And then there are the three major discrepancies. The first is the fact that the Rabbi and the shamash survived their descent into the Netherworld. An extraordinary sage may outfox the Angel of Death and be given the privilege of entering the afterlife directly, that is, without going through the pangs of death and the grave, and even then his destination can only be Paradise and not its alternative. There is also the case of the zaddik who, on his death, descends into Gehinnom for the purpose of helping his followers discharge their purgations, but he does not rejoin the living. (Immanuel of Rome does descend and return alive, but the account of his journey belongs to the more worldly tradition of secular Hebrew poetry that would not have been familiar to the world of Buczacz.) The return of the Rabbi and the shamash to the world of living remains astonishing. The second is the fact that Gehinnom contains great Torah scholars. Attaining the status of a true talmid ḥakham entails not only mastering the corpus of talmudic literature and its attendant commentaries but also contributing to the corpus by making innovative interpretations and proposing creative solutions to knotty dialectical problems. In the normative religious culture of Polish Jewry, the talmid ḥakham was the crown of Creation, the pinnacle of aspiration. If Gehinnom contains compartments for sages alongside those for common sinners, then an entire structure of value is put in question, with profound implications for a society whose elite is founded on marriage alliances between successful merchants and promising scholars. If scholars, despite their peccadilloes, cannot count on being exempted from the tortures of Hell, then what hope is there for Jews who face the uncertainties of the afterlife without their attainments?
Finally, the doctrine of sin and punishment is founded on the principle of proportionality in two senses. Minor transgressions warrant minor punishments and major transgressions major punishments. The manner of the punishment is fitted to the manner of the transgression (adulterers hanging by their sexual organs, etc.). Agnon’s Gehinnom preserves the latter but throws over the former. The story hews ingeniously to the principle of an eye for an eye in inventing infernally apt punishments for those self-important scholars who cannot help hawking their latest wares during the synagogue service. But when it comes to believing that such infractions — and many would see them as merely excesses of holy zeal — deserve eternal torture, it is only the Rabbi who takes this for granted. For everyone else, including the shamash, this new information is a kind of wild card that threatens the integrity of an entire hierarchy of religious meaning with its implicit balances and gradations. True, the people of Buczacz are eventually persuaded by the force of the shamash’s tale to accept the radical seriousness of this particular offense. But beneath their burst of moral revivalism lies a deeper anxiety. With the notion of proportionality destabilized, they have lost the reliable key to the map of their religious fate. The desperate desire to regain this certainty is most likely the reason behind the zeal the Jews of Buczacz display in eventually embracing the shamash’s message. Despite the shockingly extreme punishments meted out for ostensibly moderate transgressions, the essential principle of theological rationality is reaffirmed. They seize a chance to gain hold of a key that will make sense of their postmortem fate even if they are required to hold themselves to a new moral standard.
THE SHAMASH’S TALE
Within the larger narrative galaxy of ‘Ir umelo’ah, Agnon’s postwar stories of Buczacz, our story stands out because it boasts two narrators.23 One is the narrator who organizes, accompanies and relates most of the volume’s stories. The other, of course, is the shamash, to whom the general narrator hands off the story in Chapter 2 and from whom he takes it back in Chapter 24, with a number of intervening glosses and explanations. In allowing the shamash to tell so much of the story, the narrator is discharging his role as an impresario of memory rather than simply as a chronicler. He is for a time divesting himself of his implicit prerogative as master storyteller and welcoming, as it were, a guest artist to share the podium. The gifts brought by this visiting performer are evident. He is a direct participant in the events and can speak with the immediacy of an eyewitness. But does not the narrator of ‘Ir umelo’ah claim for himself a trans-historical omniscience that would give him all the knowledge he needs to tell the story of the shamash and rabbi himself? His knowledge, after all, goes forward in time as well as backward, and it is only he who can make reference to the Holocaust at the end of the story and explain that the present iteration of the story is a replacement for the account inscribed in the communal register, the pinqas, which burned in the destruction of Buczacz by the Nazis. What he cannot do, however, is embody himself as a historical character with a name, a wife — two wives, in fact — and a real-life role to play in the life of the town. Embodiment is the one thing that the narrator, with all his “super powers,” cannot attain.
Yet despite this vital difference, there remains a great deal that the narrator and the shamash share. Their religious outlooks are similar in their worldly piety and their devotion to the core norms of worship and Torah study. They both repeatedly insist on the fidelity of their reporting and on the scrupulous honesty with which they admit what they know and what they do not know. And they both have a pronounced penchant for digressions and the rationales that seek to justify them. Indeed, it is not easy to pry apart the texture and timbre of their individual narrative voices; and this affinity gives rise to an anxiety on the narrator’s part concerning the reader’s ability to keep the two separate. At the beginning of Chapter 7, when the shamash is in the midst of recounting the tale of Aaron’s apostasy and its grim consequences, the narrator feels compelled to intervene and address the reader directly.
I remove myself from the narrative and take on the character of the shamash so he can speak in his own voice. But lest you start thinking that this story is about me, I intrude periodically with the words “the shamash said.” (21)
The Hebrew beneath this idiomatic rendering describes a rather complex act of self-negation and appropriation. The Hebrew reads: mafshit ani et tsurati velovesh et tsurato shel hashamash venotel et leshono befi (“I dematerialize my own form and take on the form of the shamash and take his tongue into my mouth”). On the one hand, the narrator wants the reader to know that the story is not about him but about the shamash, even though they are both using the first person. He therefore proposes a device for eliminating confusion and marking the shamash’s speeches: he will insert the words “Thus said the shamash.” On the other, he insists that the reader understand that, even though the shamash was a real person who toured Hell in the seventeenth century, in this belated telling he is a device, a character created by the narrator whose very voice is produced by an act of ventriloquism. The narrator’s anxiety, in the end, is not for nothing. He succeeds so well in making the shamash an indelible character that we often forget who in fact is pulling the strings.
Who is the shamash, after all, that this extraordinary tale should be placed in his mouth? By what merit is he allowed to return from Gehinnom alive and tell a story that changes the lives of his fellow townspeople? The elders of Buczacz, having assembled to judge him and now in thrall to his account, ask the same question. Between the description of one compartment of Gehinnom and the other, they wonder: