Official Hiatus

Which will look a lot like the unofficial hiatus I've been on these last couple of weeks, I suppose. I'm off to hike and swim and play music, mostly; when I come back, I'll report on my course at Spertus, on a lovely chapbook Mike Heller sent my way, and on other matters Judaic & poetic.

E

Sunday Morning

Woke up at 5, 5:30 this morning, from a new teaching nightmare. In this one, I'd agreed to teach two new classes for two institutions in downtown Chicago in the same time slot. Spent most of the dream running full-tilt from building to building looking for the classrooms, trying to explain to my students why I had to be somewhere else for a minute, but would be right back. Even in the dream I thought to myself "this is like an I Love Lucy episode"--but it was still incredibly stressful and unpleasant, and I'm glad to be up, even early, too early, in a silent house.

Did I mention that I start my Spertus class today? The one on "Religion and Identity in Contemporary Jewish American Literature"? The one I've never taught before, to some unknown number of adult students? (Could be three, could be five, could be a minyan--I'll find out in a few hours.) I've been up to my earbuds in popular romance fiction all summer, reading and teaching it, getting up to speed on the criticism; as of this afternoon, though, and for the next week, it'll be Bernstein and Kushner and Goodman and Scholem, Ozick and Finkelstein, Ostriker, Bloom, Jacqueline Osherow, Ari Elon... A few of my favorite things, but evidently (see above) a daunting task as well.

I'll keep you posted.

E

A Bissel Gertrude Stein

Found this curious piece in Painted Lace and Other Pieces (1914-1937), p. 94:

I know all about the war I have been in France ever since the peace. Remember what was said yesterday.
We can think and we know that we love our country so.
Can we believe that all Jews are these.
Let us remember that the little bird of all is not the one that has the singing dell. It sings and it sings and a great many people say it is not pleasant. Is it litely that there is real grief. Anywhere there are beards and everywhere there are girls and all about there is a wealth of imagery.
I saw all this to prove that Judaism should be a question of religion.
Don't talk about race. Race is disgusting if you don't love your country.
I don't want to go to Zion.
This is an expression of Shem.

Dated 1920, evidently. Not sure what to make of it, but I have to return the book to the library today, and wanted to post it here for future reference.

More soon.
E

Draft Syllabus

RELIGION AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY

JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE (3 qh)

Schedule

Sunday, July 16, 2:00 pm- 6:00 pm; Monday, July 17-Friday, July 21, 9:00 am-1:00 pm.

Instructor

Dr. Eric Selinger, Ezra Sensibar Visiting Professor, Summer 2006

Course Description

Many of the best contemporary Jewish American writers are fascinated by religion—and not simply by Judaism. Whether "secular," "religious," or somewhere in between, these writers explore the power of spirituality, the dangers of fanaticism, the boundaries of community, and the complexities of modern Jewish identity, often by revisiting deeply traditional questions and texts. In this course, we will read a set of primary texts slowly and deeply, and consider not only what they say about religion and Jewish identity, but also how those ideas are embodied in the formal and literary qualities of the books themselves.

Course Objectives

This course will allow seminar participants to explore some the ways that important contemporary Jewish American authors have represented the relationship between “Jewishness” and Judaism, and how ideas about religion and identity are enacted by an author’s choices of genre, style, and form. We will learn about the religious, historical, and literary references in the primary texts for the class, but our primary focus will be on the development of those interpretive, analytical, and close reading skills which enable us to engage with literature in an increasingly nuanced and sophisticated manner. Poems, novels, and plays treat questions of religion and identity quite differently from argumentative genres like the essay, the sermon, and the op-ed piece. We will pay particular attention to character analysis, literary form, and the appreciation of artistry.

Course Requirements

The reading for this course is primarily focused on a set of primary texts: one novel, one two-part play, and several poems, both short and long. Please read all of the primary texts and as much of the secondary literature as possible before the seminar.

I expect all students to participate actively in seminar discussion. In addition to this in-class engagement with the readings, students will write an analytical essay (approximately 15 pages) on one of the works we have studied. I will give a list of suggested topics, and will be glad to work with students to develop their own topics and approaches to the texts.

Course Materials

· A Reader of photocopied materials, including primary and secondary sources

· Allegra Goodman, Kaaterskill Falls

· Tony Kushner, Angels in America, parts 1 (Millennium Approaches) and 2 (Perestroika)

· Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Volcano Sequence

[I may want to add one more book here. Maybe one volume of Norman's Track; or, for one more genre, a memoir or a book of essays. Mike's Living Root? That new memoir by Jack Marshall, From Baghdad to Brooklyn: Growing Up in a Jewish-Arabic Family in Midcentury America? Maybe some of Albert Goldbarth's essays, now back in print? Hmmm...]

Course Sessions and Topics

Sunday, July 16: “We Jews Are That Way”: Versions and Aversions of Jewish Identity

Topics

“Secular” and “Religious” versions of Jewish identity

Ribboni and Rabbani versions of Jewish identity

Approaches to reading lyric poetry and other poetic forms

Readings

Charles Bernstein, “Solidarity is the Name We Give to What We Cannot Hold” (Reader)

Ari Elon, selections from From Jerusalem to the Edge of Heaven

Norman Finkelstein, “Acher” and commentary; “The Master of Turning” (Reader)

Arielle Greenberg, “Synopsis” (Reader)

Kenneth Koch, “To Jewishness” (Reader)

Howard Nemerov, “Debate with the Rabbi” (Reader)

Jacqueline Osherow, “At the Art Nouveau Synagogue, Rue Pavee” (Reader)

Alicia Ostriker, “Entering the Tents” (from The Nakedness of the Fathers, Reader)

Monday, July 17: A Gay (and Jewish) Fantasia on National (and Jewish) Themes

Topics

America as a “chosen nation,” a “melting pot,” and other Jewish things

Transformations of religious material in secular Jewish culture

Recalling and restaging the (Jewish) history of leftist politics in America

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) and / as “Jews”

Gay men as “Jews,” Jews as Homosexuals, and other intersections of Gay and Jewish identity

Readings

Tony Kushner, Angels in America, parts 1 and 2

“Angels, Monsters, and Jews: Intersections of Queer and Jewish Identity in Kushner's Angels in America,” by Jonathan Freedman (PMLA; in Reader)

Chapters on Mormons in Bloom’s The American Religion

Tuesday, July 18: Religion and Jewish Identity in the Novel

Topics

The “Jewishness” of the Realist Novel

The “return to religion” in contemporary Jewish American Fiction

Identity and difference within Jewish community

Readings

Cynthia Ozick, TKTK

Allegra Goodman, Kaaterskill Falls

Wednesday, July 19: Kaaterskill Falls, continued (or maybe that additional fourth book)

Thursday, July 20: The Shekhinah Dialogues

Topics

Feminist revisions of Jewish tradition

Poetic appropriations of Kabbalah (and pop-Kabbalah)

Apophatic rhetoric and religious poetics

Approaches to reading a long “serial poem”

“Spirituality” and non-Halakhic Judaism

Readings

Eric Murphy Selinger, “Shekhinah in America” (Reader)

Alicia Suskin Ostriker, the volcano sequence, sections 1-5

Friday, July 21: the volcano sequence, continued

Readings

Alicia Suskin Ostriker, the volcano sequence, sections 6-9 and coda

The Shekhinah Dialogues

Sorry, I couldn't resist. Steal that, someone, please.

