Free The Parable and Its Lesson: A Novella by S. Y. Agnon

write halakhic opinions.” These last words, “to those who write halakhic opinions,” I never heard directly from our Master but only from reputable people who can be relied upon never to make statements they have not heard.
    The long and the short of it is that the three compartments of Gehinnom that I have noted I saw while completely awake and not in a dream. The same goes for the judgments visited upon all who talk during the prayers and the Torah reading. How do we account for the severity of the punishment? From the following parable that I once heard from our Master. The time and place when he told it to us are worth noting.
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    On the twentieth of Sivan, about an hour and a half after the morning service, the whole town went to the cemetery—old men and children, young men and women, even nursing mothers with their infants. Some went to visit their relatives’ graves, some to entreat the dead to pray for the living.
    That year the local citizenry did not harass us. Even those who had stolen our houses and then occupied them did not try to humiliate us as in former years, when they would stand in front of our houses and mock us with tenderhearted words. “Are you all hungry from the fast? Here, have some pork. Are you thirsty? Here, have some warm blood. Come, dear neighbors, take your fill.” That year the opposite happened. Many of them brought out water for us to wash our hands when we left the cemetery. We washed with that water, and when we got back to town everyone washed again. Some of us suggested that the world was changing for the better; others conjectured that the Gentiles were leaving us alone because they were getting tired of murdering us. Then there were others who opined that we Jews had fallen so much that we were no longer worthy of Esau’s efforts to victimize us.
    In years past our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, eulogized the victims of the abominable Khmelnitski, may his name be blotted out, and all others martyred by the Gentiles, in the cemetery. But when the cemetery was completely filled with graves and people were so crammed together all around that a kohen was once jostled into an area forbidden to kohanim, our Master moved the site of his eulogy to the Great Synagogue and delivered it there after the afternoon service. In his last years, our Master stopped going to the cemetery altogether. He is reported to have said, “Why do I need to go to the dead when they are coming toward me?” What he probably meant was that Buczacz had become one big Jewish cemetery; wherever you started to dig you would find Jewish bodies. He had already begun wondering whether a kohen could even live in Buczacz. I myself never heard him actually say that, but I believe those who say that he did, and I have no reason to doubt them. Whenever our Master was uncertain about a halakhic matter, he did not rest until he clarified it.
    When we returned from the cemetery we all went to the Great Synagogue for the afternoon service. As on all public fasts, we read from the Torah the passage beginning And Moses implored the Lord , and then the haftarah from the prophets. Our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, was called up to recite the haftarah and he chanted it beautifully. When he finished with the words Thus declares the Lord God who gathers the dispersed of Israel; I will gather still more to those already gathered , I was quite certain that Isaiah’s prophecy was about to be realized, and I had the idea that our Master thought so too.
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    When he had concluded the blessings after the haftarah, our Master picked up the prayer book and chanted the prayer “O Merciful God” for the raising up of the soul of his master, the holy Rabbi Yeḥiel Mikhl of the great town of Nemirov, who was slain for the sanctification of the Divine Name. When he reached the stanza
Precious on earth and in regions supernal,
To us mortal men and to God the eternal;
Proud head