ESSAY ON THE PARABLE AND ITS LESSON [HAMASHAL VEHANIMSHAL]
ALAN MINTZ
THE WORK OF MEMORY
Within the panoply of modern Jewish writing, Shmuel Yosef Agnon remains today an exceptional presence. At the center of the grand narrative of Jewish literature in our age is the movement outward from the world of the fathers. Whether the goal is full participation in American culture or the building of a new Jewish society in Palestine, the movement outward presupposes a break with the metaphysics of traditional Jewish belief and practice. That break can be figured as a clear-eyed ideological rejection or as a vertiginous loss of moorings, or as a sloughing off of a used-up identity. Whatever the case, the claims of Jewish law and the textual and theological world on which it is founded are stilled and suspended. The possibility of return continues to exist, and from time to time there appears a Rosenzweig who, out of the depths of acculturation, discovers the mystique of a Judaism he never knew. In relation to all these varied trajectories, Agnon’s exceptionality becomes clearer. Born into the world of tradition, Agnon found a way to participate in high European modernism without abandoning the rich textual world of Jewish faith. He even used this traditional world as a vehicle for realizing the ends of modernism at the same time as he used modernism as an instrument for illuminating fissures within the classical edifice of Judaism. Agnon thus performed the paradox of being a “revolutionary traditionalist,” in the formulation of Gershon Shaked.1 Comprehending this singular accomplishment has become one of the great challenges of modern Jewish literary studies.
During the last fifteen years of his life (he died in 1970), Agnon became increasingly preoccupied with writing an epic cycle of stories about Buczacz, the town in Galicia in which he was raised and that he left at the age of nineteen to settle in Palestine. The stories were gathered and edited by his daughter Emunah Yaron, according to her father’s guidelines, in 1973 in a volume called ‘Ir umelo’ah, A City in Its Fullness.2 It is from this story cycle that The Parable and Its Lesson is drawn. The stories of ‘Ir umelo’ah give strong evidence for the existence of a late style in Agnon. I am using late style (spätstil) in the sense in which Theodor Adorno used the term to describe the late sonatas of Beethoven as works that constitute a “moment when the artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it.”3 Edward Said adopts Adorno’s notion and uses it less as a precise term than as an evocative concept for illuminating the regressive freedom from constraints that writers and composers might allow themselves in the last stages of their careers. In a similarly evocative and nontechnical sense, the idea of late style helps us attend to the departures enacted in Agnon’s cycle of Buczacz stories. In Agnon’s case, the late breakthrough manifests itself as an act of renunciation. One of Agnon’s greatest achievements in the major phase of his career was an ironic self-dramatizing mode of narration that Arnold Band called the “dramatized ego.”4 The narrator of these important stories — as well as of the novel Oreaḥ natah lalun [A Guest for the Night] — is a figure very much like Agnon himself: a grandiose but weak-willed middle-aged writer with worldly interests as well as a loyalty to religious observance and Jewish learning, a kind of Jewish version of the homme moyen sensuel. Agnon used this persona to great advantage; but when it came to chronicling the long history of Buczacz he needed a narrative stance that, at least on the face of things, was objective, reliable and impersonal. And so he undertook the construction of the narrator of ‘Ir umelo’ah, who is a fascinating and formidable and new figure, but one whose creation meant putting away and giving up the authorial strategies relied on for so long.
Now, one might have expected a thunderous reception for a major book published three years after the death of a major author, especially if the author was the only Hebrew writer to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, as Agnon was in 1966, together with Nelly Sachs. Yet the response in Israel’s vibrant literary community was decidedly scant and muted; the book was hardly noticed, and those who wrote about it tended to be older critics who were already possessed of a long-term devotion to Agnon’s work. There are several factors that might account for this surprising failure to connect to an audience. To begin with, the stories in ‘Ir umelo’ah, all of which have to do with the lives of Galician Jews in the pre-modern period, describe a world that must have seemed remote, antiquated and irrelevant in the decades of intense state building after the War of Independence. Within the Zionist consensus about the untenable nature of Jewish life in exile, there had always been room for literary depictions that exposed the inner moral taint and political vulnerability of diaspora life. Even though the Buczacz stories convey no small measure of those failings, they nevertheless present a picture of a vital semi-autonomous and centuries-old religious communal culture; and this image could not have comported well with the attitudes and judgments of David Ben-Gurion’s statism and the society it shaped. During these years Ben-Gurion was busy building a state, while Agnon was building a city.
A second factor was the implied judgment that within Agnon’s overall artistic career ‘Ir umelo’ah represented a regression. Agnon had acceded to the status of a great European modernist with the publication of the parabolic stories of Sefer hama’ayinasim [Book of Deeds] and Temol shilshom [Only Yesterday, 1945], a novel of the Second Aliyah with its brilliantly surreal passages written in the voice of a supposedly mad dog named Balak. For readers who esteemed Agnon for these achievements, the Buczacz stories seemed a throwback to a more naïve and less accomplished artist who had become sentimental in old age and renounced the ironic lens through which his best work was filtered. The decline and decimation of Buczacz had already been critically analyzed in the great pre-war novel Oreaḥ natah lalun [A Guest for the Night, 1939], and now, after the Holocaust completed the work of destruction, it was felt that Agnon was producing something very different: a yizker bukh, a memorial volume suffused with nostalgia and mourning for a lost world. Finally, the unique qualities of ‘Ir umelo’ah were obscured within the plethora of titles published within the years following the author’s death.5 This posthumous Agnon corpus, whose volumes in their original editions are distinguished by their black dust jackets and white bindings, amounts to fourteen titles, some of which appeared in close succession. Among the lot are thematic anthologies of classical sources, collections of correspondence and gatherings of public statements and occasional speeches, as well as fiction.6 The most sensational of these publications was the appearance in 1971 of the novel Shira, a tale of marital infidelity set among German émigré scholars in Jerusalem of the 1930s. Chapters of the novel published in 1948 had whetted the appetite of an eager readership, but out of a scruple of discretion, Agnon had made provision for the appearance of the whole novel only after his death, and the estimation of the stir it would cause was not off the mark.7 When ‘Ir umelo’ah appeared two years later, fragmentary epic of a vanished world that it is, there was little critical oxygen remaining.
‘Ir umelo’ah, I would argue, is one of the most extraordinary responses to the murder of European Jewry in modern Jewish writing, yet the very connection of the work to the Holocaust is fraught and not entirely self-evident. On the one hand, the book as a whole is dedicated — on a separate page following the title page — to a city that flourished from the time of its founding “until the arrival of the vile, defiled and depraved enemy, and the madmen who abetted them, and brought about utter annihilation.” On the other hand, neither the Nazi liquidations nor even the rehearsal for them in World War One is represented in the stories, which do not reach beyond the nineteenth century. So despite the fact the stories are occasionally punctuated with invective against the Nazis and their role in bringing about the end of Jewish Buczacz, anything related to that destruction is kept from the representational field of the work. The potential for confusion created by this paradox can be illustrated, with the reader’s indulgence, by a personal testimony. Many years ago, when I was planning the research that led to my Ḥurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, I was examining Israeli literature for reactions to the Holocaust. Of course, I looked first to Agnon as the preeminent Hebrew writer who, unlike many of his Israeli counterparts, did not turn away from the diaspora and its religious culture. Yet, apart from several unconnected stories, I saw little at the time that would dissuade me from the conclusion that the literary world of the master was fixed in its characteristic modalities in the decades before the Holocaust and that a substantial reorientation toward the catastrophe could not be expected. It is clear to me now that I was wrong. What blinded me was a narrow conception of what it means to respond to catastrophe. To qualify as such, I mistakenly believed that a work of literature must represent the horrors of destruction, as well as depicting modes of survival and reconstruction. Because Agnon had not engaged the horrors, his work could not be thought of in any substantial sense as being part of Holocaust literature.
Reading ‘Ir umelo’ah has taught me three things. First, contending with the burden of the Holocaust was exactly what Agnon was doing in the postwar decades. The crucial story “Hasiman” [The Sign], which Emunah Yaron placed at the conclusion of ‘Ir umelo’ah, is actually a consecration story that introduces the project as a whole.8 The story describes the holiday of Shavuot in the Jerusalem suburb of Talpiyot in 1943, when the narrator, a stand-in for the author, is informed about the murder of the Jews of Buczacz. Late that night in the synagogue, the narrator undergoes a mystical experience in which the great medieval poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol appears to him and composes a sacred poem to perpetuate the memory of the Jews of Buczacz. The implication is that the narrator, who is deeply connected to the tradition of liturgical poetry, will now take this burden on himself and continue the task of memorialization is his own, storytelling mode. The epic cycle of Buczacz stories that took shape in these years is a direct result of that self-imposed imperative.
Second, Agnon makes a principled choice not to traffic in atrocity and instead devote his resources to reimagining the spiritual life of Galician Jewry in its fullest vigor. In a profound sense, those spiritual achievements were decimated long before the Nazis arrived on the scene; the twin forces of secularization and the terrors of World War One and the Russian Civil War saw to that. The Holocaust was the satanic coup de grace that provided a tragic point of retrospection for taking stock of Buczacz and all it represented in the centuries of its greatness when, as the narrator so often observes in ‘Ir umelo’ah, “Buczacz was Buczacz.” This reimagining is aware of itself as a literary endeavor, an artifice that knows it cannot bring back the dead or replace them. At the same time, it makes the claim that it is within the capabilities of the literary imagination to create a simulacrum of the fullness of that lost world, and that this act of creation/re-creation, both in its process and its product, is the true response we must make to catastrophe.
Finally, Agnon’s practice in ‘Ir umelo’ah has within it the power to require us to rethink our most basic notions about Holocaust literature. It has been axiomatic for many that the chief vocation of Holocaust literature is to represent the unspeakable ordeals that were visited upon the murdered victims, the survivors and their children. Without necessarily negating this mode of representation, Agnon declines to pursue it in favor of the imaginative reconstruction of an earlier lost spiritual and cultural plenitude. His motives, I would argue, derive from a deep intuition into the demands Jewish tradition makes on the modern imagination. In addition to giving voice to grief in the form of lamentation, the classical tradition stressed over time the recouping of the relationship between God and Israel and the restoration and repurification of the image of the destroyed community.9 In a modern era, this restorative impulse works through the literary imagination and takes the form of storytelling. Agnon retells the story of Buczacz as an imperfect but holy community, a qehilah qedoshah. His approach underscores the significance of cultural frameworks in determining responses to the Holocaust.10 Putting complex matters simply, we may say that an exclusive focus on extermination, atrocity and the death-in-life of survivors presents the Holocaust as the final vitiation of Enlightenment European culture. Focusing instead on the substance of the religious-cultural civilization of the past, even if the integrity of that civilization was severely compromised by the time of its destruction, presents the Holocaust as a rupture within the internal relations of the Jewish people and its history.
But does not such an imaginative program of restitution inevitably lead to an idealization of the lost object? And does the idealization of the past serve or traduce creative survival in the future? A famous example of this kind of response is Nathan Nata Hanover’s Yeven metsulah [Abyss of Despair], a chronicle of the sufferings of Polish Jewry during the Khmelnitski massacres of 1648–49.11 After a martyrologically tinged account of the horrific ordeals suffered by the Jewish communities of Galicia and the Ukraine, Hanover concludes his work with a eulogy that mourns the greatness that was once Polish Jewry; the slaughtered communities are collectively recalled as systematically embodying the cardinal virtues of Torah, avodah and ma’asim tovim. Agnon is especially aware of Hanover’s chronicle because the consequences of the Khmelnitski massacres play so important a role in the history of Buczacz. Yet when it comes to mounting his own project of remembrance, the option of composing an idyll is one Agnon conspicuously declines. Although idealization is not absent from ‘Ir umelo’ah, it is reconfigured to serve a different purpose. Memorialization, for Agnon, is a set of critical choices and discriminations. In ‘Ir umelo’ah, it is synagogue worship and Torah study that become the signs under which Agnon will set about reimagining the history of Buczacz. It is important to keep in mind that this was only one among a number of schemata Agnon could have chosen. The past could have been recouped around Jewish-gentile relations, or the economic fortunes of the various handicrafts and trades that flourished in the town, or relations between the poor and prosperous. It may seem natural that Agnon would have chosen worship and study, but it remains a choice.
‘Ir umelo’ah begins with a description of the town’s study houses and synagogues, their appurtenances and sacred objects and then proceeds to a consideration of the key personalities who held the offices of ḥazzan (cantor), shamash (sexton, beadle), and gabbai (treasurer); accounts of the great rabbis who held sway in Buczacz, as well as tales of anonymous piety, occupy the core of the book. Yet this plan is only a scaffolding; it represents the idealizing framework within which Agnon chooses to perform the memory of Buczacz and present his town in the largest possible way as inscribed within the world of Torah. Woven in and out of this scaffolding, however, are innumerable accounts of professional and scholarly jealousy, internecine commercial rivalries, unchecked acts of cruelty and expropriation by the wealthy, unrewarded acts of righteousness by the poor and lowly, apostasy, criminality, suicide and many other unsavory behaviors.
As conjured up by Agnon in ‘Ir umelo’ah, the vanished world of Buczacz can best be understood under the rubric of a norm and deviations from it. Agnon sets the value signature of the work, chooses the periods in the life of Buczacz in which Torah and worship are paramount, fashions a plan for the organization of the stories that foregrounds these institutions and their practitioners and uses the commentary of the volume’s ever-present narrator to articulate and reinforce this moral framework. Yet at the same time, the norm is continually flouted by power, envy and the general intractability of the human heart. ‘Ir umelo’ah is a world in which there is a single moral and spiritual norm alongside an abundance of variegated deviations from that norm. It will not come as a surprise that the deviations more often beguile the reader’s attention than does the norm, and the modal tension between the two accounts for the fascination exerted by the book and for the tensile forces that hold it together.
Holding together a work made up of more than 140 independent narrative units is not a small challenge. Of the several strategies Agnon uses in his efforts to create coherence in ‘Ir umelo’ah, the most important is the fashioning of a narrator whose voice is present in almost all the stories. Surely this narrator is one of Agnon’s greatest and most distinctive creations, and its arrival on the scene so late in the master’s career has much to tell us about the aesthetic impasses he faced and the solutions he was experimenting with in the years after the war. The narrator of ‘Ir umelo’ah is part chronicler and part impresario. As chronicler, he presents himself as an assiduous student of the history of Buczacz and the arcana of its centuries of spiritual life. He takes advantage of every chance to establish the reliability of his accounts of events in terms of both the accuracy of his information and the objectivity with which it is presented. But make no mistake: although he takes pains to get his facts correct and puncture fanciful myths and legends, this chronicler is not a historian. He is a believing Jew who, though fully aware of the modern world, remains rooted in the circle of traditional piety. He views his function as a belated extension of the pinqas, the register kept by Jewish communities in Europe in which significant events were recorded.12 At the conclusion of Hamashal vehanimshal [The Parable and Its Lesson], the story to be discussed below, the rationale for telling the lengthy tale is based on the fact that the pinqas of Buczacz was destroyed in the war along with the town’s Jews. The extraordinary incidents related in the story were recorded there around the year 1700 in the beautiful hand of the town’s scribe and in the formal eloquence of learned, biblical Hebrew.
It is now left to the belated narrator to reconstruct and retell the story as best he can and according to his own lights. He is not a communal scribe, but he does follow after the scribe, in his footsteps, as it were, in discharging the same function but using a different set of instruments. In his role as chronicler, most importantly, the narrator takes the prerogative to speak as an I that is simultaneously a We. He is himself first and foremost a man of Buczacz, flesh of the flesh of the town, although he has no historical embodiment that would locate him in actual events. He is at once absorbed into the collective conscience of the town and busily conducting the performance of memory under his own baton, a baton singularly inscribed with the proprietary pronoun I, if not with a proper name. It goes without saying, however, that by choosing to write about Buczacz in its “classic” era Agnon renounced his right to evoke personal childhood memories, as he did in such wonderful stories as “Hamitpaḥat” [The Kerchief], and, as pointed out above, to assimilate the figure of the narrator to his own autobiographical persona as he had done in Oreaḥ natah lalun [A Guest for the Night].
The narrator is also an impresario of memory who hosts or stages the voices of others, even while he remains on stage. In Hamashal vehanimshal, for example, most of the story is given over to the tale told by the old shamash. It is the narrator who sets up the frame story and describes the provocation that sets the story about the tour of Hell in motion, and it is he who returns toward the end to convey its effects on the community. But the greater duration of the story is given over to the shamash’s own account of these extraordinary happenings. This hand-off, however, is not accomplished with complete serenity. Even though the crusty and acerbic attitudes of the old man set his voice apart as uniquely his, the narrator periodically expresses anxiety lest the two voices, his and the shamash’s, be confused. Throughout ‘Ir umelo’ah the narrator is busy and in control and highly self-aware of the decisions he is making to follow up one story line over another and whether to allow himself a particular digression — which he usually does — or hew to a linear presentation of plot. The presence of the narrator is felt as constantly exerting an executive agency.
The narrator’s most conspicuous endowment is his omniscience. The narrator speaks from the present. It is, after all, the unspeakable news of the Holocaust that moves him to undertake telling the story of Buczacz. At the same time, however, the periods of the town’s history he has chosen to chronicle are not those about which he can have personal or eyewitness knowledge. ‘Ir umelo’ah focuses on a two-hundred-year span from the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. Even by using oral traditions and written records, no one could reasonably aspire to the omniscience the narrator claims for himself. This is exactly the nonrealistic, even magical, premise that Agnon lays down for the fundamental device that organizes his project. The narrator is a construct that is defined as a sapient, nonpersonal entity that has attained an exhaustive grasp of the history of Buczacz. His conscience is the repository of the pinqasim of the town for scores of generations. A man of faith loyal to the core norms of study and worship, he has no interest in history per se, that is, history in the modern, critical sense of the term.
