by S. Agnon
“My friends and dearly beloved brothers, the Holy One, blessed be He, has shown us a special love and extended to us the kindness of giving us the Torah, which is the document that attests to Israel’s existence and to the right we have merited to live in this world, our right to be here at all. So when we open the Torah and read it in public, we should sit in fear and awe, in dignity and in joy in knowing what God has given us. But what do we do? We interrupt His words and chatter away. We not only are heedless of what God has given us, we are also, heaven forbid, showing contempt for the living God.
“Where there is too much talk, blame will not be lacking. All of us here are afflicted, downtrodden, and hurting, no part of us has not been ravaged, and so I will put an end to words. We who are Israel, the people of God, who trust in the shelter of our Creator, let us gather strength for the honor of the synagogue, which serves us in place of the Holy Temple, and let us pay attention to our prayers, which are our conversation with God, and listen to the words of our Torah, God’s conversation with us, the people of Israel. May the One who in mercy and in favor hears the prayer uttered by every single person of Israel, receive in mercy all our prayers. And may we merit fulfilling all the words of the Torah. Amen. May thus be His will.”
After kissing the Ark curtain, our Master turned toward the congregation and his face showed great sadness. 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.
Since I have mentioned the matter of abstaining from speech, I shall relate something I heard from the leader of the service, Reb Ḥizkiah. Reb Ḥizkiah’s forebears came from Aleppo and before that from Babylonia. Circumstances required them to wander through many lands until one day they came to Poland. Reb Ḥizkiah heard from his elders that there were in the lands where they wandered great sages who took upon themselves a full-day fast of silence not only during the Ten Days of Penitence, as do some Jews here in the Kingdom of Poland, but who were silent almost all the time. No worldly or mundane word came out of their mouths. In their eagerness to assist those sages, people tried to learn their different gestures so they could fathom their wishes. But the desire for things of this world is rooted in the power of speech, and the sages eventually lost all such desire. There is a verse in the book of Proverbs that hints at this, but Reb Ḥizkiah never told it to me. I think the one he had in mind is in chapter 30.
The shamash further related another story in the name of Reb Ḥizkiah: There was a porter in Aleppo named Benjamin who never uttered one unnecessary word even if it involved his work. This Benjamin’s face glowed with a light that was not seen even on the faces of great scholars, and when he died the one who eulogized him quoted the verse in Moses’ final blessing, Of Benjamin he said, Beloved of the Lord, he rests securely beside Him; ever does He protect him, as he rests between His shoulders. The local rabbi heard about this and became angry. In a dream he heard declaimed to him the verse in Jacob’s final blessing Benjamin is a ravenous wolf and he understood that his life was in danger. He rose early, gathered ten men, and went and prostrated himself on the porter’s grave and begged his forgiveness.
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The shamash’s words left Buczacz astounded. Talking generally brings people together and dispels worry, while silence is usually a sign of sorrow and suffering, as we see in the verse Let him sit alone and keep silent. But now each one began to spout his own personal interpretation of what had been said, and they very nearly forgot the incident that touched off the whole story. The story itself they knew, but its import they forgot.
This dispirited the shamash. All those years he had kept his mouth shut, and now by opening it, he gave them an opening to fabricate all kinds of things. He looked up at them sternly, but they paid him no attention and continued talking. Until he interrupted their prattle, saying, “Now that you have heard what you have heard, I do not need to remind you that I did what I did not out of disrespect but out of pity on a fellow Jew, and I took upon myself the sin of embarrassing him in public. So now consider my case and judge me as you will. For my part, I affirm the integrity of my judges and accept whatever verdict they render.”
That brought them back to ponder the original issue before them and that they still faced, namely if they would pray with concentrated intention, the Holy One, blessed be He, would receive their prayers in mercy and favor. Likewise, if they would properly direct their hearts during the reading of the Torah, they could reach the level that Israel attained when the Torah was given at Mt. Sinai. But we, what do we do? The mouths that we were given to utter God’s praise speak trivialities, and the ears through which we were to hear the words of Torah we abandon to banalities.
A series of groans came forth from the assembled. First from despair, 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. Or sometimes a quip suggests itself, as for instance when the cantor sings the wrong melody, or the Torah reader uses the wrong cantillation, or mispronounces the vowels. And sometimes an affected piety takes hold of the congregation and they make the Torah reader repeat phrases unnecessarily, and then they all start quibbling over just why he had to go back. The result is a failure to hear not just the word in question but also the words before and after it. Jewish law is clear that if a complete weekly Torah portion is not read in public on its scheduled Sabbath, it must be read on the following Sabbath together with the portion slated for that week, for when we miss out on Torah, we are always given a chance to make up the loss. Therefore we are by law obligated to be careful not to lose out on any Torah reading. Yet because of our many sins not a Sabbath goes by when we do not miss hearing some words of the Torah because of idle chatter and needless conversations.
