by Harold Bloom
On the Destruction of the Law
The light that lacks conception
constitutes the occultation,
and with it He created
all that in the world exists.
As it lacks conception,
it’s always in ascension,
for in it no rule holds,
neither beginning nor end.
In strength he came to speak to us—
he is Shabbatai Tzvi.
His nature is destruction,
from one who knows I’ve heard.
Into the fourth husk and shell,
from his place he descended:
for he destroyed the Law—
in order to raise the Lord.
The “occultation” refers to Shabbatai’s conversion to Islam, to save the Messiah from execution, but seen by his faithful as vital to the scheme of salvation by transgression. Shabbatai’s passion for distinction was creative, in the Gnostic sense of restoring the ruined worlds bungled into being by Yahweh the Demiurge. Cole precisely catches the tone of the Ladino original, and is particularly exuberant when the death of the Torah and Christ-like resurrection of the manic Shabbatai are juxtaposed.
Scholem, who rightly haunts Peter Cole, acknowledged happily that his own masterwork was the massive Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (1957; translated by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Princeton University Press, 1973). In a copy inscribed for me, Scholem quoted from his concluding paragraph:
In the telling, the supposedly historical facts crystallized into legend—and a lively, popular legend to boot. And even as the legend is told by a nonbelieving chronicler, some rays of “faith” are shimmering on it. No doubt this faith had been humiliated and discredited. Its hope had been vain and its claims refuted, and yet the question compounded of pride and sadness persisted: Was it not a great opportunity missed, rather than a big lie? A victory of the hostile powers rather than the collapse of a vain thing?
The hint was and is clear enough: though not an unequivocal admirer of Shabbatai and of Nathan of Gaza, Scholem nevertheless found in them, as in Kafka and the Zohar, something of the essence of his own Judaism. Peter Cole concludes The Poetry of Kabbalah with Scholem’s friend Hayyim Nahman Bialik, the major modern Hebrew poet, presented here as a secular Kabbalist. His most famous lyric, “Bring Me In Under Your Wing,” is rendered by Cole with a touching plangency:
Bring Me In Under Your Wing
Bring me in under your wing,
be sister for me, and mother,
The place of you, rest for my head,
a nest for my unwanted prayers.
At the hour of mercy, at dusk,
we’ll talk of my secret pain:
They say, there’s youth in the world—
What happened to mine?
And another thing, a clue:
my being was seared by a flame.
They say there’s love all around—
What do they mean?
The stars betrayed me—there
was a dream, which also has passed.
Now in the world I have nothing,
not a thing.
Bring me in under your wing,
be sister for me, and mother,
the place of you, rest for my head,
a nest for my unwanted prayers.
Poets and Kabbalists, like literary critics, need to convert opinion into knowledge. That formulation is Dr. Johnson’s, who meant opinion in the legal sense, not public opinion. Cole, commenting upon this, Bialik’s most famous poem, emphasizes that the ambivalent “wings” refers to the pinions of the Shekhinah, and the “sister” to Song of Songs 5:2: “My sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled.”
Whether, as Cole suggests, this is a poem about the condition of the Jewish people in a secular cosmos, or, as I might venture, a purely personal High Romantic lament for a lost earliness, Bialik stands on the frontier between the sacred and the profane. Kabalistic scholarship, in the wake of Scholem and Idel, frequently threatens to forsake its ability to address a large general audience. Cole refreshingly renews the enterprise of seeing esoteric Judaism in the perspectives of a larger humanistic and aesthetic concern.
Kabbalah matters to more than its specialists because at its strongest it is part of the Jewish tradition of wisdom writing. I do not know anything in Kabbalistic literature that equals the splendor and perpetual relevance of Pirke Aboth, the sayings of the fathers. That immensely moving collection of aphorisms constitutes the most humanizing tractate of the Talmuds. Even the grandest among the Kabbalists cannot stand with Rabbi Akiba or with Rabbi Tarphon. And yet Cole’s heartening anthology is a hopeful link between the wisdom tradition and esotericism: a fresh reminder that we are not required to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it.
More Life:
The Blessing Given by Literature
LIKE MANY OTHERS MY AGE, I fall asleep quite early. I wake up frequently in the night, and lie in the dark overcome by memories. Last night, in the small hours, an image of my mother came back to me. Vividly I saw myself, a boy of three, playing on the kitchen floor, alone with her as she prepared the Sabbath meal. She had been born in a Jewish village on the outskirts of Brest Litovsk and remained faithful to her traditions. I was the youngest of her five children, and I was happiest when we were alone together. As she passed me in her preparations, I would reach out and touch her bare toes, and she would rumple my hair and murmur her affection for me.
