by S. Agnon
So there sits our young scholar during the Torah reading when he gets this new insight into the Torah portion. He leans over to the man sitting next to him and regales him with his discovery. The shamash sees this and throws him a look of rebuke. When this is ignored the shamash gives him a wrathful look. When the talking does not stop he thumps his middle finger with a “Nu! Nu!” When this has no effect the shamash thumps his finger again in order to silence him. When this has no effect he steps down from the bimah, walks over to the eastern wall, grabs the young man by the arm and ushers him out of the synagogue.
The town was in an uproar. Never in the whole history of Buczacz had anyone embarrassed another person in such a holy place, much less ejected him from it. Certainly no lowly shamash had ever done that to a Torah scholar, especially one from a prestigious family and the son-in-law of a local grandee to boot. And even though everyone knew that the shamash had acted for the sake of Heaven, the consensus was to fine him and even to dismiss him from his position.
On Monday they arraigned him before the beit din of the chief rabbi. The chief rabbi recused himself on account of his admitted partiality to Torah scholars. Thereupon they went and constituted an alternate beit din.
The dayan asked the shamash how he proposed to argue his case. The latter replied, “Is anything more meritorious than not kowtowing to a Torah scholar from a prominent family who commingles the Sacred Word with his own prattle?”
The dayan then asked, “But was he not talking words of Torah?”
“Yes, but it was during the reading of the Torah.”
“It was sufficient that you stopped him. What impelled you to embarrass him in public?”
“It was out of compassion for him that I did what I did, for I have seen the punishment that awaits one for talking during prayers and Torah reading. A thousand humiliations in this world are nothing compared to the punishment for this transgression in the world to come.”
“How is it that you knew and others did not? We have many treatises that deal with that particular sin, and it is widely condemned by our rabbis. Indeed, there are those who attribute the pogroms of 1648 to the sin of talking during the service.”
“The books may offer their condemnations, but it is the eyes that see what it is to suffer God’s wrath.”
“What do you mean ‘it is the eyes that see’? Does the whole world see with a different organ and you alone see with eyes? What do you mean by these alarming insinuations?”
The shamash lowered his eyes and fell silent.
The dayan continued, “What do you answer?” The shamash raised his eyes and then shut them, like one who sees something and is mortified by it. What was it that made him so afraid? It was visions that he had once seen, visions that were now reawakened within him and began to reappear before him. It is those visions I shall presently relate.
The dayan looked at him and saw all manner of horror etched in his face. Something is going on, he thought to himself. “Perhaps you can explain to us what you have said?” The shamash again lowered his eyes and said, “One thing I ask of the Lord, one thing I desire: that my mouth not get the better of me and make me utter something that I should not. Would that this whole incident had not happened and I were not forced to relate something of which I am not worthy to speak. Silence would be the better course.” He fell silent. The dayan said, “I think there is something you wish to say?” 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.”
2
The shamash looked out at those who sat in judgment of him and at those who had come to hear his case, and this is what he related:
The venerable elders here are already aware that I served as personal assistant to our Master, the esteemed Av Beit Din Rabbi Moshe, may the Lord illumine him in Eden until the coming of the Redeemer and may he plead well for us and all Israel. I am not worthy to tell of his greatness and his brilliance in Torah and piety. What I can relate is what is widely known, namely, that our Master Rabbi Moshe was, as you know, one of the students of the holy Rabbi Mikhl of Nemirov. On account of our many sins Rabbi Mikhel Mikhl was martyred in the massacres of 1648. Through the merits of one secret word in the Torah that that holy Tsadik communicated to our Master Rabbi Moshe, he was saved from the sword of that barbarian Khmelnitski, may his name be blotted out. Some say the word is in the weekly Torah portion Mishpatim. Some say it is in the portion of Ha’azinu. Others hold that it was not a word that he communicated but the meaning of one of the dots found above the Hebrew words in the passage haniglot vehanistarot. Who can say what that dot means? It is enough for a man like me to get through the weekly portion with Targum and Rashi’s commentary.
Our Master had a relative named Zlateh. She was the sole survivor when her family was slaughtered in the pogroms of the abominable Khmelnitski, may the names of the wicked rot. This Zlateh was a granddaughter of Reb Naftali the wine merchant. He was a wonderful advocate for the Jews in his time and did much for communities and individuals alike. He met a tragic end. A government official who owed him four hundred barrels of wine set his hunting dogs on him and they devoured him. May God avenge his blood.
