THE DOOR INTO THE LAW

The essay that follows asks a question that is not often asked of Celan’s work: the Talmudic question "Mai nafkah mineh," what is the halakhic outcome? In the Talmud all discourse circles around the question how we are to lead our lives, and discourse usually ends by coming down to specifics. On the surface, nothing seems farther from the diction of the poems than an Orthodox psak din, or halakhic decision.  Celan’s work seems predicated on the anarchic freedom of the artist, which seems incompatible with such regulation. But freedom and halakha are not opposites in the Jewish tradition. In the Talmudic tractate "Ethics of the Fathers" it is said: "Do not read ‘harut’ (engraved) but ‘herut’ (freedom)." The Law given on Sinai is not a contradiction of human freedom but a precondition of it.

Like Kafka, Celan was unable either to follow the Orthodox tradition or to detach himself wholly from it. His attachment manifested itself in the references to Jewish sources – the Hebrew Bible, liturgy and midrash, as well as Hasidic and kabbalistic traditions – that abound in his work; in the intensity with which he sought contact with Israel in his last year; and perhaps also, tragically, in the shattering of his life outside Israel.. Unable to live either inside or outside his tradition and people, he seems trapped in an approach-avoidance pattern, like the hero of a Kafka novel. In the last few years of his life, speaking off the poetic record, he tried to define his Judaism as spiritual, cultural, or thematic. But traditional Judaism is not just cultural or spiritual but halakhic – imperative and normative.  The poems, with their frequent imperatives, know this.

Need we, then, accept the answer of despair and detachment as the final one?  Toward the end of Kafka’s novel The Trial comes a well-known parable, "Before the Law," where a man is deterred by the threats of a gatekeeper from entering the Law. He settles down before the gate, grows old, finally dies. But just before he dies he becomes "aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the gateway of the Law." It then occurs to him to ask a question which he has not asked before: "Everyone strives to reach the Law...so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?" The gatekeeper replies, "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."

It is a cruel ending – and yet one in which something suddenly opens up. On first reading this story some years ago (being at that time practically a tabula rasa as to Judaism) I felt that amid the darkness of Kafka’s world, here suddenly was a gleam of spiritual teaching! Each of us has a gate that was meant just for this person!  And similarly, in reading Celan’s last poems, the ones that reflect his journey to Israel, we may ask ourselves: is there a door that opens here, or that might suddenly appear to be passable? Does a reconciliation of Celan’s poetics with traditional Judaism become, after all, imaginable?

For this reader, these final poems were the impetus to take the step of conversion, to go to Israel, to spend some time studying the tradition in the traditional community. I soon learned, of course, in how grave a light that community regarded Celan’s way of life – and death. "Crooked was the way that I walked,/ crooked, yes,/ for, yes,/ it was straight," he wrote in the No-One’s-Rose, as if to defend himself against the charges which he knew to be pending against him, so to speak, in that venue. In the mirror of the Orthodox ethic he appears as one who failed to "choose life." For his poetry there is apparently no place in the Orthodox world.

Nevertheless, in the course of my experiences in Israel and in the Orthodox community, certain things that I had understood from Celan kept recurring to me as a response to the questions of the community itself. It seemed to me possible that the door that opens for Celan’s reader in the last poems could be one for the community as well. The following essay is an attempt to develop this possibility.

The essay was written (originally in Hebrew) after a visit to Israel in November 2001, for a small circle – the ‘Olam Katan, or "Small World" – which had formed at my instigation in the mid-‘80's, and whose members gathered for a reunion meeting during that visit. The circle included Orthodox scholars as well as secular poets, and the essay is in the form of a letter addressed to both. It attempts to gather traditional authority for a horaat sha’ah, or emergency measure – a technical term for an instruction that overrides normal regulations in the light of a given situation. Its method recalls that of the traditional "word of Torah" in which the speaker is struggling to read aright not only the sacred text, but also the world, which, like the Torah, is considered as God-given.

This way of reading is, after all, not that different from the "acute" attention which Celan gives to the words of Georg Büchner in "The Meridian." As an address to the traditional community, the following essay may well be unprecedented. But the barriers between cultures are not impermeable, after all, though in the short run they may seem so.

