The Parable and Its Lesson: A Novella (14 page)

51
knows its own bitterness
   Proverbs 14:10.

51
the reward of humility is grace
   An adaptation of Proverbs 22:4.

51
to the children of Israel
   Leviticus 23:44.

52
and your father’s house
   Psalm 45:11.

52
never laid eyes on
   Despite the centrality of Torah study, full sets of the Babylonian Talmud were not then necessarily widely available because of the cost. It is, therefore, not unimaginable for someone not to have seen ‘Eruvin, which is not among the more commonly learned talmudic tractates. The tractate deals with the laws of
‘eruv
, the halakhic extension of private property into the public domain so as to permit one to carry objects within it on the Sabbath, which would otherwise be forbidden.

52
could view the minor tractates
   Tractates of rabbinic teachings on subjects not treated in the Mishnah. They are usually included at the back of some volumes in printed editions of the Babylonian Talmud.

52
weekly Torah portion was Yitro
   Exodus 18–20. The Decalogue is at 20:1–14.

52
the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy
   Deuteronomy 5:6–18, the second iteration of the Decalogue in the Pentateuch.

53
with their children forever
   Deuteronomy 5:26.

54
how feeble our strength
   Jeremiah 51:30.

54
study its ways and learn
   Proverbs 30:25 and 6:6.

54
who dwell in your House
   Psalm 84:2–5.

54
will die with my nest
   Job 29:18.

54
all the days of my life
   Psalm 23:6.

54
would only cite Rabbi Ibn Ezra
   Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089–1164), Spanish grammarian and Bible commentator.

54
the Radak
   Rabbi David Kimḥi (1160–1235), Provençal grammarian and Bible commentator.

55
who have been banished
   Psalm 113:3 and 2 Samuel 14:14.

55
passing shadow
   Psalm 144:4.

56
and trample My courts
   Isaiah 1:12.

56
who call upon him in truth
   Psalm 145:18.

57
blame will not be lacking
   An adaptation of Proverbs 10:19
Where there is much talk, there is no lack of transgression
.

57
afflicted, downtrodden, and hurting
   Talmudic tractate Yevamot 47a.

57
will put an end to words
   Job 18:1.

57
full-day fast of silence
   The practice of a “fast of speech,”
Ta’anit dibbur
, arose only in early modern times as a penance and as a means to achieve greater spiritual elevation. It is not ordained biblically or rabbinically. The time for which it was undertaken varied, and during it the practitioner either kept silent or spoke only about Torah matters.

58
between His shoulders
   Deuteronomy 33:12.

58
Benjamin is a ravenous wolf
   Genesis 49:27.

58–59
sit alone and keep silent
   Lamentations 3:28.

60
to make up the loss
   Moses Isserles (Rama), citing ’Or Zaru‘a in
Shulḥan Arukh
,
’Or hahayyim
135:2.

60
moment of truth
   After 2 Chronicles 32:1.

60
charges with folly
   Job 4:18.

61
utters in Perek Shira Perek Shira
   (Passages of Praise) is a poemlike collection of biblical and talmudic verses of praise to God placed in the figurative mouths of the heavenly bodies; the elements of the natural world; the various members of the vegetable, animal, bird, and insect kingdoms; and, as indicated here, Gehinnom. The text appears in authoritative editions of the prayerbook but is not part of the liturgy. Author and date are unknown, but the work may go back to talmudic times.

61
from one end of the world to the other Otzar hamidrashim
,
Gan ‘Eden/Gehinnom
no. 32.

61
rest on that day Otzar hamidrashim
,
‘Aseret hadibrot
no. 10.

61
judged for twelve months
   Mishnah ‘Eduyot 2.10.

61
does not descend again
   Babylonian Talmud tractate Shabbat 153a.

61
fiery glow of Gehinnom
   Talmudic tractate Ḥagigah 27a.

62
ascribe truth to Jacob
   Micah 7:20.

63
from the commandment to study Torah
   Agnon cites this teaching in his
Sefer sippur vesofer
(p. 105, 108 in new ed.), citing Nathan ben Isaac Jacob Bonn’s
Shikḥehat leket
(Amsterdam, 1700), who attributes it to the
Sodei razaya
of Eliezer of Worms (ca. 1176–1238, author of the Rokeah).

64
blessings on behalf of each individual
   At the conclusion of each section of the Torah reading (aliyah), the gabbai recites a blessing on behalf of the person called to the Torah for that section, as well as for his wife, family, and any other individuals he chooses to name. The blessing includes the sum of money the person stipulates to the gabbai as his pledge to the synagogue for the honor of having been called to the Torah reading.

65
gematria calculation
   Gematria involves adding up the numerical value of each letter of the Hebrew alphabet (alef = 1, bet = 2, etc.). Eighteen is the numerical value of the two letters in the word
ḥai
, the Hebrew word for life; twenty-six is the numerical value of the four letters of the Tetragrammaton.

65
beats her laundry to get the water out
   The term is probably related to
pralnia
, the Polish word for laundry.

65
as I have told elsewhere
   See
‘Ir umelo’ah
, pp. 1ff. and 15.

65
Rabbi Meshullam ben Kalonymus
   Rabbi Gershom (ca. 960–1028) and Rabbi Shimon (ca. 925–1010) were important rabbinical authorities in Mainz, a major Jewish community in the medieval Rhineland (Ashkenaz). Rabbi Meshullam ben Kalonymus (Italy, mid-tenth century) was a Talmudist and liturgical poet who corresponded with Gershom and Shimon on halakhic and scientific matters.

