by S. Agnon
In gauging the panic and horror these sights induce in the shamash, it is important to recall once again the function of dramatic irony in the story. We the readers have been given by the narrator some preparation for inferring a correlation between the particular punishments inflicted on these scholars and the particular sins that provoked them, by means of the remarkable opening scene of the story: the embarrassment of the garrulous son-in-law and his banishment from the synagogue. But the shamash, so many decades earlier, comes upon these tortures entirely unprepared, and when he does react there is a “double whammy” effect to his reaction. He is unhinged at first by the absence of an evident explanation for the tortures he has witnessed; yet once an explanation is provided by the Rabbi, the shamash’s panic grows greater instead of being mitigated. The first wave of the shamash’s response is horror because the boundary between him and the tortured souls momentarily disappears and he feels that the same grotesque tortures may be happening to him. “Panic seized me. Maybe my mouth was contorted. Maybe my lips had flown apart” (32). Having hidden his face out of horror in the folds of the Rabbi’s cloak, the shamash loses his bearings, and he fears that his ears are growing to enclose his body. When he wordlessly implores the Rabbi for an explanation, it is not delivered immediately. The Rabbi first takes the shamash’s measure to determine exactly how much he is capable of understanding, and the shamash uses the benefit of his retrospective wisdom to delay the rush of events and interpolate a vignette about a Jewish jeweler who measured the ears of the Gentile noblewoman so that he could fashion earrings of exactly the right proportions. The Rabbi even makes the shamash ask a second time, for he “wanted to see how important my question was to me. Sometimes the mouth wants to ask more than the heart wants to know” (33). This wisdom about unnecessary speech, which is the moral preoccupation of both the narrator and the shamash throughout the story, is, again, retrospective wisdom that was not available to the shamash when he first gazed upon these hellish afflictions.
When, after several additional delays, Rabbi Moshe fashions his custom-made response, he delivers a series of clarifications that provide some explanation but no consolation. He explains, to begin with, that what they have seen is a special compartment of Gehinnom—a kind of infernal VIP lounge, so to speak—reserved for great rabbis, heads of yeshivot, and rabbis of whole regions. Special emphasis is placed on the fact that these torments have been in operation for ages, and that the pitiable denizens of this compartment include sages from the time of Talmud and the expulsion from Spain. The nature of their punishments, he goes on to point out, are dictated by the nature of their offenses; because they sinned in matters of speech, they are punished by being rendered mute. If in life they sat one atop the other in the synagogue and beit midrash blathering to each other, now in death they are spread out at a great distance from one another and cannot get a word out of their mouths. They are tantalized by being free to produce all the ḥidushim they wish and at the same time obstructed in communicating them to anyone else. At the root of their reprehensible behavior during their lifetime—the fundamental key to all their troubles—was the sin of talking and flogging their ḥidushim during prayers and the reading of the Torah: “Our Master’s words disturbed me more than anything my eyes had seen” (34). When the shamash first came upon the afflicted souls without the benefit of any accompanying explanations, the monstrousness of their suffering seized him with raw terror; but that terror had nothing to do with him personally. Now, with the benefit of those explanations, the terror has metamorphosed into a cognitive-theological-moral complex that has turned around to seize him by the throat. “Who can say that he has never committed that sin?” anguishes the shamash. “Who among us keeps his lips and tongue under control at all times? Who has not talked during the service or the Torah reading? And if those learned in Torah bear such a punishment, what about the rest of us?” (34). Although he well knows that conversation during prayers is a transgression, his mind simply cannot stretch itself to comprehend the rationale for an otherworldly retribution so extreme in its ferocity. Using his best scholastic casuistry, the shamash can appreciate the regrettable extra burden placed on the angels, who now have to exert themselves to separate out true prayers from idle conversation. But this consideration does not go very far in addressing the disturbing phenomenon of the incommensurability between sin and punishment. The shamash glumly concludes, “The matter still remains unsettled” (35).
