Such a project cannot be answered with a proposal to “compose midrashim” by which is usually meant a literature of parable. Surely a literature of parable is not to be despised: Kafka is its practitioner, and so is Borges. But dependence on a single form, however majestic or pliant, is no foundation for an entire literature; and what we are confronting, in a time of empty bewilderment, is just that: the need for a literature.
Nor will such a project be answered by any theory of an indispensable language, such as my old fantasy of New Yiddish—i.e., the Judaization of a single language used by large populations of Jews. The enrichment of any existing language is of course not to be despised, and if English is broadened through the introduction of Jewish concepts, mores, sensibility, and terminology (the last the most prevalent and influential and yet the most trivial), that can only be its good fortune. English has already had the historic good luck (derived from historic bad luck—many invasions) to be richer than other languages. English, in fact, is perhaps the luckiest language with regard to “richness,” and we English-speakers are, as writer-technicians, probably the luckiest language-inhabitors, simply because English is really two languages, Germanic and Latinic: so that there are at least two strains of nuance for every noun, fact, feeling, or thought, and every notion has a double face.
Hebrew is a lucky language in another sense: it was the original vessel for the revolution in human conscience, teaching the other languages what it early and painfully acquired: that textual immanence I have been calling moral seriousness. Because of the power of scriptural ideas, there is hardly a language left on the planet that does not, through the use of its own syllables and vocabulary, “speak Hebrew.” All languages have this Hebrew-speaking capacity, as the literatures of the world have somewhat tentatively, yet often honorably, demonstrated. If this is true, it is a proof that Hebrew does not have a unique ability, by divine right, so to say, to carry certain ideas, although the genius of Abraham and Moses and the Prophets runs like mother milk through its lips. Language is the wineskin, thought the wine. All that is required of any language for it to carry a fresh or revolutionary idea (and what, in the history of humankind, is the Jewish recoil from idolatrous celebration, if not always fresh and always revolutionary?)—all that is required is for the language in question to will itself not to be parochial.
So if the hope of a saving midrashic form is not enough, and if the chimera of a New Yiddish is, at bottom, beside the point, what can answer to Bialik’s hint? What is the new alternative to be, this unimaginable fusion of what we are as the children of the Enlightenment, what we are as the children of Israel, and what we are to become when these learn to commingle? That they will learn to commingle is, I believe, an inevitability; just as with the hindsight of two millennia, we can see how inevitable it was for the Greek schools of philosophy to be reborn as the Jewish academies, and for Socratic pilpul* to serve Jewish moral seriousness.
Published in Commentary, February 1983
*Dr. Avi Erlich’s succinct formulation.
*A journey undertaken often in extraordinary ignorance of its starting point. “Chicken soup and Yiddish jokes may tarry awhile. But the history of the Jews from now on will be one with the history of everybody else,” the novelist Herbert Gold has written, with a clear sense of Enlightenment destination. Allen Guttman, in a study of assimilation in Jewish-American literature (The Jewish Writer in America), astutely comments: “How did chicken soup come to be understood as almost synonymous with Jewishness? How did it happen that Americans often assume that the folkways of Mitteleuropa or of the Russian shtetl are really the essentials of Jewishness? To answer such questions fully is to tell the story of the American Jews, but this much is certain: a minority that adopted many of the traits of its European neighbors is now distinguished in the eyes of its American neighbors by these adopted characteristics rather than by the fundamental differences that originally accounted for the minority status.”
*Even so, one can’t help noticing that a prefiguration of study-centeredness—and of “immanence”—occurs as early as Deuteronomy 29–31, wherein Moses repeatedly calls on every member of the community—“your heads, your tribes, your elders, and your officers, even all the men of Israel, your little ones, your wives, the stranger in your camp, from the hewer of wood to the drawer of water”—to give conscientious attention to the text of “this book.” And in Nehemiah 8: 1–9, the people are again convened, and this time Ezra the scribe “opened the book in the sight of all the people,” and “all the people wept, when they heard the words of the law.” In all these instances, however, what we have is a multitude standing democratically assembled, an intent audience listening with concentration and understanding. But the people do not read for themselves; they are read to. Whereas “study” somehow suggests an independent intellectual net.
