S. Agnon - Shira

I will now note the fact that Herbst has devised a new approach to his work. He no longer sits for long periods laboring over books, nor does he take notes. He does his work outside, on the streets of Jerusalem, in its open spaces. This is roughly his routine: He eats, drinks, smokes, gets up from the table, says, “Time for a little walk,” and goes out. Some days, he boards the bus and rides into town; other days, he goes on foot. When he gets to town, he turns toward one of the relatively uncrowded streets. Not that he avoids those places that hum with activity, for a person’s thoughts reflect the person. At times, he seeks silence and tranquility; at times, he prefers the human bustle.

Herbst is tall and hardy. His head is somewhat bowed. He has a cigarette in his mouth, a walking stick in his hand. His mind roves from Jerusalem to Byzantium. All the emperors of that Rome-of-the-East flit through his mind. He drives them away sometimes, as an emperor would drive away irritating ministers. But he sometimes welcomes one of them and responds, even to the extent of dealing with matters of the heart. The story of Arcadius and Eudoxia is a case in point. Arcadius was a young emperor with many fantasies when he married the beautiful Eudoxia. But the beautiful Eudoxia was a cold woman, with no love in her heart. She cloistered herself in her room or in a secluded chapel, isolated from people, where she prostrated herself before her God. The emperor knocked on her door many times, but she didn’t open it. The affairs of Byzantium were in a state of neglect, dire neglect; that great kingdom was in a state of neglect. The emperor ignored his city, his people, his entire realm. His mind was totally taken up with Eudoxia, who rejected him. Why did she reject him? There are many opinions, but not much truth. Herbst’s opinions on this subject are no more valid than anyone else’s. How can we arrive at the truth? How can we eliminate doubt? How can we eliminate theories that, for the most part, derive from an impulse to innovate and from a wish to demonstrate that everything is clear and obvious to us, that we have solved all the mysteries, though in our hearts we know these theories have no substance? Not only do they themselves lack substance, but they generate other theories, upon which entire new systems are built. Meanwhile, there is a mess of documents, hidden away and ensconced in storage vaults somewhere, unread and untouched. A scholar or researcher appears, unrolls the documents, reads them, studies and analyzes them to the best of his ability, and, finally, publishes a paper. Those who read it imagine that they are now holding the truth in their hand. Another document is suddenly discovered, different from the preceding ones, and what was accepted as definitive truth turns out to be totally invalid. Who can but sympathize with the learned men of the past, who labored, toiled, and lived out their lives under basic misconceptions.

Herbst walks the streets of Jerusalem, responding to greetings, exchanging pleasantries, studying a store window, reviewing his relationship to his own research. One doesn’t always know the truth about himself, what he is like at a given moment. But, if he is a person who seeks the truth, he can know, to some extent, what he was once like in specific respects. Manfred Herbst was like a deep well, filled with errors — errors that ensued from one another, engendering still more errors, ad infinitum. He had argued about them with friends, based several theories on them, taught them to his students, built his reputation on them, since they were widely accepted and, presumably, reliable. Suddenly, a photocopy of an unknown document fell into his hands. He read it. He saw and recognized that what was considered definitive truth wasn’t true at all. This is not the place to explain why this document was more convincing than the earlier ones. But it is the place to say what Herbst did after he discovered what he discovered and arrived at the truth. Herbst made no effort to protect himself. He wrote, “I made a mistake, which I retract.” When he was invited to republish some of his early papers, he declined, because most of them were based on those errors. There are famous scholars who, once they have made a statement, refuse to retract it, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary. Even when they themselves are aware of their error, they don’t admit it. They maintain their position, dismissing the opinion of peers if it suggests they themselves are in error. If they could, they would burn any manuscript that challenges their views. Needless to say, this isn’t Herbst’s way. In fact, Herbst lives by this axiom: I uphold this view today, because this is what my research suggests. If I see tomorrow that I’m mistaken, I will undo all the structures that are based on this error. Scholarship itself is more important than an individual scholar, and the essence of scholarship is precision. This remains true even if we concede that there are no absolutes in the realm of scholarship, since what was true until today is no longer true in the light of new discoveries, and what we learn from today’s discoveries may be a fleeting truth, because further discoveries remain to be discovered, and, when these further discoveries are discovered, earlier truths will be invalidated. But there is one ultimate truth, forever valid: the quest for truth itself, directing our hearts to explore the truth without political or social bias. As long as we have no evidence about the past other than the texts left to us by preceding generations, it is our mandate to examine them thoroughly and meticulously, to be very cautious about offering new theories that can’t be supported. In the future, when new data are discovered, more authentic than before, we must discard what is outdated in favor of the new. Herbst repeated this message to his students every semester, in his opening lecture. Needless to say, he repeated it to himself as well. He used to add: Who among us has read travel stories as a child without being stirred by explorers who traveled to remote lands; crossed seas, deserts, uncharted forests; risked life and limb; exposed themselves to harsh environments, deadly disease, savage animals, in order to investigate nature and life in its varied forms — unintimidated by all these perils? We who work in the serenity of our homes, who are guaranteed food, drink, and sleep — will we cling to distorted opinions and be distorted by them ourselves, because of habit, for the sake of our so-called honor? Neu, whose errors are superior to other scholars’ certainties, didn’t spare himself. On the eve of a gala event celebrating his sixtieth birthday, he published a paper entitled “My Errors,” in which he listed every error, every suspicion of an error, that he had ever perpetrated.

In those days, with Jerusalem’s area diminished by Arab gunfire, Herbst would meet a growing number of friends on his walks. There is nothing remarkable about this, since most of his walks were in Rehavia and its environs, where many of his friends lived. And those who didn’t live there were visiting others who did. Whom did he find there, and whom didn’t he find there? Everyone, except for Julian Weltfremdt, who deprived Rehavia of his company because of his cousin and because so many other university scholars lived in Rehavia. There wasn’t a day when Herbst came to Rehavia without meeting a friend or acquaintance. If I were to list them all, it would turn into a lexicon of Jerusalem’s leaders and learned men. Believe it or not, he even met Gavriel Gamzu. I don’t know when this meeting occurred, whether it was before or after Gemula’s death. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter when it was. What did Gamzu tell him, and what didn’t Gamzu tell him? No one has ever talked to Gamzu without hearing something unforgettable from him. As for Gamzu’s story, I won’t pursue it now, since its subject is remote, but I will tell about someone else whose story is more immediate.