by S. Agnon
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.”
It is evident to the reader that the explicit rationalization given by the shamash for his capitulation—public warning and education—is a fig leaf covering an ungovernable storm of emotion. The truth is that the incident in the synagogue has unhinged his hard-won and long-enduring composure by stirring up a traumatic experience repressed for many decades. The violation of principle is all the more momentous because the matters to be revealed are not ordinary scandals but nothing less than secrets about the fundamental questions of the universe.
Thus we are introduced to a central paradox of the story. On the one hand, the narrators of the story waste no chance to condemn forbidden or unnecessary speech and to adduce evidence of the mortifying consequences of laxity in these matters. Their admonition begins within the restricted purview of the synagogue but extends outward to the marketplace and to the domestic space of family life. It goes so far as to take on the features of an overarching ethical-ontological principle that identifies God’s words as the only true speech and human words as a kind of fallen or corrupted speech that, though necessary, should be kept to a minimum. Talking during the Torah reading, which at first presents itself as merely an instance of inconsiderate behavior, thus looms large as the site of a cosmic, catastrophic violation: the aggression of human speech upon the divine word.
On the other hand, there is the evidence of the story itself. This long and unwieldy tale, told by the shamash and staged by the narrator, constitutes in many respects an enormous and flagrant transgression against the very ideal of verbal abstinence that they themselves have so vehemently been promulgating. This wayward prolixity is far from obligatory. To get the business done of describing the horrible punishments of the sinning scholars and thus acquit himself of delivering his monitory message, the shamash could have vastly reduced the amplitude of his account. A principle of utility would have eliminated not only the numerous digressions but also a great swath of the story devoted to describing the conduct of his master, Rabbi Moshe. Yet the reader knows that these seemingly unnecessary accretions and dilations are in fact true expressions of what is really on the shamash’s mind: the trauma induced by what he saw so many years ago, and the loss of his connection to the great and holy man he served so devotedly.
OUR MASTER
Why does Agnon’s narrator loosen the reins and allow the shamash to take over the story? To be sure, the principled audacity he displays in banishing the talkative young scholar and then standing up to the judges of the rabbinic court marks him as a person of high resolve. But his true merit lies less in his character than in his utility to the story. This is a story about occurrences so remarkable and bizarre that only the authority of an eyewitness account has a chance of overcoming the reader’s incredulity. It is a story, moreover, whose principle actor is a taciturn rabbi whose enigmatic actions require careful observation and explication. Who better to observe and explicate them than his devoted personal assistant? The shamash functions as a lens through which we take in the moral and spiritual eminence of the figure referred to, throughout the original text, as rabeinu, our Master, as if in using the first person plural the shamash speaks for the community as a whole. As the name of his office implies, the shamash’s function is to serve his master. Yet, ironically as we shall see, despite this subservience the gruff and protective secretiveness that surrounds the shamash projects a fascination on the reader that rivals the rabbi’s mystique.
It is the rabbi who is placed squarely at the moral center of the story, even if the narrator unintentionally accepts the existence of competing currents of interest. That a moral center be established is crucial to Agnon here, as it is generally in ‘Ir umelo’ah, because the deviations from the norm, which interest his fiction as much as does the norm itself, can be located and described only in reference to the norm. Rabbi Moshe unambiguously occupies that center. He does so not only because of his personal qualities but also because he exemplifies the rabbinic “rulers” of Buczacz. In introducing Rabbi Moshe in the opening sentence of our story, the narrator states that the tale is part of his project “to describe our masters who reigned [shemalkhu] one after the other over our town.” The succession of Buczacz’s rabbis resembles a king list in an ancient chronicle. The rabbi is a Judaic version of Plato’s philosopher-king, and in the ideal vision of Buczacz as a qehilah qedoshah, a holy community informed by Jewish law, the rabbi, as the av beit din, the head—literally, the father—of the court is the ultimate arbiter of authority. Again, it is important to distinguish between the ideal and the idealized. The rulership of the rabbi as an ideal obtains only when, as a class, rabbinic authority is recognized as paramount, and when, as an individual, the rabbi is the worthy exemplar of this high authority.
Already in our story we are witness to a falling away from the ideal; for in the fifty-four years that separate the main events from the present of the telling there is a recognizable diminution of this high standard. A small detail hints at a broad and troubling problem. When it comes to putting together a panel of judges to take up the case of the shamash the day after the incident in the synagogue, the chief rabbi, the town’s av beit din, recuses himself from the proceedings, explaining that his fondness for scholars may not enable him to give the case of the shamash a fair hearing. Although this compunction presents itself as merely a zealous regard for the honor of Torah study, it is in fact symptomatic of a pervasive and systemic perversion that has infected the religious life of Buczacz. Torah study has become commodified and fetishized, and scholarship has become an arena for performance rather than piety. As presented by the narrator at the outset of the story, the offending son-in-law—and by extension his father-in-law, who “acquired” him for his daughter—are the embodiment of the problem.