*The distinguished Israeli critic Dan Miron has argued that the idea of a Jewish “moral seriousness” is itself an Enlightenment development, and that traditionally it was beside the point whether one was or was not morally serious; what mattered was that one performed what was religiously requisite in Jewish law. I am persuaded that he is right about the notion of moral seriousness having gained ascendancy post-Enlightenment, as one of the consequences of the diminution of tradition; but this certainly cannot mean that it is not present at all in the tradition, beginning with the appearance of the ram in the thicket. Moral seriousness, it seems to me, is endemic in Jewish particularity; and what has brought about its characterization as a wholly Enlightenment idea is precisely its severance from Jewish particularity.
*Hebrew for “close analysis.”
Ruth
For
Muriel Dance, in New York;
Lee Gleichmann, in Stockholm;
Sarah Halevi, in Jerusalem; and
Inger Mirsky, in New York
I. FLOWERS
There were only two pictures on the walls of the house I grew up in. One was large, and hung from the molding on a golden cord with a full golden tassel. It was a painting taken from a photograph—all dark, a kind of grayish-brown; it was of my grandfather Hirshl, my father’s father. My grandfather’s coat had big foreign-looking buttons, and he wore a tall stiff square yarmulke that descended almost to the middle of his forehead. His eyes were severe, pale, concentrated. There was no way to escape those eyes; they came after you wherever you were. I had never known this grandfather: he died in Russia long ago. My father, a taciturn man, spoke of him only once, when I was already grown: as a boy, my father said, he had gone with his father on a teaching expedition to Kiev; he remembered how the mud was deep in the roads. From my mother I learned a little more. Zeyde Hirshl was frail. His wife, Bobe Sore-Libe, was the opposite: quick, energetic, hearty, a skilled zogerke—a women’s prayer leader in the synagogue—a whirlwind who kept a dry goods store and had baby after baby, all on her own, while Zeyde Hirshl spent his days in the study-house. Sometimes he fainted on his way there. He was pale, he was mild, he was delicate, unworldly; a student, a melamed, a fainter. Why, then, those unforgiving stern eyes that would not let you go?
My grandfather’s portrait had its permanent place over the secondhand piano. To the right, farther down the wall, hung the other picture. It was framed modestly in a thin black wooden rectangle, and was, in those spare days, all I knew of “art.” Was it torn from a magazine, cut from a calendar? A barefoot young woman, her hair bound in a kerchief, grasping a sickle, stands alone and erect in a field. Behind her a red sun is half-swallowed by the horizon. She wears a loose white peasant’s blouse and a long dark skirt, deeply blue; her head and shoulders are isolated against a limitless sky. Her head is held poised: she gazes past my gaze into some infinity of loneliness stiller than the sky.
Below the picture was its title: The Song of the Lark. There was no lark. It did not come to me that the young woman, with her lifted face, was straining after the note of a bird who might be in a place invisible to the painter. What I saw and heard
was something else: a scene older than this French countryside, a woman lonelier even than the woman alone in the calendar meadow. It was, my mother said, Ruth: Ruth gleaning in the fields of Boaz.
For many years afterward—long after The Song of the Lark had disappeared from the living room wall—I had the idea that this landscape (a 1930s fixture, it emerged, in scores of American households and Sunday-school classrooms) was the work of Jean-François Millet, the French painter of farm life. “I try not to have things look as if chance had brought them together,” Millet wrote, “but as if they had a necessary bond between them. I want the people I represent to look as if they really belonged to their station, so that imagination cannot conceive of their ever being anything else.”
Here is my grandfather. Imagination cannot conceive of his ever being anything else: a melamed who once ventured with his young son (my blue-eyed father) as far as Kiev, but mainly stayed at home in his own town, sometimes fainting on the way to the study-house. The study-house was his “station.” In his portrait he looks as if he really belonged there; and he did. It was how he lived.
