I recently walked past a Little Free Library (a small box with free books). I noticed a collection of short stories by the Israeli writer S. Y. Agnon. Many years ago, when I wrote about the classics of modern literature, I had mentioned Agnon, but I’d never read him. The title of the story-collection was A Book That Was Lost and Other Stories.
I read the title story, and was much impressed by the style, though Agnon didn’t write in English (he wrote in Hebrew). One might call it a religious style — slow, serious, clear. When I read other works by Agnon, I found that he didn’t always write in the “religious style.” But this religious style is a remarkable achievement, even if it’s only in some of Agnon’s works. I suspect that this religious style wasn’t invented by Agnon, I suspect Agnon found this style in ancient religious texts, admired it, and emulated it.
Agnon is known for immersing himself in Jewish history and tradition. Wikipedia says that Agnon’s distinctive Hebrew is “based on traditional Jewish sources, such as the Torah and the Prophets, Midrashic literature, the Mishnah, and other Rabbinic literature.”
Lincoln admired Horace Greeley’s writing, and said that each of Greeley’s words “seems to weigh about a ton.” Agnon’s words have this weightiness, even in translation.
We respect the flag and the nation, and we dispose of old flags with ceremony. Jews respected books, especially when they mentioned God, so Jews disposed of old books with ceremony. An old book wasn’t put in the trash, it was put in the attic of the synagogue, then “brought to the graveyard for burial between the graves in earthenware urns.”1 The Jewish scholar S. D. Goitein wrote a classic study of medieval Jewry by poking around in the attic of a Cairo synagogue. Goitein and Agnon were close friends, and their correspondence has been published.
Agnon reminds us that one of the decisive developments in the history of book-making was, not the printing of words on paper, but the making of paper itself. If the average person couldn’t afford paper, writing was difficult. In “A Book That Was Lost,” Agnon writes,
| Though a man of great learning, [Rabbi Avraham] was poor, without the means to buy paper on which to write, and used to write his novellae [commentaries on Jewish law] on the face of the table and on the wall, and when a piece of paper came into his hands, he would compose his thoughts and jot down their essence in extremely concise language. |
Rabbi Avraham’s concise language was obscure, and needed commentary and explanation. So Rabbi Shmaria spends twelve years writing a commentary on the commentary of Rabbi Avraham. When Rabbi Shmaria takes his commentary to be printed, he notices a book lying in the print-shop; it’s a commentary on Rabbi Avraham, a commentary that renders all Rabbi Shmaria’s labors superfluous. Rabbi Shmaria sighs and says, “I have been preceded by another; there is no need for my work.”
Rabbi Shmaria’s commentary is eventually consigned to an attic storehouse, and after “four or five generations,” it’s found by the narrator. The narrator admires Rabbi Shmaria’s work, and thinks that it contains important innovations, “nice distinctions.” The narrator considers making a copy of it, but realizes that such a copy, like the original, would be ignored, consigned to oblivion, and eventually buried in a cemetery. Instead of one “lost book,” there would be two.
So instead of copying Rabbi Shmaria’s book, the narrator decides to mail it to the Ginzei Yosef Library in Jerusalem (the forerunner of today’s National Library). “In those days we believed [the library] was the depository for all the books of Jewry.”
The narrator, who probably lives in Poland, Ukraine, or Germany, eventually makes his way to Jerusalem (Agnon himself went to Palestine when he was about 35, and lived in Jerusalem until his death in 1970, at age 81). “On the Sabbath eve before sundown,” the narrator says, “I came to Jerusalem. I laid down my staff and my knapsack, washed myself of the dust of the road, and put on my Sabbath clothes and ran to the Western Wall. From there to the Hurvah Synagogue, from there to other synagogues, from there to the hostel, and to the streets of Jerusalem which were lit up quite clearly. Though Jerusalem was desolate, the moon, by the grace of God, had not ceased to shine upon it.”
