The Parable and Its Lesson: A Novella (24 page)

I would argue that the answer is no in the case of this story, as well as in many others of Agnon’s writings. The argument for rationalizing the digressions and viewing them as performing strategic functions rests on the dual nature of the shamash’s motivations. His explicit motive is to drive home the moralizing message about the evils of competing with divine speech; his implicit and unconscious motive is to give expression to a variety of traumas and anxieties that include the unexplained reasons for God’s having visited so much suffering on His people, the horrific tortures of Gehinnom that are meted out not only to the obviously wicked and the loss of his great mentor and master, together with the decline of true and wise rabbinic authority. These concerns exert pressure on the shamash’s intention to tell “the truth and nothing but the truth” and convey what is immediately relevant to the elders of Buczacz; they create a kind of interference in the dissemination of his message. The pattern is evident on almost every page of the story, but nowhere more than in two large narrative blocks. The heartrending story about Aaron’s apostasy is strictly necessary only to explain how the rabbi and shamash came to discover the compartments of Gehinnom that house the scholars who are being punished for hawking their wares during the reading of the Torah. But since Aaron’s story is saturated with emotional losses and troubling theological speculations connected to 1648, he cannot desist from giving the account ample room even at the same time he avers that it is not the main point and that he must move on. A similar case is the great block of narrative devoted to depicting the ceremonies of the twentieth of Sivan commemorating the massacres. Loving detail is lavished on all of the difficult piyyutim and on the obscure biblical verses parsed by the rabbi, and in general on the particulars of this epic scene of remembrance. Yet all this bears no relevance to the story’s moral teaching about human and divine speech. The two terse parables that do bear on the moral theme seem tacked on at the end of the day’s proceedings as if they were afterthoughts. I shall presently explain.

Thus there emerges from the story a differential hermeneutic that enables the reader to make sense of the shamash’s digressive habits. What might seem errant and meandering and the sign of a failure of discipline is in fact something else entirely. It is the record of an inner turmoil in which the traumas of the past are continually claiming their due alongside the shamash’s efforts to project the more official ethical message. This is a method of reading that provides no small measure of help in negotiating many reaches of the Agnon universe.

MASHAL AS DECOY

In accounting for the meaning of a literary text, we usually take the privileged status of the work’s title as axiomatic. We assume that in fashioning a title an author is choosing an evocative phrase that stands for the work as a whole and pointing us in the direction of its main thematic import. In the story before us, Agnon would seem to be playing against those expectations. By titling his story
The Parable and Its Lesson
[
Hamashal vehanimshal
], Agnon invites us to assume that a parabolic homily will serve as the climax of the story’s drama or as a central node around which the thematic lines of the story will be arrayed. Yet the title does not do its job, and on completion of the story the reader can be forgiven for feeling duped or at least disoriented. The two parables, the one about an anteater and the other about the lord of a palace, are grotesque and meager, and the abrupt way in which they are delivered after so many events of high moment and drama is the essence of anticlimactic. Can’t Agnon do better?

The parable of the anteater is provocative on many levels. As a general principle, the classic rabbinic parable rests on a foundation of familiarity, whether understood in terms of its rhetorical effect or the history of its conventions in homiletic literature. The homilist compares a situation that is simpler and more familiar to his listeners (the
mashal
) to a grave or complex religious message (the
nimshal
). The dynamics of a royal household in which a king banishes his consort or exiles a son who angered him is often compared to the embroiled relations between God and the Jewish people.
²⁴
In Late Antiquity, Jews lived under Roman rule, and although they had little firsthand exposure to the lives of imperial figures, they did understand the absolute authority of the emperor and his regional governors. Over time they became so accustomed to—even fond of—these stereotypical motifs that the parable was looked to as the unit in a long homily that would deliver the most delight.
²⁵
In pointed contrast to this practice, the creature Rabbi Moshe places at the center of his parable is grotesquely unfamiliar several times over. The news of the existence of this creature has been given to him thirdhand by one Reb Zevulun, a spice merchant, who in turn heard about it from caravan operators who ply the desert routes to the Land of Cush. In addition to having its existence rest on hearsay, the creature fits into no known species; it is a variety of monkey that resembles a dog and survives by eating ants. Jarring as well is the violence with which the creature lures its unsuspecting, industrious little victims into its trap and then suddenly foments their deaths. The rabbi’s laconic and hurried presentation of the nimshal, the allegorical solution to the parable, is also strange. There is no reference made to the problem the rabbi announced he was setting out to address—the sin of improper speech—and the dramatic emphasis in the nimshal falls entirely on the tragic inevitability of antlike Jews falling into the infernal trap laid for them.

