The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature

Conceptions of the Divine

Neta Stahl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317420880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Jüdische Literaturkritik

Demonstrating the pervasive presence of God in modern Hebrew literature, this book explores the qualities that twentieth-century Hebrew writers attributed to the divine, and examines their functions against the simplistic dichotomy between religious and secular literature.

The volume follows both chronological and thematic paths, offering a panoramic and multilayered analysis of the various strategies in which modern Hebrew writers, from the turn of the nineteenth century through the twenty-first century pursued in their attempt to represent the divine in the face of metaphysical, theological, and representational challenges. Modern Hebrew literature emerged during the nineteenth century as part of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) movement, which attempted to break from the traditional modes of Jewish intellectual and social life. The Hebrew literature that arose in this period embraced the rebellious nature of the Haskalah and is commonly characterized as secular in nature, defying Orthodoxy and rejecting God. Nevertheless, this volume shows that modern Hebrew literature relied on traditional narratological and poetic norms in its attempt to represent God. Despite its self-declared secularity, it engaged deeply with traditional problems such as the nature of God, divine presence, and theodicy.

Examining these radical changes, this volume is a key text for scholars and students of modern Hebrew literature, Jewish studies and the intersection of religion and literature.

1 Fin-de-Siècle Jewish writers on the God of nature

National pantheism

As discussed in the introduction, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe underwent significant demographic, economic, and social changes. Some of these changes were dramatic, even apocalyptic, while others were gradual shifts in lifeways and worldviews. As traditional lifestyles eroded, Jews began to develop new ways of thinking about the divine and its place in their lives. At the same time, a growing movement to awaken a national collective consciousness led to borrowing of religious symbols and metaphors, both deliberate and incidental.¹ These two trends led to what Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin defines as “the national interpretation that was given to the myth.”² But what is the myth that stood at the center of this national Jewish interpretation? Perhaps first and foremost there was a need, as with many other nations, to adapt the myth of the Chosen People to fit the new reality of a nation that no longer lived according to Halachic Law. This myth was crucial to the covenant between the people of Israel and their God.

The new interpretation of the covenant was part of an attempt to redefine the relationship between God and the Jewish people. One of the most prominent articulators of both the question and its answer was Ahad Ha’am (the pen name of Asher Hirsch Ginsberg, 1856–1927), who would become known as the forefather of “spiritual” or “cultural” Zionism.³ When asked about his understanding of the relationship between non-observant nationalist Jews and the Jewish people, he replied with the question: “Who respects nature more, the monotheist or the pantheist?” His answer was the pantheist:

The monotheist sees nature only as the messenger of God, which God uses for his service, and which is created by God for his own use. However, the pantheist does not distinguish between God and the world, and the spirit of God seems to him like the deepest element of reality, which is not above nature, but rather is nature itself.⁴

Ahad Ha’am’s answer rephrases the question so that it is no longer about the relationship between observant and non-observant Jewish nationalist, but rather about each group’s relationship with nature, trying to appeal to both groups at the same time. The answer illuminates his attempt to talk about the relationship with nature in religious terms, creating an analogy between God and nature.

Ahad Ha’am then applied a similar notion in the contrast he drew between the “free-thinking” and the religious Jew:

The free-thinking Jew (ha-Yehudi ha-hofshi be-de’otav),⁵ the one who still loves his nation, including its literature and all its spiritual possessions, can be considered a national pantheist. He sees the creative power of the nation from the inside, while the religious Jew sees everything as imposed [on the people] by an external power.⁶

According to Ahad Ha’am, the non-observant nationalist Jew has better justification for speaking of the “spiritual assets” of the people, since the national spirit is the creator of these assets, and “they [the spiritual assets and the nation] become one.”⁷ Unlike the observant Jew, the non-observant Jew is a free man, who knows the inner power of his own soul. Therefore, when he looks back at the glorious, creative Jewish past, he is confident of its future as well. He creates his own spiritual assets in the nation’s image, because he and the nation are one. The nation is the internal power through which these assets are born, develop, and live.⁸

The notion of pantheism in this context needs further explanation. In a gesture characteristic of Zionist thinking and writing at the turn of the century, Ahad Ha’am associates nationalism with pantheism in order to elevate the intellectual and spiritual status of the non-observant Jew, and to present him as superior to the observant Jew. By contrasting pantheism with traditional monotheism, he imbues the nation with certain divine qualities. In this new way of thinking about religious versus national consciousness, the nation is endowed with the aura of God. Ahad Ha’am’s words therefore were more than rhetoric; they also provided new imagery for the national discourse. This imagery associates the nationalist enterprise with the divine while at the same time offering “nature” as the space in which the God of the national Jew dwells.

