Prayer After the Death of God: A Phenomenological Study of Hebrew Literature 9781618115041

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Prayer after the Death of God A Phenomenological Study of Hebrew Literature

E m u n ot : J e w i s h P h i lo s o p h y

and

Kabbalah

S e r i e s Ed i to r : D ov S c hwa r t z ( B a r - I l a n U n i ve r s i t y, R a m at G a n ) Ed i to r i a l B o a rd Ad a R a p o p o r t Al b e r t ( U n i ve r s i t y Co l l e g e, Lo n d o n ) G a d Fre u d e nt h a l (C N R S , Pa r i s ) G i d e o n Fre u d e nt h a l ( Te l Av i v U n i ve r s i t y, R a m at Av i v ) M o s h e I d e l ( H e b re w U n i ve r s i t y, J e ru s a l e m ) R a p h a e l J o s p e ( B a r - I l a n U n i ve r s i t y, R a m at G a n ) Ep h ra i m Ka n a r f o g e l ( Ye s h i va U n i ve r s i t y, N e w Yo r k ) M e n a c h e m Ke l l n e r ( H a i f a U n i ve r s i t y, H a i f a ) Da n i e l La s ke r ( B e n - G u r i o n U n i ve r s i t y, B e e r S h e va )

Prayer after the Death of God A Phenomenological Study of Hebrew Literature AVI SAGI T r a n s l at e d B y BATYA STEIN

Boston 2016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-61811-503-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61811-504-1 (electronic) ©Academic Studies Press, 2016 All poems cited in this book are reproduced by permission of the c­ opyright holders. Copyright to Uri Zvi Greenberg’s poems belongs to the Greenberg family estate. Cover design by Inbal Pinto Book design by Kryon Publishing, www.kryonpublishing.com Published by Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Dedicated with deep love to my children Gitit, Nir, and Hillah, to my son-in-law Udi, my daughter-in-law Noa, and my grandchildren Naama, Gilad, Shira, Tehillah, Yeelah, and Yehonathan, who are always in my prayers.

Contents

Introduction ix Chapter 1: Prayer and Hebrew Literature

1

Chapter 2: “The Death of God” and the Possibility of Prayer

17

Chapter 3: Prayer as a Primary Datum

68

Chapter 4: Between Self-Reflection and Ontological Event

83

Chapter 5: Grappling with the Addressee Problem

107

Chapter 6: Reconstructing the “Death of God” Moment

122

Chapter 7: Humans as Praying Beings: A Phenomenological Profile

148

Bibliography 175 Index 188

Acknowledgements

The basic ideas developed in the book were first presented at the “It Is Not in Heaven” Judaism Festival, which took place in Israel in the summer of 2009. The participants’ comments enabled me to locate weak points in my arguments and helped to improve the final version. This is an opportunity to convey my thanks and pay tribute to this commendable endeavor, which fosters an open and inspiring Jewish dialogue. I am grateful to my colleagues at the Shalom Hartman Institute, whose comments on the lecture I gave at the Institute on this topic helped me to clarify my thoughts. Shlomo Naeh and Zvi Mark rendered significant assistance regarding several issues discussed in this book. Their generosity, goodwill, and wisdom, all abundantly dispensed, are strongly appreciated. Special thanks to Bilhah ben-Eliyahu, who added to my knowledge and ceaselessly encouraged me to bring the book to a close. Avidov Lipsker read the manuscript and his contribution is evident throughout this book. Shraga Baron was a partner to various processes in the writing of the book. His extensive knowledge of Hebrew literature and his profound insights, together with his support and steadfast friendship, were vital to this endeavor. As usual, Dror Yinon was involved in every detail and I am thankful for his friendship and for our ongoing dialogue over many years. This book too bears the fruits of our partnership. Special thanks to Moshe Kaveh, Bar-Ilan University’s former president, for his constant support and encouragement and for his assistance in financing the translation of this book. I am extremely grateful to Yakir Englander—this book would not have come to fruition without him, and my noting this here is but a token of my debt to him for his unwavering support. Special thanks to Roni Bar Lev, whose help in the work toward this book I greatly appreciate. Finally, I am particularly grateful to Batya Stein for her contribution. She is not only the translator of this book but a friend and a partner to an ongoing conversation, and her involvement in the contents and the style of this work was uniquely significant.*

* Translator’s Note: All the changes from the original Hebrew version were approved by the author. Thanks to John Landau for his assistance in the translation of the poems. I am truly grateful for his creative insights.

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Ack n ow l e d g e m ent s

As is true of my other works, this book would not have come to life without the two sites of my professional activity—Bar-Ilan University and the Shalom Hartman Institute. My colleagues and students at the Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies, which I founded in 1999 and directed until 2013, enriched me in ways evident throughout this entire work. The Shalom Hartman Institute has been my home for decades. The basic questions raised in the book and the possibility of formulating a position out of attention and empathy are the very core of the profound dialogue that takes place within its walls. These two sites of my activity create the vital tension required to embark on a search for new ways, a search manifest in this book.

Introduction

Father, what will a son do not to sin— and his heaven holds no God to love, fear, and pray to.1 We are not silent! The only silent one is you.2

“Who could be so inhuman as to play the observer if he saw a person praying with his whole soul? Who would not rather be permeated by an emanation from the devotion of the person praying?”3 These lines by Søren Kierkegaard are the reflections of a believer. But one need not be a believer to be amazed by the rootedness and uniqueness of prayer’s role in human existence. Prayer is not merely another human practice and, at times, it encapsulates the worshipper’s entire being. The Psalmist seems to capture this special phenomenon when he says: “But I prayer” (Psalms 109:4). Joining a subject—I—and a noun—prayer—is seemingly problematic, and a more plausible formulation would have been “And I pray”—a verb joining a subject. The Psalmist may have wished to determine an identity whereby the I is prayer. Henceforth, rather than an act performed at a particular time and place, prayer is permanent and coextensive with the self. The well known biblical exegete R. Shlomo Yitzhak (known as Rashi) hints at this interpretation when he writes: “’But I prayer’: But I pray to you constantly” (Rashi, ad locum). Prayer is thus a characterization of humans rather than a specific ritual action: humans are praying beings, regardless of the object addressed in the prayer. The formal characterization of humans as praying beings was first suggested by Samuel Dresner.4 As is usually the case, however, Dresner’s perspective is theological—he relied on a religious conceptual framework that makes the assumption of God’s existence its core. The present book, by contrast, rests on a phenomenological viewpoint (described below) rather than on a theology. This viewpoint enables the suspension of judgment, 1

Yitzhak Lamdan, “To Father,” Collected Poems (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1973), 84 [Heb]. Abba Kovner, “Master of the Dreams,” Collected Poems, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2004), 41 [Heb]. 3 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 134. 4 See Samuel H. Dresner, Prayer, Humility and Compassion (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1957), 22-28. 2

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refrains from theory or speculation, and focuses on the phenomenon per se: humans are praying beings and the object of prayer can change without detracting from this basic characterization. Indeed, many generations after the Psalmist, two contemporary Hebrew poets would refer to humans as praying beings. Levi Ben Amitai writes: At a meager meal with a company of Levites I will utter song and praise to you: Blessed art thou for the manure, for the meal, and for the feeling of prayer.5

The poet of the kibbutz movement, who was enthralled by the “fields in the valley,”6 makes life in the commune the subject of his poetry. He utters a song of praise for the fullness of this new life and sees himself as a servant of the people, one in “a company of Levites” uttering “song and praise.” The poem culminates in a blessing for “the feeling of prayer.” The poem does not bless prayer as such but the subjective experience of the feeling of prayer, which is a power unique to human existence and crucial to its very form. The object of the prayer remains unknown. The traditional Jewish blessing, “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God,” is replaced by “Blessed art thou.” But who is this “thou”? Is it God? Or is it perhaps the comrade, the partner to the communer’s life? Or perhaps both of them? What is the meaning of concealing the addressee, a recurring feature in Ben Amitai’s poems?7 These questions, which will be at the focus of the discussion, do not blur the poem’s meaning. It is the feeling, meaning the disposition that creates the prayer, that we should bless and be grateful for, conveying that this is not an obvious occurrence. Even if humans are praying beings and even if they do have a “feeling of prayer,” the feeling could fade away, a development entailing potential implications beyond the loss of the feeling as such—something in human existence would disappear. Hannah Szenes too, in her famous poem “Walking to Caesarea,” emp­ hasizes the experience of wonder inherent in human prayer: My God, My God, may they never end, The sand, and the sea, 5

Levi Ben Amitai, “In the Commune,” Selected Poems (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1979), 18 [Heb]. “Fields in the Valley”(the Jezreel valley), one of Ben Amitai’s most famous poems, is the first in the collection. See ibid., 8. 7 See, for example, ibid., 104-107. In other poems, particularly later ones, Ben Amitai clearly identifies the addressee—see ibid., 133-134. Note that the poems where the addressee is God appear in “Elegies for a Wife’s Death.” But the identification of the hidden addressee as God is not determined solely by the experience of death. The experiences following the 1967 Six-Day War had a similar effect. See, for example, ibid., 186. 6

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The rush of the waters, The crash of the heavens, The prayer of man.8

The prayer is a request for the eternity of what is—the sand and the sea, the waters and the heavens—and, in the same breath, for the eternity of prayer—“the prayer of man.” In this poem too, as in Ben Amitai’s, the gist of the request is not the prayer to God, and the prayer does not necessarily express a yearning for God. Instead, it is an appeal to God to ensure the eternity of the act of prayer. Something will be lacking in human existence were prayer to disappear. Many believers stirred by prayer could not explain its actual occurrence without assuming that it is the work of God’s grace. An echo of this feeling resonates in the poems of Szenes and Ben Amitai, who feel the need to thank whoever enabled the “feeling of prayer” or the “prayer of man.” Prayer has indeed captured the thought and imagination of thinkers and writers, both believers and non-believers. It became a topic in psychological, sociological, cultural, and philosophical research because it is a puzzling phenomenon, emblematic of the gap between humans and the surrounding reality. In prayer, humans return to this reality, evaluate it, affirm it, or seek to correct it. Prayer epitomizes the Promethean moment in human existence. It refuses the absolute dominance of the given and makes hope and expectation the linchpin of existence. Prayer is a reflection where we examine our world and our standing within it. Non-believers may also find themselves praying. Do their prayers imply a return to religion and tradition? For believers, this is indeed the only meaning of prayer: What does the simple, devout person, undisturbed by reflection, think when he prays? He believes that he speaks with a God, immediately present and personal, has intercourse with Him, that there is between them a vital and spiritual commerce. There are three elements which form the inner structure of the prayer-experience: faith in a living personal God, faith in His real, immediate presence, and a realistic fellowship into which man enters with a God conceived as present. Every prayer is a turning of man to another Being to whom he inwardly opens his heart; it is the speech of an “I” to a “Thou.” This “Thou,” this other with whom the devout person comes into relation, 8

Hannah Szenes, “Walking to Caesarea,” Poems and Diary (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2005), 5 [Heb].

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in whose presence he stands as he prays, is no human being but a supersensuous, superhuman Being on whom he feels himself dependent, yet a being who plainly wears the features of a human personality, with thought, will, feeling, self-consciousness.9

But a prayer erupting into our day-to-day reality without a religious-theological context could convey the primordiality of prayer, our existence as praying beings. In this book, I do not propose another theory and further speculation about the origin of prayer. Instead, I seek to trace the self-reflection of Hebrew writers who, in a kind of augenblick (as the one noted above in Szenes and Ben Amitai), shed light or, more precisely, attest to the meaning of prayer in their world, even if this meaning is implicit. Literature thus appears here as a kind of depth testimony to a reality that erupts into its language and is embodied by it. Since my childhood, I have lived in a world of prayer. I have always lived with people who pray, and I am one of them. When I reached maturity and learned about the meaning of prayer suggested by contemporary thinkers such as Franz Rosenzweig, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Joseph B. Soloveitchik (whose work I discuss mainly in Chapter Seven), I found the various theories extremely disappointing. None of the suggested approaches explained the practice of prayer as it is concretized in everyday life, and all left the riddle of prayer unresolved. Where I grew up, people’s prayers flowed from their heart rather than from a legal obligation. Prayer did not derive from a divine command or from some Shulhan Arukh statute, as Leibowitz claimed. The halakhic canon did shape the framework, but prayer appeared to break through from a deeper foundation, embodying aspects beyond duty. This foundation is evident in a body language unique to prayer,10 and in melodies and poetic additions. Nor did prayer always conveyed a dialogue with God, as argued by Hermann Cohen and, in his wake, by Soloveitchik. Indeed, the worshippers I meet often hope that their prayers will reach God, but they cannot be sure of it. The Amidah prayer opens with the statement: “O Lord, open thou my lips, and my mouth shall declare thy praise.” This statement calls attention to the worshippers’ anxiety. Whoever has experienced religious prayer knows how burdened it is by anxiety about the possibility of connection and how deeply it rests on a  9

Friedrich Heiler, Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Religion, trans. Samuel McComb (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 356. 10 For a rich discussion of the body language of prayer, see Uri Ehrlich, The Non-Verbal Language of Prayer: A New Approach to Jewish Liturgy (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004).

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disposition that, paradoxically, combines intimacy with fear. What we find in the synagogues and in prayers is not the dialogical connection with God but the standing before God—“I have set the Lord always before me.” This standing involves both terror and comfort, distance and closeness, expectation and waiting for a response—not really dialogue. Rosenzweig’s stance did not explain prayer either. I could not understand why I should adopt views that assume prayer is the parallel of prophecy and an expression of God’s action. I found no evidence of this approach in the worshippers’ experiences. When I studied this view, I was easily able to identify the cultural-philosophical context of its development but, usually, worshippers are neither philosophers nor theologians. What impresses me most is the natural way in which worshippers utter their prayers together with the fact that, for many, their entire being converges in prayer. The typical expression of this reality is the body’s adaptation to the act of prayer. Because of this natural quality of prayer and its bodily correlation, the biblical expression “I poured out my soul” (I Samuel 1:15), which in Jewish tradition denotes prayer, failed to resonate for me. Prayer comes forth from a person’s depths, as self speech. Observing individuals who are not believers corroborated this perspective. Prayer is a primordial phenomenon in people’s lives. They pray, be it using the words of a familiar prayer or resorting to poetry and music. The correlation and the similarity between prayer and other practices—poetry, music, dance—can hardly be ignored. Now I confronted a question: is it God—or the transcendent addressee— that endows prayer with meaning? Can a practice so primordial in human life depend on an obviously contingent religious stance? Even from a religious perspective, faith is not a logical necessity. Prayer is an expression of the believer’s world and beliefs, and only that. Does a phenomenon as primordial as prayer depend on faith? And is it a fair judgment to say that whenever people pray they go back to religion? If prayer is primordial and even natural, the interpretation of it must turn the “original datum” into less than what it is. The question, then, is how to contend with the question of prayer. I chose Hebrew literature, particularly the one called “secular,” for reasons I consider in Chapter One. The present book is an attempt to outline the meaning of prayer as embodied in this literature and the gist of the book, covering Chapters Three to Six, is devoted to rigorous textual analysis. This detailed inquiry into prayer in this literature explicates the “datum” and establishes the findings as based on a kind of recurrent experience rather

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than as a localized hunch. In the wake of this explication, I suggest in the last chapter a “theory” of prayer. I place “theory” in quotes to imply that I am not suggesting a wild hypothesis based on theological or metaphysical assumptions about the meaning of prayer. From a phenomenological perspective, the “theory” I am proposing is a framework that emerges from the data and purportedly reflects the implicit depth constructs borne by the texts that were examined. The theory is an interpretation, and nothing more. The uniqueness of this interpretation, which follows in the footsteps of the literary evidence, is that it the dismisses the option of prayer as part of a specific world view and, instead, brings together all forms of prayers and worshippers: religious, secular, traditional, or anyone rejecting dichotomous labels. The interpretation suggested in the last chapter thus challenges dichotomies, which confuse reality instead of explicating it. They force us to separate and distinguish instead of seeing the common agenda. This is a book about prayers and worshippers. The worshippers are wounded by the prayer that pervades their being, but prayer is also what heals this wound. The story of those wounded by prayer is the story of grappling with prayer. I write with deep respect for prayer and worshippers. Instead of reducing it to psychological, cultural, or other terms, I seek to explain prayer as it emerges from the testimonies of its practitioners, who, in the current context, are writers and poets. The book, then, studies the meaning of prayer’s “language game” rather than its causes. I do not delve into the problematic of reductionist theories and present some of my critique in the course of the book. For now, I will only point out that the study of meaning rather than of causes fits the phenomenological-hermeneutical perspective that has guided me in this as in other works. Chapter One proposes a method for the analysis of the literary works, and Chapter Seven, the last, presents the conclusions emerging from this analysis. Chapter Two attempts to clarify the meaning of the “death of God” and the implications of this cultural phenomenon for the possibility of prayer. The main section of the book, Chapters Three through Six, is an hermeneutical phenomenological study of literary texts. The study relies on a close reading of the works, which are presented as extensively as possible. This presentation plays a dual role: it conveys an attempt to bring to the readers a body of work not necessarily accessible, and it enables the reader to participate in the discourse. Like most of my books, this one too invites readers to a dialogue.