The letter closes with a kind of anthem – likewise originally written in Hebrew – that fuses themes of mysticism, Zionism, and global communism. "And we sang the Warschowjanka,/ With sedge-overgrown lips, Petrarca..." I think of his singing that song again in 1969 at the home of his friend Emil Singer, and I hope he would have been pleased with this one. As the song ends with the invocation of "the One enthroned beyond time," it may also be a fitting conclusion for this book.

EMERGENCY MEASURE: A LETTER TO COMRADES

Dear friends,

On my last visit to Jerusalem, at the reunion meeting of the "‘Olam Katan," I formed the intention of focusing and summarizing in writing my views about "‘Olam Katan" and the Sabbath, and to justify them, insofar as possible, from the sources which are the foundation or at least the cause of your existence in the land of Israel, that existence which is now so severely called into question. My proposal is in the nature of an "emergency measure," and I realize that I, neither a current resident in Israel nor a Torah expert, have no authority to speak on such matters. If I am to seek a precedent for this address to you, I can find it only in the episode of Jethro, a guest who comes for a while and says his piece to Moses our teacher in a conditional manner: "If you do this and if your G-d commands you" (Ex. 18:23) – that is, Jethro expects that Moses, the humblest of men, who is willing to learn from everyone, will consult the Almighty (as Rashi says) as to whether he should accept the advise or not. And I beg of you, dear friends, to hear me in that spirit.

My words are addressed to you as persons concerned with the future of the land and people of Israel, and of humanity. I know that you place the accent in different places. Some of you hold allegiance first of all to the Torah, and some of you hold allegiance first of all to a universal human concept of justice. There are differences of opinion among you as to the rights of the two populations that are presently contending with arms and with words for the territory that our calls the Land of Israel. I cannot settle these questions, only say to you that I came to Israel out of concern not only for Israel but also for the future of humanity, as a citizen of Earth, and I have continued to see the situation in the land of Israel in that light.

A foundation of this dialogue is the presupposition that all of us want peace. At present it seems far away, barred by obstacles that we do not know how to overcome. But even amid our lack of knowledge and our relative powerlessness to affect the situation, it is possible to think about method. The question is always: how can we strive for peace in a world that is dominated by the struggle for survival?

To this question the Torah gives an answer: the Sabbath. Shabbat, whose name is inseparable in the mouth of the people from the word: Shalom. I have gathered that many of those who seek "peace" have so far not taken that answer into account, and if these words can recommend the Sabbath to them, I shall be exceedingly glad. But from those who keep the Sabbath my proposal would also demand an innovation, a change. I believe that if the two sides could accept this proposal, they would find a way to approach each other and mend the rifts between them, to resolve many apparent and real contradictions.

In Scripture itself, as far as I remember, the concept of "peace" is not connected explicitly with the Sabbath. The concept associated with the Sabbath is rather kedushah, or holiness. According to Genesis , Ch. 1, the world was made in seven days, and on the seventh day G-d "rested." He then "blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it." For the first time the root K-D-SH appears in the text. And on the second mention of the Sabbath, when Israel are commanded concerning it for the first time, it is said, "Tomorrow shall be a Sabbath of rest, a holy thing to the Lord." (Ex. 17:23). From Sinai Israel is commanded: "Remember the Sabbath to hallow it."

Kedushah, "holiness," is a central concept in Judaism. The meaning of the root is: separate, set apart. G-d himself is "kadosh," i.e. He is not part of the creation but separate from it, and cannot be grasped by human senses or human reason. Israel too are commanded, "Be holy, for I your G-d and holy." (Lev. 19). These words begin that portion of the Torah in which the words "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19) occur. Israel, the Sabbath and G-d thus share one attribute, so to speak: the quality of being "set apart."

In Exodus it is said twice that Shabbat is a "sign" "between" Israel and G-d. (Exodus 31:13, 31:17). And indeed, in the Ten Commandments the Sabbath appears between the commandments about one’s relation to G-d, and those about one’s relations to other humans. In Exodus the Sabbath seems to belong to the commandments between man and G-d, for the reason given is that "in six days G-d made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is therein, and rested on the seventh day" (Exodus 19:10). In the version given in Deuteronomy, the reason given is "in order that your slave and your handmaiden may rest as well as you: and you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and G-d brought you out from there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm." (Deut. 5:14-15). Here Shabbat is given in order to secure human rights, to preserve the dignity of what was created in the Divine image.

