by S. Agnon
The long and the short of it is that 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. How do we account for the severity of the punishment? From the following parable that I once heard from our Master. The time and place when he told it to us are worth noting.
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On the twentieth of Sivan, about an hour and a half after the morning service, the whole town went to the cemetery—old men and children, young men and women, even nursing mothers with their infants. Some went to visit their relatives’ graves, some to entreat the dead to pray for the living.
That year the local citizenry did not harass us. Even those who had stolen our houses and then occupied them did not try to humiliate us as in former years, when they would stand in front of our houses and mock us with tenderhearted words. “Are you all hungry from the fast? Here, have some pork. Are you thirsty? Here, have some warm blood. Come, dear neighbors, take your fill.” That year the opposite happened. Many of them brought out water for us to wash our hands when we left the cemetery. We washed with that water, and when we got back to town everyone washed again. Some of us suggested that the world was changing for the better; others conjectured that the Gentiles were leaving us alone because they were getting tired of murdering us. Then there were others who opined that we Jews had fallen so much that we were no longer worthy of Esau’s efforts to victimize us.
In years past our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, eulogized the victims of the abominable Khmelnitski, may his name be blotted out, and all others martyred by the Gentiles, in the cemetery. But when the cemetery was completely filled with graves and people were so crammed together all around that a kohen was once jostled into an area forbidden to kohanim, our Master moved the site of his eulogy to the Great Synagogue and delivered it there after the afternoon service. In his last years, our Master stopped going to the cemetery altogether. He is reported to have said, “Why do I need to go to the dead when they are coming toward me?” What he probably meant was that Buczacz had become one big Jewish cemetery; wherever you started to dig you would find Jewish bodies. He had already begun wondering whether a kohen could even live in Buczacz. I myself never heard him actually say that, but I believe those who say that he did, and I have no reason to doubt them. Whenever our Master was uncertain about a halakhic matter, he did not rest until he clarified it.
When we returned from the cemetery we all went to the Great Synagogue for the afternoon service. As on all public fasts, we read from the Torah the passage beginning And Moses implored the Lord, and then the haftarah from the prophets. Our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, was called up to recite the haftarah and he chanted it beautifully. When he finished with the words Thus declares the Lord God who gathers the dispersed of Israel; I will gather still more to those already gathered, I was quite certain that Isaiah’s prophecy was about to be realized, and I had the idea that our Master thought so too.
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When he had concluded the blessings after the haftarah, our Master picked up the prayer book and chanted the prayer “O Merciful God” for the raising up of the soul of his master, the holy Rabbi Yeḥiel Mikhl of the great town of Nemirov, who was slain for the sanctification of the Divine Name. When he reached the stanza
Precious on earth and in regions supernal,
To us mortal men and to God the eternal;
Proud head from his body the keen sword did sever,
From our shame we beseech you, O Lord us deliver
our Master sobbed in grief, placed the prayer book on the table, and his head slumped down on it. 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. I remember once before Passover they brought him a silver goblet and he looked at it and pronounced it fit to be used as Elijah’s cup at the seder. He instructed me to go and immerse it in a mikvah, which I did, and when I took it out the water made it glisten.
There were whispers that our Master was too weak to complete the prayer and they signaled to Reb Ḥizkiah, the prayer leader, to go up and finish. When our Master saw Reb Ḥizkiah coming up, he again took hold of the prayer book and in a heart-rending voice chanted
Angels unsullied and holy beings pure
Cry out at the bitterness they must endure;
How shameful our lot, we are objects of scorn,
Disgrace and contumely, we are left all forlorn.
Hellas and Araby together contrive
That none born of Israel shall live or survive.
Our God is One and His great name is One,
Thus may our enemies all be undone.
When our Master said the words “Our God is One and His great name is One,” a great dread fell upon him. He placed the prayer book on the table, put his head down upon it, and stood there trembling. A few moments passed until he again picked up the prayer book and chanted
All who are pleasant to behold . . .
when he stopped and handed the prayer book to Reb Ḥizkiah. Reb Ḥizkiah stood there, not knowing if our Master simply wanted to pause and finish the prayer or if he wanted him to complete it. Our Master then with great effort chanted word by word the rest of the prayer as I held in front of him the tablet on which it was inscribed.
When he finished, an argument arose over whether our Master had said “proud head from his body the keen sword did sever” or “proud head from his body the mean sword did sever.” In my opinion he said “the keen sword,” which is how it was copied on the tablet. It was inappropriate that someone had erased “keen” and written “mean.”
After the Aleinu prayer, our Master instructed the aged Reb Meshullam to say the concluding kaddish because he was a descendant of Rabbi Meir ben Isaac, who composed the Akdamut prayer for Shavuot and saved a major Jewish community, and also because he came from Ashkenaz, where there had been much persecution.
