341/ The descendants of the priestly family Descendants of the Levite tribe, the family of Aaron, constitute the priestly class in Israel and are forbidden to have any contact with the dead.
341/ Song of Songs 8:13; “Flee my beloved ” Song of Songs 8:14.
343/ Casting away sins A custom ordinarily performed on the first day of the New Year in which sins are symbolically cast into water.
343/ “O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock” Song of Songs 2:14.
343/ “Every firstborn” Deuteronomy 15:19.
344/ “Ye are sons to the Lord” Deuteronomy 14:1.
344/ “Many daughters” Proverb 31:29.
344/ Seventh of Adar The traditional date of Moses’ death, which was observed in some communities as a fast followed by a feast for the members of the Hevra Kadisha, the burial society.
Notes
344/ “And Moses went up…” Deuteronomy 34.
Between Two Towns
348/ Der Israelit The leading Orthodox weekly in Germany, widely read in western Europe.
348/ Das Familienblatt Das Israelitisches Familienblatt, a Jewish newspaper published in Hamburg.
353/ Two thousand cubits…the distance one is permitted to walk on the Sabbath According to Jewish law, this is the distance one is permitted to walk beyond an established community on the Sabbath.
To the Doctor
370/ Mr. Andermann This character’s name is German for the “other one,” suggestive of the Sitra Ahra, the evil side of human nature.
371/ “And because of our sins” This line opens the collective confession that all members of the community recite together on the Day of Atonement.
A Whole Loaf
373/ I had nothing to eat on the Sabbath See Shabbat 117b: “He who observes [the practice of] three meals on the Sabbath is saved from three evils: the travails of the Messiah, the retribution of Gehinnom, and the wars of Gog and Magog.” (See also Avodah Zarah 3a.)
373/ The floor was as hot as glowing fire, the roof fevered like piercing fire The rather stylized form of this paragraph, including the repetition of “fire,” suggests the form of a medieval piyyut.
374/ The Mahaneh Yehudah Quarter…Street of the Prophets The narrator traces a map of Jerusalem’s neighborhoods in this passage.
375/ The Lord (….) In an earlier edition of the story, the ellipsis consisted of three dots. The change to four prompts the association of this unseen Lord with the tetragrammaton, the four-letter unpronounceable name of God.
376/ The mourning of Moses According to traditional belief, the 7th of Adar is considered the yahrzeit or anniversary of the death of Moses.
379/ Mr. Gressler The name suggests a German or Yiddish term for crassness or crudeness.
379/ My house was burned down Agnon lost his home in Homburg, Germany, in 1924 to a fire that destroyed all his possessions (see the reference to this fire in “Two Pairs”).
379/ Mr. Gressler sat playing cards with my neighbor Avraham Holtz points out that this recalls the talmudic warning “The house in which the words of Torah are not heard at night shall be consumed by fire” (Sanhedrin 92a).
382/ Dusting himself with the dust of the horses’ feet This phrase suggests an ironic reversal of the talmudic injunction to dust yourself with the dust of the feet of the sages, i.e., to sit at their feet and absorb their wisdom (from Pirke Avot, Ethics of the Fathers).
383/ But I want a whole loaf At the Sabbath table, the blessing of the bread can only be recited over a loaf that is whole, rather than cut into slices. Critics have attempted to connect the “whole loaf” here to a variety of talmudic injunctions concerning Sabbath requirements.
385/ The post office doors were already closed The three-letter verb for “closed,” n-’a-l, also forms the root for the noun Neilah, the title of the closing prayer on the Day of Atonement that signals the closing of the gates of heaven.
Notes
At the Outset of the Day
389/ My little daughter The standard epithet for the soul in medieval Jewish philosophical writing.
389/ The Great Synagogue In the town of Buczacz where Agnon was born and spent his boyhood.
390/ The memorial candle Memorial candles are lit on the eve of the Day of Atonement in memory of those who have died. In eastern Europe, because of the fear of fire at home, it was the custom to bring the candles to the synagogue and leave them in the lobby.
391/ The storeroom…where torn sacred books are hidden away The geniza, a room usually attached to a synagogue, where books and ritual objects containing the name of God would be preserved.
391/ When books were read, they were rent The translation here reproduces the wordplay in the Hebrew (nikra’im, meaning “read,” and nikrai’m, meaning “torn”).
392/ Reb Alter had circumcised me, and a covenant of love bound us together Circumcision is considered the sign of the covenant through which the male child enters the Jewish community. Reb Alter appears elsewhere in Agnon’s writing — in the novel Temol Shilshom (Only Yesterday), for example — as the mohel (ritual circumciser) and the keeper of the pinkas, the communal record of all those he has circumcised.
394/ Ritual gowns This is a reference to the “kittel,” the white garment that is worn by worshippers in the Ashkenazi tradition during the prayer service of the High Holidays.
394/ “At times she takes the form of an old woman” The identity of “she” here is not specified. We may read it as a further reference to the soul as a feminine image.
394/ The fool substitutes the form for the need; the wise man substitutes will for need The Hebrew plays on the guttural assonance of the nouns tsurah (form), tsorekh (need), and ratson (will).
396/ Scroll…in memory The narrator here identifies himself as a scribe who has written a scroll in memory of the souls of days that had departed. This may be interpreted as a rather solipsistic reference on Agnon’s part to his own body of work written in memory of the past. (See “The Tale of the Scribe” for an account of the inscription of a Torah scroll in memory of someone who has died.)
396/ My soul fainted within me The verb nit’atfah, translated here as “fainted,” also means “covered itself.” The sentence thus also reads: “My soul covered itself,” with nefesh as the feminine noun
for soul.
The Sign
397/ The disturbances of 1929 In 1929, widespread Arab uprisings against Jewish settlement occurred, during which Agnon’s home in Talpiyot was destroyed.
397/ My wife and I remained alive in Jerusalem…and there built a house and made a garden The phrasing here recalls Isaiah 4:3: “And those who…are left in Jerusalem” and Ecclesiastes 2:5: “I laid out gardens and groves, in which I planted every kind of fruit and tree.”