The Ritual of New Creation (14 page)

Read The Ritual of New Creation Online

Authors: Norman Finkelstein

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

 
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point. Almost any association is now possible. He frequently gives the impression of a creative artist straining against the limitations of his medium, and seeking to extend its borders so that he will have room in which to create. In a statement rather surprising for a Hasidic master, he advocates complete freedom in the realm of interpretation, as long as the law remains unaffected
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A Creative artist straining against the limitations of his medium:
it is a description that could be applied to a contemporary literary theorist as well as an eighteenth-century Hasidic rabbi. Nor is this as great a leap as one might suppose.
Bloom, after all, is a self-proclaimed heir to this tradition, and his project can be regarded as a dramatic, perhaps definitive expansion of the midrashic and kabbalistic stancewhat Hegel would call its "
Aufhebung
." As an idiosyncratic Jewish intellectual, Bloom has overstepped the limits of the canon but has maintained the formal interpretive attitudes of earlier modes of Jewish textuality. In other words, Bloom's audacious interpretations, including his notorious attack on the boundaries between literature and criticism, stem from age-old textual assumptions, such as Rabbi Akiva's "All is foreseen, but freedom of choice is given." All is no longer foreseen in the work of a post-Enlightenment humanist (and even less so in that of a deconstructionist!), but freedom of choice certainly still applies. I am reminded of Walter Benjamin's observation that Kafka ''sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility." For Bloom, even more of a latecomer than Kafka, truth
is
transmissibility and little else. The act of interpretation is its own truth, though it cannot find its own truth except through the anteriority of the text it must interpret.
Bloom's Gnostic revision of Jewish commentary finally leads to what is for me the most significant question posed by his work: what does the appropriation of religious categories for secular and humanistic purposes indicate about the current state of literary culture? Mileur touches upon this problem when he analyzes Bloom's treatment of authoritative religious texts as "poetry," considering such treatment as "a synecdoche for that privileged vantage point from which beliefs are depersonalized into humanistic values." If such is the case, then "literary humanism covertly draws on the resources of religion in order to enforce the primacy of humanistic 'values' over religious beliefs and to separate value from belief and attach it to reason."
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In the main I think Mileur is correct here: Bloom is obviously
 
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a secular humanist rather than a believer, though whether a "Gnostic" humanist values reason any more than normative belief remains an open question. To be sure, Bloom turns religion into poetry, but he is equally guilty of turning poetry into religion. His promiscuous application of the revisionary ratios indicates that, in his reading method and choice of texts, he seeks to determine neither religious belief nor humanistic values; what matters for Bloom is willful choice, the personal authority that comes from "crossing over," and much less the final position where one comes to rest.
Caught between his nostalgic longing for authority and his remorseless education in the ways in which authority undermines and negates itself, Bloom chooses to celebrate the hard-won victories of the
pneuma
(the Gnostic "spark" or soul), though he cannot help but mourn the fact that the uncovering of such victories depends upon the endless examination of the fallen, created self in a literary history that is of the Demiurge's making. Bloom is right to insist on the strength of ancient paradigms: he is his own best example of the way in which a modern, secular humanist seeks, like a Kabbalist, to raise the sparks of the shattered vessels. The sparks consist of nothing less than the texts Bloom interpretsremember, "From our perspective, religion is spilled poetry." Literature has experienced a breaking of the vessels; it must be raised up out of it fallen or spilled religious condition. That this is in itself a profoundly religious process reveals the inescapable double bind in which Bloom is caught; and I would further argue that in this predicament he is an excellent representative of modern literary culture.
A sage is one who knows, but more importantly, a sage is also one who remembers. Although he would probably deny it, Bloom longs for the impossible act of
tikkun
that would restore the entire textual cosmos, an act of criticism above and beyond the mere gestures toward
tikkun
he finds in individual texts. We may say then that Bloom
remembers forward,
and that is what we must expect of our sages as we wander toward what appears to be a post-literate world. Scholem speaks of the messianic idea in Judaism as constantly moving between the restorative and the utopian. I celebrate and mourn the work of Harold Bloom, which is caught forever in that heart-breaking dialectic.
 
