by S. Agnon
Thus there emerges from the story a differential hermeneutic that enables the reader to make sense of the shamash’s digressive habits. What might seem errant and meandering and the sign of a failure of discipline is in fact something else entirely. It is the record of an inner turmoil in which the traumas of the past are continually claiming their due alongside the shamash’s efforts to project the more official ethical message. This is a method of reading that provides no small measure of help in negotiating many reaches of the Agnon universe.
MASHAL AS DECOY
In accounting for the meaning of a literary text, we usually take the privileged status of the work’s title as axiomatic. We assume that in fashioning a title an author is choosing an evocative phrase that stands for the work as a whole and pointing us in the direction of its main thematic import. In the story before us, Agnon would seem to be playing against those expectations. By titling his story The Parable and Its Lesson [Hamashal vehanimshal], Agnon invites us to assume that a parabolic homily will serve as the climax of the story’s drama or as a central node around which the thematic lines of the story will be arrayed. Yet the title does not do its job, and on completion of the story the reader can be forgiven for feeling duped or at least disoriented. The two parables, the one about an anteater and the other about the lord of a palace, are grotesque and meager, and the abrupt way in which they are delivered after so many events of high moment and drama is the essence of anticlimactic. Can’t Agnon do better?
The parable of the anteater is provocative on many levels. As a general principle, the classic rabbinic parable rests on a foundation of familiarity, whether understood in terms of its rhetorical effect or the history of its conventions in homiletic literature. The homilist compares a situation that is simpler and more familiar to his listeners (the mashal) to a grave or complex religious message (the nimshal). The dynamics of a royal household in which a king banishes his consort or exiles a son who angered him is often compared to the embroiled relations between God and the Jewish people.24 In Late Antiquity, Jews lived under Roman rule, and although they had little firsthand exposure to the lives of imperial figures, they did understand the absolute authority of the emperor and his regional governors. Over time they became so accustomed to—even fond of—these stereotypical motifs that the parable was looked to as the unit in a long homily that would deliver the most delight.25 In pointed contrast to this practice, the creature Rabbi Moshe places at the center of his parable is grotesquely unfamiliar several times over. The news of the existence of this creature has been given to him thirdhand by one Reb Zevulun, a spice merchant, who in turn heard about it from caravan operators who ply the desert routes to the Land of Cush. In addition to having its existence rest on hearsay, the creature fits into no known species; it is a variety of monkey that resembles a dog and survives by eating ants. Jarring as well is the violence with which the creature lures its unsuspecting, industrious little victims into its trap and then suddenly foments their deaths. The rabbi’s laconic and hurried presentation of the nimshal, the allegorical solution to the parable, is also strange. There is no reference made to the problem the rabbi announced he was setting out to address—the sin of improper speech—and the dramatic emphasis in the nimshal falls entirely on the tragic inevitability of antlike Jews falling into the infernal trap laid for them.
Then, having missed the mark with his first parable, the rabbi marshals his energies and offers a second parable, which, this time around, succeeds on every level. The parable tells the story of the lord of a castle who takes pity on a poor man and listens to his tale of woes; the lord not only allows him to settle on his estate but provides him with writs that grant him hereditary ownership of his property. But the poor man ends by alienating the lord’s good will when he talks about irrelevant matters and then interrupts the lord as the lord reads from the documents that assure the poor man’s future fortune. For his listeners this time, the figures in the parable are reassuringly familiar and transparent. The theme of the parable is decidedly “on message.” And the rabbi skillfully exploits the resources of the mashal-nimshal structure so as to produce a gasp of recognition when his listeners, having recognized the evident foolishness of the poor man’s conduct, realize that they are he, and that by jabbering in the synagogue they endanger their hold on the gifts God has bestowed on them.
