The Ritual of New Creation (15 page)

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in Scholem's sense of the term. Bloom's own assessment of Scholem deserves to be quoted at length:

Scholem's massive achievement can be judged as being unique in modern humanistic scholarship, for he has made himself indispensable to all rational students of his subject. Kabbalah is essentially a
vision of belatedness,
and I would praise Scholem above all for having transformed his own belatedness, in regard to the necessary anteriority of his own ancient subject, into a surprising earliness. Kabbalah is an extraordinary body of rhetoric, and indeed is a theory of rhetoric, and Scholem's formidable achievement is as much rhetorical or figurative as it is historical. In this deep sense, Scholem has written a truly Kabbalistic account of Kabbalah, and more than any other modern scholar, working on a comparable scale, he has been wholly adequate to his great subject. He has the same relation to the texts he has edited and written commentaries upon that a later poet like John Milton had to the earlier poets he absorbed and, in some ways, transcended. Scholem is a Miltonic figure in modern scholarship, and deserves to be honored as such.
⁹

As is his wont, Bloom here transforms Scholem into his own precursor; that is, he is creatively misreading Scholem as part of his effort to establish himself as a strong critic in Scholem's line. Still, I think Bloom is correct to speak of Scholem in Miltonic terms and to indicate that Scholem's analysis of Kabbalah renders it accessible to us in terms of rhetoric or figuration as well as history. It is in the field of rhetoric that Bloom has made the most notable use of Scholem, recapitulating the older scholar's numerous accounts of the Lurianic system so that it becomes one set of coordinates for Bloom's huge map of misreading. Kabbalistic adumbrations of movements within the Godhead become analogous to rhetorical turns within the poem, as well as Freudian psychic defenses and "revisionary ratios" between earlier and later poet. Arguably, Bloom
de-historicizes
Scholem's interpretation of Kabbalah, since Scholem always takes pains to search out the connections between mystical developments within a textual tradition and specific circumstances of Jewish communities in which they arise. Thus the Lurianic Kabbalah and its emphasis on "catastrophe creation" cannot be fully understood without reference to the town of Safed and its role as a haven after the traumatic expulsion

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of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Bloom is certainly aware of this aspect of Scholem's research, but he swerves from it by arguing that the Kabbalists, spurred on by the anxiety of influence, formulated (or discovered) a paradigm for creative misreading, a psychology and a rhetoric that may be found throughout subsequent Western literary traditions. In Bloom's appropriation of Scholem's work, psychic and textual structures, always more amenable to speculative theory, takes precedence over historical spadework.

It is doubly ironic then that critics must follow Bloom's lead in dealing with Scholem while knowing full well that even to attempt to appropriate Scholem's efforts for literary purposes is to misinterpret or subvert them. But this is itself a lesson to be drawn from Scholem's historiographyat least according to Bloom. Cynthia Ozick reports that Scholem's response to Bloom's borrowings was simply to quip "It's a free country."
¹⁰At the risk of making too much of an offhand remark, I believe that this is most revealing:
freedom,
while not a candidate for Alter's list of key words in Scholem's lexicon, is still a crucial concept in his analyses of texts and events. Freedom manifests itself as a desire for creative divergence and novelty in literary expression or religious experience. Its antithesis is an equally strong psychohistorical power, conservative, entrenched, resistant to innovation and suspicious of enthusiasm. But as Scholem declares in "Religious Authority and Mysticism," "A mystic may substitute his own opinion for that prescribed by authority, precisely because his opinion seems to stem from the very same authority."
¹¹The result, as Derrida would observe, is a perpetually decentered structure in which the source of authority can never be fully located, but instead calls continually for interpretationthe signature of exile. But unlike Derrida, Scholem (and his ephebe Bloom) cannot endorse freedom as post-humanist play. Exile remains exile, a painful "ontotheological" lack for which there is no adequate compensation, including the free play of interpretation. Thus freedom is compelled to contend with authority at every observable historical juncture.