The narrator goes to the library, and inquires after Rabbi Shmaria’s book, but the book is lost.
The longing for Jerusalem is deeply embedded in Jewish culture. Agnon’s novel Bridal Canopy is set in Poland’s Jewish community in the 1600s; the characters sometimes keep a “little bag of earth from the Land of Israel” in their home, and sometimes put some of this earth on a relative’s eyes, as part of the funeral rites.2
Bridal Canopy describes the travels of Reb Yudel, who’s seeking husbands for his three daughters, or dowry-money to make his daughters more desirable. Bridal Canopy is called a “mock epic,” and it has a light-hearted tone. It also has many realistic touches; Agnon was a student of Jewish history and culture. Bridal Canopy is a “frame story,” with numerous independent tales within the frame of Reb Yudel’s travels.
I wouldn’t call Bridal Canopy a great novel, but it’s lively, it holds your attention, and it teaches you something about Jewish life. Many critics were impressed that such a work could be written in Hebrew, a recently-revived language.
“The Book That Was Lost” deals with old books. Another Agnon story, “The Tale of the Scribe,” deals with book-making. The scribe, Raphael, copies ancient texts — he makes Torah scrolls, and various ritual documents. Raphael prepares himself for the sacred work:
|
This was his way in holiness: At midnight he would rise, seat himself on the floor, place ashes on his head, and weep for the destruction of Jerusalem, for the death of the righteous, the burning of the Temple, the length of the exile... the suffering under enslavement, and all sorts of hard and cruel decrees that are inflicted on the people of Israel day in and day out.... In the morning he would go down to the ritual bath and immerse his thin body in the water, then recite the morning prayers. [He would] turn his heart away from all worldly matters. All day he sat in his house communing with his soul in solitude, completely within the frame of Torah.... He was careful never to write the Holy Name [i.e., the name of God] without first having purified his body. For this reason he often wrote an entire sheet of parchment but left blank the spaces for the Holy Name, and later he wrote the Name in the blank spaces only after having immersed himself again in the purifying ritual bath. |
There are two ways to view Jewish history:
The great Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem is known for his writings on Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism). Scholem argues that, in the early part of Jewish history, Jews lived a full life, and their literature reflected that full life. Discussing the Aggadah (i.e., Jewish legend/story/parable), Scholem says, “The old Aggadah is fed by deep and comprehensive experience; the life which it reflects has not yet become colorless.”
The later Aggadah, however, “reflects a narrow and circumscribed life which sought, nay, was compelled to seek, inspiration from hidden worlds, as the real world turned for them into the world of the Ghetto.... The realistic element in the later Aggadah has decreased because the realistic foundations, in which Jewish life was rooted, have grown more and more narrow.”3
Another writer on Kabbalah, Arthur Edward Waite, makes a similar point. Waite says that Kabbalistic literature “offers a strong contrast to the sacred scriptures of Israel, which are direct, beautiful and simple, while Kabbalism is involved, obscure and in many ways repellent as regards its outward form.”4
According to Waite, the boundary between the “sacred scriptures” and Kabbalistic literature is the dispersion of the Jews after they were defeated by the Romans. Scholem, however, seems to believe that Jews were confined to Ghettoes only after the Crusades. Were the Crusades a watershed in Jewish history, like the rise of nationalism in the 1800s?
The word “Kabbalah” means “tradition,” and the Kabbalah can be traced back to about 100 AD, and forward to recent times. Kabbalah isn’t a specific system, it’s a general approach. Scholem writes,
| Kabbalah, it must be remembered, is not the name of a certain dogma or system, but rather the general term applied to a whole religious movement. This movement... has been going on from Talmudic times to the present day; its development has been uninterrupted, though by no means uniform, and often dramatic. It leads from Rabbi Akiba [around 100 AD]... to the late Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook [died 1935], the religious leader of the Jewish community in Palestine and a splendid type of Jewish mystic. |
The Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) flourished within Judaism because it managed to respect organized religion, it managed to keep within the boundaries of monotheism, and didn’t fall into pantheism. But there’s always tension, Scholem says, between mysticism and organized religion. The Kabbalah could survive and continue despite this tense relationship with the religious establishment, but within Christianity and Islam, mysticism was sometimes crushed, since Christianity and Islam often controlled State Power, while Judaism rarely controlled State Power.