A wealthy man from the upper crust of our town took as his son-in-law a learned young man from a prominent family. The boy was skilled at advancing all kinds of novel interpretations of our holy texts, even when their meanings were already transparent. In fact, sometimes, in his encounter with a text, he would pronounce his own interpretation before he had even digested its plain sense.14 I refer here not to the nature of his insights but to the fact that his eagerness to propose them overrode any capacity he had for self-restraint. (2)
The ability to come up with novel interpretations (leḥadesh ḥidushim) is an index of scholarly brilliance, but when that ability becomes a socially sanctioned compulsion, then brilliance and piety part company. The language produced by human ingenuity competes with the language of the holy texts rather than serving it. If this were simply the young man’s particular pathology, then the matter would not be troubling. But he has been “taken” by one of the town’s wealthy men precisely because his scholarly brilliance can so readily and abundantly be put on display. The public performance of brilliance has become a valuable commodity for conspicuous consumption.
The craving for ḥidushim and the impatience with the plain meaning of the text are ills that have only recently taken root in Buczacz. This is a town in which respect for God’s word is the norm during the Torah reading, and the son-in-law’s flouting of that discipline is explained in part by his being an outsider and a recent arrival. Nevertheless, there is growing indulgence for behavior of this kind; tellingly, the wrath of the town is incited not by his transgression but by the shamash’s disregard for the respect due the wealthy and the learned. The shamash’s scandalous intervention is the gesture that creates a bridge to the Buczacz of a half century earlier when such a permissive and inadvertent collusion would have been unthinkable. This was the era when “Buczacz was Buczacz” and t
he town was “ruled” by Rabbi Moshe and by the true values he both represented and enforced.
Rabbi Moshe’s greatness is established in part by his prophetic ability to identify this tendency to unrestrained performative speech as a sin and foresee that it would bedevil his community long after his death. When he made conversing during the Torah reading the subject of the great discourse he delivered on the twentieth of Sivan, the crescendo of the story and his valedictory address before his death, his listeners must surely have been dumbfounded as to the choice of topic. The rabbi admits that this is a transgression he himself has never witnessed but merely heard about (47). It is only we the readers, who have been given access by the shamash to the dark revelations of Gehinnom, who are positioned to appreciate the momentousness of the rabbi’s subject. Yet, like the desperate efforts of his biblical namesake, Rabbi Moshe’s fierce homiletic warnings prove incapable of staving off the folly that will take root in the next generation. In the comedic turn the story takes in its conclusion, it is only the courageous ire of the ancient shamash that can break the cycle and prevent the insidious growth from spreading.
There are two other dimensions of the rabbi’s character that fill out the norm he embodies: the style of his own learning and his solicitude for Zlateh, the child who is the sole survivor among his relatives of the massacres of 1648. It goes without saying that the rabbi is a great scholar, but it is the particular manner of his greatness that makes a vital connection to the thematic axis of the story. The resources for scholarship, the shamash observes at many points, were greatly different fifty-four years ago than they are in the present of the story. When it comes to books—the term applies only to sefarim in the sense of scriptural and talmudic texts and their commentaries—the average householder in Buczacz at the time the shamash tells his story has more books on the shelves of his home than were to be found in the town as a whole at the time of Rabbi Moshe (52). Books were scarce and expensive. The first printed Hebrew books appeared only in the second half of the fifteenth century, and the widespread upheavals caused by the massacres of 1648 disrupted the chain of scholarly transmission and made books even scarcer. In an aside, the shamash relates the story of an important rabbi of the time who was about to die; although he regretted leaving the world, he was consoled by the fact that in the Supernal Academy he would have the opportunity of seeing Tractate ‘Eruvin, a major section of the Talmud, which he had never before been privileged to hold in his hands (52). Another anecdote tells of a pair of Talmud students who walk for two days straight because they heard that someone in a neighboring town possessed a copy of the minor tractates of the Talmud. Rabbi Akiva Shas, one of the elders of Buczacz, received his name from the fact that he was the only person in the town to own a complete set of the Talmud (shas is an acronym for shishah sedarim, the six orders of the Mishnah on which the Talmud forms a commentary, 16). Rabbi Moshe himself has to send to Rabbi Akiva Shas when he needs to consult Tractate Zevaḥim. We are further informed that in those days, except for the Tanhuma, the texts of the midrashim were also not available.