In the world of work, inequality and competition are natural. Through the value of their labor individuals go up and down on the economic scale. One becomes a master, another a slave. The word "milchamah" (war) is formed on the same root as the word "lechem" (bread). One who knows no interruption from work is also unlikely to know the meaning of "Love your neighbor as yourself." The Sabbath is a case-fire in the struggle for survival, a cease-fire that makes it possible for human beings to ascend from the world to which the "laws of nature" apply, the deterministic world symbolized, according to our sages, by the kingdom of "Egypt" with its animal-headed gods. For this reason the Sabbath is also called "a remembrance of the exodus from Egypt."

We may assume that this possibility of ascending from the animal kingdom is the essence of the "blessing" with which the Creator, in the first chapter of Genesis, blesses both humankind and the Sabbath. G-d created heaven and earth and saw that his work was "good," but only humankind and the Sabbath are "blessed." If there is any difference between human and animal, that difference is connected with the Sabbath.

This blessing, as is will known, is connected with fertility – but not only physical fertility. In his commentary on Genesis 2:3, Ibn Ezra says: "A ‘blessing’ means an increase of good, and on this day both fertility and the power of consciousness/reason (hakkarah) and reason (sekhel) are renewed in bodies made in the Divine image."

It may seem surprising that on Shabbat the power of consciousness-or-recognition and of reason is supposed to increase. After all, most of human thinking is done on the weekday, in connection with work. But from several commentators it appears that this power of consciousness and reason is not identical to the ingenuity which we employ in or work in order to gain wealth and to make a name for ourselves. Rashi says of the light that was created before the sun and the moon: "(G-d) saw that this light should not be used by the wicked, and set it aside for the righteous in the world to come." Our sages call the Sabbath is "a foretaste of the world to come." These two sayings are apparently the foundation for a wonderful midrash which Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his book The Sabbath, ascribes to Rabbi Aharon Shmuel ben Moshe Shalom of Kremnitz:

After all it is clear that in the domain of competition it is hard for the human being to see all the truth. We see the world as a field for our own action and are likely to forget, not to recognize, the creator in the bustle of the markeplace. Each of us sees only that fragment of the truth which is useful to him or her as a competitor. Others see those parts that can be useful to them, and when these partial truths meet the result is clashes and misunderstandings. Only to the extent that it is possible to go out of the domain of competition into a domain in which human beings are less connected to their egos and more connected to the creator, might it be possible to see the world with the eye of the Creator, as a single creation, whole, and to contemplate ways of "repairing" the world according to the will of the Creator. On Shabbat the human being recognizes the Creator, and in the light of that recognition we can also use our reason in order to carry out that encompassing Will.

In other words, Shabbat is the appropriate time for prophecy, if we understand prophecy as speech which flows from the recognition of the Creator and from the use of reason in the light of that recognition.

True, in the Scriptures the connection between Shabbat and prophecy is not expressed in so many words. But we can discern the inner connection between these two things by following the theme of the exodus from nature, which expresses itself in different ways in the stories of the patriarchs and the story of the children of Israel. First, Abraham is called to "go out of your country and your homeland and your father’s house." In promising Abraham that he will have descendants, it is said that G-d "brought Abraham out and said to him, Look at the heavens and count the stars." (Gen. 15:5). And Rashi explains that G-d said to Abraham, "Go out of your astrology," i.e. from your deterministic world-view, according to which it was impossible for Abraham to have children. For Abraham’s destiny flows not from the stars, nor from the laws of nature, but from the connection between Abraham and the Creator. By virtue of his recognition of his Creator, Abraham belongs to another level of creation, higher than that to which the laws of nature apply. And the exodus from Egypt is a repetition of the same parable.

Recognition of the Creator, then, is bound up with "kedushah," holiness, with the ability of Israel to go out of the deterministic, "Darwinistic" world. The purpose of this exodus is not the elevation of the individual alone; it is for the sake of some message to the world, some change in the world: for the sake of those "deeds of the fathers" which are a "sign to the children", for the sake of the giving of Torah, for the sake of the message of prophecy.