But he is passionately concerned about accuracy, and most of the asides and introductions and commentaries in which we hear his voice are preoccupied with asserting the reliability of his reporting and the authority of his knowledge. This is no pallid conception of reliability. The narrator knows what two characters said to each other, in their exact words, in a private conversation in the late seventeenth century; he knows what is in the heart of a merchant about to approach a Polish lord with a daring commercial proposition; he knows the text of the offer of rabbinic appointment that failed to lure a luminary to Buczacz; and he knows not only the desires of a poor yeshiva student but also the thoughts of the great fish he is transporting to a demanding gourmand. When he is not sure of a detail — say, whether it was eight coins or ten that were paid for a wagon ride 250 years ago — he readily admits his uncertainty and thereby implies that his authority on all matters not so stipulated is utterly trustworthy.
Take this example from the beginning of Hamashal vehanimshal:
There was in our beit midrash an old shamash named Reb Yeruham ben Tanhum. Some insist that his name was Reb Tanhum ben Yeruham and that it was in the Great Synagogue was where he served. Then there are those who claim that this name belongs not to the shamash but to the man who got involved with the him. I, who know only the names of those who served as shamash in the ten generations before I left my hometown, cannot make this determination. I can only tell the story.
Rather than being a genuine confession of limitation, the fuzziness about the exact name and the exact place serves as a gesture of humility whose purpose is to make the opposite point. Despite the fact that the strange adventure that is about to be described in great detail took place well beyond ten generations ago, these few facts at the beginning of the story are the only ones to which any doubt attaches. And the very fact that these details are wrangled over with other, unnamed minds works only to strengthen the status of the events described in the story as indisputably part of the collective historical record.
Agnon is playing here at something very deep yet elusive. There is of course no rational world in which a narrator can possess such infinite knowledge. Yet as readers we are prepared to recognize omniscience as a legitimate convention when it comes to modern fiction. Not only do we not question Flaubert’s right to represent Emma Bovary’s innermost thoughts but we applaud his comprehensive penetration into her mind. And although Flaubert — a favorite of Agnon’s — would claim his revelations of Emma’s inner life to be true, he would also acknowledge them, proudly, as fiction. This is not the case with Agnon in ‘Ir umelo’ah. The texts of this collection are presented as stories, as sipurim, narratives that occupy a middle ground between chronicle and fiction; sipur is a supremely serviceable term for Agnon because it as much at home in the world of Hasidic piety as it is in the world of Kleist and Kafka. Yet his was not the short story perfected and aestheticized by Chekhov, Maupassant and Joyce but rather the kind of tale told by a storyteller in a world before the institutionalization of literature. In the case of ‘Ir umelo’ah the storyteller is not a primitive spinner of legends or folktales but a sophisticated and opinionated narrator-chronicler who curates and recirculates accounts of the key moments in the town’s history and vouches for their accuracy. The pseudo-traditionalism of this form provided Agnon with a creative, flexible instrument. Although the narrator’s values are aligned with the pious norms at the core of the stories, his responsibilities as a chronicler entail his reliable reporting of the full range of human behavior; and thus a gap is opened up that is at turns playful, ironic and subversive. In subtle and surreptitious ways, Agnon could appropriate the authenticity and authority of the traditional tale without renouncing the toolkit of modernism. Agnon thus wants — and gets — to have his literary cake and eat it too. He wants the freedom to imagine conversations, inner thoughts and the intimate particulars of behavior; and at the same time he denies that his stories are made up or lack the status of responsible accounts of historical occurrences. Agnon appropriates for himself a conception of storytelling that avoids the necessity of facing this either-or.
The path that Agnon fashioned in ‘Ir umelo’ah was a watershed in the master’s relationship to the world he left behind as a youth. Setting aside for the moment the corpus of short stories, we note that Agnon wrote three novels between the world wars in which he attempted fictional reckonings with the exilic past. Hakhnasat kalah [The Bridal Canopy, 1931] is set in Galicia in the years before the Napoleonic wars and follows the wanderings of a holy fool who travels from town to town to raise money for his daughter’s dowry. Although told by a pious narrator, the novel is rife with parody and social critique, and its plot is driven by conventions of the melodramatic novel; the hero’s wanderings are used as an armature for an agglomeration of tales told at every station of his quest. Sipur pashut [A Simple Story, 1936], which takes place in Buczacz itself at the turn of the twentieth century, appropriates the conventions of the bourgeois family saga in the manner of Mann’s Buddenbrooks, in telling the story of a young man in conflict between romantic love and the mercantile ethos of his family. In this recension of Buczacz, religion has been reduced to cultural patterning in the background, and the town is presented as a site of incipient class conflict. The narrator of Oreaḥ natah lalun [A Guest for the Night, 1939] bears a close resemblance to Agnon himself; he is a Jew from Palestine who has returned for a yearlong visit to Shibush (Buczacz), the town of his youth, in the years after it was decimated by World War One and the anti-Jewish violence that accompanied it. He finds a nightmarish landscape full of amputated limbs and the ghosts of the town’s once-vibrant religious life; on the eve of his return to Palestine he is force to admit that his efforts to rekindle a spark of spirituality have come to nothing.
Each of these is a recognizably different modality of dealing with the ancestral world, entailing a particular kind of narrative framework. Without delving into their complex motives and strategies, it is enough to point out that in the last two decades of Agnon’s life none of them any longer served his purposes. The finality of the destruction of Buczacz in the Holocaust changed the status of the town as an imaginative object and required a new approach. Moreover, Agnon’s awareness of his own mortality and of the valedictory nature of the opportunity that lay before him lent urgency to the search for a large project that would stand as a final statement of his relationship to Buczacz and what it represented. That project would have to be novellike in its epic ambitions yet remain loyal to the traditional flexibility embodied in the story as an unapologetic vehicle whose value inheres in itself. The result of that search was ‘Ir umelo’ah.
HAMASHAL VEHANIMSHAL
[THE PARABLE AND ITS LESSON]
The story Hamashal vehanimshal is an excellent example of the tensions that generate Agnon’s best work in ‘Ir umelo’ah.13 The story takes place within two time frames. The present time of the story is set around the year 1710 and concerns an elderly shamash, a synagogue sexton, who is put on trial for an act of public humiliation. The tale he tells in his defense, which takes up three quarters of the whole story, is set a half century earlier during the years in which Galician Jewry was recovering from the massacres of 1648. That tale relates how he and Rabbi Moshe, the rabbi of Buczacz, undertake a descent into Gehinnom in order to ascertain the death of a young husband who has abandoned an even younger bride. While in the Netherworld, the shamash discovers a gruesome sight that subverts all his received notions about postmortem rewards and punishments. He sees great Talmud scholars suffering in Hell for the seemingly trivial infraction of talking during the reading of the Torah in the synagogue. It is the grave theological import of this ostensibly minor sin that becomes the subject of a great memorial discourse the rabbi delivers on their return. The Jews of Buczacz are stunned and moved to repentance when they hear this account from the shamash fifty-four years later, and as a sign of its importance the story is inscribed in the communal register. When the ledger is destroyed in the Holocaust, the narrator takes it upon himself to retell the story.
Despite the vast differences between modern readers and the townspeople of Buczacz three hundred years ago, it is fair to say that we are, like them, riveted by the shamash’s tale. We are moved to horror and pity by the plight of Aaron, the young scholar encountered in Hell whose efforts to solve the problem of theodicy leads him to an early and alien grave. And even if we no longer believe in a fire-and-brimstone conception of the afterlife, we, like the shamash, cannot help being disturbed by the grotesque punishments of the learned elite in Gehinnom. Most of all, we marvel at the figure of the shamash himself, his laconic loyalty to his master, his obdurate courage in exposing himself to danger, and the intriguing mixture of his motives as he withholds and releases information.
Yet despite these manifold sources of fascination, Hamashal vehanimshal remains a problem story in several crucial respects. There is a critical plot line that is left dangling: the rabbi and shamash undertake their perilous visit to Gehinnom for the purpose of enabling a teenage wife to remarry. Yet although they are successful in confirming her husband’s death, their errand has no effect on the girl’s plight, which is quickly moved to the margins of the story. Moreover, after the sensational revelations about the true nature of Hell, the shamash’s tale concludes with a moment-by-moment, word-for-word transcription of the memorial ceremonies on the twentieth of Sivan, the fast day that commemorated the martyrs of 1648, without our being shown the relevance of this lengthy bloc of exposition to themes of the story. Finally, the happy ending is likely to be felt by modern readers to be too happy. This instantaneous, concerted and corporate act of repentance seems too easily purchased and remains at odds with the grimmer vision of human nature presented earlier in the story. Problematic also are the digressions that litter the narrations of both the shamash and the story’s overall narrator. Despite the ideal of restraint in speech embodied by the rabbi and advocated at every turn by the shamash, the story cannot be told without frequently yielding to the temptation to explore narrative byways of little patent relevance that dissipate rather than focus the energies of the plot.
Are these issues a sign of Agnon’s wavering artistic control in the late stage of his career as a writer? Did he think that presenting tales about Buczacz required less writerly rigor than the existential parables of his middle period? Or did he perceive himself as imitating a pre-modern poetics that did not make the criterion of aesthetic success the taut fitting together of all of the pieces of the story’s puzzle? My answer to all these questions is no, and my aim in the following pages is to demonstrate through an analysis of Hamashal vehanimshal that what the Torah says of Moses in the final chapter of Deuteronomy can be said of Agnon in his late phase: “His eyes were undimmed and his vigor unabated” (34:7). My argument is based on the assumption that as modern readers we are trained to look for submerged tensions in a text in order to makes sense of its manifest difficulties, and that Agnon relies on this faculty when he puts before us stories told by ostensibly naïve narrators.
In Hamashal vehanimshal the tension is between an explicit moralizing theme regarding forbidden speech and a subversive, implicit theme that registers the traumatic effects of both the 1648 massacres and the horrors of Gehinnom. The first theme focuses on the temptation to converse during worship and the reading of the Torah in the synagogue, which are shown to be grave violations with horrific consequences beyond the normal imagining of the townspeople of Buczacz. Even beyond this dramatic but restricted sense, the theme of proper and improper speech resonates at every level of the story: in the communication between the rabbi and the shamash, in the need of scholars to hawk their insights, in the circulation of opinion within the town, in the parabolic form of the great memorial homily the rabbi delivers and, most of all, in the unremitting anxieties of both narrators about exerting their control over their own discourses. On all these levels, the narrators propound an ethics of self-restraint that views all unnecessary speech as a source of bedevilment. Even the most learned and pious are tempted to muffle God’s speech — as recorded in the Torah — by the proliferation of their own.
Yet behind and beneath this moralizing message lie darker forces that harbor much deconstructive potential and shape the way the story is told at every turn. The sights the shamash saw as a young man on his visit to the Netherworld were so profoundly disturbing that it has taken him more than half a century to be able to tell the story, even if it has meant depriving the community all the while of the lesson it teaches. Even once the point has been taken, there remains a festering dread about the unknowableness of actions and their potentially horrendous consequences. That some of the greatest sages of history are suffering the tortures of hell because of what seemed to be merely an excess of zeal is a destabilizing discovery that produces troubling questions about the proportionality of human conduct and divine punishment. An even more grievous theological wound is opened up by the Khmelnitski massacres of 1648, which continue to emit waves of destructive energy long after the Jews of Buczacz have reestablished communal life and rabbinic authority. There is barely a page of the story on which these losses are not felt. The very spring for the audacious journey to Hell concerns the rabbi’s brilliant student Aaron, who suffers for eternity there because he could not understand how God could let His people be viciously slaughtered.
It is the pressure exerted by the trauma narrative on the narrators’ moralizing enterprise that accounts for, I would argue, much of what is strange, discontinuous and unresolved in the story. The digressions remain digressions, but the motives for them become clearer when we understand them as expressions of the narrators’ anxieties. The narrators’ reliability is undermined by forces they cannot govern. Written on these two levels, Hamashal vehanimshal is a story riven by unquiet tensions whose complexity is ultimately in the firm executive control of its author.
A SCANDAL IN BUCZACZ
The eyes through which we see all this are those of the shamash. Unlike the gabbai, a householder who volunteers to distribute roles in the service (“honors”) and collect payment for them, the shamash is a wage earner employed by the community. It is therefore precisely because of the office’s subservient status that it is an unusual move to place one of its occupants at center stage. After introducing the shamash and describing the story’s precipitating incident, the busy and authoritative narrator of ‘Ir umelo’ah steps aside and hands over the narrative to the voice of the shamash and, with a few exceptions, does not repossess the telling of the story until its final section. This is a renunciation of the narrator’s executive management. Far from being a marionette, the shamash emerges as his own man: an idiosyncratic mixture of curmudgeonly stubbornness, fiercely reverential loyalty and surprising religious learning. He has a name and a family story, and a fixed location in history, unlike the narrator, who must remain impersonal and anonymous and floating in time. Furthermore, the shamash possesses a special kind of authority. Although the narrator of ‘Ir umelo’ah brandishes the chronicler’s near-omniscient overview of the affairs of Buczacz, it was not he who accompanies Rabbi Moshe on this tour of the Netherworld. There is no substitute for hearing about those searing sights directly from the eyewitness.
The handover of the narrative from the narrator to the shamash takes place as a result of the events described in Chapter 1. The unusual occurrence that warrants description is a disciplinary hearing in which a venerable shamash is being accused of the sin of public embarrassment. The violation takes place during Sabbath morning prayers when the shamash notices a young man, the son-in-law of one of the town’s wealthiest citizens, speaking to his neighbor during the reading of the Torah; failing repeatedly to get the young man’s attention by various eye signals and hand gestures, the shamash descends the bimah, takes the young man by the elbow and escorts him out of the synagogue. All Buczacz is in an uproar over this unprecedented act of public shaming, and the next day the shamash is brought up on charges.
The inherent sensationalism of this precipitating incident is deliberately squandered by the narrator by interrupting it in the middle with a sizable digression concerning the changing customs surrounding the Torah reading in Buczacz. Once upon a time in Buczacz — the time in which the shamash’s story is set — the blessing recited by the seven men called to the Torah on Sabbath mornings was a fleeting pause in the public recitation of God’s word. By increments over time, this pause was expanded and filled by verbiage of various kinds that distracted the congregation from the reading and even promoted envy and conflict. The narrator is constrained to dissipate the drama and insert the digression because he knows that without it his readers will have little chance of properly construing the shamash’s action. His readers — as opposed to the shamash’s listeners — live in modern times in which the Torah reading as a circus of honors and announcements has become common practice. The narrator therefore has to work to bridge the distance between reality as we know it and the very different norm that was observed by the holy community of Buczacz at an earlier time in its history. Yet in no sense is this merely an ethnographic footnote. For both the narrator and the shamash, in their respective narrations, success is wholly measured by the ability to restore the credibility of the earlier, purer standard and make people believe that, rather than being a matter of religious nicety, competing with God’s word during the recitation of His Torah is, especially for the learned elite, literally a matter of life and death.
The court scene introduces some of the story’s key themes: the prerogatives of class, the above-the-law status of scholars, the conflict between eyewitness knowledge and received truths. The narrator is again on hand to explain to us what is so truly provocative in the shamash’s behavior as to warrant the formation of an ad hoc beit din and the slapping of an aged community functionary with a fine for enforcing synagogue decorum. Ironically, the reasons turn out to have little to do with the legal principles that ostensibly serve as the basis for the court’s deliberations. Public shaming, to be sure, is a matter to which legal culpability attaches in Jewish law. But the narrator does not present it as such; rather, he frames it in terms of a scandalous transgression of social norms. The heart of the matter is the public refusal of a poor person to acknowledge the honor due to two classes, the wealthy and the learned. The strength of the community is sustained by the intertwining of these two classes; distinguished young scholars are taken as husbands for the daughters of successful merchants in a distinctly Jewish version of the process of natural selection. The young man the shamash escorts out of the synagogue is just such a case. The seriousness of his infraction is presumably mitigated by two facts. He is not a native of Buczacz, having been recently brought there by marriage, and therefore does not appreciate the rigorousness with which the town treats the ban on speaking during the Torah reading. Moreover, he was uttering words of Torah relevant to the moment at hand — a novel insight into the weekly portion — rather than idle chatter. He is an errant young prince of the law who has been brutally importuned by an impoverished synagogue functionary.
In the face of the amassed authority of the community and its rabbinic judges, this lowly sexton asserts the authority not of what he has learned but of what he has seen. When he declares that the humiliation he has visited upon the young scholar is nothing compared to the punishments in the World to Come, he makes his claim based on what his eyes have witnessed. The judge picks up on the peculiarity of this assertion, and, although he stipulates the gravity of the infraction, he pushes the shamash to specify how it is that he has seen things that others, endowed with the same faculty of sight, have not. “The books may offer their condemnations,” the shamash insists enigmatically, “but it is the eyes that see what it is to suffer God’s wrath” (4). Beneath this verbal sparring lies a profound epistemological provocation. The shamash is asserting that, when it comes to wisdom and truth, what he has seen with his own eyes trumps the official determinations arrived at through textual interpretation and halakhic decision making. This is an assertion that will be both amplified and tested in the course of the story. For example, by finding Aaron in Gehinnom, Rabbi Moshe and the shamash succeed in the object of the journey: they confirm the fact of his death. This is a tragic, heart-rending meeting, yet the knowledge it yields regarding the husband’s death has no halakhic standing whatever, despite all the rabbi’s efforts to effect the girl’s release from the bonds of being an agunah. The evidence of the eyes, whether it is traumatic as in the case of the shocking scenes of suffering or ennobling as in the case of the shamash’s veneration of his master, possesses an urgent truthfulness that often eludes the institutionalized orders of meaning and registers fully only in what the reader is privileged to be shown.