Rabbi Moshe has finally hit the mark. But why did he fail to get it right the first time? The answer becomes evident if we stand back and view the anteater parable in the larger context of the lengthy commemorative ceremonies on the twentieth of Sivan. The parables come at the very end, at a point where the rabbi has announced that he is shifting from the theme of mourning and memorialization to the theme of synagogue worship and its disturbances. The import of the first parable clearly indicates, starkly and dolefully, that despite his intentions the rabbi has not succeeded in making the shift. His deepest thoughts remain entangled in and possessed by the horrible losses of 1648 and the troubling theological questions they raise, questions that have already led to the apostasy and death of his favorite student. How could those gentle and industrious ants, so admired by King Solomon in his proverbs, have known that the sand hill they swarmed upon was in fact a satanic trap? “And yet with all their wisdom, the ants cannot avoid falling into the hands of the monkey” (53). The source of their livelihood suddenly becomes their grave when the creature rouses itself from its camouflaged hiding place and shuts the trap. In its evocation of gruesome violence and disorienting astonishment, the parable is supremely effective, but only if we think of it as serving the sermonic agenda the rabbi has announced he was moving beyond.
Again we are confronted with the memories of 1648 welling up unbidden and interfering with the moral message the story seeks to broadcast. The shared wish of the narrator, the shamash and the rabbi to hew to the moral message is a desire they can only imperfectly fulfill. They seek to do so nevertheless because of the portentous theological issues at stake. Rabbi Moshe can skillfully offer the standard consolations about repentance and God’s abiding love for Israel, but he is powerless to mitigate the terrible losses and the terrible memories, and when it comes to sensitive and inquisitive souls such as Aaron, he cannot avert the corrosive spread of theological doubt with its calamitous consequences. This sense of wayward ungovernability is precisely what is absent from the call to refrain from mixing human speech with divine speech in the synagogue. The latter is a question of comportment and discipline; it may pose a challenge to the grandiosity of some scholars, but it is inscribed wholly within the realm of human choice. The mechanisms of moral introspection and fulfillment of religious duty operate on a psychological level very different from traumatic loss and memory. True, the duty to avoid improper speech is not without its frightening aspects. The horrific punishments for transgression, as the shamash has so powerfully witnessed, can seem inexplicably disproportionate to the offense, and the offense itself may be inevitably wired into human behavior. Nevertheless, of the two contending themes of the story, moral challenge is the more optimistic and less demoralizing because it admits of the possibility of corrective human action. When it comes to what God allowed to be done to the Jews in 1648, however, there could be no nostrums.
Why in fact, at the end of this very long fast, does the rabbi introduce a subject that has no ostensible connection to the theme of the day? If he seeks to turn away from imponderable matters of historical suffering and toward governable matters of practical religious conduct, there are undoubtedly any number of areas of spiritual laxity that need shoring up. It is far from clear that in the community of Buczacz at that moment the temptation to speak during the reading of the Torah has the status of a clear and present danger. For when the rabbi begins to turn his attention to the subject he goes so far as to admit that, even though he has heard of the problem, he himself has not seen it with his own eyes (47). The rabbi, to be sure, is in possession of secret knowledge that the townspeople are not privy to. In his journ
ey to Gehinnom, he has seen graphic evidence of the severity of the issue and its persistence over many centuries. It is this long view that may account for why the rabbi, whose last public discourse this is before his death six months later, insists on addressing an area of conduct that is not an acute need of the present moment. Now, Rabbi Moshe is a holy sage who, at least in the shamash’s mind, is endowed with ruaḥ haqodesh, prophetic foresight. Is it not then possible that the rabbi is in fact directing his words not to the present faithful of Buczacz, the meager remnants of the massacres, the community of two hundred souls who stand as they listen to rabbi’s long homily because their synagogue does not yet have chairs or benches, but rather to the Buczacz of some fifty-four years later, whose inhabitants have multiplied and whose merchants have grown prosperous enough to forget when the word of God takes precedence over the casuistry of their sons-in-law?
This speculation gives birth to another speculation. The depiction of the rabbi comes to us wholly through the eyes and lips of the shamash, who selects behaviors, incidents and quotations in order to construct the figure of his venerated master. The shamash lives long into the period of Buczacz’s reconstruction and prosperity even as he observes disturbing signs of spiritual complacency in matters concerning which he knows there are dire consequences. Might not the shamash have exercised a preemptive prophetic wisdom on behalf of the rabbi? Might not the parables that concluded the rabbi’s long discourse have been “retrofitted” through the work of the imagination to yield an older wisdom that would have the éclat of prophetic authority when they would be most needed?
