The Parable and Its Lesson: A Novella (17 page)

In
Hamashal vehanimshal
the tension is between an explicit moralizing theme regarding forbidden speech and a subversive, implicit theme that registers the traumatic effects of both the 1648 massacres and the horrors of Gehinnom. The first theme focuses on the temptation to converse during worship and the reading of the Torah in the synagogue, which are shown to be grave violations with horrific consequences beyond the normal imagining of the townspeople of Buczacz. Even beyond this dramatic but restricted sense, the theme of proper and improper speech resonates at every level of the story: in the communication between the rabbi and the shamash, in the need of scholars to hawk their insights, in the circulation of opinion within the town, in the parabolic form of the great memorial homily the rabbi delivers and, most of all, in the unremitting anxieties of both narrators about exerting their control over their own discourses. On all these levels, the narrators propound an ethics of self-restraint that views all unnecessary speech as a source of bedevilment. Even the most learned and pious are tempted to muffle God’s speech—as recorded in the Torah—by the proliferation of their own.

Yet behind and beneath this moralizing message lie darker forces that harbor much deconstructive potential and shape the way the story is told at every turn. The sights the shamash saw as a young man on his visit to the Netherworld were so profoundly disturbing that it has taken him more than half a century to be able to tell the story, even if it has meant depriving the community all the while of the lesson it teaches. Even once the point has been taken, there remains a festering dread about the unknowableness of actions and their potentially horrendous consequences. That some of the greatest sages of history are suffering the tortures of hell because of what seemed to be merely an excess of zeal is a destabilizing discovery that produces troubling questions about the proportionality of human conduct and divine punishment. An even more grievous theological wound is opened up by the Khmelnitski massacres of 1648, which continue to emit waves of destructive energy long after the Jews of Buczacz have reestablished communal life and rabbinic authority. There is barely a page of the story on which these losses are not felt. The very spring for the audacious journey to Hell concerns the rabbi’s brilliant student Aaron, who suffers for eternity there because he could not understand how God could let His people be viciously slaughtered.

It is the pressure exerted by the trauma narrative on the narrators’ moralizing enterprise that accounts for, I would argue, much of what is strange, discontinuous and unresolved in the story. The digressions remain digressions, but the motives for them become clearer when we understand them as expressions of the narrators’ anxieties. The narrators’ reliability is undermined by forces they cannot govern. Written on these two levels,
Hamashal vehanimshal
is a story riven by unquiet tensions whose complexity is ultimately in the firm executive control of its author.

A SCANDAL IN BUCZACZ

The eyes through which we see all this are those of the shamash. Unlike the gabbai, a householder who volunteers to distribute roles in the service (“honors”) and collect payment for them, the shamash is a wage earner employed by the community. It is therefore precisely because of the office’s subservient status that it is an unusual move to place one of its occupants at center stage. After introducing the shamash and describing the story’s precipitating incident, the busy and authoritative narrator of
‘Ir umelo’ah
steps aside and hands over the narrative to the voice of the shamash and, with a few exceptions, does not repossess the telling of the story until its final section. This is a renunciation of the narrator’s executive management. Far from being a marionette, the shamash emerges as his own man: an idiosyncratic mixture of curmudgeonly stubbornness, fiercely reverential loyalty and surprising religious learning. He has a name and a family story, and a fixed location in history, unlike the narrator, who must remain impersonal and anonymous and floating in time. Furthermore, the shamash possesses a special kind of authority. Although the narrator of
‘Ir umelo’ah
brandishes the chronicler’s near-omniscient overview of the affairs of Buczacz, it was not he who accompanies Rabbi Moshe on this tour of the Netherworld. There is no substitute for hearing about those searing sights directly from the eyewitness.