Finally, the encounter between the shamash and his examiners adumbrates the theme of silence and its voluntary and involuntary violations. The course of the questioning is worth looking at with some care. The shamash enters the interview with a seemingly unshakable intention of accepting his punishment without explaining himself. But this resolve is soon assailed by unbidden forces within him. “He raised his eyes and shut them like someone who sees something and is terrified by it,” the narrator tells us; and he then goes on to explain that just those terrifying sights are the ones that will be related in the tale to follow, and it is those terrors that have now “returned, reawakened and begun to reappear before him” (5). The judge himself sees “all manner of horror etched on his face,” and urges the shamash to speak. The shamash rebuffs him and, with a mixture of dignity and desperation, pronounces that he has struggled his whole life to prevent himself from engaging in unnecessary speech, and on this occasion too he will remain true to that principle, whatever the costs. Yet all it takes is for the judge to say perceptively, “I think you wished to say something,” for the shamash to do an about-face and begin speaking.
Consternation took hold of the shamash. He raised his eyes to those who sat in judgment of him and began to speak: “It is not because I seek acquittal from this earthly court or because I want to curry favor with the esteemed members of the congregation that I permit my tongue to reveal a profound mystery. I speak so that you may all come to know the true punishment for something that everyone takes much too lightly.”
It is evident to the reader that the explicit rationalization given by the shamash for his capitulation — public warning and education — is a fig leaf covering an ungovernable storm of emotion. The truth is that the incident in the synagogue has unhinged his hard-won and long-enduring composure by stirring up a traumatic experience repressed for many decades. The violation of principle is all the more momentous because the matters to be revealed are not ordinary scandals but nothing less than secrets about the fundamental questions of the universe.
Thus we are introduced to a central paradox of the story. On the one hand, the narrators of the story waste no chance to condemn forbidden or unnecessary speech and to adduce evidence of the mortifying consequences of laxity in these matters. Their admonition begins within the restricted purview of the synagogue but extends outward to the marketplace and to the domestic space of family life. It goes so far as to take on the features of an overarching ethical-ontological principle that identifies God’s words as the only true speech and human words as a kind of fallen or corrupted speech that, though necessary, should be kept to a minimum. Talking during the Torah reading, which at first presents itself as merely an instance of inconsiderate behavior, thus looms large as the site of a cosmic, catastrophic violation: the aggression of human speech upon the divine word.
On the other hand, there is the evidence of the story itself. This long and unwieldy tale, told by the shamash and staged by the narrator, constitutes in many respects an enormous and flagrant transgression against the very ideal of verbal abstinence that they themselves have so vehemently been promulgating. This wayward prolixity is far from obligatory. To get the business done of describing the horrible punishments of the sinning scholars and thus acquit himself of delivering his monitory message, the shamash could have vastly reduced the amplitude of his account. A principle of utility would have eliminated not only the numerous digressions but also a great swath of the story devoted to describing the conduct of his master, Rabbi Moshe. Yet the reader knows that these seemingly unnecessary accretions and dilations are in fact true expressions of what is really on the shamash’s mind: the trauma induced by what he saw so many years ago, and the loss of his connection to the great and holy man he served so devotedly.
OUR MASTER
Why does Agnon’s narrator loosen the reins and allow the shamash to take over the story? To be sure, the principled audacity he displays in banishing the talkative young scholar and then standing up to the judges of the rabbinic court marks him as a person of high resolve. But his true merit lies less in his character than in his utility to the story. This is a story about occurrences so remarkable and bizarre that only the authority of an eyewitness account has a chance of overcoming the reader’s incredulity. It is a story, moreover, whose principle actor is a taciturn rabbi whose enigmatic actions require careful observation and explication. Who better to observe and explicate them than his devoted personal assistant? The shamash functions as a lens through which we take in the moral and spiritual eminence of the figure referred to, throughout the original text, as rabeinu, our Master, as if in using the first person plural the shamash speaks for the community as a whole. As the name of his office implies, the shamash’s function is to serve his master. Yet, ironically as we shall see, despite this subservience the gruff and protective secretiveness that surrounds the shamash projects a fascination on the reader that rivals the rabbi’s mystique.
It is the rabbi who is placed squarely at the moral center of the story, even if the narrator unintentionally accepts the existence of competing currents of interest. That a moral center be established is crucial to Agnon here, as it is generally in ‘Ir umelo’ah, because the deviations from the norm, which interest his fiction as much as does the norm itself, can be located and described only in reference to the norm. Rabbi Moshe unambiguously occupies that center. He does so not only because of his personal qualities but also because he exemplifies the rabbinic “rulers” of Buczacz. In introducing Rabbi Moshe in the opening sentence of our story, the narrator states that the tale is part of his project “to describe our masters who reigned [shemalkhu] one after the other over our town.” The succession of Buczacz’s rabbis resembles a king list in an ancient chronicle. The rabbi is a Judaic version of Plato’s philosopher-king, and in the ideal vision of Buczacz as a qehilah qedoshah, a holy community informed by Jewish law, the rabbi, as the av beit din, the head — literally, the father — of the court is the ultimate arbiter of authority. Again, it is important to distinguish between the ideal and the idealized. The rulership of the rabbi as an ideal obtains only when, as a class, rabbinic authority is recognized as paramount, and when, as an individual, the rabbi is the worthy exemplar of this high authority.
Already in our story we are witness to a falling away from the ideal; for in the fifty-four years that separate the main events from the present of the telling there is a recognizable diminution of this high standard. A small detail hints at a broad and troubling problem. When it comes to putting together a panel of judges to take up the case of the shamash the day after the incident in the synagogue, the chief rabbi, the town’s av beit din, recuses himself from the proceedings, explaining that his fondness for scholars may not enable him to give the case of the shamash a fair hearing. Although this compunction presents itself as merely a zealous regard for the honor of Torah study, it is in fact symptomatic of a pervasive and systemic perversion that has infected the religious life of Buczacz. Torah study has become commodified and fetishized, and scholarship has become an arena for performance rather than piety. As presented by the narrator at the outset of the story, the offending son-in-law — and by extension his father-in-law, who “acquired” him for his daughter — are the embodiment of the problem.
A wealthy man from the upper crust of our town took as his son-in-law a learned young man from a prominent family. The boy was skilled at advancing all kinds of novel interpretations of our holy texts, even when their meanings were already transparent. In fact, sometimes, in his encounter with a text, he would pronounce his own interpretation before he had even digested its plain sense.14 I refer here not to the nature of his insights but to the fact that his eagerness to propose them overrode any capacity he had for self-restraint. (2)
The ability to come up with novel interpretations (leḥadesh ḥidushim) is an index of scholarly brilliance, but when that ability becomes a socially sanctioned compulsion, then brilliance and piety part company. The language produced by human ingenuity competes with the language of the holy texts rather than serving it. If this were simply the young man’s particular pathology, then the matter would not be troubling. But he has been “taken” by one of the town’s wealthy men precisely because his scholarly brilliance can so readily and abundantly be put on display. The public performance of brilliance has become a valuable commodity for conspicuous consumption.
The craving for ḥidushim and the impatience with the plain meaning of the text are ills that have only recently taken root in Buczacz. This is a town in which respect for God’s word is the norm during the Torah reading, and the son-in-law’s flouting of that discipline is explained in part by his being an outsider and a recent arrival. Nevertheless, there is growing indulgence for behavior of this kind; tellingly, the wrath of the town is incited not by his transgression but by the shamash’s disregard for the respect due the wealthy and the learned. The shamash’s scandalous intervention is the gesture that creates a bridge to the Buczacz of a half century earlier when such a permissive and inadvertent collusion would have been unthinkable. This was the era when “Buczacz was Buczacz” and the town was “ruled” by Rabbi Moshe and by the true values he both represented and enforced.
Rabbi Moshe’s greatness is established in part by his prophetic ability to identify this tendency to unrestrained performative speech as a sin and foresee that it would bedevil his community long after his death. When he made conversing during the Torah reading the subject of the great discourse he delivered on the twentieth of Sivan, the crescendo of the story and his valedictory address before his death, his listeners must surely have been dumbfounded as to the choice of topic. The rabbi admits that this is a transgression he himself has never witnessed but merely heard about (47). It is only we the readers, who have been given access by the shamash to the dark revelations of Gehinnom, who are positioned to appreciate the momentousness of the rabbi’s subject. Yet, like the desperate efforts of his biblical namesake, Rabbi Moshe’s fierce homiletic warnings prove incapable of staving off the folly that will take root in the next generation. In the comedic turn the story takes in its conclusion, it is only the courageous ire of the ancient shamash that can break the cycle and prevent the insidious growth from spreading.
There are two other dimensions of the rabbi’s character that fill out the norm he embodies: the style of his own learning and his solicitude for Zlateh, the child who is the sole survivor among his relatives of the massacres of 1648. It goes without saying that the rabbi is a great scholar, but it is the particular manner of his greatness that makes a vital connection to the thematic axis of the story. The resources for scholarship, the shamash observes at many points, were greatly different fifty-four years ago than they are in the present of the story. When it comes to books — the term applies only to sefarim in the sense of scriptural and talmudic texts and their commentaries — the average householder in Buczacz at the time the shamash tells his story has more books on the shelves of his home than were to be found in the town as a whole at the time of Rabbi Moshe (52). Books were scarce and expensive. The first printed Hebrew books appeared only in the second half of the fifteenth century, and the widespread upheavals caused by the massacres of 1648 disrupted the chain of scholarly transmission and made books even scarcer. In an aside, the shamash relates the story of an important rabbi of the time who was about to die; although he regretted leaving the world, he was consoled by the fact that in the Supernal Academy he would have the opportunity of seeing Tractate ‘Eruvin, a major section of the Talmud, which he had never before been privileged to hold in his hands (52). Another anecdote tells of a pair of Talmud students who walk for two days straight because they heard that someone in a neighboring town possessed a copy of the minor tractates of the Talmud. Rabbi Akiva Shas, one of the elders of Buczacz, received his name from the fact that he was the only person in the town to own a complete set of the Talmud (shas is an acronym for shishah sedarim, the six orders of the Mishnah on which the Talmud forms a commentary, 16). Rabbi Moshe himself has to send to Rabbi Akiva Shas when he needs to consult Tractate Zevaḥim. We are further informed that in those days, except for the Tanhuma, the texts of the midrashim were also not available.
Rabbi Moshe’s own teacher, the revered Rabbi Mikhl of Nemirov, was among the slaughtered in 1648. It was as a young man in his academy in Nemirov that Rabbi Moshe was formed as a scholar, and his recall of those printed texts has had to stand by him after the calamity, when those texts are no longer available. When the rabbi traces the development of prayer as an institution in Bible and Talmud in his great discourse on the twentieth of Sivan, each statement is accompanied by an exact quotation of the source reference. Which is of course as it should be, except for the fact that the rabbi has not been privileged to have access to most of these texts since he was a youth studying in Nemirov and recites them by heart. Although this is assuredly evidence of extraordinary precocity and mental gifts, the true source of the shamash’s veneration lies in the rabbi’s relationship to the texts he so readily brings to his lips. In their eagerness to parade their virtuosity, the scholars of today use passages from Scripture and rabbinic literature as grist for their mill, as means of reinforcing and showcasing their ḥidushim, those novel interpretations or stunning solutions to textual difficulties by which they make their mark on the world. Rabbi Moshe, by contrast, places as his chief object his audience’s understanding of the verses from Scripture rather than the interpretations and constructions built on them. He does so out of the conviction that, understood correctly, the plain meaning of the verse speaks for itself. For that reason he enunciates and even chants each verse, explicating as he goes, so that every member of his flock “can receive it according to his capacity” (49).15
The rabbi’s everyday practice provides a model for the proper relation between human speech and divine speech. This means, first and foremost, that he says little and speaks only when necessary. His preferred mode of communication with the shamash is the nonverbal gesture, which is sufficient to convey his meaning; often these are instances in which looking substitutes for speaking. When he does speak, he prefers to make his points through quotations from Scripture, and when he does quote, he is careful to insert a brief pause between the quotation and his own words in order to recognize the distinction of one from the other. Rather than giving discursive addresses, his public homilies are strings of verses tied together in thematic strands. In doing so he is not hiding behind the verses or avoiding making his own conceptual formulations; rather, again, he is honoring divine speech and declining to impose his own.
Perplexingly, after delivering these great discourses with their abundance of verses, the rabbi is observed to be in a state of dejection. The shamash reports:
I have heard two reasons for this. One is that he grew sad after every sermon, because, being a great preacher, he was worried that the beauty of his words overshadowed the message he was imparting. The other is that he worried lest he had said something that was not for the sake of Heaven. Years later, after I had remarried, and Zlateh, may she rest in peace, was my wife, I heard from her that after every sermon he delivered, our Master took upon himself a full-day fast of silence. (58)
The shamash’s informant on these matters is none other than Zlateh, the rabbi’s young relation on whose behalf he undertook his journey to Gehinnom. (It is only from this casual aside, by the way, that the reader discovers a small trove of background information: that after she was released from her state of being an agunah, Zlateh married the shamash following the death of his own wife, and that Zlateh has died in the meantime.) Both explanations for the rabbi’s post-sermon tristesse are connected to the extreme anxiety and even danger inherent in handling divine speech and mixing it with human speech. Handling such materials, so the rabbi’s scrupulousness leads him to feel, must inevitably bring with it some culpability; and so the rabbi submits himself to a daylong regimen of silence. Ta‘anit dibur was not an ascetic practice known from earlier Jewish sources or familiar to European Jewry, and so the shamash permits himself a digression in which he explains how he learned of the practice from one Rabbi Hezkiah, a Buczacz native whose ancestors emigrated from Syria and Babylonia.
It is solicitude for Zlateh, finally, that completes the picture of the rabbi as the embodiment of the norm anchoring the world of the story. Zlateh is the granddaughter of Rabbi Naftali, a relation of Rabbi Moshe and a wealthy wine merchant with dealings with the Polish gentry who used his position to better the political situation of his Jewish brethren. Instead of paying what he owed for a wine shipment, one of those Polish noblemen set his dogs on Rabbi Naftali and murdered him. Shortly after that, all the members of the extended family, except for Zlateh, were slaughtered in the massacres of 1648 or died of sickness or starvation in their aftermath. Surviving as a nearly feral child, Zlateh traveled from town to town with a group of survivors, and when they came to Buczacz, Rabbi Moshe’s wife, without at first knowing who she is, arranged for her to be taken into her home. The discovery of her family connection flooded the rabbi, who has suffered so much loss, with a sense of grace and joy. He personally supervises her education and gives her in marriage to Aaron, his prized student. When Aaron inexplicably deserts her, leaving her an agunah at the age of fifteen for the rest of her life, the rabbi is overcome by grief and despondency. But before too long he collects himself and conceives of the idea of visiting Gehinnom. He reasons, correctly it turns out, that Aaron must be dead, because if he were alive it is simply impossible that he would not have sent word to Zlateh and divorced her. The plan to journey to the Netherworld to confirm that fact, it is important to emphasize, is far from being either a swashbuckling adventure or an instance of theological tourism. True, the plan is audacious, but it is also perilous and likely lethal; “visitors” to Gehinnom generally do not return. That the rabbi and the shamash do return is the fact that furnishes the story’s sensational premise. Because this dangerous errand lacks probative halakhic value — Zlateh cannot be released from her bonds on the strength of this spectral sighting — the undertaking is an expression of Rabbi Moshe’s emotional exigency.16 Yet rather than diminishing him in our eyes, this knowledge contributes to his centrality in orienting the world of significance the story constructs.
1648
At the opening of the story, after stating his two purposes for telling it (to praise Rabbi Moshe and to warn of the consequences of improper speech), the narrator concludes with a perplexing statement.
To be sure, some things related here will not square with those who maintain that Buczacz was unaffected by the Khmelnitski pogroms. I leave it to the One who reconciles all matters to settle this one too.
The narrator seems to be engaged in a polemical exchange with unnamed parties who argue that Buczacz was spared in the massacres. Refuting this position is presented as one of the tasks that will be accomplished by the telling of the story, even though it is subsidiary to the narrative’s main goals. Invoking God as the arbiter who will finally decide the matter is an equivocal statement. Does it mean that the issue remains vexed despite the story’s having been laid out by the narrator? Or does it express confidence in the ultimate — but not public or immediate — vindication of his conviction concerning the town’s fortunes during the massacres?
The narrator’s antagonist would appear to be none other than the historical record itself. According to most accounts — both contemporary seventeenth-century chronicles and modern historiography — the Jews of Buczacz defended themselves in 1648 and prevented extensive damage to the town, which, because it remained relatively intact, became a refuge for survivors from other destroyed communities.17 Although the town later suffered damage when it was occupied by Ottoman Turks, in the vast and horrendous spasm of anti-Jewish violence known in Jewish parlance as gezeirot taḥ vetat18 Buczacz was spared. So what then is the proof for the narrator’s revisionist assertion to the contrary, an assertion that remains tantalizingly unexplained and requires recondite divine sanction? The proof lies in the anecdotes, incidents and major plot developments that demonstrate the effects of the pogroms at almost every level and at almost every turn in the story. The puzzle is why the narrator chooses not to gather together these abundant instances and adduce them as evidence for an explicit refutation of the assertion that Buczacz eluded the effects of 1648.
