The siren and the sibyl, potent representatives of the First Religion, swallow up all things—every achievement, every desire, every idea—into the poetry of ecstatic obliteration, Eros joined with degradation and death. Gemulah’s bewitchment of Gamzu is no different, though Agnon’s voice, like Gemulah’s, is airier:
Because songs are conjoined, they are linked up with one another, the songs of the springs with the songs of high mountains, and those of high mountains with the songs of the birds of the air. And among these birds there is one whose name is Grofith; when its hour comes to leave the world, it looks up to the clouds and raises its voice in song; and when its song is ended, it departs from the world. All these songs are linked together in the language of Gemulah. Had she uttered that song of Grofith, her soul would have departed from her, and she would have died.
Yet finally Gamzu opposes Gemulah’s sorcery in a way imagination will never dream of opposing the siren’s song or the oracle’s cry: he puts his hand over Gemulah’s mouth to save her from singing the notes of Grofith, the poetry of ecstatic frenzy, which can kill. It is the hand of anti-myth. Who, in the gossamer realms of the First Religion, dares to stop the mouths of Delphic sibyls or glittering mermaids?
And still Gemulah dies. She dies for magic, for voluptuous longing, for ecstasy; she dies singing the song of the bird Grofith after all, bidden to do so by Dr. Ginath, whom she takes to be the Jerusalem Hacham, the magus who once sojourned in her country. As an act of science, the philologist Ginath transcribes the strange syllables of her mysterious language; but Gemulah has no science; she is the antithesis of science. Spellbound under the moon, she walks on the roof of Ginath’s part of the Greifenbachs’ house—the very roof weakened long ago by an earthquake that came as a judgment upon those who abandon Jerusalem to run after exile. Ginath pursues her, and together they fall to their deaths.
Scanning the obituary notices in the newspaper, the narrator happens on a curious misprint: the announcement of the death of a Dr. Gilath. The letter l has been substituted for the letter n. Agnon’s Hebrew readers can readily guess the reason. “Ginath” (which means “garden”) suggests the garden of esoteric knowledge, the fatal pardes (“paradise”) into which, according to legend, four scholars, all prodigious and original, ventured; only one of them, Rabbi Akiva, came out alive—perhaps because he more than the others revered the Law. And “Gilath”? Omitting the vowels, the root consonants spell out the letters of galuth: Hebrew for exile, displacement.
Gemulah is in exile from her country of charms and talismans and conjury and divination and necromantic hymn; Jerusalem, the city of the Law, is inimical to all of these. In her native land, Gemulah blooms unharnessed, under the mild rule of poetry and play and random rapture. But in Jerusalem wizards and their hymns weaken and perish; so Gemulah sickens, and takes to her bed spiritless and speechless; it is well known that a golem lacks the capacity for speech. When the moon calls her, she rises up to meander through Jerusalem, infiltrating her omens and influences through the city, and then Jerusalem too sickens with the sickness of exilic ailments: dread and dryness and departure.
But as soon as Gemulah is destroyed, disordered and disconsolate Jerusalem comes to healthy life again: the water begins to flow freely in the pipes, the exiles stream home, yeridah gives way to aliyah—the narrator’s family returns, the Greifenbachs hurry back from abroad, nothing more is heard of housebreakers, squatters, marauders, or separated couples. The First Religion is routed, and Jerusalem is restored.
How is it, though, that Gemulah’s husband, Gamzu, escapes death? Like Ginath, who is punished for flying after the enticements of the languages of exile, Gamzu has been an enamored soul possessed by the music of the First Religion; and yet Gamzu lives. Like Akiva, he survives the penetration into pardes. Gamzu is safe—ultimately he can keep his eye, his only eye, on Jerusalem’s principle of Law; he wears his yarmulke, and has the power to stop up Gemulah’s mouth, so that she will not lose herself in the song of the deadly bird of beauty. Only in the regions beyond Jerusalem is he powerless before savage beauty.
The principle of Jerusalem versus the principle of exile; aliyah versus yeridah; redemption versus illusion; seeking to be “safe” versus finding oneself swallowed up by the forces of obliteration. A fugue of antagonisms. Nevertheless one cannot be sure of Agnon’s definitive passion, whether he is finally on the side of lyrical sorcery or of Torah. Near the close of Edo and Enam, the narrator learns that Dr. Ginath has burned all his papers, among them the record of Gemulah’s inchoate utterances. Jerusalem, it would seem, has won over the wilderness. But in the very last sentences of the tale, the Enamite Hymns are lauded for their “grace and beauty,” and Dr. Ginath is celebrated for saving them for the world: is this jubilant praise rendered in the narrator’s voice or in Agnon’s own? And in the end how do we know whether Jerusalem itself is really safe, even after the destruction of the enchantress Gemulah? Heine’s Lorelei, after all, now sings in the Holy Tongue, the better to sabotage the citizens of Jerusalem.
Published in Commentary, December 1988
*A longer extract from this same passage may be found in the final essay in this collection.
Bialik’s Hint
What is the question?