Cha p te r O n e

Prayer and Hebrew Literature

This book asks a question: what is the meaning of prayer in a world where God is no longer? This is a world constituted through the charged combination of a divine presence in the past and its absence or departure in the present. In the wake of Hegel and Heine, Nietzsche referred to this new reality as the death of God, a term denoting a presence that has evaporated, a fullness that is now empty. The world of the death of God differs from that of the atheist because an atheist is unlike one who no longer has faith. Atheism has two prevalent denotations. According to the more common one, atheism indicates that the term “God” does not signify an entity in reality. For this kind of atheist, the statement “there is no God” is a negation, postulating that the theistic claim whereby the term “God” signifies a metaphysical entity is false. According to another use, an atheist is a person who does not believe in God even if there is one.1 In the former denotation, atheism is a metaphysical stance. In the latter, it is an existential one—this atheist does not believe in God, does not trust God, and does not need God, even if there is one. Although both these denotations have been used, I hold that the former is the most prevalent and will be the one at the focus of my discussion. A theist can become an atheist and still not have a “death of God” experience. What distinguishes an atheist from one who experiences the “death of God” is the meaning of the religious past. This past is significant (at times traumatically so) for someone who has lived thought the “death of God,” but is not necessarily relevant to an atheist who may never have had a religious experience or suffered the disappointment it entails. The “death of God” is thus part of the history of religion as the refusal of faith, whereas atheism is not necessarily a part of this history. Experiencing the death of God means being aware of a presence that has left, living through an amputation that hurts the one bearing its memory. For the atheist, the past or the 1

For a discussion of the two uses, see Martin Michael, “General Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1-7.

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present wherein people believe in God reflects the history of an error or an irrelevance. But for one enduring the “death of God,” the past—meaning the history of faith—is a bleeding wound requiring a response. Dialectically, one who experiences the “death of God” reaffirms God’s presence in the past as well as in the present by repeatedly proclaiming that what is missing in the present had existed in the past, and this absence evokes an emotional as well as an existential response. The distinction between the experience of atheism and that of the death of God is not only theoretical, and emerges recurrently in Hebrew literature. For instance, in a harrowing dialogue between Gideon and Yitzhak in Yosef Arikha’s story “Bread and Vision,” Gideon says: —I once leaned toward faith, but I have never prayed. There were no prayers in my heart . . . The God of Israel is a cruel God, “a vengeful and jealous God” who mustn’t be annoyed with prayers because he doesn’t answer. One shouldn’t pray to him. I don’t think there is a God. Anyway, no signs of life from him . . . He may be fooling us. . . —But why this anger? —Why? To this day the screams and the cries of the slaughtered and tortured in the Ukraine pierce my years! . . . That was the day I lost my faith and said: Damned is the maker of man! I cursed him many times . . . —But don’t you then admit to his existence?2

This exchange pinpoints the difference between an atheist and one who experiences the “death of God.” Gideon is not an atheist. His refusal to pray conveys his disappointment with God. But this very disappointment denotes how intensely he holds on to God, his failed expectation. Yitzhak can therefore tell him—“ But don’t you then admit his existence?” Atheists, as noted, either do not admit that God exists or do not believe in God and therefore expect nothing. Gideon, however, is not an atheist. He confronts the “death of God,” the disappointment with God that is paradoxically part of faith and, more precisely, of the faith that failed. The “death of God” is discussed in greater detail in Chapter Two, but these preliminary remarks help to set the proper focus on the meaning of prayer in this book. The book deals with those “wounded by prayer,” those who have been hurt by prayer as a living memory or as an ongoing practice that requires explanation. The “wounded” are those who are still bleeding and need help. 2

Yosef Arikha, Bread and Vision (Tel Aviv: Twersky, 1946), 45 [Heb].

Praye r a n d H e b re w L i te rat ure

The fundamental question I ask in this book is: is there any meaning to prayer after the “death of God”? In one of the most lucid evaluations of prayer, Ludwig Feuerbach stated: “The essential acts of religion, that in which religion puts into action what we have designated as its essence, is prayer.”3 Three religious thinkers formulate this insight from a religious perspective. R. Nahman of Bratslav states: “And faith is prayer.”4 The Protestant theologian Auguste Sabatier claims: “Prayer is religion in act—that is to say, real religion. It is prayer which distinguishes religious phenomena from all those which resemble them or lie near to them.”5 In a similar spirit, Hermann Cohen states that prayer comprises in itself the entire content of worship . . . Prayer is an original form of monotheism . . . No people lacks, and could not lack, the general type of prayer insofar as that people expresses its relation to a godhead in language. The first stammering of man in his direct address to God can be nothing other than prayer.6

The perception of prayer as the quintessence of religion and, even more so, as the quintessence of monotheism rests on the assumption that prayer embodies the relationship between humans and God, which is the foundation of religion. Martin Buber and Joseph B. Soloveitchik, apparently under the influence of Hermann Cohen, view the dialogical stance vis-à-vis God as a necessary condition for the very occurrence of prayer. Buber holds: The man who prays pours himself out in unrestrained dependence, and knows that he has—in an incomprehensible way—an effect upon God, even though he obtains nothing from God; for when he no longer

3

Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Prometheus Books, 1989), 122. See also Jean-Louis Chrétien, “The Wounded Word: The Phenomenology of Prayer,” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, ed. Dominique Janicaud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 147-149. This approach is also found in the work of Friedrich Heiler, who refers to prayer “as the central phenomenon of religion.” See Friedrich Heiler, Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Religion, trans. Samuel McComb (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), v. See also ibid., v-xvi. William James endorses a similar approach: “Prayer . . . is the very soul and essence of religion . . . Prayer is religion in act . . . It is prayer that distinguishes the religious phenomenon from such similar or neighboring phenomena.” William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 358-359. In part of this citation, James quotes the theologian Auguste Sabatier, who is discussed below. 4 R. Nahman of Bratslav, Likutey Moharan (Bnei Brak: Yeshivat Bratslav, 1972), 8 [Heb]. 5 Auguste Sabatier, Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion Based on Psychology and History (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 25. 6 Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972), 371.

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desires anything for himself he sees the flame of his effect burning at its highest.7

Buber argues that a person praying or bringing a sacrifice expresses the same disposition: “. . . sacrifice and prayer are set ‘before the Face,’ in the consummation of the holy primary word that means mutual action: they speak the Thou, and then they hear,” contrary to the one who turns to magic: “Magic desires to obtain its effects without entering into relation, and practises its tricks in the void.”8 Soloveitchik, who was influenced by both Cohen and Buber, formulated this idea as follows: “Prayer likewise is unimaginable without having man stand before and address himself to God in a manner reminiscent of the prophet’s dialogue with God.”9 He emphasizes that prayer should not be identified with its liturgical, external signs: “Prayer is basically an awareness of man finding himself in the presence of and addressing himself to his Maker, and to pray has one connotation only: to stand before God.”10 A study of traditional Jewish prayers shows them to be founded on the phenomenological construct of intentionality. Prayer is the act of a praying subject turning to God. In any intentional act, the act cannot be isolated from its object and, at first glance, this statement appears to apply to prayer as well. In an ordinary intentional act, however, the object is constituted by the subject’s action. An object such as a table or a chair is “for” the subject, who constitutes it through the performance of a predicating action. The subject characterizes the table or the chair, and this description determines what the object is. In traditional prayer, however, God is a constitutive rather than a constituted object. Without God’s primary and pre-predicative presence, prayer is impossible: the stance “vis-à-vis” God determines God’s primary and unconditioned status. This presence shatters the subject’s sovereignty. It breaks into the subject’s world and refuses to be a constituted entity. For believers, prayer is a basic expression of presence. Only a subject who assumes to be standing before God—“I have set the Lord always before me”—a God independent of the self, can turn to God in prayer. If humans make God or create him through the action of consciousness, what is the logic of turning to him? From the believer’s perspective—creating a god to

 7

Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner, 1958), 83.

 9

Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 34-35.

 8 Ibid. 10 Ibid.

Praye r a n d H e b re w L i te rat ure

which one turns in prayer is a senseless act. What is created by humans and conditioned by them cannot serve as a proper destination of prayer. The comparison between prophecy and prayer suggested by Soloveitchik is highly revealing—prophets do not lose their human subjectivity, but prophecy is an act of divine presence independent from the prophet, who is overwhelmed by the word of God beating from within. Similarly, prayer cannot take place without an experience of the divine presence, and yet this presence neither threatens nor silences the individual. In prayer, says Feuerbach, humans turn to God as Thou, confessing before God as the entity closest to them. Feuerbach goes so far as saying that prayer is the clear declaration that God is the worshipper’s alter ego.11 The conclusion warranted by this analysis is that, in the absence of God, prayer cannot take place; if God is dead, who is the addressee of the prayer?! But is the “death of God” indeed the death of prayer? In search of an answer to this question, I will analyze the reflections of Hebrew writers on the meaning of prayer. My interest is not in the many prayer texts found in Hebrew literature, but in texts where the literary expression creates a kind of initial reflection about prayer and its meaning in a world where God is dead. The fact that the texts I use are taken from Hebrew literature should not be interpreted as a concern with its historiography or its poetics. It is not my intention to engage in a study of the writers, or the works, or the biographical or social-cultural contexts that were at the cradle of the texts discussed. The method of my study is thus not diachronic but synchronic.12 I will listen to the literary texts, follow their course, and trace the meaning of the prayer that takes shape within them. The text is the objective guideline leading the study. My concern is to retrieve from Hebrew literature the meaning, the “eidos” (in phenomenological terminology) ascribed to prayer, to analyze how the meaning of prayer becomes manifest in Hebrew literature. Hence, it is shaped by the question itself and by the themes that answer it, as they emerge in the literature. The literary text is the phenomenological “datum” that I seek to analyze and explicate. The relationship between literature and philosophy is not a simple one. As Friedrich Schlegel noted: “The whole history of modern poetry is a running commentary on the following brief philosophical text: all art 11 Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 122. 12

For further discussion of synchronic research, see Aron Gurwitsch, “Phenomenology of Perceptions,” in An Invitation to Phenomenology, ed. James M. Edie (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1965), 45-102.

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should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one.”13 This statement emphasizes the literary content and assigns it greater weight than the formal-artistic aspect, and can therefore claim unity between them. Schlegel does not argue that philosophy is an interpretation of poetry but, rather unexpectedly, the opposite: poetry is an interpretation of philosophy. Poetry expands and completes the spectrum of meanings found in the brief philosophical text. We tend to think of the poetic text as the brief version and the philosophical text as the long one, whereas Schlegel holds precisely the opposite. The length of the texts, then, is not a function of their size. The pages of the philosophical books are “short ”because they are not sufficiently clear, and what explains them is poetry. What kind of explanation does poetry create for philosophy? How is philosophy less successful than poetry? Schlegel held that modern poetry, referring to the Romantic poetry that he dealt with, could unite the entire range of cultural, artistic, and philosophical existence by melting everything into the poem and projecting it back into life. The aim of Romantic poetry “isn’t merely to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature; and make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetical.” Schlegel added that poetry can create a poetic reflection “and can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors.”14 According to this approach, poetry spans the full spectrum of insights and creates a process of full and consistent understanding; it is far more comprehensive than philosophy, which is included in it. Despite this Romantic perspective, however, literature is not philosophy and certainly not phenomenology. Milan Kundera warns us against the attempt to bring philosophy, any philosophy (including phenomenology) closer to the novel: “The novel’s wisdom is different from that of philosophy. . . . The art . . . does not by nature serve ideological certitudes. . . . It undoes each night the tapestry that the theologians, philosophers, and learned men have woven the day before.”15 Kundera’s remarks are valid for all literary genres. The power of literature is embodied in its ability to capture a mood’s ephemeral, unstructured 13

Friedrich von Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 14. 14 Ibid., 31-32. 15 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 160.

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moments.16 Literature is, above all, an artistic endeavor; it is not philosophy and certainly not an interpretation of philosophy. Nevertheless, literature can be a testimony that conveys a life experience. This is how Shoshana Felman relates to Elias Canetti’s judgment on Franz Kafka’s Letters to Felice. Canetti writes: “To call these letters a document would be saying too little, unless one were to apply the same title to the life-testimonies of Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoyevsky.”17 Felman explains: A “life testimony” is not simply a testimony to a private life, but a point of conflation between text and life, a textual testimony which can penetrate us like an actual life. As such Kafka’s correspondence is testimony not merely to the life of Kafka but to something larger than the life of Kafka.18

The witness, Felman notes, “from within the solitude of his own stance, is the vehicle of an occurrence, a reality, a stance or a dimension beyond himself.”19 This kind of testimony cannot be final, nor does it necessarily reflect the full awareness of the witness, who, although he is the one giving the testimony, is a voice for something that transcends him. Felman then claims that literature as testimony reflects the witness’ “readiness to become himself a medium of the testimony—and a medium of the accident.”20 Not all poetry is a testimony to an accident, but poetry or prose can become that. Ultimately, deciding what literature is testimony and testimony of an accident is left to the reader—the judge. Often the meaning of the specific “something” that the text delivers depends on the reader’s starting point, since a testimony is not necessarily transparent. A literary text is not, as noted, a reflective philosophical essay and its explication is therefore contingent on the reader. Hermeneutically, the text’s meaning is neither given nor self-evident and depends on the reader. The very perception of a text as testimony reflects a presumption that is imposed on the text, stating that the text bears a meaning that has been fulfilled within the literary creation. 16 17 18 19 20

This issue is discussed at length in my book, The Human Voyage to Meaning: A Philosophical-Hermeneutical Study of Literary Works (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press: 2009) [Heb]. Elias Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice, trans. Christopher Middleton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), 8. Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), 2 (emphasis in original). Ibid., 3 (emphasis in original). Ibid., 24 (emphasis in original).

