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.
27
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.
I spoke before of twelve pence. In the past a penny was worth much more than it is now, and people donated twelve pence to correspond to the twelve tribes of Israel. Poor people gave three for the three patriarchs or two for the two tablets of the Ten Commandments. Today, however, when it takes one hundred pence to buy what you could once get for a penny, people donate eighteen or twenty-six pence or more, according to whatever gematria calculation occurs to them.
But let me get back to how things unfolded. The assembly did not break up until it was determined that henceforth the shamash would stand on the bimah throughout the entire service, from beginning to end, and if he would see anyone talking he would rap on the table top regardless of whether the offender was an important member of the community, or a rich man, or the son-in-law of a rich man, a scholar, a ruffian, or someone who had privileges at the court. Normally in the Great Synagogue a rap on the table top could not be heard because of the crowd, but now the shamash would bang on the Pralnik book as he might during the repetition of the silent devotion to signal the congregation to respond Amen, or as he might when he was about to make an announcement. And what, you may ask, is the Pralnik book? A bunch of empty pages bound together like a book on which you bang a stick the way a woman beats her laundry to get the water out. The congregation further ordained that the cantor include a special blessing on behalf of all who take care not to utter a word in the synagogue from the time the leader of the service begins the prayer “Blessed be the One who spoke” until the service is concluded. This special blessing was instituted in Buczacz by our forbears on the very first Sabbath after they arrived there, before they founded the actual town of Buczacz, as I have told elsewhere. They brought the blessing with them from the Rhineland, where local custom went back to the days of such renowned rabbis as Rabbenu Gershom, Light of the Exile, Rabbi Shimon the Great, the eminent Rabbi Meshullam ben Kalonymus, and the other illustrious sages of Ashkenaz, may they rest in peace, whose traditions were authoritative in Buczacz in former days.
In order to lend authority to these new directives it was instructed that they be inscribed in the pinqas, the great communal register, because anything written down there was meticulously followed. They further instructed that the entire story told by the shamash also be recorded in the pinqas, because stories awaken the heart, especially of those who cannot picture something unless they read it in writing. So shortly thereafter a scribe wrote out all the details of the story, and he considered it so important that he decided to begin it on a new page in the pinqas lest it get lost among all the things written there previously. The town leaders then read the story and decided that it deserved a wider hearing beyond Buczacz. They agreed amongst themselves that should anyone ever find himself in another town, he would be sure to tell there the whole tale, certainly if he would see someone talking during the service or the reading of the Torah. And he would tell it without fear of intimidation by any of the locals, for the impudent pass on while the word of our God stands firm forever.
So the scribe wrote out the whole story in words true and wise, in the way words were used in Buczacz at the time when Buczacz was Buczacz. Some of the words were from the Torah, some from the sages, all of them had an eloquence that gives tongue to knowledge. The town leaders read the document and showed it to the local maskilim. In Buczacz and the Kingdom of Poland of those days, the term maskilim referred to men broadly learned in many branches of wisdom, men who exemplified the ideal of Understanding and knowing Me. It did not apply to those who strayed from the path of reason, of whom David complained, Is there any man of understanding who seeks after God? The maskilim read what was written and saw that the scribe indeed had a sophisticated sense of style and grammar, and they acknowledged it, one with words of praise, one with a simple nod of the head. There was one who equivocated and could not say whether it was good or bad, for it is human nature that what one person deems beautiful, another does not. In the end, though, even he admitted that the scribe had expressed everything exactly as it was meant to be written.