Whatever their etiology, the parables can in no meaningful sense be construed to constitute the climax of the story, or the distillation of its meaning, or the banner under which the reader first encounters the text. As a title, The Parable and Its Lesson [Hamashal vehanimshal] is a decoy or a counter that draws our attention away from the unstable and contending binaries of the story.
THE HOLY COMMUNITY OF BUCZACZ
As the shamash concludes his tale and the narrator resumes direct narration of the story, a new character moves to center stage: the holy community of Buczacz. One of the great questions that haunts Agnon’s epic cycle of Buczacz stories as a whole is whether a community can in fact be conceived of as a character and function like one. Can a social organism exercise the will and agency that we associate with the great figures of fiction? Can a town meaningfully function as the protagonist of a formidable cycle of stories? ‘Ir umelo’ah is the large canvas on which Agnon experiments with this proposition. Although we can reckon with these questions only by taking the whole cycle into account, the final sections of our story give us a glimpse how this collective portraiture might work.
The last four chapters of the story (24–27) present a complex picture of how the community of Buczacz absorbs and processes the extraordinary new information revealed by the shamash’s tale. Throughout these pages, Buczacz is spoken about as a single collective, as when the narrator begins Chapter 24 with the statement “The shamash’s words left Buczacz astounded” (‘amdah Bitshatsh temihah, 58); or when verbs in the third person plural are used to convey concerted action on the part of the inhabitants of the town as a whole. Although the distinct behavior of some subgroups is pointed out, the corporate identity of Buczacz is maintained throughout.
The first response of Buczacz is cognitive disorientation. It was always taken for granted that “talking generally brings people together and dispels worry, while silence is usually a sign of sorrow and suffering” (58–59), and now this commonsense conviction has been powerfully refuted. Dealing with the contradiction brings out the dialectical acumen of the town, and it is in the course of their arguments that they come to admit the logic of the shamash’s arguments and acknowledge how even learned human discourse can become an affront to God’s honor and generosity. After having grasped the point intellectually, they begin to confront the dread and anxiety that inevitably follow in the wake of this realization.
A series of groans came forth from the assembled. First from despair, and then from trepidation, for even when one takes care not to talk during the services or the Torah reading, there are times when one simply cannot control oneself and things that serve purposes neither lofty nor base come out. (59)
Reviewing their Sabbath morning practices with an honest eye, the townspeople are constrained to admit that rarely a week goes by when some words of the Torah reading are not drowned out or otherwise lost by well-meaning (or sarcastic) remarks correcting the reader and by the commotion they provoke.
Within this general spiritual reckoning, there are those who are especially receptive to this heightened stringency because they have already intuited its truth but not yet grasped its enormity. They not only immediately take upon themselves the rule of silence in synagogue but, in a way that would have gratified the shamash’s master Rabbi Moshe, also extend the principle of avoiding unnecessary speech to behavior in the marketplace and in the home. At the same time, there are others in the community who, while accepting the validity of the new stricture, give themselves over to an obsessive and even lurid fascination with the details of Gehinnom. Are there fallen angels there? Are the tortures interrupted on the Sabbath? Do they say the same prayers we do? What happens to their clothes and their fringed undergarments after their bodies cease to exist? “There was no end to their questions,” the narrator informs us, “and because they had not yet learned to restrain their tongues, those tongues nattered on with abandon” (61). Absorbed in the sensational revelations of the shamash’s tale, they have allowed the real import of the story to pass by them.
Yet, in the final analysis, the townspeople of Buczacz do the right thing. They recognize that the shamash’s precipitating act of public humiliation was in fact a gesture of self-sacrifice, and instead of fining him and removing him from his office, they restore him to public honor and give him the special task of standing on the bimah during the Torah reading and vigilantly surveying the congregation for errant instances of idle chatter. This is but one instance of the procedures and safeguards the elders put into effect so that the new discipline will be made a permanent part of the religious life of the town.