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Combining the theory that views literature as testimony (in Felman’s terms) and the phenomenological method is not a random choice. It is through this method that the testimony, which is at times articulated implicitly rather than reflectively, can gradually emerge. Phenomenology thus contributes to testimony theory the tool that makes the clarification and explanation of the testimony possible. My starting point in the reading of texts dealing with prayer is the existentialist view of literature as conveying a life experience.21 This starting point is neither arbitrary nor based on an a priori theoretical preference. I will not enter into a discussion of the theoretical question about the relationship between life and literature. My claims are limited solely to texts about prayer, and my perspective is largely determined by their contents and their cultural context. The literary interest in prayer in the period that concerns me—secular Hebrew literature as the literature of a society and a culture in the making—reflects the concrete existential problematic of its authors. The term “prayer” as addressed by these writers has its roots in the world reflected in their work. Hence, prayer is for them an existential question that should not be confined to the realm of poetic-aesthetic discourse. This closeness between literature and existentialist philosophy is not fortuitous. A philosophy attempting to capture concrete existence cannot limit itself to abstract formulations and must find a way to enter life. Literature, more than philosophy, can capture the augenblick through which to grasp life. Literature, more than philosophy, can offer a complex phenomenology of life, including its latent options and contingencies. It describes situations, actions, and events in a way that is close to life itself,22 and its time is that of life per se, unlike that of philosophy. For philosophy, writes Franz Rosenzweig, “thinking is timeless and wants to be timeless,“23 since its gist is the abstract general claim. “The new thinking,” in Rosenzweig’s terms—meaning the philosophy concerned with life as such— cannot be satisfied with general claims and must pave a way to life, to its temporality and historicity, to its contingency and fragility, to human discourse and human loneliness. Literature, not philosophy, offers a way to life. Not in vain does the phenomenological description of life per se carry such significant weight in existentialist thought. This thorough description is meant to pave a way to life as is, regardless of whether the description 21

This issue is discussed at length in my book To Be a Jew: Joseph Hayyim Brenner as a Jewish Existentialist, trans. Batya Stein (London: Continuum, 2011), ch. 3. 22 See also Iris Murdoch, Existentialism and Mystics (New York: Penguin Press, 1997), 3-30. 23 Nahum Glatzer, ed., Franz Rosenzweig, His Life and Thought, 2nd ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 199.

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is systematic, as in the philosophy of Heidegger or Sartre, or focused on situations and feelings, as in the work of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, who hold that fragmentary unsystematic writing is what enables life to surface in language. Life is not exhausted through language but bursts forth within it. At times, a philosophical reflective insight is born from a life experience. This augenblick, condensing the essence of sober consciousness in the rhythmical and concise lines of a poem or a story, can become an object of philosophical reflective study. What the artistic experience captured in the augenblick now becomes the object of thematic philosophical criticism. The implicit, the polysemic, and the obscure in this experience are progressively disclosed, sharpened, and illuminated through philosophical inquiry. A complex relationship thus prevails between literature and existentialist philosophy. Literature provides this philosophy with a powerful tool of expression, while existentialist philosophy provides this literature, and its writers and readers, profound insights that are concretized in the writing and reinterpreted in the reading. From an existentialist perspective, literature is at the core of concrete human life, exposing and illuminating existence. Heidegger’s theoretical formulation of this view states that beauty is a feature of ontological truth, which is disclosed through the artistic act: “When truth explodes within action, it [beauty] appears. This is the appearance of beauty as an ontological aspect of truth in action and as an aspect of action. Beauty is thereby part of truth.”24 Paul Celan conveyed a similar insight and held that the poet and the writer are as one “who, shelterless in this till now undreamt of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being to language, stricken by and seeking reality.”25 And so also Hayyim Nahman Bialik, who, in “My Song,” points to suffering and pain as the source of his poetry: Do you know where I got my song? In my father’s house a lonely singer lived .... He knew one melody, familiar, fixed. And when my heart grew dumb, and my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth in silent misery and stifled weeping welled up in my throat 24

Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Band 5, Holzwege: Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), 69. 25 Paul Celan, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 396.

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that tune re-echoed through my empty soul— the chirp of cricket—bard of poverty.26

Writers return to this motif in various forms. Literature is fiction, and we cannot premise the meaning of a literary work on the biographical context,27 and yet life and literature are closely connected. And again a writer’s testimony. Aharon Appelfeld writes: “A writer, if he’s a writer, writes from within himself and mainly about himself, and if there is any meaning to what he says, it’s because he’s faithful to himself—to his voice and his rhythm.”28 Jorge Semprún’s testimony complements Appelfeld’s. In Literature or Life, Semprún considered the difficulty of giving literary-­aesthetic expression to the terror of the Holocaust. He rejects the possibility of writing his book in third person: “I need a narrative ‘I’ that draws on my experience but goes beyond it, capable of opening the narrative up to fiction, to imagination. . . . Fiction that would be as illuminating as the truth, of course. That would help reality to seem true-to-life, truth to seem convincing.”29 A literature deeply rooted in its cultural-biographical context, then, can also bear testimony to what transcends it. Literature can at times do this more successfully than other types of discourse,30 and Semprún repeatedly refers to this question.31 The current book, then, does not endorse a view of the literary work as an expression of what Paul Valéry calls “the poetic situation,” or the perception of the literary work— for Valéry only of poetry—as a field constituted by a pure, autonomous linguistic design, like music.32 These basic insights accompany me when I seek to trace the literary account of prayer after the death of God. This book is an attempt to structure the moods, the outlooks resting on the augenblick that literature bears within itself, as statements bearing meaning. Recognition of the gap between philosophy and literature justifies the choice of the phenomenological method because this method begins from the manifestation—in the current case the text—in order to arrive at the datum, that is, the meaning 26

Chaim Nahman Bialik, Selected Poems: Bilingual Edition, trans. Ruth Nevo (Tel Aviv: Dvir and the Jerusalem Post, 1981), 14. 27 On this issue see Avi Sagi, Tradition vs. Traditionalism: Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008), 107-111. 28 Aharon Appelfeld, The Story of a Life, trans. Aloma Halter (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), 125. 29 Jorge Semprún, Literature or Life, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Viking, 1997), 165. See also 264-265. 30 Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, 231. 31 Semprún, Literature or Life, 10, 12-14, 123-125. 32 Paul Valéry, “Poetry and Abstract Thought,” trans. Charles Guenther, The Kenyon Review 16, no. 2 (1954): 208-233.

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or the implicit idea latent within this manifestation. The “datum” is not the primary manifestation, though one cannot arrive at it except through the manifestation itself. The starting phenomenological assumption is that the manifestation is opaque rather than transparent, and at times masks the datum. To arrive at the datum, then, the observer must resort to reflection or explication. In this sense, phenomenology enables both the preservation of the open, non-transparent character of the literary manifestation and the ability to reach its implicit meaning through it.33 I have chosen literature in general, and poetry in particular, due to the special affinity between poetry and prayer. At times, poetry is prayer and prayer is poetry. Goethe noted the closeness between religion and poetry: “For, as in poetry a certain faith in the impossible, and as in religion a like faith in the inscrutable, must have a place.”34 According to this view, poetry, just like religious faith, assumes that the revealed immanent reality is not all. In existence is a hidden element, which poetry reveals and to which faith turns. But this connection between faith and poetry is not a privilege reserved to believers. I present the closeness between faith and poetry from a secular perspective, which does not assume the existence of a transcendent entity, through the poems of Yitzhak Laor. These poems epitomize a distinctly secular view of poetry as prayer. This pure secularity, which does not endorse the religious model of prayer as a turn to the divine addressee, explicates the subjective aspect common to poetry and prayer. The focus on the subjective aspect, which is compelled by the “secular” perspective, directs attention to the disposition that both share: I can’t think of anyone to write to but I want to write a poem . . . Religious intent without God: I, thirsty prisoner, banging on the wall painfully, call out to me, tormenting jailer, don’t fear, my darling, don’t fear the poem.35

Ostensibly, this is an ars poetica poem grappling with the will to write a poem. This will assumes different patterns, which resemble patterns of 33

For an analysis of the datum in phenomenology, see also Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 34 Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, The Autobiography of Goethe: Truth and Poetry, From My Own Life, trans. John Oxenford (London: H. G. Bohn, 1848), 184. 35 Yitzhak Laor, “Recoil,” in Poems in the Valley of Iron (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1990), 21 [Heb]. The poems in this book were reprinted in the anthology Poems 1972-1992: A Selection (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2002) [Heb].

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prayer: the poem flows from the depths of the person’s heart and, in a way, turns to an addressee. The addressee in this poem is ultimately the self— “me, tormenting jailer”—since we cannot transcend our borders and are imprisoned within the limits of our existence. And yet, the poem bears the hallmark of prayer as a call. The call, or the will to write a poem, can therefore be described as a religious intention without God. Laor deals with the same theme in another poem, where he again points to poetry as speech turning to an addressee. 36 The addressee cannot be God, however, since the experience conveyed by the poem is that the addressee does not transcend its being. The basic disposition when writing the poem or, more precisely, the disposition of the poem itself, is one of religious intentionality, of holiness. What makes this a disposition of religious intentionality? And how is religious intentionality possible without God? These questions will be at the center of my discussion in the book, and I therefore delay the full answer. For the purpose of the comparison between poetry and prayer, I will make do here with a temporary statement: both manifest a disposition of turning outward, of transcendence. Schlegel offered an interesting formulation of the connection between poetry and the religious phenomenon, and wrote as follows: “The life and power of poetry consist in its ability to step out of itself, tear off a fragment of religion, and then return into itself and absorb it … Whoever has religion will speak in poetry.”37 In these poems, the addressee of the transcendence is the self given that, in Laor’s poems, man himself is divine: “Hear O man, man/ our God, our God/ man, our God is one/ our gods are as many as the sand/ upon the seashore.”38 Eli Wiesel also reiterates, from a religious perspective, the basic tie between literature and prayer. His perspective is particularly important since it is, above all, the testimony of someone who is both a writer and a worshipper, at home in both the world of prayer and the world of literature: Literature and prayer have much in common. Both take everyday words and give them meaning. Both appeal to what is most personal and most transcendent in man. Both are rooted in the most obscure and mysterious zone of our being. Nourished by anguish and fervor, both negate detachment and imitation—and are negated by them . . .

36

Ibid., “In the Chaos,” 24.

38

Laor, “Hear, O Man,” in Poems in the Valley of Iron, 87.

37 Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, 96-97.

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Both are as open as an open wound—both live tense and privileged moments.39

Wiesel’s comparison of prayer and literature in general, and of prayer and poetry in particular, is enlightening: prayer and poetry touch the person’s innermost being and reflect the very core of human existence. Hannah prays to her God silently, “only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard” (I Samuel 1:13). Eli the Priest, who does not understand her actions, thinks she is drunk. But Hannah explains that she is praying—“have poured out my soul before the Lord” (1:15). The expression “poured out my soul” is highly significant because prayer is perceived as expressing the soul, the innermost part of a person’s being. In biblical literature, prayer is talk, and the Psalmist therefore says: “A prayer of the afflicted, when he faints, and pours out his talk before the Lord” (102:1). The term “talk” in the Psalms parallels the term “soul” in the Book of Samuel, and both denote that prayer is speech, “talk,” expressing what is latent and hidden in human existence. Wiesel, whose spiritual world is founded on Jewish tradition, would certainly remember the Talmudic saying, “Isaac instituted the afternoon prayer, as it says, ‘And Isaac went out to talk in the field at eventide’ (Genesis 24:62), and talk means only prayer” (TB Berakhot 26b). For Wiesel, literature is also a discourse exposing the writer’s or poet’s being. Like prayer, poetry sheds light on what is dark and mysterious in human existence without making it banal or ordinary. The special language, festive or poetic, intensifies the moment of discovery or exposure of the mysterious, leaving margins not fully deciphered. Prayer and literature reveal the light and the shadow, the obvious and the secret in human existence, without stripping down their mystery. No wonder, then, that prayer becomes poetry and poetry becomes prayer. Prayer, like poetry, is a language that bears within it the wounds of existence. Many other instances of the comparison between poetry and prayer could be added to those suggested by Laor and Wiesel. I will only note that prayers are often poetically worded. Even without delving into the discussion about the reasons, we may state that prayer and poetry place humans in special, unusual situations. The self-transcendence that, as will be shown, is at the foundation of prayer, is also at the foundation of poetry, and the language of prayer is therefore poetic as well. In a conversation he conducts with Gustav Janouch, Kafka states: “Poetry is a condensate, an essence.” 39

Elie Wiesel, “Prayer and Modern Man,” in Prayer in Judaism: Continuity and Change, ed. Gabriel H. Cohn and Harold Fisch (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996), 3.

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When Janouch then concludes: “So poetry tends towards religion,” Kafka replies: “I would not say that, but certainly to prayer.”40 Biblical scholar Yochanan Muffs concisely articulates this insight as follows: “The experience of poetry is not removed from the experience of the Divine.”41 It is thus not surprising that an attempt to deal with prayer through the literary medium would make poetry rather than prose the main datum of the study. My study focuses on Hebrew literature from the beginning of the twentieth century up to today because it was in this period that a secular Hebrew culture emerged as the culture of a generation and a society rather than as a cluster of isolated individual voices. Although a secular Hebrew literature had already begun its course in the mid-nineteenth century, it was only with the arrival of pioneering waves of immigration that the problem of the relationship between the new, secular present and the old, traditional, religious past became constitutive in the shaping of the national culture. This fundamental question bothered not only selected outstanding individuals but the broad public, and found expression in practical, theoretical, and literary aspects of life. I have chosen to concentrate on the manifestations of this problem in Hebrew literature because literature was a subtle sensor through which prayer was experienced as a collective event and, in it, it also became a problem to be dealt with. Literature reflected the culture and provided the stage for ongoing reflection about the endeavor of building a secular Jewish culture. These parameters clarify that this book is not concerned with secular prayers but with the question of prayer and its meaning within this literature. My interest is to trace the course of literary 40

Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka: Notes and Reminiscences, trans. Gorowny Rees (London: Derek Verschoyle, 1953), 39. Note that, in a conversation where he discusses a poet, Kafka says: “For him [the poet] personally his song is only a scream” (ibid., 28). Kafka was seriously interested in prayer, to the point of identifying writing with prayer in his famous saying: “Writing is a form of prayer.” (For an analysis of prayer in Kafka’s world and for an interpretation of this saying, see Yoram Bar-David, Kafka: His Silent Jewishness and the Subtle Idolatry of his Personae [Jerusalem: Tsor-Ot, 1998] [Heb]). Walter Benjamin wrote an article about Kafka in 1934, long before the full extent of Kafka’s writings, including his special attitude toward prayer, became known. Benjamin unhesitatingly states: “Even if Kafka did not pray—and this we do not know—he still possessed in the highest degree what Malebranche called ‘the natural prayer of the soul’: attentiveness. And in this attentiveness he included all creatures, as saints include them in their prayers” (Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 1927-1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et. al., vol. 2 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999], 812). It seems questionable that Benjamin decoded the full meaning of prayer for Kafka, which involves a great deal more than attentiveness. As will be shown, self-reflection is one meaning of prayer, but Kafka’s prayer transcends this model. It turns to an unknown transcendence, it yearns and longs for what is beyond (Bar David, Kafka). In this sense, the meaning of prayer for Kafka is explicated by the approach presented in ch. 5. 41 Yochanan Muffs, The Personhood of God: Biblical Theology, Human Faith and the Divine Image (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publications, 2005), 104.