66
our God stands firm forever
   Isaiah 40:8.

66
gives tongue to knowledge
   Proverbs 16:21.

66
to the local maskilim
   The
maskilim
(lit. enlightened ones, sing.
maskil
) referred to here are the literati in the Jewish community of that time who had some notion of secular ideas and books beyond classical Jewish sources. They antedate and anticipate their namesakes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who formally espoused the values of the Enlightenment (
Haskalah
in Hebrew). See above, note to page 8 (
Aron began
. . .).

66
and knowing Me
   Jeremiah 9:23.

66
who seeks after God
   Psalms 14:2 and 53:3.

68
my Rock and my Redeemer
   Psalm 19:15.

ESSAY ON
THE PARABLE AND ITS LESSON

[
HAMASHAL VEHANIMSHAL
]

ALAN MINTZ

THE WORK OF MEMORY

Within the panoply of modern Jewish writing, Shmuel Yosef Agnon remains today an exceptional presence. At the center of the grand narrative of Jewish literature in our age is the movement outward from the world of the fathers. Whether the goal is full participation in American culture or the building of a new Jewish society in Palestine, the movement outward presupposes a break with the metaphysics of traditional Jewish belief and practice. That break can be figured as a clear-eyed ideological rejection or as a vertiginous loss of moorings, or as a sloughing off of a used-up identity. Whatever the case, the claims of Jewish law and the textual and theological world on which it is founded are stilled and suspended. The possibility of return continues to exist, and from time to time there appears a Rosenzweig who, out of the depths of acculturation, discovers the mystique of a Judaism he never knew. In relation to all these varied trajectories, Agnon’s exceptionality becomes clearer. Born into the world of tradition, Agnon found a way to participate in high European modernism without abandoning the rich textual world of Jewish faith. He even used this traditional world as a vehicle for realizing the ends of modernism at the same time as he used modernism as an instrument for illuminating fissures within the classical edifice of Judaism. Agnon thus performed the paradox of being a “revolutionary traditionalist,” in the formulation of Gershon Shaked.
¹
Comprehending this singular accomplishment has become one of the great challenges of modern Jewish literary studies.

During the last fifteen years of his life (he died in 1970), Agnon became increasingly preoccupied with writing an epic cycle of stories about Buczacz, the town in Galicia in which he was raised and that he left at the age of nineteen to settle in Palestine. The stories were gathered and edited by his daughter Emunah Yaron, according to her father’s guidelines, in 1973 in a volume called
‘Ir umelo’ah
,
A City in Its Fullness
.
²
It is from this story cycle that
The Parable and Its Lesson
is drawn. The stories of
‘Ir umelo’ah
give strong evidence for the existence of a late style in Agnon. I am using late style (
spätstil
) in the sense in which Theodor Adorno used the term to describe the late sonatas of Beethoven as works that constitute a “moment when the artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it.”
³
Edward Said adopts Adorno’s notion and uses it less as a precise term than as an evocative concept for illuminating the regressive freedom from constraints that writers and composers might allow themselves in the last stages of their careers. In a similarly evocative and nontechnical sense, the idea of late style helps us attend to the departures enacted in Agnon’s cycle of Buczacz stories. In Agnon’s case, the late breakthrough manifests itself as an act of renunciation. One of Agnon’s greatest achievements in the major phase of his career was an ironic self-dramatizing mode of narration that Arnold Band called the “dramatized ego.”
⁴
The narrator of these important stories—as well as of the novel
Oreaḥ natah lalun
[A Guest for the Night]—is a figure very much like Agnon himself: a grandiose but weak-willed middle-aged writer with worldly interests as well as a loyalty to religious observance and Jewish learning, a kind of Jewish version of the
homme moyen sensuel
. Agnon used this persona to great advantage; but when it came to chronicling the long history of Buczacz he needed a narrative stance that, at least on the face of things, was objective, reliable and impersonal. And so he undertook the construction of the narrator of
‘Ir umelo’ah
, who is a fascinating and formidable and new figure, but one whose creation meant putting away and giving up the authorial strategies relied on for so long.

Now, one might have expected a thunderous reception for a major book published three years after the death of a major author, especially if the author was the only Hebrew writer to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, as Agnon was in 1966, together with Nelly Sachs. Yet the response in Israel’s vibrant literary community was decidedly scant and muted; the book was hardly noticed, and those who wrote about it tended to be older critics who were already possessed of a long-term devotion to Agnon’s work. There are several factors that might account for this surprising failure to connect to an audience. To begin with, the stories in
‘Ir umelo’ah
, all of which have to do with the lives of Galician Jews in the pre-modern period, describe a world that must have seemed remote, antiquated and irrelevant in the decades of intense state building after the War of Independence. Within the Zionist consensus about the untenable nature of Jewish life in exile, there had always been room for literary depictions that exposed the inner moral taint and political vulnerability of diaspora life. Even though the Buczacz stories convey no small measure of those failings, they nevertheless present a picture of a vital semi-autonomous and centuries-old religious communal culture; and this image could not have comported well with the attitudes and judgments of David Ben-Gurion’s statism and the society it shaped. During these years Ben-Gurion was busy building a state, while Agnon was building a city.