There are two related reasons for this disinclination. The story focuses on the spiritual rather than the material or physical damage caused by the massacres. Admittedly, the town was spared overt death and destruction, but the theological crisis provoked by the broad sweep of events, though less stark and exposed, is more profoundly troubling. At the heart of the crisis lies the problem of theodicy: How could the God of Israel have abandoned His beloved people to the bloodthirsty depredations of the gentiles? Within the pious certainties of the shamash, there is ostensibly no crisis: “Because of His love for us, God encumbers us with suffering in order to purge us of the qelipot we have acquired in the lands of the Gentiles and thereby prepare us for the day of His Redemption” (9–10). Yet a multiplicity of evidence, with the case of Aaron’s apostasy figuring first and foremost, plays havoc with the neatness of the shamash’s explanation. The shamash’s own wide-ranging and digressive account of events works to undermine the certainty of his theology. Despite itself, his narrative records how the catastrophe insinuated itself into every aspect of Buczacz life and created a vast reservoir of belated trauma. “Suffering is hard,” states the shamash, “hard when it happens and hard afterward” (8). He is referring specifically to Aaron’s fate, but his comment on the aftermath of catastrophe radiates throughout the story.
The second reason for the narrator’s reticence lies precisely in the anxiety it arouses concerning the gap between the official theology and the suffering that came in the wake of the pogroms, a suffering that has changed shape but hardly diminished. On the one hand, the suffering is there, persisting and ramifying, and no account of life in Buczacz of that time can ignore it. On the other, to name it, to call attention to it as such, would mean to approach closer to the fraught and menacing theological boundary that Aaron has calamitously crossed over. This anxiety is palpable in the shamash’s reconstruction of events that took place fifty-four years ago. But does it resonate for the listeners to his tale some two generations later? It is crucial to keep this retrospective time difference in mind. The Buczacz we are introduced to at the opening of the story is a place where a great deal has faded from memory. The community grew and prospered in the second half of the seventeenth century. An accord was reached with the Potocki family, the Polish magnates who owned the town, which granted the Jews residential and occupational equality with Christian residents.19 There is in evidence more wealth and security and learning. This means not only that the tractates of the Talmud and its commentaries are more commonly available but also that the indiscretion of the scholarly son-in-law of a rich man can be overlooked precisely because he is a scholar and the son-in-law of a rich man.
In the intervening half century, in sum, two things have declined: the effects of the trauma of 1648 and a basic, class-blind piety in which competing with God’s word is unthinkable. Which of the two is the true subject of Hamashal vehanimshal and the real engine of the shamash tale? It is a question worth asking because both the shamash and the narrator are indefatigable in insisting that the purpose of the story is to underscore the mortal consequences of inappropriate speech. After his lengthy and sensational account of Aaron’s apostasy, for example, the shamash is at pains to persuade us that his story is being told only en passant as an introduction to the “main thing”: “That is the story of Aaron, husband of Zlateh, and it is through his fate that I came to see how severe is the punishment for all who talk during the service and the Torah reading. If this introduction is longer than the story, more severe still is the story itself” (27). The shamash is anxious here and elsewhere to avoid the perception of a symmetry or proportionality between the two themes. And it is not just Aaron’s tale that solicits our attention; after the tour of Gehinnom, beginning in Chapter 15 the story turns toward the epic account of the twentieth of Sivan, the communal commemoration of the martyrs who perished in the massacres. Neither theme, in the final analysis, can be left behind. That being the case, we are left to ask a series of questions: Is there a fundamental link between the two themes? Or is this is a story that is burdened with accommodating two separate ideas? And finally, why are the narrators so insistent on foregrounding one over the other? These are questions that will be returned to once the effects of 1648 have been more fully explored.
The damage done by Aaron’s apostasy extends beyond the theological questions it raises. By turning Zlateh into an agunah, Aaron’s disappearance prevents the fifteen-year-old girl from marrying for the rest of her life. This is a devastating blow to the rabbi because of his affection for her as the lone survivor of his family and his empathic sorrow over the barren life that lies before her. Indeed, he is nearly unhinged by the news. He neglects his communal duties, stops giving his regular public lessons on Maimonides and Alfasi and becomes wholly obsessed with the futile quest for a legal loophole that would release Zlateh from her bonds (10–11). The man who hews to a strict regimen of reticence now finds himself, again futilely, chatting for hours over brandy and cakes with gentile peasants in hope of extracting scraps of information about Aaron’s whereabouts. What precipitates this breakdown is not only heartbreak over his poor relative’s plight but the disappointment of a broader hope: “Our Master saw in Aaron and Zlateh his aspirations for a new generation that would serve God righteously in place of their parents murdered by the enemy” (8). The rabbi sees in the young couple the seeds of a recovery that would recoup horrendous losses and reestablish the chain of Torah learning. Aaron’s desertion therefore signals not just a private sorrow but the prospect of a sliding back into the morass of communal breakdown and disintegration. It is another example of how the trauma of 1648, rather than being contained by the passing years, extends its baleful effects like time-released capsules.
The effort at containment is palpable in the shamash’s account of Aaron’s fate. The shamash first tells us about the student’s religious crisis in Chapter 2, at the point when his disappearance is first discovered, and then again in greater length in Chapter 7, when he is encountered in Gehinnom. In both instances, the affecting and disturbing tale is thickly overlaid with the shamash’s stern moralizing. Only when the rabbi and the shamash first come across Aaron’s shade is the young man allowed to speak in his own voice. In its mixture of pathos and fatefulness, it is a moment that seems taken directly from Dante’s Inferno.
At this Aaron let out a wail and began crying loudly and bitterly. “They never let me! They never let me go to her! They buried me in their cemetery, a Gentile cemetery with a cross on my grave!… They cut me off from Jews, and I couldn’t even go into a Jewish home. When I wanted to leave my grave to visit my wife in a dream and tell her that I was dead and that she was free to remarry, the cross would bar my way, and I could not get to her. Rebbe, Gehinnom is terrible, but the torment of knowing that I left my wife to be an agunah is much, much worse.” (22)
Aaron’s remorse comes too late; his responsibility for a grievous wrong cannot be evaded. At the same time, however, he never meant to injure Zlateh, and his own plight is terrible and visited on him for eternity. Yet the shamash is quick to intervene and prevent Aaron from continuing to tell his story in his own words. He explains to his listeners that he will now proceed to narrate Aaron’s story in the third person, assuring them that none of the substance of the situation will be lost in converting from one mode to the other (22–23). He further assures the listeners that the shift is merely a technical matter necessitated by the fact he could not retrieve the young man’s exact words because of the profound mortification he (the shamash) was experiencing when he heard them.
The shamash’s quick appropriation of Aaron’s voice answers another need as well. It shuts down the source of pathos that radiates from the young man’s situation. Left to tell his own story in his own words, Aaron would reprise and amplify the soul-rending theological emergency that impelled him to take the heedless steps that delivered him to his present fate. The shamash therefore initiates deliberate measures to take over Aaron’s story and reframe it in such a way as to minimize the effects of the corrosive doubt consuming the life of the young scholar. He does so by making Aaron’s fate into a moral exemplum for the dangers of intellectual inquiry (ḥaqirah), which, rather than leading to true knowledge, places the seeker deeper and deeper into the clutches of the qelipot (literally, husks), seductive demonic forces that imperil the soul of the believer. This theological schema makes the shamash very much of his time and place and reflects the penetration of Lurianic Kabbalah into the scholarly circles of Polish Jewry, especially through the writings of Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz (c. 1565–1630), the author of the Shenei luḥot habrit, which itself was first published in 1648. Aaron is portrayed as a rationalist whose desperate search for reasons for God’s apparent abandonment of His people, for which he learns Latin and immerses himself in “alien” wisdom, leads him down a slippery slope to apostasy and death. In that portrayal, the harrowing pathos of Aaron’s individual fate, in all its troubling implications, is exchanged for a pitiable case study in a transgression against norms held jointly by the shamash and his pious listeners.
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider how unlikely it would be to find Aaron’s story, even as filtered by the shamash, in any text from the period in which our story is set. The explicit wrestling with the problem of theodicy provoked by national catastrophe has a distinctly modern tang to it, as do other features of the story, especially its consciousness of its multiple narrative planes. Indeed, in the final pages of the story, the narrator — that is, the overarching narrator who allows the shamash to recount many of the events — makes direct reference to the Holocaust, in which the communal register recording these events was destroyed. In fact, throughout ‘Ir umelo’ah20 references to the murder of European Jewry are common, although the events of that period are not represented. This means that Agnon’s narrator, in this story as in others, writes about earlier times out of an awareness of what has taken place in his own; and in a profound sense his very motive for telling these stories is fueled by that catastrophic loss. It is therefore not farfetched to say that at some level 1648 is viewed through 1939–1945, and vice versa. 1648 is presented as a kind of rehearsal for the Holocaust, while at the same time the sort of theological crisis Aaron suffers is retrojected from the modern period to seventeenth-century Galicia. The parallel can be taken even further. The Khmelnitski massacres, even though causing vast collective devastation, did not bring about the horrible totality of the Final Solution. Buczacz survived, albeit in the traumatized state described in our story, and with time Galician Jewry rebuilt its communities and institutions and flourished. Now, this would seem to be where the parallel breaks down, were it not for the fact that there is an offshoot of European Jewry that not only survived but flourished: the Yishuv and the state of Israel. And so there emerges a different kind of parallel, one between Buczacz and Israel. The whole of ‘Ir umelo’ah can be taken as a project in which one is substituted for the other, although it is never wholly clear at any given moment precisely which for which.
As much as Hamashal vehanimshal is a story that represents the traumatic persistence of 1648, it is also a story that represents the way in which catastrophe can be mourned. This is not mourning as a state of vanquished dejection but rather mourning as a dynamically active liturgical process that both commemorates the dead and tends to the needs of the living. Agnon devotes a substantial portion of the story to the observance of the twentieth of Sivan; he positions these scenes, especially the rabbi’s parables (as in the title of the story), so as to serve as the climax of the narrative, and he makes them thick with quotations from Scripture and the sacred poetry composed to lament the recent disasters. Whether or not the rabbi’s parables serve their climactic purpose is a question that will be taken up in a subsequent section. The focus here is on the ceremony of mourning.
Like the ninth of Av, the twentieth of Sivan (a date in the Hebrew calendar that falls in the late spring) is a date to which many calamities have been attached. Its origins perhaps lie in massacres surrounding a blood libel in Blois in 1171 and the day decreed by the Tosafist Rabeinu Tam for its commemoration. Five centuries later, when the Jews of Nemirov were murdered by Cossack bands in the late spring of 1648, the date was taken up in the aftermath as a day of fasting and mourning for all the victims of the massacres, much as in our own time the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, twenty-seventh of Nissan) came to stand for the Holocaust as a whole. In the economy of its narrative, Hamashal vehanimshal turns away at this point from a preoccupation with the journey to Gehinnom and its aftermath and clears a monumental space for a depiction of the observance of the twentieth of Sivan. Even though the Jewish population of Buczacz is not large — it will become so in the following century — the depiction is monumental in the way it is framed. It is presented as a phenomenon of what might be called liturgical totalization. Every last member of the community, even nursing mothers with their infants, fasts and makes the trip to the cemetery and later stands for hours in the synagogue for the intoning of dirges and the rabbi’s eulogy for the dead. There is an intimate, reciprocal relationship between the living and the dead: “Some went to visit their relatives’ graves, some to entreat the dead to pray for the living” (39). Even though Buczacz physically escaped the massacres, it has subsequently been turned into a kind of necropolis. The cemetery itself is so overloaded with graves of martyrs that the Rabbi has relocated the venue of the eulogy to the synagogue, lest in the jostling kohanim, Jews of priestly origin, be inadvertently pushed into stepping on burial plots, where they are forbidden to go. For the Rabbi, the omnipresence of the dead is a nightmarish perception rather than an actuality. In explaining the transfer of the ceremony from the cemetery to the synagogue, he says, “Why do I need to go to the dead when they are coming toward me?” (40). The Rabbi’s meaning, according to the shamash, is that the town proper contains so many unknown graves of murdered Jews that it may be forbidden for kohanim to reside there altogether. The fact that the Rabbi has not issued a definitive ruling is found curious (qetsat qasheh) in the eyes of the shamash, given the Rabbi’s usual diligence in getting to the bottom of any legal issue he addresses. We, however, are given to understand that the matter is ultimately not a legal one but the projection of a consciousness enmeshed in the world of the dead.
As the ceremony proceeds, this extended scene comes to focus exclusively on the Rabbi, almost as if, in cinematographic terms, he were the subject of an extreme close-up. The Rabbi, we already well know, is the object of the shamash’s veneration, and it is therefore no wonder that his every gesture and utterance is taken to be infinitely meaningful. But the choice to place at the center of the scene a man so wholly absorbed in the reality of the martyred Jews is the sign of a broader narrative strategy intended to expose the depths of the trauma left in the wake of 1648. The Rabbi takes the prerogative of beginning with special memorial prayers for his own teacher, Rabbi Yeḥiel Mikhl of Nemirov, but he soon undergoes a breakdown. He bursts into tears, lays down the Torah scroll and places his head on the scroll. The object of fascination for the shamash and other observers in the congregation is the rabbi’s hair. Since receiving a wound to his skull during the massacres, he has not cut his hair, and his face is wreathed with a profusion of silver curls. Rather than attending to the grief that has momentarily disabled him, observers prefer a more transfiguring interpretation.
After a while he pulled himself up, and his white earlocks shone like polished silver. The interpreters of mystic secrets said that our Master had bathed his head in the waters of grace. His face shone in the crimson glow of the setting sun, but his eyes were closed, and our Master seemed like one who had been on a distant journey. Those same commentators said that he had returned from the far western edge of the world, where the Divine Presence resides, and there he had seen his Master, that holy light Rabbi Mikhl of Nemirov, and all the martyrs with him, sitting in the Academy on High, radiant in the Divine Presence. I do not concern myself with hidden matters — for a person like me what my eyes behold is sufficient — but I agree with those who say that every single one of our Master’s curls resembled a silver goblet that has been immersed in pure water. (41)
On the face of things, the kabbalistically attuned observers in the congregation would seem to be merely amplifying the shamash’s reverential stance toward the Rabbi. But the mystical ascent they ascribe to him, together with its happy vision of the martyrs basking in God’s presence, functions to evade the anguish and bereavement that are the dominant and proper emotions of the moment and the ones that the Rabbi’s breakdown truly expresses. Even the shamash, who, with his customary skeptical humility, distances himself from the transfiguring extremes proposed by the mystically inclined, is willing to permit a resemblance between the curls and the silver goblet immersed in pure water. The irony is that the Rabbi is indeed momentarily lost in another world, but it is the world of grief, not mystical transport. He recovers and regains control not once but twice, and with his commanding spiritual authority he proceeds to conduct the memorial service, so laden with complex liturgical poems, unflinchingly toward the goal of remembering the dead. The liturgy of that lengthening day, one of the longest days in the calendar, has a number of crescendos, and we shall return to the final parables that give the story its name. Surely one of those heightened moments reflects how the events of 1648 have impressed themselves on his mind: “He recited the names of the towns and villages that had been destroyed, and there was not one town or hamlet that he did not mention, and there was not one community of which he did not enumerate the number of Jews killed in it” (44). It is the tragic, epic and — certainly from the point of view of mental acuity — dazzling recitation of the names of the lost communities that demonstrates not only the abiding vigor of his mind but also the oceanic dimensions of the catastrophe.
GEHINNOM
When it comes to the sensational scenes in the Netherworld, it is important to keep in mind that the shamash’s narrative has at least two audiences: within the framework of the story there are the town elders assembled to judge him for his infraction, and outside it there are modern readers reading the story when it first appeared in Haaretz in 1958 or when it later appeared as part of ‘Ir umelo’ah. (One can also speak of an ideal implied audience created by the expectations of the pious narrator in the act of telling the story; that theoretical construct will be put aside for the present.) The responses of these two audiences to the scenes in Gehinnom are, unsurprisingly, likely to be very different. As modern readers, we have a variety of filters and rubrics through which we might make sense of depictions of grotesque punishments in the afterlife that are foreign to our sensibilities. We can choose to view them as literature rather than theology. When I was required to read Dante’s Divine Comedy as a freshman in college — the relevance of this particular example will be evident shortly — the poem was presented as a sublime integration of the social, scientific and political ideas of the Renaissance written within the idiom of the contemporary Christian religious imagination. This is an example of just one of the many ways in which we recuperate religiously exotic material by “appreciating” it rather than feeling called on to accept or reject the credal demands it makes on us. We are likely to respond to the Gehinnom scenes in Hamashal vehanimshal with a similar mixture of fascination and curiosity. In fact, the more fantastic and grotesque, the greater our fascination and curiosity.
The reaction of the listeners within the story is quite otherwise. They are shaken to the core, as was the shamash fifty-four years ago when he underwent the experience and as he now relives it. They are deeply disturbed because his eyewitness account contradicts essential elements of their beliefs about the afterlife. As Galician Jews living at the end of the seventeenth century, they are profoundly anxious about the fate that awaits them after death, and their absorption in imagining the afterlife, it needs hardly be said, has little to do with literary or anthropological fascination. The learned Jews depicted in the story were living at a time in which there had recently been a dramatic expansion in imagining the fate of the body and soul after death. Historians have long emphasized the fact that a belief in an afterlife became an official part of the religion of the Jews only after the biblical period. The rabbis of the Talmud authorized the existence of a postmortem Gehinnom (Hell) and Gan Eden (Paradise) and promulgated a doctrine of resurrection and tied them together with a belief in a messianic redemption at the end of history. Yet despite their insistence on the credal status of these beliefs, which were made into an integral part of the daily and Sabbath liturgy, the Rabbis discouraged speculation on these matters and provided tantalizingly little concrete information about what would happen in the afterlife. In the Middle Ages, this vacuum was abhorred by some and reaffirmed by others. Maimonides seconded the belief in resurrection, but only after discouraging speculation about it and only with the provision that it is solely the intellect that survives death and not the body. In contrast to this philosophical rationalism, the mystical tradition had no inhibitions about elaborately imagining the workings of the divine mysteries, whether they included the flow of divine energy within the Godhead or the abstruse geography of Hell.
