“Oh yes, we were filled with ideals when we arrived. One soon loses them in this country. Look at it … so ruined that nothing can grow. What little we do have is stolen by the Bedouins, and the Turks take what the Bedouins leave. If I were you boys I’d keep on going to Jaffa and get on the next boat to America.”
An. outlandish idea, Jossi thought.
“If it were not for the charity of Rothschild, De Hirsch, and De Schumann we would all have starved long ago.”
They left Rosh Pinna the next morning and set out to cross the hills to Safed. Safed was one of the four holy cities of the Jews. It sat on a beautiful cone-shaped hill at the entrance to the Huleh area of the Galilee. Here, Jossi thought, their dejection would soon fade because here there were second-, third-, and fourth-generation Jews who lived and studied the Cabala, the book of mystics. The shock of Rosh Pinna was repeated in Safed. They found a few hundred aged Jews who lived in study and from the alms of coreligionists around the world. They cared nothing about the rebirth of the House of Jacob-but wanted only to live quietly, studiously, and in poverty.
The Rabinsky brothers set out again from Safed the next morning, and crossed to nearby Mount Canaan, and stopped to get their bearings. From Mount Canaan the vista was magnificent. From here they could look back at Safed on its cone-shaped hill and beyond it to the Sea of Galilee. To the north they could see the rolling hills of the Huleh from whence they had come. Jossi loved this view-for before him was the land he had first trod. Yes, he vowed again that someday-someday it would be his.
Yakov’s bitterness began to show. “All our lives, all our prayers… and look at it, Jossi.”
Jossi put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Look how beautiful it appears from here,” he said. “I tell you, Yakov, someday we will make it look just as beautiful from the bottom of the hill as it does from the top.”
“I don’t know what to believe any more,” Yakov whispered. “All through those winters as we walked through the mountains blue with cold … all through those blistering summers.”
Jossi said, “Now cheer up. Tomorrow we begin our journey to Jerusalem.”
Jerusalem! The magic word caused Yakov’s flagging spirits to soar.
The next morning they came down from Mount Canaan and moved south along the Sea of Galilee into the Genossar Valley, past Arbel and the Horns of Hattin on the plains where Saladin the Kurd had once crushed the Crusaders in mortal combat.
But as they trudged on, even Jossi became dismayed. Their Promised Land was not a land flowing with milk and honey but a land of festering stagnated swamps and eroded hills and rock-filled fields and unfertile earth caused by a thousand years of Arab and Turkish neglect. It was a land denuded of its richness. It was a land that lay bleeding and fallow.
After a while they came to Mount Tabor in the center of the Galilee, and climbed up this hill which had played such a great part in the history of their people. It was here that the Jewish Joan of Arc, Deborah, and her General Barak hid with their armies and swooped down to crush the invading host. Atop Tabor they could see for miles in every direction. Around them stood Crusader ruins and a tiny monastery; it was here that Jesus was transfigured and held communion with Moses and Elijah.
From Tabor they could see the entire sorrowful picture. A fruitless, listless, dying land.
… and they trudged on with heavy hearts. The seeds of the past were all around them. They passed Mount Gilboa
where Saul and Jonathan fell in battle and where Gideon lies-and they passed Bethel and Jericho––
As they moved into the hills of Judea their spirits rose again! The ancient terraces still stood from the time when hundreds of thousands of Jews took richness from the earth. There was no richness left, the hills were eroded, but the elation of the Rabinsky brothers could not be dimmed as they ascended higher and higher and higher.
Arriving at the peak of the ridges, Jossi and Yakov saw fee City of David!
Jerusalem! Heart of their hearts-dream of their dreams! In that second all the years of privation and all the bitterness and suffering were erased.
They entered the old walled city through the Damascus Gate and wended their way through the narrow streets and bazaars to the mighty Hurva Synagogue.
“If only Father were with us now,” Jossi whispered.
“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem …” Yakov prayed the lament of the captives.
From the synagogue they went to the one remaining wall of their great ancient temple. It stood on the site of the Mosque of Omar, the Dome of the Rock. This wall was the holiest place in all Jewry.
When at last they sought hospitality from the Jews they lost their illusions. The Jews in Jerusalem were Hasidim, ultra-Orthodox fanatics whose interpretations of the Laws were so strict they could be lived up to only by complete withdrawal from the civilized world. Even in the Pale these groups had separated themselves from the rest of the ghetto.
For the first time since they left Zhitomir, Jossi and Yakov were refused the hospitality of a Jewish home. The Jerusalem Jews did not like the Bilus, and the Lovers of Zion were berated for their ungodlike ideas.
The boys then saw themselves as intruders in their own land. They walked away from Jerusalem shrouded in sadness-down from the hills of Judea toward the port of Jaffa.
This ancient port, which had been in constant use since Phoenician times, was another version of Beirut, Aleppo, or Tripoli-narrow alleys, filth, degradation. However, there were a few Jewish settlements nearby at Rishon le Zion, Rehovot, and Petah Tikva. In Jaffa itself there was some Jewish commerce as well as an agency for Jewish immigrants. Here they learned the full story. There were but five thousand Jews in the entire Palestine Province of the Ottoman Empire. Most of these were ancients who lived in study and prayer in the four holy cities of Safed, Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias. The dozen or so agricultural colonies established by Jews were all in dire straits. They were kept
going through the philanthropy of wealthy European Jews, the Barons de Hirsch, Rothschild, and the Swiss multimillionaire De Schumann. Much of the idealism of the Bilus had disappeared. It was one thing to speak of rebuilding the House of Jacob from a cellar in the Pale-it was another to face the realities of the hardships and the cornplete disintegration that had befallen Palestine. The Bilus were all inexperienced in agriculture. The philanthropists sent over experts to help them, but it was a matter of using cheap Arab labor and settling on two or three crops for export: olives, grapes, and citrus. No attempt at self-labor had been tried nor were there attempts to balance the agriculture. The Jews, in fact, had become overseers.
Both the Arabs and the ruling Turks stole from the Jews mercilessly. Crops were taxed to the limit-there were all sorts of restrictive stumbling blocks. The roving bands of Bedouins looked upon the Jews as “Children of Death” because of their refusal to defend themselves.
There were, however, a few hundred Jewish boys like the Rabinsky brothers who stayed around Jaffa, and these kept the spark of the Bilu movement alive. They talked night after night in the Arab cafes. The task of regenerating this miserable land seemed nearly impossible, but it could be done if there were only more Jews with a fighting spirit. Jossi reck— oned that more Jews had to come to Palestine sooner or later, for there were bound to be more and worse pogroms in Russia and the entire Pale was stirring. Everyone recognized that something was missing that was not in the Talmud or the Torah or the Midrash or the Mishna. Most of the boys, like Yakov and Jossi, had escaped from Russian military service or had fled out of misery or poverty or some idealistic hopes. The Jews already in Palestine treated them as “outsiders.” Further-they were stateless wanderers.
It took a year for an answer to come back from Rabbi Lipzin. They learned that their mother had died of incurable and bottomless grief.