The Parable and Its Lesson: A Novella (5 page)

We went out to the courtyard of the synagogue. Our Master stood and checked the direction of the wind. He sniffed the breeze, got his bearings, and said, “Let us go.”

We passed the synagogues and came out behind the Strypa at the Butchers Street. From there we got to Ox Gore Street, so named because an ox once gored a woman and her children there. Today it is called King Street. From there we headed northwest.

As long as we were in the town our Master would take one step and stop, one step and stop. It seemed as if it was hard for him, as if he had almost forgotten how to walk. He never went outside more than twice a year, once to draw the water for making matzot and once on Rosh Hashanah to perform the tashlikh ritual. And if the first day of Shavuot was clear, he would go out to the surrounding hills to commemorate the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. You can still see the rock on which he would sit and rest.

The moon shone and all was still. In the silence every so often we could hear the sound of hammering. People were putting up their sukkot. Once or twice our Master stopped to whisper the words “Hark! My beloved knocks.” I knew that his whole reason for stopping was to take in the sight of all those sukkot. He remembered the terrible years when people were hiding from Khmelnitski’s hordes and no one could observe the commandment of dwelling in the sukkah.

Once we got beyond town the moon disappeared and the road became rugged. I quickly lit the candle and held on to the lantern tightly. It felt as if someone were trying to grab it away from me. At times I thought I heard someone trying to blow out the candle though there was no wind. And it seemed as if someone was whispering in my ear, though I could not hear what it was. I got an earache from those murmurings. My fingers were shaking from holding on to the lantern so tightly.

We walked on in silence. When our Master was quiet, I was too. No one ever dared speak in his presence unless he gave them permission—that is how much respect we had for him. How far we walked I cannot say. Once we left the town I lost all track of time. I became numb with fear. If our Master had not motioned for me to take hold of the hem of his cloak, I would have died of fright. At first I thought he had some amulets with him, but when I heard him whispering, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for Thou art with me,” then I knew that he put his trust in the Eternal One, in Him alone, may He be blessed.

6

Were I to tell of all the difficulties our Master and I had on the way, I would never finish. Were I to recount all the places we passed, I would never get to the site of this story. Our Master extracted me from the domain of space just as he had taken me out of the flow of time. Much later, when I got back from where we had gone, all the places we passed through came back to me. They swirl before me even now, sometimes all jumbled together, sometimes hovering dimly on the ravines of hills and mountains, the sky above them lowering. The space between heaven and earth is as thin as an eggshell. Sometimes the earth rears itself up and presses against the sky, and sometimes the blue dome of the heavens takes on the dark color of the earth below. When I stand here, down below, it feels as though I am there, up above, and when I stand there, up above, it feels like I am here, down below. But enough of this.

The shamash proceeded:

Those who think that a wicked person who dies goes down to Gehinnom do not know that there is a punishment even more severe. It is known as “being hurled from the hollow of the sling.” This sling punishment is not a place, as the treatises have it, but a bloody brawl, so named because of what is done to the sinners. They are so battered by the embroilments of their sins that they try to seek refuge in Gehinnom. But no sooner do they approach its gates than they are flung back to all the places where they sinned and where they thought about sinning. But now they cannot find those places because the sins committed there have disfigured them, and the ones that are still recognizable crumble underfoot, and sharp spikes spring up and impale their soles. Snarling dogs appear and nip at their heels. Some of these sinners are encrusted with soil, and when they are flung the soil is hurled and they remain suspended in midair. Some return to the gates of Gehinnom, while others never arrive there again.

A sinner’s punishment, then, is hard, but even worse is what happens to someone who wants to sin but does so only in thought and not in deed. Someone who has actually sinned is to some extent cleansed by the remorse, suffering and heartbreak he will feel. But one who wanted to sin and never had the chance to do so will be undone by the prideful illusion that he knows how to control himself even as the fires of temptation still burn within him. Worst of all are those contemptible people who feel false pangs of conscience and fancy that they have repented, yet all the while they are consumed by sinful thoughts and their illusory pleasures. No one can accuse me of loving sinners, but when I see them flung around like that, I am quite ready to hire myself out as the doorkeeper of Gehinnom so I can personally let them in.