After the kaddish our Master instructed Reb Ḥizkiah, the prayer leader, to chant the piyyut “Though few in number we plead before You.” Though this poem was composed by Rabbi Meshullam ben Kalonymus for the Fast of Esther, some maintain that our Master intended it to be said on that day so as to remind God that our numbers today are diminished; others hold that he wanted it said because of what had happened to him on Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur, during the recitation of a piyyut by Meshullam ben Kalonymus, our Master was overcome by weakness and fell asleep, and he wanted to make up for that now on the fast of the twentieth of Sivan with another piyyut by Meshullam. I am inclined to think that he did it for the honor of Rabbi Meshullam ben Kalonymus. The proof is that the next day he sent me to Reb Akiva Shas to borrow the talmudic tractate Zevaḥim, and Reb Akiva asked me if I had ever seen our Master study tractate Gittin. I asked him why he wanted to know that and he told me that the name Kalonymus is mentioned in one of Rashi’s comments in tractate Zevaḥim and in a Tosafot note in tractate Gittin. Reb Akiva showed me the place where Rashi writes “This is how the excellent Rabbi Meshullam ben Kalonymus explained it in the hour of his death.” He did not point out to me the note in the Tosafot. When I related this matter in the beit midrash, they remarked that it was odd that Reb Akiva forgot to include the note in the Tosafot
at the end of tractate Menaḥot in which Rabbi Meshullam is mentioned.
I would mention here in passing that whenever our Master would borrow a volume of the Talmud, he would send as security the Sabbath candelabrum. He had both simple and symbolic reasons for doing this, the simple one being that on Friday when he would be arranging the Sabbath candles he would be reminded to return the Talmud volume, and the symbolic one because Torah is compared to light, and just as a candelabrum supports the light, so the Talmud is the basis on which the Torah rests.
More to the point, I should also note that just before the afternoon service our Master instructed that it be announced that whoever was feeling weak should go home and eat, particularly the sick and women who were pregnant or nursing, all of whom were obligated to break their fast immediately without apology. He had already sent a child who had not yet studied Talmud to go and tell the rabbi’s wife to inform Zlateh that he was ordering her to eat and drink. He ordered me to send that same instruction to my wife. Our Master knew exactly when to do this because she was then right at the point of fainting from the fast. It was no wonder that she was fasting. How could a woman who had witnessed the deaths of her father, her mother, her three brothers, and her four sisters, take pleasure from food and drink on that day? But since our Master had commanded her to break her fast, she did eat something. So great was the respect for our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, that even tiny babies in their mothers’ wombs obeyed him. Tiny babies is an exaggeration, but certainly women and infants.
After that our Master went up to the Holy Ark, with Reb Akiva Shas and Reb Meshullam supporting him on either side. Our Master kissed the curtain in front of the Ark and the doors, and paused for a few moments. Then he began his eulogy for the martyrs of the pogroms of 1648 and 1649, all the righteous and saintly ones who met cruel and gruesome deaths, and all the other men, women, and infants, children of the Holy One, who sanctified His great Name through their deaths. 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. Some thought that our Master used some biblical verses as a memory aid, but which verses they were was anyone’s guess. Some thought they were from the first chapter of the prophet Malachi, but exactly which verses they were was, again, anyone’s guess. I always thought they were from the book of Malachi because on the eve of the twentieth of Sivan I found our Master sitting by himself and reciting aloud the verse “Remember the Torah of My servant Moses . . .”
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As the shamash was narrating, the sun glowed crimson from the radiance of the flowers and the red hot stones of Eden, in accordance with the explanation of the reddening of the sun in the late afternoon in the Book of the Angel Razi’el. And so as the sun grew crimson, the time for the afternoon service arrived, and everyone went and washed their hands and recited the passage about the daily sacrificial offering in the Temple and then stood for the silent devotion. The evening service followed immediately. After the Aleinu prayer and the concluding kaddish, they all crowded around the shamash to find out how the matter ended.
The old man looked at them and said, “If you are so intent on listening to stories, how will you be able to hear the sound of the Messiah’s shofar on the day when it is sounded? Why do you need to know the end of the story when it was already clear from the beginning? You heard then that we have to be very, very careful not to talk during prayer and certainly not while the Torah is being read.” The shamash repeated the word “very” so intensely that everyone began to tremble at the severity of the transgression. After that they stopped asking how the story ended.
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.
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The shamash continued:
Because I treasure every word our Master uttered, I now return to what he said. The details of the story are clear, but the depths of his teachings—who can plumb them, especially now that fifty-four years have passed since they were spoken.
And so our Master stood before the Holy Ark facing the congregation, with Reb Akiva Shas and Reb Meshullam on either side of him. I stood below facing the congregation so as to prevent anyone from pushing forward to go up the bimah, all the while keeping an eye on our Master to be ready at a moment’s notice in case he needed me.