Then, having missed the mark with his first parable, the rabbi marshals his energies and offers a second parable, which, this time around, succeeds on every level. The parable tells the story of the lord of a castle who takes pity on a poor man and listens to his tale of woes; the lord not only allows him to settle on his estate but provides him with writs that grant him hereditary ownership of his property. But the poor man ends by alienating the lord’s good will when he talks about irrelevant matters and then interrupts the lord as the lord reads from the documents that assure the poor man’s future fortune. For his listeners this time, the figures in the parable are reassuringly familiar and transparent. The theme of the parable is decidedly “on message.” And the rabbi skillfully exploits the resources of the mashal-nimshal structure so as to produce a gasp of recognition when his listeners, having recognized the evident foolishness of the poor man’s conduct, realize that they are he, and that by jabbering in the synagogue they endanger their hold on the gifts God has bestowed on them.

Rabbi Moshe has finally hit the mark. But why did he fail to get it right the first time? The answer becomes evident if we stand back and view the anteater parable in the larger context of the lengthy commemorative ceremonies on the twentieth of Sivan. The parables come at the very end, at a point where the rabbi has announced that he is shifting from the theme of mourning and memorialization to the theme of synagogue worship and its disturbances. The import of the first parable clearly indicates, starkly and dolefully, that despite his intentions the rabbi has not succeeded in making the shift. His deepest thoughts remain entangled in and possessed by the horrible losses of 1648 and the troubling theological questions they raise, questions that have already led to the apostasy and death of his favorite student. How could those gentle and industrious ants, so admired by King Solomon in his proverbs, have known that the sand hill they swarmed upon was in fact a satanic trap? “And yet with all their wisdom, the ants cannot avoid falling into the hands of the monkey” (53). The source of their livelihood suddenly becomes their grave when the creature rouses itself from its camouflaged hiding place and shuts the trap. In its evocation of gruesome violence and disorienting astonishment, the parable is supremely effective, but only if we think of it as serving the sermonic agenda the rabbi has announced he was moving
beyond
.

Again we are confronted with the memories of 1648 welling up unbidden and interfering with the moral message the story seeks to broadcast. The shared wish of the narrator, the shamash and the rabbi to hew to the moral message is a desire they can only imperfectly fulfill. They seek to do so nevertheless because of the portentous theological issues at stake. Rabbi Moshe can skillfully offer the standard consolations about repentance and God’s abiding love for Israel, but he is powerless to mitigate the terrible losses and the terrible memories, and when it comes to sensitive and inquisitive souls such as Aaron, he cannot avert the corrosive spread of theological doubt with its calamitous consequences. This sense of wayward ungovernability is precisely what is absent from the call to refrain from mixing human speech with divine speech in the synagogue. The latter is a question of comportment and discipline; it may pose a challenge to the grandiosity of some scholars, but it is inscribed wholly within the realm of human choice. The mechanisms of moral introspection and fulfillment of religious duty operate on a psychological level very different from traumatic loss and memory. True, the duty to avoid improper speech is not without its frightening aspects. The horrific punishments for transgression, as the shamash has so powerfully witnessed, can seem inexplicably disproportionate to the offense, and the offense itself may be inevitably wired into human behavior. Nevertheless, of the two contending themes of the story, moral challenge is the more optimistic and less demoralizing because it admits of the possibility of corrective human action. When it comes to what God allowed to be done to the Jews in 1648, however, there could be no nostrums.

