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

ben Kalonymus. The proof is that the next day he sent me to Reb Akiva Shas to borrow the talmudic tractate Zevaḥim, and Reb Akiva asked me if I had ever seen our Master study tractate Gittin. I asked him why he wanted to know that and he told me that the name Kalonymus is mentioned in one of Rashi’s comments in tractate Zevaḥim and in a Tosafot note in tractate Gittin. Reb Akiva showed me the place where Rashi writes “This is how the excellent Rabbi Meshullam ben Kalonymus explained it in the hour of his death.” He did not point out to me the note in the Tosafot. When I related this matter in the beit midrash, they remarked that it was odd that Reb Akiva forgot to include the note in the Tosafot at the end of tractate Menaḥot in which Rabbi Meshullam is mentioned.
    I would mention here in passing that whenever our Master would borrow a volume of the Talmud, he would send as security the Sabbath candelabrum. He had both simple and symbolic reasons for doing this, the simple one being that on Friday when he would be arranging the Sabbath candles he would be reminded to return the Talmud volume, and the symbolic one because Torah is compared to light, and just as a candelabrum supports the light, so the Talmud is the basis on which the Torah rests.
    More to the point, I should also note that just before the afternoon service our Master instructed that it be announced that whoever was feeling weak should go home and eat, particularly the sick and women who were pregnant or nursing, all of whom were obligated to break their fast immediately without apology. He had already sent a child who had not yet studied Talmud to go and tell the rabbi’s wife to inform Zlateh that he was ordering her to eat and drink. He ordered me to send that same instruction to my wife. Our Master knew exactly when to do this because she was then right at the point of fainting from the fast. It was no wonder that she was fasting. How could a woman who had witnessed the deaths of her father, her mother, her three brothers, and her four sisters, take pleasure from food and drink on that day? But since our Master had commanded her to break her fast, she did eat something. So great was the respect for our Master, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, that even tiny babies in their mothers’ wombs obeyed him. Tiny babies is an exaggeration, but certainly women and infants.
    After that our Master went up to the Holy Ark, with Reb Akiva Shas and Reb Meshullam supporting him on either side. Our Master kissed the curtain in front of the Ark and the doors, and paused for a few moments. Then he began his eulogy for the martyrs of the pogroms of 1648 and 1649, all the righteous and saintly ones who met cruel and gruesome deaths, and all the other men, women, and infants, children of the Holy One, who sanctified His great Name through their deaths. He recited the names of the towns and villages that had been destroyed, and there was not one town or hamlet that he did not mention, and there was not one community of which he did not enumerate the number of Jews killed in it. Some thought that our Master used some biblical verses as a memory aid, but which verses they were was anyone’s guess. Some thought they were from the first chapter of the prophet Malachi, but exactly which verses they were was, again, anyone’s guess. I always thought they were from the book of Malachi because on the eve of the twentieth of Sivan I found our Master sitting by himself and reciting aloud the verse “ Remember the Torah of My servant Moses . . .”
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    As the shamash was narrating, the sun glowed crimson from the radiance of the flowers and the red hot stones of Eden, in accordance with the explanation of the reddening of the sun in the late afternoon in the Book of the Angel Razi’el. And so as the sun grew crimson, the time for the afternoon service arrived, and everyone went and washed their hands and recited the passage about the daily sacrificial