But it is well known that according to the view of the Torah world today, the voice of prophecy fell silent after the return of Israel from the Babylonian captivity, and has not been heard since. The reasons are bound up with the conditions of exile, the lack of independence from which Israel has suffered ever since. Our sages held that a prophet one must be "wise, strong, and rich" in order to merit prophetic illumination, and the possession of wisdom, strength and riches frees a person from that dependency on others which checks the ascent to G-d. While Israel is dependent on other nations, "since the destruction of the Temple G-d has nothing left in the world but the four cubits of halakha." (Brakhot 8a). The halakha, including the laws of the Sabbath, developed in a time when Israel had little control over its environment.

Two hundred years ago, a great change occurred in the lives of all peoples, namely the accelerated and aceelerating development of science and technology. Some view this development as enlightenment and liberation, while others view it as the exact opposite. It freed humans from much physical labor – and subordinated them to machines and to large organizations formed for the purpose of competition. It supplied the humans with much information on their origins and the origins of the world, gave us new possibilities of self-understanding – and veiled the face of the Creator behind a thick curtain of data. The natural sciences described the world as a complex of causes and effects in which it was difficult to see the traces of Providence. This development encouraged a skeptical relation to religion: people viewed it as one more expression of "human nature," a natural phenomenon like any other. Faith and tradition seemed like delusions, dreams of the night of ignorance, destined to disappear at the rising of the sun of enlightenment, of truth. But to an increasing extent the guiding light of secular society has been supplied to it by actors that seek not pure truth, and certainly not the good of the community, but merely their own advantage. These actors have discovered only those truths that can be of use to them. Moreover, among the various truths which they propagated, contradictions appeared, and little thought was given to reconciling them. In secular society the keeping of the Sabbath could not longer be backed by Divine law, and the reasons for this commandment were not evident the secular mind. As a result society drifted toward a life of uninterrupted weekdays, and its culture developed accordingly. To anyone who has not fallen into "Newton’s sleep" (as the English poet Yeats put it), it is clear that between technical sophistication on the one hand, and consciousness on the other, there is a vast difference. The first generations after the Enlightenment may have hoped for a wiser, more humane culture; they would hardly have foreseen the brutality and disrespect for human dignity that characterizes much of contemporary secular culture. As a result many have sought to "return" to traditional culture. But it is not possible to restore the uncritical, naive relation to the tradition; even those most faithful to tradition sense, today, the need for a renewal.

The first Chief Rabbi of the Zionist settlement, Abraham Yitzchak Kook, perceived that the revival of the state demands a revival of prophecy. He saw that prophecy is not essentially different from poetry and hoped that poets, even secular poets, might play a prophetic role in the life of a Jewish state. Unfortunately, to my knowledge few in the religious community seem to have taken this hope seriously so far. The yeshivot have not made room for contemporary poets and poetry, and the tradition of contemporary secular poetry seems to be away from the tradition rather than toward it. Harav Kook’s call for a renewal of prophecy received a response.

It might seem that the absence of prophecy is not a problem for human reason to solve. Prophecy is in the hands of heaven. No one can make himself or herself a prophet. Today we are skeptical, and probably with good reason, of those who claim to hear the voice of G-d directly.

But Scriptures show us one other way in which the spirit of prophecy can manifest itself in this world. In the book of Esther there is no direct prophecy, but we feel the hand of Providence, and it is possible for humans to cooperate with Providence. This way demands that we be attentive to new possibilities, for we cannot expect that the Creator will always work in the same way.

I come, then, to the proposal which I wish to make. This proposal stems from an encounter with a poet who was entirely "secular" in practice, who lived apart from his people and did not keep Shabbat and came to a bitter end. But apparently he saw this terrible disconnection as a condition of inspiration. Sound to me very much like the passages on prophecy that I have quoted: "It is to step out of the human..." "With all my thoughts I went out/ of the world..."

The poems of Paul Celan appealed to me first of all as a human being concerned about the human future. But they aroused my curiosity about the poet’s Jewish background, started me reading Jewish books. When in Heschel’s book on Shabbat I came to the midrash about the Sabbath light by which you could see from one end of the world to the other, it seemed to me that I recognized that illumination, that I had encountered it in Celan’s poems. This is, of course, a subjective impression; but it seems certain that the last word he wrote as a poet was: Sabbath.

