The Ritual of New Creation (3 page)

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to the forces of modernity. In modern times, ritual and the investment of faith which stood behind it have been cast radically into doubt. If ritual remains, it is preserved in the act of new creation itself. Contemporary Jewish writers, dwelling all their lives in a secular world but never quite at home (since when have Jews felt at home?), know only that in their books they perform this ritual of new creation. They honor the past
through
rupture because, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi tells us, their past has been a tradition
of
rupture.
⁷Commentary, which becomes virtually synonymous with "Jewish writing," both records and enacts these longstanding conditions.

The themes which recur and overlap throughout this book are all related to what I have come to call the "modern ritual of new creation." To the extent that they are identifiable as distinct entities, I can name three: (1) the matter of secular literary activity; (2) the matter of "wandering meaning"; (3) the matter of loss and exile. These issues tend to resist narratization. Although they can be associated with the various writers whom I address directly (such as Bloom, Steiner, or Benjamin) or to whom I sometimes refer (such as Yerushalmi, Revault D'Allonnes, or Derrida), they most often appear at the borders of my discussions, insistently drawing my attention from specific authors and texts to larger cultural concerns. They constitute the essential subject matter of a work which is, paradoxically, deeply vexed by the very notion that there are essences in writing at all.

The first of my themes completely pervades the book and concerns every writer under discussion herein. The more I read modern Jewish authors, the more dubious I find the conventional polarity of religious and secular writing. Kafka was probably the first such author to fully articulate the problem, as in his famous diary entry concerning writing as an "assault on the last earthly frontier" which "might easily have developed into a new secret doctrine, a Kabbalah."
⁸Bloom, meditating on this passage and its probable influence on Scholem, concludes by predicting that Kafka will become "the severest and most harassing of the belated sages of what will yet become the Jewish cultural tradition of the future."
⁹Such a conflation of terms and traditions ("severest and most harassing" is taken from Wallace Stevens) underscores Bloom's declaration that ''What I find incoherent is the judgment that some authentic literary art is more sacred or more secular than some other."
¹⁰The literary imagination escapes or resists these supposedly antithetical categories, or as a deconstructionist would say, collapses this binary opposition.

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It is just through these troubled oppositions and resistances that "the Jewish cultural tradition of the future" is being born. Even writers with what appear to be more normative orientations cannot avoid this issue. George Steiner, for example, insists that meaning is dependent upon "a wager on transcendence" which he believes to stand behind the production and reception of all works of art.
¹¹By calling in "our debts to theology and the metaphysics of presence,"
¹²Steiner challenges us to reconsider just what occurs when we enter the ineluctably ritualistic sphere of creativity. The need for this reconsideration is especially pertinent for Jewish textuality: the traditional Jewish emphasis on writing, which survives (and participates in) the crisis of modernity, continually reminds us of the
contractual
relationship of the Jews to God, even when that contract appears to be void.
¹³Jewish writing, to move from Steiner's terms to those of Cynthia Ozick, "touches on the liturgical.'' For like Steiner (although she argues with him), Ozick insists that a religious sensibility is always at work in significant literary production. Indeed, Ozick goes so far as to say that "The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew. This is especially true for makers of literature."
¹⁴This statement is valuable because it is blunt and to the point, but in regard to literature at least, it merely returns us to our original problem: how can we describe that quality we call "Jewish" which we find in a Jewish writer?
¹⁵If it is not a matter of a specific religious propensity (and I, for one, do not believe it is, since I maintain the validity of the notion of the secular Jew), then what aspects of Jewish writing must we investigate?

This leads me to my second theme, that of "wandering meaning," a term which I borrow once more from Bloom, specifically from his discussion of Revault d'Allonnes and Freud. Seeing in the Freudian transference "a synecdoche for all the Jewish metamorphoses of exile into achievement," Bloom then makes an important generalization: "The wandering people has taught itself and others the lesson of wandering meaning, a wandering that has compelled a multitude of changes in the modes of interpretation available to the West."
¹⁶I am deeply impressed by the endurance and applicability of this notion, which once again strikes me as the kind of idea that is more pertinent to modern Jewish writing than any normative belief. Wandering and transformation imply process, movement, change of state. But how far can Jewish writing wander, to what extent can it be transformed, before we say it has gone too far, it has changed too much?

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A range of answers emerges. At one extreme we find an author like Jabès with his notorious conflation of writing and Judaism as "
one and the same waiting, one and the same hope, one and the same wearing down
."
¹⁷Jabès believes that (at least for himself) the process of writing is completely congruent with the process of discovering Jewish self-identity. And because he defines modernity as openness, which he names in turn the basic condition of the book, Jewish identity remains open and individualized.
¹⁸Jabès's chain of metonymsmodernity-openness-the book-the writer-the Jewenacts the processes of wandering and transformation. In one of his essays on Jabès, Derrida links such writing to one of the central insights of deconstruction:

Just as there is a negative theology, there is a negative atheology. An accomplice of the former, it still pronounces the absence of a center, when it is play that should be affirmed. But is not the desire for a center, as a function of play itself, the indestructible itself? And in the repetition or return of play, how could the phantom of the center not call to us? It is here that the hesitation between writing as decentering and writing as an affirmation of play is infinite.
¹⁹

For Derrida and Jabès, modern Jewish writing in particular is constituted by this infinite hesitation between negative atheology and the affirmation of play.