A surprising digression at this juncture in the narrative makes an important connection between two of the story’s preoccupations. The shamash is struggling to resolve the troubling contradiction between a seemingly minor offense and its terrible punishment, when he suddenly halts his story and surveys his listeners, among whom, he realizes, are scholars as well as community leaders who are not scholars. He turns to them and says:
Now listen to me all you people of Buczacz. You think that Gehinnom is only for Torah scholars. Well, let me tell you otherwise. There is one area there compared to which all the rest of Gehinnom is like Gan Eden. I never noticed it at first because it was covered in dust. But the voices that could be heard through the dust suggested that there were people there. I could not tell if they were people or cattle or fowl until I went in and saw that it was one huge market fair, like the ones our great-grandparents and those who came before them used to tell about, before Khmelnitski, may his name be blotted out. There were traders, dealers, noblemen and noblewomen, goods galore–-like you’ve never seen before. Silver and gold and all kinds of expensive things. Then suddenly the whole fair was thrown into a panic. The Tatars had arrived. They came on swift horses in rumbling hordes. My body trembles even now as I recall it. I will stop talking about it and go back to where I left off. (35)
The shamash’s outburst is all the more intriguing for its strangeness and disconnection from what comes before and after it. Although he labels the scene of the fair and the horsemen as yet another compartment (mador) of Gehinnom, it quickly becomes recognizable as connected to the Tatar incursions of the 1670s rather than to the afterlife. It is different from anything that has come before because the suffering it represents is unrelated to any misdeeds that might have provoked it, and the ordeal is collective in nature rather than pertaining to the culpability of the individual soul. The scene belongs, in short, to an entirely different kind of discourse: the historical tribulations of Israel in recent persecutions. Even within this category, there is much that remains strange. Rather than picturing recent events, the tableau evokes an imagined earlier era of great commercial wealth and weighty transactions between Polish rulers and Jewish traders at the great market fairs. It is this older world that is made the target of the swift and devastating incursions of the Tatar horsemen, scourges that in fact come from a later period, the 1670s. The conflation of time and the sketchy, fragmentary evocation of events lend this scene the quality of a nightmare. It can be understood as a posttraumatic memory in light of all we have gleaned from the pervasive persistence of 1648 in our story. “My body trembles even now as I recall it,” confesses the shamash.
The digression breaks off as abruptly as it began. Yet by the time the shamash regains his composure and determines to “go back to where I left off,” he has unwittingly broached the link between the two kinds of trauma in the story, both hitherto presented as unrelated to one another. On the one hand, there are the events of 1648 and their pervasive baleful consequences for all the Jews of Buczacz, including the shamash’s wife, who witnessed the murder of her parents and seven siblings (43), and the shamash himself, whose family was also wiped out. The orphaning of Zlateh and the apostasy of Aaron also belong to this line of the narrative. On the other hand, there are the horrific tortures suffered by prideful and self-important scholars in Gehinnom forming the main story the shamash has been relating. Although a connection between them is made neither by the narrator nor by the shamash, they are both alive and comingled in the unconscious imagination of the shamash, as evin
ced by the digression about the Tatar horsemen and its surprising placement within the tour of Gehinnom. There is of course an implicit connection between the two, but it is one that is not thinkable to the figures in the story—except perhaps Aaron. It is only we, the modern readers, who, through Agnon’s agency, can see it clearly. It is the shared theological problem of incommensurability. How is it possible that the sins of Ukrainian Jewry were so unspeakable as to have warranted the horrors of Khmelnitski and his hordes? How is it possible that infractions of well-meaning scholars can result in unspeakable tortures for eternity? In both cases, the physical afflictions are horrible enough in their own right, but the enduring suffering, when it comes to the surviving and living, comes from the festering cognitive-theological wound that has been opened up.
The coexistence and even commingling of 1648 and Gehinnom in the shamash’s mind beg further questions: Is one the result of the other? Is the preoccupation with matters beyond the grave an outcome of a consciousness rooted in mass death and sacrifice? Is it the pervasiveness of death, arising from persecutions that took place in a concrete political-historical context, that generates the anxiety about postmortem punishments and their stringencies? The answer to these questions, as well as to the question of incommensurability, are located beyond the theological imagination of both the narrator and the shamash; the farthest they can go is to mark the wall that has been reached with the modest understatement, qetsat qasheh (It is a little difficult).22 The notion that 1648 may be the generating cause is expressed in the shamash’s repeated insistence that the tale of Aaron’s apostasy and his discovery in Gehinnom is merely preparatory and subservient to the main moral teaching about inappropriate speech. It is ultimately in the narrative syntax of the story that Agnon wrestles with these questions. The shamash returns from his tour of Hell between Yom Kippur and Sukkot, with many questions about the plausibility of what he has witnessed buzzing in his head; but within half a chapter it is suddenly late spring, and the monumental description of the twentieth of Sivan memorial takes over the story. Immersion in the 1648 theme kidnaps the story for the length of these protracted ceremonies, until the point at which the Rabbi at the very end arrives at his parable, which he uses to refocus the narrative and once again underscore the gravity of inappropriate speech. The story as a whole, in sum, stages a contest in which the spiritually wasting forces of death unleashed by 1648 are resisted by the desire to impose a moralizing meaning on the experience of life and death.
Stepping back and looking at the Gehinnom episode as a whole, we see clearly its extraordinary nature. On his return, the shamash himself can barely believe it has taken place because it is so disturbingly at odds with what he knows about the afterlife. Having been plucked from time and space and exposed to confounding horrors, he has difficulty in accommodating to the fact that life in Buczacz proceeds as usual. Perplexingly, the rabbi takes no action on Zlateh’s case as a result of having confirmed the fact of Aaron’s death. Her situation, in fact, is resolved only when a mysterious emissary from the East comes to Buczacz bearing a writ of divorce, which could only have been written when Aaron was alive. Yet despite these peculiarities, the shamash insists on the truth of his experience: “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” (39). And whatever hesitations the shamash himself may have had, the people of Buczacz are entirely persuaded by his testimony. So much so that they treat him like a revered authority, surrounding him and pestering him with endless trivial questions about the precise conditions that obtain in Gehinnom (Chapter 25).
