S. Agnon - The Parable and Its Lesson - A Novella

I tried to stop thinking about those visions, but I could not. If I had not been distracted by my wife’s worsening condition, I do not know what would have been with me.

One could not have guessed that our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, was about to do something momentous, namely, free a young agunah from the chains of her condition by dint of the fact that we saw her dead husband in Gehinnom. I had often thought to myself, he has to do that or all the arduous efforts he put himself through to make the journey there would have been for naught.

The righteous do what they do and God does what He does. One day just before Ḥanukah, a man from a distant country appeared. He was strangely dressed, his round beard neatly trimmed, and his brownish hair had no sidecurls. He asked, in Hebrew, where the house of the Ḥakham could be found. At first no one realized that he was speaking Hebrew because of his strange accent. When they finally realized it was Hebrew, they did not understand that it was our Master he was looking for. In the lands from which he came a rabbi is called Ḥakham.

The essence of the matter is that this man had with him a bill of divorce for Zlateh that Aaron had sent. I will not go into details because I want to get to the end of the story. So I pass over the fact that these details contradict what Aaron had explicitly told our Master, namely, that he was dead and had died in such and such a way. Still, the details bear repeating. The man who brought the bill of divorce was a great scholar. In addition to his mastery of Torah in all its aspects, he knew Greek and Arabic. If I remember correctly, our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, asked him the meaning of certain terms he had come across in his studies whose meanings were not clear to him. He declared at one point, “If I had the strength, I would compile those words into a lexicon as an aid to students and especially to those who write halakhic opinions.” These last words, “to those who write halakhic opinions,” I never heard directly from our Master but only from reputable people who can be relied upon never to make statements they have not heard.

The long and the short of it is that the three compartments of Gehinnom that I have noted I saw while completely awake and not in a dream. The same goes for the judgments visited upon all who talk during the prayers and the Torah reading. How do we account for the severity of the punishment? From the following parable that I once heard from our Master. The time and place when he told it to us are worth noting.

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On the twentieth of Sivan, about an hour and a half after the morning service, the whole town went to the cemetery — old men and children, young men and women, even nursing mothers with their infants. Some went to visit their relatives’ graves, some to entreat the dead to pray for the living.

That year the local citizenry did not harass us. Even those who had stolen our houses and then occupied them did not try to humiliate us as in former years, when they would stand in front of our houses and mock us with tenderhearted words. “Are you all hungry from the fast? Here, have some pork. Are you thirsty? Here, have some warm blood. Come, dear neighbors, take your fill.” That year the opposite happened. Many of them brought out water for us to wash our hands when we left the cemetery. We washed with that water, and when we got back to town everyone washed again. Some of us suggested that the world was changing for the better; others conjectured that the Gentiles were leaving us alone because they were getting tired of murdering us. Then there were others who opined that we Jews had fallen so much that we were no longer worthy of Esau’s efforts to victimize us.

In years past our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, eulogized the victims of the abominable Khmelnitski, may his name be blotted out, and all others martyred by the Gentiles, in the cemetery. But when the cemetery was completely filled with graves and people were so crammed together all around that a kohen was once jostled into an area forbidden to kohanim, our Master moved the site of his eulogy to the Great Synagogue and delivered it there after the afternoon service. In his last years, our Master stopped going to the cemetery altogether. He is reported to have said, “Why do I need to go to the dead when they are coming toward me?” What he probably meant was that Buczacz had become one big Jewish cemetery; wherever you started to dig you would find Jewish bodies. He had already begun wondering whether a kohen could even live in Buczacz. I myself never heard him actually say that, but I believe those who say that he did, and I have no reason to doubt them. Whenever our Master was uncertain about a halakhic matter, he did not rest until he clarified it.

When we returned from the cemetery we all went to the Great Synagogue for the afternoon service. As on all public fasts, we read from the Torah the passage beginning And Moses implored the Lord , and then the haftarah from the prophets. Our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, was called up to recite the haftarah and he chanted it beautifully. When he finished with the words Thus declares the Lord God who gathers the dispersed of Israel; I will gather still more to those already gathered , I was quite certain that Isaiah’s prophecy was about to be realized, and I had the idea that our Master thought so too.

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When he had concluded the blessings after the haftarah, our Master picked up the prayer book and chanted the prayer “O Merciful God” for the raising up of the soul of his master, the holy Rabbi Yeḥiel Mikhl of the great town of Nemirov, who was slain for the sanctification of the Divine Name. When he reached the stanza

Precious on earth and in regions supernal,

To us mortal men and to God the eternal;

Proud head from his body the keen sword did sever,

From our shame we beseech you, O Lord us deliver

our Master sobbed in grief, placed the prayer book on the table, and his head slumped down on it. After a while he pulled himself up, and his white earlocks shone like polished silver. The interpreters of mystic secrets said that our Master had bathed his head in the waters of grace. His face shone in the crimson glow of the setting sun, but his eyes were closed, and our Master seemed like one who had been on a distant journey. Those same commentators said that he had returned from the far western edge of the world, where the Divine Presence resides, and there he had seen his master, that holy light Rabbi Mikhl of Nemirov, and all the martyrs with him, sitting in the Academy on High, radiant in the Divine Presence. I do not concern myself with hidden matters — for a person like me what my eyes behold is sufficient — but I agree with those who say that every single one of our Master’s curls resembled a silver goblet that has been immersed in pure water. I remember once before Passover they brought him a silver goblet and he looked at it and pronounced it fit to be used as Elijah’s cup at the seder. He instructed me to go and immerse it in a mikvah, which I did, and when I took it out the water made it glisten.

There were whispers that our Master was too weak to complete the prayer and they signaled to Reb Ḥizkiah, the prayer leader, to go up and finish. When our Master saw Reb Ḥizkiah coming up, he again took hold of the prayer book and in a heart-rending voice chanted

Angels unsullied and holy beings pure

Cry out at the bitterness they must endure;

How shameful our lot, we are objects of scorn,

Disgrace and contumely, we are left all forlorn.

Hellas and Araby together contrive

That none born of Israel shall live or survive.