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After that moment of truth, many woke up to the fact that talking during the services, not to mention during the reading of the Torah, is indeed a serious offense. Just how serious they were only now beginning to comprehend. They took it upon themselves to be careful not to talk not only during the services but even from the moment they entered the synagogue until the time they left. And so they did. A few began to be mindful to say nothing unnecessary even at home and in the marketplace, for nothing is more harmful to a person than needless words. A person says things that are uncalled for and eventually has to deny that he said them, which means he has to lie. Why does he lie? Because he spoke words that were not called for. But our main concern here is Torah and prayer, so let us return to the shamash and his story.
Everyone crowded around the shamash and badgered him with questions, some intelligent, some foolish. For example, if the population of Gehinnom increases, will the distance between one person and another decrease? Or, “Since you visited Gehinnom on the day after Yom Kippur, and the repentance undertaken on that day influences worlds beyond this one, did you notice any purifying effect on the wicked in Gehinnom?” Still another question was, “Did you see any angels among the inhabitants of Gehinnom, since it is written His angels He charges with folly, and we know that there is no favoritism before God, and so if angels go astray, do they go to Gehinnom? And if they do, do they go with their wings on? And are their wings affected by the fire of Gehinnom?” There was no end to their questions, and because they had not yet learned to restrain their tongues, those tongues nattered on with abandon.
There were other questions, too: Where do the praises that Gehinnom utters in Perek Shira belong? Some prayer books place them after the ones uttered by all the different creatures, while our prayer books put them with the ver
ses sung by heaven, earth, and the Garden of Eden. Furthermore, if the din of Gehinnom reverberates from one end of the world to the other, which is louder, the praises Gehinnom sings or that din? And what about Sabbath in Gehinnom? We know that the wicked there rest on that day, but does Gehinnom itself fall silent for the day, and do the praises it sings stop? And when it utters its praises, what pronunciation does Gehinnom use? Are certain vowels pronounced the way those newly arrived there pronounce them, as the mystical tradition has it? Others wondered, If wicked people in Gehinnom are judged for twelve months, and we have learned that after twelve months the body ceases to exist and the soul rises up into the next world and does not descend again, then are the wicked still standing there as they were, with their clothes and prayer shawls on? Are scholars impervious to the fiery glow of Gehinnom? There was no end to their questions and theories, for they had not yet learned to restrain their tongues, and so they talked on and on.
The shamash did not answer all the questions put to him, nor did he tell all that he had seen. Not everything needs to be told, and what is told does not always need be spelled out in detail, unless doing so serves some purpose such as bringing people to repentance. The punishment for a sin of this kind must be spelled out, but not necessarily for others. The sages have already told us what is good and what God requires of us, and we, the people of Israel, do try to fulfill what our Creator desires. But in every generation something arises that weakens our ability to perform the commandments, especially a commandment that is necessary for that particular generation. Had God not opened our eyes to this, we would never have survived. Sometimes He makes it known through an event, and sometimes He only gives us a hint; sometimes it is obvious and sometimes we have to figure it out. The illustrious and excellent Rabbi Moshe went to Gehinnom for the sole purpose of freeing his young relative from the chains of her agunah status, and he took the shamash along with him only to light the way with his lantern. Yet in the end the warrant for her release came from elsewhere, and as for the shamash, he told us what he found, including the punishment those who commit this sin receive after they die. Let not this account of sin and punishment become simply a story, a story that one hears for the sheer pleasure of it. Such pleasure has been the downfall of many. But there are many kinds of pleasure, and happy is the one whose pleasure brings him edification and whose edification is his pleasure.
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Thus did Buczacz come to understand what we see every day: a man does something good for his fellow and nevertheless is punished. Here was an old man who saved a Jew from Gehinnom and they tried to deprive him of his livelihood and dismiss him from his position. By describing the punishment for a transgression that, because of the proliferation of our sins, has tripped up many, including scholars who are supposed to be exemplars, the shamash did a service for many more people than the one he tried to help. The fact is that there are many in this world who appear to be righteous, but in the next one, where truth reigns, they are accounted as absolute sinners, as the shamash saw that night he visited Gehinnom. But now let us take leave of such spurious tsadikim and return to our story.
Buczacz made amends with the shamash. Some did it with words and some with deeds. The first to reconcile with him was, appropriately, the leading light of the community, the father-in-law of the man the shamash had thrown out of the beit midrash for talking during the Torah reading. It is a tribute to the wealthy men of Buczacz that their money does not blind them to the truth and does not fool them into thinking that because they are rich they can dictate what the truth is or what they want it to be. On the contrary, they accept the truth no matter what its source and acknowledge it as the supreme attribute, the virtue personified by the patriarch Jacob, as it is written, You will ascribe truth to Jacob. The magnate made amends with the shamash with more than words; he sent him a flask of raisin wine sufficient for kiddush and havdalah for several Sabbaths. And as with the father-in-law, so, too, did the son-in-law, with anguish and deep remorse, beg forgiveness from the shamash for the embarrassment the beit din had caused him. Then in turn came the pious men and the rest of the congregation. Some wanted to forget the angry words they had spoken about dismissing him from his position; some said they really hadn’t said what they said; some belittled the whole act of talking, some praised the virtue of silence. Since they had not yet learned to curtail their words, they waxed verbose both in praise of silence and in belittlement of speech.
