Authors: Norman Finkelstein

Tags: #History, #Jewish, #Religion, #General, #test

The Ritual of New Creation (2 page)

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Only radically atheistic ages can thoroughly understand what constitutes not the privilege but the originality of Jewish culture. If only they do not miss its poetry!
OLIVIER REVAULT D'ALLONNES

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for Ann and Steven

Page ix

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Postmodernism and the Jewish Literary Intellectual

2. Harold Bloom; Or, the Sage of New Haven

3. Gershom Scholem and Literary Criticism

4. The Struggle for Historicity: Cynthia Ozick's Fiction

5. Lost and Found: Hollander, Mandelbaum, and the Poetry of Exile

6. Judaism and the Rhetoric of Authority: George Steiner's Textual Homeland

7. Walter Benjamin, Messianism, and Marxism: A Midrash

117

8. Nostalgia and Futurity: Jewish Literature in Transition

127

Notes

141

Index

159

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Faculty Development Committee and the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences of Xavier University for giving me a faculty development grant and reduced teaching loads during the years 19871990, during which time
The Ritual of New Creation
was conceived and written. To Sarah Blacher Cohen, the editor of the Modern Jewish Literature and Culture series at SUNY Press, my deep appreciation for her ongoing interest in my work. A number of sections of the book originally appeared in periodicals, sometimes in earlier versions. Chapter 2 was published in
Critical Texts
as "The Sage of New Haven." Chapter 4 appeared in
LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory,
under the title "The Struggle for Historicity in the Fiction of Cynthia Ozick." Part of Chapter 5 appeared in
Pequod
as "The Book In Tatters." My thanks to the editors of these periodicals. Part of Chapter 1 was presented at a symposium held at Baltimore Hebrew University on ''The Culture of Jewish Modernity and the Post-Modern Turn"; I am grateful to Professor Alan Udoff for the invitation to speak at the symposium.

During the summer of 1990, while this book was nearing completion, I participated in the NEH summer seminar on Jewish-American literature at the University of Illinois-Chicago, directed by Professor Mark Krupnick. This experience provided me with the inspiration and ideas I needed to bring
The Rituals of New Creation
to its conclusionmany thanks to Professor Krupnick and my fellow participants.

Two cherished friends of long standing, one nearby and one far away, read, discussed, and often argued various parts of this book with me at length. On this occasion I extend my greetings and thanks to Ross Feld and Henry Weinfield. And finally, I am indebted to my wife Kathryn for her love and her support. I think she understands my relation to Jewish culture better than anyone else, myself included.

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I gratefully acknowledge the following for having given me permission to quote from published work:

David R. Godine, Publisher, for permission to quote from
Chelmaxioms,
by Allen Mandelbaum, copyright 1977 by Allen Mandelbaum.

John Hollander, for permission to quote from
Spectral Emanations,
copyright 1978 by John Hollander.

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for permission to quote from
Harp Lake
by John Hollander, copyright 1988 by John Hollander; and from
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
by Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens.

Persea Books Inc., for permission to quote from
The Poems of Paul Celan,
translated by Michael Hamburger, copyright 1988 by Michael Hamburger.

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Introduction

This book has grown slowly. Even before it was really born, these words were spoken over it: "We no longer know just what makes a book Jewish, or a person Jewish, because we have no authority to instruct us as to what is or is not Jewish thought."
¹I felt my Jewishness deeply, but in what ways did it manifest itself? My daily life was lived on a completely secular plane, although I remained attracted to the old customs and rituals as to a remote but still beautiful poem. Raised as a Conservative Jew, I had ceased to believe in God long before, yet I was a rather pious atheist and brooded over the space He had vacated. Harold Bloom's bold assertion challenged me to ask questions of thought and culture which I had previously put aside.

The paths down which I pursued my answers had already been set before me by cultural heritage, personal temperament, and professional training. They were textual paths, and they confirmed for me, as Bloom elsewhere argues, that it is "text-centeredness" rather than any "religious idea" which distinguishes the modern Jewish sensibility.
²While this notion, stated so bluntly, probably would be considered unacceptable (or at least inadequate) by most of those who seek for an understanding of Jewish identity, it has helped me nevertheless to imagine the role I wished to play as a reader, a critic, a commentator, as I began to focus on recent Jewish writing. For it is only in these capacities that I could situate myself at all in modern Jewish, and specifically modern Jewish-American life.

In an essay to which I return again and again, Gershom Scholem speaks of the development of rabbinic Judaism: "Not system but
commentary
is the legitimate form through which truth is approached."
³It is this faith in commentary which survives, however translated, the entrance of Judaism onto the modern world-stage. However remote modern Jewish intellectuals seem to grow from traditional concerns, and no matter how directly and violently history may impose itself upon them, their projects and pursuits are peculiarly mediated by the book. "In the book, the Jew himself becomes a

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book. In the Jew, the book itself becomes Jewish words. Because for him, the book is more than confirmation, it is the revelation of his Judaism."
⁴In these lines, Edmond Jabès, typically, does not specify the book he means. By now, the "secular" Jewish writera Bloom, a Jabèsthinks less of Scripture than of the processes through which Scripture has been disseminated. Regardless of what normative Judaism still has to offer, Walter Benjamin's commentary on Kafka remains paradigmatic for all Jewish intellectuals who cannot accept the old ways:


The gate to justice is learning. And yet Kafka does not dare attach to this learning the promises which tradition has attached to the study of the Torah. His assistants are sextons who have lost their house of prayer, his students are pupils who have lost the Holy Writ. Now there is nothing to support them on their "untrammeled, happy journey." ⁵

And so (to momentarily conflate Jabès and Benjamin), "the Jew bends over his book" and goes, however ironically, on his "untrammeled, happy journey." This book is the record of one such journey.

So in writing this book I returned to certain authors, certain texts, certain motifs again and again, and my readers surely will note such obsessive, such ecstatic repetitions. All commentary, as I have come to understand it, requires repetition; it produces Kierkegaard's "remembering forward" or Bloom's "misreading" through which commentators can, in the full paradox of the word, say something
original
. My title will serve as an example. Readers familiar with Scholem (one of those figures with whom I am most obsessed) will recognize in it the key terms from the title of his "Tradition and New Creation in the Ritual of the Kabbalists.'' In this essay, Scholem demonstrates how the Kabbalists subtly reworked the rituals of remembrance and sanctification which they found in rabbinic Judaism into transformative, magical rituals. "The existing ritual was not changed," Scholem tells us. "It was taken over more or less intact."
⁶The Kabbalists, given their passionate mythical intentions, followed out the sober, inherited rituals, but changed them from within. The result was a new creation that still accorded itself with the old ways.

The historical dialectics of religious thought and cultural attitude are subtle and full of irony: as Scholem argues, the messianic crisis of kabbalism, culminating in the Sabbatian debacle, may well have moved Judaism closer to the Haskalah and to its great receptivity

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