Back to drafting.

E

Something to Chew On

I'll be teaching a Masters level course on "Religion and Identity in Contemporary Jewish American Literature" at the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies here in Chicago this summer, along with my Summer Romance course at DePaul. Any suggestions for the reading list?

Here's something for everyone to chew on while I grade and write my summer syllabi. It breaks off abruptly after the Bernstein poem. I'd love, but love, any thoughts on that poem as well!

--E

Among religious Jewish American poets—or, to be more precise, among those Jewish American poets who draw on religious topics and texts, whatever their practice may be—the notion that God Himself likes a lively opponent has proven deeply inviting. Consider the use that Alicia Ostriker makes of this idea in the volcano sequence, a serial poem that gives italicized voice to the Divine in order to let Him / Her / It—the gender and degree of anthropomorphism shift throughout the text—respond to the poet’s questions, quotations from scripture, and other forms of address. (“Only in the space of this dialogue does that which is addressed take form,” she quotes from Celan in an epigraph, “and gather around the I who is addressing it.” Through this imagined colloquy, the secular “nothing” that marks the absence of a God becomes a mystical “nothing,” an apophatic no-thing of a Deity, and thus an addressable, if still unembraceable, You.) In the “addendum to Jonah” that closes section VII of the book, Ostriker casts herself as the pouting prophet and puts words of response in the Mouth of Mouths:

a dead gourd

one of your jokes

are you very angry

be serious

your heartbreak is not interesting

it is your rhetoric that beguiles me

I liked your performance at Nineveh

just as I liked your song by the waters of Babylon

your legal brief at Uz

I want you to praise me hotly but more than that

I want you to save the world

by any means necessary

your word against

mine

The sudden twist at the end of this passage from end-paused free verse to a jarring enjambment—“your word against / mine”—draws our attention to the complexity of the thought. This God loves human rhetoric, indeed longs for our human “word” to contest, as well as report, divine decrees, as though thereby to hone our moral sense or resist His own worst instincts. (He even quotes Malcolm X, “by any means necessary,” as though to suggest that divine rule is no more natural or inevitable than white supremacy.) As the linebreak hints, however, our human word may also belong to God—“your word against / [is] mine”—, which makes our resistance part of an argument, so to speak, within the Godhead: a new twist on the Talmudic precept that “these and these [two opposing rulings] are the words of the living God” (BT Eruvin 13b).

Among secular Jews—again, a fuzzy category, given the atheism, pantheism, Buddhism, and je-m’en-foutism so prevalent even in synagogues, at least in my own experience—so let’s say, among those Jews who recite the Shema less frequently and reverently than they tell Jewish jokes, the Judaism of disputation has been put to a variety of uses. Some are political. When Sarah Ironson tells her grandson Louis, in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, “As er darf ringen mit zain Libm Nomen,” (“You should struggle with the Almighty”) since "Azoy toot a Yid” (“It's the Jewish way"), her injunction has little to do with theology, and everything to do with fighting the powers-that-be and the way-life-is, on Earth much more than in Heaven. That she gives the admonition in Yiddish, the language of twentieth-century Jewish sotsyalizm, lets Kushner stake two claims, one religious and one secular, to resistance as the “Jewish way.” Kushner credits Harold Bloom as an influence on his play, and in Bloom’s Ruin the Sacred Truths, the critic describes “Jewish dualism” in terms that echo and expand Kushner’s “Jewish way,” stripping it of its lingering theistic rhetoric. A “ceaseless agon within the self,” Bloom calls it, “not only against all outward injustice but also against what I have called the injustice of outwardness, or, more simply, the way things are” (Ruin, 162, my emphasis). Like Marlon Brando’s biker in The Wild One, the secular Jew is ready to rebel against whatever you’ve got. (Is this such a leap? The film’s director, Laszlo Benedek, was a Hungarian Jew smuggled to safety by Louis B. Mayer in 1939.)

Religious, ambivalent, and thoroughly secular Jewish poets have all made good use of this figure of the Jew-as-mental-rebel. Jacqueline Osherow draws on it in her long poem “Views of La Leggenda della Vera Croce,” where its bravado launches her into a quickly shifting series of confessions, theological musings, and arguments with herself. “Don’t be too shocked, I’m often blasphemous,” she shrugs at first.

It’s a deal I have with God; at least I pray.

Though he may have a plan—I’m not impervious—

In which I’m expected to wake up one day,

Go to synagogue, recite the psalms,

And convince myself with every word I say.

Beggers can’t be choosers; these are godless times;

Let Him hold on to His illusions.

A moment later, since “the way things are” now includes her skepticism, Osherow pivots to turn against it—and, which is more, to find a Jewish precedent for her imaginative claims and retractions:

Besides, maybe I do have a few qualms

About my persistent heretical allusions

To Someone who is—after all—a Deity….

You’ll find I’m a jumble of confusions.

Besides, I’m not sure God much cares for piety;

My guess is—since David was His favorite—

That He’s partial to passion, spontaneity,

And likes a little genuine regret.

True, David lost his ill-begotten child—

But what did the pious ever get? (10-11)

Osherow’s regal eyebrow cocked at “the pious” finds an ostensibly unschooled, am-ha’aretz counterpart in Howard Nemerov’s “Debate with the Rabbi,” where the Jew against Judaism turns out to be the truest Jew of all:

You’ve lost your religion, the Rabbi said,

It wasn’t much to keep, said I.

You should affirm the spirit, said he,

And the communal solidarity.

I don’t feel so solid, I said.

….

Stubborn and stiff-necked man! the Rabbi cried.

The pain you give me, said I.

Instead of bowing down, said he,

You go on in your obstinacy.

We Jews are that way, I replied.

The Rabbi here speaks not simply for normative faith (“your religion” at best, or at least “the spirit” of it), but also for the normative identity imposed by “communal solidarity.” The speaker demurs, at first because he feels himself too fluid or shifting or multiple—not “so solid”—to affirm his membership in the community. (Like Kafka, perhaps, he feels like he has little in common with himself, let alone with “the Jews.”) By the poem’s final stanza, however, he proudly steps into that very communal role, speaking in the first person plural (“We Jews”) to embrace an identity based on multiple Biblical precedents. If to be a Jew means to be “stiff-necked,” as God, Moses, Jeremiah, Nehemiah, and others lament, this speaker will be one. If it means to bow down, he’d prefer not to, and if that means that Jew is to Rabbi as Mordechai is to Haman, so be it.