What then, in the end, is so shocking about the news the shamash brings back from Hell? In light of the widespread diffusion of expanded ideas about Gehinnom among Polish Jews in the seventeenth century, what is revisionary about the shamash’s tale, and by extension what is original about Agnon’s appropriation of these materials? First the minor discrepancies. There was neither fire nor snow in the compartments that the shamash observed, which is at odds with all written accounts. The Talmud states that there are three entrances to Gehinnom (one in the desert, one in the sea and one in Jerusalem; Eruvin 19a), yet the Rabbi was able to find a portal only a short distance from Buczacz. The Talmud further states that the tortures of Gehinnom last twelve months, yet the shamash observed souls suffering their afflictions, according to the Rabbi, for hundreds and even thousands of years.
And then there are the three major discrepancies. The first is the fact that the Rabbi and the shamash survived their descent into the Netherworld. An extraordinary sage may outfox the Angel of Death and be given the privilege of entering the afterlife directly, that is, without going through the pangs of death and the grave, and even then his destination can only be Paradise and not its alternative. There is also the case of the zaddik who, on his death, descends into Gehinnom for the purpose of helping his followers discharge their purgations, but he does not rejoin the living. (Immanuel of Rome does descend and return alive, but the account of his journey belongs to the more worldly tradition of secular Hebrew poetry that would not have been familiar to the world of Buczacz.) The return of the Rabbi and the shamash to the world of living remains astonishing. The second is the fact that Gehinnom contains great Torah scholars. Attaining the status of a true talmid ḥakham entails not only mastering the corpus of talmudic literature and its attendant commentaries but also contributing to the corpus by making innovative interpretations and proposing creative solutions to knotty dialectical problems. In the normative religious culture of Polish Jewry, the talmid ḥakham was the crown of Creation, the pinnacle of aspiration. If Gehinnom contains compartments for sages alongside those for common sinners, then an entire structure of value is put in question, with profound implications for a society whose elite is founded on marriage alliances between successful merchants and promising scholars. If scholars, despite their peccadilloes, cannot count on being exempted from the tortures of Hell, then what hope is there for Jews who face the uncertainties of the afterlife without their attainments?
Finally, the doctrine of sin and punishment is founded on the principle of proportionality in two senses. Minor transgressions warrant minor punishments and major transgressions major punishments. The manner of the punishment is fitted to the manner of the transgression (adulterers hanging by their sexual organs, etc.). Agnon’s Gehinnom preserves the latter but throws over the former. The story hews ingeniously to the principle of an eye for an eye in inventing infernally apt punishments for those self-important scholars who cannot help hawking their latest wares during the synagogue service. But when it comes to believing that such infractions—and many would see them as merely excesses of holy zeal—deserve eternal torture, it is only the Rabbi who takes this for granted. For everyone else, including the shamash, this new information is a kind of wild card that threatens the integrity of an entire hierarchy of religious meaning with its implicit balances and gradations. True, the people of Buczacz are eventually persuaded by the force of the shamash’s tale to accept the radical seriousness of this particular offense. But beneath their burst of moral revivalism lies a deeper anxiety. With the notion of proportionality destabilized, they have lost the reliable key to the map of their religious fate. The desperate desire to regain this certainty is most likely the reason behind the zeal the Jews of Buczacz display in eventually embracing the shamash’s message. Despite the shockingly extreme punishments meted out for ostensibly moderate transgressions, the essential principle of theological rationality is reaffirmed. They seize a chance to gain hold of a key that will make sense of their postmortem fate even if they are required to hold themselves to a new moral standard.
THE SHAMASH’S TALE
Within the larger narrative galaxy of ‘Ir umelo’ah, Agnon’s postwar stories of Buczacz, our story stands out because it boasts two narrators.23 One is the narrator who organizes, accompanies and relates mos
t of the volume’s stories. The other, of course, is the shamash, to whom the general narrator hands off the story in Chapter 2 and from whom he takes it back in Chapter 24, with a number of intervening glosses and explanations. In allowing the shamash to tell so much of the story, the narrator is discharging his role as an impresario of memory rather than simply as a chronicler. He is for a time divesting himself of his implicit prerogative as master storyteller and welcoming, as it were, a guest artist to share the podium. The gifts brought by this visiting performer are evident. He is a direct participant in the events and can speak with the immediacy of an eyewitness. But does not the narrator of ‘Ir umelo’ah claim for himself a trans-historical omniscience that would give him all the knowledge he needs to tell the story of the shamash and rabbi himself? His knowledge, after all, goes forward in time as well as backward, and it is only he who can make reference to the Holocaust at the end of the story and explain that the present iteration of the story is a replacement for the account inscribed in the communal register, the pinqas, which burned in the destruction of Buczacz by the Nazis. What he cannot do, however, is embody himself as a historical character with a name, a wife—two wives, in fact—and a real-life role to play in the life of the town. Embodiment is the one thing that the narrator, with all his “super powers,” cannot attain.