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secularization, in whose context the literary works confront prayer and its significance. Although this is a phenomenological discussion seeking to disclose the “datum” or meaning embodied in the literary texts, I do not assume that this disclosure is the ultimate purpose of the concern with this subject. Art in general and literature in particular fulfill an important social role—they are meant to present a possibility of existence that, in a deep sense, endows our experiences with new meaning. Ingeborg Bachmann conveyed this notion when saying: “When art grasps a new possibility, it enables us to consider where we stand and where we should have stood, where are we and where we should have been.”42 Resonating in Bachmann’s words is Aristotle’s view in his Poetics, which does not deal with “what happened” but with “what may happen.”43 But whereas Aristotle released art from the shackles of factuality and located it in the realm of possibility denoted by “what may happen,” Bachman goes a step further: art, in her view, delineates an existential possibility worthy of realization. Hence, it enables readers to rethink what they already are. Kafka voiced a similar insight when saying: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.”44 Literature, then, is supposed to enable a new, critical perspective on existence. According to M. H. Abrams’ classic taxonomy,45 the position presented here fits the pragmatic theory, which states that the literary work has an external purpose beyond itself.46 Literature, rather than necessarily an autonomous realm of inner meanings, can provide a new perspective that might enrich the reader’s world. Hebrew literature, as will be shown, provides a new perspective on the subject, a new possibility of understanding Jewish existence, and new insights, beyond the obvious, concerning prayer. It affords a new view of a practice that is basically considered religious and breaks the standard dichotomy that was set up in modernity between religion and secularity. It opens up a new horizon in the relationship with prayer. It is stimulating and controversial. 42

Ingeborg Bachmann, Frankfurter Vorlesungen: Probleme zeitgenössischer Dichtung (München-Zurich: R. Piper Verlag, 1984), 20. 43 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 68. 44 Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 16. 45 See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), ch. 1. 46 Ibid., 14-20.

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For most of the writers I discuss, God’s “death” is a living moment that they bear in their memory. Most of them speak the language of the religious tradition that they have relinquished, and most made a conscious choice to live within a secular world where the human being, rather than God, is sovereign. Works of Hebrew literature grappling with the question of prayer thus acquire a special value, when their look shifts between God’s presence in the past and his absence and death in the present.

Ch a p te r Two

“The Death of God” and the Possibility of Prayer

What is the current standing of prayer? Is there still room for prayer in the modern or postmodern world? French psychologist and theologian Louis Beirnaert offers a believer’s candid account of the state of prayer today: Today prayer is undergoing a crisis even among believers . . . In these circumstances, prayer, and more precisely prayer of petition, appears to be a survival from an epoch that is over and done with . . . it appears superfluous, if not ineffective. It will still spring to the lips in those moments of sheer distress known in every human existence, but the place allotted to it is being reduced, and then it even happens that it is felt to be a weakness, an attempt to avoid accepting the harsh law of the human condition.1

The testimony of this reflective contemporary believer is particularly important. Prayer has become problematic not only for non-believers but also for believers, particularly for those who are deeply connected to the modern or postmodern world. These believers, whose lives are organized according to this world’s practices and networks of meaning, could find themselves struggling to understand the phenomenon of prayer. Often, they will support extreme theories such as that of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who views prayer as an obligation bearing no meaning. It is not intended to fulfill human needs and feelings but imposed on us from outside, and we must comply with it. Even if this approach reflects a deep religious intuition, we can hardly ignore that it involves a judgment of the connection between concrete individuals and their God, a connection that has shaped religion from its very beginnings. Prayer, the most personal of expressions, is now perceived as meaningless. The only way of relocating it in human life is to turn it into a heteronomous obligation, a call for liberation from concrete existence in the name of the demand to comply with God’s command. 1

Louis Beirnaert, “Prayer and Petition to the Other,” in From Cry to Word: Contributions towards a Psychology of Prayer, ed. A. Godin (Brussels: Lumen Vitae Press, 1968), 27-28.

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The difficulty of praying and at times the inability to pray are symptoms of modern life, where the hero is the individual who rules reality. The difficulty of prayer in modern culture is a complementary aspect of the “death of God” phenomenon. In this chapter, I attempt to trace the history of the “death of God” idea and its implications for the possibility of prayer. The death of God is not always contingent on public declarations about it and statements about the divinity of humans at times implicitly convey the dismissal, or the death, of God. The idea of the death of God began to spread in the eighteenth century. In this century, as Paul Hazard notes, “God was being put on trial.”2 According to Hazard’s analysis, the “trial” focused on the question of God’s existence and God’s concern with humans and not necessarily on the loss of faith, but it still paved the way for the “death of God” and for the loss of faith. Consider several statements that illustrate the unfolding of this process. Goethe (1749-1832) described in his memoirs his personal experience of God’s detachment from the world, which he had felt during the Great Lisbon earthquake (1755). Even if God does exist, he is no longer closely connected to human beings: “God, the Creator and Preserver of Heaven and Earth, whom the explanation of the first article of the Creed declared so wise and benignant . . . had not manifested Himself, by any means, as a fatherly character.”3 Goethe draws a clear distinction between knowledge of God’s existence in the context of natural religion and belief in God in the context of a “specific religion”: ”One can return to conviction, but not to faith.”4 Goethe argues that faith in the context of the specific religion “must be immovable if it would not be instantly destroyed.”5 Loss of faith due to the sense that God has abandoned the world therefore violates the foundation of faith; even if God does exist, believers have lost faith in him. Another aspect of this process is concretized in the displacement of divine features from God to humans. Thus, Friedrich Schlegel (17721829) writes: “Every good human being is always progressively becoming God. To become God, to be human, to cultivate oneself are all expressions that mean the same thing.”6 And he adds: “God is everything that is purely 2

Paul Hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century: From Montesquieu to Lessing (London: Hollis and Carter, 1946), 47. 3 Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, The Autobiography of Goethe: Truth and Poetry, From My Own Life, trans. John Oxenford (London: H. G. Bohn, 1848), 19. 4 Ibid., 113. 5 Ibid. 6 Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 55.

“ The D e ath o f G o d ” a n d th e Po s s i bilit y o f Prayer

original and sublime, consequently the individual himself taken to the highest power. But aren’t nature and the world also individuals?”7 These two statements denote a displacement in the use of the term “God,” which no longer signifies a metaphysical, transcendent entity, as it had so far, but rather an action or a quality. As an action, the term suggests that humans can become more and more divine; as a quality, it denotes the original and the sublime, meaning individuals in their individuality. Schlegel draws conclusions from this analysis: If every infinite individual is God, then there are as many gods as there are ideals. And further, the relation of the true artist and the true human being to his ideals is absolutely religious. The man for whom this inner divine service is the end and occupation of all his life is a priest, and this is how everyone can and should become a priest.8

God is now the ideal that humans set themselves. Furthermore, this ideal could become an object of “divine worship.” If the traditional object of divine worship is the transcendent God, the object is now the ideals that humans set themselves. Schlegel writes “everyone can and should become a priest,” but the gist of his claim is that human beings serve as priests in a temple where they are God. God is thus absorbed into the discourse about immanence without an open proclamation of his death. Revolutions often take place without explicit declarations of war on the old or prevailing traditions and concretize instead as subtle processes that percolate into the language and the culture. At times, these processes appear obvious, part of a pervasive traditional view. The displacement in the use of the term God from a noun to the denotation of an action or a quality is not a proclamation about the death of God, but it is his unobtrusive killing. In truth, it represents the full modernist turnabout that set up the individual subject as sovereign, and his victory is so complete that the subject and his action can now be described in divine terms. To grasp the scope of the revolution entailed by the writings of Schlegel, Goethe, Friedrich Schiller,9 and others, I skip to Ludwig Feuerbach, one generation later. In a deep sense, Feuerbach grows the tree planted by Schlegel, even though he is part of the Hegelian tradition. The best starting

7

Ibid., 98. Ibid., 82. 9 Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers: A Tragedy in Five Acts, trans. Elizabeth Craven (London: Wigstead, 1799). 8

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point for understanding Feuerbach’s stance is his description of the philosophical project he embarked upon in his book The Essence of Christianity: Thus in the first part [of the book] I show that the true sense of Theology is Anthropology, that there is no distinction between the predicates of the divine and human nature, and, consequently, no distinction between the divine and human subject . . . In the second part, on the other hand, I show that the distinction which is made, or rather supposed to be made, between the theological and anthropological predicates resolves itself into an absurdity.10

Feuerbach reiterates the claim that any quality we consider essential for our existence, we ascribe to God: Thou believest in love as a divine attribute because thou thyself lovest; thou believest that God is a wise, benevolent being because thou knowest nothing better in thyself than benevolence and wisdom; and thou believest that God exists, that therefore he is a subject . . . because thou . . . art thyself a subject.11

The claims about the predicates displaced from humans to God become far more dramatic when we take into account Feuerbach’s argument, in the wake of Hegel, that the predicates are inseparable from the subject. Indeed, the predicates are the subject, and through them the subject expresses its existence. There is no unknown subject who is at the foundation of, and separate from, these predicates; the subject is what they embody. In Feuerbach’s terms, “the predicates are not accidents, but express the essence of the subject, there is no distinction between subject and predicate.”12 Indeed, the predicates, meaning the attributes through which we describe ourselves, become our objects. We know we exist through knowledge of our characteristics.13 Feuerbach, following Hegel and resembling Kierkegaard, characterizes the consciousness of the subject as made up of two constitutive poles: finite and infinite. The finite aspect characterizes compliance with facts and the limited data, and the infinite aspect characterizes transcendence of them— the unlimited element in humans. An unlimited element is disclosed in 10

Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), xvii (emphasis in original). 11 Ibid., 18. 12 Ibid., xvii. 13 Ibid., 5.

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the very existence of human characteristics such as love, mind, and will. These characteristics, rather than striving for a finite limited goal, are ends in themselves. As Feuerbach notes, they are “divine, absolute powers” that human beings cannot oppose.14 After Hegel, Feuerbach knew that the process of self-knowledge is realized in objectification. We cannot know ourselves unless we set up ourselves as objects: “We know the man by the object, by his conception of what is external to himself; . . . this object is his manifested nature, his true objective ego.”15 This context locates God in a separate space. God is no longer a transcendent object existing for and by itself, independent of humans. God is the separate, external shaping of self-objectification.16 The qualities that express human nature now express the divine existence that is independent of humans.17 For Feuerbach, who follows Hegel, the separate divine existence that is the foundation of religion is merely man’s earliest and also indirect form of self-knowledge . . . Man first of all sees his nature as if out of himself, before he finds it in himself. His own nature is in the first instance contemplated by him as that of another being. Religion is the childlike condition of humanity; . . . in childhood a man is an object to himself, under the form of another man.18

Feuerbach went so far as bringing back a revised version of Xenophanes’ statement, “if horses and oxen had hands and could draw pictures, their gods would look remarkably like horses and oxen.”19 Similarly, Feuerbach states: “If God were an object to the bird, he would be a winged being: the bird knows nothing higher, nothing more blissful, than the winged ­condition.”20 Feuerbach’s stance is not the ideological manifesto of an atheist in search of radical formulations and blatant slogans. Fundamentally, it is based on a post-Kantian epistemology whereby God, as an epistemic object, appears as an object of human knowledge.

14

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 5. 16 Ibid., xviii. 17 Ibid., xx. 18 Ibid., 13. 19 Xenophanes of Colophon, Fragments, trans. J. H. Lesher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), B15. 20 Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 17. 15

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Believers draw a distinction between God as he is and God as known to us, as an object of our knowledge. Contrary to this view, Feuerbach claims: I cannot know whether God is something else in himself or for himself than he is for me; what he is to me is to me all that he is . . . but this transcendentalism is only an illusion; for I can make the distinction between the object as it is in itself, and the object as it is for me.21

Feuerbach, however, goes a step further. His approach reflects an attempt to redeem humans and lead them to the radical conclusion that “atheism . . . is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally . . . in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.”22 Henceforth, the term “God” denotes ideal human perfection. The contrast that religion draws between God and humans is merely the contrast between the weak, imperfect human situation and the ideal, between the given and the potential.23 This contrast does not create an absolute separation between the human and immanent on the one hand, and the divine and transcendent on the other. Rather, it is a contrast within the same existential space: “if the divine nature, which is the object of religion, were really different from the nature of man, a division, a disunion could not take place. If God is really a different being from myself, why should his perfection trouble me?”24 The connection between the divine and the human attests to these qualities as divine and, therefore, to the very existence of God, which is the concretization of human existence. Hence the conclusion: “Every being is in and by itself infinite—has its God, its highest conceivable being, in itself.”25 The seeds planted by Goethe, Schlegel, Schiller, and others thus sprouted into a systematic weltanschauung, at whose center is the human being. Schlegel’s discovery, and Feuerbach’s world view in its wake, were not meant to belittle humans. Rather, as Feuerbach argues, “while reducing theology to anthropology, [I] exalt anthropology into theology, very much as Christianity, while lowering God into man, made man into God.”26 Schlegel elevated the human being to the rank of God without formulating this as a principle, whereas Feuerbach articulated these ideas into a coherent 21

Ibid., 16. Ibid., xvi. See also ibid., 11. 23 Ibid., 33. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 7. 26 Ibid., xviii. 22

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doctrine. Ultimately, this position removes the historical, traditional God from the stage. Feuerbach’s God did not have to die, did not have to be murdered, as Nietzsche would argue later; indeed, Feuerbach’s God, like Schlegel’s, came back to life: human existence itself became divine. Schlegel and others removed God and empowered humans subtly and quietly. Feuerbach, however, who viewed his philosophical endeavor as a mission, cleared the path for God’s open dismissal. Feuerbach’s is not a serene atheism; it is not a statement about what does and does not exist in reality. Feuerbach’s version of atheism requires a traditional religion—it confronts it, and is built on its basis; it needs its religious symbols to reshape the correct human program. Driven by this sense of mission, it shifts from the service of God to the service of the philosophy that liberates from God.27 Despite this difference, both thinkers hold that the term “God” denotes the human or, more precisely, all that is sublime and infinite in human nature. Schlegel proposes an inconspicuous path, wherein God disappears. Feuerbach turns this disappearance into a theoretical project. He thereby follows in the path of a philosophical tradition outlined by Hegel himself. I have brought forward the discussion of him in order to point out the power of understated culture because, through Feuerbach’s approach, we can capture what is already found in Schlegel. Mainstream modernist culture did not follow the unobtrusive path chosen by Schlegel, and Feuerbach is the more prominent representative of an approach that deemed it important to kill God through an ordered ritual system. This system even created an idiom, “the death of God,” which is identified above all with Nietzsche even though the history of this term’s use precedes him. The first and most significant figure to deal with this matter was Hegel. His use of the “death of God” terminology is particularly enlightening because it is based on Christian faith: “God Himself is dead,” as it is said in a Lutheran hymn; the consciousness of this fact expresses the truth that the human, the finite . . . is itself a divine moment . . . the finite, the negative, is not outside of God, and that in its character as otherness it does not hinder unity with God; otherness, the negation, is consciously known to be a moment of the Divine nature. The highest knowledge of the nature of the Idea of Spirit is contained in this thought.28 27

On this issue, see John Edward Toews, Hegelianism: The Path toward Dialectical Humanism 1805-1841 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 184-185. 28 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson, vol. 3 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1895), 98.