One of Scholem's most crucial insights concerns the form such struggles take in religiousand textualtraditions. Because of his dialectical perspective, Scholem tends to see developments in these traditions as manifestations of the antitheses we have just identified. In "Religious Authority and Mysticism," he poses the textual aspect of the problem as follows: "where the authority is set forth in holy scripture, in documents bearing a character of revelation, the question

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arises: what is the attitude of mysticism toward such a historically constituted authority?"
¹²Scholem's answer demonstrates the simultaneous preservation of authority and assimilation of novelty as the mystic reinterprets the sacred texts. Because of the ancient Jewish view of commentary, which is dependent upon the belief in the revealed scripture's infinite capacity to contain all subsequent interpretations, even the most revolutionary of the mystic's new formulations can be accepted as authoritative by adherents to the faith, despite the obvious appearance of innovation to the investigative historian.

In "Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism," Scholem describes the historical growth of tradition (Oral Torah) as it emerges from the original content of revelation (Written Torah). The expanding interpretative tradition, "the medium through which creative forces express themselves," gradually enters into a process of canonization, but not without serious consequences:

Tradition is not simply the totality of that which the community possesses as its cultural patrimony and which it bequeathes to its posterity; it is a specific selection from this patrimony, which is elevated and garbed with religious authority. It proclaims certain things, sentences, or insights to be Torah, and thus connects them with the relation. In the process, the original meaning of revelation as a unique, positively established, and clearly delineated realm of propositions is put in doubtand thus a development as fruitful as it is unpredictable begins which is highly instructive for the religious problematic of the concept of tradition.
¹³

When the creative forces of interpretation become so strong as to vie with the original authority of revelation, Oral Torah comes to be regarded as a preexistent component of Written Torah; thus "revelation comprises everything that will ever be legitimately offered to interpret in meaning."
¹⁴The extraordinary freedom of interpretation demonstrated by one generation of writers after the next is licensed by what Scholem calls "a historical construction whose fictitious character cannot be doubted but which serves the believing mind as a crutch of external authentication."
¹⁵This canonic procedure in effect resolves the contradiction between textual authority and interpretative freedom. Within the verbal community, commentary is seen as a dualistic practice that is simultaneously reverential and presumptuous

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in its relation to the canon, eternally authoritative and historically contingent, measured and spontaneous.

The kabbalistic view of the Written Torah as comprised of an infinite, braided texture based on the absolute name of God raises this dialectic of interpretive freedom and canonic authority to a point of mystical sublimityand of even greater historical moment. The original word of God is "meaningless" or incomprehensible; revelation is unique because "it is the very essence of interpretability."
¹⁶Canonic authority as it is conventionally understood does not exist in Kabbalah. As Scholem declares:


Tradition undergoes changes with the times, new facets of its meaning shining forth and lighting its way. Tradition, according to its mystical sense, is Oral Torah, precisely because every stabilization in the text would hinder and destroy the infinitely moving, the constantly progressing and unfolding element within it, which would otherwise become petrified. ¹⁷

"Canon formation" becomes as much a matter of radical change as authoritative maintenance. Indeed, at its furthest extreme, Kabbalah asserts that the Ur-Torah, composed by God before Creation in letters of black fire upon white fire, never really finds expression on earth except through an infinite process of mediation: what we know as Written Torah is actually Oral Torah, the mediation of a truth that will remain forever esoteric, incapable of revelation as such.
¹⁸The monumental text remains with God; tradition from its beginning is a sequence of creative tropes upon the hidden Word.

This belief in the textual duality of Scripturewhat a modern theorist might call a literary ideologyhas a profound affect upon religious thinkers who find themselves in this tradition, and may even shed some light on the situation in which critics find themselves today. As Scholem says of Isaac Luria, whose revisionary Kabbalah spread widely during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:


His whole attitude was decidedly conservative. He fully accepted the established religious authority, which indeed he undertook to reinforce by enhancing its stature and giving it deeper meaning. Nevertheless, the ideas he employed in this seemingly conservative task were utterly new and seem doubly daring in their conservative context. And yet, for all their

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