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

by S. Agnon

  Yet despite this vital difference, there remains a great deal that the narrator and the shamash share. Their religious outlooks are similar in their worldly piety and their devotion to the core norms of worship and Torah study. They both repeatedly insist on the fidelity of their reporting and on the scrupulous honesty with which they admit what they know and what they do not know. And they both have a pronounced penchant for digressions and the rationales that seek to justify them. Indeed, it is not easy to pry apart the texture and timbre of their individual narrative voices; and this affinity gives rise to an anxiety on the narrator’s part concerning the reader’s ability to keep the two separate. At the beginning of Chapter 7, when the shamash is in the midst of recounting the tale of Aaron’s apostasy and its grim consequences, the narrator feels compelled to intervene and address the reader directly.

  I remove myself from the narrative and take on the character of the shamash so he can speak in his own voice. But lest you start thinking that this story is about me, I intrude periodically with the words “the shamash said.” (21)

  The Hebrew beneath this idiomatic rendering describes a rather complex act of self-negation and appropriation. The Hebrew reads: mafshit ani et tsurati velovesh et tsurato shel hashamash venotel et leshono befi (“I dematerialize my own form and take on the form of the shamash and take his tongue into my mouth”). On the one hand, the narrator wants the reader to know that the story is not about him but about the shamash, even though they are both using the first person. He therefore proposes a device for eliminating confusion and marking the shamash’s speeches: he will insert the words “Thus said the shamash.” On the other, he insists that the reader understand that, even though the shamash was a real person who toured Hell in the seventeenth century, in this belated telling he is a device, a character created by the narrator whose very voice is produced by an act of ventriloquism. The narrator’s anxiety, in the end, is not for nothing. He succeeds so well in making the shamash an indelible character that we often forget who in fact is pulling the strings.

  Who is the shamash, after all, that this extraordinary tale should be placed in his mouth? By what merit is he allowed to return from Gehinnom alive and tell a story that changes the lives of his fellow townspeople? The elders of Buczacz, having assembled to judge him and now in thrall to his account, ask the same question. Between the description of one compartment of Gehinnom and the other, they wonder:

  You might think that this was because he was great in Torah and wisdom and piety and good deeds. Not at all. This was a poor shamash, one who was no different from anyone else in Buczacz, except for his temper. Perhaps the merits of his forebears who were killed in the pogroms stood in his stead. But in this matter he was no more privileged than the other townspeople, almost all of whom saw their father or mother die a terrible and cruel death. So the matter is truly puzzling. (30)

  The shamash himself would make no exception to this characterization. He goes out of his way to underscore his ordinariness in relation to the learned elite of Buczacz. In commenting on mystical speculations relating to why Rabbi Moshe’s life was spared during the massacres, the shamash professes that such matters are beyond him: “It is enough for a man like me to get through the weekly portion with Targum and Rashi’s commentary” (6). He is, moreover, a man burdened with sorrows. He was a young man with many children at the time of the journey to Gehinnom; his wife was already an invalid, bedridden and unable to speak, who would not live out the year.

  Yet despite his lack of distinction, the shamash leverages prodigious power on the people of Buczacz. His power derives not so much from the fact of his journey to Gehinnom as from the telling of it many years later. In the galaxy of Agnon’s fiction, storytelling is an omnipresent and highly privileged activity, but rare indeed is the case when the telling of a story has the impact described in Hamashal vehanimshal. When his listeners reach the point at which they are too terrified by his story to press for more details, the shamash drives home his advantage: “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” (45). What is the source of this power, so rare among great preachers and scholars but here invested in a curmudgeonly sexton?

  Our sexton, to begin with, is not quite as unlettered as others see him, or as he would have us believe. He spends his days in and around the beit midrash and in conversation with scholars who devote their time to study. He knows the text of the Hebrew Bible well and can identify the sources of the scriptural quotations that are the rabbi’s preferred mode of communication. Difficult verses with original interpretations fall into his mouth (“A verse in the Torah occurred to me”) at key moments (35). He fully comprehends all of the rabbi’s homilies and textual references, and he is not so humble to observe about himself, “That is one thing I take pride in: if I do not understand our Master’s words right away, later on I do” (46). The shamash’s religious world has been deeply influenced by the dissemination of Kabbalah into broad sectors of Polish Jewry, and it is natural for him, for example, when he bemoans Aaron’s misguided inquiries into the meaning of Jewish suffering, to speak of persecutions as God’s way of purging us from the “qelipot we have acquired in the lands of the Gentiles and thereby prepare us for the day of His Redemption” (9). Although he repeatedly avers that he is not among the devotees of mystical interpretation (49), he does not hesitate to include the glosses of those who are, and on occasion to offer his own (36). When he looks up at the stars after emerging from the Netherworld, a line occurs to him from the Book of the Angel Razi’el, an early medieval kabbalistic work (see translator’s note to p. 36). After he witnesses the tortures of the scholarly sinners in Gehinnom and before the rabbi explains the reason for their fate, the shamash performs a mental search: “I reviewed all the sins and punishments enumerated in the holy books and could find none that matched what I had seen” (32). This is a feat that requires no small amount of learning. His reading is also broad, as demonstrated by his referring to an anecdote in Sefer kaftor vaferaḥ, a Hebrew treatise on rabbinic aggadah by Yaakov bar Yitzchak Luzzato, Safed, ca. 1527–1587 (8). In sum, although the shamash is no talmid ḥakham in terms of scholarly attainment or class position, he is a creature of the culture of the beit midrash whose literacy enables him to grasp the meaning of all that transpires around him in the beit midrash and its culture. The most eloquent testimony to his literacy is to be found in his reconstruction from memory of the memorial ceremonies on the twentieth of Sivan and the many quotations from Scripture and from arcane liturgical poems that attended them.