With Osherow and Nemerov in mind, we can find something quite familiar, even traditional, in Charles Bernstein’s formally disjunctive (and thus more “radical”) poem “anafirmation.” It is short enough to quote as a whole:

I am not I

when called to account—

plaster over, dumbly benched

the corrosive ardency

of blinkered identification.

To affirm nothing, a veil

of asymptotic bent,

prattling over-

tunes in the striated

ecstacy of a turned-

around spade. Sprain parkway

gulls its titular

horizon, & my growling

Zebra knows me just

enough to tip

her hat.

Quick Response to Ben

Ben writes:

I don't quite get the equation of the Bloom/Kushner stance with Bernstein's: To struggle with God over matters of right and wrong is, if not a religious stance, then a stance that keeps faith with what makes religion matter. Bernstein's non-Jewish Jew is something different, no?

Anyway, here's what I've been struggling with, trying to work out my own response to this "secular Jewish culture" project: if we set aside religious observance as our sole definition, what possible path could a Jewish-born writer take that would not be Jewish? Since even antisemitism has its Jewish aspect, as Sander Gilman once reminded us...

To answer the first of these, I'm going to have to go back to the original essay by Isaac Deutscher, "The Non-Jewish Jew." No time for that at the moment; the short answer would be that Deutscher's NJJs are all boundary-crossers or borderland-inhabitants who are free, by virtue of that ambiguous position, to disbelieve in the doxa that surrounded them and to believe instead in the "ultimate solidarity of man," which is why they have to leave "Jewry" behind. Bernstein's NJJs may not pledge allegiance to the second half of this (does Stein?), but I think they preserve the first half, and in that sense remain very much like Bloom's and Kushner's Godwrestling Jews. They struggle against the normative as such, or against "the way things are," and thereby metaphorically against whatever sponsors, preserves, or imposes "the way things are" on them. Since "Jewish identity" is one of those "ways things are," it gets abandoned or struggled against, too.

As for the second, it's a vexing, wonderful question! "What possible path could a Jewish-born writer take that would not be Jewish?" Hmmm... the rabbinic answer might be "none," in keeping with the dictum that "an Israelite, even though he sin, remains an Israelite" (Sanhedrin 44a). A Jewish-born writer, no matter what path he or she takes, remains a Jew, and thus his or her writing remains "Jewish" in the broadest sense of the word. Call this the Slow Train Coming paradox: Dylan's Christian songs are the songs of a Christian Jew, and we can listen to them as such. On the other hand, we might also--should also--be willing to say that some paths a Jewish-born writer could take are not interestingly Jewish; they don't hold our attention for long as Jewish cultural production or potential Jewish identity formations. Stein, for me, falls into that category: a Jewish-born writer whose work I find it hard to care about as Jewish literature, despite Bernstein's arguments.

See, for more on this, Boyarin's Border Lines: a book that grows more essential to me as I reread it. "There is now virtually no way that a Jew can stop being a Jew," he writes of the Stammaic period (when the Babylonian Talmud is redacted, roughly 450-650 C.E.) "since the very notion of heresy was finally rejected and Judaism (even the word is anachronistic) refused to be, in the end, a religion. For the Church, Judaism is a religion, but for the Jews...only occasionally, ambivalently, and strategically is it so. [...] Not a religion, not quite, Judaism (including the bizrrely named Jewish orthodoxy of modernity) remained something else, neither quite here nor quite there. Among the various emblems of this different difference remains the fact that there are Christians who are Jews, or perhaps better put, Jews who are Christians, even up to this very day" (224-5).

Fragment on Bernstein

This is a false start, a fragment, but might be of interest to someone:

Among secular Jews—a fuzzy category, given the atheism, pantheism, Buddhism, and je-m’en-foutism so prevalent even in synagogues, at least in my own experience—so let’s say, among those Jews who recite the Shema less frequently than they tell Jewish jokes, the notion that God Himself likes a worthy opponent has proven deeply inviting. “As er darf ringen mit zain Libm Nomen,” declares Sarah Ironson, the deceased Yiddishe-grandma of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: “You should struggle with the Almighty.” "Azoy toot a Yid,” she adds: “It's the Jewish way." In Ruin the Sacred Truths, Harold Bloom translates this struggle into non-theistic terms: a “ceaseless agon within the self,” he calls it, “not only against all outward injustice but also against what I have called the injustice of outwardness, or, more simply, the way things are” (Ruin, 162). Again, we cannot claim such a stance to be exclusively Jewish—unless, I suppose, we are prepared to attribute a crypto-Jewish consciousness to Marlon Brando’s biker in The Wild One, ready to rebel against whatever you’ve got. (Is this inconceivable? The film’s director, Laszlo Benedek, was a Hungarian Jew smuggled out to safety by Louis B. Mayer in 1939.) But its Jewish roots run deep enough, in both sacred and secular texts, that when we see an identifiably Jewish poet wrestling anything normative—syntax, history, Jewish identity, God-language, a vision of him or herself—we may be tempted to read this as a step along that “Jewish way.”

How useful is this as a reading strategy? Two instances will show its limitations and its possibilities. Consider, first, this passage from Charles Bernstein’s essay “Stein’s Identity”:

Stein did not identify as a Jew she didn’t have to; perhaps there was enough of that being done for her (“May I see your Identity Card, please?”). She takes her place in that line of what Isaac Deeutscher calls “non-Jewish Jews”, going back at least to Spinoza, and, in this, her most immediate company in American poetry includes Louis Zukofsky (who incorporates Spinoza and Stein into “A”) and Laura Riding (her onetime protégé). (This heterodox tradition of Jewish writings is charted in Jerome Rothenberg’s A Big Jewish Book.) Those Jewish-American modernists, like Stein, who turned away from Yiddish or other overt markers of ethnicity did not necessarily adopt an assimilationist cultural program, since the language of assimilation is never neutral, not an arena of ‘human mind’ but of the name/nature-inf(l)ected language of the ascendant culture. Stein never bought into this assimilation, moving entirely in the other direction. In this sense her triple marginalization provided an ontological grounding for her radical forms of nonidentification, just as her affluence and education provided a space to perform them. Stein is one of the least assimilationist of American modernist writers and in this one of the most American if, following Stanley Cavell’s reading of Emerson, we take America to be a movement away from given identities and toward something new, unapproachable, unrepresentable, and unattainable” (My Way, 143).

Bernstein starts with a negative: “Stein did not identify as a Jew.” A moment later, he has turned the tables on anyone who wants her to identify as such, since to do so is apparently to pull on the boots of the anti-Semite. As a gesture of resistance, we then learn, Stein’s refusal marks her as at least as Jewish as someone who deploys “overt markers of ethnicity”: in fact, it places her in a twice-charted territory—mapped first by Deutscher, then by Rothenberg—of heterodox or “non-Jewish” Jews.

