The handover of the narrative from the narrator to the shamash takes place as a result of the events described in Chapter 1. The unusual occurrence that warrants description is a disciplinary hearing in which a venerable shamash is being accused of the sin of public embarrassment. The violation takes place during Sabbath morning prayers when the shamash notices a young man, the son-in-law of one of the town’s wealthiest citizens, speaking to his neighbor during the reading of the Torah; failing repeatedly to get the young man’s attention by various eye signals and hand gestures, the shamash descends the bimah, takes the young man by the elbow and escorts him out of the synagogue. All Buczacz is in an uproar over this unprecedented act of public shaming, and the next day the shamash is brought up on charges.
The inherent sensationalism of this precipitating incident is deliberately squandered by the narrator by interrupting it in the middle with a sizable digression concerning the changing customs surrounding the Torah reading in Buczacz. Once upon a time in Buczacz — the time in which the shamash’s story is set — the blessing recited by the seven men called to the Torah on Sabbath mornings was a fleeting pause in the public recitation of God’s word. By increments over time, this pause was expanded and filled by verbiage of various kinds that distracted the congregation from the reading and even promoted envy and conflict. The narrator is constrained to dissipate the drama and insert the digression because he knows that without it his readers will have little chance of properly construing the shamash’s action. His readers — as opposed to the shamash’s listeners — live in modern times in which the Torah reading as a circus of honors and announcements has become common practice. The narrator therefore has to work to bridge the distance between reality as we know it and the very different norm that was observed by the holy community of Buczacz at an earlier time in its history. Yet in no sense is this merely an ethnographic footnote. For both the narrator and the shamash, in their respective narrations, success is wholly measured by the ability to restore the credibility of the earlier, purer standard and make people believe that, rather than being a matter of religious nicety, competing with God’s word during the recitation of His Torah is, especially for the learned elite, literally a matter of life and death.
The court scene introduces some of the story’s key themes: the prerogatives of class, the above-the-law status of scholars, the conflict between eyewitness knowledge and received truths. The narrator is again on hand to explain to us what is so truly provocative in the shamash’s behavior as to warrant the formation of an ad hoc beit din and the slapping of an aged community functionary with a fine for enforcing synagogue decorum. Ironically, the reasons turn out to have little to do with the legal principles that ostensibly serve as the basis for the court’s deliberations. Public shaming, to be sure, is a matter to which legal culpability attaches in Jewish law. But the narrator does not present it as such; rather, he frames it in terms of a scandalous transgression of social norms. The heart of the matter is the public refusal of a poor person to acknowledge the honor due to two classes, the wealthy and the learned. The strength of the community is sustained by the intertwining of these two classes; distinguished young scholars are taken as husbands for the daughters of successful merchants in a distinctly Jewish version of the process of natural selection. The young man the shamash escorts out of the synagogue is just such a case. The seriousness of his infraction is presumably mitigated by two facts. He is not a native of Buczacz, having been recently brought there by marriage, and therefore does not appreciate the rigorousness with which the town treats the ban on speaking during the Torah reading. Moreover, he was uttering words of Torah relevant to the moment at hand — a novel insight into the weekly portion — rather than idle chatter. He is an errant young prince of the law who has been brutally importuned by an impoverished synagogue functionary.
In the face of the amassed authority of the community and its rabbinic judges, this lowly sexton asserts the authority not of what he has learned but of what he has seen. When he declares that the humiliation he has visited upon the young scholar is nothing compared to the punishments in the World to Come, he makes his claim based on what his eyes have witnessed. The judge picks up on the peculiarity of this assertion, and, although he stipulates the gravity of the infraction, he pushes the shamash to specify how it is that he has seen things that others, endowed with the same faculty of sight, have not. “The books may offer their condemnations,” the shamash insists enigmatically, “but it is the eyes that see what it is to suffer God’s wrath” (4). Beneath this verbal sparring lies a profound epistemological provocation. The shamash is asserting that, when it comes to wisdom and truth, what he has seen with his own eyes trumps the official determinations arrived at through textual interpretation and halakhic decision making. This is an assertion that will be both amplified and tested in the course of the story. For example, by finding Aaron in Gehinnom, Rabbi Moshe and the shamash succeed in the object of the journey: they confirm the fact of his death. This is a tragic, heart-rending meeting, yet the knowledge it yields regarding the husband’s death has no halakhic standing whatever, despite all the rabbi’s efforts to effect the girl’s release from the bonds of being an agunah. The evidence of the eyes, whether it is traumatic as in the case of the shocking scenes of suffering or ennobling as in the case of the shamash’s veneration of his master, possesses an urgent truthfulness that often eludes the institutionalized orders of meaning and registers fully only in what the reader is privileged to be shown.
Finally, the encounter between the shamash and his examiners adumbrates the theme of silence and its voluntary and involuntary violations. The course of the questioning is worth looking at with some care. The shamash enters the interview with a seemingly unshakable intention of accepting his punishment without explaining himself. But this resolve is soon assailed by unbidden forces within him. “He raised his eyes and shut them like someone who sees something and is terrified by it,” the narrator tells us; and he then goes on to explain that just those terrifying sights are the ones that will be related in the tale to follow, and it is those terrors that have now “returned, reawakened and begun to reappear before him” (5). The judge himself sees “all manner of horror etched on his face,” and urges the shamash to speak. The shamash rebuffs him and, with a mixture of dignity and desperation, pronounces that he has struggled his whole life to prevent himself from engaging in unnecessary speech, and on this occasion too he will remain true to that principle, whatever the costs. Yet all it takes is for the judge to say perceptively, “I think you wished to say something,” for the shamash to do an about-face and begin speaking.