Mysticism often leads to a new conception of God, which in turn leads to a new community, a new movement. “Mystical tendencies [have] frequently led to the formation of new social groupings and communities, a fact which is true also of Jewish mysticism.” Among Protestants, voices and visions led to new churches, new denominations, even utopian communities. Surely the “inner voice” (i.e., the voice of the unconscious, the voice of God) will be a source of religious movements in the future.
The Kabbalah is about the experience of God, it’s about personal experience. Inner experience leads to universal truth; the Kabbalah leads to “the original stock of knowledge common to mankind.” Kabbalah is Tradition, Kabbalah hands down “the secret of God’s revelation to Adam.” (I’m reminded of my own theory of Connections, which has much in common with primitive wisdom, with the oldest worldview.) The Kabbalah might be compared to the Hermetic writings, which probably originated among the Gnostics around 200 AD, but were attributed to a much earlier Egyptian sage, Hermes Trismegistus.
True intuition, according to the Kabbalists, agrees with true tradition. This is apparent in the work of Isaac Luria, who created “the most influential system of later Kabbalism.” Luria’s teachings were “excitingly novel,” but at the same time “traditional wisdom.” (Luria was a teacher in Safed in northern Israel, around 1550. He didn’t write books; his teachings were written down by his students. Safed became a center for Kabbalism after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.)
More than thirty years ago, I wrote, “I hope that my writings will inspire people with the belief that one can be faithful to pre-20th-century traditions, and at the same time create works that are original; the adjectives ‘traditional’ and ‘original’ can be applied to the same work.” As an epigraph for my book of aphorisms, I used a quote from Confucius: “A teacher should teach what is new by resurrecting what is old.”
Respect for tradition is important in Jewry; a teacher like Luria is known for being both innovative and traditional. Scholem says that the only Kabbalist work that was as influential as Luria’s was the Zohar, which was written about 1275 AD by a Spanish rabbi, when Spain was a center of Kabbalism.
Scholem contrasts Jewish rational philosophers with Jewish mystics. According to Scholem, Jewish rational philosophers used allegory in their discussions of Jewish Law and Jewish Legend. Jewish mystics, on the other hand, used symbolism. The difference between allegory and symbolism, Scholem says, is that allegory is “the representation of an expressible something by another expressible something,” whereas symbolism is “an expressible representation of something which lies beyond the sphere of expression and communication.”
Jewish mysticism acknowledged evil; “the mystic does not even recoil before the inference that in a higher sense there is a root of evil even in God.” Rational Jewish philosophy, on the other hand, often denied evil:
| The philosophers of Judaism treat the existence of evil as something meaningless in itself. Some of them have shown themselves only too proud of this negation of evil as one of the fundamentals of what they call rational Judaism. Hermann Cohen has said with great clarity and much conviction: “Evil is non-existent. It is nothing but a concept derived from the concept of freedom. A power of evil exists only in myth.”5 One may doubt the philosophical truth of this statement, but assuming its truth it is obvious that something can be said for ‘myth’ in its struggle with ‘philosophy’. To most Kabbalists, as true seal-bearers of the world of myth, the existence of evil is, at any rate, one of the most pressing problems, and one which keeps them continuously occupied with attempts to solve it. |
What Scholem calls the mythical standpoint is also Jung’s standpoint. Jung acknowledges evil, and even notes the possibility of evil in God. Why do people pray “Lead us not into temptation” unless God might be disposed to lead us into temptation? Jung notes a dark side, a shadow side, in Jesus, as Jesus is described in the New Testament.