The dissemination of kabbalistic ideas among Polish Jews intensified and broadened remarkably at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Meditation on divine mysteries, centered especially on the text of the Zohar, had long been a secret occupation of individual elite scholars. The theosophical innovations of Isaac Luria and his circle in Safed in the sixteenth century not only created a more applied and activist theology but also took an evangelizing stance toward promulgating that theology far beyond a narrow circle. Through their writings, Moses Cordovero and Isaiah Horowitz (known as the Shelah Hakadosh) restated Luria’s ideas in an approachable form and integrated them into familiar genres of ethical and pietistic guides. In this fashion, teachings that had been limited to an esoteric group of Sephardi mystics in the East were transferred to Polish Jews over the course of the seventeenth century and, in more domesticated and exoteric guise, became an essential part of everyday piety. Within this new framework, the religious imagination was liberated when it came to the afterlife, amply filling in the gaps left by the laconic restraint of the sages of the talmudic period. A good place to find these new imaginings about the afterlife gathered together is the Reishit ḥokhmah, a widely popular and oft-reprinted compendium of ethical teachings by Elijah de Vidas, a student of Cordovero’s, which first appeared in 1579. In chapter 13, de Vidas brings together texts bearing on the afterlife from the Talmud and the Zohar, as well as from Masekhet Gehinnom, a work of unknown provenance.21
The picture that emerges in these accounts is various and shifting in its details but never less than gruesomely vivid. There are seven compartments (medorim) in Gehinnom containing various kinds of sinners and five kinds of fire. Every compartment is divided into seven thousand holes, and their breadth and height are each three hundred years’ journey. Each compartment is presided over by a special angel, who in turn commands thousands of subsidiary angels of destruction. The punishments of Gehinnom are meted out on the principle of an eye for an eye. Slanderers hang by the tongue, robbers by their hands, adulterers by their sexual organs, wanton women by their breasts, and coveters by their eyes. Whereas the Talmud sees Gehinnom as a purgative ordeal lasting twelve months, the medieval accounts fix twelve months as a sentence that must be served in each of the compartments, as the suffering soul is lowered from one to the other in a succession of increasingly severe tortures.
In constructing the compartments of Gehinnom that figure so sensationally in Hamashal vehanimshal, Agnon had recourse to another important source from a very different cultural sphere. Immanuel of Rome (1261–1328), a contemporary of Dante’s, was a satirical Hebrew poet who introduced the sonnet into Hebrew poetry. In his collected poetic works — he called his diwan the Maḥbarot—there is an extended cycle in rhymed prose titled “Hatofet veha‘eden,” which describes a tour of Hell and Heaven guided by the biblical Daniel. Immanuel Judaizes Dante by replacing Christian schemata with the Rabbis’ teachings on Gehinnom in the Talmud while preserving the poetic conventions of the Divine Comedy. To be sure, the Maḥbarot did not circulate widely in rabbinic circles, yet Immanuel’s composition was well enough known to be banned by Yosef Karo in the Shulḥan arukh. Although it is unlikely that this particular vision of Hell would have been known to the elders of Buczacz listening to the shamash’s tale, it was certainly known to Agnon. And even if there are no borrowings from Immanuel in the story’s Gehinnom scenes, the reader familiar with the history of Hebrew poetry hears the echoes of Dante in Jewish guise in Agnon’s very enterprise of exploring this territory.
In sum, an unprecedented expansion of the Jewish theological imagination in the Middle Ages provided Agnon with much material to draw on in constructing these key scenes in his story. Indeed, the template for each scene is conventional, and therefore familiar, in giving a name to a compartment, specifying its dimensions, citing the angel appointed to supervise it, explaining the nature of the sins being punished and sparing no grisly or horrific detail in the execution of those punishments. Yet if these scenes are conventional in their presentation of the afterlife and familiar from the medieval ethical literature, then why is it that the shamash was so deeply shaken when he saw these sights many years ago, and why are his listeners in the present time of the story similarly shaken? The answer is that although the template is familiar, the content Agnon has placed within it is a radical departure that subverts some of the deepest convictions of the Jews of Buczacz. To understand the disturbing originality of Agnon’s account, let us first delineate the four distinct scenes that make up the tour of Gehinnom.
There are altogether four scenes from Gehinnom: (1) Kaf Haqela (the Sling), (2) Tsalmavet (Shadow of Death), (3) Gag ‘al Gag (Roof upon Roof), and (4) the Tatar horsemen. (The fourth scene differs from the rest; it has the characteristics of a nightmarish vision particular to the shamash’s febrile imagination. When he speaks of his tour of Gehinnom, he does not include it, speaking only of three compartments.) The first contrasts with the second and the third in that it precedes the encounter with Aaron’s shade and is in fact a series of tortures that take place outside Gehinnom. It is additionally distinct from those two in the confidence with which the shamash explains the scene; he does not need the rabbi to parse the meaning of strange and inscrutable practices. Based on a passage in the Talmud (Shabbat 152b), the scene describes sinners being flung by gigantic slingshots from the gates of Gehinnom back to the original sites of their sins, which, because of their sins, are no longer identifiable. Having failed to enter Gehinnom, they are flung back and forth until they are wholly worn down. Worse than the fate of confirmed sinners is that of those who wanted to sin and had sinful thoughts but lacked the opportunity to sin. Because of lack of commission, they cannot avail themselves of the process of regret and contrition that purges sin; it remains with them forever. Worse still are “those contemptible people who feel false pangs of conscience and fancy that they have repented, yet all the while they are consumed by sinful thoughts and their illusory pleasures” (20). Of these latter, says the shamash not without a note of grim humor, “No one can accuse me of loving sinners, but when I see them flung around like that, I am quite ready to hire myself out as the doorkeeper of Gehinnom so I can personally let them in” (20).
The Kaf Haqel‘a scene established disorientation as the sign under which all the subsequent matters relating to Gehinnom will be presented. What happens in the Netherworld, the shamash tells his listeners, does not conform to your notions, and it is much worse than you think. The norms and hierarchies we live by do not apply there. Reason and received rabbinic teaching would dictate that sins actually committed warrant a more severe punishment than those merely contemplated, but not so in that world, in which the order is reversed. You would think that the quest of the sinner to return to the site of his sin and expiate it would be rewarded, but the infernal ordeal into which he has been thrust makes that impossible. You would think that Gehinnom is terrible, but in fact there are those for whom admission to Gehinnom would be a kindness. This first iteration remains abstract; the sins of the sinners are not named. The stunning, upending news to come is that there are sufferers in Hell who, remarkably, resemble — and in most cases are superior in learning and scholarship to — the shamash’s listeners themselves.
This cognitive disorientation is explicitly named in the descriptions of the second and third compartments. The first is called Tsalmavet [Shadow of Death] and the second Gag ‘al Gag [Roof upon Roof]. Both compartments are filled with innumerable scholars, heads of yeshivot and chief rabbis, from the time of the Mishnah through the period of the Spanish Inquisition to the present. In the first, the scholars are floating in space and separated from each other by great distances, and in the second they are piled one atop the other. Central to both is a grotesque scene of desire repeatedly frustrated. The myriad scholars are all puffed up with self-importance, and each believes that the fate of Torah wisdom depends solely on him. And he wants nothing more than to broadcast his novel insights and arguments and induce his fellow to acknowledge his superior acumen. But not only is the wished-for acknowledgment denied, the very possibility of communication is nullified in the most gruesome way. In the first compartment, the ears of the listener grow bigger and bigger until they cover his entire body and muffle the scream that dies in the throat of the scholar who sought to impress him, whose own lips have enlarged to engulf his body. In the second compartment, the lips of the speaker fly away from him, and his tongue becomes impaled on his teeth and swells to the size of a church bell. His listener attempts to yell from horror, but no sound comes out of his mouth. “I am an old man and have seen much trouble and travail,” says the shamash, “but misery like that I have never seen.”
This cognitive disorientation is explicitly named in the second scene, the compartment of Gehinnom called Tsalmavet. “Nothing in the world is as paradoxical [davar vehipukho] as that compartment. It is circular in shape but appears square, square in shape but appears circular. The eyes perceive it one way, the mind another. These differences in perspective induce a certain melancholy” (28). The compartment is notable for being neither hot nor cold and totally airless, and for being presided over by a nameless angel who does nothing but stand with his mouth agape “like a person utterly bored and about to yawn.” The population of this compartment is huge, “twice the number of people who went out of Egypt,” and, as is evident from their accoutrements (silver-collared talitot and large tefillin), they are all heads of yeshivot and chief rabbis of whole regions, and they are all prodigious Torah scholars with total mastery of the Talmud with its earlier and later commentators. What is most unnerving about this scene is how these mighty throngs are situated. Each is separated from the other by a distance of two thousand cubits (a Sabbath boundary), and because their eyes have grown dim from study they cannot see the hundreds of thousands of similar scholars who float in the space surrounding them. Each, literally, is full of himself and, puffing himself up, proclaims, “I’m all alone in the world; all wisdom dies with me” (29). When he finally manages to prop himself up and realizes that the tiny distant creatures are also Jews, his overwhelming desire is to bestow on them some of his pilpul. (Pilpul is the intellectual gymnastics employed by advanced scholars to resolve difficult legal problems.) But as soon as he conceives of this plan, he falls into a desultory sleep.
What happens next in the shamash’s description of this compartment can only be described as a scene of talmudic jousting that is a parodic enactment of pilpul itself. The sleeper awakes to see someone striding toward him, and the two begin to trade taunts. One claims that he possesses a pilpul greater than anyone else has ever conceived; the other retorts that the first has stolen his words and that he possesses a pilpul that the other would long to hear with every fiber in his body. The two now enter into a parody of scholarly etiquette in which each, supposedly deferring to the other, in fact claims the right to speak first. But the contest turns out to be pointless because communication proves impossible. As soon as one begins to speak, his ears expand until they cover his entire body. The two stand facing one another, utterly mortified and wanting to cry out. But the “first one’s scream dies in his throat, and the other’s is muffled by his ears.” The total effect of their panic on the torpor of the presiding angel is to make him rock back and forth; he would have destroyed them if he had not been striving to produce a yawn.
The second compartment, Gag ‘al Gag (Roof Upon Roof), described in Chapter 11, visits a similar punishment on its scholarly inhabitants but stresses other aspects of their ordeal. The hugeness of this compartment consists in its spatial dimensions rather than its population. Not only is it so vast that no boundaries are perceptible to the eye but the compartment as a whole is suspended within a void (talui ‘al belimah). The inhabitants all have prominent foreheads and pinched eyes from excessive study, and they are frozen in an endlessly repeated gesture in which they pluck hairs from their beards and float them into space. Yet instead of being isolated from one another in this vastness, as they were in the other compartment, here they are piled one atop the other. In this crush, they do in death what they did in life: they pronounce ḥidushim. The difference between their scholarly activity now and then results from the peculiar conditions of academic integrity that are involuntarily visited upon them by Gehinnom. When they were alive and going about their business of issuing ḥidushim, if they found they had been hasty or exaggerated and thus made an error, they always had available to them the option of retraction. But here in Gehinnom, every word they uttered while alive is “permanently engraved in public view with his signature attached” with no possibility of denial.
The corruption of Torah study by grandiosity is the sin that has landed these prodigious scholars in Gehinnom. When a scholar penetrates the contextual truth of a passage of Talmud (poshet lo devarim kifshutam), the truer his insight the less his need to inflate his importance on the strength of it. But the more forced and over-ingenious is his insight, the more desperate he is to put it on display to his colleagues. And thus his punishment in Gehinnom. When he opens his mouth to broadcast his ḥidush, his lips fly away from him, and when he sticks out his tongue to find his lips, his tongue gets impaled on his incisors and begins to swell. The tongue thickens and swells up to the size of a church bell, a figure of speech the shamash insists is apt, “for just as a church bell peals without knowing why, so the tongue wags without knowing why it was put into motion” (32). The scholar he was seeking to address now tries to cry out in fright, only to have his own scream swallowed between his lips. It is little wonder that the angel appointed over this compartment of Gehinnom is called Otem, after the Hebrew verb that designates the shutting of the ears and the failure of comprehension.
In gauging the panic and horror these sights induce in the shamash, it is important to recall once again the function of dramatic irony in the story. We the readers have been given by the narrator some preparation for inferring a correlation between the particular punishments inflicted on these scholars and the particular sins that provoked them, by means of the remarkable opening scene of the story: the embarrassment of the garrulous son-in-law and his banishment from the synagogue. But the shamash, so many decades earlier, comes upon these tortures entirely unprepared, and when he does react there is a “double whammy” effect to his reaction. He is unhinged at first by the absence of an evident explanation for the tortures he has witnessed; yet once an explanation is provided by the Rabbi, the shamash’s panic grows greater instead of being mitigated. The first wave of the shamash’s response is horror because the boundary between him and the tortured souls momentarily disappears and he feels that the same grotesque tortures may be happening to him. “Panic seized me. Maybe my mouth was contorted. Maybe my lips had flown apart” (32). Having hidden his face out of horror in the folds of the Rabbi’s cloak, the shamash loses his bearings, and he fears that his ears are growing to enclose his body. When he wordlessly implores the Rabbi for an explanation, it is not delivered immediately. The Rabbi first takes the shamash’s measure to determine exactly how much he is capable of understanding, and the shamash uses the benefit of his retrospective wisdom to delay the rush of events and interpolate a vignette about a Jewish jeweler who measured the ears of the Gentile noblewoman so that he could fashion earrings of exactly the right proportions. The Rabbi even makes the shamash ask a second time, for he “wanted to see how important my question was to me. Sometimes the mouth wants to ask more than the heart wants to know” (33). This wisdom about unnecessary speech, which is the moral preoccupation of both the narrator and the shamash throughout the story, is, again, retrospective wisdom that was not available to the shamash when he first gazed upon these hellish afflictions.
When, after several additional delays, Rabbi Moshe fashions his custom-made response, he delivers a series of clarifications that provide some explanation but no consolation. He explains, to begin with, that what they have seen is a special compartment of Gehinnom — a kind of infernal VIP lounge, so to speak — reserved for great rabbis, heads of yeshivot, and rabbis of whole regions. Special emphasis is placed on the fact that these torments have been in operation for ages, and that the pitiable denizens of this compartment include sages from the time of Talmud and the expulsion from Spain. The nature of their punishments, he goes on to point out, are dictated by the nature of their offenses; because they sinned in matters of speech, they are punished by being rendered mute. If in life they sat one atop the other in the synagogue and beit midrash blathering to each other, now in death they are spread out at a great distance from one another and cannot get a word out of their mouths. They are tantalized by being free to produce all the ḥidushim they wish and at the same time obstructed in communicating them to anyone else. At the root of their reprehensible behavior during their lifetime — the fundamental key to all their troubles — was the sin of talking and flogging their ḥidushim during prayers and the reading of the Torah: “Our Master’s words disturbed me more than anything my eyes had seen” (34). When the shamash first came upon the afflicted souls without the benefit of any accompanying explanations, the monstrousness of their suffering seized him with raw terror; but that terror had nothing to do with him personally. Now, with the benefit of those explanations, the terror has metamorphosed into a cognitive-theological-moral complex that has turned around to seize him by the throat. “Who can say that he has never committed that sin?” anguishes the shamash. “Who among us keeps his lips and tongue under control at all times? Who has not talked during the service or the Torah reading? And if those learned in Torah bear such a punishment, what about the rest of us?” (34). Although he well knows that conversation during prayers is a transgression, his mind simply cannot stretch itself to comprehend the rationale for an otherworldly retribution so extreme in its ferocity. Using his best scholastic casuistry, the shamash can appreciate the regrettable extra burden placed on the angels, who now have to exert themselves to separate out true prayers from idle conversation. But this consideration does not go very far in addressing the disturbing phenomenon of the incommensurability between sin and punishment. The shamash glumly concludes, “The matter still remains unsettled” (35).
A surprising digression at this juncture in the narrative makes an important connection between two of the story’s preoccupations. The shamash is struggling to resolve the troubling contradiction between a seemingly minor offense and its terrible punishment, when he suddenly halts his story and surveys his listeners, among whom, he realizes, are scholars as well as community leaders who are not scholars. He turns to them and says:
Now listen to me all you people of Buczacz. You think that Gehinnom is only for Torah scholars. Well, let me tell you otherwise. There is one area there compared to which all the rest of Gehinnom is like Gan Eden. I never noticed it at first because it was covered in dust. But the voices that could be heard through the dust suggested that there were people there. I could not tell if they were people or cattle or fowl until I went in and saw that it was one huge market fair, like the ones our great-grandparents and those who came before them used to tell about, before Khmelnitski, may his name be blotted out. There were traders, dealers, noblemen and noblewomen, goods galore — like you’ve never seen before. Silver and gold and all kinds of expensive things. Then suddenly the whole fair was thrown into a panic. The Tatars had arrived. They came on swift horses in rumbling hordes. My body trembles even now as I recall it. I will stop talking about it and go back to where I left off. (35)
The shamash’s outburst is all the more intriguing for its strangeness and disconnection from what comes before and after it. Although he labels the scene of the fair and the horsemen as yet another compartment (mador) of Gehinnom, it quickly becomes recognizable as connected to the Tatar incursions of the 1670s rather than to the afterlife. It is different from anything that has come before because the suffering it represents is unrelated to any misdeeds that might have provoked it, and the ordeal is collective in nature rather than pertaining to the culpability of the individual soul. The scene belongs, in short, to an entirely different kind of discourse: the historical tribulations of Israel in recent persecutions. Even within this category, there is much that remains strange. Rather than picturing recent events, the tableau evokes an imagined earlier era of great commercial wealth and weighty transactions between Polish rulers and Jewish traders at the great market fairs. It is this older world that is made the target of the swift and devastating incursions of the Tatar horsemen, scourges that in fact come from a later period, the 1670s. The conflation of time and the sketchy, fragmentary evocation of events lend this scene the quality of a nightmare. It can be understood as a posttraumatic memory in light of all we have gleaned from the pervasive persistence of 1648 in our story. “My body trembles even now as I recall it,” confesses the shamash.
