Monday, February 25, 2008
Shmuel and the Tallis
The Festival of Ephemera has been… concluded? revoked? let’s say, cancelled for lack of interest - which is as it should be. Ephemera are entitled to no greater indulgence than I have already afforded them. Let us now briefly pause, before I get back to poop jokes and longwinded tales of events fascinating only to myself, for a moment of reflection. I’ve done writ a story and I’m not sure why, but you are going to get it now and get it good. Or well. I’m not feeling terribly adverbial at present.
Background: I went recently to a lovely bar mitzvah ceremony, which is a standard sabbath morning service at which a youth - in this case, my sterling nephew Aaron - is inducted into the jewish community by leading the congregation in key parts of the ceremony. Afterwards, but before the congregation descends upon the thimbles of concord grape juice and the tables groaning with kugel and lox and pound cake awaiting in the activities hall, the celebrant is traditionally given a variety of symbolic gifts. There’s a wine cup from the sisterhood, a certificate of tree-planting by the youth group, a prayerbook from the rabbi and, from the parents, a tallis - a prayer shawl. As Aaron received his tallis I was wearing one given to me by my own father, who was sitting just across the aisle from me. It all started me thinking and in the end I wrote this story. I considered loading it up with hyperlinks for those unfamiliar with the jargon, but then I decided it was too late and anyway why should I deprive you the thrill of internet research? In that spirit of selfishness and verbosity, I am pleased to unload:
Shmuel and the Tallis
There’s a storied (!) tradition of the interview at heaven’s gate, in which an angel or some such numinousity queries one of the newly dead about why paradise is, or is not, the appropriate destination for that particular soul. Usually the interlocutor is St Peter but there’s no reason jewish yarnspinners can’t work this genre too. And thus I’m inspired to try one myself:
When Shmuel was laid out, it was, consistent with everything that had led him to that moment, with tradition. The coffin was pinewood, untreated, fastened with pegs. Internment was swift, and prior thereto his corporal remains were never left unattended. And what he wore, inside that plain pine box that he so briefly occupied above-ground, was a plain white shroud, over which was draped a tattered white shawl woven through with stripes of blue and fringed at three corners with tassels of four threads wrapped and bound in knots by a fifth. (The fourth tassel had been cut when the garment had been placed on the body.) Shmuel had received this tallis 57 years previously, and had worn it religiously for every holy day and torah reading thenceforward. He had davened in it and prostrated himself in it on Yom Kippur; he’d shielded his eyes with it and used it to contain the light of the Torah whenever he was called up to read from the scrolls. It had aged well, as he had himself, but they had both finally reached the end of their respective roads a little threadbare and ragged. He had even thought, the preceding Saturday morning, as he’d pulled it from its worn velvet bag for the last time, that perhaps it had served him for as long as it would be able. The old tallis had seen better days. One does not dismiss the services of a lifelong companion so easily, however, and so Shmuel had made no plans to get a new tallis even when he noticed that his rheumy eyes could see right through his old one. He just thought that the end of an era was upon him. Three days later, he woke up dead.
“So, I’m dead already?,” he asked himself. He was passing through darkness. He could see nothing, felt nothing, but sensed his movement away from one realm and toward another. His mind was untroubled; his body, nonexistent. “So,” he reflexively re-inquired into the stygian void, “this is death?”
“Of course it’s death.” The response was felt, not heard; apprehended, not perceived. “What else would it be? A chometz hunt?”
Shmuel felt silly for questioning the obvious, but then again, it was his way. He was an asker of questions, even in answer to other questions. He had a few good ones in mind right now but he wasn’t sure how to ask them.
“You’re wondering what’s happening, nu?” The entity’s inquiry pervaded him like thunder pervades falling rain, filling its interstices and shuddering its substance. The silence that ensued was so awfully silent that Shmuel’s answer blurted itself out of its own accord: “Yes, I’m wondering.” All that seemed clear at this point to him was that any further inquiry would be, at best, delaying - at worst, impertinent. Any understanding he might eventually be granted would be on terms over which he would have no control whatsoever. He resigned himself to answering, for once.
“Do you think this is heaven?” The question opened up within him like a budding flower.
“I don’t know. It’s not what I would have expected. It feels like an afterlife. From heaven, I don’t know.”
“You’re a wise man, Shmuel. The real question, though, is not if you’re wise, nu?”
“No?”
“No. The important thing is not wisdom, but righteousness. So look at yourself, Shmuel. Do you see a righteous man, or just a clever one?”
Looking at anything had heretofore been an impossibility beyond comprehension in the blackness of the buried coffin. But upon the entity’s suggestion, a visual image presented itself to Shmuel, one that he immediately recognized.
