by S. Agnon
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 Co
medy. 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.