And here is Ruth, on the far side of the piano, in Boaz’s field, gleaning. Her mouth is remote: it seems somehow damaged; there is a blur behind her eyes. All the sadness of the earth is in her tender neck, all the blur of loss, all the damage of rupture: remote, remote, rent. The child who stands before the woman standing barefoot, sickle forgotten, has fallen through the barrier of an old wooden frame into the picture itself, into the field; into the smell of the field. There is no lark, no birdcall: only the terrible silence of the living room when no one else is there. The grandfather is always there; his eyes keep their vigil. The silence of the field swims up from a time so profoundly lost that it annihilates time. There is the faint weedy smell of thistle: and masses of meadow flowers. In my childhood I recognized violets, lilacs, roses, daisies, dandelions, black-eyed Susans, tiger lilies, pansies (I planted, one summer, a tiny square of pansies, one in each corner, one in the middle), and no more. The lilacs I knew because of the children who brought them to school in springtime: children with German names, Koechling, Behrens, Kuntz.
To annihilate time, to conjure up unfailingly the fragrance in Boaz’s field (his field in The Song of the Lark), I have the power now to summon what the child peering into the picture could not. “Tolstoy, come to my aid,” I could not call then: I had never heard of Tolstoy: my child’s Russia was the grandfather’s portrait, and stories of fleeing across borders at night, and wolves, and the baba yaga in the fairy tales. But now: “Tolstoy, come to my aid,” I can chant at this hour, with my hair turned silver; and lo, the opening of Hadji Murad spills out all the flowers in Boaz’s field:
It was midsummer, the hay harvest was over and they were just beginning to reap the rye. At that season of the year there is a delightful variety of flowers—red, white, and pink scented tufty clover; milk-white ox-eye daisies with their bright yellow centers and pleasant spicy smell; yellow honey-scented rape blossoms; tall campanulas with white and lilac bells, tulip-shaped; creeping vetch; yellow, red, and pink scabious; faintly scented, neatly arranged purple plantains with blossoms slightly tinged with pink; cornflowers, the newly opened blossoms bright blue in the sunshine but growing paler and redder towards evening or when growing old; and delicate almond-scented dodder flowers that withered quickly.
Dodder? Vetch? (Flash of Henry James’s Fleda Vetch.) Scabious? Rape and campanula? The names are unaccustomed; my grandfather in the study-house never sees the flowers. In the text itself—in the Book of Ruth—not a single flower is mentioned. And the harvest is neither hay nor rye; in Boaz’s field outside Bethlehem they are cutting down barley and wheat. The flowers are there all the same, even if the text doesn’t show them, and we are obliged to take in their scents, the weaker with the keener, the grassier with the meatier: without the smell of flowers, we cannot pass through the frame of history into that long ago, ancientness behind ancientness, when Ruth the Moabite gleaned. It is as if the little spurts and shoots of fragrance form a rod, a rail of light, along which we are carried, drifting, into that time before time “when the judges ruled.”
Two pictures, divided by an old piano—Ruth in The Song of the Lark, my grandfather in his yarmulke. He looks straight out; so does she. They sight each other across the breadth of the wall. I stare at both of them. Eventually I will learn that The Song of the Lark was not painted by Millet, not at all; the painter is Jules Breton—French like Millet, like Millet devoted to rural scenes. The Song of the Lark hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago; it is possible I will die without ever having visited there. Good: I never want to see the original, out of shock at what a reproduction now discloses: a mistake, everything is turned the other way! On our living room wall Ruth faced right. In the Art Institute of Chicago she faces left. A calendar reversal!—but of course it feels to me that the original is in sullen error. Breton, unlike Millet, lived into our century—he died in 1906, the year my nine-year-old mother came through Castle Garden on her way to framing The Song of the Lark two decades later. About my grandfather Hirshl there is no “eventually”; I will not learn anything new about him. He will not acquire a different maker. Nothing in his view will be reversed. He will remain a dusty indoor melamed with eyes that drill through bone.