What, though, does Bernstein do with this Jewishness of “nonidentification”? In this essay, not much—except, in a delicious paradox, to claim it as not only thoroughly Jewish, but thoroughly American. Note, though, where his vision of America comes from: not Emerson directly, but Emerson as read by a Jewish American philosopher (Stanley Cavell). Just as Emma Lazarus reads Bertholdi’s statue of Liberty Enlightening the World as though it said “Mother of Exiles,” thus declaring the nation not merely to be safe, but home, for millions of Jewish immigrants, Cavell has read Emersonian romanticism as a home for precisely the forms of self-production, self-transformation, and play with identity that a heterodox Jew might most desire.

At which, it breaks off. But as I said, it may be useful someday--here's posting & hoping.

Say, which day of the Omer are we on again? I hate it when I lose count!

Excuse Me?

Working hard on the Radical Jewish Poetry piece again--or, I should say, poised to work on it, waiting for instructions from The Editors. (An email from D suggests that maybe I should write something a little broader than just the Norman vs. Norman piece, since they have an essay by Norman and another that talks about him with Oppen and others. Now they tell me? Oy.)

So here I am at the office, re-reading Charles Bernstein's lovely piece on Reznikoff for the first time in years, and I come across this:

"In orthodox Judaism, as in other orthodox religions, the holy is external; graspable, if at all, only through law and ritual; it is an 'object of dogmatic knowledge' as Gershom Scholem puts it (10). In Jewish mysticism, holiness is present in everyday--'low'--activities and not separated out to particular sites, such as the synagogue, or to particular times, such as the High Holy Days" (My Way, 212).

The essay goes on to claim that in "Kabbalism" we see that "holiness is found in the most common deeds and language, the most base and vulgar acts" (212), and from here to musings on Rez and Ginsberg and the "Footnote to Howl."

Now, folks, I'm not actually wearing my "Frummer than Thou" T-Shirt, although I do know where you can buy one. (Only for women? Ha!) But the more time I spend on this Radical Jewish Poetry project, the less patient I'm a-getting with the scraps of half-digested Scholem that pass for Jewish chops, no matter who's dishing them out. Where in Gehenna did Bernstein get the idea that Orthodox Judaism allocates holiness to synagogues and the Hi-Hos, and not in everyday activities and "the most common deeds"? (There's a brocha after going to the bathroom, dude.) Where, at that, does he get this distinction between "Orthodox" and "mystical" Judaism? Grrr.... As the Pope himself says, a bissel lernin is a dangerous thing.

***

As long as we're talking Orthodoxy, a useful, even inspiring interview over at Orthodox Anarchist today. Someday I'll be in touch with this guy directly, inshallah. Part of my minyan, my tribe.

Prayer, Performance, and Matsiyahu

A kind email from Adam this morning, re: prayer and performance. He notes the differences between two synagogue "stages" and the performances they suggest:

In Safed, the Abuhav synogogue, which local lore cites as having flown like a rocket-ship from Spain, is set up in Classic Sephardic mode: People look to one another along cushioned benches. In the middle, the Torah reader or Cantor leads the prayers. I often think of the liturgical texts which the piytanim would compose & sing to the congregations in Spain. Here was poetic-devotional theater.

Certainly hearing the original compositions was more stimulating than a Rabbinical sermon.

I was also present recently at the Liberal Jewish Synogogue in London. There, the choir & organist led the prayers. I found that somewhat alienating as it seemed that these Jews wanted their service to resemble Anglican Church or Roman Catholic performances rather than the authentic Jewish expressions.

When I was a younger man, living in Washington D.C., I davened every week at Fabrangen, a long-standing havurah made famous in Rabbi Arthur Waskow's writings, although he is no longer living in the area. The worship space was a room at the George Washington University Hillel, and the setup was in the round, as Adam describes the Sephardic synagogue in Sefad. After a few weeks, I certainly felt like part of the collective performance there, although after a couple of years, I must confess that I always drifted out when we got to the Torah discussion. It felt too much like a seminar discussion of poetry--too close to work, I guess. I liked the singing more.

(In Leon Weiseltier's derisive phrase--to me, simply a description--I believe in the "religion of singing.")

My sense is that the second architecture Adam describes, with organ and choir, puts the congregation into the role of audience, rather than performer. I grew up in synagogues like that, and hated them, as a rule, because I was lucky if anyone in the room was actually praying. No one in the pews seemed to be--not that I could acually see them--and the rabbi and cantor, although performing roles, never seemed to lose themselves in actual devotion. Whatever gates there are stayed closed.

(I should add, though, that my own ability to pray was deeply fostered by the Roman Catholic, mostly-black church in D.C. where my wife's cousin was the priest, whose praying and singing styles were more Baptist than traditionally Catholic.)

My wee Carlbachian twist a moment ago, about "the gates," was inspired by yesterday's obsessive on-line listening to Matisyahu, the young Lubovitcher reggae singer who is making such a splash these days. Whatever his merits and flaws, I'm struck by how watching him perform Jewish identity (in songs and in videos) opens up a performance style for me, singing along, that I haven't used in several years now: and through that style, certain emotional registers as well. What does Michael Ventura say about Elvis's hip-swiveling equivalent? "A dance it took a whole civilization to forget, and ten seconds to remember," or something like that. I'll be interested to watch, over the coming ten or twenty years, the ways in which his stylings filter up into unOrthodox Jewish prayer performance.

News and Reviews

At some point, a few years ago--around the time I went on my official ages 35-40 hiatus, to spend time with my wife and kids--I dropped my print subscription to The Forward. I figured I'd read it on-line, like everything else.

Knowing how curds lead on to whey, whatever the hell that means, I should have stuck with print. I don't keep up on line, and have missed a lot of very good poetry and poetry reviewing as a result. Up early this morning, I searched the word "poet" in their archives, and came up with some good stuff.

First, this review of Harvey Shapiro's The Sights Along the Harbor: New and Collected Poems, by David Curzon. Shapiro has become one of my favorite poets, not least thanks to the excellent material on him in Norman's Not One Of Them In Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity, a book that just keeps getting better the more I reread it. When my copy of this arrives, I'll post more on it--my sense is that it will be an essential book, and Shapiro an increasingly important poet to me, as I grow into him.

David Kaufman got the chance to review the new Collected Reznikoff: a book that will, I hope, put this poet onto more maps and syllabi and bookshelves in the next few years. (Rez seems to show up in more and more new anthologies of Modern American Poetry, too, a development driven no doubt by the desire to be more ethnically diverse in earlier periods--but hey, if it's good for the Jews, who am I to object?)

Jay Michaelson, the editor of Zeek: a Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, recently reviewed a collection by Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa. Evidently it won a number of prizes; somehow I missed it, but this Russian-born American poet--he came here in his teens--sounds like he has a lovely international reach in his work, from Mandelstam to Montale, and clearly I need to hunt the book up and give it a look.

