Resumo de The Tale Of The Scribe

B?H
The Tale of the Scribe

(Abstract)

As in the solace of waking from a tender sleep that has brought a dream of home, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, the scriptural architect of Modern Hebrew Literature, unveils a delicate, age old tapestry overlaying the portrait of Raphael the scribe and his wife, Miriam. The tale embroidered by the text is the prayer shawl of piety that enwraps the couple?s life. The underlying textile threads of Agnon?s literary loom, however, weave more varied, distorted shades of meaning.
Raphael is dedicated to the holy, vital task of writing the words of G-d on Torah scrolls, tefillin, and mezuzot. Although he works alone, his consecrated ritual of personal preparation and meticulous scribal art preserve the link and sustain the valid reality of the community?s past and present.
Raphael?s wife, humble, devout and modest, is just as dedicated to the reverent, measured ceremonial of their home so that her husband may devote himself entirely to his work. Yet, within the regimen of a Jewish wife?s responsibilities maintaining a religious household, in the endeavors of her own spiritual sphere, Miriam ceaselessly beseeches G-d for children. She is like a sea without a shore.
Although her husband tries to console her, the threads in their ascetic fabric of life have worn thin and become frayed. They have discolored over time the robust richness of the original, homespun texture of marriage and first love, and unraveled a tear in the material of living itself. Raphael?s complete absorption in his sacred devotion precludes his equally requisite obligation as a husband for his wife?s conjugal rights, and, ironically, the Ashkenazic mystical tendency of abstinence in ecstatic holiness sows the seeds of its own undoing in the real life of human beings. Here, that ecstasy prone to tragic excess puts the validity of tradition itself in question.
Agnon, a writer like his protagonist, is also a master weaver. Irony, a disturbing sprite carding the wool, shuttles the warp and woof of his textual composition. In Hebrew, Raphael means ?G-d heals,? and by inference, that he might have brought healing and wholeness to their marriage bereft of a future without children. In Jewish thought, Torah study is likened to a garden, teachers and students to gardeners, letters and words to roses, and Torah scrolls themselves to bouquets. It is telling that Raphael, whose whole life was Torah, never brought one to his wife, Miriam, whose whole life was her husband, Raphael the Scribe.

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