My mother told me several times that I was born to her at dawn on July 11, 1930, after a long, hard labor. On my eighty-seventh birthday I woke at first light, and recalled her face as I had seen it lighting the Shabbat candles and reciting the Berakhah: “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe….” A reverie took shape in me on the secular blessing given to me and to my students by the highest literature, from Homer and the Hebrew Bible through Dante and Chaucer and on to Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne, Milton, and the tradition of Western literature that culminates in Proust and Joyce.
The original meaning of the state of being blessed was to be favored by God. Since I do not share my mother’s trust in Yahweh’s covenant with my people, I long ago transmuted the blessing into its prime form, which is our love for others. I turned to the reading and studying of literature in search of the blessing, because I came to understand we cannot love enough people. They die and we abide. Literature has become, for me and many others, a crucial way to fill ourselves with the blessing of more life.
As I translate the Berakhah, it means “more life into a time without boundaries.” John Ruskin remarked, “The only wealth is life.” The presence of Yahweh is declared by his mysterious name. When Moses asks for that name, the God replies, “Ehyeh asher ehyeh,” which the King James Bible translates as: “I AM THAT I AM.” I render it: “I will be present wherever and whenever I choose to be present.” But what is presence? We speak of it as charisma or as superb poise. Originally presence meant “being at hand,” but the Latin original passed through Old French and became the English “presence.”
Western literature distinguishes between God’s presence or absence in the natural world and God’s presence among all women and men, or, most crucially, in each of us. A lifelong teacher, I associate presence with the presentation or showing that is part of the process of instruction. As I have practiced it for sixty-three years, the work of a teacher is to bring the student into a sense of her or his own presence. The word “teaching” comes from German origins through Old English, and takes one back to an Indo-European root in the Attic Greek for “show” and the Latin for “say.” What has this to do with the blessing?
In Genesis, Yahweh’s blessing passes from generation to generation of his chosen people. Of those he favors, the
most remarkable personalities are Jacob, who becomes Israel, and David, who replaces Saul as king and fathers Solomon upon Bathsheba. Jacob is an old kind of man, cunning and persistent in his drive for survival and for the blessing of Yahweh. David is something new, and his progeny in literature includes Jesus, as we know him in the Gospel of Mark, and Hamlet.
The most illuminating commentary upon the Yahwist’s Jacob is in a now sadly unread comic masterpiece, Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, composed between 1926 and 1942, with a splendid translation by John E. Woods (2005). I gave an account of it in my short book The Shadow of a Great Rock (2011) and will confine myself to only a few remarks here.
Whereas elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible the Blessing (I shall capitalize this henceforward) is simply “May you be fruitful and have many descendants,” in the texts composed by the Yahwist I interpret the Blessing as a promise that your name will live on in the memory of others and so will not be scattered.
Jacob comes up out of the womb with his hand taking hold on the heel of his brother Esau, who will grow to be a hunter while Jacob will be a tent dweller. Their mother, Rebekah, loves Jacob, while her husband, Isaac, prefers Esau. In a scene of remarkable pathos mingled with comedy, Jacob deceives Isaac into giving him Esau’s blessing. The aftermath is troubling and memorable:
And Isaac his father said unto him, Who art thou? And he said, I am thy son, thy firstborn Esau.
And Isaac trembled very exceedingly, and said, Who? where is he that hath taken venison, and brought it me, and I have eaten of all before thou camest, and have blessed him? yea, and he shall be blessed.
And when Esau heard the words of his father, he cried with a great and exceeding bitter cry, and said unto his father, Bless me, even me also, O my father.
And he said, Thy brother came with subtilty, and hath taken away thy blessing.
And he said, Is not he rightly named Jacob? for he hath supplanted me these two times: he took away my birthright; and, behold, now he hath taken away my blessing. And he said, Hast thou not reserved a blessing for me?
And Isaac answered and said unto Esau, Behold, I have made him thy lord, and all his brethren have I given to him for servants; and with corn and wine have I sustained him: and what shall I do now unto thee, my son?
Geneva Bible, Genesis 27:32–37
It is only in the next chapter that our sympathy for Jacob is renewed, when he dreams of a ladder between heaven and earth, with angels ascending and going down. Above the stairs Yahweh stands and reaffirms the Blessing. An even grander epiphany takes place in chapter 32, with its endlessly fecund vision of Jacob wrestling a nameless one among the Elohim:
And he rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two womenservants, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok.
And he took them, and sent them over the brook, and sent over that he had.
And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.
And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.
And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob.
And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.
And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there.
And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.
And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh.