Leaving aside the wall, leaving aside the child who haunts and is haunted by the grandfather and the woman with the sickle, what is the connection between this dusty indoor melamed and the nymph in the meadow, standing barefoot amid the tall campanula?
Everything, everything. If the woman had not been in the field, my grandfather, three thousand years afterward, would not have been in the study-house. She, the Moabite, is why he, when hope is embittered, murmurs the Psalms of David. The track her naked toes make through spice and sweetness, through dodder, vetch, rape, and scabious, is the very track his forefinger follows across the letter-speckled sacred page.
II. MERCY
When my grandfather reads the Book of Ruth, it is on Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, with its twin furrows: the text’s straight furrow planted with the alphabet; the harvest’s furrow, fuzzy with seedlings. The Feast of Weeks, which comes in May, is a reminder of the late spring crops, but only as an aside. The soul of it is the acceptance of the Torah by the Children of Israel. If there is a garland crowning this festival of May, it is the arms of Israel embracing the Covenant. My grandfather will not dart among field flowers after Ruth and her sickle; the field is fenced round by the rabbis, and the rabbis—those insistent interpretive spirits of Commentary whose arguments and counter-arguments, from generation to generation, comprise the Tradition—seem at first to be vexed with the Book of Ruth. If they are not actually or openly vexed, they are suspicious; and if they are not willing to be judged flatly suspicious, then surely they are cautious.
The Book of Ruth is, after all, about exogamy, and not simple exogamy— marriage with a stranger, a member of a foreign culture: Ruth’s ancestry is hardly neutral in that sense. She is a Moabite. She belongs to an enemy people, callous, pitiless; a people who deal in lethal curses. The children of the wild hunter Esau—the Edomites, who will ultimately stand for the imperial oppressors of Rome—cannot be shut out of the family of Israel. Even the descendants of the enslaving Egyptians are welcome to marry and grow into intimacy. “You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your kinsman. You shall not abhor an Egyptian, for you were a stranger in his land. Children born to them may be admitted into the congregation of the Lord in the third generation” (Deut. 23: 8–9). But a Moabite, never: “none of their descendants, even in the tenth generation, shall ever be admitted into the congregation of the Lord, because they did not meet you with food and water on your journey after you left Egypt, and because they hired Balaam . . . to curse you” (Deut. 23: 4–5). An abyss of memory and hurt in that: to have passed through the furnace of the desert famished, parched, and to be chased after by a wonder-worker on an ass hurling the king’s maledictions, officially designed
to wipe out the straggling mob of exhausted refugees! One might in time reconcile with Esau, one might in time reconcile with hardhearted Egypt. All this was not merely conceivable—through acculturation, conversion, family ties, and new babies, it could be implemented, it would be implemented. But Moabite spite had a lasting sting.
What, then, are the sages to do with Ruth the Moabite as inlaw? How to account for her presence and resonance in Israel’s story? How is it possible for a member of the congregation of the Lord to have violated the edict against marriage with a Moabite? The rabbis, reflecting on the pertinent verses, deduce a rule: Moabite, not Moabitess. It was customary for men, they conclude, not for women, to succor travelers in the desert, so only the Moabite males were guilty of a failure of humanity. The women were blameless, hence are exempt from the ban on conversion and marriage.
Even with the discovery of this mitigating loophole (with its odd premise that women are descended only from women, and men from men; or else that all the women, or all the men, in a family line are interchangeable with one another, up and down the ladder of the generations, and that guilt and innocence are collective, sex-linked, and heritable), it is hard for the rabbis to swallow a Moabite bride. They are discomfited by every particle of cause-and-effect that brought about such an eventuality. Why should a family with a pair of marriageable sons find itself in pagan Moab in the first place? The rabbis begin by scolding the text—or, rather, the characters and events of the story as they are straightforwardly set out.
Metaphor and Memory Page 26