The Parable and Its Lesson: A Novella (6 page)

One whose punishment already awaits him will forget that it is Sabbath, as Aaron did that night. He got up and took the candle and placed it on top of one of the Christian books and sat and read. Satan then did his work and Aaron’s eyes did theirs. He went on reading until the candle burned down without his noticing. The candle burned through the book it was sitting on, leaving a round hole in the middle. When Aaron later returned the book, the priest took one look at it and promptly accused him of deliberately setting fire to it. He threatened to have Aaron drawn and quartered and thrown to the dogs, but if he accepted the Christian faith he could be saved. Furthermore, they would spare him all the suffering the Jews were facing, and if he feared retribution from them, the priest would arrange for him to be taken to a place where there were no Jews and no fear of Jews. Aaron chose life over death and thus bartered eternal life for this transient one. In his heart he fantasized escaping to another country, returning to the God of Israel, and getting word to his wife to come and join him. Fearing that the Gentiles would somehow discover his designs, he redoubled his violations of Jewish practice so as to show them that he accepted their god with a perfect faith. But he was torn up inside. He began to afflict his body by fasting, even though he knew that fasting without repentance is of no avail. His body shriveled and the volume of his blood shrank, not only from the fasting but also from the agony he suffered. At length he took sick and died. They buried him in a Gentile cemetery and put a cross on his grave, thereby setting up a permanent barrier between him and the Jews and preventing him from visiting his wife in a dream to inform her that he was dead and she could remarry. When a Jew engages in idolatry it is as if the idolatry itself is empowered to do him harm.

That is the story of Aaron. But I must add here something that I really should have stated earlier. That year, on the Sabbath of Repentance before we went on the journey to Gehinnom, our Master began his discourse with these words: “Preachers who chastise their congregations customarily begin with a verse from the weekly Torah portion and conclude with the verse
And a redeemer shall come to Zion and to those in Jacob who turn from transgression, says the Lord
. I, however, shall begin with that verse.
And a redeemer shall come to Zion
summarizes the foundation of our faith and the basis of repentance, for when we see year after year the same tribulations, and we continue to wait for the End of Days, and we are not destroyed by the Gentiles—all that gives us the strength and the courage to turn in complete repentance.” That is what I mean when I say that our Master possessed the power of prophesy. Because even before he spoke with Aaron in Gehinnom, he already knew that his sin consisted in his having questioned the very idea of an End of Days.

That is the story of Aaron, husband of Zlateh, and it is through his fate that I came to see how severe is the punishment for all who talk during the service and the Torah reading.

If this introduction is longer than the story, more severe still is the story itself. I wish I were not telling it, and now that I am telling it, I hope it will not be taken as just a story but rather that you will learn from it how very careful we must be not to talk in the synagogue during the prayers and especially during the reading of the Torah.

8

Aaron’s story diverted everyone’s attention from the shamash’s case, and it was the shamash himself who brought them back to it. “If you wish to hear it,” he said, “I will now tell it. But I must add a word or two before I begin.”

The shamash sat upright and a great sadness emanated from him. It created a wall between him and the assembled. If he had not begun speaking, no one would have reminded him that they wanted to hear the story he was about to relate.

This is what he said:

I know that I have violated the teachings of our Sages according to which one who embarrasses another person in public forfeits his share in the world to come. Not only have I violated that teaching, I have impugned the honor of a scholar of good family and the son-in-law of a benefactor of the community, whose generosity underwrites half the expenses of our synagogue; moreover, I have shamed him not for mindless chatter but for talking Torah, and doing that not in a Gentile marketplace but in a holy place in front of the Torah scroll, and on the holy Sabbath, when the Holy One spreads the tent of peace over Israel. I have therefore every right to regret what I did. But not only do I have no regret, I am certain that when I die, a band of beneficent angels will come out to welcome me saying, Come, let us keep company with someone who selflessly relinquished his share in the world to come in order to save another person from a harsh sentence and severe punishment. I could cite sources for my position in our holy books, but there are present here learned men who have the whole Torah at their fingertips. So I will simply tell you what my eyes saw. Solomon the wise wrote that
What the eyes see is better than the flights of desire
. He means to say that what a person sees with his own eyes is better than where his fancy takes him. His fancy roams over mountain tops, descends into valleys, creeps into caves, and insists that the earth is flat.

From what you have heard about Aaron so far, you know that our Master, may the memory of the righteous ever be for a blessing, took me to that place. I cannot tell you all that I saw there. Nor do I want to tell you all that I saw there. But I can speak of some of the things these ancient eyes saw when they were younger.

I pass over all the old man’s moanings and groanings and “oy vays” and get to the main events. At some points I will cite him word for word, at others I will paraphrase, and at some points I will summarize. But I must note that even though the shamash was rather long-winded about the events surrounding Aaron, which was after all only a prologue, when it came to the events themselves he was concise. I have found that it is easier to relate what you have heard from others than to relate what your own eyes have seen. It was easier for the old man to tell what he heard from Aaron than to recount what he himself had seen. In any case, being succinct will not diminish the story.

I will mark off his words from mine by prefacing them with the phrase “the shamash said,” except now, where it will be obvious that he is speaking.

9

In Gehinnom there is a compartment they call Tsalmavet, Shadow of Death. It is larger than Earth in size, and its dimensions are perfectly symmetrical. Nothing in the world is as paradoxical as that compartment. It is circular in shape but appears square, square in shape but appears circular. The eyes perceive it one way, the mind another. These differences in perspective induce a certain melancholy.

