The Parable and Its Lesson: A Novella (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and C)

by S. Agnon

  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 Tora
h—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 exam
ple, 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.