A lucky fellow by the name of Isaac Meyers gets to review some new books by new poets who write about religion and newly-Orthodox (and post-Orthodox) life, Yermiyahu Ahron Taub (The Insatiable Psalm) and Eve Grubin (Morning Prayer). Meyers frames the review in terms of biographies: Taub grew up Orthodox, then left that world, coming out as gay; Grubin is a baalat teshuvah, an identity that Meyers links quite convincingly to the linguistic texture of her poems: "Orthodoxy is not just a faith but also a social sphere with its own language. All baalei teshuvah, therefore, are as unsettled linguistically as they are spiritually. We can hear and feel the poet searching urgently for a language that better fits her changing life..." I'm going to get a copy of this one, too--and keep an eye out for other pieces by Meyers, who seems to take an interest in poetry and the Orthodox world, as in this piece from a few months ago.

So, how do I get some of these review copies coming my way, eh? Don't tell me I have to get my Jewish poetry retail!

Prayer and Performance (Anxiety)

An interesting, even passionate response from Norman to my last post on Rabbi Hirsch.

"I part company with Hirsch regarding his theatricalizing of Jewish ritual and prayer," saith the poet. "I no longer know if I'm a secular or religious Jew, but I don't attend synagogue much at all. Still, I love the rituals too much to think of them as theater or the prayers as mere quotation. Jews died rather than give up those practices. I could never go to shul thinking that what I was doing was anything like a play, regardless of any outward similarities to performance."

I find this fascinating, mostly because it is entirely alien to me. I almost always think of prayer as performance, whether I'm at shul or at church with my wife: to me, performance is about self-transformation, as I turn myself into the person who is singing, with believable passion, "Rock of Israel, rise up and help Israel!" or "Sweet soul daddy, bend me, shape me, any way you want me," or however Y'did Nefesh is properly translated. I do the same thing singing along to the radio, or saying a poem out loud in class. The joy of prayer to me is partly communal--there's a deep, abiding pleasure in davening together--but partly, or even mostly, the inward and individual magic that happens when I make believe that I'm addressing Someone. Isn't "You" the most intimate, most sacred of divine names, the one that makes things happen most often? Isn't apostrophe always serious juju?

Maybe you need to think of performance via Austen, rather than Broadway. Prayer is performative language: it makes something happen, at least to the pray-er, when you "pour out your heart like water," as it says in Lamentations.

As for the thought that Jews have died rather than give up these practices--I'm embarassed to say that I've almost never thought about that. Again, a deeply foreign reaction; not wrong, just radically Other, in a way that Norman's instincts and insights rarely feel to me. Curious...

Anyone else out there thinking about prayer and performance these days?

Can Secularism Save Jewish Religion?

Thinking about "secular Jewish culture," I stumbled on a useful little essay by Rabbi Richard Hirsch, formerly the rabbi of my own synagogue, JRC, and now the Executive Director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, which sounds big-wiggish and official enough, I trust. It's called "Can Secularism Save Jewish Religion?"--you can find it here. Money quotes:

Reconstructionist Judaism, based on the teachings of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan in the first half of the 20th century, shares with Jewish secularism many assumptions (and denials) about the origins of Judaism. It is, in many ways, a secular form of religious Jewish affirmation. Kaplan’s essential insight was that Judaism is not a religion, but rather a civilizational culture — a perspective secular Jews would readily embrace. Yet while secular Jews might have difficulty embracing or even tolerating religious practice within that civilization, Kaplan believed one could reconstruct Jewish religion and keep a central place for it in Jewish life — on contemporary terms.

Kaplan’s “heresy” was in seeing Jewish culture, including Jewish religion, as growing from the ground up, rather than as revealed from the (mountain-) top down. While traditional Jewish religion posits that there is a supernatural “God” who “gave the Torah” and “chose the Jews,” Reconstructionist Judaism posits that whatever we have inherited as Jewish religion is the product of the natural experience of the Jewish people throughout history. “God,” “revelation” and “chosen-ness,” to pick just a few traditional categories, are cultural constructs of the Jewish people, not objective realities to be found “out there.”

***

To avoid the word “God” entirely is to avoid the meanings our ancestors poured into it — some with which we might agree and many from which we would dissent. Therefore, while a secular Jew might typically ask, “If I have no belief in God, at least in any of the traditional senses of that term, why should I bother retaining a problematic and misleading word?” — I would argue that we needlessly deprive ourselves of a rich and complex category of discourse if we excise God from our conversation. “God” is a prism through which Jewish struggles about ultimate issues are refracted. To me, the really interesting questions about God are: Why and how have Jews used that word? What kind of imagery and associations have they attached to it? At what times in earlier Jewish history and under what circumstances did certain ideas of God advance and others recede? As the late scholar Paul van Buren argued in his important book, The Edges of Language, when we use the word “God,” we are talking about the things that really matter — from our subjective, human viewpoint. No other word has the same power to animate such conversations.

***

Secular Jews, as well as religious Jews, often share the erroneous assumption that in order to recite or sing traditional Hebrew prayers, one must believe the words one is saying. This is not at all obvious to me. We manage to recite poetry, popular song lyrics, greeting card messages, and the Pledge of Allegiance without feeling morally compromised. Why does prayer have to be judged like philosophy, as true or false? Why can’t it be thought of as poetry, provoking reflection and invoking emotion? I do not require art, literature, poetry and music to conform to a consistent and rational standard of truth, and I do not understand why my secular friends have such a hard time applying this type of aesthetic analysis to prayer and to the study of traditional Jewish texts.

Hebrew prayers can be seen as a form of quotation: I am saying (preferably singing) the words my ancestors said. It is rather like being in a theater production: the prayerbook is a script, the tallit and kippah are the costume, the shul is the stage. I don’t have to believe in the character I am playing or in the words I am saying in order to participate.

The English side of the prayerbook — now, that is a different matter. I will agree with my secular friends that too few prayerbooks take the time to explain that what is printed is poetry, quotation, archaic imagery and myth, and need not be believed. (The current Reconstructionist Haggadah and High Holy Day prayerbooks are notable exceptions.) Why can’t the English side of the page be expanded to include probing and ambiguous poetry and prose (the writings of Yehuda Amichai and Leon Wieseltier come to mind), and edited to avoid the patronizing paraphrases and translations that alienate the intelligent synagogue participant?

The longer I live with this SJC / RP project, the more it strikes me that the intersections of these two make most sense in light of the broader Reconstructionist project. So, everyone: what say we draft ourselves a heretical siddur? Leaving the original liturgy in place, more or less, in the Hebrew, what are your picks for the English side of the page? Not that I have anything against Amichai (what, he's not on the Hebrew side?) and Wieseltier, but I think we could come up with some fresher selections--and certainly some more probing and ambiguous ones!

I'm Back!

Did I say a two week hiatus? I meant two months, clearly.

It's been a busy time. I've written, what? A fat review essay for Parnassus (on dichtersromane, or novels-about-poets), another NEH grant application, a fistful of lesson plans for high school poetry teachers, each hustling into the queue as the last slipped past.