The digression breaks off as abruptly as it began. Yet by the time the shamash regains his composure and determines to “go back to where I left off,” he has unwittingly broached the link between the two kinds of trauma in the story, both hitherto presented as unrelated to one another. On the one hand, there are the events of 1648 and their pervasive baleful consequences for all the Jews of Buczacz, including the shamash’s wife, who witnessed the murder of her parents and seven siblings (43), and the shamash himself, whose family was also wiped out. The orphaning of Zlateh and the apostasy of Aaron also belong to this line of the narrative. On the other hand, there are the horrific tortures suffered by prideful and self-important scholars in Gehinnom forming the main story the shamash has been relating. Although a connection between them is made neither by the narrator nor by the shamash, they are both alive and comingled in the unconscious imagination of the shamash, as evinced by the digression about the Tatar horsemen and its surprising placement within the tour of Gehinnom. There is of course an implicit connection between the two, but it is one that is not thinkable to the figures in the story — except perhaps Aaron. It is only we, the modern readers, who, through Agnon’s agency, can see it clearly. It is the shared theological problem of incommensurability. How is it possible that the sins of Ukrainian Jewry were so unspeakable as to have warranted the horrors of Khmelnitski and his hordes? How is it possible that infractions of well-meaning scholars can result in unspeakable tortures for eternity? In both cases, the physical afflictions are horrible enough in their own right, but the enduring suffering, when it comes to the surviving and living, comes from the festering cognitive-theological wound that has been opened up.
The coexistence and even commingling of 1648 and Gehinnom in the shamash’s mind beg further questions: Is one the result of the other? Is the preoccupation with matters beyond the grave an outcome of a consciousness rooted in mass death and sacrifice? Is it the pervasiveness of death, arising from persecutions that took place in a concrete political-historical context, that generates the anxiety about postmortem punishments and their stringencies? The answer to these questions, as well as to the question of incommensurability, are located beyond the theological imagination of both the narrator and the shamash; the farthest they can go is to mark the wall that has been reached with the modest understatement, qetsat qasheh (It is a little difficult).22 The notion that 1648 may be the generating cause is expressed in the shamash’s repeated insistence that the tale of Aaron’s apostasy and his discovery in Gehinnom is merely preparatory and subservient to the main moral teaching about inappropriate speech. It is ultimately in the narrative syntax of the story that Agnon wrestles with these questions. The shamash returns from his tour of Hell between Yom Kippur and Sukkot, with many questions about the plausibility of what he has witnessed buzzing in his head; but within half a chapter it is suddenly late spring, and the monumental description of the twentieth of Sivan memorial takes over the story. Immersion in the 1648 theme kidnaps the story for the length of these protracted ceremonies, until the point at which the Rabbi at the very end arrives at his parable, which he uses to refocus the narrative and once again underscore the gravity of inappropriate speech. The story as a whole, in sum, stages a contest in which the spiritually wasting forces of death unleashed by 1648 are resisted by the desire to impose a moralizing meaning on the experience of life and death.
Stepping back and looking at the Gehinnom episode as a whole, we see clearly its extraordinary nature. On his return, the shamash himself can barely believe it has taken place because it is so disturbingly at odds with what he knows about the afterlife. Having been plucked from time and space and exposed to confounding horrors, he has difficulty in accommodating to the fact that life in Buczacz proceeds as usual. Perplexingly, the rabbi takes no action on Zlateh’s case as a result of having confirmed the fact of Aaron’s death. Her situation, in fact, is resolved only when a mysterious emissary from the East comes to Buczacz bearing a writ of divorce, which could only have been written when Aaron was alive. Yet despite these peculiarities, the shamash insists on the truth of his experience: “The three compartments of Gehinnom that I have noted I saw while completely awake and not in a dream. The same goes for the judgments visited upon all who talk during the prayers and the Torah reading” (39). And whatever hesitations the shamash himself may have had, the people of Buczacz are entirely persuaded by his testimony. So much so that they treat him like a revered authority, surrounding him and pestering him with endless trivial questions about the precise conditions that obtain in Gehinnom (Chapter 25).
What then, in the end, is so shocking about the news the shamash brings back from Hell? In light of the widespread diffusion of expanded ideas about Gehinnom among Polish Jews in the seventeenth century, what is revisionary about the shamash’s tale, and by extension what is original about Agnon’s appropriation of these materials? First the minor discrepancies. There was neither fire nor snow in the compartments that the shamash observed, which is at odds with all written accounts. The Talmud states that there are three entrances to Gehinnom (one in the desert, one in the sea and one in Jerusalem; Eruvin 19a), yet the Rabbi was able to find a portal only a short distance from Buczacz. The Talmud further states that the tortures of Gehinnom last twelve months, yet the shamash observed souls suffering their afflictions, according to the Rabbi, for hundreds and even thousands of years.
And then there are the three major discrepancies. The first is the fact that the Rabbi and the shamash survived their descent into the Netherworld. An extraordinary sage may outfox the Angel of Death and be given the privilege of entering the afterlife directly, that is, without going through the pangs of death and the grave, and even then his destination can only be Paradise and not its alternative. There is also the case of the zaddik who, on his death, descends into Gehinnom for the purpose of helping his followers discharge their purgations, but he does not rejoin the living. (Immanuel of Rome does descend and return alive, but the account of his journey belongs to the more worldly tradition of secular Hebrew poetry that would not have been familiar to the world of Buczacz.) The return of the Rabbi and the shamash to the world of living remains astonishing. The second is the fact that Gehinnom contains great Torah scholars. Attaining the status of a true talmid ḥakham entails not only mastering the corpus of talmudic literature and its attendant commentaries but also contributing to the corpus by making innovative interpretations and proposing creative solutions to knotty dialectical problems. In the normative religious culture of Polish Jewry, the talmid ḥakham was the crown of Creation, the pinnacle of aspiration. If Gehinnom contains compartments for sages alongside those for common sinners, then an entire structure of value is put in question, with profound implications for a society whose elite is founded on marriage alliances between successful merchants and promising scholars. If scholars, despite their peccadilloes, cannot count on being exempted from the tortures of Hell, then what hope is there for Jews who face the uncertainties of the afterlife without their attainments?
Finally, the doctrine of sin and punishment is founded on the principle of proportionality in two senses. Minor transgressions warrant minor punishments and major transgressions major punishments. The manner of the punishment is fitted to the manner of the transgression (adulterers hanging by their sexual organs, etc.). Agnon’s Gehinnom preserves the latter but throws over the former. The story hews ingeniously to the principle of an eye for an eye in inventing infernally apt punishments for those self-important scholars who cannot help hawking their latest wares during the synagogue service. But when it comes to believing that such infractions — and many would see them as merely excesses of holy zeal — deserve eternal torture, it is only the Rabbi who takes this for granted. For everyone else, including the shamash, this new information is a kind of wild card that threatens the integrity of an entire hierarchy of religious meaning with its implicit balances and gradations. True, the people of Buczacz are eventually persuaded by the force of the shamash’s tale to accept the radical seriousness of this particular offense. But beneath their burst of moral revivalism lies a deeper anxiety. With the notion of proportionality destabilized, they have lost the reliable key to the map of their religious fate. The desperate desire to regain this certainty is most likely the reason behind the zeal the Jews of Buczacz display in eventually embracing the shamash’s message. Despite the shockingly extreme punishments meted out for ostensibly moderate transgressions, the essential principle of theological rationality is reaffirmed. They seize a chance to gain hold of a key that will make sense of their postmortem fate even if they are required to hold themselves to a new moral standard.
THE SHAMASH’S TALE
Within the larger narrative galaxy of ‘Ir umelo’ah, Agnon’s postwar stories of Buczacz, our story stands out because it boasts two narrators.23 One is the narrator who organizes, accompanies and relates most of the volume’s stories. The other, of course, is the shamash, to whom the general narrator hands off the story in Chapter 2 and from whom he takes it back in Chapter 24, with a number of intervening glosses and explanations. In allowing the shamash to tell so much of the story, the narrator is discharging his role as an impresario of memory rather than simply as a chronicler. He is for a time divesting himself of his implicit prerogative as master storyteller and welcoming, as it were, a guest artist to share the podium. The gifts brought by this visiting performer are evident. He is a direct participant in the events and can speak with the immediacy of an eyewitness. But does not the narrator of ‘Ir umelo’ah claim for himself a trans-historical omniscience that would give him all the knowledge he needs to tell the story of the shamash and rabbi himself? His knowledge, after all, goes forward in time as well as backward, and it is only he who can make reference to the Holocaust at the end of the story and explain that the present iteration of the story is a replacement for the account inscribed in the communal register, the pinqas, which burned in the destruction of Buczacz by the Nazis. What he cannot do, however, is embody himself as a historical character with a name, a wife — two wives, in fact — and a real-life role to play in the life of the town. Embodiment is the one thing that the narrator, with all his “super powers,” cannot attain.
Yet despite this vital difference, there remains a great deal that the narrator and the shamash share. Their religious outlooks are similar in their worldly piety and their devotion to the core norms of worship and Torah study. They both repeatedly insist on the fidelity of their reporting and on the scrupulous honesty with which they admit what they know and what they do not know. And they both have a pronounced penchant for digressions and the rationales that seek to justify them. Indeed, it is not easy to pry apart the texture and timbre of their individual narrative voices; and this affinity gives rise to an anxiety on the narrator’s part concerning the reader’s ability to keep the two separate. At the beginning of Chapter 7, when the shamash is in the midst of recounting the tale of Aaron’s apostasy and its grim consequences, the narrator feels compelled to intervene and address the reader directly.
I remove myself from the narrative and take on the character of the shamash so he can speak in his own voice. But lest you start thinking that this story is about me, I intrude periodically with the words “the shamash said.” (21)
The Hebrew beneath this idiomatic rendering describes a rather complex act of self-negation and appropriation. The Hebrew reads: mafshit ani et tsurati velovesh et tsurato shel hashamash venotel et leshono befi (“I dematerialize my own form and take on the form of the shamash and take his tongue into my mouth”). On the one hand, the narrator wants the reader to know that the story is not about him but about the shamash, even though they are both using the first person. He therefore proposes a device for eliminating confusion and marking the shamash’s speeches: he will insert the words “Thus said the shamash.” On the other, he insists that the reader understand that, even though the shamash was a real person who toured Hell in the seventeenth century, in this belated telling he is a device, a character created by the narrator whose very voice is produced by an act of ventriloquism. The narrator’s anxiety, in the end, is not for nothing. He succeeds so well in making the shamash an indelible character that we often forget who in fact is pulling the strings.
Who is the shamash, after all, that this extraordinary tale should be placed in his mouth? By what merit is he allowed to return from Gehinnom alive and tell a story that changes the lives of his fellow townspeople? The elders of Buczacz, having assembled to judge him and now in thrall to his account, ask the same question. Between the description of one compartment of Gehinnom and the other, they wonder:
You might think that this was because he was great in Torah and wisdom and piety and good deeds. Not at all. This was a poor shamash, one who was no different from anyone else in Buczacz, except for his temper. Perhaps the merits of his forebears who were killed in the pogroms stood in his stead. But in this matter he was no more privileged than the other townspeople, almost all of whom saw their father or mother die a terrible and cruel death. So the matter is truly puzzling. (30)
The shamash himself would make no exception to this characterization. He goes out of his way to underscore his ordinariness in relation to the learned elite of Buczacz. In commenting on mystical speculations relating to why Rabbi Moshe’s life was spared during the massacres, the shamash professes that such matters are beyond him: “It is enough for a man like me to get through the weekly portion with Targum and Rashi’s commentary” (6). He is, moreover, a man burdened with sorrows. He was a young man with many children at the time of the journey to Gehinnom; his wife was already an invalid, bedridden and unable to speak, who would not live out the year.
Yet despite his lack of distinction, the shamash leverages prodigious power on the people of Buczacz. His power derives not so much from the fact of his journey to Gehinnom as from the telling of it many years later. In the galaxy of Agnon’s fiction, storytelling is an omnipresent and highly privileged activity, but rare indeed is the case when the telling of a story has the impact described in Hamashal vehanimshal. When his listeners reach the point at which they are too terrified by his story to press for more details, the shamash drives home his advantage: “But he did not leave it at that and proceeded to tell the story to its end, and his words sank deep into their bones and stayed with them all their days. And when they passed away, they saw in another world everything the shamash had told them in this one” (45). What is the source of this power, so rare among great preachers and scholars but here invested in a curmudgeonly sexton?
Our sexton, to begin with, is not quite as unlettered as others see him, or as he would have us believe. He spends his days in and around the beit midrash and in conversation with scholars who devote their time to study. He knows the text of the Hebrew Bible well and can identify the sources of the scriptural quotations that are the rabbi’s preferred mode of communication. Difficult verses with original interpretations fall into his mouth (“A verse in the Torah occurred to me”) at key moments (35). He fully comprehends all of the rabbi’s homilies and textual references, and he is not so humble to observe about himself, “That is one thing I take pride in: if I do not understand our Master’s words right away, later on I do” (46). The shamash’s religious world has been deeply influenced by the dissemination of Kabbalah into broad sectors of Polish Jewry, and it is natural for him, for example, when he bemoans Aaron’s misguided inquiries into the meaning of Jewish suffering, to speak of persecutions as God’s way of purging us from the “qelipot we have acquired in the lands of the Gentiles and thereby prepare us for the day of His Redemption” (9). Although he repeatedly avers that he is not among the devotees of mystical interpretation (49), he does not hesitate to include the glosses of those who are, and on occasion to offer his own (36). When he looks up at the stars after emerging from the Netherworld, a line occurs to him from the Book of the Angel Razi’el, an early medieval kabbalistic work (see translator’s note to p. 36). After he witnesses the tortures of the scholarly sinners in Gehinnom and before the rabbi explains the reason for their fate, the shamash performs a mental search: “I reviewed all the sins and punishments enumerated in the holy books and could find none that matched what I had seen” (32). This is a feat that requires no small amount of learning. His reading is also broad, as demonstrated by his referring to an anecdote in Sefer kaftor vaferaḥ, a Hebrew treatise on rabbinic aggadah by Yaakov bar Yitzchak Luzzato, Safed, ca. 1527–1587 (8). In sum, although the shamash is no talmid ḥakham in terms of scholarly attainment or class position, he is a creature of the culture of the beit midrash whose literacy enables him to grasp the meaning of all that transpires around him in the beit midrash and its culture. The most eloquent testimony to his literacy is to be found in his reconstruction from memory of the memorial ceremonies on the twentieth of Sivan and the many quotations from Scripture and from arcane liturgical poems that attended them.
A source of his power lies, paradoxically, in the meekness of his subservience to Rabbi Moshe. To be sure, the very nature of his office as shamash enjoins this subordination, as does the fact of his youth — he was fifty-four years younger than when he relates the story! — in relation to the rabbi’s venerable age when he served him in what turned out to be the last year of the sage’s life. Yet the devotion of this proud and irascible man to his master rests on a more compelling foundation. There is a profound affinity of spirit and temperament between master and servant. This is expressed in an area of human interaction that is central to the thematic preoccupation of the story: speech, necessary and unnecessary. Although there are many tasks that the shamash is called on to perform at the rabbi’s behest, his intuitive understanding of what is required of him often obviates the need for his instructions to be articulated: “Many times it seemed as though the look in his eyes told what he wanted to say to me” (13). The repertoire of nonverbal communications between the two enables them to use speech only for what is truly worthy to be spoken about: “One did not make small talk with our Master” (13). But it is more than a gift for attunement that enables the shamash to offer such devotion. Rather, it is his identification with the authority the rabbi wields with such utter probity and integrity, and it is in the enforcement of this authority that the shamash finds a calling suited to his temperament. When, as quoted above, the elders of Buczacz express their amazement over the shamash being singled out to witness astonishing sights, the one exception to his ordinariness they note is his temper.
This strikes the reader as an accurate observation. The shamash is indeed a man of intense moral focus who is easily provoked by the temporizing of others. In Rabbi Moshe’s rule over Buczacz, he finds a regime with whose righteousness he wholeheartedly identifies, so much so that he can subsume his will within the rabbi’s will without feeling diminished. To the contrary, he is nurtured, empowered and elevated by being enlisted in the rabbi’s service. After the rabbi gives him the first intimations of their fateful journey, the shamash says to himself, “How good it is to know that we have leaders whose words keep us on the straight path and sustain us in this Exile” (15). Reported a half century later, his words convey to his listeners an implicit critique of current rabbinic regimes and the leadership they offer.
The vignette about the melamed and the tax collector in Chapter 4 underscores the affinity between the rabbi’s unbowed leadership and the shamash’s fierce resolve. The story is told in the context of a conversation between the shamash and his first wife, and it occurs at the moment when the rabbi has told the shamash that he requires his help for a special undertaking, but before there is an inkling of just how special the errand will be. The reason the rabbi gives for enlisting his help is particularly telling: “I know that people do not frighten you” (12). And indeed, when the shamash goes home for breakfast before returning to the rabbi, his nervous preoccupation is noticed by his wife, who engages him in speculating about the mysterious task. In the course of these speculations, she mentions the episode of the melamed and the tax collector, which the shamash now reprises for the reader. The episode concerns a melamed who was slapped in the face by a wealthy man who was disappointed with the results of the melamed’s attempts to educate his son. The melamed brought the tax collector to court over the assault, and when the latter failed to show up, “Our Master then instructed me to go and tell the man that if there is no legal accounting here below, there certainly is one up above, and if he would not appear before the local rabbinical court he would absolutely be hauled before the beit din of Gehinnom. So I went to him without the least fear of him or his dogs or his servants” (13). The shamash will shortly discover that the mission for which he is being enlisted will expose him to dangers greater than menacing dogs and nasty servants. Nonetheless, the rabbi has identified within this poor, young and unrecognized assistant an unbowed resoluteness of purpose that can be mobilized for holy purposes.
