You might think that this was because he was great in Torah and wisdom and piety and good deeds. Not at all. This was a poor shamash, one who was no different from anyone else in Buczacz, except for his temper. Perhaps the merits of his forebears who were killed in the pogroms stood in his stead. But in this matter he was no more privileged than the other townspeople, almost all of whom saw their father or mother die a terrible and cruel death. So the matter is truly puzzling. (30)
The shamash himself would make no exception to this characterization. He goes out of his way to underscore his ordinariness in relation to the learned elite of Buczacz. In commenting on mystical speculations relating to why Rabbi Moshe’s life was spared during the massacres, the shamash professes that such matters are beyond him: “It is enough for a man like me to get through the weekly portion with Targum and Rashi’s commentary” (6). He is, moreover, a man burdened with sorrows. He was a young man with many children at the time of the journey to Gehinnom; his wife was already an invalid, bedridden and unable to speak, who would not live out the year.
Yet despite his lack of distinction, the shamash leverages prodigious power on the people of Buczacz. His power derives not so much from the fact of his journey to Gehinnom as from the telling of it many years later. In the galaxy of Agnon’s fiction, storytelling is an omnipresent and highly privileged activity, but rare indeed is the case when the telling of a story has the impact described in Hamashal vehanimshal. When his listeners reach the point at which they are too terrified by his story to press for more details, the shamash drives home his advantage: “But he did not leave it at that and proceeded to tell the story to its end, and his words sank deep into their bones and stayed with them all their days. And when they passed away, they saw in another world everything the shamash had told them in this one” (45). What is the source of this power, so rare among great preachers and scholars but here invested in a curmudgeonly sexton?
Our sexton, to begin with, is not quite as unlettered as others see him, or as he would have us believe. He spends his days in and around the beit midrash and in conversation with scholars who devote their time to study. He knows the text of the Hebrew Bible well and can identify the sources of the scriptural quotations that are the rabbi’s preferred mode of communication. Difficult verses with original interpretations fall into his mouth (“A verse in the Torah occurred to me”) at key moments (35). He fully comprehends all of the rabbi’s homilies and textual references, and he is not so humble to observe about himself, “That is one thing I take pride in: if I do not understand our Master’s words right away, later on I do” (46). The shamash’s religious world has been deeply influenced by the dissemination of Kabbalah into broad sectors of Polish Jewry, and it is natural for him, for example, when he bemoans Aaron’s misguided inquiries into the meaning of Jewish suffering, to speak of persecutions as God’s way of purging us from the “qelipot we have acquired in the lands of the Gentiles and thereby prepare us for the day of His Redemption” (9). Although he repeatedly avers that he is not among the devotees of mystical interpretation (49), he does not hesitate to include the glosses of those who are, and on occasion to offer his own (36). When he looks up at the stars after emerging from the Netherworld, a line occurs to him from the Book of the Angel Razi’el, an early medieval kabbalistic work (see translator’s note to p. 36). After he witnesses the tortures of the scholarly sinners in Gehinnom and before the rabbi explains the reason for their fate, the shamash performs a mental search: “I reviewed all the sins and punishments enumerated in the holy books and could find none that matched what I had seen” (32). This is a feat that requires no small amount of learning. His reading is also broad, as demonstrated by his referring to an anecdote in Sefer kaftor vaferaḥ, a Hebrew treatise on rabbinic aggadah by Yaakov bar Yitzchak Luzzato, Safed, ca. 1527–1587 (8). In sum, although the shamash is no talmid ḥakham in terms of scholarly attainment or class position, he is a creature of the culture of the beit midrash whose literacy enables him to grasp the meaning of all that transpires around him in the beit midrash and its culture. The most eloquent testimony to his literacy is to be found in his reconstruction from memory of the memorial ceremonies on the twentieth of Sivan and the many quotations from Scripture and from arcane liturgical poems that attended them.
A source of his power lies, paradoxically, in the meekness of his subservience to Rabbi Moshe. To be sure, the very nature of his office as shamash enjoins this subordination, as does the fact of his youth — he was fifty-four years younger than when he relates the story! — in relation to the rabbi’s venerable age when he served him in what turned out to be the last year of the sage’s life. Yet the devotion of this proud and irascible man to his master rests on a more compelling foundation. There is a profound affinity of spirit and temperament between master and servant. This is expressed in an area of human interaction that is central to the thematic preoccupation of the story: speech, necessary and unnecessary. Although there are many tasks that the shamash is called on to perform at the rabbi’s behest, his intuitive understanding of what is required of him often obviates the need for his instructions to be articulated: “Many times it seemed as though the look in his eyes told what he wanted to say to me” (13). The repertoire of nonverbal communications between the two enables them to use speech only for what is truly worthy to be spoken about: “One did not make small talk with our Master” (13). But it is more than a gift for attunement that enables the shamash to offer such devotion. Rather, it is his identification with the authority the rabbi wields with such utter probity and integrity, and it is in the enforcement of this authority that the shamash finds a calling suited to his temperament. When, as quoted above, the elders of Buczacz express their amazement over the shamash being singled out to witness astonishing sights, the one exception to his ordinariness they note is his temper.
This strikes the reader as an accurate observation. The shamash is indeed a man of intense moral focus who is easily provoked by the temporizing of others. In Rabbi Moshe’s rule over Buczacz, he finds a regime with whose righteousness he wholeheartedly identifies, so much so that he can subsume his will within the rabbi’s will without feeling diminished. To the contrary, he is nurtured, empowered and elevated by being enlisted in the rabbi’s service. After the rabbi gives him the first intimations of their fateful journey, the shamash says to himself, “How good it is to know that we have leaders whose words keep us on the straight path and sustain us in this Exile” (15). Reported a half century later, his words convey to his listeners an implicit critique of current rabbinic regimes and the leadership they offer.
The vignette about the melamed and the tax collector in Chapter 4 underscores the affinity between the rabbi’s unbowed leadership and the shamash’s fierce resolve. The story is told in the context of a conversation between the shamash and his first wife, and it occurs at the moment when the rabbi has told the shamash that he requires his help for a special undertaking, but before there is an inkling of just how special the errand will be. The reason the rabbi gives for enlisting his help is particularly telling: “I know that people do not frighten you” (12). And indeed, when the shamash goes home for breakfast before returning to the rabbi, his nervous preoccupation is noticed by his wife, who engages him in speculating about the mysterious task. In the course of these speculations, she mentions the episode of the melamed and the tax collector, which the shamash now reprises for the reader. The episode concerns a melamed who was slapped in the face by a wealthy man who was disappointed with the results of the melamed’s attempts to educate his son. The melamed brought the tax collector to court over the assault, and when the latter failed to show up, “Our Master then instructed me to go and tell the man that if there is no legal accounting here below, there certainly is one up above, and if he would not appear before the local rabbinical court he would absolutely be hauled before the beit din of Gehinnom. So I went to him without the least fear of him or his dogs or his servants” (13). The shamash will shortly discover that the mission for which he is being enlisted will expose him to dangers greater than menacing dogs and nasty servants. Nonetheless, the rabbi has identified within this poor, young and unrecognized assistant an unbowed resoluteness of purpose that can be mobilized for holy purposes.