Vineyardmen are redigging

the dark-houred clock,

depth upon depth,

 

you are reading,

 

the Invisible

summons the wind into bounds,

 

you are reading,

 

the open ones bear

behind the eye the stone

that recognizes you

on the Sabbath.

Like most of Celan’s poems, this one is not easy to interpret. But to my ear the tone is one of reassurance, addressed to whoever is reading the poem now, and perhaps especially to a reader in the land of Israel (the "vineyardmen" seem to place us in that landscape). The stanza about the wind reminds me of a story by S.Y. Agnon, "From Foe to Friend," a Zionist classic which Celan may well have known, in which the wind tries to destroy the house which the narrator is building, but desists and becomes a "friend" when the narrator builds a foundation that the wind cannot overturn. Here it is the "Invisible One," perhaps a hidden Providence, that the poet hopes will keep destructive forces at a distance while a process of introspection and mutual recognition goes on. The "stone" which "recognizes you" I take to be a common grief or concern or insight. Here Celan’s second-to-last poem may also be cited:

Crocus, seen

from the hospitable table:

tiny, sign-

sensitive exile

of a common

truth,

you need

each grassblade.

I did not know these two poems when in 1975 I wrote a poem called "Invitation," for Celan’s last poems were not published until 1976. But "Invitation" grew out of my study of his poems and summarizes the ideas they suggested to me.

We gather here to see

faces from which we need not hide our face,

to hear the sound of honest speech, to share

what dreams have etched upon the sleeping brain,

what the still voice has said, when heavy hours

plunged us to regions of the mind and life

not mentioned in the marketplace: to find

and match the threads of common destinies,

designs grimed over by our thoughtless life --

A sanctuary for the common mind

we seek. Not to compete, but to compare

what we have seen and learned, and to look back

from here upon that world where tangled minds

create the problems they attempt to solve

by doubting one another, doubting love,

the wise imagination, and the word.

For, looking back from here upon that world,

perhaps ways will appear to us, which when

we only struggled in it, did not take

counsel of kindred minds, lay undiscovered;

perhaps, reflecting on the Babeled speech

of various disciplines that make careers,

we shall find out some speech by which to address

each sector of the world's fragmented truth

and bring news of the whole to every part.

We say the mind, once whole, can mend the world.

To mend the mind, that is the task we set.

How many years? How many lives? We do not know;

but each shall bring a thread.

For many years – odd as this now seems to me – I did not connect this poem literally with Shabbat. The "Invitation" came to me as I was attempting to write an organizational statement for the American predecessor of the "‘Olam Katan," the "Small World."

Over the years, the design of the "‘Olam Katan" has gradually clarified itself for me. From the first I envisioned people meeting in groups of ten or so, with the leaders of these groups forming a second tier, and so on, in the manner of Jethro’s proposal to Moses in Exodus 18. After the first experiment I realized the importance of having people sit in a circle and speak in turn, without interruptions, on any subject they chose, for five minutes each, measured by a timer that was passed from hand to hand. This rule avoids arguments and tensions as to who will speak next – those pressures from the competitive world which the exercise is designed to keep at a distance.

This exercise turned out to be not easy, but fruitful. Perhaps it is easier to stand on Mount Sinai than first to hear the voice of the other without trying to convince or change them, and then to let our own inner reflections be heard. These are real "peace talks." I found that when participants kept to these rules, voices from the depths were heard, there were moments of surprising communication, and we felt that something important was happening. Where people speak together in this manner, there is hope for something like the renewal of prophecy. But in order for them to achieve significant results, such meetings would have to be a regular occurrence.

One of the main difficulties was finding time. It was always hard to agree on a time when all participants could be present. At times I would think wistfully of the Rotary Club, which I understand requires its members to attend luncheon every Wednesday, wherever they might be in the world, or pay a heavy fine. The Rotary Club is a club for business people who meet together as a way of making business connections. Why could an organization dedicated to the "repair of the world" adopt a similar stringency? But the lament over how much easier it is to recruit people for self-interested is an ancient one. And even when meetings took place, much time was wasted in discussions as to the value of the exercise, in attempts to disrupt the procedure with various excuses. These material and spiritual obstacles prevented the ‘Olam Katan from growing and bearing fruit.