I'm not likely to be any less busy this Spring, but I've been missing the blogosphere--haven't read it, since I wasn't contributing--and now that I'm back to work on my essay on Norman, this blog seems newly important, somehow. Besides, we're coming up on our one-year anniverary, you readers and me. It seems a decent time to start afresh, afresh, afresh.

***

I find myself writing several essays on Norman simultaneously. None of them is precisely the one I want to write, yet I haven't figured out yet what they have in common, or how they might fit together into a single piece. Here's the start of one for you all to chew on, while I work on the other:

Azoi Toot a Yid:
or, the Curious Case of Finkelstein v. Finkelstein

To begin, an old joke—a canonical joke, I suppose, since it’s now in the Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature. The new rabbi of an old congregation found himself in an awkward situation. Week after week, when the Shema was said, half the congregants would stand, and half stay seated. Each group yelled at the other to sit back down or get up on their feet. Baffled by this cacophony, the rabbi turned for advice to the housebound elder of the shul. “It the tradition to stand during the prayer?” he demanded.

The old man answered, “No, that is not the tradition.”

“Then the tradition is to sit during the Shema!”

The old man answered, “No, that is not the tradition.”

Then the rabbi said to the old man, “But the congregants fight all the time, yelling at each other about whether they should sit or stand….”

The old man interrupted, exclaiming, “That is the tradition!”

The Jewish sensibility, this little tale suggests, prefers argument to harmony, disputation to accord. Even at the moment in the service when everyone bears witness, each to the other, that God is One, “the tradition” endorses endless human bickering. Nothing could stand (or sit, as the case may be) much farther from the radical unity of the Muslim prayer line, say, or the Christian longing to be, as the popular hymn puts it, “one in the Spirit … one in the Lord.”

Now, as Daniel Boyarin has recently argued, there are deep, unspoken limits to this Jewish ideal of dissensus. No one in the joke suggests that the congregants not say Shema at all, nor that after Kiddush, those who wish may share the gospel of Yeshua. Nor can we claim interminable debate as an exclusively Jewish value. Any number of non-Jewish poets, for example, have proclaimed its importance, from Blake’s assertion that “Opposition is true friendship” to the “quarrel with ourselves” that produces poetry in Yeats, and most recently to the “YES & NO” of James Merrill’s Ouija-board. Nevertheless, the Jewish love of argument remains a noteworthy phenomenon, capable of playing out in multiple tones and modes of exposition. If the joke from the Norton embodies it as comedy, for example, a tale from the Babylonian Talmud captures its pathos:

Resh Lakish died, and Rabbi Yohanan grieved greatly.

The talmidei hakhamim said, “Who will go and revive him? Let Elazar ben Pedat go, whose shma’atas are so sharp.

He went and sat before him. To everything that Rabbi Yohanan would say, he would say, “Here is a tannaitic passage that supports you.”

He said to him, “You are [supposed to be] like Ben Lakish?! Ben Lakish, whenever I said anything, would pose twenty-four questions, and I would give him twenty-four responses and the shma’ata would expand. You answer ‘Here is a tannaitic passage that supports you.’ Don’t I know that I am speaking well?”

He would walk tearing his clothes, crying, and saying “Where are you, Ben Lakish? Where are you, Ben Lakish?”

He cried until he lost his mind.

The talmidei hakhamim asked mercy for him:
He found his rest (he died). (BT Bava Metzia 84; qtd in Elon, TKTK)

The former bandit, Resh Lakish, and his teacher, Rabbi Yohanan, who transformed the bandit into a master of Torah, may have been rivals, even enemies at times. But their battles were more life-giving, and more expansive of the text at hand (the shma’ata) than the hapless echo and affirmation supplied by Elazar ben Pedat. Indeed, in the Talmud, even the Holy One prefers a fight to mere assent. “My children have defeated me,” He laughs, on finding that direct divine intervention—a voice from Heaven declaring one side right and the other wrong—will not settle a fractious rabbinic debate (Baba Metzia 59ab).

Among secular Jews—a fuzzy category, given the atheism, pantheism, Buddhism, and je-m’en-foutism so prevalent in synagogues, at least in my own experience—so let’s say, among those Jews who recite the Shema less frequently than they tell Jewish jokes, the notion that God Himself likes a worthy opponent has been embraced, however metaphorically, as defining a Jewish duty to resist the status quo or normative authority, religious and otherwise. Harold Bloom’s definition of “Jewish dualism” puts the case in appropriately sweeping terms: “neither the split between body and soul nor the abyss between subject and object,” but rather “the ceaseless agon within the self not only against all outward injustice but also against what I have called the injustice of outwardness, or, more simply, the way things are” (Ruin, 162). Again, we cannot claim such a stance to be exclusively Jewish—unless, I suppose, we are prepared to attribute a crypto-Jewish consciousness to Marlon Brando’s biker in The Wild One, ready to rebel against whatever you’ve got. (Is this inconceivable? The film’s director, Laszlo Benedek, was a Hungarian Jew smuggled out to safety by Louis B. Mayer in 1939.) But secular Jews have been happy to claim ontological rebellion for their own, and even, again, to declare it to be the defining characteristic of “the tradition.” Tony Kushner puts the watchwords of this faithless faith in the mouth of two inarguably Jewish characters playing cards in Heaven: Sarah Ironson, the deceased Yiddishe-grandma of Angels in America, and (for the English gloss), the late Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz. "Az er darf ringen mit zain Libm Nomen!" Sarah declares. "You should struggle with the Almighty." "Azoy toot a Yid." "It's the Jewish way."

How might this “Jewish way” play out as a poetics? A variety of models spring to mind: the rabbinic dialogues of Edmond Jabes’ Le Livre des Questions; the stick-and-move parataxis of Charles Bernstein’s work; the self-indicting serial reflections of Alicia Ostriker’s the volcano sequence; perhaps even the plunges and soarings of diction in Aharon Shabtai’s “Love,” although here the Libm Nomen to be wrestled sounds more like Petrarch than HaShem. Few figures, however, have explored the aesthetic possibilities of the “Jewish way” more variously, and with greater awareness of its tangled Jewish and non-Jewish roots, than poet-critic Norman Finkelstein.

Over the past dozen years, Finkelstein has established himself as a significant scholar of both American poetry and Jewish literature, and with the publication of Not One of Them in Place, his groundbreaking study of “Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity,” he consolidated his position as the foremost critic of Jewish American poetry. During these same years, however, Finkelstein also turned the traditional yeshiva method of chevrusa, or study-through-debate, into a model of literary productivity. By turns proving points in prose and disputing them in verse, staking out poetic voices and abandoning them in subsequent volumes, and deploying assertion, contradiction, and paradox within individual poems with a gusto that would make Ben Lakish blush, Finkelstein has carried on a series of significant, as-yet-overlooked arguments with himself about the role of nostalgia in secular Jewish culture, about the relationship between religion and poesis, and about the place of the Jewish poet vis-à-vis any sort of normative Jewish community. It may be an overstatement to claim, as I have elsewhere, that readers who know Finkelstein only as a scholar know only half his thought on any subject. Frequently the poems track conflicting moods, as much as contrasting ideas. But Finkelstein-the-scholar, who (let’s say) sits during the Shema, has for too long overshadowed Finkelstein-the-poet, who stands up, and sometimes walks out. It seems time to give the latter a chance to claim, and reward, our critical attention.

