Despite the vast differences between modern readers and the townspeople of Buczacz three hundred years ago, it is fair to say that we are, like them, riveted by the shamash’s tale. We are moved to horror and pity by the plight of Aaron, the young scholar encountered in Hell whose efforts to solve the problem of theodicy leads him to an early and alien grave. And even if we no longer believe in a fire-and-brimstone conception of the afterlife, we, like the shamash, cannot help being disturbed by the grotesque punishments of the learned elite in Gehinnom. Most of all, we marvel at the figure of the shamash himself, his laconic loyalty to his master, his obdurate courage in exposing himself to danger, and the intriguing mixture of his motives as he withholds and releases information.
Yet despite these manifold sources of fascination, Hamashal vehanimshal remains a problem story in several crucial respects. There is a critical plot line that is left dangling: the rabbi and shamash undertake their perilous visit to Gehinnom for the purpose of enabling a teenage wife to remarry. Yet although they are successful in confirming her husband’s death, their errand has no effect on the girl’s plight, which is quickly moved to the margins of the story. Moreover, after the sensational revelations about the true nature of Hell, the shamash’s tale concludes with a moment-by-moment, word-for-word transcription of the memorial ceremonies on the twentieth of Sivan, the fast day that commemorated the martyrs of 1648, without our being shown the relevance of this lengthy bloc of exposition to themes of the story. Finally, the happy ending is likely to be felt by modern readers to be too happy. This instantaneous, concerted and corporate act of repentance seems too easily purchased and remains at odds with the grimmer vision of human nature presented earlier in the story. Problematic also are the digressions that litter the narrations of both the shamash and the story’s overall narrator. Despite the ideal of restraint in speech embodied by the rabbi and advocated at every turn by the shamash, the story cannot be told without frequently yielding to the temptation to explore narrative byways of little patent relevance that dissipate rather than focus the energies of the plot.
Are these issues a sign of Agnon’s wavering artistic control in the late stage of his career as a writer? Did he think that presenting tales about Buczacz required less writerly rigor than the existential parables of his middle period? Or did he perceive himself as imitating a pre-modern poetics that did not make the criterion of aesthetic success the taut fitting together of all of the pieces of the story’s puzzle? My answer to all these questions is no, and my aim in the following pages is to demonstrate through an analysis of Hamashal vehanimshal that what the Torah says of Moses in the final chapter of Deuteronomy can be said of Agnon in his late phase: “His eyes were undimmed and his vigor unabated” (34:7). My argument is based on the assumption that as modern readers we are trained to look for submerged tensions in a text in order to makes sense of its manifest difficulties, and that Agnon relies on this faculty when he puts before us stories told by ostensibly naïve narrators.
In Hamashal vehanimshal the tension is between an explicit moralizing theme regarding forbidden speech and a subversive, implicit theme that registers the traumatic effects of both the 1648 massacres and the horrors of Gehinnom. The first theme focuses on the temptation to converse during worship and the reading of the Torah in the synagogue, which are shown to be grave violations with horrific consequences beyond the normal imagining of the townspeople of Buczacz. Even beyond this dramatic but restricted sense, the theme of proper and improper speech resonates at every level of the story: in the communication between the rabbi and the shamash, in the need of scholars to hawk their insights, in the circulation of opinion within the town, in the parabolic form of the great memorial homily the rabbi delivers and, most of all, in the unremitting anxieties of both narrators about exerting their control over their own discourses. On all these levels, the narrators propound an ethics of self-restraint that views all unnecessary speech as a source of bedevilment. Even the most learned and pious are tempted to muffle God’s speech — as recorded in the Torah — by the proliferation of their own.
Yet behind and beneath this moralizing message lie darker forces that harbor much deconstructive potential and shape the way the story is told at every turn. The sights the shamash saw as a young man on his visit to the Netherworld were so profoundly disturbing that it has taken him more than half a century to be able to tell the story, even if it has meant depriving the community all the while of the lesson it teaches. Even once the point has been taken, there remains a festering dread about the unknowableness of actions and their potentially horrendous consequences. That some of the greatest sages of history are suffering the tortures of hell because of what seemed to be merely an excess of zeal is a destabilizing discovery that produces troubling questions about the proportionality of human conduct and divine punishment. An even more grievous theological wound is opened up by the Khmelnitski massacres of 1648, which continue to emit waves of destructive energy long after the Jews of Buczacz have reestablished communal life and rabbinic authority. There is barely a page of the story on which these losses are not felt. The very spring for the audacious journey to Hell concerns the rabbi’s brilliant student Aaron, who suffers for eternity there because he could not understand how God could let His people be viciously slaughtered.
It is the pressure exerted by the trauma narrative on the narrators’ moralizing enterprise that accounts for, I would argue, much of what is strange, discontinuous and unresolved in the story. The digressions remain digressions, but the motives for them become clearer when we understand them as expressions of the narrators’ anxieties. The narrators’ reliability is undermined by forces they cannot govern. Written on these two levels, Hamashal vehanimshal is a story riven by unquiet tensions whose complexity is ultimately in the firm executive control of its author.
A SCANDAL IN BUCZACZ
The eyes through which we see all this are those of the shamash. Unlike the gabbai, a householder who volunteers to distribute roles in the service (“honors”) and collect payment for them, the shamash is a wage earner employed by the community. It is therefore precisely because of the office’s subservient status that it is an unusual move to place one of its occupants at center stage. After introducing the shamash and describing the story’s precipitating incident, the busy and authoritative narrator of ‘Ir umelo’ah steps aside and hands over the narrative to the voice of the shamash and, with a few exceptions, does not repossess the telling of the story until its final section. This is a renunciation of the narrator’s executive management. Far from being a marionette, the shamash emerges as his own man: an idiosyncratic mixture of curmudgeonly stubbornness, fiercely reverential loyalty and surprising religious learning. He has a name and a family story, and a fixed location in history, unlike the narrator, who must remain impersonal and anonymous and floating in time. Furthermore, the shamash possesses a special kind of authority. Although the narrator of ‘Ir umelo’ah brandishes the chronicler’s near-omniscient overview of the affairs of Buczacz, it was not he who accompanies Rabbi Moshe on this tour of the Netherworld. There is no substitute for hearing about those searing sights directly from the eyewitness.