Folktales of the Jews, Volume 2: Tales from Eastern Europe

59. The Elderly Cantor (IFA 6655)

59 The Elderly Cantor T O L D B Y M O T E L A D A R When the Holy One, Blessed Be He, created the world, He assembled all His creatures and assigned them their allotted life span—forty years to each—as well as their tasks on earth. When it was the horse’s turn, that animal asked the Holy One, Blessed Be He, “What will my labor be?” “Human beings will ride on you,” replied the Holy One, Blessed Be He. “If that is what I have been created for,” replied the horse, “twenty years are enough.” After the horse came the donkey. He too asked what his task would be. When he heard that he would carry heavy loads on his back he, too, asked to be exempted from twenty years of such toil. Finally the cantor entered and asked what his mission would be. The Holy One, Blessed Be He, replied, “Yours will be a clean and easy job— singing melodiously.” When the cantor heard this he asked that his years be augmented. What did the Holy One, Blessed Be He, do? He gave him the twenty years returned by the horse and the twenty years returned by the donkey. And this is why until the age of forty a cantor sings with the voice of a cantor. But when he passes forty he starts neighing like a horse—and eventually he brays like a donkey! COMMENTARY FOR TALE 59 (IFA 6655) Written down from memory in 1965 by Motel Adar, a member of Bet ha-Shittah, originally from Poland.1 Cultural, Historical, and Literary Background In eastern European Jewish societies, the community leaders and religious functionaries , known as klei kodesh (instruments of worship), have often been the target of social criticism, satire, and humor.2 Among these community leaders, the cantors are vulnerable to such attacks because their capacity to fulfill their role declines as they grew older. As much as this tale appears to specifically target a role in the Jewish community , it has roots in classic fable literature. The Aesopic tradition includes two distinct fables that present two different narrative patterns involving the attribution of animal qualities to human beings through transformation and through reallocation of the life span. Transformation According to the transformation fable3 —which is included in the manuscript known as Augustana, Recenssion Ia (probably from the second century C.E.)4 —at the command of Zeus, Prometheus, who had created too many animals, transformed some of them into human beings. These people, however, retained in their personalities their animal characteristics. In Jewish tradition, this theme pertains mainly to women, in stories of the daughters of Noah, for example (see tale IFA 660 [vol. 1, no. 33]). Reallocation of the Life Span In the second Aesop’s fable, the horse, the ox, and the dog give man a portion of their respective life allotment in gratitude for his hospitality.5 Therefore, in his youth, man is haughty in spirit; in his middle years, he works like an ox; and in his old age, he has the life of a dog. This tale has a wide European and Asian distribution. The Brothers Grimm included in their collection a version that was recorded from oral tradition.6 Comparative information about this tale is available.7 The course of transmission of this tale is rather enigmatic. Bolte and Polivka8 cited, following Köhler,9 the works of the Spanish Renaissance writer Jayme Juan Falco (1522–1594) as the earliest European documentation of this fable. So far, subsequent scholarship has not uncovered any other medieval renditions of this story. Unless new evidence becomes available, it appears that neither Jewish nor non-Jewish medieval fabulists included this tale in their collections, and the story passed from antiquities to the dawn of the modern period through oral transmission.10  428  Folktales of the Jews: Volume 2  428  Folktales of the Jews: Volume 2 59 / The Elderly Cantor  429  In the recorded oral versions from Jewish tradition, fables of reallocation of life years from animals to humans center on the figure of the congregation cantor , as in the present tale.11 Human Life Stages The metaphoric comparison of the stages of human life to animal behavior also occurs in Jewish tradition independently of the theme of the reallocation of the life span. Thus within the talmudic-midrashic and medieval literature, the following comparisons...