The choice to compare the nationalist Jew to a pantheist should not surprise us given Ahad Ha’am’s Hassidic background. As his biographer Steven Zipperstein stresses, Hassidism—especially that of the Rabbi of Sadigura’s court—stood at the center of the life of Ahad Ha’am’s extended family from childhood through adolescence.⁹ The view of a pantheistic divinity was central to the Hassidic movement, and the Zionist leader may have intentionally adopted Hassidic terminology to attract Hassidic youth and propagate his intended revision of the new national Jewish worldview.¹⁰ However, we can also find here a move that symbolically, even provocatively, marks a turn from traditional view of the divine. Pantheistic perceptions of the divine prevailed in Kabbalistic texts and were embraced by Hassidic circles. Yet, both movements were met with opposition by those who believed that they bring to Judaism elements that contradict its monotheistic nature. Pantheism indeed poses two main theological problems: first, the problem of avoiding the corporeality of God—the notion that if God exists in all the things in the world He must have a physical nature, and second, the idea that this corporal existence implies a multiplicity, a notion at odds with the concept of monotheism.

Contrasting pantheism with monotheism, Ahad Ha’am then signals a choice not to reject traditional Judaism altogether, but to frame the new national Judaism as a continuation of prior revolutionary movements in Judaism. Modeling national Judaism after Hassidism is thus a form of revolt against mainstream Judaism, not against traditional Judaism altogether. To be sure, Ahad Ha’am’s God is not the God of Hassidism but following Raz-Krakotzkin’s terminology, it can be argued that his interpretation of the myth of the covenant between God and the Jewish people fits the aspirations of the new national Jewish collective spirit. As we will see in this chapter, this notion was later adopted by many modern Hebrew writers not as reflecting a traditional though controversial view, but rather as a complete break from the traditional Jewish world and its God. Monotheism in this view stands for everything that is associated with the old Judaism, while pantheism symbolizes the presence of the divine in nature and therefore is embraced as more suited to the reviving national spirit.

A softer ideological strain of pantheism can be found in the work of Mendele Mocher Sforim (“Mendele the Book Peddler,” the pen name of Shalom Yaakov Abramovitsh, 1836–1917) who suggested a connection between the national spirit and the divine at least a decade earlier. Mendele Mocher Sforim is considered the father (or grandfather) of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature. He depicted the lives of Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement in both Hebrew and Yiddish. Many of his stories take place outside of towns; as the narrator, Mendele the peddler of holy books, travels around and meets other travelers on his way. This narrative convention provides a perfect vehicle for describing the lives of Jews. I would argue that it also serves a further purpose: it offers Abramovitsh¹¹ a rationale for presenting Jews in encounters with nature, which his works depict as the world of God.

Especially in his later fiction, Abramovitsh recounts what the narrator and his companions see while traveling, describing the beauty of the natural landscape in adoring terms, and attributing its glories to God, its creator. Consider, for example, the following passage from the story “Shem and Japheth on the Train” (“Shem ve-Yefet ba-agala,” 1890):¹²

Time flows on for [the coach passengers], here come evening and morning, one day … a second day … a third … there is world enough and time to meditate on all things, to satisfy every desire in the course of their travels… . But, in contrast, the railway train is like a whole city in motion, with its multitude and its uproar, its population split into classes and sects, who carry with them their hatred and envy, their bickering and rivalries and petty deals. Such passengers may traverse the whole world without regard to the grandeur of nature, the beauty of mountains and plains, and all the handiwork of God.¹³

In this passage, Mendele describes his first trip on the train. The comparison between the old coach and the new train is offered to illustrate what the travelers would miss should they choose this new and modern means of transportation. Nature, which God created and in which God dwells, is nowhere to be found for those who take the fast, claustrophobic train instead of the coach.¹⁴

“Shem and Japheth on the Train” deals with changes in Jewish collective consciousness during times of great technological and political development. In a sophisticated move, Abramovitsh adds another important element to the symbolic dichotomy between the train and the coach: the presence of God. The world that the travelers on the train experience is a world that lacks the sense of creation as part of God’s world. Indeed, the story ends with a feeling that Mendele’s conservative views about technological change led to his disapproval of the journey by train. By contrast, Reb Moishe, Mendele’s companion on this journey, counters this celebration of the world of nature with an ironic remark regarding the relationship between Jews and God. He suggests an interesting way to interpret the Jews’ status as the chosen people, describing it as a curse rather than a blessing. As God’s elected people, Jews are doomed to eternal exile, to be expelled from one place after another, and thus to wander perpetually. This irony towards the notion of the elected people is contrasted with the sensual and joyful exper...