Scholem divides Judaism into three parts:
Scholem says that Kabbalists treated Law as “a sacrament, a mystery rite,” hence it became a “revival of myth in the very heart of Judaism.” This approach to Law/Halakha “raised the Halakhah to a position of incomparable importance for the mystic, and strengthened its hold over the people. Every mitzvah [commandment] became an event of cosmic importance, an act which had a bearing upon the dynamics of the universe.”6
When someone performs a mitzvah, is it done out of spontaneous religious feeling, or is it done to achieve something? Scholem says, “This conflict is inseparable from any and every fulfilment of a religious command, since every prescribed duty is also conceived as assumed willingly and spontaneously. The antinomy is, in fact, inescapable, and can only be overcome by religious feeling so long as it is strong and unbroken.”
So the Kabbalist treatment of Law made Law more popular with the Jewish people, and also made Kabbalah more popular. The same is true of the Kabbalist treatment of Prayer. When the Kabbalist prayed, he used Kavanah — intention, concentration, sincere feeling. The Kabbalists “developed a technique of meditation.” Scholem boldly links this meditation to magic; he says that Kavanah has “a solemnity which not only approaches but also passes the border of the magical.”
Scholem is aware that Kabbalah sometimes degenerates, Kabbalah can’t be swallowed whole. Scholem speaks of, “The dangers which myth and magic present to the religious consciousness.” We shouldn’t despise Kabbalah, as rationalists are prone to do, but at the same time we shouldn’t adopt an “uncritical and obscurantist glorification of the Kabbalah.” Even the writings of the “great Kabbalists” provoke in Scholem both “admiration and disgust.”
One of the basic goals of the Jewish mystic is to interpret the Torah, i.e., interpret the first five books of the Old Testament. The mystic finds all sorts of meanings beneath the plain words of the Torah.
| All Jewish mystics [are] at one in giving a mystical interpretation to the Torah; the Torah is to them a living organism animated by a secret life which streams and pulsates below the crust of its literal meaning.... The Torah, in other words, does not consist merely of chapters, phrases and words; rather is it to be regarded as the living incarnation of the divine wisdom which eternally sends out new rays of light. |
The Kabbalists lamented that language couldn’t convey mystical experience, but they also revered language (especially Hebrew) as something divine.
| They continuously and bitterly complain of the utter inadequacy of words to express their true feelings, but, for all that, they glory in them; they indulge in rhetoric and never weary of trying to express the inexpressible in words.... Kabbalism is distinguished by an attitude towards language which is quite unusually positive.... To them Hebrew, the holy tongue, is not simply a means of expressing certain thoughts, born out of a certain convention and having a purely conventional character.... Language in its purest form, that is, Hebrew, according to the Kabbalists, reflects the fundamental spiritual nature of the world; in other words, it has a mystical value. |
Scholem complains that the Kabbalists never write about their personal experience, they never write in an autobiographical way; he calls this “a serious obstacle to any psychological understanding of Jewish mysticism.” Perhaps the Kabbalists felt that their personal experience didn’t fit the conception of God found in orthodox Judaism. There is, however, one school of Jewish mysticism “whose teachings and writings bear the imprint of a strong personality,” namely, “the Hasidic movement and its leaders since 1750.”
Scholem notes that “there have been no women Kabbalists,” though there are female mystics in Islam and Christianity. He ascribes this “exclusive masculinity” to “an inherent tendency to lay stress on the demonic nature of woman.” He notes, however, that some Kabbalists speak of a feminine element in God; they use the term Shekhinah for this feminine element.