Why in fact, at the end of this very long fast, does the rabbi introduce a subject that has no ostensible connection to the theme of the day? If he seeks to turn away from imponderable matters of historical suffering and toward governable matters of practical religious conduct, there are undoubtedly any number of areas of spiritual laxity that need shoring up. It is far from clear that in the community of Buczacz at that moment the temptation to speak during the reading of the Torah has the status of a clear and present danger. For when the rabbi begins to turn his attention to the subject he goes so far as to admit that, even though he has heard of the problem, he himself has not seen it with his own eyes (47). The rabbi, to be sure, is in possession of secret knowledge that the townspeople are not privy to. In his journey to Gehinnom, he has seen graphic evidence of the severity of the issue and its persistence over many centuries. It is this long view that may account for why the rabbi, whose last public discourse this is before his death six months later, insists on addressing an area of conduct that is not an acute need of the present moment. Now, Rabbi Moshe is a holy sage who, at least in the shamash’s mind, is endowed with
ruaḥ haqodesh
, prophetic foresight. Is it not then possible that the rabbi is in fact directing his words not to the present faithful of Buczacz, the meager remnants of the massacres, the community of two hundred souls who stand as they listen to rabbi’s long homily because their synagogue does not yet have chairs or benches, but rather to the Buczacz of some fifty-four years later, whose inhabitants have multiplied and whose merchants have grown prosperous enough to forget when the word of God takes precedence over the casuistry of their sons-in-law?

This speculation gives birth to another speculation. The depiction of the rabbi comes to us wholly through the eyes and lips of the shamash, who selects behaviors, incidents and quotations in order to construct the figure of his venerated master. The shamash lives long into the period of Buczacz’s reconstruction and prosperity even as he observes disturbing signs of spiritual complacency in matters concerning which he knows there are dire consequences. Might not the shamash have exercised a preemptive prophetic wisdom on behalf of the rabbi? Might not the parables that concluded the rabbi’s long discourse have been “retrofitted” through the work of the imagination to yield an older wisdom that would have the
éclat
of prophetic authority when they would be most needed?

Whatever their etiology, the parables can in no meaningful sense be construed to constitute the climax of the story, or the distillation of its meaning, or the banner under which the reader first encounters the text. As a title,
The Parable and Its Lesson
[
Hamashal vehanimshal
] is a decoy or a counter that draws our attention away from the unstable and contending binaries of the story.

THE HOLY COMMUNITY OF BUCZACZ

As the shamash concludes his tale and the narrator resumes direct narration of the story, a new character moves to center stage: the holy community of Buczacz. One of the great questions that haunts Agnon’s epic cycle of Buczacz stories as a whole is whether a community can in fact be conceived of as a character and function like one. Can a social organism exercise the will and agency that we associate with the great figures of fiction? Can a town meaningfully function as the protagonist of a formidable cycle of stories?
‘Ir umelo’ah
is the large canvas on which Agnon experiments with this proposition. Although we can reckon with these questions only by taking the whole cycle into account, the final sections of our story give us a glimpse how this collective portraiture might work.

The last four chapters of the story (24–27) present a complex picture of how the community of Buczacz absorbs and processes the extraordinary new information revealed by the shamash’s tale. Throughout these pages, Buczacz is spoken about as a single collective, as when the narrator begins Chapter 24 with the statement “The shamash’s words left Buczacz astounded” (
‘amdah Bitshatsh temihah
, 58); or when verbs in the third person plural are used to convey concerted action on the part of the inhabitants of the town as a whole. Although the distinct behavior of some subgroups is pointed out, the corporate identity of Buczacz is maintained throughout.