As much as Hamashal vehanimshal is a story that represents the traumatic persistence of 1648, it is also a story that represents the way in which catastrophe can be mourned. This is not mourning as a state of vanquished dejection but rather mourning as a dynamically active liturgical process that both commemorates the dead and tends to the needs of the living. Agnon devotes a substantial portion of the story to the observance of the twentieth of Sivan; he positions these scenes, especially the rabbi’s parables (as in the title of the story), so as to serve as the climax of the narrative, and he makes them thick with quotations from Scripture and the sacred poetry composed to lament the recent disasters. Whether or not the rabbi’s parables serve their climactic purpose is a question that will be taken up in a subsequent section. The focus here is on the ceremony of mourning.
Like the ninth of Av, the twentieth of Sivan (a date in the Hebrew calendar that falls in the late spring) is a date to which many calamities have been attached. Its origins perhaps lie in massacres surrounding a blood libel in Blois in 1171 and the day decreed by the Tosafist Rabeinu Tam for its commemoration. Five centuries later, when the Jews of Nemirov were murdered by Cossack bands in the late spring of 1648, the date was taken up in the aftermath as a day of fasting and mourning for all the victims of the massacres, much as in our own time the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, twenty-seventh of Nissan) came to stand for the Holocaust as a whole. In the economy of its narrative, Hamashal vehanimshal turns away at this point from a preoccupation with the journey to Gehinnom and its aftermath and clears a monumental space for a depiction of the observance of the twentieth of Sivan. Even though the Jewish population of Buczacz is not large — it will become so in the following century — the depiction is monumental in the way it is framed. It is presented as a phenomenon of what might be called liturgical totalization. Every last member of the community, even nursing mothers with their infants, fasts and makes the trip to the cemetery and later stands for hours in the synagogue for the intoning of dirges and the rabbi’s eulogy for the dead. There is an intimate, reciprocal relationship between the living and the dead: “Some went to visit their relatives’ graves, some to entreat the dead to pray for the living” (39). Even though Buczacz physically escaped the massacres, it has subsequently been turned into a kind of necropolis. The cemetery itself is so overloaded with graves of martyrs that the Rabbi has relocated the venue of the eulogy to the synagogue, lest in the jostling kohanim, Jews of priestly origin, be inadvertently pushed into stepping on burial plots, where they are forbidden to go. For the Rabbi, the omnipresence of the dead is a nightmarish perception rather than an actuality. In explaining the transfer of the ceremony from the cemetery to the synagogue, he says, “Why do I need to go to the dead when they are coming toward me?” (40). The Rabbi’s meaning, according to the shamash, is that the town proper contains so many unknown graves of murdered Jews that it may be forbidden for kohanim to reside there altogether. The fact that the Rabbi has not issued a definitive ruling is found curious (qetsat qasheh) in the eyes of the shamash, given the Rabbi’s usual diligence in getting to the bottom of any legal issue he addresses. We, however, are given to understand that the matter is ultimately not a legal one but the projection of a consciousness enmeshed in the world of the dead.
As the ceremony proceeds, this extended scene comes to focus exclusively on the Rabbi, almost as if, in cinematographic terms, he were the subject of an extreme close-up. The Rabbi, we already well know, is the object of the shamash’s veneration, and it is therefore no wonder that his every gesture and utterance is taken to be infinitely meaningful. But the choice to place at the center of the scene a man so wholly absorbed in the reality of the martyred Jews is the sign of a broader narrative strategy intended to expose the depths of the trauma left in the wake of 1648. The Rabbi takes the prerogative of beginning with special memorial prayers for his own teacher, Rabbi Yeḥiel Mikhl of Nemirov, but he soon undergoes a breakdown. He bursts into tears, lays down the Torah scroll and places his head on the scroll. The object of fascination for the shamash and other observers in the congregation is the rabbi’s hair. Since receiving a wound to his skull during the massacres, he has not cut his hair, and his face is wreathed with a profusion of silver curls. Rather than attending to the grief that has momentarily disabled him, observers prefer a more transfiguring interpretation.
After a while he pulled himself up, and his white earlocks shone like polished silver. The interpreters of mystic secrets said that our Master had bathed his head in the waters of grace. His face shone in the crimson glow of the setting sun, but his eyes were closed, and our Master seemed like one who had been on a distant journey. Those same commentators said that he had returned from the far western edge of the world, where the Divine Presence resides, and there he had seen his Master, that holy light Rabbi Mikhl of Nemirov, and all the martyrs with him, sitting in the Academy on High, radiant in the Divine Presence. I do not concern myself with hidden matters — for a person like me what my eyes behold is sufficient — but I agree with those who say that every single one of our Master’s curls resembled a silver goblet that has been immersed in pure water. (41)
On the face of things, the kabbalistically attuned observers in the congregation would seem to be merely amplifying the shamash’s reverential stance toward the Rabbi. But the mystical ascent they ascribe to him, together with its happy vision of the martyrs basking in God’s presence, functions to evade the anguish and bereavement that are the dominant and proper emotions of the moment and the ones that the Rabbi’s breakdown truly expresses. Even the shamash, who, with his customary skeptical humility, distances himself from the transfiguring extremes proposed by the mystically inclined, is willing to permit a resemblance between the curls and the silver goblet immersed in pure water. The irony is that the Rabbi is indeed momentarily lost in another world, but it is the world of grief, not mystical transport. He recovers and regains control not once but twice, and with his commanding spiritual authority he proceeds to conduct the memorial service, so laden with complex liturgical poems, unflinchingly toward the goal of remembering the dead. The liturgy of that lengthening day, one of the longest days in the calendar, has a number of crescendos, and we shall return to the final parables that give the story its name. Surely one of those heightened moments reflects how the events of 1648 have impressed themselves on his mind: “He recited the names of the towns and villages that had been destroyed, and there was not one town or hamlet that he did not mention, and there was not one community of which he did not enumerate the number of Jews killed in it” (44). It is the tragic, epic and — certainly from the point of view of mental acuity — dazzling recitation of the names of the lost communities that demonstrates not only the abiding vigor of his mind but also the oceanic dimensions of the catastrophe.