Scholem argues that Kabbalah isn’t primordial religion, it arises later. Primordial religion, everywhere in the world, sees
| the world as being full of gods whom man encounters at every step and whose presence can be experienced without recourse to ecstatic meditation.... The immediate consciousness of the interrelation and interdependence of things, their essential unity which precedes duality and in fact knows nothing of it, the truly monistic universe of man’s mythical age, all this is alien to the spirit of mysticism.... In this first stage, Nature is the scene of man’s relation to God.7 |
The second stage of religion, according to Scholem, is also non-mystical. The second stage is organized religion, which destroys
| the dream-harmony of Man, Universe and God.... In its classical form, religion signifies the creation of a vast abyss, conceived as absolute, between God, the infinite and transcendental Being, and Man, the finite creature. For this reason alone, the rise of institutional religion, which is also the classical stage in the history of religion, is more widely removed than any other period from mysticism and all it implies.... The scene of religion is no longer Nature, but the moral and religious action of man and the community of men.8 |
Now mysticism emerges; it emerges within organized religion, as an attempt to bridge the gap between god and man, an attempt to restore the primordial unity of Man, Universe, and God. If primordial religion is in Nature, and organized religion is in Community, mystical religion is in the individual soul. Scholem writes,
| Only now that religion has received, in history, its classical expression in a certain communal way of living and believing, only now do we witness the phenomenon called mysticism; its rise coincides with what may be called the romantic period of religion. Mysticism does not deny or overlook the abyss; on the contrary, it begins by realizing its existence, but from there it proceeds to a quest for the secret that will close it in, the hidden path that will span it. It strives to piece together the fragments broken by the religious cataclysm, to bring back the old unity which religion has destroyed, but on a new plane, where the world of mythology and that of revelation meet in the soul of man. Thus the soul becomes its scene and the soul’s path through the abysmal multiplicity of things to the experience of the Divine Reality, now conceived as the primordial unity of all things, becomes its main preoccupation. To a certain extent, therefore, mysticism signifies a revival of mythical thought, although the difference must not be overlooked between the unity which is there before there is duality, and the unity that has to be won back in a new upsurge of the religious consciousness. |
Scholem’s prose is somewhat thorny, but he has a deep understanding of Kabbalah, and of religion in general; he’s not a great literary writer, but he’s a great scholar. He says that Kabbalah attempts to grasp the hidden forces behind the visible world, and “this attempt is as important for us today as it was for those ancient mystics,” and this attempt “will always form one of the most important preoccupations of the human mind.”9 But Kabbalah has more than intellectual value; an understanding of hidden forces will impact our lives; Kabbalah has both spiritual and intellectual value. It has historical importance, too; it has exerted considerable impact on Jewish life.
I went back to John Burroughs, whom I started reading three years ago. Very impressive writer, one of the most underrated American writers. He doesn’t fit into any academic department. He writes for the layman, who wants to enrich his life with nature-experience and nature-literature. He’s an excellent prose writer, a deep thinker, and a literary man with a wide knowledge of literature. He writes about nature — his experiences walking, camping, fishing, etc., and also the philosophical questions raised by nature, such as how life started, and how life evolved.
I started with Signs and Seasons, a collection of essays by Burroughs, edited by Jeff Walker. Walker’s commentary is useful and readable. Walker tells us that Time and Change is the book in which Burroughs discusses evolution, geology, etc. Walker says that “Speckled Trout” is Burroughs’ “fishing masterwork” (“Speckled Trout” is in a volume called Locusts and Wild Honey).
Walker says that Burroughs was involved in the Nature Fakers Controversy, a debate about whether popular nature-writers were true-to-nature. This controversy prompted Burroughs to ponder what sort of intelligence animals have, and it prompted Burroughs to write the essays that were published as Ways of Nature. Besides Walker’s edition of Signs and Seasons, other editions/anthologies have been made, such as Birch Browsings: A John Burroughs Reader, edited by Bill McKibben. You can also read Burroughs un-edited — he’s easy to read, and his works are available for free at gutenberg.org.
In an essay on birds’ nests, Burroughs says that phoebes use some moss in their nests. When they nest in barns, the moss is conspicuous, hence their nests are raided by predators. Burroughs writes, “Doubtless in time the bird will take the hint, and when she builds in such places will leave the moss out.” This suggests that the phoebe is thinking, is responding to danger, is being active and creative, is trying to build a safe nest. When I say “thinking,” I mean thinking with its whole being, not with reason, maybe not with consciousness.
