusader walls he could discern the tomb of Moses Maimonides, of whom it was said, “From Moses to Moses there was no one like Moses.” Eliav thought: I hope I find one tenth the wisdom he did; and he promised himself that this afternoon, when he passed Tiberias, he would pause to light a candle at the tomb. He doubted that any part of the great philosopher’s corpse had reached this burial ground. The tomb could only be a cenotaph, for legend explained that as Maimonides lay dying in Egypt he asked to be buried in Israel, whereupon his corpse was lashed to a donkey and the beast headed north. The animal had died at Tiberias, so there the tomb stood, reminding ordinary men that even they could attain reason if they applied themselves. “I’ll light three candles,” Eliav said.

  Then his eye climbed the hill back of Tiberias, toward those fatal Horns of Hittim, and he could imagine the cave in which another legend placed the grave of Rabbi Akiba, and as he paid homage to this great leader he thought: I wish we had him with us now.

  For there was beginning to be an outcry, both in Israel and in the world, against the arbitrary structure of contemporary Judaism: Zipporah Zederbaum unable to marry because of an outworn law four thousand years old; Eliav forbidden to marry Vered because of the Cohen legalities; Zodman’s divorce not legal because modern-thinking American rabbis could not be trusted; the German woman, faithful to Judaism even at the cost of her eye and her life, with children who were not accepted as Jews; the Indian Jews who were disbarred; and Leon Berkes who could not work as a Jew. Eliav was particularly worried by such rigid crystallization because he had read enough history to know that if it were continued, the revolt of the kibbutzniks and people like Ilana and Vered could become damaging. In any other nation a typical official like Eliav would find himself allied against the priests who insisted upon such irrefrangible law, and even he had begun to echo the warning voiced by Ilana Hacohen: “this Mickey Mouse crap.”

  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, “Ilan, 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 whe
re 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.”