The extremity of this stance is tempered in Bloom's project, in which, as we have seen, text-centeredness is the sine qua non of Jewish writing and identity. But for Bloom, the presence of a literary tradition stabilizes writing: in their agonistic relationship to their precursors, strong writers are both individualized and situated in an ongoing textual community, however strained relations may be within such a group. Meaning wanders, to be sure, but only insofar as there are tests through which it can wander. Jewish identity and Jewish writing are less metonyms for this dynamic than they are indispensable examples. It is difficult to ascertain, finally, if Bloom's theory of writing is drawn from Judaism or projected onto it, but then, it is just such distinctions that Bloom's work criticizes.

We can say, however, that Bloom occupies something of a middle ground in the debate over wondering Jewish meaning. He is situated closely to his precursors, Scholem and Benjamin. When Benjamin speaks of the changing relation of aggadah to halakah in his

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interpretation of Kafka, or when Scholem discusses the strange combination of awe and presumptuousness in the relation of commentator to scripture, we encounter fluid but nonetheless definable textual categories. These categories, however much they undergo change, have operated continually in the domain of Jewish writing, which is not, then, merely congruent with the indeterminacy of writing itself.

But there are those who would stabilize the notion of Jewish writing to an even greater extent. The contemporary tendency to conflate literary theory and traditional Jewish textuality has led to an extraordinary debate, which is, fortunately, shedding as much light as heat on what could be called the identity crisis of Jewish writing. Against what they regard as the extravagance of post-structuralist claims on Jewish writing, cautious and responsible scholars have sought to delineate Jewish textual traditions from more recent developments, while at the same time acknowledging parallels and even influences.
²⁰These scholars (who might well cast a cold eye on some passages in this book) have provided an important service by carefully explaining many of the intricacies of aggadah, midrash, and kabbalah: indeed, we are witnessing a renaissance of traditional Jewish studies, but one which must also take literary theory into account. As David Stern observes, "The difference separating these conceptions is at least one sign of the distance that interpretation has traveled in the course of history."
²¹

So meaning has wandered and continues to wander; whether one is an advocate of writerly freeplay or scholarly definitiveness, the trope itself seems unavoidable in any discussion of Jewish literature. The reason for this, of course, is that for Jews, wandering is far more than a trope: it is a historical given. If, in what I have said up until now, history tends to appear as a fold in the text, then in the matter of exile, the text must appear as a fold in history. Loss and exile, the third of my themes, however much they lend themselves to literary matters, insistently point to the unstable boundary between the book and the world. "Our Homeland, the Text": here we are reminded of the enduring historical substitution of textual rootlessness for geopolitical ground, which, in George Steiner's crucial formulation, achieves its most probing, most disturbing modern articulation.

I do not think we can speak of the Jewish experience of exile and the concomitant Jewish devotion to the text, even when they are coupled with utopian and messianic longings for restoration, as constituting a single ideology. Aside from the term's connotation of "false consciousness" which the presence of the utopian and the messianic

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serve to mitigate,
²²belief-systems, and more importantly, practices of writing derived from the conditions of diaspora vary greatly, in keeping with the extraordinary diversity of modern Jewish thought. Writing in itself may be the ne plus ultra of diasporic culture, but the role which exile plays in writing still must be determined, for the most part, in terms of the individual author and the individual work. If we can speak of loss as being inscribed, then each Jewish author inscribes the experience of exile through his or her unique economy of writing.

Having claimed this, I must also admit that in another sense, exile is always already inscribed upon Jewish writers' texts. In his great essay on the Messianic idea, Gershom Scholem describes this sense:

The magnitude of the Messianic idea corresponds to the endless powerlessness in Jewish history during all the centuries of exile, when it was unprepared to come forward onto the plane of world history. There's something preliminary, something provisional about Jewish history; hence its inability to give of itself entirely. For the Messianic idea is not only consolation and hope. Every attempt to realize it tears open the abysses which lead each of its manifestations
ad absurdum
. There is something grand about living in hope, but at the same time there is something profoundly unreal about it. It diminishes the singular worth of the individual, and he can never fulfill himself, because the incompleteness of his endeavors eliminates precisely what constitutes its highest value. Thus in Judaism the Messianic idea has compelled a
life lived in deferment,
in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished.
²³

The condition adumbrated by Scholem in this passage is of particular moment for modern Jewish writers. If the overdetermined force of exile produces, through the Messianic idea, a radical incompleteness in Jewish life, then Jewish writers are faced with continual frustration. Unable to effect what might be called an existential closure in their work, they are compelled to accept
the exile of the text,
living, as Derrida says, "the necessity of interpretation as an exile."
²⁴But if Scholem is correct, it is this very exile which, however much it diminishes personal achievement, maintains the work of hope.

It may seem difficult to imagine the authoritative utterances of a Bloom or a Steiner as provisional; even the high comedy of Cynthia

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