GERTRUDE STEIN, dying
I once had a theory about Jewish language. I began by renaming English; I called it “New Yiddish.” Since the majority of Jews alive today are native English speakers, I reasoned, English was in the way of becoming a Jewish language for nearly universal Diaspora employment, much as Old Yiddish (or Ladino, its Sephardic counterpart) used to be before its murderous weakening by the mappers of Lebensraum. I posited a variety of literary forms for New Yiddish, and imagined for it a liturgical spirit that would nevertheless not contravene what it is nowadays fashionable to call postmodern modes.
Before that, I held some notions, clearly not very original, about the creation of a literature of midrasb, or Active commentary. Jewish writing, I thought, whether or not developed by Jews (I cited George Eliot and Thomas Mann), was that literature which dared to introduce into the purely imaginative the elements of judgment and interpretation. Literature, I declared, was not simply an enterprise of essence (“A poem should not mean / But be”), but must be charged with the power to sift through the light and the dark. Story should not only be but mean. And to back this up, I quoted from Judah Halevi, who accused Hellenism of producing “flowers without fruit,” in contrast to the Jewish spirit, which bears the ripe fruit of responsibility and judgment.
In addition, I had a theory about the more local and partial conditions of American Jewish writing. Bellow, Roth, Paley, Malamud, I privately argued, had taken the post-immigration experience as far as it could go. Anyone who hoped to push forward in that same direction of portraiture and sensibility was bound to end up as an imitator. For new work, the aftermath of emigration was played out and offered nothing but repetition and desiccation—or something worse: ventriloquism, fakery, nostalgia, sentimentalism, cardboard romanticism. The solution, it seemed to me, was to escape the descent into “ethnicity”—debased and debasing sociologists’ misnomer—and to drive toward the matrix of the Jewish Idea.
The Jewish Idea, I believed, was characterized by two momentous standards. The first, the standard of anti-idolatry, led to the second, the standard of distinction-making*—the understanding that the properties of one proposition are not the properties of another proposition. Together, these two ideals, in the form of urgencies, had created Jewish history. The future of a Jewish literature was to derive from an insight into what a Jew is—not partially, locally, sociologically, “ethnically,” but in principle. To be a Jew is to be old in history, but not only that; to be a Jew is to be a member of a distinct civilization expressed through an oceanic culture in possession of a group of essential concepts and a multitude of texts and attitudes elucidating those concepts. Next to the density of such a condition—or possibility— how gossamer are the stories of those wri
ters “of Jewish extraction” whose characters are pale indifferent echoes of whatever lies to hand: this or that popular impingement.
Lately I have been thinking hard about the cultural destiny of those very writers. What comes to me now is far less than “theory”; a mere meditation; a mooning, say, over the effects of the Enlightenment and its concomitant issue, Jewish Emancipation.
Gershom Scholem has revealed, with miraculous intellectual daring, how Sabbatai Zevi, the seventeenth-century false messiah, was the precursor of Jewish Enlightenment fervor as well as of Reform Judaism. The electrifying wand that unites these seemingly dissimilar strands—-an irrational mass delusion giving rise to rational skepticism—is the purposeful relinquishment of the “yoke of the Law,” Sabbatai Zevi’s deliberate snapping of the chain of commitment to the central root-system of historical Jewish expression. A manic-depressive, the false messiah was a performer of “strange acts,” kabbalistically inspired religious ceremonies without precedent; and once freedom from the Jewish mainstream was fostered, Scholem claimed, Jewish ideation could and did follow many paths formerly unthinkable. The variety of nineteenth-century currents in which Jews were active, socialism and secularism among them, had their origins in the volcanic pseudo-theological events of the seventeenth. Sabbatai Zevi, hoping to lead a liberated Jewish people triumphantly back to Jerusalem, repudiated the constraints and hatreds of Europe and proclaimed his own immediately serviceable messianic Emancipation; the rules, he showed, could be broken, society and politics need not stand in the way, nothing imaginable was preposterous. That he concluded his own career in the posture of a forced convert to Islam may itself have seemed preposterous; but he had already demonstrated to a rigidly structured and restricted community that anything can happen.
If Sabbatai Zevi, promising extravagant new possibilities, opened the way to internal Jewish liberalization (or deviation), the external route was still barred. Not until the actual Emancipation did Jews experience any choice more subtle or flexible than conversion, and the effects of post-Enlightenment choice have been shaking Jewish life ever since. It is true that Europe canceled both the Enlightenment and the Emancipation for a dozen cataclysmic years in the heart of our own century, the long-range influence of which will perhaps remain unresolved for another hundred years. Or, rather, from another point of view it might be said that Hitler carried the Enlightenment to its inevitable resolution, bringing liberte to its highest romantic pitch: the liberty, with no brake of tradition or continuity, to imagine everything, hence to do anything. And Zionism, in one interpretation, is itself a late-blooming version of Jewish Emancipation.