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The death of God that Hegel speaks of is the crucifixion. Hegel thus refers to the Lutheran interpretation of a central event in the religious history of Christianity. This interpretation involved a controversy hinging on the question of whether it was God who had died or, as the Orthodox believed, only the human embodiment of God—the son. Hegel cites the Lutheran hymn of Johannes Rist stating that God had died—the passion and the death were indeed God’s.29 According to Hegel, this is not only a historical-religious event that happened in the past, but one that reflects the movement of the spirit, basically manifest in the displacement of the transcendent to the immanent. What is perceived as outside the spirit is contained, in a process at once historical and epistemological, within the spirit. The death of God, then, implies that the transcendent aspect of the divinity is emptied and replaced by the immanent movement of history, culture, and knowledge. Hegel understood that the term “God” denotes, above all, his transcendent otherness. Hence, the historical-cultural and epistemological process through which the transcendent element is revealed as immanent—that is, as an act of the spirit—implies the death of God. Hegel holds that the death of God is the death of natural metaphorical thinking about God. The God of this thought must die so that the God of knowledge can come to life at the depth of human consciousness.30 Hegel’s analysis neither negates nor destroys the significance of Chris­ tianity. Hegel confers eternal value on the death of God in the crucifixion, which is independent of its actual historical occurrence since God’s death is not perceived as a dismissal of the eternal divine foundation.31 Quite the contrary, Hegel emphasizes that the death of God in the historical-­ cultural process implies that the finite is also a moment in the eternal, in the infinite. The crucifixion, then, is not only the movement of the infinite toward the finite, but also implies acknowledging the value of the infinite within the finite. The divine, eternal foundation is not represented in the world solely through human action. For Hegel, the divine itself turns to the human; the divine, the infinite, is realized in the finite, in the concrete, in its death,32 and Hegel can therefore argue that “the finite is itself a divine moment.” Not only was Christianity not weakened, then, but it indeed 29

See Robert Williams, “Theology and Tragedy,” in New Perspectives on Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, ed. David Kolb (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1992), 57 note 34. 30 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 475-476. 31 See also Stephen Crites, “The Golgotha of Absolute Spirit,” in Method and Speculation in Hegel’s Phenomenology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1982), 51. 32 See Emil L. Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 140.

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became the quintessential manifestation of the perfect synthesis between the finite and the infinite.33 Religion, then, rather than a random human creation liable to disappear, represents a key moment in the history of the spirit—the mediation between the infinite and the finite. The products of human history and of culture thus bear absolute value. Hegel held that this idea of mediation cannot rely on a past historical event and must take place anew through the believers. The divine spirit, then, must come alive within the community of faith, since only in this way can it again embody the mediation between the eternal, the infinite, and the finite. The crucifixion is thus rescued from being a contingent past event and becomes a perennial life task: Christ—man as man—in whom the unity of God and man has appeared, has in his death, and his history generally, himself presented the eternal history of Spirit—a history which every man has to accomplish in himself, in order to exist as Spirit, or to become a child of God, a citizen of his kingdom. The followers of Christ, who combine on this principle and live in the spiritual life as their aim, form the Church, which is the Kingdom of God.34

The historical movement of the eternal and the infinite toward the finite is embodied in the crucifixion, in the death of God. Rather than removing the eternal element from history and culture, this movement endows the finite manifestation with infinite meaning. Culture and history are not only culture and history—they are manifestations of eternity, although they are ultimately conditioned by the community of believers. They are not guaranteed, however, nor do they simply happen, and believers must repeatedly realize this process within the Church.35 Contrary to the prevailing perception stressing the necessary character of Hegel’s thought, this passage and many others emphasize the responsibility of humans for the realization of the spirit. Hegel claims that this is the deep meaning of human redemption through Jesus’ death.36 Redemption marks the zenith of an immanent ­process—it is the full consciousness of the spirit as a mediation between 33

Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 141-142. 34 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 328 (emphasis in original). 35 On Hegel’s Christian approach in light of his view about the death of God, see Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension, 138-154, 193-214. 36 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 328.

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the infinite and the finite. In sum, the death of God is the very heart of faith. The death of God, Jesus’ death in the past, constitutes the believers’ religious paradigm. This religious approach, however, hardly reflects the experience of the believers. For the believers, the event of God’s death, like the death of Jesus, concretizes the divine-human connection rather than the absolute spirit. The death of God, as it is perceived by generations of Christian believers, cannot be detached from faith in revelation, from God’s grace, from the experience of religious awe, and from various religious phenomena. The price that Hegel pays for this new interpretation of the death of God is clear: as Edith Wyschogrod noted, Hegel’s God is a silent God. His silence is not a mode of the transcendent God’s presence in the world, to be decoded by the believer. God’s silence reflects the world’s emptying of God’s transcendence as well as the loss of God’s personal meaning, and their replacement with a “moment” of the spirit.37 But Hegel, who wished to endow Christianity with meaning in a secular era, could not but recognize that religion, as he describes it, reflects the death of God in another sense—God became irrelevant. Elsewhere, Hegel remarks: “Formerly, the infinite grief only existed historically in the formative process of culture. It existed as the feeling that ‘God Himself is dead,’ upon which the religion of more recent times rests.”38 Hegel stands here as a somewhat disappointed spectator who reflects religious reality and reports a crucial cultural event. He sums up the situation at a given time: humans have lost God. Hegel targets for criticism the culture of the Enlightenment. For the Enlightenment, God had indeed died, since he was no longer an object of knowledge and thus became an abstract irrelevant entity,39 contrary to his position in Hegelian philosophy, which presumes to retain its essential meaning while still containing the religious world. For Hegel, the “death of God” was not a recent invention. Hegel cites Blaise Pascal, who writes in Pensées: “For nature is such that she testifies everywhere, both within man and without him, to a lost God and a corrupt nature.”40 The death of God, then, was not a new crisis in the nineteenth century. God had already been dead for centuries, ever since man discovered 37 Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes, 145. 38

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1977), 190. See also Jeffrey L. Kosky, “The Birth of the Modern Philosophy of Religion,” in Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond, ed. Regina Schwartz (New York: Routledge, 2004), 14-28. 40 Blaise Pascal, Pascal Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (London: Dent, 1954), 124. Hegel quotes him in Faith and Knowledge, 190. 39

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himself as a sovereign subject, an ego cogito whose knowledge conditions everything. Although Hegel relates to Pascal, Buber justly argued that Nietzsche, Pascal, and Hegel “actually mark three very different stages on one road.”41 Pascal speaks of a God that is lost to universal reality. It is not God as such that is lost, but the natural, human reality that has lost him, though it can still find him in faith. Hegel, by contrast, uses the “death of God” term to point to a world entirely void of God. This, then, is a new stage in God’s death. In the last passage by Hegel quoted above, the death of the Christian God is reinterpreted in a way that dictates the later use of the term. For Christians and for Hegel himself, the “death of God” was meant to open the way to human redemption. Christians believed that God died to redeem humans; Hegel believed that, in dying, God outlined the paradigm of the spirit. And yet, when Hegel speaks about the death of God in this passage, he deeply transforms this idea. Now, the death of God is not part of divine history but part of a cultural-historical process that makes God redundant. A traditional Christian doctrine is thus reversed and denied its theological-­ religious meaning. Heinrich Heine took a further step in the shaping of the death of God narrative. He grasped the spirit of Hegel’s statement and was well aware of the transformation that modern culture was undergoing. In an essay dealing with the history of religion and philosophy in Germany, Heine argues that, in the modern era, “the ultimate fate of Christianity thus depends on whether we still need it.”42 This statement fully reflects the transformation in the status of religion and God in the modern era. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, the status of religion had not depended on the need it satisfied; religion was binding because believers thought it embodied God’s word, and obedience to God and religion rested on the deep acknowledgement of an obligation of absolute compliance. The human-God relationship was constituted hierarchically and asymmetrically: God is the sovereign and humans are his subjects. Human fate was in God’s hands and compliance was therefore unconditional. Now, however, the situation is reversed: humans became sovereign. This reversal reshaped the status of religion and of God: in order for God and religion to have a place in human life, they 41

Martin Buber, Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), 20 (note). 42 Heinrich Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings, trans. Howard PollackMilgate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 14.

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must satisfy a human need. The status of religion and God thus becomes permanently conditional: “the ultimate fate of Christianity thus depends on whether we still need it.” Without this human need for religion and God, they will disappear. We must not underestimate this statement by Heine, which conveys a deep modernist mood: the modern individual refuses to be a subject in God’s kingdom and aspires to be the sovereign. This aspiration does not necessarily dismiss religion and God, but locates them in relation to the subject, who endows them with meaning. The recognition of sublimity in the divine, the human awe of the sacred, and the sense that we are dust and ashes vis-à-vis God are replaced by a new consciousness. This consciousness is not yet necessarily secular (since human beings may still find room in their lives for God and religion, which supply their needs), but does clear the way for secularization in the profound sense of the term: the creation of spaces entirely unconditioned by religion and God, spaces that embody human sovereignty. This basic insight leads Heine to one of the earliest and deepest articulations of the “death of God.” In rhythmic sentences that probably influenced Nietzsche, Heine writes: Our heart is full of terrible compassion—it is old Jehovah himself who is readying himself for death.—We have gotten to know him so well, from his cradle, in Egypt. . . . We saw him bid farewell to the playmates of his childhood . . . and become a small God-King in Palestine, over a poor shepherd people, living in his own temple palace. We saw later how he came into contact with Assyrian-Babylonian civilization and gave up his all-too-human passions, no longer spewed pure wrath and vengeance, or at least no longer went into rages about every little trifle.—We saw him emigrate to Rome, the capital city, where he gave up all national prejudice and proclaimed the heavenly equality of all peoples. With such splendid phrases, we saw him form a party in opposition to old Jupiter, intrigue long enough to come to power and rule from the Capitol over city and world, urbem et orbem.—We saw how he became even more ethereal, how he gently whined, how he became a loving father, a general friend of mankind, a benefactor of the world, a philanthropist—none of this could help him. Do you hear the bell ringing? Kneel down—Sacraments are being brought to a dying God.43

43

Ibid., 76.

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Heine makes radically bold statements here: God is located within a historical biography. It is not a negligible claim that the sacred and the sublime— the transcendent God—have a history, and that their place in the world will be traced through a biographical narrative rather than through theology or metaphysics. Only one who has already lost his God and does not recognize him as sovereign of the universe could write a biography of God. For Heine, God is indeed already dying in an “objective” occurrence wherein the sovereign human individual has no share. Heine’s empathy with the dying God is itself an expression of the distance between this event and human beings. But Heine is the spectator of God’s death and not the one who has brought it about. Heine was not a sociologist of religion and definitely not a philosopher delving into the mysteries of religion and theology, which is precisely why he could convey the zeitgeist. Peter Berger, in one of his daring theses, argued that the death of God heralded by Heine, among others, was the culmination of a process that begins with Protestantism. Protestantism, contrary to Catholicism, was no longer pervaded by the divine presence: Reality is polarized between a radically transcendent divinity and a radically “fallen” humanity that, ipso facto, is devoid of sacred qualities. Between them lies an altogether “natural” universe . . . In other words, the radical transcendence of God confronts a universe of radical immanence, of “closedness” to the sacred. Religiously speaking, the world becomes very lonely indeed. . . . It [Protestantism] broke the continuity . . . between heaven and earth, and thereby threw man back upon himself in a historically unprecedented manner . . . “God is dead.”44

In the essay mentioned above, Heine dwelt at length on Protestantism, and particularly on Luther. He did not, however, view Luther as a decisive factor but rather as part of a prolonged process, which reached one of its summits in Immanuel Kant’s thought. In Kant’s philosophy, God’s standing is considerably and deliberately minimized: God is, for Kant, a noumenon. According to his argumentation, the transcendental ideal being which we have, up to now, called God is nothing but a fiction. It arose through a natural illusion. Indeed, Kant shows that we can know nothing of that noumenon, God, and that 44

Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 111-112.

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even any future proof of his existence is impossible. We must write Dante’s words: “Abandon all hope!” above this section of the Critique of Pure Reason.45

Many years separate Heine the poet and Berger the contemporary sociologist, but the reading of these texts leaves a similar impression: God’s abandonment of the world is a long historical process rather than a single dramatic event, with God and religion suffering a prolonged agony. The world was emptied of the divine.46 And again: Heine, as a Jew (though he converted to Christianity), knew well what the death of God meant for Catholicism. In the poem “Disputation,” which describes a medieval theological disputation between a rabbi and a Catholic monk, the rabbi contrasts the Jewish with the Christian God: Our great God, like some poor lambkin, For humanity would never Perish; for such philanthropic Actions he is far too clever. ... Our great God, he lives forever In his heavenly halls in glory, And, compared with him, eternal Ages are but transitory.47

Heine’s death of God, then, is above all the death of Christianity, which believed that God died for humanity but cannot himself die. He is now “a dying God,” since the power of Christianity has been weakened. Is the death of God, in the sense of the death of Christianity, necessarily also the death of faith? Heine leaves room for a faith that is neither dogmatic nor Catholic. Ludwig Marcuse writes in his well-known biography of Heine: “We no longer have the courage” so preached the Jew Heine, before Kierkegaard or Nietzsche—the courage of a faith which none of them possessed any longer. The great Danish Protestant Kierkegaard later 45 Heine, On the History of Religion, 84. 46

In this context, Heine’s connection to Protestantism deserves note: “You know, I am no supporter of Catholicism. The dogma of Protestantism is no longer part of my religious convictions, but its spirit certainly lives on in them. Thus, I am still biased towards the Protestant Church” (Ibid., 63). 47 Heinrich Heine, The Poems of Heine, trans Edgar Alfred Bowring (London: George Bell and Sons, 1894), 499.

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asked over and over again: “What must a man do to have faith?” and declared over and over again: “There is only one reasonable aim— to achieve faith”; and avowed despairingly as many times: “I know the goal, but I cannot reach it.” In the same way Heine, the great Rhineland Jew, whose spirit was tragically akin, knew what was needful. But Heine too was one of the unconquerable defeated—always aiming clearly at a goal but always lacking the strength to make it.48

Heine was a voice that expressed the spirit of a generation and pointed to the possibilities and the relentless pain involved in faith, which he never fully renounced. Heine’s death of God does not create a problem but denotes a specific phenomenon—the death of Christianity. As Marcuse argues, “the baptised Jew Heine became, a generation before Nietzsche, the great Antichrist,”49 but precisely because of it, the religious horizon remained open. The “early” history of the death of God ends with three authors: Jans Peter Jacobsen,50 Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche.51 For all three of them, God did not die a “natural” death. The death of God is an existential demand— humans are required to, and at times do, “murder” God. This is the third stage that Buber speaks of: the first is the “loss” of God, the second the “death of God,” and now the “murder” of God—an act that prepares a realm of human freedom.52 Henceforth, at the center of history, culture, and all significant processes, is the human being. Humans are responsible for God’s death and will be defined as God’s murderers. Jacobsen, though less well known than Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, suggests a similar philosophical move. In the influential novel Niels Lyhne is a fascinating dialogue between Lyhne and Hjerrild. Lyhne makes a paradoxical statement: “There is no God, and man is his prophet.”53 Hjerrild does not question Lyhne’s atheistic starting point, but claims: “The belief in a God who rules everything and judges everything is humanity’s last great illusion, and when that is gone, what then? Then you are wiser; but 48 49 50

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Ludwig Marcuse, Heine: A Life between Love and Hate, trans. Louise M. Sievelking and Ian F. D. Morrow (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1933), 93-94. Ibid., 107. Denmark, 1847-1885. For an extensive discussion of the similarities between Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, see Richard Elliot Friedman, The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery (Boston: Little Brown, 1995), 143-171. Although inaccurate on some points, Friedman does provide an illuminating picture of the relationship between these two thinkers. See Buber, Eclipse of God. Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne, trans Hanna Astrup Larsen (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1919), 160.