The shamash’s monumental expression of will is the one that the reader might easily take for granted: telling the story that accounts for the great majority of Hamashal vehanimshal. This power resides, of course, not merely in the fact of telling the story but rather in the extraordinary capacity to shape and project a narrative that compels his listeners to change their lives. In this he even surpasses his master, the great homilist, whose revered preaching does not approach the shamash’s narrative in its electric ability to produce moral self-questioning. Underlying the shamash’s astonishing performance is the perplexing question of why he launches into it in the first place. The precipitating events lie in the distant past. Because of the tale’s air of dramatic immediacy, we do not realize just how far in the past they lie until the shamash mentions in passing the figure of fifty-four years toward the very end of his narrative. For these many long years, those astounding events had remained secret knowledge guarded by the shamash in accordance with the sacred principles of restraint and discretion in matters of language laid down by Rabbi Moshe.
What impels the shamash to violate those principles and disclose the terrible events of a half century earlier? The story discloses two motives, one explicit and one implicit, and the coexistence of the two explains a great deal about the way the shamash tells his tale. The explicit motive is a moral indignation that pays tribute to the values of the shamash’s long-dead master. In the years since the originating events, the shamash has witnessed a drift away from the high principles of restraint in speech that the rabbi had made the thrust of his valedictory address to his flock. Conspicuous displays of learning, as witness by the proliferation of pilpul and ḥidushim, have undercut loyalty to the plain and true meaning of the Torah; the members of the mercantile elite have purchased scholars with these showy talents as husbands for their daughters in order to elevate their family status. That fateful Sabbath morning when one such son-in-law blathers his latest scintillating ḥidush into his friend’s ear during the Torah service is simply too much for the shamash. The implicit motive lies in the twin traumas that left their searing impress on him as a youth and a young man: the massacres of 1648 and the journey to Gehinnom. To be sure, as a victim/survivor of 1648, the shamash underwent an ordeal, which is given no back story, that was presumably no worse than that of many other Jews of Buczacz. And that is precisely the important point: Although Buczacz famously escaped the brunt of the physical injury inflicted by Khmelnitski, do not think that the spiritual damage was anything but severe and far-reaching. The shamash is a Buczacz everyman in this regard, and fifty-four years later, when the town is once again teeming and prosperous, he is among the few surviving firsthand witnesses who carry the horrors within them. When it comes to Gehinnom and the gruesome tortures of the ostensibly righteous there, however, the shamash inhabits his own singular category. He has remained silent about these twin traumas for many decades, even as they have presumably never ceased to exert painful pressure on his inner and unconscious life. Although moral indignation provides a respectable trigger for his extraordinary act of public humiliation and the story that follows it, there is much in this outpouring that taps the need for confession and catharsis.
The simultaneous operation of two sets of motivation is critical in explaining a highly problematic hallmark of the shamash’s narration: his penchant for digression. Now, having entered the Agnonian universe, the experienced reader may extend wide latitude to this practice, or even simply take it for granted. Yet if we attend to the particular, urgent message of this story, then the question of narrative superfluity becomes marked as moral laxity. After all, the moral the shamash works hard at impressing on his listeners — a moral learned from his master and confirmed by the narrator — is that speech should be husbanded and expended only when necessary. Silence, discretion, reticence, gesture in place of words, Scripture in place of human discourse, the avoidance of speech about others — these are the bywords of a religious seriousness that begins with chatting in the synagogue and exfoliates into an ethics of being in the world. The actual telling of the story itself is the dramatic result of an accidental violation of this principle. The shamash certainly does not intend to tell the story of the journey to Hell that took place a half century earlier; but when his ire is enflamed and he commits an act of public humiliation, he has no recourse but to divulge the events he has kept silent about for so very long. Yet once he is inevitably launched on his narrative of those extraordinary events, the ethics of restraint should, by his own lights, require him to hew closely to his moral message and avoid all extraneous remarks. But the outcome, as any reader can see, is quite otherwise. The shamash’s tale is replete with all manner of subsidiary observations, anecdotes and vignettes. Is this simply the old Agnonian charm, the traditional license of the storyteller, beguiling to some and irksome to others?
I would argue that the answer is no in the case of this story, as well as in many others of Agnon’s writings. The argument for rationalizing the digressions and viewing them as performing strategic functions rests on the dual nature of the shamash’s motivations. His explicit motive is to drive home the moralizing message about the evils of competing with divine speech; his implicit and unconscious motive is to give expression to a variety of traumas and anxieties that include the unexplained reasons for God’s having visited so much suffering on His people, the horrific tortures of Gehinnom that are meted out not only to the obviously wicked and the loss of his great mentor and master, together with the decline of true and wise rabbinic authority. These concerns exert pressure on the shamash’s intention to tell “the truth and nothing but the truth” and convey what is immediately relevant to the elders of Buczacz; they create a kind of interference in the dissemination of his message. The pattern is evident on almost every page of the story, but nowhere more than in two large narrative blocks. The heartrending story about Aaron’s apostasy is strictly necessary only to explain how the rabbi and shamash came to discover the compartments of Gehinnom that house the scholars who are being punished for hawking their wares during the reading of the Torah. But since Aaron’s story is saturated with emotional losses and troubling theological speculations connected to 1648, he cannot desist from giving the account ample room even at the same time he avers that it is not the main point and that he must move on. A similar case is the great block of narrative devoted to depicting the ceremonies of the twentieth of Sivan commemorating the massacres. Loving detail is lavished on all of the difficult piyyutim and on the obscure biblical verses parsed by the rabbi, and in general on the particulars of this epic scene of remembrance. Yet all this bears no relevance to the story’s moral teaching about human and divine speech. The two terse parables that do bear on the moral theme seem tacked on at the end of the day’s proceedings as if they were afterthoughts. I shall presently explain.
Thus there emerges from the story a differential hermeneutic that enables the reader to make sense of the shamash’s digressive habits. What might seem errant and meandering and the sign of a failure of discipline is in fact something else entirely. It is the record of an inner turmoil in which the traumas of the past are continually claiming their due alongside the shamash’s efforts to project the more official ethical message. This is a method of reading that provides no small measure of help in negotiating many reaches of the Agnon universe.
MASHAL AS DECOY
In accounting for the meaning of a literary text, we usually take the privileged status of the work’s title as axiomatic. We assume that in fashioning a title an author is choosing an evocative phrase that stands for the work as a whole and pointing us in the direction of its main thematic import. In the story before us, Agnon would seem to be playing against those expectations. By titling his story The Parable and Its Lesson [Hamashal vehanimshal], Agnon invites us to assume that a parabolic homily will serve as the climax of the story’s drama or as a central node around which the thematic lines of the story will be arrayed. Yet the title does not do its job, and on completion of the story the reader can be forgiven for feeling duped or at least disoriented. The two parables, the one about an anteater and the other about the lord of a palace, are grotesque and meager, and the abrupt way in which they are delivered after so many events of high moment and drama is the essence of anticlimactic. Can’t Agnon do better?
The parable of the anteater is provocative on many levels. As a general principle, the classic rabbinic parable rests on a foundation of familiarity, whether understood in terms of its rhetorical effect or the history of its conventions in homiletic literature. The homilist compares a situation that is simpler and more familiar to his listeners (the mashal) to a grave or complex religious message (the nimshal). The dynamics of a royal household in which a king banishes his consort or exiles a son who angered him is often compared to the embroiled relations between God and the Jewish people.24 In Late Antiquity, Jews lived under Roman rule, and although they had little firsthand exposure to the lives of imperial figures, they did understand the absolute authority of the emperor and his regional governors. Over time they became so accustomed to — even fond of — these stereotypical motifs that the parable was looked to as the unit in a long homily that would deliver the most delight.25 In pointed contrast to this practice, the creature Rabbi Moshe places at the center of his parable is grotesquely unfamiliar several times over. The news of the existence of this creature has been given to him thirdhand by one Reb Zevulun, a spice merchant, who in turn heard about it from caravan operators who ply the desert routes to the Land of Cush. In addition to having its existence rest on hearsay, the creature fits into no known species; it is a variety of monkey that resembles a dog and survives by eating ants. Jarring as well is the violence with which the creature lures its unsuspecting, industrious little victims into its trap and then suddenly foments their deaths. The rabbi’s laconic and hurried presentation of the nimshal, the allegorical solution to the parable, is also strange. There is no reference made to the problem the rabbi announced he was setting out to address — the sin of improper speech — and the dramatic emphasis in the nimshal falls entirely on the tragic inevitability of antlike Jews falling into the infernal trap laid for them.
Then, having missed the mark with his first parable, the rabbi marshals his energies and offers a second parable, which, this time around, succeeds on every level. The parable tells the story of the lord of a castle who takes pity on a poor man and listens to his tale of woes; the lord not only allows him to settle on his estate but provides him with writs that grant him hereditary ownership of his property. But the poor man ends by alienating the lord’s good will when he talks about irrelevant matters and then interrupts the lord as the lord reads from the documents that assure the poor man’s future fortune. For his listeners this time, the figures in the parable are reassuringly familiar and transparent. The theme of the parable is decidedly “on message.” And the rabbi skillfully exploits the resources of the mashal-nimshal structure so as to produce a gasp of recognition when his listeners, having recognized the evident foolishness of the poor man’s conduct, realize that they are he, and that by jabbering in the synagogue they endanger their hold on the gifts God has bestowed on them.
Rabbi Moshe has finally hit the mark. But why did he fail to get it right the first time? The answer becomes evident if we stand back and view the anteater parable in the larger context of the lengthy commemorative ceremonies on the twentieth of Sivan. The parables come at the very end, at a point where the rabbi has announced that he is shifting from the theme of mourning and memorialization to the theme of synagogue worship and its disturbances. The import of the first parable clearly indicates, starkly and dolefully, that despite his intentions the rabbi has not succeeded in making the shift. His deepest thoughts remain entangled in and possessed by the horrible losses of 1648 and the troubling theological questions they raise, questions that have already led to the apostasy and death of his favorite student. How could those gentle and industrious ants, so admired by King Solomon in his proverbs, have known that the sand hill they swarmed upon was in fact a satanic trap? “And yet with all their wisdom, the ants cannot avoid falling into the hands of the monkey” (53). The source of their livelihood suddenly becomes their grave when the creature rouses itself from its camouflaged hiding place and shuts the trap. In its evocation of gruesome violence and disorienting astonishment, the parable is supremely effective, but only if we think of it as serving the sermonic agenda the rabbi has announced he was moving beyond.
Again we are confronted with the memories of 1648 welling up unbidden and interfering with the moral message the story seeks to broadcast. The shared wish of the narrator, the shamash and the rabbi to hew to the moral message is a desire they can only imperfectly fulfill. They seek to do so nevertheless because of the portentous theological issues at stake. Rabbi Moshe can skillfully offer the standard consolations about repentance and God’s abiding love for Israel, but he is powerless to mitigate the terrible losses and the terrible memories, and when it comes to sensitive and inquisitive souls such as Aaron, he cannot avert the corrosive spread of theological doubt with its calamitous consequences. This sense of wayward ungovernability is precisely what is absent from the call to refrain from mixing human speech with divine speech in the synagogue. The latter is a question of comportment and discipline; it may pose a challenge to the grandiosity of some scholars, but it is inscribed wholly within the realm of human choice. The mechanisms of moral introspection and fulfillment of religious duty operate on a psychological level very different from traumatic loss and memory. True, the duty to avoid improper speech is not without its frightening aspects. The horrific punishments for transgression, as the shamash has so powerfully witnessed, can seem inexplicably disproportionate to the offense, and the offense itself may be inevitably wired into human behavior. Nevertheless, of the two contending themes of the story, moral challenge is the more optimistic and less demoralizing because it admits of the possibility of corrective human action. When it comes to what God allowed to be done to the Jews in 1648, however, there could be no nostrums.
Why in fact, at the end of this very long fast, does the rabbi introduce a subject that has no ostensible connection to the theme of the day? If he seeks to turn away from imponderable matters of historical suffering and toward governable matters of practical religious conduct, there are undoubtedly any number of areas of spiritual laxity that need shoring up. It is far from clear that in the community of Buczacz at that moment the temptation to speak during the reading of the Torah has the status of a clear and present danger. For when the rabbi begins to turn his attention to the subject he goes so far as to admit that, even though he has heard of the problem, he himself has not seen it with his own eyes (47). The rabbi, to be sure, is in possession of secret knowledge that the townspeople are not privy to. In his journey to Gehinnom, he has seen graphic evidence of the severity of the issue and its persistence over many centuries. It is this long view that may account for why the rabbi, whose last public discourse this is before his death six months later, insists on addressing an area of conduct that is not an acute need of the present moment. Now, Rabbi Moshe is a holy sage who, at least in the shamash’s mind, is endowed with ruaḥ haqodesh, prophetic foresight. Is it not then possible that the rabbi is in fact directing his words not to the present faithful of Buczacz, the meager remnants of the massacres, the community of two hundred souls who stand as they listen to rabbi’s long homily because their synagogue does not yet have chairs or benches, but rather to the Buczacz of some fifty-four years later, whose inhabitants have multiplied and whose merchants have grown prosperous enough to forget when the word of God takes precedence over the casuistry of their sons-in-law?
This speculation gives birth to another speculation. The depiction of the rabbi comes to us wholly through the eyes and lips of the shamash, who selects behaviors, incidents and quotations in order to construct the figure of his venerated master. The shamash lives long into the period of Buczacz’s reconstruction and prosperity even as he observes disturbing signs of spiritual complacency in matters concerning which he knows there are dire consequences. Might not the shamash have exercised a preemptive prophetic wisdom on behalf of the rabbi? Might not the parables that concluded the rabbi’s long discourse have been “retrofitted” through the work of the imagination to yield an older wisdom that would have the éclat of prophetic authority when they would be most needed?
Whatever their etiology, the parables can in no meaningful sense be construed to constitute the climax of the story, or the distillation of its meaning, or the banner under which the reader first encounters the text. As a title, The Parable and Its Lesson [Hamashal vehanimshal] is a decoy or a counter that draws our attention away from the unstable and contending binaries of the story.
THE HOLY COMMUNITY OF BUCZACZ
As the shamash concludes his tale and the narrator resumes direct narration of the story, a new character moves to center stage: the holy community of Buczacz. One of the great questions that haunts Agnon’s epic cycle of Buczacz stories as a whole is whether a community can in fact be conceived of as a character and function like one. Can a social organism exercise the will and agency that we associate with the great figures of fiction? Can a town meaningfully function as the protagonist of a formidable cycle of stories? ‘Ir umelo’ah is the large canvas on which Agnon experiments with this proposition. Although we can reckon with these questions only by taking the whole cycle into account, the final sections of our story give us a glimpse how this collective portraiture might work.
The last four chapters of the story (24–27) present a complex picture of how the community of Buczacz absorbs and processes the extraordinary new information revealed by the shamash’s tale. Throughout these pages, Buczacz is spoken about as a single collective, as when the narrator begins Chapter 24 with the statement “The shamash’s words left Buczacz astounded” (‘amdah Bitshatsh temihah, 58); or when verbs in the third person plural are used to convey concerted action on the part of the inhabitants of the town as a whole. Although the distinct behavior of some subgroups is pointed out, the corporate identity of Buczacz is maintained throughout.
The first response of Buczacz is cognitive disorientation. It was always taken for granted that “talking generally brings people together and dispels worry, while silence is usually a sign of sorrow and suffering” (58–59), and now this commonsense conviction has been powerfully refuted. Dealing with the contradiction brings out the dialectical acumen of the town, and it is in the course of their arguments that they come to admit the logic of the shamash’s arguments and acknowledge how even learned human discourse can become an affront to God’s honor and generosity. After having grasped the point intellectually, they begin to confront the dread and anxiety that inevitably follow in the wake of this realization.
A series of groans came forth from the assembled. First from despair, and then from trepidation, for even when one takes care not to talk during the services or the Torah reading, there are times when one simply cannot control oneself and things that serve purposes neither lofty nor base come out. (59)
Reviewing their Sabbath morning practices with an honest eye, the townspeople are constrained to admit that rarely a week goes by when some words of the Torah reading are not drowned out or otherwise lost by well-meaning (or sarcastic) remarks correcting the reader and by the commotion they provoke.
Within this general spiritual reckoning, there are those who are especially receptive to this heightened stringency because they have already intuited its truth but not yet grasped its enormity. They not only immediately take upon themselves the rule of silence in synagogue but, in a way that would have gratified the shamash’s master Rabbi Moshe, also extend the principle of avoiding unnecessary speech to behavior in the marketplace and in the home. At the same time, there are others in the community who, while accepting the validity of the new stricture, give themselves over to an obsessive and even lurid fascination with the details of Gehinnom. Are there fallen angels there? Are the tortures interrupted on the Sabbath? Do they say the same prayers we do? What happens to their clothes and their fringed undergarments after their bodies cease to exist? “There was no end to their questions,” the narrator informs us, “and because they had not yet learned to restrain their tongues, those tongues nattered on with abandon” (61). Absorbed in the sensational revelations of the shamash’s tale, they have allowed the real import of the story to pass by them.
Yet, in the final analysis, the townspeople of Buczacz do the right thing. They recognize that the shamash’s precipitating act of public humiliation was in fact a gesture of self-sacrifice, and instead of fining him and removing him from his office, they restore him to public honor and give him the special task of standing on the bimah during the Torah reading and vigilantly surveying the congregation for errant instances of idle chatter. This is but one instance of the procedures and safeguards the elders put into effect so that the new discipline will be made a permanent part of the religious life of the town.
