A Literary Shema

Annie Dillard’s Judeo-Christian Vision and Voice

Lori A. Kanitz

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781532642036
  9781532642043
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532642050
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Literary Criticism

For the duration of her writing career, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard has unflinchingly asked and kept on asking enormous and difficult questions: What is the relation of Creator to creation? Why is there evil and unjust suffering? How do we make meaning of our experiences? Who is responsible for redeeming the world's brokenness? Moreover, she has done so in every genre within the impressive range of her canon: her poetry, literary nonfiction, novels, autobiography, literary criticism, and memoirs. Two enduring influences have shaped Dillard's cosmos-spanning questions and their metanarratives--Christianity and Jewish mysticism, particularly Hasidism and Isaac Luria's Kabbalism. Though much scholarly attention has been paid to the influence of Christian mysticism in Dillard's work, none has yet explored the role of her lifelong interest in Jewish mystical traditions. This book seeks to fill that scholarly gap and demonstrate how Dillard's theological vision and voice both reflect and enact central features of Hasidic and Kabbalistic thought, resulting in what could be called Dillard's literary shema.

Chapter 1

Annie Dillard and Jewish Mysticism

A Brief Overview

“I quit the Catholic Church and Christianity; I stay near Christianity and Hasidism.”

—Annie Dillard, “Official Website”

Introduction

In the vaults of Yale University’s Beinecke Library are seventy-eight boxes that hold the Annie Dillard Papers, a vast collection, dating from 1955 to 2012, including everything from the note cards Dillard used to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to a torn scrap of newspaper on which Dillard has written a phone number, no doubt long since disconnected. Her earliest research journals contain page after page of handwritten notes on Jewish mysticism, Hasidic theology, and Martin Buber’s works, including The Tales of the Hasidim, Between Man and Man, I and Thou, and The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism. Interspersed between definitions of “mitzvot” and research on insects are long quotations from the books of the Hebrew prophets. A marginal note reveals she was reading through the “Old Testament” systematically while doing the research that eventually made its way into Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In the very first of her writing journals, “Book 1—Summer 1970,” one finds in Dillard’s quick and legible hand, “Been reading theology. Like this fellow Buber. Just read The Dialogue w/God [sic], a little essay. Marked it all up. Like the way he talks about God.” Dillard would return decades later to this same journal and remark in the margin, “Look at that. / (decades later) / (over 30 yrs) . . . I keep finding Time Being in here / maybe its [sic] all in here.”1

Indeed, her reading log from two decades later, labeled “Books ’95—’02,” provides a window into the research that informed For the Time Being. Several of Buber’s works, such as both volumes of Tales of the Hasidim appear, with Dillard’s parenthetical note “(again).” One also finds listed Abraham Heschel, Elie Wiesel, Moshe Idel, Gershom Scholem, Lawrence Kushner among many other Jewish authors, as well as studies on Hasidic prayer and Torah commentators. Written in cramped hand below the entry for Your Word is Fire: Hasidic Masters on Prayer is Dillard’s explanatory note: “I’ve never listed in here all the zillions of Hasid [sic], etc. books I’ve read—only the light ones.”2 One can only imagine how long the list might have been had she recorded them all, and one can only regret she did not.

The Dillard papers corroborate the ample evidence from her canon that Dillard’s fascination with Jewish mysticism spans her entire career. As noted in the preface, her earliest books contain scores of references to its thinkers and texts, and, in her final book-length work of literary non-fiction,3 For the Time Being (1999), she openly acknowledges her enduring interest, stating “For twenty-five years, with increasing admiration, I have studied [Isaac Luria and the Baal Shem Tov]: the gloomy Luria because he influenced the exuberant Baal Shem Tov, and the Baal Shem Tov because he and his followers knew God, and a thing or two besides.”4 As Dillard herself indicates, Jewish mysticism is not a late-emerging or incidental interest but a pervasive, shaping influence on her thinking and writing that significantly pre-dates 1974, the year her inaugural books, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, were published.

A brief overview of the presence of Jewish mystical elements in her work indicates its scope and longevity. Dillard’s earliest work of non-fiction, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, reveals that she was even at the outset of her writing career well acquainted with Kabbalistic and Hasidic strains of Jewish mysticism. The book contains nearly twenty references to Martin Buber, the Kabbalah, Hasidic tales, and Hasidic doctrine. The framing motif in her most overtly Christian book, Holy the Firm (1977), alludes to the Jewish custom of salting newborns spoken of in Ezekiel 16:4 and the covenant of salt between God and Israel described in Leviticus 2:13. Old Testament texts such as Isaiah, the Psalms, and Proverbs also appear, as do concepts from Jewish mysticism, such as tsimtsum and shevirat ha-kelim. Over half of the essays in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982) contain allusions to Hasidic tales, doctrines, and motifs as well as to Hebrew scriptures.

Moreover, For the Time Being, devotes significant and lengthy sections to the Jewish mystic and founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, as well as to Jewish rabbis, artists, philosophers, and scholars. Dillard invokes the Talmud, Midrash, Mishnah, and the Zohar. She quotes rabbis Isaac Luria, the Baal Shem Tov, Tarfon, Akiva, Pinhas, Dov Baer the Great Maggid, Yehudah Hechasid, Nathan of Nem...

Table of contents

• TItle Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations for Works by Annie Dillard
• 1. Annie Dillard and Jewish Mysticism
• 2. “Each Day Splintered Down”
• 3. The Emptying God
• 4. Tsimtsum, Theodicean Spaces, and Annie Dillard’s Asyndetic Style
• 5. “It Could Be That We Are Not Seeing Something”
• 6. Tikkun: Redemption, Memory, and Mysticism Turned Ethos
• Conclusion
• Bibliography