In that compartment it is neither hot nor cold nor in-between. No wind blows there, only an occasional vapid gust encased in a cool dry silent breeze. A nameless long-legged angel oversees the compartment, but this angel does absolutely nothing. It stands there with its mouth agape, like a person utterly bored and about to yawn.

The compartment is populated by twice the number of people who went out of Egypt, all of them wrapped in silver-crowned talitot. The tefillin on their heads are as big as those worn by chief rabbis and heads of yeshivot. The space between one person and another is equivalent to the distance of a Sabbath boundary. All of them are brilliant intellects with a profound knowledge of Talmud and its earlier and later authorities. Each one sits by himself, in talit and tefillin, steeped in Torah. When he seeks to disseminate his wisdom, he looks this way and that but sees no one. The years of poring over tomes of text have dimmed his eyes and he is unable to notice that there are thousands upon thousands of Torah scholars just like him there. Boastfully he thinks, “I’m all alone in the world; all wisdom dies with me.” He gets up from his place, looks around and sees a multitude of people as tiny as sesame seeds. He says to himself, “The tefillin on their heads tell me that they are human beings, so I will go over to them and say a pilpul.” But then he becomes drowsy and falls asleep, like a hermaphrodite who sleeps without pleasure or desire or satisfaction or sweet dreams, until he awakens and doesn’t know if he is really awake or has simply turned over on his side. He notices a humanlike form striding by and gets up and walks toward it. When the two draw near, one of them says, “I have developed a brand new pilpul no one has ever thought of before.” The other replies, “You are taking the words right out of my mouth. The pilpul that I have devised every bone in your body would strain to hear. But since you desire to speak, I defer to you. And now, since I have deferred to you, it would be right for you too to defer your desire to speak to mine. Moreover, since I deferred to you before you deferred to me, it follows that I should rightfully have primacy. Therefore, I should speak first.” As soon as he begins to speak his mouth grows as wide as a church courtyard. His colleague says, “A pilpul like that just goes right past me.” At which point his ears grow bigger and bigger until they cover his whole body. The two of them stand there gaping at each other, confounded, frightened, ready to scream. But no scream is heard from either one. The first one’s scream dies in his throat, and the other’s is muffled by his ears. At that moment the angel sways from side to side, the only time it ever moves. It sits and gazes at the two of them as if they were one, looking not with its eyes but with its mouth. If the angel had not then wanted to yawn, that look would have killed them.

10

I place the different punishments described here in different chapters so as to separate them, even though the shamash recounted them without interruption, except when he gave forth with such anguished expressions as “oy vay!” and various invocations of God and His mercies.

Just as he went on uninterruptedly, so did his listeners never cease being amazed at what they were hearing. They knew full well that a righteous person goes to Gan Eden and a wicked person to Gehinnom and that there are certain righteous ones who enter Gan Eden while still alive. But in all their days they had never heard of anyone who went into Gehinnom alive and came out unscathed—until they heard from that old gentleman that he himself saw Gehinnom in his lifetime and walked around inside it as one walks around in his home, and even the hems of his clothing were not singed. 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.

Many things are unfathomable. I can shed no light on them and therefore return to the main thread of this tale, continuing again with the phrase “the shamash went on.”

11

The shamash went on:

Beneath that compartment of Gehinnom is another one known as Gag ‘al Gag, Roof Upon Roof. It is several times bigger than the first one and wider. It is so wide, in fact, that the walls, the ceiling, and the floor are invisible to the naked eye. It is as if the whole compartment were suspended over the void. Of course the earth too is suspended over the void, but the earth, as the Bible says, He has given to mankind, which means that the earth was given by God to mankind so it could flourish over the void. But in the nothingness over which this place hangs nothing can flourish. The people sitting here all have foreheads that are either wide or high or wrinkled. Their eyes are small, squeezed by all the intellectual activity into the space between the forehead and the nose. Some of them stroke their beards, some of them pluck out hair after hair and flick them into the air without even knowing it. This part of Gehinnom is different from the first; there the people sit as far from each other as the distance of a Sabbath boundary, whereas here they sit right next to each other, cramped together, each one sharing his ḥidush with the other, exactly as they did in the land of the living. The name of the angel appointed over them is Otem. This is not Gabriel, who covers over Israel’s sins with a veil, but an evil angel who once was good but was debased by all the silly ḥidushim he heard. All this I learned from what our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, told me.

The people here do exactly what they did when they were alive, namely, they offer ḥidushim anywhere and anytime. The difference is that in this world a person who recognizes that he is mistaken will, if he so chooses, admit his error, or if he is so inclined will deny it completely. There every word a person uttered in this world is permanently engraved in public view with his signature attached, and the dead cannot contradict what the living say.

When a person studies a page of Talmud and parses the plain sense of the text, the more his reading approximates what the words say, the less will he seek out colleagues to praise him for it. But when a person thinks up a ḥidush on that text, the more far-fetched it is, the more eager he is to proclaim it. He leans over to his colleague to propose it to him and his lips fly apart. His tongue goes in search of his lips and becomes impaled on the sharp edges of his teeth, whereupon it starts to swell, growing thicker and thicker. I am an old man and do not like exaggerations, but when I say that that tongue becomes as massive as a church bell I would not be too far from the truth. My comparison to a church bell is apt, for just as a church bell peals without knowing why, so the tongue wags without knowing why it was put into motion. His colleague sees all this and starts to yell, but no sound comes forth. I am an old man and have seen much trouble and travail, but misery like that I have never seen.

I buried my face in our Master’s cloak so that I would not have to look at all that suffering. I covered my eyes but the torments were still visible. I stood there wondering: what offense brought on such a punishment?