  A source of his power lies, paradoxically, in the meekness of his subservience to Rabbi Moshe. To be sure, the very nature of his office as shamash enjoins this subordination, as does the fact of his youth—he was fifty-four years younger than when he relates the story!—in relation to the rabbi’s venerable age when he served him in what turned out to be the last year of the sage’s life. Yet the devotion of this proud and irascible man to his master rests on a more compelling foundation. There is a profound affinity of spirit and temperament between master and servant. This is expressed in an area of human interaction that is central to the thematic preoccupation of the story: speech, necessary and unnecessary. Although there are many tasks that the shamash is called on to perform at the rabbi’s behest, his intuitive understanding of what is required of him often obviates the need for his instructions to be articulated: “Many times it seemed as though the look in his eyes told what he wanted to say to me” (13). The repertoire of nonverbal communications between the two enables them to use speech only for what is truly worthy to be spoken about: “One did not make small talk with our Master” (13). But it is more than a gift for attunement that enables the shamash to offer such devotion. Rather, it is his identification with the authority the rabbi wields with such utter probity and int
egrity, and it is in the enforcement of this authority that the shamash finds a calling suited to his temperament. When, as quoted above, the elders of Buczacz express their amazement over the shamash being singled out to witness astonishing sights, the one exception to his ordinariness they note is his temper.

  This strikes the reader as an accurate observation. The shamash is indeed a man of intense moral focus who is easily provoked by the temporizing of others. In Rabbi Moshe’s rule over Buczacz, he finds a regime with whose righteousness he wholeheartedly identifies, so much so that he can subsume his will within the rabbi’s will without feeling diminished. To the contrary, he is nurtured, empowered and elevated by being enlisted in the rabbi’s service. After the rabbi gives him the first intimations of their fateful journey, the shamash says to himself, “How good it is to know that we have leaders whose words keep us on the straight path and sustain us in this Exile” (15). Reported a half century later, his words convey to his listeners an implicit critique of current rabbinic regimes and the leadership they offer.

  The vignette about the melamed and the tax collector in Chapter 4 underscores the affinity between the rabbi’s unbowed leadership and the shamash’s fierce resolve. The story is told in the context of a conversation between the shamash and his first wife, and it occurs at the moment when the rabbi has told the shamash that he requires his help for a special undertaking, but before there is an inkling of just how special the errand will be. The reason the rabbi gives for enlisting his help is particularly telling: “I know that people do not frighten you” (12). And indeed, when the shamash goes home for breakfast before returning to the rabbi, his nervous preoccupation is noticed by his wife, who engages him in speculating about the mysterious task. In the course of these speculations, she mentions the episode of the melamed and the tax collector, which the shamash now reprises for the reader. The episode concerns a melamed who was slapped in the face by a wealthy man who was disappointed with the results of the melamed’s attempts to educate his son. The melamed brought the tax collector to court over the assault, and when the latter failed to show up, “Our Master then instructed me to go and tell the man that if there is no legal accounting here below, there certainly is one up above, and if he would not appear before the local rabbinical court he would absolutely be hauled before the beit din of Gehinnom. So I went to him without the least fear of him or his dogs or his servants” (13). The shamash will shortly discover that the mission for which he is being enlisted will expose him to dangers greater than menacing dogs and nasty servants. Nonetheless, the rabbi has identified within this poor, young and unrecognized assistant an unbowed resoluteness of purpose that can be mobilized for holy purposes.

  The shamash’s monumental expression of will is the one that the reader might easily take for granted: telling the story that accounts for the great majority of Hamashal vehanimshal. This power resides, of course, not merely in the fact of telling the story but rather in the extraordinary capacity to shape and project a narrative that compels his listeners to change their lives. In this he even surpasses his master, the great homilist, whose revered preaching does not approach the shamash’s narrative in its electric ability to produce moral self-questioning. Underlying the shamash’s astonishing performance is the perplexing question of why he launches into it in the first place. The precipitating events lie in the distant past. Because of the tale’s air of dramatic immediacy, we do not realize just how far in the past they lie until the shamash mentions in passing the figure of fifty-four years toward the very end of his narrative. For these many long years, those astounding events had remained secret knowledge guarded by the shamash in accordance with the sacred principles of restraint and discretion in matters of language laid down by Rabbi Moshe.

