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

At this Aaron let out a wail and began crying loudly and bitterly. “They never let me! They never let me to go to her! They buried me in their cemetery, a Gentile cemetery with a cross on my grave! Two sticks, vertical and horizontal. They cut me off from Jews, and I had no way to get to a Jewish home. When I wanted to leave my grave to visit my wife in a dream and tell her that I was dead and that she was free to remarry, the cross would bar my way, and I could not get to her. Rebbe, Gehinnom is terrible, but the torment of knowing that I left my wife to be an agunah is much, much worse.”

I could see tears in our Master’s eyes. I heard him ask, “My son, how did you get here? For what sin did you die?” I heard Aaron’s answers and got the gist of what he said, but I was so terror-stricken that I do not remember his exact words. But I do remember the gist of it. If there is a difference here between what he said and what I report, it is not in the content. He spoke in the first person, the technical term for which is “indirect speech.” I give over his words in the third person. He spoke, he cried, he spoke, he groaned, he sighed, and I was as one who heard it all from afar.

When Aaron saw the troubles that had overtaken Israel, he began to wonder about what God had done to this people and what lay behind this great and terrible anger. He started to probe the matter deeply but found no answers. He immersed himself in volumes of theosophical speculation, the great texts of the Kabbalah, the Kanah and the Peli’ah . Now a man who is righteous and along in years will read such texts and attain an even deeper sense of awe. But a young man wet behind the ears who starts delving into Kabbalah will bring upon himself only inner turmoil, all the more so when he fills his head with metaphysical investigations. He will not only fail to grow in piety, he will fall into the depths of the qelipot. That is what happened to Aaron. He not only failed to resolve his doubts, he reached the dire conclusion that the God of Israel had disengaged Himself from Israel, Heaven forbid, and had become, Heaven forbid, an enemy.

As the saying goes, “One who seeks to purify himself will get help from above, just as one who seeks to pollute himself will find the door open to him.” Foolishly, Aaron decided to find out what the Gentile scholars say. He took the trouble to learn Latin and picked up in one year what the priests could not learn in seven. He buried his nose in their books and pored over their words, but the ideas he found there brought him no satisfaction. And sure enough, when a person loses his way, Satan comes and leads him on.

Satan showed him the way to a priest. Those priests have books that deal with what is above and what is below and what came before and what will be in the end, and they put forth ridiculous ideas that do nothing to resolve doubts about those matters. They say, for example, that when the different languages originated after the Tower of Babel, God created strange creatures with swordlike hands with which they incised letters in their books. Some of those books were written under the sign of Mars, and their guardian angel was Gabriel. That is totally false. Gabriel loves the Jews and champions their cause. Some of those books were written under the sign of Venus and were protected by the daughters of humans who were corrupted by the superhuman sons of God. That is a bit closer to the truth but needs to be qualified, because one of the maidens separated herself from transgression and ascended to the firmament to become one of the stars of the Pleiades. The priests bind all their books in pigskin, and as they read them the light in their soul darkens until eventually they fall into tehom, the abyss which is hinted at in the verse and darkness was over the surface of the deep . And note: the word tehom is made up of the same four Hebrew letters as the word hamavet (Death), and the two are one and the same, which is why tehom is the domain of the qelipot.

Aaron borrowed a few books from the priest and secreted himself away with them as one would with an adulterous woman. He drank of the bitter water, and the bitter water induced its curse within him. A person possesses two souls, an outer one that encompasses him about, and an inner one. When a person sins, God forbid, his inner soul descends below while he is still in this life.

One Friday night Aaron was at home alone. Zlateh had gone off to search for her father’s grave. As you know, her father disappeared just after the murder of his father-in-law Reb Naftali. Both deaths occurred right before the pogroms of 1648–49 and were forgotten in the ensuing carnage.

It so happened that a Jewish butcher from our town made a trip to a certain place to buy cattle. A Gentile there started bragging about his cows, which, he said, were of superior quality because they grazed in a field where Jews were buried. On hearing this, the butcher pretended not to believe him. So the Gentile called his mother, who related how she had worked in the home of Naftali the wine merchant and how his son-in-law worked with him in the business. One day Naftali came to the estate in a wagon loaded with casks of wine. When night fell he slept in the open next to his wagon. Now the lord of the estate had some young noblemen who regularly dined with him. They caught the scent of the wine, went out and opened all the casks, and proceeded to get good and drunk. When they sobered up they became fearful that the lord would punish them, because he had promised the authorities that no harm would come to merchants passing through his estates. Besides, they knew that with a nobleman of his stature no actions were to be taken without his orders. After debating what to do, they killed the wine merchant. They knew it was likely that some nobleman would inform on them. After all, noblemen informed on Jews and were just as likely to inform on them. So they took the body and buried it in a field where there were Jewish graves from long ago. When Zlateh heard about all this she went with the butcher’s wife to find her father’s grave. But she got delayed and could not get back before the Sabbath.

That night Aaron dined with our Master. After dinner he went home and forgot that it is forbidden to sleep in one’s house all alone. Why, you may ask, did our Master not remind him about that? He assumed that Aaron had arranged for a Yeshiva student to come over and stay with him overnight. So Aaron went home, sat down, and read through the weekly Torah portion. When he finished and then reviewed the prophetic reading, he found a verse in it that troubled him. He reviewed the commentaries but found no explanation that satisfied him. He then went to see what the Christian exegetes had to say. From under his bed he took out one of the books the priest had loaned him and started reading but could not make out a single letter. He thought that this was because the candle was set down too low. He did not know that on the holy Sabbath Jewish eyes cannot take in anything written in Gentile script.

One whose punishment already awaits him will forget that it is Sabbath, as Aaron did that night. He got up and took the candle and placed it on top of one of the Christian books and sat and read. Satan then did his work and Aaron’s eyes did theirs. He went on reading until the candle burned down without his noticing. The candle burned through the book it was sitting on, leaving a round hole in the middle. When Aaron later returned the book, the priest took one look at it and promptly accused him of deliberately setting fire to it. He threatened to have Aaron drawn and quartered and thrown to the dogs, but if he accepted the Christian faith he could be saved. Furthermore, they would spare him all the suffering the Jews were facing, and if he feared retribution from them, the priest would arrange for him to be taken to a place where there were no Jews and no fear of Jews. Aaron chose life over death and thus bartered eternal life for this transient one. In his heart he fantasized escaping to another country, returning to the God of Israel, and getting word to his wife to come and join him. Fearing that the Gentiles would somehow discover his designs, he redoubled his violations of Jewish practice so as to show them that he accepted their god with a perfect faith. But he was torn up inside. He began to afflict his body by fasting, even though he knew that fasting without repentance is of no avail. His body shriveled and the volume of his blood shrank, not only from the fasting but also from the agony he suffered. At length he took sick and died. They buried him in a Gentile cemetery and put a cross on his grave, thereby setting up a permanent barrier between him and the Jews and preventing him from visiting his wife in a dream to inform her that he was dead and she could remarry. When a Jew engages in idolatry it is as if the idolatry itself is empowered to do him harm.