Man of Agnon

Can sarcasm, irony, surrealism, irreverence and Joycean wordplay with Talmudic references help bring us closer to Torah and to God? Can you turn the rabbinic tradition upside down and still honor it?

Is it possible to understand a religious message better when you play with it, challenge it and even mock it?

These are not questions that have often crossed my mind. Until, that is, I started hanging out with Rabbi Daniel Bouskila, spiritual leader of Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel in Westwood.

Bouskila believes there’s one Jew who can revolutionize the way Torah and Judaism are taught, and, in the process, bring a generation of Jews closer to their Judaism.

That one Jew is the late Israeli novelist and Nobel Prize-winner Shmuel Yosef Agnon.

Agnon (1888-1970) was a religious Jew and talmudic scholar who was raised in a shtetl in Ukraine and who, after moving to Israel in 1907, became a world-famous novelist and storyteller. He used traditional religious sources and folklore, played with sacred and secular texts, blended classic and rabbinic Hebrew and fused irony with religious storytelling to create a body of work unlike any other.

The problem, however, is that because Agnon was seen mostly as a literary figure, he was never embraced and given his due by the Torah and religious world. Bouskila, who fell in love with Agnon years ago while studying in Israel, would love to change that.

Over lunch at Shilo’s the other day, the rabbi spent several hours giving me examples of Agnon’s potential to revolutionize Torah study.

His argument came down to this: For people who get bored easily (most of us?), the best way to teach is to surprise, challenge and provoke.

For example, let’s say you want to teach the importance of not speaking lashon harah. You can go through the laws of the Talmud and Shulchan Aruch, analyze and debate the commentaries of the Chofetz Chaim and other great thinkers, study the relevant biblical stories, meditate on the mystical dimension of the mitzvah or give a passionate sermon on the ethics of avoiding hurtful language.

Bouskila has no particular problem with these traditional approaches. It’s just that for him, if you want the message to “really stick, ” there’s nothing like the magic of an Agnon story.

To help make his point, he read me an Agnon story of a woman who sits at home knitting on Shabbat instead of gossiping with her neighbors. One day, the great Moses happens to walk by her house and notices that God’s spirit hovers above the house. Moses is shocked that the woman is desecrating the Shabbat by violating one of the 39 prohibited Shabbat labors.

He instructs her to sit with her neighbors so that she should not violate the Shabbat, yet the following week, when he once again passes by her house, he notices that God’s spirit no longer hovers above the house. Moses understands that her original practice was better, so he instructs her to return to it.

Agnon, a Torah-observant Jew his whole life, had the chutzpah to challenge the notion of “violating the Shabbat,” and through the character of Moses — God’s lawgiver, no less — he suggests that idle gossip is more of a legal violation than the other 39 prohibitions. He concludes his story by mocking rabbinic authorities who concocted a cover-up to protect Moses’ reputation.

Amazingly, Bouskila says, even though the story challenges halachah, a reader can walk away with a deeper appreciation for both the holiness of Shabbat and the importance of avoiding lashon harah.

Because Agnon’s stories are so fertile and real and often surreal, they can touch you in a way that a typical Torah class cannot. And because the stories are textured with hard-core talmudic elements, they have enough Torah credibility to be taken seriously. The resulting brew is like midrash on steroids: it plays with your mind, sneaks up on you, tantalizes you, enchants you, provokes you, and, finally, invites you to challenge away.

After all that, Bouskila says, the reader begins to own the message.

At a Torah salon at my house recently, Bouskila took us through Agnon’s “Fable of the Goat,” a short story that touched on the themes of intergenerational conflict and the yearning to return to Zion. The story was only three pages long, but we debated its meaning for hours. After a while, the story became ours.

Bouskila, who’s written about Agnon in The Jewish Journal in the past, has hundreds of these rich Agnon stories in his repertoire. The stories are his ammunition to spark a greater interest in Judaism — both with his flock and the community at large. He’d love to publish an anthology one day that will connect specific Agnon stories to each week’s Torah portion and make Agnon “an engaging and thought-provoking guest at every Shabbat table.”

He’s banking on the notion that a lot of Jews are not turned on by the traditional ways of the religious trade — the preachy classes and sermons, the easy stories, the mitzvah pitch, the talmudic micro-debates, etc. — and that it’s time to try a new, provocative and literary approach to Torah studies that can open up and energize Jewish minds.

At the very least, he’ll have a ball trying.

David Suissa, an advertising executive, is founder of OLAM magazine, Meals4Israel.com and Ads4Israel.com. He can be reached at {encode=”dsuissa@olam.org” title=”dsuissa@olam.org”}.