Geneva Bible, Genesis 32:22–31
“A man” is “one among the Elohim” in the Hebrew. Is it the Angel of Death or Yahweh himself playing that role? We are not told. But this is not a loving encounter. Jacob will limp ever after, and the nameless one fears daybreak. The astonishment is that Jacob, strong only in his cunning, should have the strength to hold a dangerous angel to a standstill. The name he wins, Israel, I render as “To strive with the Almighty.”
Jacob knows that soon after dawn he will have to confront his vengeful brother, Esau. In this extraordinary prolepsis, he strengthens himself for that encounter and thus prolongs his survival.
Since childhood, I have meditated upon this agon of Israel with the Angel of Death. I interpret it not only as an allegory of Jewish history—indeed, of universal history—but also as the story of my own life, and the lives of everyone I have known, loved, taught, and mourned. In the half-light of my incessant nocturnal wakefulness, I begin to conceive of it as the struggle of every solitary deep reader to find in the highest literature what will suffice.
Moses:
The Sublime of Silence
THERE ARE MANY different ways in which you can be possessed by memory. Some of them are involuntary, and yet sometimes there is a kind of collaboration between the will and memory; when you learn how to relax your will, new modes of memory begin to flood in. These days, I find I am flooded by memories of my own earliest childhood. I recall a clear sense in which I moved about like someone in worlds not yet realized. It was as though I wanted to bring about a better time, but with no clear notion as to what such a time might be.
I still remember, as a child, being puzzled by the great song of the sea in Exodus 15:1–18:
Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the Lord, and spake, saying, I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea.
The Lord is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation: he is my God, and I will prepare him an habitation; my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
The Lord is a man of war: the Lord is his name.
Pharaoh’s chariots and his host hath he cast into the sea: his chosen captains also are drowned in the Red sea.
The depths have covered them: they sank into the bottom as a stone.
Thy right hand, O Lord, is become glorious in power: thy right hand, O Lord, hath dashed in pieces the enemy.
And in the greatness of thine excellency thou hast overthrown them that rose up against thee: thou sentest forth thy wrath, which consumed them as stubble.
And with the blast of thy nostrils the waters were gathered together, the floods stood upright as an heap, and the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea.
The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my lust shall be satisfied upon them; I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them.
Thou didst blow with thy wind, the sea covered them: they sank as lead in the mighty waters.
Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods? who is like thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders?
Thou stretchedst out thy right hand, the earth swallowed them.
Thou in thy mercy hast led forth the people which thou hast redeemed: thou hast guided them in thy strength unto thy holy habitation.
The people shall hear, and be afraid: sorrow shall take hold on the inhabitants of Palestina.
Then the dukes of Edom shall be amazed; the mighty men of Moab, trembling shall take hold upon them; all the inhabitants of Canaan shall melt away.
Fear and dread shall fall upon them; by the greatness of thine arm they shall be as still as a stone; till thy people pass over, O Lord, till the people pass over, which thou hast purchased.
Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of thine inheritance, in the place, O Lord, which thou hast made for thee to dwell in, in the Sanctuary, O Lord, which thy hands have established.
The Lord shall reign for
ever and ever.
Whether as a child or now, I find the Hebrew of this song so archaic that it baffles me. Then as now, I wonder at the diminishment in this great song. The man of war, Yahweh, is celebrated for what is his victory alone. I remain perplexed by verse 15:11. Who are those gods to whom Yahweh is compared? Can they really just be the angels of his court?
It is not possible to read this poem and not remember Handel’s setting of it in his Israel in Egypt. And yet, like so much of Exodus, it is disquieting. We are given an antiphon between wilderness and revelation. Ever since childhood, I have been unhappy with the forty years of wandering back and forth in the Sinai. How has Yahweh’s outrageousness in imposing a ghastly ordeal upon his chosen people escaped commentary? Could you or I endure forty years in the wilderness without horrible anguish and fierce discontent?
Yahweh, evidently unhappy at having to extend his Blessing to an entire nation, starts to be angry and self-contradictory. He says that he must not be seen by the people, and yet he will be seen, coming down upon Sinai in the sight of everyone:
And the Lord came down upon mount Sinai, on the top of the mount: and the Lord called Moses up to the top of the mount; and Moses went up.
And the Lord said unto Moses, Go down, charge the people, lest they break through unto the Lord to gaze, and many of them perish.
And let the priests also, which come near to the Lord, sanctify themselves, lest the Lord break forth upon them.
And Moses said unto the Lord, The people cannot come up to mount Sinai: for thou chargedst us, saying, Set bounds about the mount, and sanctify it.
And the Lord said unto him, Away, get thee down, and thou shalt come up, thou, and Aaron with thee: but let not the priests and the people break through to come up unto the Lord, lest he break forth upon them.
So Moses went down unto the people, and spake unto them.