The Parable and Its Lesson: A Novella (25 page)

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 of 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.

INSCRIPTION, CATASTROPHE, RETELLING

On the last page of
Hamashal vehanimshal
we discover that the story we have been reading is the work of a writer living in modern-day Jerusalem, a city filled with its own share of noisy synagogues. This is a disorienting discovery. Although we “know” that we have been reading a text by S. Y. Agnon, a twentieth-century Hebrew writer, the story all along has been told by a narrator close to the events in the seventeenth century, who, in turn, hands over most of the narration to an eyewitness; it is a world in which we have been fully immersed. What is the relationship between the narrator, in whose grip we have been held throughout this remarkable tale, and the writer, who pokes his head up at the very conclusion? Is the former merely a creation or a device of the latter? Our disorientation is compounded when we are informed that the story we have read is not the original story but rather a replacement for the original story that was inscribed in the pinqas of Buczacz and lost in the Holocaust. What is the relationship between the original and its replacement?

Most of what we know about the lost text revolves around the office of the scribe and his role in formulating the account of the shamash’s story that is inscribed in the communal register. The narrator is unstinting in his praise for the scribe’s work. “So the scribe wrote out the whole story in words true and wise, in the way words were used in Buczacz at the time when Buczacz was Buczacz. Some of the words were from the Torah, some from the sages, all of them had an eloquence that gives tongue to knowledge” (66). The scribe takes the events of the shamash’s tale as his raw material and submits them to a process of sublimation whereby they are recast into a more exalted style that draws directly from the language of sacred texts. The calligraphy itself is the result of the scribe’s unrelenting drive to perfection, with “each letter distinct unto itself and each one in its place on the line, like people standing for the silent devotion.” The elders of Buczacz proceed to show the scribe’s handiwork to the wise men of the day throughout Poland, who pronounce its style and grammar above reproach.

We can only imagine what that text was like, yet, having read the story before us, we can have a strong presumption about what it does
not
contain. In the effort to fashion an exemplary tale that foregrounds its religious message, the lost text likely eliminated most of the elements that makes the story fascinating to us as modern readers: the digressions and obiter dicta of the shamash’s narrative through which the personal and collective anxieties of the times find their unofficial expression. Eliminated too would have been many (unsolved!) mysteries large and small: How could Zlateh’s
get
(ritual divorce) have been given by Aaron if his death was confirmed by the visit to Gehinnom? How do the rabbi and shamash emerge from Gehinnom unscathed? Why does the shamash wait fifty-four years to tell his story? How did he come to marry Zlateh? Now, with all due respect to the perfection of the scribe’s text and with all due respect to the destruction of the holy community of Buczacz, few of us would wish to have that text restored if it meant giving up the story we have just read. As the shamash himself wisely said, there is pleasure and there is pleasure. To subsist on the pleasure of edification alone, even combined with exquisite calligraphy, is an option many of us would forgo.

Nonetheless, our knowledge of Buczacz, our understanding of the time when “Buczacz was Buczacz,” is not diminished by our having acquired it through our reading a story written by a modern author. To make the ironic point sharper, it is
only
through this modern act of imaginative writing that we can make a connection to the world of Buczacz. It is through the fountain pen that coyly beckons to the author on the story’s last page that the town comes alive, rather than through the quill and ink pot of the scribe. But if the means of inscription are different, Agnon gamely insists on an essential continuity, if not identity, between these two offices, both of which are represented by the word
sofer
. When the Hebrew language was modernized in the nineteenth century and an equivalent was sought for the new vocation of “writer,” it was decided to stick with
sofer
rather than invent a new term. It would be left to context alone to determine if a particular use of the word indicated the God-fearing artisan who meticulously calligraphed Torah scrolls, tefillin and mezuzot or whether it indicated the modern author of novels, short stories and feuilletons. For Agnon, the confusion fitted perfectly.

1648 AND THE HOLOCAUST

By leaving mention of the Holocaust to the last page of his story, Agnon exercised a canny circumspection. He did not want the trauma of 1648 to be backlit by the later catastrophe, or reduced to being a foreshadowing. This of course does not prevent us (belated readers of the story, saturated with Holocaust consciousness) from doing so. But the experience of reading the story should, I think, urge upon us restraint. If anything, Agnon wants us to work the relationship between the two events in reverse. We should take the horrific knowledge imprinted on us from the events of the twentieth century and use it in the service of understanding a calamity in the distant and unfamiliar seventeenth century.

I pondered the possibility that the Gehinnom of our time would make us forget the Gehinnom that the shamash saw, and the story about it, and all we can learn from that story. (68)

There is something uncanny as well about the span of time between the two events and the acts of memory that follow them. Between 1648 and the Holocaust is an arc of almost exactly three hundred years. The descent into Gehinnom takes place in the immediate aftermath of the massacres—let us say ten years later—and the shamash’s telling of the story fifty-four years later. Agnon wrote
The Parable and Its Lesson
in the mid-1950s—it was serialized in
Haaretz
in 1958—and here we are reading and interpreting it a half century or so later. What is this correspondence meant to tell us? To begin with, it sets up a correspondence between Buczacz in the aftermath of 1648 and Israel, where Agnon is writing the story in the aftermath of the murder of European Jewry. In Buczacz, although the memory of the horrific recent events permeates Jewish life, the community is struggling successfully to reconstitute itself and rehabilitate the institutions of Jewish worship and study. In Israel, although the struggle to make the young state into a secure refuge for the Jewish people is bearing fruit, remembrance of the Holocaust has been pushed to the margins, as has religious culture and practice as well. In this complex analogy, which can be developed in a number of directions, Buczacz emerges as a precursor to Israel, vulnerable to Gentile violence, yes, but autonomous and living under the sway of Torah.
²⁶
Israel, in turn, becomes the successor to Buczacz whose mission it is to perpetuate the full and autonomous living of Jewish life without dependence on the gentiles. This is a dialectic that moves forward and backward in time and transcends the received dichotomy between a decaying and moribund diaspora and a Jewish state born of revolutionary Zionism.