The willingness of Buczacz to rectify its ways, in other words, gives the story a happy ending, at least in the classic sense in which the bonds of society are reconstituted after a threat to their cohesion. It remains unclear, however, whether the positive ending outweighs the grave instances of suffering so strongly adduced earlier in the story concerning the aftermath of 1648 and in the compartments of Gehinnom. These two sources of tragic undertow, we have seen, contend at every level of the story with the moral issue of divine and human speech, the former the result of ungovernable forces and the latter more susceptible to human agency. Through his narrator, Agnon formerly converts the story into a comedy by devoting the final chapters to the successful repentance of the town. In metaphysical and aesthetic terms, however, the ending comes across as less of a consummation than an act of will. To the threat posed by the corrosive and deconstructive forces of unexplained suffering — in this world and the next — the story offers the example of Buczacz as a qehilah qedoshah, a holy community that is imperfect but capable of religious renewal.
In the privileging of religious rationality in the concluding chapters of the story, some readers may find a disappointing falloff in aesthetic interest. For after the melodrama of a court trial and a descent into Hell, the efforts to reform synagogue protocols may seem lacking in dramatic moment, or smacking of a tacked-on happy ending. Yet this ending, on closer inspection, turns out to be less than wholly consummate and accomplished. Although the community makes amends and institutes many reforms, the spirit of those corrections are eclipsed over time by the realities of communal life. Synagogues cannot subsist without contributions from congregants, and these are generally made when a man is called to the Torah and given the opportunity to have blessings publicly recited for the well-being of the members of his household. In a sardonically funny passage (64), the narrator catalogues the many ways in which this seemingly benign practice can result in propagating waves of distraction and animosity. This report on the equivocal fate of the reforms over time not only reconfirms the narrator’s reliability as a jaundiced observer but also leavens the story’s positive resolution by grounding it in the realities of human nature and communal behavior.
The apotheosis of the shamash and the restoration of his office and honor camouflage a similar uncertainty. Beset by endless questions about the afterlife, most of them maddeningly trivial, the shamash has to decide how much of what he discovered about Gehinnom he is willing to give up to these inquisitive and intrusive townspeople. Although he would much prefer to abide by the ethos of discretion and restraint, he knows that without disclosing secrets he has no chance of stoking the will to repent. He has, after all and for ostensibly higher ends, broken his decades-long silence and told the shocking tale of the descent into the Netherworld. The last glimpse the narrator gives us of the shamash finds him meditating on the mysteries of divine indirection that have brought him and his tale to the center of attention, and this even though he was merely a candle holder to the rabbi in his audacious mission to release an agunah from her bonds.
The shamash is well aware that it is the sensational revelations about the afterlife that have been the engine for the town’s new moral resolve. The townspeople of Buczacz have been riveted by his story because all human beings are fascinated by suffering, sin and punishment, the stranger and more grotesque the better. There is no denying that it is the perverse pleasure people derive from such tales that makes them willing to attend to the moral message. But that kind of pleasure is only a provocative stimulant; it does not provide the inner resources for sustained change. “Such pleasure has been the downfall of many,” the shamash observes and then goes on to posit, “But there are many kinds of pleasure, and happy is the one whose pleasure brings him edification and whose edification is his pleasure” (62). In the shamash’s wistful sigh, we can hear the prayerful wish of many writers who would hope their readers derive as much aesthetic gratification from the nuanced description of the everyday lives of their characters seeking to reform their lives as from the melodramatic events that precipitated the desire to change. This sentiment would not be out of place, for example, in the mouth of George Eliot’s narrator in Middlemarch as she describes the long night of Dorothea Brooke’s moral reckoning with herself and its prosaic aftermath. It is the particular burden Agnon takes on himself in ‘Ir umelo’ah as he seeks to make the life of a holy community interesting and important to us, even if in the process he supplies us with no small stock of the shocking and the deviant.
INSCRIPTION, CATASTROPHE, RETELLING
On the last page of Hamashal vehanimshal we discover that the story we have been reading is the work of a writer living in modern-day Jerusalem, a city filled with its own share of noisy synagogues. This is a disorienting discovery. Although we “know” that we have been reading a text by S. Y. Agnon, a twentieth-century Hebrew writer, the story all along has been told by a narrator close to the events in the seventeenth century, who, in turn, hands over most of the narration to an eyewitness; it is a world in which we have been fully immersed. What is the relationship between the narrator, in whose grip we have been held throughout this remarkable tale, and the writer, who pokes his head up at the very conclusion? Is the former merely a creation or a device of the latter? Our disorientation is compounded when we are informed that the story we have read is not the original story but rather a replacement for the original story that was inscribed in the pinqas of Buczacz and lost in the Holocaust. What is the relationship between the original and its replacement?
Most of what we know about the lost text revolves around the office of the scribe and his role in formulating the account of the shamash’s story that is inscribed in the communal register. The narrator is unstinting in his praise for the scribe’s work. “So the scribe wrote out the whole story in words true and wise, in the way words were used in Buczacz at the time when Buczacz was Buczacz. Some of the words were from the Torah, some from the sages, all of them had an eloquence that gives tongue to knowledge” (66). The scribe takes the events of the shamash’s tale as his raw material and submits them to a process of sublimation whereby they are recast into a more exalted style that draws directly from the language of sacred texts. The calligraphy itself is the result of the scribe’s unrelenting drive to perfection, with “each letter distinct unto itself and each one in its place on the line, like people standing for the silent devotion.” The elders of Buczacz proceed to show the scribe’s handiwork to the wise men of the day throughout Poland, who pronounce its style and grammar above reproach.
We can only imagine what that text was like, yet, having read the story before us, we can have a strong presumption about what it does not contain. In the effort to fashion an exemplary tale that foregrounds its religious message, the lost text likely eliminated most of the elements that makes the story fascinating to us as modern readers: the digressions and obiter dicta of the shamash’s narrative through which the personal and collective anxieties of the times find their unofficial expression. Eliminated too would have been many (unsolved!) mysteries large and small: How could Zlateh’s get (ritual divorce) have been given by Aaron if his death was confirmed by the visit to Gehinnom? How do the rabbi and shamash emerge from Gehinnom unscathed? Why does the shamash wait fifty-four years to tell his story? How did he come to marry Zlateh? Now, with all due respect to the perfection of the scribe’s text and with all due respect to the destruction of the holy community of Buczacz, few of us would wish to have that text restored if it meant giving up the story we have just read. As the shamash himself wisely said, there is pleasure and there is pleasure. To subsist on the pleasure of edification alone, even combined with exquisite calligraphy, is an option many of us would forgo.
Nonetheless, our knowledge of Buczacz, our understanding of the time when “Buczacz was Buczacz,” is not diminished by our having acquired it through our reading a story written by a modern author. To make the ironic point sharper, it is only through this modern act of imaginative writing that we can make a connection to the world of Buczacz. It is through the fountain pen that coyly beckons to the author on the story’s last page that the town comes alive, rather than through the quill and ink pot of the scribe. But if the means of inscription are different, Agnon gamely insists on an essential continuity, if not identity, between these two offices, both of which are represented by the word sofer. When the Hebrew language was modernized in the nineteenth century and an equivalent was sought for the new vocation of “writer,” it was decided to stick with sofer rather than invent a new term. It would be left to context alone to determine if a particular use of the word indicated the God-fearing artisan who meticulously calligraphed Torah scrolls, tefillin and mezuzot or whether it indicated the modern author of novels, short stories and feuilletons. For Agnon, the confusion fitted perfectly.
1648 AND THE HOLOCAUST
By leaving mention of the Holocaust to the last page of his story, Agnon exercised a canny circumspection. He did not want the trauma of 1648 to be backlit by the later catastrophe, or reduced to being a foreshadowing. This of course does not prevent us (belated readers of the story, saturated with Holocaust consciousness) from doing so. But the experience of reading the story should, I think, urge upon us restraint. If anything, Agnon wants us to work the relationship between the two events in reverse. We should take the horrific knowledge imprinted on us from the events of the twentieth century and use it in the service of understanding a calamity in the distant and unfamiliar seventeenth century.
I pondered the possibility that the Gehinnom of our time would make us forget the Gehinnom that the shamash saw, and the story about it, and all we can learn from that story. (68)
There is something uncanny as well about the span of time between the two events and the acts of memory that follow them. Between 1648 and the Holocaust is an arc of almost exactly three hundred years. The descent into Gehinnom takes place in the immediate aftermath of the massacres — let us say ten years later — and the shamash’s telling of the story fifty-four years later. Agnon wrote The Parable and Its Lesson in the mid-1950s — it was serialized in Haaretz in 1958—and here we are reading and interpreting it a half century or so later. What is this correspondence meant to tell us? To begin with, it sets up a correspondence between Buczacz in the aftermath of 1648 and Israel, where Agnon is writing the story in the aftermath of the murder of European Jewry. In Buczacz, although the memory of the horrific recent events permeates Jewish life, the community is struggling successfully to reconstitute itself and rehabilitate the institutions of Jewish worship and study. In Israel, although the struggle to make the young state into a secure refuge for the Jewish people is bearing fruit, remembrance of the Holocaust has been pushed to the margins, as has religious culture and practice as well. In this complex analogy, which can be developed in a number of directions, Buczacz emerges as a precursor to Israel, vulnerable to Gentile violence, yes, but autonomous and living under the sway of Torah.26 Israel, in turn, becomes the successor to Buczacz whose mission it is to perpetuate the full and autonomous living of Jewish life without dependence on the gentiles. This is a dialectic that moves forward and backward in time and transcends the received dichotomy between a decaying and moribund diaspora and a Jewish state born of revolutionary Zionism.
A reading of The Parable and Its Lesson in the context of the larger project of A City in Its Fullness shows us the difference between Holocaust literature and Jewish literature provoked by the Holocaust. By their very nature, Holocaust fiction, memoir and testimony, whether in words or video images, focus on the war years and their aftermath. Only in some cases is memory pushed back to the generation of the parents or the grandparents, and then often in the service of shaping a family idyll that is subsequently shattered. For Agnon, the spiritual power of European Jewry, now after its utter eradication, lay farther back in time, much farther than human remembrance can reach. We must therefore rely on the literary imagination and the protean powers of the story, as told in Hebrew, the historical language of the Jewish people, to enter the world that was lost.
NOTES
1. Gershon Shaked, Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist (New York: New York University Press, 1989).
2. Jerusalem: Schocken, 1973. The title is a phrase from the Hebrew Bible, but where it comes from is less simple than meets the eye. The only location where the exact phrase is found is in a stinging prophecy of condemnation against the Northern Kingdom in Amos (6:8): “My Lord swears by Himself: I loathe the Pride of Jacob, and I detest its fortresses. I will declare forfeit city and inhabitants alike [‘ir umelo’ah]” (JPS). The word umelo’ah itself is most familiar from the declarative opening line of Psalm 24, the coronation hymn sung in the synagogue when returning the Torah to the ark on holidays. There umelo’ah occurs in a bound phrase with erets: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” (King James). That bound phrase erets umelo’ah occurs another eight times in Scripture. Since Agnon’s evident purpose in this book is to elevate and sanctify the name of his town, he can hardly mean us to think about the corrupt and condemned city of Amos’ prophecy. By a barely perceptible sleight of hand, Agnon has taken the familiar ecstatic pronouncement about the earth and the fullness thereof and substituted city for earth; all the while we assume — both correctly and mistakenly — that he has simply plucked and transcribed a piece of Scripture. The point of the maneuver is to emphasize that it is a city, his city, that he has come to extol. Whereas the psalm famously declares that the earth and its fullness are the Lord’s, whether the same goes for the city that has been substituted for the earth is not as clear.
3. Quoted in Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Vintage, 2006), p. 8.
4. Arnold Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of S. Y. Agnon (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 330–366.
5. Among the most important of these are Beḥanuto shel mar Lublin, ‘Ad henah, Kisui hadam, ‘Ad ‘olam, Eido veEinam, and Hadom vekhise.
6. A select list of critical reactions to the book when it appeared includes Yehudah Friedlander, “Masekhet shivah ufreidah” [Return and Leave Taking], Ha’aretz, June 1, 1973; and “A City and the Fullness Thereof,” Hebrew Book Review (Tel Aviv), Autumn 1973, pp. 3–6; Hillel Barzel, “‘Ir umelo’ah: ‘uvdah uvedayah” [Ir umeloah: Fact and Invention], Yediyot Aḥaronot, September 26, 1973; Yaakov Rabi, “Hatorah, ha’emunah, vemirmat hatsedaqah” [Torah, Belief, and the Dishonesty of Charity], ‘Al Hamishmar, October 12, 1973; Yisrael Cohen, “Haḥavayah ha’arkhtipit shel ‘Ir umelo’ah” [The Archetypal World of ‘Ir umelo’ah], Moznayim, Vol. 28, Nos. 1–2 (Dec. — Jan. 1973–74), pp. 61–73; A. Y. Brawer, “‘Ir umelo’ah: ‘olam shene‘elam” [‘Ir umelo’ah: A World That Disappeared], Ha’umah, April 1974, pp. 246–253.
7. Dan Laor, Ḥayyei ‘Agnon [A Life of Agnon] (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1998), p. 408.
8. The story began as a fragment, also called “Hasiman,” which appeared in Moznayim (Iyyar/Sivan [May] 1944), p. 104. The full story, with its forty-two sections, appeared in S. Y. Agnon, Ha’eish veha‘eitsim (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1962), pp. 283–312. Translated by Arthur Green in Alan Mintz and Anne Golomb Hoffman (eds.), S. Y. Agnon: A Book That Was Lost: Thirty-Five Stories (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2008), pp. 397–429.
9. I have argued this point in my Ḥurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996).
10. For an expansion of this theses, see chapter 2 (“Two Models in the Study of Holocaust Representation”) in my Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).
11. Abyss of Despair (Yeven metsulah), trans. Abraham J. Mesch (New York: Bloch, 1950).
12. The narrator as a chronicler allied with the communal register was already employed to great advantage in Hebrew literature by Micha Yosef Berdichevsky. See the story “Parah adumah” in Kitvei Mikhah Yosef Bin-Gurion (Berdichevsky) (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1975), pp. 181–184.
13. The story originally appeared in Haaretz on September 14, October 5, and December 5, 1958.
14. Literally in the Hebrew: the meat was still between his teeth and undigested. The reference is to Numbers 11:33, which describes the unrestrained cravings of the Israelites for meat. A more contemporary example would be Abraham Joshua Heschel’s celebration of East European Jewish piety in his The Earth Is the Lord’s (New York: H. Schuman, 1950).
15. The pedagogical passion for fashioning a mode of communication that is precisely fitted to his listeners is made the subject of an anecdote, a mashal of sorts, about a Jewish jeweler who is summoned to create gold earrings for the king’s daughter and takes special pains to adapt the ornament to the exact proportions of her ear (414).
16. Shulamit Almog argues that Rabbi Moshe does not make practical use of his eyewitness knowledge of Aaron’s death because he realizes that matters of Jewish law must be adjudicated according to evidence and procedures that are transparent and available to all. Despite the rabbi’s intense empathy for Zlateh, he knows that supernatural disclosures that he alone — together with the shamash — have been privy to cannot meet this standard of evidence. See Shulamit Almog, ‘Ir, mishpat, sipur [City, Law, Story] (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 2002), pp. 78–82.
17. Joshua Shanes, “Buchach,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Buchach; Martin Rudner, “Buczacz Origins,” http://www.ibiblio.org/yiddish/Places/Buczacz/bucz-p1.htm.
18. Literally, the persecutions of 5408 and 5409.
19. Shanes, ibid.
20. This is a rich theme in Agnon’s corpus. At the conclusion of Oreaḥ natah lalun [A Guest for the Night] the keys to the study house of Buczacz, which has been decimated by World War One, are transferred to Eretz Yisrael. In the opening, foundational story of ‘Ir umelo’ah (“Buczacz,” pp.9–13), the founding of the city is framed as a way station on an ascent to Eretz Yisrael that became permanent.
21. For a responsible overview of these issues with representative texts, see Simcha Paull Raphael, Jewish Views of the Afterlife (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994), especially chapter 6, “Visionary Tours of the Afterlife in Medieval Midrash,” pp. 163–232.
22. Qetsat qasheh, “a little difficult,” is a phrase that has its origins in the Tosafists’ commentary on the Talmud; it is used when the Tosafists find glaring contradictions or problems in Rashi’s commentary. It is a classic instance of understatement. Within a religious tradition based on the presumed authority of earlier teachers, the phrase is a delicate means of noting a major issue. See “Hasiman” [The Sign], 714, for an interesting parallel.
23. The other outstanding example of the overall narrator handing over the narration to a narrator dramatized within the story is “Ha’ish levush habadim” [The Linen Man, 84–121].
24. David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
25. This is wonderfully dramatized in the story “Genizah” by Devorah Baron, Parshiyot: sipurim mequbatsim [Collected Stories] (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1951), pp. 236–245. Also note to pp.424–425, where the shamash digresses on the rabbi’s championing the mashal as a homiletic tool superior to the rhetoric of reproach (tokheḥah). It is worth noting that the narrator intervenes immediately after this remark to point out that midrash collections were scarce in the rabbi’s time, whereas today all recognize the worth of the mashal. In the story “Hamevakshim lahem rav” in ‘Ir umelo’ah, a letter of rabbinic appointment specifies the obligation to include aggadah and meshalim in public homilies in anticipation of an inclination of scholarly rabbis to speak only of matters of halakhah.
26. In the very first story in ‘Ir umelo’ah, “Buczacz,” the founding of the city is presented as resulting from an arrested pilgrimage to the Land of Israel.
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