The Ritual of New Creation (30 page)

Page 101

with these and other matters of Jewish textuality and Jewish history, in relation to what he has to offer us regarding the general contours of Western culture, that remains to be explored.

As we have observed, Steiner's strategic understanding of Judaism depends upon two interrelated concepts: exile and textuality. Of course, these concepts in themselves are basic to any understanding of Judaism, but their appropriation and refinement in Steiner's work renew them, for they become keener intellectual categories and more urgent existential modalities. Steiner rarely speaks of them separately. A passage from
Real Presences,
his most recent book, is typical:

Hermeneutic unendingness and survival in exile are, I believe, kindred. The text of the Torah, of the biblical canon, and the concentric spheres of texts about these texts, replace the destroyed Temple. The dialectical movement is profound. On the one hand, there is a sense in which all commentary is itself an act of exile. All exegesis and gloss transports the text into some measure of distance and banishment. Veiled in analysis and metamorphic exposition, the
Ur
-text is no longer immediate to its native ground. On the other hand, the commentary underwritesa key idiomthe continued authority and survival of the primary discourse. It liberates the life of meaning from that of historical-geographical contingency. In dispersion, the text is homeland.
¹²

Following Scholem, Steiner recognizes that commentary is a matter of both interpretive freedom and authoritative restraint, and he is at least as ambivalent about this state of affairs as his precursor. Commentary distances or banishes the primary text, but assures or "underwrites" its authority. Hermeneutic motion involves risk and loss, but the original word will not endure without it; only by wandering away from the text can we insure its survival. Textual exile recapitulates historical exile, even as the former is largely a result of the latter. But in a certain sense, the exilic state of commentary also guarantees the continuance of historical exile, since devotion to the text reinforces "bookishness" and opposes the blandishments of "historical-geographical contingency." In Steiner's vision of Judaism (which is, needless to say, that of an intellectual elite or "clerisy"), ''active reading, answerability to the text on both the meditative-interpretative and the behavioural levels, is the central motion of personal and national homecoming."
¹³

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This view of Jewish intellectual fife as a clerisy fostered by the conditions of exile cannot be fully comprehended except in contrast to nationalism, which Steiner bluntly calls "the venom of our age."
¹⁴The Jews in diaspora, bound not to a nation-state which has its meaning in space but to textual processes unfolding over time, give the lie "to the vulgar mystique of the flag and the anthem, to the sleep of reason which proclaims 'my country right or wrong.'"
¹⁵Devotion to the book rather than the state, the outward manifestation of which is the "rootless cosmopolitanism" of the Jews in exile, proves intolerable to patriotic demagoguery: the result has always been anti-Semitism.
¹⁶Thus Steiner is deeply suspicious of any form of political or cultural populism, which too often leads to vulgarity and barbarism; he unabashedly prefers an elitism of mind and soul though not of social class per se. Turning the tables on his critics, he declares that "the real 'snob' seems to me the one who would deny his own vocation of almost autistic clerisy, of infection with thought, in order to harvest at the same time the rewards of popularity and democratic good-fellowship."
¹⁷

Popularity and democratic good-fellowship are the seemingly benign American equivalents to the virulence of the European forms of nationalism which Steiner also condemns. But regardless of its type, nationalism undermines the critical self-absorption, the "autism" of the cleric, who in turn "is, by definition, a conscientious objector."
¹⁸This model makes a good deal of sense when applied to Jewry in exile among the Gentile nations: traditional rabbinic Judaism and emancipated Jewish humanism are both text-centered, drawing the individual inward while at the same time fostering a critical attitude toward belief-systems which stand outside the faith in the book. Ghettos of the intellect, like ghettos in communities, are built from without and within. But when Jews seek to replace the scribal autism of diaspora with a geopolitical homeland of their own, the result, however predicated upon a textual tradition of exile and return, is yet another nationalism.

Steiner's response to Zionism is forthright but troubling. The true Zion must remain the homeland of the text:


For the cleric, for the ideal of clerisy in Jewishness, this house of the future tense need not be Israel. Or rather, it is an 'Israel' of truth-seeking. Each seeking out of a moral, philosophic, positive verity, each text rightly established and expounded, is an aliyah, a homecoming of Judaism to itself and to its keeping of the books. ¹⁹

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Steiner's insistence upon a textual rather than a geopolitical home, in which
aliyah
means going to the book rather than going to the land, is at the heart of his attempt to preserve what could be called a "third way" in modern Judaism, one which remains true to his tradition of critical humanism. This third way is fraught with uncertainty and ambivalence, for it is predicated upon clerical "truth-seeking" rather than upon accepted truths. On the one hand, secular Zionism, which Steiner rightly connects to other nineteenth-century European nationalist movements, requires unswerving patriotic devotion; the result is Israel's disastrous political situation, for not only is it "armed to the teeth" but it is "compelled to make other men homeless, servile, disinherited, in order to survive from day to day."
²⁰On the other hand, the Orthodox position, requiring strict halakhic observance and the hope of a messianic return, likewise proves unacceptable to the modern, skeptical Jewish intellectual.

Steiner is somewhat more sympathetic to the Orthodox position than to secular Zionism, but like so many Jews today, he feels that he has "no part in the beliefs and ritual practices which underwrite it."
²¹What he preserves from the Orthodox stance is that which so powerfully shaped the thinking of his most important precursors: messianism. Surely the most volatile element of modern Jewish thought, messianism, as Anson Rabinbach explains,

demands a complete repudiation of the world as it is, placing its hope in a future whose realization can only be brought about by the destruction of the old order. Apocalyptic, catastrophic, utopian and pessimistic, Messianism captured a generation of Jewish intellectuals before the First World War. The Messianic impulse appears in many forms in the Jewish generation of 1914secular
and
theological, as a tradition that stands opposed to both secular rationalism and what has been called "normative Judaism."
²²

Despite his claim that he is most drawn to "the Nietzschean gaiety in the face of the inhuman,"
²³it seems to me that book for book, essay for essay, Steiner is given to
Kulturpessimismus
to a much greater degreeand that this dark brooding stems from a messianic desire, usually held back, to "press for the end." To be sure, Steiner is no full-fledged apocalyptic messianisthe is too much the representative of Central European humanismbut like the conservative Talmudist drawn to the theurgy of Kabbalah, Steiner is lured again

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