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2. The Master of Prayer: Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav
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67 2 The Master of Prayer Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav David G. Roskies The rabbi traveled to the zaddik and he cried: “Gevald, gevald! Help me, oh help me! Alas for those who are lost and are no longer found!” —Rabbi Nahman ben Simhah of Bratslav Stories, it was once believed, offer a temporary reprieve from death. So Scheherazade stayed her execution at the hands of the sultan with fantasy, suspense, and eroticism enough to last a thousand and one years. So too the seven noble women and three amorous men who fled the plague-ridden city of Florence in 1348. While they did nothing to alleviate the collective horror, they managed to stave off their own fear of death in a ten-day long contest of bawdy and irreverent tales. But six centuries after Boccaccio, when the poet Itzik Manger assembled a minyan of ten Holocaust survivors in an imaginary bunker, each Jew hailing from another part of Europe, he could finish no more than two stories of this modern Decameron. The muse simply failed in the face of such catastrophe.1 How much redemptive weight can stories bear? For Walter Benjamin, storytelling was the answer to modern angst. Storytelling conjured up a world of communal listening, of young and old alike sharing and shaping the collective memory of the folk; a world where each individual storyteller, according to Benjamin, was a master of local traditions, rooted in the soil, or a mercurial figure just returned from his travels. Whether a master of local or exotic tales, Benjamin’s storyteller inhabited a moral universe of “experience” rather than an alienated world of “facts.” The storyteller used “transparent layers” of personal and collective experience, of wisdom and practical knowledge gained over centuries, in much the same way as a craftman used the tools and techniques passed down from master to apprentice. By choosing the Russian storyteller Nikolai Leskov (1831– 1895) to occupy the center of this idyllic, preindustrial landscape, Benjamin implicitly repudiated the Nazi image of the past, complete with Teutonic knights and pagan bloodlust, and the Nazi vision of a racially purged Europe. As Benjamin tells it, the Slavic-born storytellers inherit the earth.2 Stories, however ephemeral and insubstantial, can stay the executioner’s hand or offer a humane countervision in a world gone mad. But stories have never 68 David G. Roskies enjoyed autonomy within the Jewish tradition. Live audiences of today, whether they sign up for “The Oral Tradition: Jewish Stories for Adults” at the 92nd Street Y in New York or whether they attend the Annual Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, have little in common with the orthodox practice of Jewish men studying sacred texts out loud. These men are not only heir to a learned tradition that devalued stories and storytelling but also are at work within a closed circle in which even the meaning of the tales is governed by strict rules of interpretation. The reason why one needs to learn the art of Jewish storytelling nowadays at community centers, conferences, and workshops is that stories were preserved—that is to say, recorded and revered—within the folio pages of a seyfer, a “sacred tome” in Hebrew-Aramaic, or not at all.3 The Torah was the Book of Life, the source of law and lore. So thoroughly did the rabbis accomplish their task of binding one to the other that the study of Halachah, the Jewish Law, was inconceivable without recourse to the lore of Aggadah, and vice versa. Some legal interpreters and commentators made free and frequent use of their favorite aggadic tales while others made do with a cryptic reference to folk traditions current in their own day. The Mishnah (codified around 250 c.e.) teaches that a man may not be alone with two women but a woman can be alone with two men. The Gemara (codified in 450 c.e.) brings a beraita (a source contemporary with the Mishnah) that contradicts the Mishnaic ruling. Abba Saul taught that when a child dies within thirty days of birth there is no need of a coffin. The dead child may be carried out in one’s bosom. But how many people should accompany the corpse? Abba Saul said, “Even by one man and two women!” The real argument, then, centers on human behavior in extremis. Abba Saul believes that in a period of intense mourning, man’s lustful passion is inactive while the rabbis of the Mishnah...