The Parable and Its Lesson: A Novella (12 page)

The scribe took the document and looked it over a few times, changing a word here, a phrase there. Sometimes the revisions needed are apparent to a writer from the language itself, and sometimes simply from how the words look to him on the page. The writer has to struggle mightily until he finds the appropriate words, and then when he thinks he has found them, others occur to him that look even better. Were it not for the mercies of Heaven, this process of revision could go on forever. Only a writer who is a fool will think that he has found exactly the right words; a wise one knows that the only correct words are the ones revealed in the Torah, the prophets, and the other books of the Bible. Therefore, the more a writer truly knows the Hebrew language, the more anxious he will be that in his writing he may have, Heaven forfend, tarnished a word.

Why is it that all the other languages are spoken and written without difficulty, whereas Hebrew requires that every word be given extra consideration and that careful attention be paid to word order and syntax? Because all the other languages were devised by humans, whereas Hebrew is the language in which the Torah was given and with whose letters the world was created. Just as there is no letter in the Torah that does not hold great significance, so there is nothing in the world that is superfluous, because everything is ordered as God desires. In the same way, anything composed in Hebrew, the language of holiness, cannot have words that are superfluous or anything in it that is out of place. Hebrew is special for other reasons too, as those who have studied the matter know.

After he made his corrections, the scribe sat down and copied everything out in a handsome script, the letters written the way they were written in Buczacz at the time when Buczacz was Buczacz, each letter distinct unto itself and each one in its place on the line, like people standing for the silent devotion, where the tall ones stick up like a
lamed
and the short ones are small as a
yod
, and all of them are directed to the same place. Had the pinqas not been consumed in the flames, we could have read the entire story just as it was set down in its true and original form, with the unique blend of wisdom and faith that marked all that our ancestors wrote and did and thought and said. But now that book is no more, and Buczacz is destroyed, and many thousands of Jews have been slain, the least of them the equal of the most eminent of the Gentiles, who watched the loathsome monsters destroy the world and did nothing. From our town there were those who were buried alive in graves they dug for themselves; there were those who were never buried; and there were those upon whom the murderers poured kerosene and were immolated one by one, limb by limb.

So now, since that pinqas went up in the flames, and Buczacz has been destroyed, and the deeds of the former generations have been forgotten in the recent suffering, I pondered the possibility that the Gehinnom of our time would make us forget the Gehinnom that the shamash saw, and the story about it, and all we can learn from that story. So I said to myself, Let me put it all down in a book and thus create a memorial to a holy community that sanctified its life in its death as its ancestors sanctified their lives with Torah, which is our life.

(And may I achieve some merit if what I write will motivate some denizens of Jerusalem. For I have seen even here in Jerusalem, the holy city, the gate of heaven, from whence all prayers ascend, that there are people who sit in synagogues and houses of study and talk during the service and the reading of the Torah. I asked my pen, Will you join me in writing this story? And my pen said, Give me your words and I will put your story down on paper. I gave it my words and now the story is written on paper.

Would that my toil has not been for naught nor my effort in vain. And that all who guard their mouth and their tongue will give honor to their Maker and sit in fear and in awe before the One who is above all praise, when the Torah is being read and the prayers are being said, on New Moon and Sabbath and festivals and weekdays. Then the meditation of every heart and the offering of their voices shall ascend in favor before the Lord of all, and they shall be pleasing to God as in days of old, as is written,
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to You, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer
.)

The noble story
The Parable and Its Lesson
is now complete.

NOTES

1
Khmelnitski pogroms
   In 1648–49 the Cossack leader Bogdan Khmelnitski, as part of the uprising against the Polish Commonwealth, led a campaign of atrocities against Jews in the Ukraine. Jews were prime targets of Cossack fury because they were agents of the Polish aristocracy, who hired them to manage their estates. As many as tens of thousands of Jews were murdered and many communities were destroyed. The massacres were deeply rooted in the collective memory of Ashkenazic Jewry until the Holocaust overshadowed them. In Jewish annalistic literature Khmelnitski is often referred to as “Khmiel.”

2
through which his soul passes
   The idea that a name contains the essence of a person has its roots in Kabbalistic doctrine, as does the notion of
gilgul neshamot
(lit. the cycle of souls), in which the soul of a person cycles through a series of bodily incarnations over time.

6
weekly Torah portion Mishpatim
   The weekly Torah portion comprising Exodus 21:1–24:18.

6
portion of Ha’azinu
   The weekly Torah portion comprising Deuteronomy 32.

6
the passage haniglot vehanistarot
   Lit. “
The revealed and the hidden
. . . .” These words occur in Deuteronomy 29:28. The authorized Hebrew (Masoretic) text of this verse contains eleven dots above these words and above the first letter of the word that follows. The origin and import of these dots is the subject of both scholarly speculation and midrashic interpretation. The JPS TANAKH renders the verse “Concealed acts concern the Lord our God; but with overt acts, it is for us and our children ever to apply all the provisions of this Teaching.”

6
the piyyut Unetanneh tokef
   A
piyyut
is a liturgical poem. The piyyut referred to here,
Unetanneh tokef
(Let Us Declare the Holiness of the Day), is recited during the Musaf service on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Though its origins are earlier, the present text was written by the eleventh-century poet Kalonymus ben Meshullam Kalonymus of Mainz, Germany. Legend attributes it to one Amnon of Mainz, who is said to have composed it as he was being martyred by the local bishop for refusing to convert to Christianity. Three days after his death, so the story goes, he appeared to Kalonymus in a dream and taught him the poem.