Not a bad opening, as I read it over. I'm just in the "bang your head against the damn piece to get it started again" phase of the writing process. It's all b'seder, really. I just need to get back to work.

Two-Week Hiatus

I hate to do this, after just getting back on a roll here, but I need to focus all my writing energies on a couple of essays over the next two weeks. Look for me at the end of January, folks!

"A Poem for the Little Shoemakers"

A Poem for the Little Shoemakers

The sunset opens against the horizon
           like a book in which are inscribed
the deeds of a thousand generations
                       —and yet the pages are blank.
           Nothing but sentiment
                       among the hosts of heaven,
           while here on earth
                       the black smoke rises
           as the villages are consumed.

To be scattered among the nations
           and seek through codes of piety
to raise the sparks of creation,
           or to follow some leader
                       into the maw of the abyss:
the choices are dashed on the rocks
           and the rocks are worn into dust.
There is nothing to be learned from patience
           except for the most minute of wonders:
                       toadstools around the door
and moss growing softly in the rafters,
           a halo of clouds around the moon,
                       stars when the moon is new.

And then to turn and worship the invisible,
           creation wrenched once more from a book,
                       an alphabet of living forms.
           Why are we held back, oh Lord?
the cry rising from the corners of the world,
anxious to escape the workshops and kitchens,
           chipped plates, mismatched silverware,
           love weaving itself into a carpet
           as wealth suddenly breeds and thrives,
                       an exile wrought in gold.

                       So lean into the past:
Somewhere is a house that is the navel of the world.
In winter the wolves come down out of the mountains,
and in spring the goats seek the higher pastures,
           but the shoemaker sits at his bench forever
and the people walk back and forth upon the earth.
           For this is merely the story of a passage
                       not from one land to another
                       nor from one world to the next,
            but into the living structure of memory,
                        as that alone must suffice.
The books are submerged in a great repository
                        or consumed by braided flames;
                        the Throne of Justice is vacant
                        as it was always meant to be

--but the sun is warming the shoemaker’s shed
            and his hammer, striking the worn sole,
seems to make the sparks fly up into the light.

--Norman Finkelstein, Restless Messengers

Stray Thoughts and Short Takes

I've spent the morning polishing the introduction to my Piece On Norman [PON, for short, from now on]. I think it's now good enough that I can move on to some actual poems. Huzzah! First stop, the "Poem for the Little Shoemakers," from Restless Messengers. Norman, do I have your permission to post it here?

(And let me just say, for the record, that if you only know Norman as a critic, you're not only missing out on some wonderful poetry--you're missing out on half his thought on any given topic. Or, at least, that's how it strikes me today.)

***

A lovely email yesterday from Mike, about my last post from "inside the eruv." I hope it's OK to post it here:

Dear Eric,

First many thanks again for posting my words and for the generosity with which you've introduced them. And yes, credit where credit is due, it was your bringing up Ari Elon's book that led me on my path. But, despite your fatigue, please indulge a bit of a response to your final cri de coeur. I'd hope that the thrust of my paper would reinforce the ribboni sense, and, in that wild pitch toward Whitman, Scholem's expression that the secular is sacred (and that therefore the sacred is secular), and that the only thing the poet seeks to do--in my estimation, where he/she most acts like a poet--is in testing and exploring the boundaries drawn by Authority against human freedom or self-realization. Not that the poet gets it right, but as a poet, he forswears the total comforts of the eruv, in order to live into his doubt, to be, as Elon insists for himself, self-authorizing (the message, as I see it, of Jewish ethics and teaching). That's the source and strength of my "inbetween-ness" (of the uncertainty that permeates my essay collection)--it was Yeats's when he said the poet must be at the threshold and not in the building, it is the Buddhists' who, in proclaiming that the world should be considered as the shrine room floor, speak of the very identity of nirvana and samsara, the sacred and the profane.

So yes rest in the eruv, but have a few wild dogs ready to unleash.

Many regards & best,

Mike

For what it's worth, I'm not entirely sure that those who say "the secular is sacred" do in fact always mean that "the sacred is secular." Such reversable propositions mark Buddhist thought, certainly, and Yeatsian thought, and James Merrillian, too--but would Rav Kook, say, have agreed?

(Maybe so, but only inasmuch as what we think of as sacred is secular by comparison to the Utterly Sacred nature of the Ein Sof. That's slightly different, no?)

On the other hand--not to say on the Other Side!--I find the shouts out to Yeats and Buddhism, but especially to Yeats, quite useful. More on this anon.

***

Check this out, by Celia Dropkin (trans. by Kathryn Hellerstein).
I stumbled on it in the Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature. I should spend more time with that book.

My Mother

Twenty-two years old,
A widow with two small children,
My mother modestly decided
Not to be anyone's wife again.
Her days and years continued quietly,
As if lit by a meager wax candle.
My mother became wife to no one,
But all the daily,
Yearly, nightly sighs
Of her young and affectionate being,
Of her longing blood
Seeped into me.
I knew them with my child's heart.
And like an underground spring,
My mother's seething, concealed longing
Flowed freely into me.
Now out of me, into the open
Spurts my mother's seething, holy,
Deeply hidden lust.

ca. 1920-1930; pub'd in In heysn vint (In the Hot Wind), 1935

More translations by Hellerstein, a true heroine of Jewish poetry, folks, in this issue of The Drunken Boat. Read and be proud.

An Interlude from Stevens

I woke from a nap this afternoon with this passage in mind. Somehow it, too, is a part of our SJC / RP conversation.

It's the first canto of the "It Must Be Abstract" section of Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction--as relevant a passage, certainly, as the one from Stevens' prose that Vendler cited in my post a few days ago:

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.

You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.

How clean the sun when seen in its idea,
Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven
That has expelled us and our images . . .

The death of one god is the death of all.
Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest,
Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber,

Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was
A name for something that never could be named.
There was a project for the sun and is.

There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what it is to be.

The last three stanzas are the most on point, here. What would a Jewish poem that thought such thoughts look like, sound like, be like? A Jewish Romantic poem, or Romantic Jewish one. That's my next question to consider, perhaps after another nap.

***
Two good quotes from Ha'aretz this morning, from a piece about secular Israelis getting together to study & worship & do good deeds with some American Jews from New York. I was struck, first, by the reference to "the spirit of American Judaism" strikes the Israelis, as "naive and sentimental." And, second, by this:

Even inspirational tension requires effort. "It's not straightforward," admitted Rabbi Ofer Shabbat-Beit-Halahmi, who was ordained as a rabbi after visiting BJ at the end of the 1990s and is now active in the Reform community in Tzur Hadassah. He spoke about the issue on the lawn of Kibbutz Tzuba, where 20 leaders of the Israeli communities met last week to discuss this year's visit. "First of all it's a different culture," he said. "A culture that's different from the Jewish perspective as well. The type of Judaism experienced by people like me, who grew up in Israel, is totally different from [that] in the Diaspora."

