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

“My friends and dearly beloved brothers, the Holy One, blessed be He, has shown us a special love and extended to us the kindness of giving us the Torah, which is the document that attests to Israel’s existence and to the right we have merited to live in this world, our right to be here at all. So when we open the Torah and read it in public, we should sit in fear and awe, in dignity and in joy in knowing what God has given us. But what do we do? We interrupt His words and chatter away. We not only are heedless of what God has given us, we are also, heaven forbid, showing contempt for the living God.

“Where there is too much talk, blame will not be lacking. All of us here are afflicted, downtrodden, and hurting, no part of us has not been ravaged, and so I will put an end to words. We who are Israel, the people of God, who trust in the shelter of our Creator, let us gather strength for the honor of the synagogue, which serves us in place of the Holy Temple, and let us pay attention to our prayers, which are our conversation with God, and listen to the words of our Torah, God’s conversation with us, the people of Israel. May the One who in mercy and in favor hears the prayer uttered by every single person of Israel, receive in mercy all our prayers. And may we merit fulfilling all the words of the Torah. Amen. May thus be His will.”

After kissing the Ark curtain, our Master turned toward the congregation and his face showed great sadness. I have heard two reasons for this. One is that he grew sad after every sermon, because, being a great preacher, he was worried that the beauty of his words overshadowed the message he was imparting. The other is that he worried lest he had said something that was not for the sake of Heaven. Years later, after I had remarried, and Zlateh, may she rest in peace, was my wife, I heard from her that after every sermon he delivered, our Master took upon himself a full-day fast of silence.

Since I have mentioned the matter of abstaining from speech, I shall relate something I heard from the leader of the service, Reb Ḥizkiah. Reb Ḥizkiah’s forebears came from Aleppo and before that from Babylonia. Circumstances required them to wander through many lands until one day they came to Poland. Reb Ḥizkiah heard from his elders that there were in the lands where they wandered great sages who took upon themselves a full-day fast of silence not only during the Ten Days of Penitence, as do some Jews here in the Kingdom of Poland, but who were silent almost all the time. No worldly or mundane word came out of their mouths. In their eagerness to assist those sages, people tried to learn their different gestures so they could fathom their wishes. But the desire for things of this world is rooted in the power of speech, and the sages eventually lost all such desire. There is a verse in the book of Proverbs that hints at this, but Reb Ḥizkiah never told it to me. I think the one he had in mind is in chapter 30.

The shamash further related another story in the name of Reb Ḥizkiah: There was a porter in Aleppo named Benjamin who never uttered one unnecessary word even if it involved his work. This Benjamin’s face glowed with a light that was not seen even on the faces of great scholars, and when he died the one who eulogized him quoted the verse in Moses’ final blessing, Of Benjamin he said, Beloved of the Lord, he rests securely beside Him; ever does He protect him, as he rests between His shoulders . The local rabbi heard about this and became angry. In a dream he heard declaimed to him the verse in Jacob’s final blessing Benjamin is a ravenous wolf and he understood that his life was in danger. He rose early, gathered ten men, and went and prostrated himself on the porter’s grave and begged his forgiveness.

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The shamash’s words left Buczacz astounded. Talking generally brings people together and dispels worry, while silence is usually a sign of sorrow and suffering, as we see in the verse Let him sit alone and keep silent . But now each one began to spout his own personal interpretation of what had been said, and they very nearly forgot the incident that touched off the whole story. The story itself they knew, but its import they forgot.

This dispirited the shamash. All those years he had kept his mouth shut, and now by opening it, he gave them an opening to fabricate all kinds of things. He looked up at them sternly, but they paid him no attention and continued talking. Until he interrupted their prattle, saying, “Now that you have heard what you have heard, I do not need to remind you that I did what I did not out of disrespect but out of pity on a fellow Jew, and I took upon myself the sin of embarrassing him in public. So now consider my case and judge me as you will. For my part, I affirm the integrity of my judges and accept whatever verdict they render.”

That brought them back to ponder the original issue before them and that they still faced, namely if they would pray with concentrated intention, the Holy One, blessed be He, would receive their prayers in mercy and favor. Likewise, if they would properly direct their hearts during the reading of the Torah, they could reach the level that Israel attained when the Torah was given at Mt. Sinai. But we, what do we do? The mouths that we were given to utter God’s praise speak trivialities, and the ears through which we were to hear the words of Torah we abandon to banalities.

A series of groans came forth from the assembled. First from despair, then from trepidation, for even when one takes care not to talk during the services or the Torah reading, there are times when one simply cannot control oneself and things that serve purposes neither lofty nor base come out. Or sometimes a quip suggests itself, as for instance when the cantor sings the wrong melody, or the Torah reader uses the wrong cantillation, or mispronounces the vowels. And sometimes an affected piety takes hold of the congregation and they make the Torah reader repeat phrases unnecessarily, and then they all start quibbling over just why he had to go back. The result is a failure to hear not just the word in question but also the words before and after it. Jewish law is clear that if a complete weekly Torah portion is not read in public on its scheduled Sabbath, it must be read on the following Sabbath together with the portion slated for that week, for when we miss out on Torah, we are always given a chance to make up the loss. Therefore we are by law obligated to be careful not to lose out on any Torah reading. Yet because of our many sins not a Sabbath goes by when we do not miss hearing some words of the Torah because of idle chatter and needless conversations.

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After that moment of truth, many woke up to the fact that talking during the services, not to mention during the reading of the Torah, is indeed a serious offense. Just how serious they were only now beginning to comprehend. They took it upon themselves to be careful not to talk not only during the services but even from the moment they entered the synagogue until the time they left. And so they did. A few began to be mindful to say nothing unnecessary even at home and in the marketplace, for nothing is more harmful to a person than needless words. A person says things that are uncalled for and eventually has to deny that he said them, which means he has to lie. Why does he lie? Because he spoke words that were not called for. But our main concern here is Torah and prayer, so let us return to the shamash and his story.

Everyone crowded around the shamash and badgered him with questions, some intelligent, some foolish. For example, if the population of Gehinnom increases, will the distance between one person and another decrease? Or, “Since you visited Gehinnom on the day after Yom Kippur, and the repentance undertaken on that day influences worlds beyond this one, did you notice any purifying effect on the wicked in Gehinnom?” Still another question was, “Did you see any angels among the inhabitants of Gehinnom, since it is written His angels He charges with folly , and we know that there is no favoritism before God, and so if angels go astray, do they go to Gehinnom? And if they do, do they go with their wings on? And are their wings affected by the fire of Gehinnom?” There was no end to their questions, and because they had not yet learned to restrain their tongues, those tongues nattered on with abandon.