The handover of the narrative from the narrator to the shamash takes place as a result of the events described in Chapter 1. The unusual occurrence that warrants description is a disciplinary hearing in which a venerable shamash is being accused of the sin of public embarrassment. The violation takes place during Sabbath morning prayers when the shamash notices a young man, the son-in-law of one of the town’s wealthiest citizens, speaking to his neighbor during the reading of the Torah; failing repeatedly to get the young man’s attention by various eye signals and hand gestures, the shamash descends the bimah, takes the young man by the elbow and escorts him out of the synagogue. All Buczacz is in an uproar over this unprecedented act of public shaming, and the next day the shamash is brought up on charges.

The inherent sensationalism of this precipitating incident is deliberately squandered by the narrator by interrupting it in the middle with a sizable digression concerning the changing customs surrounding the Torah reading in Buczacz. Once upon a time in Buczacz—the time in which the shamash’s story is set—the blessing recited by the seven men called to the Torah on Sabbath mornings was a fleeting pause in the public recitation of God’s word. By increments over time, this pause was expanded and filled by verbiage of various kinds that distracted the congregation from the reading and even promoted envy and conflict. The narrator is constrained to dissipate the drama and insert the digression because he knows that without it his readers will have little chance of properly construing the shamash’s action. His readers—as opposed to the shamash’s listeners—live in modern times in which the Torah reading as a circus of honors and announcements has become common practice. The narrator therefore has to work to bridge the distance between reality as we know it and the very different norm that was observed by the holy community of Buczacz at an earlier time in its history. Yet in no sense is this merely an ethnographic footnote. For both the narrator and the shamash, in their respective narrations, success is wholly measured by the ability to restore the credibility of the earlier, purer standard and make people believe that, rather than being a matter of religious nicety, competing with God’s word during the recitation of His Torah is, especially for the learned elite, literally a matter of life and death.

The court scene introduces some of the story’s key themes: the prerogatives of class, the above-the-law status of scholars, the conflict between eyewitness knowledge and received truths. The narrator is again on hand to explain to us what is so truly provocative in the shamash’s behavior as to warrant the formation of an ad hoc beit din and the slapping of an aged community functionary with a fine for enforcing synagogue decorum. Ironically, the reasons turn out to have little to do with the legal principles that ostensibly serve as the basis for the court’s deliberations. Public shaming, to be sure, is a matter to which legal culpability attaches in Jewish law. But the narrator does not present it as such; rather, he frames it in terms of a scandalous transgression of social norms. The heart of the matter is the public refusal of a poor person to acknowledge the honor due to two classes, the wealthy and the learned. The strength of the community is sustained by the intertwining of these two classes; distinguished young scholars are taken as husbands for the daughters of successful merchants in a distinctly Jewish version of the process of natural selection. The young man the shamash escorts out of the synagogue is just such a case. The seriousness of
his
infraction is presumably mitigated by two facts. He is not a native of Buczacz, having been recently brought there by marriage, and therefore does not appreciate the rigorousness with which the town treats the ban on speaking during the Torah reading. Moreover, he was uttering words of Torah relevant to the moment at hand—a novel insight into the weekly portion—rather than idle chatter. He is an errant young prince of the law who has been brutally importuned by an impoverished synagogue functionary.

In the face of the amassed authority of the community and its rabbinic judges, this lowly sexton asserts the authority not of what he has learned but of what he has
seen
. When he declares that the humiliation he has visited upon the young scholar is nothing compared to the punishments in the World to Come, he makes his claim based on what his eyes have witnessed. The judge picks up on the peculiarity of this assertion, and, although he stipulates the gravity of the infraction, he pushes the shamash to specify how it is that he has seen things that others, endowed with the same faculty of sight, have not. “The books may offer their condemnations,” the shamash insists enigmatically, “but it is the eyes that see what it is to suffer God’s wrath” (4). Beneath this verbal sparring lies a profound epistemological provocation. The shamash is asserting that, when it comes to wisdom and truth, what he has seen with his own eyes trumps the official determinations arrived at through textual interpretation and halakhic decision making. This is an assertion that will be both amplified and tested in the course of the story. For example, by finding Aaron in Gehinnom, Rabbi Moshe and the shamash succeed in the object of the journey: they confirm the fact of his death. This is a tragic, heart-rending meeting, yet the knowledge it yields regarding the husband’s death has no halakhic standing whatever, despite all the rabbi’s efforts to effect the girl’s release from the bonds of being an agunah. The evidence of the eyes, whether it is traumatic as in the case of the shocking scenes of suffering or ennobling as in the case of the shamash’s veneration of his master, possesses an urgent truthfulness that often eludes the institutionalized orders of meaning and registers fully only in what the reader is privileged to be shown.