Walker says that Burroughs’ remark “leaves open the possibility of change within a species over several generations because birds that nest in barns and do not use moss have a higher survival rate.” Walker avoids the question, Why do some phoebes not use moss? Walker skips over the heart of the matter, which is striving, creativity, unconscious thinking. Professional scholars like Walker take a mechanical view of nature; they like clarity, and avoid the mystery of unconscious thinking; they prefer to talk about “survival rate.”
Another mystery that Walker avoids is the inheritance of learned behavior. If a parent phoebe learns to leave moss out of a barn-nest, will this knowledge/instinct be passed to its offspring? Or will the offspring need to learn by hard experience? Should we use the term “knowledge” for the product of unconscious thinking, or should we use the term “instinct”?
Burroughs not only recognizes the creativity of animals, he recognizes a certain creativity and vitality in the world as a whole, including matter. He understands that the living came from the non-living, came from matter. Man came from matter, consciousness came from matter, so matter must have some kinship with life and consciousness. Burroughs writes, “Evolution makes the universe alive. In its light we see that mysterious potency of matter itself.... We are no longer the adopted children of the earth, but her own real offspring.... This is the redemption of the earth: it is the spiritualization of matter.”
Burroughs quotes his friend Whitman:
| Some principle or force that we do not see [Burroughs writes] is active in the ground underfoot and in the forms of life about us which is the final secret of the origin of man and of all other creatures. This something is the evolutionary impulse, this innate aspiration of living matter to reach higher and higher forms. “Urge and urge,” says Whitman, “always the procreant urge of the world.” [Footnote by Burroughs:] This passage was written long before I had read Bergson’s Creative Evolution, as were several others of the same import in this volume. |
Note that Burroughs sees a kinship between his thinking and Bergson’s.
Burroughs was born in 1837. As Walker notes, Burroughs has a different attitude toward animal-killing than we have. In Burroughs’ essays, animals are often shot, sometimes by Burroughs himself, and Burroughs rarely regrets their death. He mentions a weasel that was shot and wounded, then another weasel picked it up and carried it away.10 “Leave no wounded man behind” is apparently the weasel motto.
Burroughs traveled quite widely, and made multiple trips to Europe. In 1871, he visited Carlyle at 24 Cheyne Row, London (this house is now open to the public). Burroughs visited Cheyne Row again around 1883, after Carlyle had died.
On this later visit, Burroughs recalled Carlyle’s long friendship with Emerson. “The friendship, the love of those two men for each other, as revealed in their published correspondence, is one of the most beautiful episodes in English literary history.” Emerson and Carlyle first met at Carlyle’s farm, Craigenputtock, in southern Scotland, not far from the English border. After this meeting, Emerson wrote of Carlyle,
| He talks finely, seems to love the broad Scotch, and I loved him very much at once. I am afraid he finds his entire solitude tedious, but I could not help congratulating him upon his treasure in his wife, and I hope he will not leave the moors; ’tis so much better for a man of letters to nurse himself in seclusion than to be filed down to the common level by the compliances and imitations of city society....