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richer, happier? I can’t see it.”54 Resonating in Hjerrild’s formulation is the Kantian view of God as a postulate: man needs God in order to exist. The question of God’s existence is thus existential rather than simply ontological. Existentially, we need God. But Lyhne attacks precisely this aspect and, in a clearly Nietzschean tone, argues against Hjerrild: But don’t you see . . . that on the day when men are free to exult and say: “There is no God!” On that day a new heaven and a new earth will be created as if by magic. Then and not till then will heaven be a free infinite space instead of a spying, threatening eye. Then the earth will be ours and we the earth’s . . . Don’t you see what nobility it will give men when they are free to live their life and die their death, without fear of hell or hope of heaven, but fearing themselves, hoping for themselves?55

Jacobsen, then, proposes a humanist manifesto based on the removal of God from the world. It is no longer an atheistic position confined to a metaphysical claim about the non-existence of God, or to a saying about non-­ belief in God, even if he does exist. His position is a call for rebellion against God, invoking human existence, freedom, and responsibility, the denial of transcendence, and the affirmation of immanence in all its meanings. Jacobsen’s position, however, is not that simple. As I noted in Chapter One above, the death of God, unlike atheism, is part of religiosity. Indeed, at his son’s deathbed, Lyhne “threw himself down on the floor on his knees, praying to the Lord Who is in heaven, Who keeps the earth in fear through trials and chastisements.”56 This prayer does not retract Lyhne’s original position; he knows that this prayer attests to his failure, it is a test he did not pass.57 But this clear understanding does not prevent Lyhne from reflecting as he is dying: “What a relief it would have been if he had had a god to whom he could have moaned and prayed!”58 The manifesto placing trust in humanism is replaced by the cry of a lonely desperate man who needs God, yearns for God. This passion does not lead Lyhne to renounce his original position, but does highlight the gap between the atheistic stance and the one focusing on the death of God. 54 Ibid. 55

Ibid., 160-161. Ibid., 276. 57 Ibid., 278. 58 Ibid., 283. 56

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Jacobsen, a contemporary of Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche, conducts a distant and particularly fascinating dialogue with Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. His mood is similar to theirs, as are the tensions at the basis of the “death of God” position. I will now consider their views. In Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed, Kirilov presents the thesis about the death of God. He sets up a dichotomy: man or God. In his view, the existence of God negates human freedom and humans cannot be free unless they kill God: “If God exists, all is His will and from His will I cannot escape. If not, it’s all my will and I am bound to show self-will.”59 The proclamation is no longer a theory and reflects Kirilov’s inner transformation. It is a testimony to this turnabout, which is founded on the will to be free. This defiance, rather than merely a rebellion against the existent God, becomes also a new reading of human history, where the idea of God emerges as a human invention. Kirilov enlists history in his favor: I have no higher idea than disbelief in God. I have all the history of mankind on my side. Man has done nothing but invent God so as to go on living, and not kill himself; that’s the whole of universal history up till now. I am the first one in the whole history of mankind who would not invent God.60

Kirilov sees the historical invention of God as necessary for human survival. Without God, human beings would commit suicide because they would find no point to their lives. Kirilov finds that the source of this invention is deep fear. In Martin Heidegger’s terms, this invention reflects the anxiety evoked by the knowledge that we are alone, without comfort or support, thrown entirely onto ourselves: Life is pain, life is terror, and man is unhappy. Now all is pain and terror. Now man loves life because he loves pain and terror, and so they have done according. Life is given now for pain and terror, and that’s the deception. Now man is not yet what he will be. There will be a new man, happy and proud. For whom it will be the same to live or not to live, he will be the new man. He who will conquer pain and terror will himself be a god. And this God will not be.61

59

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: The Heritage Press, 1959), 531. Ibid., 532. 61 Ibid., 96. 60

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Without delving into the classic question concerning Dostoyevsky’s possible influence on Nietzsche, Kirilov’s words anticipate Nietzsche’s ­formulations about the Superman, the new man who will be his own sovereign, his own creator, and will therefore do away with God. The death of God is no longer a historical-cultural process of religion’s loss of power, but a kind of existential test that exposes the inventor of God as a frightened creature, willing to bear pain if it will only ensure the continuation of life. The man willing to kill God is the one who does not fear for his life, and will willingly renounce it in exchange for absolute freedom. He must therefore kill God, perform an act expressing his being as a free individual. Inspired by this approach, Kirilov suggests a new periodization of human history, which will only be realized after the killing of God is completed. When the new man stands up on the stage of human history, he “will become himself a god. Then there will be a new life, a new man, everything will be new . . . then they will divide history into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of God to. . . .”62 Kirilov struggles against religion as well as against metaphysics, against the lies and the fictions about God’s existence. The struggle against these beliefs is part of the struggle for self-liberation, for redemption from the belief in other redemptions, and for the positioning of individuals as free entities. Kirilov thus proposes the man or God equation, which is a constitutive component of the liberation from God. Liberation is attained both through the existential decision expressing a willingness to be God and through the epistemological act showing that the term “God” does not denote an entity, but a necessary fiction invented in the past. Kirilov’s destruction of God is the destruction of a misleading idea that has disrupted human life. In this sense, Kirilov is involved in a humanist project seeking to place humans where they deserve—as free creatures shaping their lives and their deaths as they wish. Dostoyevsky never ceased to deal with this topic, and he goes back to it in The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan Karamazov returns to Kirilov’s themes, but in more complex ways. His basic statement is: “There would have been no civilization if they hadn’t invented God.”63 He then clarifies his position and presents a complex view, involving a far deeper rejection of God: There was an old sinner in the eighteenth century who declared that, if there were no God, he would have to be invented. . . . And man has 62 63

Ibid., 97. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 160.

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actually invented God. And what’s strange, what would be marvellous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man, so holy it is, so touching, so wise and so great a credit it does to man. As for me, I’ve long resolved not to think whether man created God or God man . . . and so I accept God and am glad to, and what’s more I accept His wisdom, His purpose—which are utterly beyond our ken; I believe in the underlying order and the meaning of life; I believe in the eternal harmony in which they say we shall one day be blended . . . I don’t accept this world of God’s, and although I know it exists, I don’t accept it at all. It’s not that I don’t accept God, you must understand, it’s the world created by Him I don’t and cannot accept.64

Ivan Karamazov is not Kirilov, despite the similarities between them; the problems and the solutions they offer are entirely different. Kirilov seeks his freedom, his own liberation, which he believes is contingent on God’s destruction. By contrast, Ivan Karamazov is a moralist; the fundamental feature of his world is the match between justice and reality. God is meant to represent justice and harmony, but the world is full of evil. In Albert Camus’ terms, Ivan is a metaphysical rebel who rises up against an evil world pervaded by schism and cacophony. The metaphysical rebel of the Ivan Karamazov kind “is seeking . . . a moral philosophy or a religion . . . If the rebel blasphemes it is in the hope of finding a new god. He staggers under the shock of the first and most profound of all religious experiences, but it is a disenchanted religious experience.”65 Underlying religion is the disappointment with God and with the expectation of an ordered world, leading to a special pattern of relationships between God and humans. For Kirilov, faith in God is irrelevant, a damaging mistake. The attitude toward this mistake serves as a personality test. Kirilov neither has nor could have any connection to God nor to God’s standing in existence, beyond God being a temptation that precludes human freedom. Humans are not disappointed with God nor could they be, since one cannot be disappointed with an idea. Ivan Karamazov is entirely different—even when he denies God (which he claims he does not), he retains his connection to him. If Ivan Karamazov is an apostate, his apostasy is a deep attachment to what he negates. Tichon, 64 65

Ibid., 278-279. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953), 73.

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one of the protagonists of The Possessed, formulates this notion as follows: “The complete atheist stands on the penultimate step to most perfect faith (he may or he may not take a further step), but the indifferent person has no faith whatever except a bad fear.”66 Tichon is closer to Ivan Karamazov than to Kirilov. Aaron David Gordon grasped the meaning of the apostasy represented by Ivan Karamazov (but not by Kirilov). One of Gordon’s most famous distinctions is that between “small apostasy” and “great apostasy.” The small apostasy “has no roots either in the soul or the mind of the apostate. Instead, it is sown by any wind that bears this light seed on its wings and grows like thorns in the desert, for lack of food for better plants.”67 The small apostasy, then, is a statement that does not express a person’s complete attitude toward the world and God. It can be expressed as an atheistic statement, which involves no commitment beyond the statement as such. Not so the great apostasy: The great, original apostasy, originating in great sorrow and great, searching thought, is no less fruitful and creative than great faith, which is also related to great sorrow and great searching thought . . . Great sorrow gives no rest to those afflicted with it . . . Of this great apostasy—as well as of this great faith—you will not find much in our times . . . Any vitality a contemporary person may have had, any spiritual power, any passion, has been spent on the negative, and for the positive there is nothing left.68

Ivan Karamazov is a great apostate who experiences the “great sorrow,” the disappointment with God and with the world he has created. This sorrow eats away at his life. He refuses to be saved through faith in a place of pain and pervasive evil.69 Kirilov seeks freedom and sovereignty. Karamazov, the great apostate, is a rebel who refuses what is, refuses God if this is his world, and seeks a better one. The distinction between Ivan Karamazov and Kirilov brings us closer to Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, the death of God concretizes elements from both Kirilov and Karamazov. The Kirilov elements are obvious: the manGod dichotomy as well as the idea of the new, free man—the Superman, are basic foundations of his thought. The death of God makes room for 66 Dostoyevsky, The Possessed, 593-594. 67

Aaron David Gordon, “Man and Nature,” in Collected Writings, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Zionist Library, 1957), 48 [Heb].

68 Ibid.

69 Camus, The Rebel, 50-53.

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the realization of these ideas, but Nietzsche’s account with God is not yet settled. God for him is not just a misleading idea. Lou Salomé, who knew Nietzsche well, described him as a man who was driven by a religious motive, and identified the tragic conflict of his life as one between the yearning for God and the compulsive need to negate God.70 In a celebrated claim, Heidegger too noted that Nietzsche is the last German seeker of God in the twentieth century.71 The death of the Nietzschean God, then, entails obvious Karamazovian elements of disappointment with God, beside a desperate passion for him. Nietzsche is one of the more prominent thinkers that convey, in Gordon’s terms, the “great apostasy.” Nietzsche returned to the death of God question and formulated it as a problem. The thesis about the death of God is tied above all to Nietzsche, but the comparison with Hegel and Heine is what really sheds light on it.72 In the brief space of time between the Enlightenment era represented by Hegel and Heine, when the spirit of human freedom discovers itself, and the era in which Nietzsche writes, a shift takes place. A deep expression of this shift is Nietzsche’s thesis about the death of God. For Nietzsche, the death of God is not a fact but an occurrence, a historical event with vast implications, led by the individual who performs the heroic or insane act of God’s murder: The greatest recent event—that “God is dead”; that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe . . . For many people’s power of comprehension, the event is itself far too great, distant, and out of the way even for its tidings to be thought of as having arrived yet. Even less may one suppose many to know at all what this event really means.73 70

Lou Salomé, Nietzsche, trans. Siegfried Mandel (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 88. See Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, ed. Günther Neske and Emil Kettering (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 90. For a detailed consideration of this claim, see Michael Haar, “Nietzsche and the Metamorphosis of the Divine,” in Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology, ed. Philip Blond (London: Routledge, 1998), 157-158. 72 For further discussion of the relationship between Heine’s and Nietzsche’s views of the “death of God,” see E. Biser, “Nietzsche und Heine: Kritik des christlichen Gottesbegriffs,” in Nietzsche as Affirmative Thinker: Papers Presented at the Fifth Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter, April 1983, ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 204-218. In this context, Nietzsche’s tremendous respect for Heine is worth noting: “The highest conception of the lyric poet was given me by Heinrich Heine. I seek in vain in all the realms of millennia for an equally sweet and passionate music . . . I assess the value of people, of races according to how necessarily they are unable to separate the god from the satyr. And how he employs German! It will one day be said that Heine and I have been by far the first artists of the German language” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, trans. R. H. Hollingdale [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979], 58). 73 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 199 (emphasis in the original). 71

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For Nietzsche, the death of God is not merely another metaphysical fact; above all, it is an existential fact touching on human values and human culture.74 Further on in the passage cited, Nietzsche describes the existential implications of this fact—the human horizon opens up: “at hearing the news that ‘the old god is dead,’ we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel illuminated by a new dawn . . . finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright.”75 In this passage, Nietzsche describes the implications of the death of God for the individual’s mood. The section is entitled “how to understand our cheerfulness,” and further on he speaks of feelings of gratitude, amazement, foreboding, and expectation among “free spirits.” This text is seemingly an ode to the death of God, which is based on the perception that God’s death liberated humans. The quintessential manifestation of this liberation is the ability to inquire, to dare, without being subject to the authority of a religion or a faith that will imprison the human spirit; humans are now sovereign. But where too much cheerfulness prevails, we must again ask—is it not covering up sadness and dread? Heidegger directed attention to the importance of the “mood” (Befindlichkeit)76 in the disclosure of being.77 And with deep insight he remarks: “a mode of elation can alleviate the manifest burden of Being.”78 Joy and exaggerated cheerfulness are at times a mask for the completely opposite feeling. This analysis is not merely speculative, since Nietzsche himself describes elsewhere in The Gay Science the event of the death of God as a horrid experience, an act of murder: Haven’t you heard of that madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly: “I’m looking for God! I’m looking for God!” . . . “Where is God?” he cried; “I’ll tell you! We have killed him—you and I. We are all his murderers .  .  . Where are we moving to? . . . Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? Isn’t night and more night coming again and again? . . . “How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to

74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76

On the difficulty of translating the German term, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 172, note 2 of the translators. 77 Ibid., 172-174. 78 Ibid., 173.

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death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? . . . Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it?” . . . It is still recounted how on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there started singing his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What then are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?”79

This widely discussed exceptional passage is still stirring. Who is the madman? Is he a prophet, like Zarathustra? Is he a projection of man ­himself, the disclosure of the “other self ” who undermines the foundations of human existence? The text leaves unanswered the question of whether the madman is the “other,” or perhaps a personification of a specific personality feature, an unassimilated component of our being that we project onto another, seeking to be cleansed from a horrid, pervading thought. The shadow of this question hovers over the entire passage. This text is not a report about an external event; its writer is not a spectator, unconnected to the object he is contemplating. The personal tone of the writing is considerably different from that of Heine’s writing, and its pathos intensifies the sense of crisis, the deep personal trauma of a religious personality that has despaired of religion.80 Indeed, the madman opens with a desperate statement: “I seek God!” Only one who indefatigably seeks God and fails to find him can angrily proclaim that God is nowhere to be found because humans have killed him. An echo of this view resonates in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “He who loved and possessed him most, he has now lost him the most also.”81 The “old pope,” Zarathustra’s interlocutor, gradually comes to understand his statements and reaches a conclusion: “O Zarathustra, you are more pious than you believe, with such an unbelief! . . . Is it not your piety itself that no longer allows you to believe in a god?”82 God’s murderer, then, yearns for God. Heidegger, as noted, consistently pointed to the passion of Nietzsche’s search for God and he directs 79 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 119-120 (emphasis in the original). 80

See also Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, What Nietzsche Really Said (New York: Schocken Books, 2000), 85. For further discussion, see also Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), ch. 3. 81 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), 272. 82 Ibid., 274.