Finally, the encounter between the shamash and his examiners adumbrates the theme of silence and its voluntary and involuntary violations. The course of the questioning is worth looking at with some care. The shamash enters the interview with a seemingly unshakable intention of accepting his punishment without explaining himself. But this resolve is soon assailed by unbidden forces within him. “He raised his eyes and shut them like someone who sees something and is terrified by it,” the narrator tells us; and he then goes on to explain that just those terrifying sights are the ones that will be related in the tale to follow, and it is those terrors that have now “returned, reawakened and begun to reappear before him” (5). The judge himself sees “all manner of horror etched on his face,” and urges the shamash to speak. The shamash rebuffs him and, with a mixture of dignity and desperation, pronounces that he has struggled his whole life to prevent himself from engaging in unnecessary speech, and on this occasion too he will remain true to that principle, whatever the costs. Yet all it takes is for the judge to say perceptively, “I think you
wished
to say something,” for the shamash to do an about-face and begin speaking.

Consternation took hold of the shamash. He raised his eyes to those who sat in judgment of him and began to speak: “It is not because I seek acquittal from this earthly court or because I want to curry favor with the esteemed members of the congregation that I permit my tongue to reveal a profound mystery. I speak so that you may all come to know the true punishment for something that everyone takes much too lightly.”

It is evident to the reader that the explicit rationalization given by the shamash for his capitulation—public warning and education—is a fig leaf covering an ungovernable storm of emotion. The truth is that the incident in the synagogue has unhinged his hard-won and long-enduring composure by stirring up a traumatic experience repressed for many decades. The violation of principle is all the more momentous because the matters to be revealed are not ordinary scandals but nothing less than secrets about the fundamental questions of the universe.

Thus we are introduced to a central paradox of the story. On the one hand, the narrators of the story waste no chance to condemn forbidden or unnecessary speech and to adduce evidence of the mortifying consequences of laxity in these matters. Their admonition begins within the restricted purview of the synagogue but extends outward to the marketplace and to the domestic space of family life. It goes so far as to take on the features of an overarching ethical-ontological principle that identifies God’s words as the only true speech and human words as a kind of fallen or corrupted speech that, though necessary, should be kept to a minimum. Talking during the Torah reading, which at first presents itself as merely an instance of inconsiderate behavior, thus looms large as the site of a cosmic, catastrophic violation: the aggression of human speech upon the divine word.

On the other hand, there is the evidence of the story itself. This long and unwieldy tale, told by the shamash and staged by the narrator, constitutes in many respects an enormous and flagrant transgression against the very ideal of verbal abstinence that they themselves have so vehemently been promulgating. This wayward prolixity is far from obligatory. To get the business done of describing the horrible punishments of the sinning scholars and thus acquit himself of delivering his monitory message, the shamash could have vastly reduced the amplitude of his account. A principle of utility would have eliminated not only the numerous digressions but also a great swath of the story devoted to describing the conduct of his master, Rabbi Moshe. Yet the reader knows that these seemingly unnecessary accretions and dilations are in fact true expressions of what is really on the shamash’s mind: the trauma induced by what he saw so many years ago, and the loss of his connection to the great and holy man he served so devotedly.