The murder of Reb Naftali occurred not long before the pogroms of 1648. When the evil decree fell, the whole family perished, “some by water, some by fire, some by strangling, some by stoning,” as the poet wrote in the piyyut Unetanneh tokef. Those who were spared such gruesome deaths died of hunger or thirst. Through the mercy of God the little girl saved herself from death by hiding in the forest. Like an innocent lamb she lived on grass and very nearly forgot how to talk like a human being. She was found by some survivors who had come out of hiding when the pogroms began to abate. They took her with them as they wandered from town to town and from community to community. Some of them tried to return to their hometowns but could not find them. Most of the communities had been razed in the cataclysm and were unrecognizable. Some of these survivors got used to being on the road and never found a place to stop and settle down. During their wanderings they came to Buczacz and arrived at the house of our Master.
The Rabbi’s wife looked at the little girl but had no idea who she was. The good qualities that she noticed in her endeared the child to her. She took her in and fed her, clothed her, put shoes on her bare feet. The Rabbi’s wife made an arrangement with the people who had brought the girl with them, paying them off so they would leave the child with her. And so they did. The Rabbi’s wife asked the girl about her hometown and where she came from and about her father and her mother. The child told what she remembered.
The Rabbi’s wife listened to all this and related it to our Master. Upon hearing it he declared, “Is she not of our family? Why, she is a descendant of our relative Naftali!” Our Master raised his sacred hands and intoned, “Blessed be the One who is beneficent to the wicked and the good alike. Blessed is the One who has been beneficent to this granddaughter of Naftali, who has found her way to her family. And blessed be the One who has allowed us to raise this orphan girl in our home, the only one of our family left alive.”
Our Master took the girl in and provided for all her needs—food, drink, lodging, clothing. Our Master, who was not particular about his own clothes except for his beautiful talit and tefillin, personally picked out the material for her dresses and personally sent for the cobbler to make her a pair of shoes. On Friday afternoons, before leaving for the bathhouse to get ready for the Sabbath, he would look in on the kitchen and ask, “Has she had her bath? Has her hair been combed?” Sometimes he would stand and make sure they were not hurting her when they combed her hair, which had gotten tangled during the long time in the forest.
As she grew older
our Master thought about a match for her. He cast his eye on his favorite student, a clever and knowledgeable young man with some proficiency in several languages. This student was the son of Zevulun the spice merchant. Zevulun, after his death, left a manuscript of a book on the prayer recited upon embarking on a journey. It contained some shocking things about disputations he had with freethinkers in various cities in the Ottoman lands. I heard that he had asked our Master to write an approbation for the book, and our Master declined the invitation. He said that since the questions it dealt with were of no concern to him, he was quite ready to forgo the answers it offered.
So our Master married off Zlateh to Zevulun’s son Aaron. Because he loved the couple so much, our Master himself recited the seven nuptial benedictions at all seven wedding feasts. I remember that at the feast of the seventh day they were sitting around the table and there was no new guest present. The door opened and in came a young man with a volume of the talmudic tractate Kiddushin in hand. And so they recited the seven benedictions. Among the company was a scholar who loved to joke. He said to Aaron, “You see, tractate Kiddushin itself has sent you a new face so that all seven benedictions can be said.”
About the young man who came in with tractate Kiddushin in hand I have nothing to say. But about the tractate itself I do. I once saw in a certain book, Kaftor vaferaḥ, a tale about a scholar who spent his whole life studying the tractate Ḥagigah. When he departed this world no one took any notice, until there appeared a woman who lamented him loudly, the way a bereaved wife keens for her husband. The woman was the tractate Ḥagigah, which took on the form of a woman because of that scholar’s lifelong devotion to it.
Our Master made a place for the couple in his home and arranged with Aaron fixed times to study Torah together, before dawn and at night after the evening service. You had to see our Master sitting and learning with him to know the love of a master for his student. Matters that our Master would usually treat cursorily he expounded to him in minute detail. 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.
Suffering is hard, hard when it happens and hard afterward. Because of the many troubles that had befallen the Jews, Aaron began to inquire into what God had done to this people, into the great wrath that caused this people to be handed over to the Gentiles, Heaven forfend, to be destroyed by them.
One inquiry leads to another, like one mouse that squeals out to another until very soon a whole horde of them come and chew up all the clothing and household goods. 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. But this young man reached the false conclusion that God had withdrawn His love from Israel.