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attention to the madman’s opening sentence: “I seek God!” This madman, claims Heidegger, has nothing in common with the men “who do not believe in God.” They, argues Heidegger, are not unbelievers because for them God, as God, has become unworthy of belief, but because they themselves have abandoned the possibility of faith since they are no longer able to seek God. They can seek no longer because then can no longer think . . . [They] have abolished thinking and replaced it with gossip . . . The madman, in contrast, is seeking God by crying out after God.83

The madman, holds Heidegger, is one who yearns for the entity’s being. He is uncomfortable with the self-deception that explains everything. He experiences the terror of existence, which deconstructs all that had long ago been clear and intelligible. And it is precisely this terror that is the beginning of thought. Heidegger concludes his essay on Nietzsche with a question: does the madman’s cry still resonate?84 Consider the sentence proclaiming: “We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers.” If Nietzsche is indeed engaged in the battle against the Christian God, he is now in conflict with Christian theology, which had ascribed the murder of God to the Jews. From Nietzsche’s perspective, the Jews were not God’s murderers, since God has only been murdered now. And God has been murdered, and should be murdered, by any person who rejects transcendence as the metaphysical pivot of reality as a whole, including human existence. The murder of God is no longer a religious matter but a basic existential matter, it is the bold proclamation of the centrality of immanence. Now, with the death of God, humans can shape their lives and realize their freedom. The death of God is simultaneously the death of the traditional person, bound by commands, guilt, and culture; the death of God liberates us from God and from ourselves.85 People whose God is dead have no other support but their will. Such individuals resemble “a tightrope walker,”86 prevented from falling into the abyss below him only by his willpower.87 Nietzsche’s ceaseless passion is the removal of 83

Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead,’” in Martin Heidegger: Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 199. 84 Ibid. 85 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 40. 86 Ibid., 41. 87 See also Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought, trans. David Green (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 319.

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metaphysical-transcendent “shadows” from life in order to enable self-creation. He is aware that the religious temptation of faith in God is relentless; the divine shadow pursues us, and he therefore writes: “When will all these shadows of god no longer darken us? When will we have completely de-deified nature? When may we begin to naturalize humanity with a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?”88 God’s shadows assume various forms: faith in a rational world, in an orderly cosmos, in the regularity prevailing in the universe, is also an expression of the divine shadows that pursue us. The person caught between these shadows seeks redemption and liberation, and can no longer remain a passive observer—he must murder God.89 Heidegger rightfully noted that the “death of God” is not only the death of the Christian God, so this statement is not only anti-theological. The death of God denotes the death of a truth resting on a supra-sensory, metaphysical reality. The term “God” is a symbol of all the ideals beyond day-to-day existence.90 Furthermore, even if God in the sense of the Christian God has vanished from his place in the supersensory world, still the place itself is preserved, although it has become empty . . . The empty place even invites its own re-occupation and calls for the God who disappeared from it to be replaced by another.91

Among the options for a new God, Heidegger mentions such ideas as socialism, universal happiness, and so forth. The Nietzschean God thus symbolizes not only metaphysical ideas but any dogmatic organization of the world that denies humans their freedom. Heine, following Hegel, reports the event of the death of God quite distantly, as an objective occurrence: God is dying. This is not the report of an action by one or more individuals. Rather, it is the way of biographies to cover whatever takes place between birth and death. The sacraments administered to the dying God, which Heine describes, are merely a response to the objective event. This was not Nietzsche’s view; the “requiem aeternam deo“ is the height of a process wherein the individual—every individual who performs this move—is the active figure—God’s murderer. The equation that Nietzsche presents is: God or an individual that yearns to be God; this yearning leads to “the murder of God.” 88 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 110. 89

See also Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1996), 135-136 [Heb]. Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word,” 164-165. 91 Ibid., 168. 90

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But this murder, like any other, and certainly the murder of a father figure, creates a trauma that humans find hard to heal. The trauma is a bleeding wound precisely because humans cannot ignore the religious experience: religiosity, according to Nietzsche, is merely the other side of the human distress within the infinite. God’s “murderer” experiences a cold world, a hopeless night. Horrible anxiety floods the murderer’s heart, reflecting awareness of life in a world where God is no longer.92 Camus described the Nietzschean world after the death of God as cruel and dangerous, even if full of might and power. It leaves humans alone to dare: Because his mind was free, Nietzsche knew that freedom of the mind is not a comfort, but an achievement that one aspires to and obtains, at long last, after an exhausting struggle. He knew that there is a great risk in wanting to consider oneself above the law, of finding oneself beneath that law . . . It can be said that Nietzsche rushes, with a kind of frightful joy, towards the impasse into which he methodically drives his nihilism. His avowed aim is to render the situation untenable to his contemporaries . . . The death of God accomplishes nothing and can only be lived through in terms of preparing a resurrection . . . He knew in fact that creation is only possible in the extremity of solitude and that man would only commit himself to this staggering task if, in the most extreme distress of mind, he must undertake it or perish.93

The death of God is indeed a trauma, but necessary for shaping a creative life. But precisely because this is a trauma and a bleeding wound, it points to the power of metaphysical passion. The death of God does not destroy this passion—the individual struggles with it and against it in order to turn it into a constitutive foundation of a life striving to be divine. Jacques Lacan writes: But if for us God is dead, it is because he always has been dead, and that’s what Freud says. He has never been the father except in the mythology of the son, or, in other words, in that of the commandment which commands that he, the father, be loved, and in the drama of the passion which reveals that there is a resurrection after death.94 92

Haar, “Nietzsche and the Metamorphosis,” 158. For a unique literary expression of this experience see Bruno Schulz, “The Age of Genius,” in The Street of Crocodiles: The Fictions of Bruno Schulz, trans. Celina Wieniewska (London: Pan Books, 1988), 103-104. 93 Camus, The Rebel, 62-63. 94 Jacques Lacan, “The Death of God,” in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed. Graham Ward (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 43.

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This is a flawed interpretation, which does not take into account the significant difference between the “death of God” statement and the claim that God does not exist. Only someone who was alive can die, and the mention of God’s death is the dialectical proclamation that he had been alive in the past and is possibly alive even in the present, wherein he is negated. Someone dead is someone for whom others yearn, since he had been, not a dead body no one wants. His death embodies the constant reference to his presence. The conclusion warranted by this analysis is that Nietzsche’s determination about the “death of God” is not identical to the atheist determination that the linguistic statement “God” does not signify any entity existing in reality. Jean-Luc Marion and Carl G. Jung categorically formulated these insights. Marion writes: “There is nothing more foreign to the ‘death of God’ than common atheism.”95 Long before Marion, Jung states: “Nietzsche was no atheist, but his God was dead.”96 Indeed, Nietzsche is not at all interested in the traditional arguments about the existence of God.97 He is not concerned with the question of whether the term “God” denotes an entity that does or does not exist. The innovation in the death of God thesis is the claim about the departure of God from the realms of human existence; even if God does exist as a metaphysical entity, he has become irrelevant to human life. Paul Roubiczek, who offers a cautious analysis of Nietzsche’s position, points out that atheists never make their determinations by ­stating “God is dead”: The atheist would simply say that there is no God, that belief in him is a nonsensical superstition and has no foundation whatever; but the phrase “God is dead” refers to the loss of faith. Nietzsche recognizes that Christianity has lost its hold over the majority of the Europeans . . . and that is the most significant event in the nineteenth century.98

The experience of the loss of faith can leave the metaphysical determination about the existence of God in place: atheists do not believe that God 95

Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 32. See also Haar, “Nietzsche and the Metamorphosis,”158. 96 Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), 108. 97 See also E. E. Sleinis, Nietzsche’s Revaluation of Values: A Study in Strategies (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 93-94. For other analyses of Nietzsche’s view, see, for example, Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 119-129. 98 Paul Roubiczek, Existentialism For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 39.

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exists, whereas one who experiences the death of God does not believe in God, no longer trusts him even if he does exist, and God loses his place in human life. Human beings become sovereign, replacing God: “Better no god, better to produce destiny on one’s own account . . . better to be God oneself!”99 The shift from Hegel and Heine’s report to Nietzsche’s existentialist stance is clear: for Nietzsche, the death of God is a challenge, a permanent occurrence. Contrary to Hegel and Heine, who make a post-mortem report, for Nietzsche the death of God is a constant challenge to religion but also to a sated and self-assured secularism. For Hegel, the death of God implies the absolute triumph of immanence, whereas for Nietzsche, the death of God means a constant struggle with the transcendent shadows recurrently appearing in our lives. The death of God is not a proclamation about a new cultural era but a critical moment in human life, in the life of anyone who confronts the challenge.100 Somewhat paradoxically, the death of God thesis has religious manifestations as well. In the first, of which Kierkegaard is the classic representative, the death of God means that the center of gravity in religious life shifts from the world to the individual, from the objective to the subjective. Kierkegaard, who preceded Nietzsche, sensed the meaning of the death of God thesis and held that, from a religious perspective, the “death of God” means that the responsibility for God’s presence in the world shifts from God to humans. Human beings will determine whether God is alive or dead in their world: Immanently (in the imaginative medium of abstraction) God does not exist or is not present—only for the existing person is God present, i.e., he can be present in faith . . . If an existing person does not have faith then [for him] God neither is nor is God present, although understood eternally God nevertheless eternally is.101  99 Nietzsche,

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 274. This formulation, somewhat more moderately, recurs in Schulz’s story “Tailor’s Dummies”: “We have lived for too long under the terror of the matchless perfection of the Demiurge. . . . For too long the perfection of his creation has paralysed our own creative instinct. We don’t wish to compete with him. . . . We wish to be creators in our own, lower sphere . . . we want—in one word—Demiurgy.” See Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, 40. 100 Cf. Daniel Conway, Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game: Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 83-84. 101 For this passage in Kierkegaard’s journal and for a discussion of it, see Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 143. Cf. also Samuel Hugo Bergman, On the Path (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1976), 183-190 [Heb].

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The thesis of the death of God, then, is not the concern of atheists or apostates; it is deeper in that it reverses the hierarchical order—human beings become sovereign under God.102 This Kierkegaardian move is the typical reaction of a Protestant who does not see the world as the realm where humans meet God. This, however, is precisely the point targeted for critique by two thinkers who were influenced by Kierkegaard—Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel. From Buber’s perspective, the shift to subjectivity is the classic expression of religiosity’s loss of meaning. True religiosity is the relationship with concrete reality rather than an inner spiritual connection. The shift to the inner realm and the intensification of subjectivity imply a renunciation of dialogue and a declaration that what had been considered a dialogue between man and God is merely a monologue, “a conversation between various strata of the self. Thereupon, as a representative of this school in our time has done, it becomes necessary to proclaim that God is ‘dead.’ Actually, this proclamation means only that man has become incapable of apprehending a reality absolutely independent of himself.”103 Buber emphasizes that, even if this move is far from the one that Hegel had endorsed, both share a common element and, moreover, this move actually relies on the Hegelian stance, since “the radical abstraction, with which philosophizing begins for Hegel, ignores the existential reality of the I and of the Thou.”104 Epistemology and ontology now split into two trends. In one, knowledge is founded on the subject, enhancing the subject’s sovereignty and negating the possibility of an ontological experience that does not rest on the subject’s knowledge. The antithetical trend, which emphasizes responsiveness to the being, takes as its starting point the acknowledgement of an “essential mystery” that the subject’s knowledge is unable to decode. The subject experiences the being and grasps the traces of this experience, but does not seek to constitute it by means of knowledge.105 If the starting point of the former trend based the ontology on the epistemology, the latter one based the epistemology on the ontology. This trend seeks to detect another epistemic mechanism, which will enable the encounter with the cosmos. Heschel points to wonder, as opposed to reflective knowledge, as the unique epistemic mechanism. Wonder “is not the beginning of knowledge 102

See also Avi Sagi, Tradition vs. Traditionalism: Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2008), 111-113. 103 Buber, Eclipse of God, 13-14. 104 Ibid., 19. 105 Ibid., 36.

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but an act that goes beyond knowledge.”106 The connection to reality turns the “death of God” into a question about the relationship between humans and God. According to Heschel, the “death of God” is no longer a manifestation of God as deus absconditus, but a manifestation of God as an entity that hides itself. Now, in the modern reality we inhabit, which is morally horrendous and no longer distinguishes good from evil, “God is in exile.”107 Thus, the “death of God” is a testimony not to God’s strength but to God relinquishing a world that betrayed his values. Heschel’s approach is more radical than Buber’s. According to Buber, God is a presence in reality, but individuals will not experience it as long as they remain buried in their subjective sovereignty. By contrast, Heschel, who draws on Jewish kabbalistic tradition, views the death of God as an ontological event: God hides himself. Be it as it may, Buber and Heschel reverse the Nietzschean statement: “God died” is merely a report about human reality—we experience the death of God, but this determination cannot provide any information about God’s existence. Buber and Heschel agree with Kierkegaard that the death of God is a human experience. They disagree with him on the question of the realm wherein God returns to be a “living” God. Kierkegaard suggests a shift from the objective-external to the inner realm, from the established religious system to reflective experience. By contrast, Buber offers another human experience—openness to concrete reality—and Heschel suggests amending human ways so that God might return from his exile, which is perceived as his death. From a religious perspective, Marion interprets Nietzsche differently, and claims that the “death of God” is the death of the idol signified by the term “God.” Marion drew a clear distinction between the one who is signified by the term “God” and God as such. The former is merely an idol, and at times also an idol of God. “God” as opposed to God is an object in the world that is interpreted in human terms. God, by contrast, is not an object and is not perceived in human terms. God is an entirely transcendent entity. Henceforth, the “death of God” is interpreted as the death of an idol, as a deep expression of religiosity that cannot accept the fact that God is interpreted in worldly concepts and categories.108 Rather, “the death of 106

Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1955), 46, and 43-72. See also idem, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1976), 11-18. 107 Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 153 (emphasis in original). 108 Marion, The Idol and Distance, 27-78. See also idem, God Without Being, trans. Thomas Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 29-30, and chs. 4 and 5 below.

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the idols frees up a space, an empty space,” which allows expectations of a new and different presence of the distant divine.109 Marion’s approach is highly compatible with outlooks endorsed by Christian believers, who are aware of the large gap between the transcendent God and his presence in the world as a flesh and blood creature in the form of Jesus. Michel de Certeau suggests a specific Christian stance, arguing that the essence of Christian faith is a divine presence that is alienated from God’s true being, “because in himself God remains always other than what he permits.”110 From a religious perspective, the death of Jesus is now the death of an “idol” that might have blocked our gaze when turned to God. The death of God, like the death of Jesus, is therefore the death of an object in the world, which enables the growth of new religious opportunities to experience the divine presence.111 These trends actually continue Karl Barth’s approach, who holds that the death of God means, above all, the death of the prevalent theological conception. The death of God is merely a recognition that God is unknowable; faith in God is therefore impossible and is, fundamentally, divine grace.112 Since the Nietzschean call that God is dead began to resonate, some religious thinkers endorsed Nietzsche’s view and made the thesis about the death of God part of their religious world.113 Furthermore, the death of God idea gave new impetus to the renovation of contemporary religious life. A radical expression of this thesis 109 Marion, The Idol and Distance, 36. For a similar interpretation, see also Haar, “Nietzsche and the Metamorphosis,”

110 111 112

113

157-159. The similarity between Marion’s and Tillich’s views is worth noting. According to Tillich, the transcendent God is “the God above God,” that is, the God that is beyond all the standard manifestations of religion. This is a God that ”is neither object nor subject and is therefore above the scheme into which theism has forced him.” This God is “above the God of theism.” See Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 186-187. Many thinkers saw Tillich’s philosophy as the basis of the death of God theology, which I discuss below. Richard Rubenstein sees a clear continuity between the Nietzschean death of God and the death of God in radical theology. “Every one of today’s radical theologians was either Tillich’s student or was profoundly influenced by his writing.” Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 243. Tillich’s position is obviously different, and closer to Marion’s. One cannot ignore, however, that radical theologians who adopted the thesis of the death of God understood that God’s absolute transcendence ultimately means the absolute dismissal of God. The Nietzschean death of God is thus interpreted in two contradictory ways: one preserves God’s existence and centrality in human life, and the other rejects it entirely. Michael de Certeau, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today,” in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed. Graham Ward (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 145. Ibid., 147. See Giles Fraser, Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (New York: Routledge, 2002), 8-9. On this issue, see the extensive discussion in Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), particularly 164-200. See also Fraser, Redeeming Nietzsche, 3-23.

