The shamash’s monumental expression of will is the one that the reader might easily take for granted: telling the story that accounts for the great majority of Hamashal vehanimshal. This power resides, of course, not merely in the fact of telling the story but rather in the extraordinary capacity to shape and project a narrative that compels his listeners to change their lives. In this he even surpasses his master, the great homilist, whose revered preaching does not approach the shamash’s narrative in its electric ability to produce moral self-questioning. Underlying the shamash’s astonishing performance is the perplexing question of why he launches into it in the first place. The precipitating events lie in the distant past. Because of the tale’s air of dramatic immediacy, we do not realize just how far in the past they lie until the shamash mentions in passing the figure of fifty-four years toward the very end of his narrative. For these many long years, those astounding events had remained secret knowledge guarded by the shamash in accordance with the sacred principles of restraint and discretion in matters of language laid down by Rabbi Moshe.
What impels the shamash to violate those principles and disclose the terrible events of a half century earlier? The story discloses two motives, one explicit and one implicit, and the coexistence of the two explains a great deal about the way the shamash tells his tale. The explicit motive is a moral indignation that pays tribute to the values of the shamash’s long-dead master. In the years since the originating events, the shamash has witnessed a drift away from the high principles of restraint in speech that the rabbi had made the thrust of his valedictory address to his flock. Conspicuous displays of learning, as witness by the proliferation of pilpul and ḥidushim, have undercut loyalty to the plain and true meaning of the Torah; the members of the mercantile elite have purchased scholars with these showy talents as husbands for their daughters in order to elevate their family status. That fateful Sabbath morning when one such son-in-law blathers his latest scintillating ḥidush into his friend’s ear during the Torah service is simply too much for the shamash. The implicit motive lies in the twin traumas that left their searing impress on him as a youth and a young man: the massacres of 1648 and the journey to Gehinnom. To be sure, as a victim/survivor of 1648, the shamash underwent an ordeal, which is given no back story, that was presumably no worse than that of many other Jews of Buczacz. And that is precisely the important point: Although Buczacz famously escaped the brunt of the physical injury inflicted by Khmelnitski, do not think that the spiritual damage was anything but severe and far-reaching. The shamash is a Buczacz everyman in this regard, and fifty-four years later, when the town is once again teeming and prosperous, he is among the few surviving firsthand witnesses who carry the horrors within them. When it comes to Gehinnom and the gruesome tortures of the ostensibly righteous there, however, the shamash inhabits his own singular category. He has remained silent about these twin traumas for many decades, even as they have presumably never ceased to exert painful pressure on his inner and unconscious life. Although moral indignation provides a respectable trigger for his extraordinary act of public humiliation and the story that follows it, there is much in this outpouring that taps the need for confession and catharsis.
The simultaneous operation of two sets of motivation is critical in explaining a highly problematic hallmark of the shamash’s narration: his penchant for digression. Now, having entered the Agnonian universe, the experienced reader may extend wide latitude to this practice, or even simply take it for granted. Yet if we attend to the particular, urgent message of this story, then the question of narrative superfluity becomes marked as moral laxity. After all, the moral the shamash works hard at impressing on his listeners — a moral learned from his master and confirmed by the narrator — is that speech should be husbanded and expended only when necessary. Silence, discretion, reticence, gesture in place of words, Scripture in place of human discourse, the avoidance of speech about others — these are the bywords of a religious seriousness that begins with chatting in the synagogue and exfoliates into an ethics of being in the world. The actual telling of the story itself is the dramatic result of an accidental violation of this principle. The shamash certainly does not intend to tell the story of the journey to Hell that took place a half century earlier; but when his ire is enflamed and he commits an act of public humiliation, he has no recourse but to divulge the events he has kept silent about for so very long. Yet once he is inevitably launched on his narrative of those extraordinary events, the ethics of restraint should, by his own lights, require him to hew closely to his moral message and avoid all extraneous remarks. But the outcome, as any reader can see, is quite otherwise. The shamash’s tale is replete with all manner of subsidiary observations, anecdotes and vignettes. Is this simply the old Agnonian charm, the traditional license of the storyteller, beguiling to some and irksome to others?
I would argue that the answer is no in the case of this story, as well as in many others of Agnon’s writings. The argument for rationalizing the digressions and viewing them as performing strategic functions rests on the dual nature of the shamash’s motivations. His explicit motive is to drive home the moralizing message about the evils of competing with divine speech; his implicit and unconscious motive is to give expression to a variety of traumas and anxieties that include the unexplained reasons for God’s having visited so much suffering on His people, the horrific tortures of Gehinnom that are meted out not only to the obviously wicked and the loss of his great mentor and master, together with the decline of true and wise rabbinic authority. These concerns exert pressure on the shamash’s intention to tell “the truth and nothing but the truth” and convey what is immediately relevant to the elders of Buczacz; they create a kind of interference in the dissemination of his message. The pattern is evident on almost every page of the story, but nowhere more than in two large narrative blocks. The heartrending story about Aaron’s apostasy is strictly necessary only to explain how the rabbi and shamash came to discover the compartments of Gehinnom that house the scholars who are being punished for hawking their wares during the reading of the Torah. But since Aaron’s story is saturated with emotional losses and troubling theological speculations connected to 1648, he cannot desist from giving the account ample room even at the same time he avers that it is not the main point and that he must move on. A similar case is the great block of narrative devoted to depicting the ceremonies of the twentieth of Sivan commemorating the massacres. Loving detail is lavished on all of the difficult piyyutim and on the obscure biblical verses parsed by the rabbi, and in general on the particulars of this epic scene of remembrance. Yet all this bears no relevance to the story’s moral teaching about human and divine speech. The two terse parables that do bear on the moral theme seem tacked on at the end of the day’s proceedings as if they were afterthoughts. I shall presently explain.