Our Master was reaching the end of his eulogy when it looked as if his talit was falling off his left shoulder, as it often did at the end of his sermons and never did when he stood for the silent prayer, when it stayed in place all the time. I heard from Reb Shmuel the scribe that Reb Yosef Halevi, who wrote a book about the victims of the 1648–49 massacres and another about the shofar that the Messiah will one day sound, once opined that our Master’s soul belonged to those Rabbi Yoḥanan had in mind when he made the statement in the Talmud, “Would that a person might pray the whole day long.” That is why our Master’s talit clung to him even after prayer. But this was not the case after his sermons, which in our time have largely become messages of moral instruction and rebuke for the Jewish people’s shortcomings. This whole matter can be explained in different ways, and I do not want to belabor it. In any case, it seemed to me that our Master was motioning to me, so I hurried up to him.
He looked at me as if he were puzzled why I was standing next to him. He had definitely motioned me to come up, but since he had taken flight to worlds where people like us can never go, his visage had altered, and what people like us think they see is often not so.
Our Master continued looking at me and quoted the verse that God said to Moses after the sin of the golden calf, But you remain standing here with Me. Then he added the verse from the laws in the book of Exodus By the word of two witnesses or three shall a case be established. I would be surprised if there was anyone in the synagogue who could fathom our Master’s intention. I myself began to understand it only when he was halfway through his sermon, for after he concluded the eulogy he continued to sermonize. That is one thing I take pride in: if I do not understand our Master’s words right away, later on I do. I heard from the saintly Rabbi Isaac the Chastiser, the son of Reb Yedidiah Lieberman, the nephew of the holy Rabbi Mikhl of Nemirov, may the Lord avenge his blood, that the deeds of the righteous correspond to their thoughts, and therefore their words are coherent from beginning to end.
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Our Master began as follows: “My brothers, dear members of the congregation, you who love God, blessed be His holy name. I will offer no words of rebuke today, for God has visited upon us a double measure of punishment for our transgressions.” Our Master turned to the Holy Ark and said: “You, O Lord, know that I had in mind only the sins known to us. Our hidden sins and iniquities and transgressions are known only to You.” He then recited a verse from the book of Ezra. Which one it was I forget because I could not find a single copy of the full Bible anywhere in town and thus was unable to check the text. Our Master then turned to the congregation and continued: “God is righteous, and so our only task is to ask for the strength to withstand our sufferings until He will deem them sufficient. And we must never stop hoping for them to end”—and here our Master wiped away a tear with his talit. That tear was surprising, for our Master never teared up in public except when he mentioned his holy teacher, may God redeem his blood. When he faced God in prayer he certainly shed tears, but not when he faced people. This is why I think his eyes always glistened and a light shone from them, even in the hour of his passing.
Our Master continued: “Nor will I offer any words of Torah. Words of Torah require a joyful heart and a clear mind, and all of us here today are weighed down by mourning and fasting. But the day is long and we stand in a holy place sanctified by Torah and prayer, and so let us say some thi
ngs about Torah and prayer. In truth, in a holy place we should not even speak about mundane matters, but since I want to talk about silence, let speech come and serve the cause of silence.”
Here our Master stopped talking and just stood there. I stood beside him in mute astonishment and the whole congregation stood in hushed silence. Nothing stirred in the synagogue other than the rustle of his snowy white curls. Because of headaches resulting from an old sword wound, our Master never shaved his head, even for Shavuot. Then he raised his eyes and looked out upon the assembled. He scrutinized each and every person to see how much he could absorb.
After surveying the congregation, our Master closed his eyes and said: “Though I have not seen it, I have heard that there are people who do not restrain themselves from talking during the services and even while the Torah is being read. I am not referring to those who are compelled by circumstances to do so. Rather, I have in mind those whose vocal chords function independently, everywhere, all the time, on any subject, for no purpose in particular and for no purpose in general, even during the services, even during the reading of the Torah. When you tell such people that what they are doing is not appropriate, they answer you by saying that, yes, it is indeed forbidden to talk during the services, and so on. Do you think they hear what they are saying? No, they continue chattering away. Then there are those who, when you rebuke them for talking, reply, ‘For only two or three words spoken aloud you are making such a fuss?’
“And so, my beloved friends, as I have said, I am not here to chastise you for the sin of talking during the services and the Torah reading. One only rebukes those whose actions demand it, whereas you have been blessed by God not to be guilty of this transgression, and you are not in need of my reprimand. But since we are in a house of God consecrated to Torah and prayer, and since it is customary to offer admonitions concerning this particular sin, let me say a few words about it. Not by castigating you but by way of a parable.