Now when a person opens the door to speculation, if he is worthy he will repent, and God will bring him to inner peace, and nothing will unnerve him. Superior to him is one who never experiences any philosophical doubts. He will not be subverted by them; nor will he even have to expend intellectual energy to refute them. This young man, alas, was not worthy. His doubts were not only not dispelled, they multiplied. He became lax in his attitude to Torah and its observance. When he had the opportunity to perform a commandment, he did so not out of love or fear or religious yearning or because the Torah commanded him to do it. He did so only because the sources he was reading did not disapprove of it. When he studied Torah it was not with any love or holiness or because a Jew is enjoined to meditate upon it day and night. He studied Torah because it sharpens the intellect. How shameful, how disgraceful it is that there are people who think that the words of the living God are in need of human validation. And what is worse, they make the Torah secondary and human wisdom primary.
When a person studies Torah, the Torah protects him. When he does a commandment, the commandment saves him from transgression. But when he studies Torah and takes no joy in it, the Torah will take no joy in him. Torah and mitzvot will bring him only melancholy until perforce he will seek to anchor himself in something else. He will be oblivious to the fact that the qelipot created by his worthless investigations now encase him. Yet God’s mercy is not exhausted, for were he to turn in repentance God would receive him. But contemptible ideas darkened his mind and prevented him from finding the doorway to repentance.
3
One day, an hour or two before dawn, our Master went to the beit midrash and did not find Aaron there. Our Master noticed me and asked me for an explanation. I said I would go and find out but he said, no, he would go himself. When Zlateh heard him coming she got out of bed and ran outside. “Where is Aaron?” our Master asked her. She went back to her room and found his bed just as she had made it the previous evening. Clearly he had not slept there. “Aaron is not here,” she said, and fainted.
The Rabbi’s wife heard about this and went to her, as did several neighbors, and eventually the whole town came. They all began to speculate and spin all kinds of tales, tales which were not so much implausible as improbable. When the speculation stopped, confusion set in. How could it be that the night before, he was seen in the synagogue, and in the morning he is gone? If he had started out for home after the evening service, did he disappear on the way? It was all quite baffling. Our Master seemed removed from the whole thing. Finally he bestirred himself and said, “It is time for the morning service.”
The passing days brought little hope. All kinds of testimonies were offered, and rumors too. Our Master received the bearers of these rumors respectfully so as to keep people looking for new information. He spent a lot of time talking to the local peasants who, he knew, came to him only for the brandy he would give them. The more outlandish their talk, the more our Master paid attention to it. For example, a Gentile who had too much to drink told him of a Jew who burned a book revered by the Jews. Our Master sat there and hung on every word that came out of that Gentile’s mouth.
Our Master could see the agony of his little relative who was not yet fifteen and was already an agunah. He put aside all his civic affairs and obligations and even his regular lectures on Maimonides and Alfasi and began to look into the matter of freeing this agunah. He had, apparently, abandoned all hope that Zlateh’s husband would ever return. He searched for some ruling that would permit this woman to be freed from the chains of the marital bond. But no such ruling could he find.
Our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, possessed prophetic powers that enabled him to divine that Aaron was dead. If he were alive, he reasoned, the law would be clear: it would be an open-and-shut case for all the rabbinical authorities and I would not even look for a way to permit her to marry where there is none. Furthermore, he ruminated, when I ponder the legal status of this poor girl, my heart and my head are divided. My head knows the law on the books while my heart tells me that maybe, or quite possibly, she is no agunah. Yet so long as no one comes forward to say that they saw him dead and buried, she remains a married woman plain and simple, and there is no way to declare her eligible to remarry. Can you imagine the compassion that saintly man had for this last surviving member of his family, a girl not yet fifteen who faced the prospect of living out her years as an agunah? No, his heart told him, her husband is dead. But what could he do? Neither a Gentile’s idle talk nor a rabbi’s prophetic powers are sufficient to free an agunah. Our Master conferred with all the illustrious rabbis of Poland and Lithuania, and not a single one of them could champion the cause of freeing this girl from her shackled state.
4
We are now at Monday morning of the week of the Torah portion Behukotai. Our Master is being called up to the Torah and I am helping him step up to the bimah. I looked at him and saw that he was in another world and struggling to get back to this one. I think to myself: he is trying to get his mind off that poor girl’s predicament so he can concentrate on the blessings over the Torah.
After the re
ading, as I was helping him go down the steps and return to his place, he indicated that he wanted to tell me something. When he had taken off his tefillin, I went over to him. He looked up and said, “Ah, here you are.” He put his tefillin back in their bag, but he still had his talit on. He looked at me again and said to me these exact words: “I know that people do not frighten you. Go home and have breakfast and then come to me.” Since he had instructed me to go home and eat, I felt no compulsion to stand there and wait for him to summon me.