But the object of these speculations is the fact of choice itself. Emancipation threw open the path of entry into all the complex and abundant allure of Gentile culture. On the face of things, the old restrictions fell away, and it was possible to be, as the famous phrase had it, “a man abroad and a Jew at home”; but the very formulation of that notion split off “man” from “Jew,” and Jew from humanity, so that “Jew,” no longer an instance of humanity, as the rabbinic tradition held, came rather to represent a difference from humanity, eventually an opposition to it, precisely as the advocates of Christian triumphalism had always maintained. And on the Jewish side, to accept the formulation was already to reject the Jewish way, which claimed wholeness of person. Hence the locution “just Jewish.” “These matters are not just Jewish,” we hear the Jewish heirs of the Enlightenment explain. “They should interest everyone,” as if Jews are automatically excluded from the compass of “everyone.” As, in the medieval scheme, they were.
Yet we are all of us—all of us, insofar as we live in the world—children of the Enlightenment. It is a condition that was prepared for us generations ago—even in the enclosed chambers of the East European shtetl, when it began to be infiltrated by the Haskalah movement, with its sense of holiness-as-literature and truth-as-art replacing Torah-from-Sinai. For the Sephardim, a kind of foretaste of Enlightenment occurred three centuries early, in the freely intermingling dual culture of the Spanish era; and the same was true of Jews in Renaissance Italy. But Golden Age Spain and Renaissance Italy were idiosyncratic moments, and, so to speak, meteoric flashes; they came as bright patches, erratic and unpredictable, unlike the Enlightenment’s singular and steady Grand Principle. It is the Grand Principle that confers on us its legacy. Especially as writers we may not repudiate the gifts of the Enlightenment, because freedom of the imagination—the freedom to imagine alternative lives, on which poets feed—is what the Enlightenment offered, delectably, in contrast to the traditional mold of an immovable condition.
Two hundred years post-Enlightenment, our choice is not whether to accept cultural liberation and variety—we were, after all, born into the Grand Principle—but whether to fuse that freedom with the Sinaitic challenge of distinctive restraint and responsibility that the rabbis held out. The democratic and egalitarian Grand Principle, seductive to the liberated and brotherly mind, celebrated not uniqueness but multiplicity, not religio, a binding together, but proliferation. Nothing could be more natural than that the eighteenth century’s Grand Principle should give birth to the nineteenth century’s wayward Romanticism. Yet the rabbis’ contrary call was by no means a cry against imagination; inventive rather than conservative thinkers, the assembly of disputants who comprise the rabbinic way were nevertheless wary of the fancifulness of enchanting alternatives and branching roads with no promise of arrival. The rabbis’ call to imagination, by contrast, was a call to imagine arrival: homecoming, deliverance, fruition, resolution, an idealism of character, right conduct, just determinations, communal wellbeing. In short, the messianic impulse.
It is plain that the Enlightenment too, though it turned away from Christianity, was all the same formed in the fertilization dish of Jewish and Christian messianism. But Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality tend (more than intend) to break down distinctions, and right conduct can emerge only out of the stringent will toward distinction-making. The rabbinic way is to refuse blur, to see how one thing is not another thing, how the road is not the arrival, the wish not the deed, the design not the designer, man not God. The true ship is the shipbuilder, Emerson said, in a single phrase that sums up all of Romanticism; but the rabbis would not allow for the ship until it was there—not out of literal-mindedness, but because it is spiritually necessary to make ultimate distinctions; otherwise Creator becomes confused with creation, leading to the multiform versions of antinomianism from which Jewish monotheism characteristically, and uniquely, turns away its purified face.
Chaim Nachman Bialik, the great fountain of Hebrew modernism, in a magisterial essay comparing Aggadah to Halachah—the formless to the structured, the imaginatively wanderlusting to the imagination of arrival— remarks that the “whole justification” for “literature” and “creation” is the sense of duty. A stunning conclusion. “Modern Hebrew literature,” Bialik wrote in 1916, “on the intellectual side. . . . has nothing to say; its only approach to life is through the narrow wicket-gate of a dubious aestheticism.” “The value of Aggadah,” he asserts, “is that it issues in Halachah. Aggadah that does not bring Halachah in its train is ineffective.” If we pause to translate Aggadah as tale and lore, and Halachah as consensus and law, or Aggadah as the realm of the fancy, and Halachah as the court of duty, then what Bialik proposes next is astonishing. Contrariwise, he says, Halachah can bring Aggadah in its train. Restraint the begetter of poetry? “Is she not”— and now Bialik is speaking of the Sabbath—“a source of life and holiness to a whole nation, and a fountain of inspiration to its singers and poets?” Yet the Tractates that touch on the Sabbath consist, in their hundreds of pages, “of discussions and decisions on the minutiae of the thirty-nine kinds of work and their branches, and on the limits within which it is permissible to carry on the Sabbath. What the Sabbath candles are to be made of, what a beast may be loaded with; how the limits may be jointly fixed—such are the questions discussed. What weariness of th
e flesh! What waste of good wits on every trifling point!” Weariness of flesh the begetter of inspiration? Waste of good wits bringing rapture in its train? These hairsplitters deciding on the minutiae of the thirty-nine kinds of work, Bialik determines, “are in very truth artists of life in the throes of creation,” and the perfection of their work, “antlike and giantlike at once,” is the “sacred and sublime. . . . Queen Sabbath. . . . endowed with wondrous and dazzling beauty.”
Metaphor and Memory Page 24