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Chapter 3
Gershom Scholem and Literary Criticism
Why, given the eclectic nature of today's literary studies, does Gershom Scholem have so few readers? Or, to phrase the question more precisely, why have so few critics attempted to make use of Scholem's work? The fact that he deals with a difficult and esoteric subject can hardly serve as a reason: difficult and esoteric voices in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and political science have a siren-like effect on the present generation of readers. Indeed, as a widely acknowledged monument of both historiography and philology, Scholem's work should naturally attract not only traditional literary scholars but theorists too, who continually probe such great edifices in all the human sciences to discover their methodological and epistemological foundations, with all their cracks and flaws. Scholem's expansive studies of Jewish mysticism would seem to invite such treatment, demonstrating, as do those studies themselves, equal measures of criticism and respect. But no: although Scholem single-handedly created the field of modern scholarship in the Kabbalah and with it an ongoing succession of dedicated and assiduous students, the appropriation of any aspect of his endeavors to different intellectual pursuits has been a surprisingly rare eventespecially for a thinker whose work, at least for Cynthia Ozick, "envelopes Freud's discoveries as the sea includes its most heroic whitecaps."
1
A slightly more plausible reason for the infrequent uses of Scholem's discoveries in literary rather than religious studies is the frankly Jewish nature of his investigations, linked, of course, to his lifelong Zionism. In the days when the Anglo-Catholic New Critics
 
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held sway, little more would have needed to be said. But today, in the midst of a great reconsideration of Jewish Scriptures, when prominent theorists freely acknowledge the Jewish roots of their work and when, more than ever, Kafka appears as the universal writer of our century, one would think that Scholem would naturally take his place in the critical pantheon. Furthermore, as Joseph Dan observes, "By ruthlessly dedicating himself to the comprehensive study of a historical phenomenon in its fullness Scholem presented a conclusion which is meaningful and relevant to any scholar in any field of study."
2
Scholem's very ruthlessness, his unapologetic emphasis on particularity, is itself worthy of critical consideration.
If the answer lies anywhere, we must look at the current state of literary knowledge; that is, we must consider what we know about interpretation. In the conclusion of "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences," Derrida states:
There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheologyin other words, throughout his entire historyhas dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.
3
What Derrida describes in this passage is meant to be understood as the universal situation of interpretation in the West: either one remains perpetually aware of the predicament of interpretation as exile or one accepts a home in the homelessness of free play, rejecting the origin that is also the goal. But Derrida's words also have a peculiarly Jewish, even kabbalistic resonance.
As I noted in the Introduction, the condition of Jewish literary activity in the Diaspora parallels the situation of the Jewish people itself. Jewish writing suffers what I call "the exile of the text." Traditionally, commentary and interpretation were meant to bring the student of Talmud or Kabbalah closer to the presence: indeed, the Shekinah, the female emanation of Deity that is said to represent the Jewish people in exile, also refers to "the Divine Presence."
4
For Derrida, we live in a period when we can no longer think of interpretation
 
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as leading us to the "ontotheological" experience of presence which we have traditionally desired. Faced with the possibility of passing beyond humanism into the realm of play, we avert our eyes as at the birth of a "monstrosity."
5
For Jewish literary concerns, this means accepting, even celebrating, a condition that is tantamount to permanent exile, a massive disruption of the traditional view of writing and interpretation.
It is at just this point that we can begin to appreciate the importance of Gershom Scholem, who is preeminently a historian and theorist of disruption. Robert Alter calls Scholem a modernist, one for whom "the truth is to be sought in extremes."
6
One has only to consider the titles of some of Scholem's major essays"Redemption Through Sin," "Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories In Judaism," "Religious Authority and Mysticism," "Tradition and New Creation In the Ritual of the Kabbalists''to see how true this is. Here is a genuine dialectician at work, willing to take extraordinary risks in order to accurately gauge the flux of accepted truth and startling, even threatening innovation in a given historical phenomenon.
Alter notes the recurrence of three words in Scholem's discourse: "paradox," "dialectic," and "abyss."
7
These are prized terms in the vocabulary of modern literary criticism, the first dating back to the New Critics, the second a ubiquitous continental import, the third a fashionable invocation to the
deus absconditus
of deconstruction. But despite such discursive similarities, we must never forget that Scholem is primarily an historian: the texts he examines within their historical circumstances are always regarded, however obscure or recondite they might be, as having an ascertainable impact upon specific communities. When Scholem identifies the explosive messianic tensions in the Lurianic Kabbalah, as arcane a theosophical system as can be imagined, he goes on to demonstrate how such forces result in Sabbatianism, perhaps the most important Jewish mass movement since the destruction of the Second Temple. It is difficult to think of such concerns in terms of free play: here at least, interpretation continues to be lived as exile.
The literary critic who has made the most thoroughgoing attempt to come to terms with Scholem's thought is, of course, Harold Bloom. There is a certain irony to be found in this relationship however, since Bloom, even if we grant Frank Lentricchia's remark that "Few have succeeded, as Harold Bloom has succeeded, in returning poetry to history,"
8
is anything but a historical thinker

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