The willingness of Buczacz to rectify its ways, in other words, gives the story a happy ending, at least in the classic sense in which the bonds of society are reconstituted after a threat to their cohesion. It remains unclear, however, whether the positive ending outweighs the grave instances of suffering so strongly adduced earlier in the story concerning the aftermath of 1648 and in the compartments of Gehinnom. These two sources of tragic undertow, we have seen, contend at every level of the story with the moral issue of divine and human speech, the former the result of ungovernable forces and the latter more susceptible to human agency. Through his narrator, Agnon formerly converts the story into a comedy by devoting the final chapters to the successful repentance of the town. In metaphysical and aesthetic terms, however, the ending comes across as less of a consummation than an act of will. To the threat posed by the corrosive and deconstructive forces of unexplained suffering—in this world and the next—the story offers the example of Buczacz as a qehilah qedoshah, a holy community that is imperfect but capable of religious renewal.
In the privileging of religious rationality in the concluding chapters of the story, some readers may find a disappointing falloff in aesthetic interest. For after the melodrama of a court trial and a descent into Hell, the efforts to reform synagogue protocols may seem lacking in dramatic moment, or smacking of a tacked-on happy ending. Yet this ending, on closer inspection, turns out to be less than wholly consummate and accomplished. Although the community makes amends and institutes many reforms, the spirit of those corrections are eclipsed over time by the realities of communal life. Synagogues cannot subsist without contributions from congregants, and these are generally made when a man is called to the Torah and given the opportunity to have blessings publicly recited for the well-being of the members o
f his household. In a sardonically funny passage (64), the narrator catalogues the many ways in which this seemingly benign practice can result in propagating waves of distraction and animosity. This report on the equivocal fate of the reforms over time not only reconfirms the narrator’s reliability as a jaundiced observer but also leavens the story’s positive resolution by grounding it in the realities of human nature and communal behavior.
The apotheosis of the shamash and the restoration of his office and honor camouflage a similar uncertainty. Beset by endless questions about the afterlife, most of them maddeningly trivial, the shamash has to decide how much of what he discovered about Gehinnom he is willing to give up to these inquisitive and intrusive townspeople. Although he would much prefer to abide by the ethos of discretion and restraint, he knows that without disclosing secrets he has no chance of stoking the will to repent. He has, after all and for ostensibly higher ends, broken his decades-long silence and told the shocking tale of the descent into the Netherworld. The last glimpse the narrator gives us of the shamash finds him meditating on the mysteries of divine indirection that have brought him and his tale to the center of attention, and this even though he was merely a candle holder to the rabbi in his audacious mission to release an agunah from her bonds.
The shamash is well aware that it is the sensational revelations about the afterlife that have been the engine for the town’s new moral resolve. The townspeople of Buczacz have been riveted by his story because all human beings are fascinated by suffering, sin and punishment, the stranger and more grotesque the better. There is no denying that it is the perverse pleasure people derive from such tales that makes them willing to attend to the moral message. But that kind of pleasure is only a provocative stimulant; it does not provide the inner resources for sustained change. “Such pleasure has been the downfall of many,” the shamash observes and then goes on to posit, “But there are many kinds of pleasure, and happy is the one whose pleasure brings him edification and whose edification is his pleasure” (62). In the shamash’s wistful sigh, we can hear the prayerful wish of many writers who would hope their readers derive as much aesthetic gratification from the nuanced description of the everyday lives of their characters seeking to reform their lives as from the melodramatic events that precipitated the desire to change. This sentiment would not be out of place, for example, in the mouth of George Eliot’s narrator in Middlemarch as she describes the long night of Dorothea Brooke’s moral reckoning with herself and its prosaic aftermath. It is the particular burden Agnon takes on himself in ‘Ir umelo’ah as he seeks to make the life of a holy community interesting and important to us, even if in the process he supplies us with no small stock of the shocking and the deviant.