The shamash proceeded:

There are distinguished people who think that after they die they will go straight to Gan Eden. But when I visited Gehinnom with our Master I saw that it was filled with such people. Let me be more precise about this. Those who fill the ranks of Gehinnom are people who have already attained considerable merit. Those who have not descend to the nethermost parts of Sheol, which is to Gehinnom as Gehinnom is to Gan Eden. I mention no names here out of respect for their families. In this regard I try to emulate a practice our Master instituted after he came back from Gehinnom. Before he went, his study was focused on the Zohar and the writings of the Ari, aside from the regular classes he gave in halakhah. When he came back he devoted himself to studying Mishnah. The Mishnah study was for the purpose of raising up the souls of those who went down to Gehinnom, even though everyone thought they were righteous while they were alive. I try to do likewise. Though I am poor, whenever I get penny from the children and grandchildren of such people, I light a candle in their memory.

7

When the shamash finished these digressions, he resumed his story, first telling about the husband who abandoned his wife, then recounting all the twists and turns of the journey, then relating all the extraordinary things he had seen—everything that led up to and resulted from the fact that he had thrown a scholar from a prominent family out of the beit midrash for talking during the Torah reading.

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.”

And so he did, as follows:

Look how modest our Master was, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing: he had taken me with him to serve as his spotter, yet it was he who recognized the wicked one first. When Aaron realized he had been seen, he ran over to our Master and said, “Rebbe, you are here! I always knew you would come to me. When a scholar goes into exile, his master is exiled with him.” Our Master nodded. “Tractate Makkot folio 10a, a little below the middle of the page!” Our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, always did that. Whenever someone quoted a passage from the Talmud he would think for a moment and then cite the tractate, the folio, the precise side of the folio—a or b—and sometimes even the exact line and whether it was on the top half of the page or the bottom half of the page. The two of them began to converse quietly.

Our Master said to Aaron, “How could you leave your wife, the woman you married according to the laws of Moses and Israel? You transgressed, but what about your wife? What was her sin that you made not the least effort to release her from the shackles of her chained state? How terrible it is that your sin has wiped out your capacity for mercy, which is the hallmark of a Jewish person.”

At this Aaron let out a wail and began crying loudly and bitterly. “They never let me! They never let me to go to her! They buried me in their cemetery, a Gentile cemetery with a cross on my grave! Two sticks, vertical and horizontal. They cut me off from Jews, and I had no way to get to a Jewish home. When I wanted to leave my grave to visit my wife in a dream and tell her that I was dead and that she was free to remarry, the cross would bar my way, and I could not get to her. Rebbe, Gehinnom is terrible, but the torment of knowing that I left my wife to be an agunah is much, much worse.”

I could see tears in our Master’s eyes. I heard him ask, “My son, how did you get here? For what sin did you die?” I heard Aaron’s answers and got the gist of what he said, but I was so terror-stricken that I do not remember his exact words. But I do remember the gist of it. If there is a difference here between what he said and what I report, it is not in the content. He spoke in the first person, the technical term for which is “indirect speech.” I give over his words in the third person. He spoke, he cried, he spoke, he groaned, he sighed, and I was as one who heard it all from afar.

When Aaron saw the troubles that had overtaken Israel, he began to wonder about what God had done to this people and what lay behind this great and terrible anger. He started to probe the matter deeply but found no answers. He immersed himself in volumes of theosophical speculation, the great texts of the Kabbalah, the
Kanah
and the
Peli’ah
. Now a man who is righteous and along in years will read such texts and attain an even deeper sense of awe. But a young man wet behind the ears who starts delving into Kabbalah will bring upon himself only inner turmoil, all the more so when he fills his head with metaphysical investigations. He will not only fail to grow in piety, he will fall into the depths of the qelipot. That is what happened to Aaron. He not only failed to resolve his doubts, he reached the dire conclusion that the God of Israel had disengaged Himself from Israel, Heaven forbid, and had become, Heaven forbid, an enemy.