Shabbat-Beit-Halahmi gave an example connected to the language of prayer. Israelis understand the words of the prayers and so sometimes feel uncomfortable saying liturgical blessings like, "And you are faithful to resuscitate the dead. Blessed are you God, who resuscitates the dead." He said that Bronstein told the Israelis, "You have to find a language that people don't understand in order to pray in it."

"I think that this joke is actually not a joke," said Shabbat-Beit-Halahmi.

Mulling that one over,
E

SJC: Some New Perspectives

Still mulling over this sacred / secular business. I hope I'm not boring you!

Some of my new thoughts are sparked by Mike Heller's lovely essay "Remains of the Diaspora: a Personal Meditation": the piece he's written for the upcoming Secular Jewish Culture and Radical Poetics volume, or whatever the book will be called.

Mike starts by framing the relationship between the sacred and secular in spatial terms:

the poet who is in touch—allied in some fashion--with Judaism's speculations on language has as his animating creative goad primarily his awareness of the "between," of the space of the diaspora.

This "between" is, in a sense, foundational. It exists in the relational sphere between the law of religious observance and secular life. Robert Alter, commenting on Walter Benjamin's reading of Kafka, sees it as operative in the decay of "traditional" tradition (if I may use an oxymoron), the loss of Halakic Judaism to Aggadic Judaism. What is left, according to Alter, is "lore in quest of Law, yet so painfully estranged from what it seeks that the pursuit can end in a pounce of destruction, the fictional rending the doctrinal" (H 53). Alter could as well be speaking of the poetic, for Kafka's 'graven' images are imagistic and allegorical constructs, already caught in the "between" of Law and lore, and demanding to be read across the two genres.

A page later, using terms from Ari Elon--was that lead from my blog, Mike? What fun!--the essay gives us again a spatial image of the ribboni [freethinking, self-mastering] poet's task:

The ribboni's mission, Elon implies, is to "turn the Torah of Israel from a source for authority to a source for inspiration" (35). "Law" into "lore." The ribboni must take a walk into or over the void, at which point he or she is suspended between the religious and the secular worlds, but there, according to Elon, the ribboni must try to hang in suspension. The "Shabbat" boundary signifies not only the limits of the theocratic dispensation but is also the edge beyond which labor must continue. If "shabbat" poetics sanctify rules, strategies, even moments where labor is no longer governed by thought (in the sense that it is rule- and precedent- driven), the poetics of the space beyond the Sabbath's broken string boundaries, requires endless questioning and testing. Nothing is established as final. No clean break, no new totalizing embrace. The ribboni is not a new person; rather, he must live with Shabbat memory, the time and space of sanctity that, like a mother's embrace, offered answers and comfort. He is governed by this history, by his textual origins. For the poet of the diaspora, then, all yearnings, even those seeking to recover a lostness, involve, even if only sub rosa, a sense of felt opposition, of yearning against as well as for.

Notice how Mike has carved out a space between the sacred--the realm of "theocratic dispensation"--and a realm so fully secular that the theocratic realm is simply unimagined, neither remembered nor rejected anymore.

At times, later in the essay, this fully secular realm seems equivalent to the realm of "experimental" poetry, at least as this is understood to be poetry that remains "in the realm of 'art,' in the realm of a 'consumerist' culture of planned obsolescence and inflated political claims"--an argument fleshed out at length in Mike's essay "Avant-Garde Propellants of the Machine Made of Words," in Uncertain Poetries. At other points it seems equivalent to the "husks" of language deployed in more perfunctory circumstances. At one point, the fully secular turns out to have (perhaps, at times) a sanctity all its own. Mike quotes Scholem here, and Whitman. I suspect this means a secularity pushed farther than the realm of art or of husks could contain. (Remember Blake's "If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise"?) As you might expect, George Oppen's work turns out to serve as an example of this last; indeed, he remains an exemplary figure for Mike, and oneI need to know better.

I had planned to post more on the social circumstances of this whole SJC discussion: that is, on the actual, practical issues that seem to me at stake, which have not been addressed as directly in the essays I've read (for the volume) or the thoughts I have posted here as yet. Too tired, though, to go on with this now--and too vexed by one last question. Why is it that writers and poets always want to find some way to claim that the secular has a spark of the sacred somewhere within in, and no one ever wants to claim that the sacred has a spark of secularity?

Maybe I'm just too much the Reconstructionist, maybe I've just read too much Richard Poirier (and Wallace Stevens, maybe, and William James), maybe I just live too deeply inside the eruv here in Skokie, on a mostly Orthodox block, but I get a little tired of ceding the rhetorical high ground to the Unnamable. Surely most of this talk of "the sacred" really stands for (or masks?) a set of emotional states, social contexts, communal ties, and other secularly definable moods and activities, for which "the sacred" is our too-reverential shorthand. A little Tom Paine chutzpah, please!

More soon,
E

Mike, Myshkin, Milosz

This just in from Michael Heller,

Dear Eric,

I done something wrong--tried to use the blog response page and it went blank on me. I probably typed too much. So I'm going the old-fashioned way.

Interested in Myshkin2's invoke of Milosz. This summer I read Donald Davie's little book on him, Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric and found this operative passage, which may key into some of the sacred-secular discussions on ABJB. "...'the sacral,' we might say, so long as it is experienced only in discontinuous moments of illumination, is being short-changed--either it informs the whole of our experience, or else it has no firm purchase on any part of it. The lyrical 'moment' cedes the initiative to that non-lyrical continuum from which it is, confessedly an exception. Milosz will not strike that bargain..." (58) This citation seems to lie athwart the problems of the sacred-secular nexus, the esoteric/exotic use of lore one is not fully committed to in the theological sense, for instance. But it also paradoxically modifies the direction by which what is "sacred" is to be understood (see the essay I just sent you). Anyway, I throw this out to be kicked around.

Regards,

Mike

Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems (2003) and Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays (2005)
available from Salt Publishing at www.saltpublishing.com and at both regular and online bookstores.
For a survey of work, poems, essays, prose, go to: http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/heller.htm

Mike also sent me a copy of his piece for the SJC/RP volume, which I'll blog about as soon as I can. Classes started this week--a busy time, as you all know. One thing I notice right off the bat with Mike's piece, though: lots of discussion of Bialik. Very welcome, this: we in the States need to season our discussion of "Jewish poetry" with more Hebraic and Israeli spice. I must say, though, that the more I hear about the way the sacred intersects (or lurks within) the secular, the more I want to reverse the claim, to spot the secular lurking where the sacred claims to be--or, at least, to take a strictly functionalist approach to claims about "the sacred," whatever they might be.

(By which I mean what, you ask? More soon--)