I often thought how much easier it would be if the groups could meet on the Sabbath. The Sabbath, at least, no one has to schedule. And perhaps only on the Sabbath, with its "foretaste of the coming world," with the "extra soul," might we find the power to overcome the spiritual obstacles. But during the my years in Israel I did not dare to suggest this, knowing the difficulties it would raise. In order to hold these meetings it would be necessary to shorten the prayers (the Sabbath morning prayers, I think, as this is the time when people are most free and most alert). And it would also be necessary to speak of "weekday" things. It is hoped that we could speak of these things in a different spirit, see them in a different light, "for the sake of the union of the Holy One, blessed be He, and His Shekhinah." Still, the departure from tradition would be significant.

Could this proposal indeed be justified as a horaat sha’ah, an "emergency measure"? Granted that it does not address directly any of the problems that threaten the state of Israel. But if enough this method were adopted and used earnestly, if a movement to use it could gain momentum, it might help Israel find the wisdom it needs to walk a "narrow bridge" between terrible alternatives.

I would like to buttress this proposal with one further argument from the tradition. Our sages established the daily and Sabbath prayers as a substitute for the sacrifices which were offered in the Temple before its destruction. "‘Olam Katan" was, as you know, one of the names for the Temple – something I did not know in 1975, when I chose the English Name "Small World" for the movment I hoped to start. Perhaps participation in these gatherings could be regarded as a kind of sacrifice, suited to our present conditions. For today most people are not involved in agriculture; sacrifices of animals and grain would have no relation to their daily life. Most of our people are involved in intellectual work. It seems reasonable, then, to ask that they think once a week about the "repair of the world" – with the same sharpness and consequentiality with which they think about their professional work. When Malachi, the last of the prophets, criticized the one who brings for sacrifice the lame animal in his herd, (Mal. 1:14), one may translate: the service of G-d demands our best effort of thought. For the next "version" of the ‘Olam Katan I envision an alternative form of the meetings, in which the group would give one member permission to speak for a half an hour on his or her area of expertise, after which discussion would follow in the usual form. I would like, too, to hope that the synagogue and beit midrash could receive the writings of participants in these discussions.

It is true that one cannot make oneself into a prophet. But one can train oneself to be open to the voices from the depth of one’s own soul and to the voice of the other. One can learn to strengthen others in this effort and to receive strength from them. Perhaps in the framework of Shabbat, the holy time, we could find the sense of independence and security which we need in order to open ourselves to inspiration, to the unexpected, to what calls for our attention.

Comrades, this essay contains, I believe, the gist of what I came to Israel to say. I have told you something of the path by which I came to you, and I hope that you have felt, in the little I could tell here, a touch of the hand of a hidden Providence. This writing was for me a prayer that the people Israel will find the wisdom both to make their existence in the land secure and to show a way to other nations. Perhaps in this time these two imperatives cannot be separated.

I would close with that song I wrote in 1998 after one of you sent me the issue of Nekudah in which fifty writers, mainly from the religious "right," reflected on the Israeli situation by commenting on poems written mainly by secular leftist writers. Most of what is said in the song corresponds to longings expressed in those essays and those poems; I hope that you will also hear in it the echo of Celan’s last poem.

A song of peace we will sing to you, our country,

A song of peace that is honest and faithful,

Land of Israel, inseparable

From the One enthroned beyond time.

 

A song of Sabbath we will sing to you, our country,

A song of Sabbath open and strong,

In which the heart of those who unite in the heart of time

Will hear the voices that call for justice.

 

A song of Sabbath we will sing to you, our country,

In which the voice of each one shall be included,

A mighty and delicate song, sensitive

To the tremor of every soul made by one artist.

 

A song of Sabbath we will sing to you, our country,

A song of Sabbath we will sing to you, Earth,

A song of ascent that also descends

To uplift the hearts of all that mourn.

 

A song of peace we will sing to you, our country,

A song of peace that is honest and faithful.

Land of Israel, inseparable

From the One enthroned beyond time.