If I were to report everything that was said, there would be no end here. But there is one thing I will note, namely, that all the days of the week are equal in the opportunities they offer for sinning through speech. Monday, Thursday, and Sabbath are not superior in that respect to Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, even if the Torah is read on the former three days (corresponding to the three patriarchs) and is not read on the latter four (corresponding to the four matriarchs, as women are exempt from the commandment to study Torah). Therefore, if some Torah idea or nice interpretation or some brilliant new ḥidush or explanation or explication occurs to you while you are standing before your Maker or are hearing the Torah being read—suppress them and let them not be heard. King Solomon, may he rest in peace, the wisest of all men, took many foreign wives because he knew that there were present in each of them sparks of purity, and he hoped, by marrying them, to tame sin and eradicate transgression. In the end they led him astray. Similarly, during the service or the Torah reading, a person wants to share with his friend a nice thought that came to him, and look what happens to him. May we not end up like him.
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No one left the communal meeting chamber without committing themselves not to talk during the service from the moment the leader would begin with the prayer “Blessed be the One who spoke” until after the Aleinu prayer, and certainly not during the Torah reading. Some went so far as to commit themselves to remain silent even during the pauses in the Torah reading after each aliyah, when the blessings on behalf of each individual called up to the Torah are customarily made. Doing that would entail a loss of income for the synagogue, but the rabbis concluded that the gains from such silences would outweigh the losses. Consider, for example, what would be going through the mind of someone called up to the Torah: instead of paying attention to the words on the scroll being read as he stood there, he would be trying to figure out exactly who he would designate to be named in the subsequent blessing, and calculating how much he would pledge on that person’s behalf. Whether the person he named was worthy of the blessing or if he somehow got misled into designating a person he had no intention of having blessed, the fact is that he would be giving priority to names like Getzel or Feivel or Feivush, Koppel, Berel, and Shmerl over the holy names in the Torah, where each and every word is holy. Moreover, sometimes he could get the names mixed up, and the person who was blessed was not the one he wanted blessed, and the person he wanted blessed was not. Then the one who was blessed unintentionally would think that for twelve pence pledged on his behalf the donor was currying favor with him, and he would come to despise him, as he despised all flatterers, while the one who was supposed to be blessed and was not would secretly regard the donor as an ingrate, a man who, when he asks you to do him a favor and you do it, then goes and blesses everyone in the world but the one he should. What is the cause of all such rancor and resentment and jealousy? The interrupting of the Torah reading for these blessings. But then, how could the synagogue afford to lose the money pledged for those blessings? The solution would be to have all pledges made at the very end, after the reading of the haftarah. That way no money would be mentioned in the presence of the Torah scroll, for even if the money pledged was kosher, the names for the currency were not. They were either named for some unsavory king or they had idolatrous overtones.
I spoke before of twelve pence. In the past a penny was worth much more than it is now, and people donated twelve pence to correspond to the twelve tribes of Israel. Poor people gave three for the three patriarchs or two for the
two tablets of the Ten Commandments. Today, however, when it takes one hundred pence to buy what you could once get for a penny, people donate eighteen or twenty-six pence or more, according to whatever gematria calculation occurs to them.
But let me get back to how things unfolded. The assembly did not break up until it was determined that henceforth the shamash would stand on the bimah throughout the entire service, from beginning to end, and if he would see anyone talking he would rap on the table top regardless of whether the offender was an important member of the community, or a rich man, or the son-in-law of a rich man, a scholar, a ruffian, or someone who had privileges at the court. Normally in the Great Synagogue a rap on the table top could not be heard because of the crowd, but now the shamash would bang on the Pralnik book as he might during the repetition of the silent devotion to signal the congregation to respond Amen, or as he might when he was about to make an announcement. And what, you may ask, is the Pralnik book? A bunch of empty pages bound together like a book on which you bang a stick the way a woman beats her laundry to get the water out. The congregation further ordained that the cantor include a special blessing on behalf of all who take care not to utter a word in the synagogue from the time the leader of the service begins the prayer “Blessed be the One who spoke” until the service is concluded. This special blessing was instituted in Buczacz by our forbears on the very first Sabbath after they arrived there, before they founded the actual town of Buczacz, as I have told elsewhere. They brought the blessing with them from the Rhineland, where local custom went back to the days of such renowned rabbis as Rabbenu Gershom, Light of the Exile, Rabbi Shimon the Great, the eminent Rabbi Meshullam ben Kalonymus, and the other illustrious sages of Ashkenaz, may they rest in peace, whose traditions were authoritative in Buczacz in former days.