As the saying goes, “One who seeks to purify himself will get help from above, just as one who seeks to pollute himself will find the door open to him.” Foolishly, Aaron decided to find out what the Gentile scholars say. He took the trouble to learn Latin and picked up in one year what the priests could not learn in seven. He buried his nose in their books and pored over their words, but the ideas he found there brought him no satisfaction. And sure enough, when a person loses his way, Satan comes and leads him on.

Satan showed him the way to a priest. Those priests have books that deal with what is above and what is below and what came before and what will be in the end, and they put forth ridiculous ideas that do nothing to resolve doubts about those matters. They say, for example, that when the different languages originated after the Tower of Babel, God created strange creatures with swordlike hands with which they incised letters in their books. Some of those books were written under the sign of Mars, and their guardian angel was Gabriel. That is totally false. Gabriel loves the Jews and champions their cause. Some of those books were written under the sign of Venus and were protected by the daughters of humans who were corrupted by the superhuman sons of God. That is a bit closer to the truth but needs to be qualified, because one of the maidens separated herself from transgression and ascended to the firmament to become one of the stars of the Pleiades. The priests bind all their books in pigskin, and as they read them the light in their soul darkens until eventually they fall into tehom, the abyss which is hinted at in the verse
and darkness was over the surface of the deep
. And note: the word tehom is made up of the same four Hebrew letters as the word hamavet (Death), and the two are one and the same, which is why tehom is the domain of the qelipot.

Aaron borrowed a few books from the priest and secreted himself away with them as one would with an adulterous woman. He drank of the bitter water, and the bitter water induced its curse within him. A person possesses two souls, an outer one that encompasses him about, and an inner one. When a person sins, God forbid, his inner soul descends below while he is still in this life.

One Friday night Aaron was at home alone. Zlateh had gone off to search for her father’s grave. As you know, her father disappeared just after the murder of his father-in-law Reb Naftali. Both deaths occurred right before the pogroms of 1648–49 and were forgotten in the ensuing carnage.

It so happened that a Jewish butcher from our town made a trip to a certain place to buy cattle. A Gentile there started bragging about his cows, which, he said, were of superior quality because they grazed in a field where Jews were buried. On hearing this, the butcher pretended not to believe him. So the Gentile called his mother, who related how she had worked in the home of Naftali the wine merchant and how his son-in-law worked with him in the business. One day Naftali came to the estate in a wagon loaded with casks of wine. When night fell he slept in the open next to his wagon. Now the lord of the estate had some young noblemen who regularly dined with him. They caught the scent of the wine, went out and opened all the casks, and proceeded to get good and drunk. When they sobered up they became fearful that the lord would punish them, because he had promised the authorities that no harm would come to merchants passing through his estates. Besides, they knew that with a nobleman of his stature no actions were to be taken without his orders. After debating what to do, they killed the wine merchant. They knew it was likely that some nobleman would inform on them. After all, noblemen informed on Jews and were just as likely to inform on them. So they took the body and buried it in a field where there were Jewish graves from long ago. When Zlateh heard about all this she went with the butcher’s wife to find her father’s grave. But she got delayed and could not get back before the Sabbath.

That night Aaron dined with our Master. After dinner he went home and forgot that it is forbidden to sleep in one’s house all alone. Why, you may ask, did our Master not remind him about that? He assumed that Aaron had arranged for a Yeshiva student to come over and stay with him overnight. So Aaron went home, sat down, and read through the weekly Torah portion. When he finished and then reviewed the prophetic reading, he found a verse in it that troubled him. He reviewed the commentaries but found no explanation that satisfied him. He then went to see what the Christian exegetes had to say. From under his bed he took out one of the books the priest had loaned him and started reading but could not make out a single letter. He thought that this was because the candle was set down too low. He did not know that on the holy Sabbath Jewish eyes cannot take in anything written in Gentile script.