Rabbi Moshe’s own teacher, the revered Rabbi Mikhl of Nemirov, was among the slaughtered in 1648. It was as a young man in his academy in Nemirov that Rabbi Moshe was formed as a scholar, and his recall of those printed texts has had to stand by him after the calamity, when those texts are no longer available. When the rabbi traces the development of prayer as an institution in Bible and Talmud in his great discourse on the twentieth of Sivan, each statement is accompanied by an exact quotation of the source reference. Which is of course as it should be, except for the fact that the rabbi has not been privileged to have access to most of these texts since he was a youth studying in Nemirov and recites them by heart. Although this is assuredly evidence of extraordinary precocity and mental gifts, the true source of the shamash’s veneration lies in the rabbi’s relationship to the texts he so readily brings to his lips. In their eagerness to parade their virtuosity, the scholars of today use passages from Scripture and rabbinic literature as grist for their mill, as means of reinforcing and showcasing their ḥidushim, those novel interpretations or stunning solutions to textual difficulties by which they make their mark on the world. Rabbi Moshe, by contrast, places as his chief object his audience’s understanding of the verses from Scripture rather than the interpretations and constructions built on them. He does so out of the conviction that, understood correctly, the plain meaning of the verse speaks for itself. For that reason he enunciates and even chants each verse, explicating as he goes, so that every member of his flock “can receive it according to his capacity” (49).15
The rabbi’s everyday practice provides a model for the proper relation between human speech and divine speech. This means, first and foremost, that he says little and speaks only when necessary. His preferred mode of communication with the shamash is the nonverbal gesture, which is sufficient to convey his meaning; often these are instances in which looking substitutes for speaking. When he does speak, he prefers to make his points through quotations from Scripture, and when he does quote, he is careful to insert a brief pause between the quotation and his own words in order to recognize the distinction of one from the other. Rather than giving discursive addresses, his public homilies are strings of verses tied together in thematic strands. In doing so he is not hiding behind the verses or avoiding making his own conceptual formulations; rather, again, he is honoring divine speech and declining to impose his own.
Perplexingly, after delivering these great discourses with their abundance of verses, the rabbi is observed to be in a state of dejection. The shamash reports:
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. (58)
The shamash’s informant on these matters is none other than Zlateh, the rabbi’s young relation on whose behalf he undertook his journey to Gehinnom. (It is only from this casual aside, by the way, that the reader discovers a small trove of background information: that after she was released from her state of being an agunah, Zlateh married the shamash following the death of his own wife, and that Zlateh has died in the meantime.) Both explanations for the rabbi’s post-sermon tristesse are connected to the extreme anxiety and even danger inherent in handling divine speech and mixing it with human speech. Handling such materials, so the rabbi’s scrupulousness leads him to feel, must inevitably bring with it some culpability; and so the rabbi submits himself to a daylong regimen of silence. Ta‘anit dibur was not an ascetic practice known from earlier Jewish sources or familiar to European Jewry, and so the shamash permits himself a digression in which he explains how he learned of the practice from one Rabbi Hezkiah, a Buczacz native whose ancestors emigrated from Syria and Babylonia.
It is solicitude for Zlateh, finally, that completes the picture of the rabbi as the embodiment of the norm anchoring the world of the story. Zlateh is the granddaughter of Rabbi Naftali, a relation of Rabbi Moshe and a wealthy wine merchant with dealings with the Polish gentry who used his position to better the political situation of his Jewish brethren. Instead of paying what he owed for a wine shipment, one of those Polish noblemen set his dogs on Rabbi Naftali and murdered him. Shortly after that, all the members of the extended family, except for Zlateh, were slaughtered in the massacres of 1648 or died of sickness or starvation in their aftermath. Surviving as a nearly feral child, Zlateh traveled from town to town with a group of survivors, and when they came to Buczacz, Rabbi Moshe’s wife, without at first knowing who she is, arranged for her to be taken into her home. The discovery of her family connection flooded the rabbi, who has suffered so much loss, with a sense of grace and joy. He
personally supervises her education and gives her in marriage to Aaron, his prized student. When Aaron inexplicably deserts her, leaving her an agunah at the age of fifteen for the rest of her life, the rabbi is overcome by grief and despondency. But before too long he collects himself and conceives of the idea of visiting Gehinnom. He reasons, correctly it turns out, that Aaron must be dead, because if he were alive it is simply impossible that he would not have sent word to Zlateh and divorced her. The plan to journey to the Netherworld to confirm that fact, it is important to emphasize, is far from being either a swashbuckling adventure or an instance of theological tourism. True, the plan is audacious, but it is also perilous and likely lethal; “visitors” to Gehinnom generally do not return. That the rabbi and the shamash do return is the fact that furnishes the story’s sensational premise. Because this dangerous errand lacks probative halakhic value—Zlateh cannot be released from her bonds on the strength of this spectral sighting—the undertaking is an expression of Rabbi Moshe’s emotional exigency.16 Yet rather than diminishing him in our eyes, this knowledge contributes to his centrality in orienting the world of significance the story constructs.
1648
At the opening of the story, after stating his two purposes for telling it (to praise Rabbi Moshe and to warn of the consequences of improper speech), the narrator concludes with a perplexing statement.
To be sure, some things related here will not square with those who maintain that Buczacz was unaffected by the Khmelnitski pogroms. I leave it to the One who reconciles all matters to settle this one too.