7
prayer recited upon
   Called in Hebrew
tefillat haderekh
, it is traditionally recited by travelers as they set out on a journey.

8
seven nuptial benedictions
   Seven benedictions are chanted at the marriage ceremony and at the ensuing wedding feast. During the week following the wedding, tradition mandates that a festive meal for the newlyweds be held each day. At the end of each meal, following the Grace, the seven benedictions are repeated. In order to ensure that the blessings remain fresh, it is customary to make sure there is present at each of the meals at least one “new face,” i.e., someone who did not attend either the wedding ceremony or any of the previous meals. If there is not, the seven benedictions are not recited, except for the blessing over a cup of wine at the conclusion of the Grace after the meal.

8
Kiddushin
   The talmudic tractate that treats the laws of betrothal.

8
tractate Ḥagigah Kaftor vaferaḥ
   is a Hebrew treatise on rabbinic aggadah by Yaakov bar Yitzchak Luzzato, Safed, ca. 1527–1587. In the Lemberg, 1891 edition, the tale is found on p. 66a. The talmudic tractate Ḥagigah deals with the laws of the festival sacrifices.

8
Aaron began to inquire
   It is unclear exactly what kind of inquiry Aaron is engaging in or who he is reading. Clearly it involves the philosophical speculation about first things and the problem of evil that was prevalent in the late seventeenth century.

9
qelipot
   Lit. shells or husks. The reference is to the complex notion in Lurianic Kabbalah of “the breaking of the vessels.”
Qelipot
signify the impurity and grossness that adhere to a person living in the unredeemed cosmos.

11
Behukotai
   The Torah portion comprising Leviticus 26:3–27:34, generally read during May.

12
melamed
   One who teaches Torah to children.

12
banned by the community
   The reference is to
niddui
, a temporary ban (as opposed to excommunication) that could be imposed by the rabbinic authorities to ostracize and discipline a recalcitrant member of the community. The practice goes back to rabbinic times but with modifications was applied by later Jewish communities. It has currency today only in ultra-Orthodox communities.

13
Fear no man
   Deuteronomy 1:17.

13
Rabbenu Tam’s tefillin
   Jewish law records a debate between Rashi (1040–1105) and his grandson, Rabbi Jacob Tam (usually referred to as Rabbenu Tam, ca. 1100–1171), over the order in which the parchments containing passages from the Torah are to be positioned inside the tefillin fitted on the head. Jews who are fastidious about the observance of this precept will don both Rashi and Rabbenu Tam tefillin on weekday mornings.

13
Mountains of Darkness
   See Babylonian Talmud tractate Tamid 32b: “The Tanna de-be Eliyahu taught: Gehinnom is above the firmament; some, however, say that is behind the Mountains of Darkness.”

14
Sabbath of Repentance
   The Sabbath of Repentance (Hebrew, Shabbat
Shuvah
) is the Sabbath between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Its name derives from the opening words of the prophetic reading that follows the Torah reading at the morning service: “
Shuvah yisra’el
” (Return, O Israel, to the LORD your God; Hosea 14:2.) It was customary on that Sabbath for the rabbi to present a major discourse or sermon on the theme of repentance to prepare the congregants for Yom Kippur.

15
Israel in the desert
   See Exodus 13:21ff., 40:34ff., Numbers 9:15–23.

16
Shas
   A Hebrew acronym for (1)
sh
omer
s
efarim
, which has the sense of book collector or bibliophile; and (2) “
sh
ishah
s
edarim
” (six orders or parts), a Hebrew designation for the Mishnah, which contains six volumes. The term is used more broadly to denote the many tomes that contain the elaboration of the Mishnah in the sixty-three tractates of the Babylonian Talmud.

16
Akdamut hymn
   Composed by Meir ben Isaac Nehorai (eleventh century, northern France). The ninety-line
piyyut
is read by Ashkenazic Jews at the morning service on Shavuot just prior to the reading from the Torah.

17
Gehinnom has seven names
   Babylonian Talmud, tractate ‘Eruvin 19a.

18
twentieth of Sivan
   The day on which the Jewish community of Nemirov was destroyed in the Cossack uprising of 1648. It came to be designated as a minor fast day to mark all the Khmelnitski massacres. In the Middle Ages Rabbi Jacob Tam designated the same date as a day of mourning for the Jews burned alive in the blood libel in Blois, France, in 1171.

18
Strypa
   A tributary of the Dniester river in Galicia, now western Ukraine, on which Buczacz is located.

18
tashlikh ritual
   The water used for making Passover matzah must be “water that has stood overnight,” such that the dough will be sufficiently cool so as not to make it ferment quickly. The water must be drawn by a Jew from a river or well, placed in a clean vessel, and allowed to stand overnight or at least for twelve hours.
Tashlikh
(casting away) is the ritual performed on Rosh Hashanah afternoon or in the days following, in which one’s sins are symbolically cast away into a naturally flowing body of water.

19
My beloved knocks
   Song of Songs 5:2.

19
for Thou art with me
   Psalm 23:4.