  What impels the shamash to violate those principles and disclose the terrible events of a half century earlier? The story discloses two motives, one explicit and one implicit, and the coexistence of the two explains a great deal about the way the shamash tells his tale. The explicit motive is a moral indignation that pays tribute to the values of the shamash’s long-dead master. In the years since the originating events, the shamash has witnessed a drift away from the high principles of restraint in speech that the rabbi had made the thrust of his valedictory address to his flock. Conspicuous displays of learning, as witness by the proliferation of pilpul and ḥidushim, have undercut loyalty to the plain and true meaning of the Torah; the members of the mercantile elite have purchased scholars with these showy talents as husbands for their daughters in order to elevate their family status. That fateful Sabbath morning when one such son-in-law blathers his latest scintillating ḥidush into his friend’s ear during the Torah service is simply too much for the shamash. The implicit motive lies in the twin traumas that left their searing impress on him as a youth and a young man: the massacres of 1648 and the journey to Gehinnom. To be sure, as a victim/survivor of 1648, the shamash underwent an ordeal, which is given no back story, that was presumably no worse than that of many other Jews of Buczacz. And that is precisely the important point: Although Buczacz famously escaped the brunt of the physical injury inflicted by Khmelnitski, do not think that the spiritual damage was anything but severe and far-reaching. The shamash is a Buczacz everyman in this regard, and fifty-four years later, when the town is once again teeming and prosperous, he is among the few surviving firsthand witnesses who carry the horrors within them. When it comes to Gehinnom and the gruesome tortures of the ostensibly righteous there, however, the shamash inhabits his own singular category. He has remained silent about these twin traumas for many decades, even as they have presumably never ceased to exert painful pressure on his inner and unconscious life. Although moral indignation provides a respectable trigger for his extraordinary act of public humiliation and the story that follows it, there is much in this outpouring that taps the need for confession and catharsis.

  The simultaneous operation of two sets of motivation is critical in explaining a highly problematic hallmark of the shamash’s narration: his penchant for digression. Now, having entered the Agnonian universe, the experienced reader may extend wide latitude to this practice, or even simply take it for granted. Yet if we attend to the particular, urgent message of this story, then the question of narrative superfluity becomes marked as moral laxity. After all, the moral the shamash works hard at impressing on his listeners—a moral learned from his master and confirmed by the narrator—is that speech should be husbanded and expended only when necessary. Silence, discretion, reticence, gesture in place of words, Scripture in place of human discourse, the avoidance of speech about others—these are the bywords of a religious seriousness that begins with chatting in the synagogue and exfoliates into an ethics of being in the world. The actual telling of the story itself is the dramatic result of an accidental violation of this principle. The shamash certainly does not intend to tell the story of the journey to Hell that took place a half century earlier; but when his ire is enflamed and he commits an act of public humiliation, he has no recourse but to divulge the events he has kept silent about for so very long. Yet once he is inevitably launched on his narrative of those extraordinary events, the ethics of restraint should, by his own lights, require him to hew closely to his moral message and avoid all extraneous remarks. But the outcome, as any reader can see, is quite otherwise. The shamash’s tale is replete with all manner of subsidiary observations, anecdotes and vignettes. Is this simply the old Agnonian charm, the traditional license of the storyteller, beguiling to some and irksome to others?

  I would argue that the answer is no in the case of this story, as well as in many others of Agnon’s writings. The argument for rationalizing the digressions and viewing them as performing strategic functions rests on the dual nature of the shamash’s motivations. His explicit motive is to drive home the moralizing message about the evils of competing with divine speech; his implicit and unconscious motive is to give expression to a variety of traumas and anxieties that include the unex
plained reasons for God’s having visited so much suffering on His people, the horrific tortures of Gehinnom that are meted out not only to the obviously wicked and the loss of his great mentor and master, together with the decline of true and wise rabbinic authority. These concerns exert pressure on the shamash’s intention to tell “the truth and nothing but the truth” and convey what is immediately relevant to the elders of Buczacz; they create a kind of interference in the dissemination of his message. The pattern is evident on almost every page of the story, but nowhere more than in two large narrative blocks. The heartrending story about Aaron’s apostasy is strictly necessary only to explain how the rabbi and shamash came to discover the compartments of Gehinnom that house the scholars who are being punished for hawking their wares during the reading of the Torah. But since Aaron’s story is saturated with emotional losses and troubling theological speculations connected to 1648, he cannot desist from giving the account ample room even at the same time he avers that it is not the main point and that he must move on. A similar case is the great block of narrative devoted to depicting the ceremonies of the twentieth of Sivan commemorating the massacres. Loving detail is lavished on all of the difficult piyyutim and on the obscure biblical verses parsed by the rabbi, and in general on the particulars of this epic scene of remembrance. Yet all this bears no relevance to the story’s moral teaching about human and divine speech. The two terse parables that do bear on the moral theme seem tacked on at the end of the day’s proceedings as if they were afterthoughts. I shall presently explain.