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

There were other questions, too: Where do the praises that Gehinnom utters in Perek Shira belong? Some prayer books place them after the ones uttered by all the different creatures, while our prayer books put them with the verses sung by heaven, earth, and the Garden of Eden. Furthermore, if the din of Gehinnom reverberates from one end of the world to the other, which is louder, the praises Gehinnom sings or that din? And what about Sabbath in Gehinnom? We know that the wicked there rest on that day, but does Gehinnom itself fall silent for the day, and do the praises it sings stop? And when it utters its praises, what pronunciation does Gehinnom use? Are certain vowels pronounced the way those newly arrived there pronounce them, as the mystical tradition has it? Others wondered, If wicked people in Gehinnom are judged for twelve months, and we have learned that after twelve months the body ceases to exist and the soul rises up into the next world and does not descend again, then are the wicked still standing there as they were, with their clothes and prayer shawls on? Are scholars impervious to the fiery glow of Gehinnom? There was no end to their questions and theories, for they had not yet learned to restrain their tongues, and so they talked on and on.

The shamash did not answer all the questions put to him, nor did he tell all that he had seen. Not everything needs to be told, and what is told does not always need be spelled out in detail, unless doing so serves some purpose such as bringing people to repentance. The punishment for a sin of this kind must be spelled out, but not necessarily for others. The sages have already told us what is good and what God requires of us, and we, the people of Israel, do try to fulfill what our Creator desires. But in every generation something arises that weakens our ability to perform the commandments, especially a commandment that is necessary for that particular generation. Had God not opened our eyes to this, we would never have survived. Sometimes He makes it known through an event, and sometimes He only gives us a hint; sometimes it is obvious and sometimes we have to figure it out. The illustrious and excellent Rabbi Moshe went to Gehinnom for the sole purpose of freeing his young relative from the chains of her agunah status, and he took the shamash along with him only to light the way with his lantern. Yet in the end the warrant for her release came from elsewhere, and as for the shamash, he told us what he found, including the punishment those who commit this sin receive after they die. Let not this account of sin and punishment become simply a story, a story that one hears for the sheer pleasure of it. Such pleasure has been the downfall of many. But there are many kinds of pleasure, and happy is the one whose pleasure brings him edification and whose edification is his pleasure.

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Thus did Buczacz come to understand what we see every day: a man does something good for his fellow and nevertheless is punished. Here was an old man who saved a Jew from Gehinnom and they tried to deprive him of his livelihood and dismiss him from his position. By describing the punishment for a transgression that, because of the proliferation of our sins, has tripped up many, including scholars who are supposed to be exemplars, the shamash did a service for many more people than the one he tried to help. The fact is that there are many in this world who appear to be righteous, but in the next one, where truth reigns, they are accounted as absolute sinners, as the shamash saw that night he visited Gehinnom. But now let us take leave of such spurious tsadikim and return to our story.

Buczacz made amends with the shamash. Some did it with words and some with deeds. The first to reconcile with him was, appropriately, the leading light of the community, the father-in-law of the man the shamash had thrown out of the beit midrash for talking during the Torah reading. It is a tribute to the wealthy men of Buczacz that their money does not blind them to the truth and does not fool them into thinking that because they are rich they can dictate what the truth is or what they want it to be. On the contrary, they accept the truth no matter what its source and acknowledge it as the supreme attribute, the virtue personified by the patriarch Jacob, as it is written, You will ascribe truth to Jacob . The magnate made amends with the shamash with more than words; he sent him a flask of raisin wine sufficient for kiddush and havdalah for several Sabbaths. And as with the father-in-law, so, too, did the son-in-law, with anguish and deep remorse, beg forgiveness from the shamash for the embarrassment the beit din had caused him. Then in turn came the pious men and the rest of the congregation. Some wanted to forget the angry words they had spoken about dismissing him from his position; some said they really hadn’t said what they said; some belittled the whole act of talking, some praised the virtue of silence. Since they had not yet learned to curtail their words, they waxed verbose both in praise of silence and in belittlement of speech.

If I were to report everything that was said, there would be no end here. But there is one thing I will note, namely, that all the days of the week are equal in the opportunities they offer for sinning through speech. Monday, Thursday, and Sabbath are not superior in that respect to Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, even if the Torah is read on the former three days (corresponding to the three patriarchs) and is not read on the latter four (corresponding to the four matriarchs, as women are exempt from the commandment to study Torah). Therefore, if some Torah idea or nice interpretation or some brilliant new ḥidush or explanation or explication occurs to you while you are standing before your Maker or are hearing the Torah being read — suppress them and let them not be heard. King Solomon, may he rest in peace, the wisest of all men, took many foreign wives because he knew that there were present in each of them sparks of purity, and he hoped, by marrying them, to tame sin and eradicate transgression. In the end they led him astray. Similarly, during the service or the Torah reading, a person wants to share with his friend a nice thought that came to him, and look what happens to him. May we not end up like him.

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No one left the communal meeting chamber without committing themselves not to talk during the service from the moment the leader would begin with the prayer “Blessed be the One who spoke” until after the Aleinu prayer, and certainly not during the Torah reading. Some went so far as to commit themselves to remain silent even during the pauses in the Torah reading after each aliyah, when the blessings on behalf of each individual called up to the Torah are customarily made. Doing that would entail a loss of income for the synagogue, but the rabbis concluded that the gains from such silences would outweigh the losses. Consider, for example, what would be going through the mind of someone called up to the Torah: instead of paying attention to the words on the scroll being read as he stood there, he would be trying to figure out exactly who he would designate to be named in the subsequent blessing, and calculating how much he would pledge on that person’s behalf. Whether the person he named was worthy of the blessing or if he somehow got misled into designating a person he had no intention of having blessed, the fact is that he would be giving priority to names like Getzel or Feivel or Feivush, Koppel, Berel, and Shmerl over the holy names in the Torah, where each and every word is holy. Moreover, sometimes he could get the names mixed up, and the person who was blessed was not the one he wanted blessed, and the person he wanted blessed was not. Then the one who was blessed unintentionally would think that for twelve pence pledged on his behalf the donor was currying favor with him, and he would come to despise him, as he despised all flatterers, while the one who was supposed to be blessed and was not would secretly regard the donor as an ingrate, a man who, when he asks you to do him a favor and you do it, then goes and blesses everyone in the world but the one he should. What is the cause of all such rancor and resentment and jealousy? The interrupting of the Torah reading for these blessings. But then, how could the synagogue afford to lose the money pledged for those blessings? The solution would be to have all pledges made at the very end, after the reading of the haftarah. That way no money would be mentioned in the presence of the Torah scroll, for even if the money pledged was kosher, the names for the currency were not. They were either named for some unsavory king or they had idolatrous overtones.