“Oh dear,” he thought out loud, “what’s happened to my tallis?” For indeed, the vision occurring to him was not that of the gleaming linen shawl he’d seen each time he’d put it on in the many years immediately elapsed. This tallis, though indisputably the same one, was dingy, tattered and stained; the tzitzis dangling from all four corners hardly more than frayed threads. The satin atarah at the neck, inscribed with the blessing he always recited but never actually needed to read, was dull and illegible. A conscientious cook wouldn’t have used that shmata to dry a soup pot.
“So, it’s your tallis?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“What have you to be sorry about?”
“Look at it. Look at it! It’s hardly recognizable! I can’t believe I wore it to shul, a thing like that. It’s a shondeh. I meant no disrespect.... I guess it happened so gradually I never noticed. I just -”
“Enough. It’s a tallis. You wore it for your entire lifetime as a man of the community. So tell me: Why?”
“Why?”
“Why did you wear this tallis?”
“It was ordained! We all wear it! It reminds us of birthright and duty! It honors the almighty! What do you mean, why?”
“So, you’re saying, if you had no tallis, you would have neglected your duty? Deprived of this piece of cloth, you would have spent your days dishonoring the holy name? If you never had a tallis to wrap around your bony shoulders, how long would it have taken you to disown your birthright?”
Shmuel was starting to forget his place in this conversation. “What kind of a question is that? What do you think? Never! My birthright and my duty are woven through my being like the blue threads woven through this garment - even though they’re barely blue anymore!”
A moment was granted for him to regain himself before he was then asked: “So look back on your life - on the men you met. Did you ever meet a man who forsook his duty, who lived in disrespect of hashem?”
Shmuel considered the unfurled scroll of his life and answered, “Yes. Such men are everywhere. Well, maybe not here, but everywhere else.”
“Indeed. And that is why you are here, now, engaging in this polemic. There are two kinds of people who wear the tallis: those who never need to be reminded why they wear it, and those who can never be reminded no matter how often they wear it. You, Shmuel, are one who does not need reminding.”
“Just those two types? For all people? No middle group?”
“Darkness was created, and light. There was no need to create twilight or dimness or a gentle auroral glow. These all consist of the two extremes, in different relations. And thus it is with persons, too - there are good ones and ones who forsake their goodness, and though these extremes occur in innumerably blended degrees, each of you falls to one side or the other. And thus, your tallis you wore not for the eternal - the eternal is untroubled by individual practice. Neither did you wear it for yourself, for its knots and tassels and stripes are superfluous to the heart upon which its lessons are already inscribed. Rather, you wore this tallis as a beacon to those around you who might be induced to blend a little more light into their own darkness. That’s why it looks to you so worn and dirty. You see it dimly because of all the light it has bestowed on others, and it appears stained to you because it bears all the stains it helped erase from other souls. To me, you understand, it is infinitely radiant and impeccably maintained.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“I’m glad to let you know. And now, you are bade a task: unravel your tallis. Loosen the knots, pluck free the fringes, tease apart the threads of the fabric. Continue until you are left with a bundle of fibers and a satin strip, and then I will return to you.”
A lonesomeness unlike any he had ever conceived fell upon Shmuel; time was meaningless to him as he confronted his task. Fingerless, incorporeal, he didn’t even know how to start. Eventually his concentration focused on one tassel, one knotted bundle of string. It spoke to him of the first commandment, and he listened to it with all his heart. He dwelt upon it until it dwelled within him and he absorbed it like bodies are absorbed into the earth. Understanding came to him at last, and as it did so, the knot became not. Where once there’d been a firmly tied bundle, now there was a loose grouping of strings. Shmuel turned to the next knot, and the next commandment. He let the lesson arise from within him and fill his being. The strings came loose. In this way, mitzvah by mitzvah, he deconstructed his tallis.
When he was done all that remained was a jumbled mass of thread and twine, linen fibers kinked from interwoven years. He sensed the entity’s return, replacing an infinite void with a sense of impossible fullness. “You’ve left nothing but threads.”
“It was a good tallis.”
“No, the goodness was yours; you’ve just reclaimed it. You had poured so much of your soul into that tallis, you deserved to get some of it back. We will leave the fibers to rest with your bones. But now, congratulations and let’s get going. Someone would like to ask you a question or two.”
good enough for govt work, anyway, and it’s past my bedtime. dentist tomorrow, then a big heavy week of big heavy work. i’ll make up for it with less weighty posts. till then, take it easy. it’s not as easy as it sounds.