I found him one of the most simple and frank of men, and became acquainted with him at once. We walked over several miles of hills, and talked upon all the great questions that interest us most. |
Carlyle wrote to his mother about
| the arrival of a certain young unknown friend, named Emerson, from Boston, in the United States, who turned aside so far from his British, French, and Italian travels to see me here! He had an introduction from Mill.... Of course we could do no other than welcome him; the rather as he seemed to be one of the most lovable creatures in himself we had ever looked on. He stayed till next day with us, and talked and heard talk to his heart’s content, and left us all really sad to part with him. Jane [Carlyle’s wife] says it is the first journey since Noah’s Deluge undertaken to Craigenputtock for such a purpose. In any case, we had a cheerful day from it, and ought to be thankful. |
Like Nietzsche, Carlyle opposed the egalitarian trend of his time. Burroughs writes, “The one great movement of the modern world, the democratic movement, the coming forward of the people in their own right, [Carlyle] assailed and ridiculed in a vocabulary the most copious and telling that was probably ever used, and with a concern and a seriousness most impressive.”11
Burroughs says that Carlyle wasn’t content to deal with Truth and Beauty, he was a man of action, and wrestled with reality in his writings. Burroughs writes of Carlyle, “What a gripe this man had upon both shores, the real and the ideal! The quality of action, of tangible performance, that lies in his works, is unique. ‘He has not so much written as spoken,’ and he has not so much spoken as he has actually wrought. He experienced, in each of his books, the pain and the antagonism of the man of action.”12
When I discussed the novelist G. B. Edwards, I noted that he, too, seemed to be speaking in his book, rather than writing.
© L. James Hammond 2024
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| Footnotes | |
| 1. | I mentioned this earlier in connection with an Israeli TV show, “Shtisel.”
After I posted this, I received e-mail from a Chinese friend: “In Chinese history, paper with words were sacred and must be well kept. The words are from saints and paper with words cannot be taken lightly. There are many stories about that.” back |
| 2. | See “The Tale of the Scribe.” Similar passages are in Bridal Canopy. back |
| 3. | Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Lecture 1, #9 back |
| 4. | Waite, The Doctrine and Literature of the Kabalah (1902). Wikipedia says that Waite published The Holy Kabalah in 1929; I’m not sure if this later book is different from the earlier book, or simply a re-publication. Wikipedia also says that Waite published, in 1913, The Secret Doctrine in Israel: A Study of the Zohar and Its Connections. Scholem specializes in Kabbalah; Waite, on the other hand, is interested in the occult/esoteric in general. Scholem praises Waite’s “fine philosophical intuition.” back |
| 5. | This is from a 1907 book by Cohen, perhaps he would have felt differently after the Holocaust. back |
| 6. | Scholem, Lecture 1, #9. Jewish law was different from our law; Jewish law overlapped with morality and religion.(Waite, p. 17, footnote)
It has been argued that, without Kabbalah, Jewish Law can become flat, stale, uninspiring. Jewish Law had “no horizon and no future; it had no place in the life of philosophy. The Zohar [a classic of Kabbalism] gave to Israel the splendid impulsion of the ideal; it gave philosophy; it created a wide horizon; it brought the exiled Jew into correspondence with the thought of the world; it communicated the Eternal.”(Waite, pp. 18, 19, paraphrasing Isidore Loeb)
Waite says, “The Kabbalah once fascinated some of the great minds of Christendom.”(p. 29) Waite devotes a chapter to these non-Jewish students of Kabbalah, among whom are Pico della Mirandola, Cornelius Agrippa, and Robert Fludd. back |
| 7. | Scholem, Lecture 1, #3 back |
| 8. | Scholem, Lecture 1, #3. Judaism was a monotheistic religion par excellence, it tried to make a clean break with nature, mythology, imagery. So the development of a mystical tradition in Judaism, a “mythical domain” in Judaism, seems “strange and paradoxical.”(Scholem, Lecture 1, #7) back |
| 9. | Scholem, Lecture 1, #12. I read only Lecture 1, so all my Scholem quotes are from Lecture 1. back |
| 10. | This anecdote is in “The Tragedies of the Nests” (in Signs and Seasons), and also in “Ways of Nature” (in Ways of Nature). back |
| 11. | Burroughs, Fresh Fields, “A Sunday in Cheyne Row” back |
| 12. | “He has not so much written as spoken.” Where does this quote come from? Burroughs doesn’t tell us, and a Google search turns up only Burroughs himself. I’m guessing that Burroughs is paraphrasing another writer, perhaps Emerson.
Emerson first visited Carlyle at his farm in 1833, then visited him in London in 1848. back |