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appears in the work of the American theologian Thomas Altizer, who vigorously argued: A theology that chooses to meet our time, a theology that accepts the destiny of history, must first assess the theological significance of the death of God. We must realize that the death of God is an historical event, that God has died in our cosmos, in our history, in our Existenz.114

In his view, the divine incarnation is an irreversible event wherein God deviates from his transcendence and becomes fully immanent.115 Altizer is at the center of a movement called “radical theology,” which has varied expressions. His views and those of the movement are rather complex and seem to be based on two contradictory trends: on the one hand, radical theology affirms Christianity and argues “that Christianity is alive in the modern world. The radicals are Christians, and they assume that they belong to a Christian community.”116 Altizer does not endorse the view that we live in a post-Christian era. Christianity is relevant now too. On the other hand, radicals relate seriously to the claim that God has died. They hold that at some previous time God was alive and now he is dead, and that “there was a time when it was authentic to believe in, worship and trust in God, but that this time has passed.”117 William Nicholls stresses that this atheism is not synonymous with secularity, given that the Christian atheist does not “rule out the possibility of the recovery of a sense of the presence of God, but he is sure that it will not be in any form recognizably in continuity with the Christian past.”118 This is indeed a radical view attempting to have it both ways: deny God and continue belonging to the community of the faithful. Even without endorsing Altizer’s radical positions, one could claim that a religious position or a theology founded on a shift from God to the subject and claiming that the anchor of faith in God is the believing individual rather than God’s revelation and presence, adopts some version of the death of God. In these approaches, the active entity is the individual, on whom God’s fate in the world depends. This reversal of roles in modern 114 115 116 117 118

Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 11. Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), 103. William Nicholls, Systematic and Philosophical Theology (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969) 337. Ibid., 336 Ibid., 337

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religious philosophy is a reaction to the death of the Nietzschean God. If for Nietzsche and his followers the death of God is the death of faith, from a religious point of view the death of God transforms the religious world: humans are indeed the active entity, but precisely through this action they turn to God and make room for God in their world.119 And yet, the death of God is usually the end of faith in God: one who experiences the death of God, contrary to the atheist or the theist, goes through a double experience of presence and negation. One who had proof of God’s existence in the world remembers the era of faith when God had been relevant to human life. This occurrence intensifies the experience of negation—God’s departure from the living world. One who lives through the death of God experiences loss and disappointment, which the Nietzschean “death of God” successfully sums up. Nietzsche formulated this duality in the above cited statement: “He who loved and possessed him most, he has now lost him the most also.” The death of God is a complex story, lacking set and stable contours. Voices of victory sneak into the rebellion and the protest. Beside the rebellion against God, which reflects a disappointed religiosity, we see a flourishing process of minimized divine transcendence that began with Hegel, with Feuerbach and Karl Marx featuring prominently beside him. Each in his own way made God redundant, pointed to the reasons for inventing God, and called on humans to assume their proper place as their own creators. Feuerbach held that, ultimately, God is merely a human projection: “the nature of faith, the nature of God, is itself nothing else than the nature of man placed out of man, conceived as external to man.”120 This discovery is supposed to release humans from transcendence and irrationality and lead them to immanence and rationality. Marx warned against the seductive power of religion. His negative attitude toward religion, and hence toward God, is evident in his statement: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed the self-consciousness and self-awareness of man who either has not yet attained himself or has already lost himself again . . . It [religion] is the imaginary realization of the human essence, because the human essence possesses no true reality.121 119

Kierkegaard offers an interesting formulation of this position. See Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence, 137-147.

121

Karl Marx, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLelellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 63.

120 Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 338-339.

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Since he was a humanist who saw immanence in general and the economic-social conditions of life in particular as the be-all and end-all of human existence, Marx could ascribe no positive value to religion. God is also doomed to disappear as soon as humans understand that he is merely a projection of themselves. Like Feuerbach, Marx declares: “man has found in the imaginary reality of heaven where he looked for a superman only the reflection of his own self.” This discovery releases us from religious temptation and we can now turn to the human immanent realm of action. The critique of religion is therefore the maturing of consciousness, directing it to its proper realm of action: “He will therefore no longer be inclined to find only the appearance of himself, the non-man, where he seeks and must seek his true reality.” Given this discovery, Marx states that religion is a worthless remnant conveying the oppression of those who fail to act. In a poetic tone, he states: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the people.”122 Religion and God thereby lose their meaning and are revealed as an obstacle in the individual’s path to realization. They defeat human suffering and turn it into the core of religion: “Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.”123 As a conscious gesture, suffering is a confrontation with reality and sorrow for it, but as a religious expression, this suffering perpetuates reality instead of contending with it. Humans must shake off religion and God and shape reality with their own powers. All these iconoclasts, who expose the fraud, share the understanding that “God was nothing but a hemorrhage of the soul, and this soul urgently needed a tourniquet.”124 Is the “death of God” at all a Jewish phenomenon? In what sense can we speak about the “death of God” in the context of Jewish culture? Richard Rubenstein, an ordained rabbi and a celebrated thinker famous for his “death of God” theology, pointed to the fundamental difficulty that Jews face in attempting to identify with this phenomenon. Rubenstein writes, according to the analysis in this chapter: “Technically death-of-God ­theology reflects the Christian tradition of the passion of the Christ. As such, the terminology of the movement [of radical theology] creates some very obvious problems for Jewish theologians.”125 Nevertheless, Rubenstein 122

Ibid., 64. Ibid. On the connections of Marx and Nietzsche to Feuerbach, see Nancy S. Love, Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 124 Bernard Henry Lévy, The Testament of God, trans. George Holoch (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 89. 125 Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 151. 123

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identifies with this approach, but not because it reflects something about God, since, given our epistemic limitations, “no man can really say that God is dead. How can we know that?”126 The death of God is not an ontological claim about the divine being: “This is more a statement about man and his culture than about God.”127 Among the main reasons that Rubenstein adduces for this fact is Auschwitz. In a harsh statement, Rubenstein argues: “After Auschwitz, many Jews did not need Nietzsche to tell them that the old God of Jewish patriarchal monotheism was dead beyond all hope of resurrection.”128 The death of God, however, is not the death of Jewish culture and Jewish tradition. Rubenstein is extremely critical of Altizer’s radical theology, precisely because it renounces tradition and is entirely future-­ oriented.129 No one lives only in the future. We are thrown into our Jewish existence. Rubenstein, as an existentialist who draws on the legacy of thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre, reiterates that the death of God is precisely the moment that enables us to see clearly the importance of tradition in the creation of Jewish self-identity. In an essay full of pathos, entitled “The Meaning of Torah in Contemporary Jewish Theology: An Existentialist Philosophy of Judaism,”130 Rubenstein enlists the entire existentialist network of meaning in order to point to the centrality of Jewish tradition. A Jew is not merely a person, an abstract creation, but someone thrown into Jewish factuality: The situation of the contemporary Jew is absurd, tragic and free. Paradoxically, the recognition of this situation allows us to recapture for the first time in the modern period the entire Torah as our decisive religious text. Jewish religion is inseparable from Jewish identity. In turn, identity is inseparable from the facticity of the Jewish situation.131

Within the death of God theology as well, then, it becomes possible to preserve and renew Jewish religion as the concretization of Jewish identity. I will not enter into a critique of Rubenstein’s position here. For the current discussion, his view is important because it affords a glimpse into a non-dichotomous perception of Jewish tradition. Rubenstein questions 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid. 128

Ibid., 227. Ibid., 243-264. 130 Ibid., 113-130. 131 Ibid., 119. 129

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the believer/non-believer or religious/secular dichotomy by presenting an approach that is simultaneously secular and religious. From a traditional religious perspective, Rubenstein is an apostate who negates the God of Jewish history and accepts a view of divinity resembling those of Marion and Paul Tillich. From the perspective of the study of tradition, however, his approach points to the unique power of tradition (including religious tradition) to survive even after the “death of God.” Will this culture and this tradition also be capable of endowing prayer with meaning? Rubenstein assumes the yoke of Torah and prayer, not because they are commanded by God but because he finds that they provide an answer to his existence. The range of life experiences—sorrow, joy, terror, birth, marriage, and every other element that is significant in the life of a Jewish person— finds expression within Jewish tradition and within the synagogue. With unusual candor, Rubenstein writes about these arguments: This may be a highly subjective rationale for synagogue participation, but such subjectivity need not be solipsistic. I suspect other people find the life and liturgy of the synagogue meaningful for similar reasons. . . . Over the years I have come to question the adequacy of non-traditional liturgy for this purpose. . . . I have found increasingly that the traditional Jewish liturgy, with the fewest possible rationalistic alterations, is the most appropriate vehicle for the expression of both my conscious and my unconscious feelings toward the crises I have enumerated.132

The “death of God” is henceforth a moment through which individuals return to the tradition that embodies their world. In this context, prayer is not an unconscious yearning for God. It is an expression of experiencing existence as Jewish existence. These worshippers are now Jews, descendants of a tradition and a culture they have not created but into which they have been thrown. Prayer is henceforth the endorsement of thrownness: I am a Jew not only because I have been born one but also, and mainly, because I have chosen to express the fullness of my existence in traditional ways. Rubenstein does not sense that tradition fails to fill his being. Quite the contrary. Tradition, including the tradition of prayer, gathers together his entire world and bestows meaning upon it even if the historical God, who is revealed anew, does not respond to those who call upon him.

132

Ibid., 222.

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Rubenstein’s theology thus offers the option of a complex Jewish existence. It is a secular existence since, in Rubenstein’s world, God is already dead. And yet, it preserves distinct religious practices such as prayer. True, these practices assume meaning only because they are part of a tradition. But the question now is: is this the only way of explaining prayer? Does the power of prayer stem only from the fact that it is part of a tradition where Jews who accept this kind of Judaism find meaning in their lives? Does prayer have another, independent meaning? Rubenstein advanced the discussion by pointing to the possibility of prompting a transformation at the very core of tradition. The power of ­tradition in establishing identity is not contingent on the question of God’s existence. But is prayer at all dependent on God’s past existence? Is the meaning of prayer based on the memory of a divine addressee? At this point, I turn from theology and philosophy to literature. Hebrew literature, a highly responsive antenna to the searing lava of Jewish existence, addressed the death of God. The death of God is a relatively new phenomenon in Jewish culture, which did not experience the long historical process of Protestantism and made a swift transition from religious tradition to secularism. With his usual sharpness, Baruch Kurzweil formulates this insight: In world literature, lack of faith in God did not spur the same transformations it triggered in our literature for the simple reason that the existence of Jews depends on religion in ways entirely different from that of all other nations. By the first half of the eighteenth century, life without God was already a fundamental assumption in most of European literature, without this change inspiring too deep an upheaval in the perception of life, suffering, and existence in general. The culture of most European nations was already secular, and they lived on their lands and in their states. . . . The situation is different for the Jewish people and another, special, and more fateful meaning attends the ­process of detachment from religious faith in our literature.133

Kurzweil rejects the possibility of a secular Hebrew literature, but we do not need to agree to the entire course of his argument in order to acknowledge that the trauma of the death of God emerges recurrently in Hebrew literature because the process of “recovery” from the historical trauma has not been as long as in other nations. Traces of the Nietzschean trauma surface 133

Baruch Kurzweil, Between Vision and the Absurd (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1966), 272-273 [Heb].

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repeatedly in this literature, which returns again and again to the “death of God” even now, after the victory of secularism. The return to the wound of God’s death is found not only among such writers as Yosef Haim Brenner, Micha Yosef Berdyczewski, or Hayyim Nahman Bialik, who experienced the actual moment of the death of God, of transition from a religious-traditional society to life in a secular culture. The trauma reappears in Hebrew literature at various levels of intensity ever since. The “death of God” in Hebrew literature expresses the pathos of faith but also the experience of orphanhood. As this book shows, particularly in Chapter Five, the yearning for God emerges at times as a yearning for the renewal of the religious experience, but even then it does not resemble the basic assumptions of radical theology. Without delving too deeply into the distinctions between them, one fundamental difference is that radical theology assumes the possibility of a new discovery of God. By contrast, the yearning in Hebrew literature for a God who is lost or has died is a yearning for the God who has disappeared, one bearing the image of a God who had been present—the past simmers in the emptiness of the present. Rather than a theoretical possibility that enables a new space, this is a kind of tense expectation marked by the past memory of the presence. Thus, Abraham Halfi writes: I looked for you and did not find you ... and empty is the space, - - - (our window is open so we might see how empty the space is).134

Precisely because the yearning is for something that had been, for an intimacy that has collapsed, the “death of God” experience is conveyed here in a deeper, different sense from that of radical theology. Let us consider two contradictory expressions of the death of God experience in Hebrew literature. The first is by Meir Wieseltier, who describes its positive aspect, manifest in the empowerment of humans and the world’s emptying of the divine: “And only man in the entire world/I see man and only man.”135 For Wieseltier, the death of God is synonymous with the recognition of the secular realm of life, where the human being is the sole sovereign: “Empty is the world, only man is in it.” This declaration is antithetical to the traumatic experience in Nietzsche’s version. It could only be written 134

Abraham Halfi, “The Dream of Your Traces,” in Poems, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987), 118-119 [Heb]. See also Zvi Luz, The Poetry of Abraham Halfi (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1994), 19-44 [Heb]. 135 Meir Wieseltier, “Identity,” in Poems 1959-1972 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1984), 152 [Heb].

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after the death of God, after the remnants of faith are no longer. This is a victory poem after the death of God. Yaakov Orland stands at the opposite pole, in an illuminating example of the death of God experience as a paradox of both presence and negation: I know, I’m sure, I’ve proven it to myself a thousand times— you don’t exist, you’re not, you’re nothing, you’re a thread hanging on chaos. What troubles, teases, embarrasses me every time anew is the mystery of the urge to tell you this every day and share with you my personal conclusions.136

At times, the death of God is experienced in the course of a struggle with God. As shown below, this view of Orland is summed up within his perception of prayer. Like Orland, Yehuda Amichai conveys this dual experience in the poem “My First Days in New York”: My first days in New York We talked a lot about the death Of God. We didn’t talk, We were just amazed that others Discovered now what we had discovered In the great desert After bar mitzvah. Not With thunder and lightning, not with a bang But in silence. And how They managed to conceal his death As one would conceal the death Of a great and admired ruler leaving no heirs. ... We are both of an age Where they won’t say orphan anymore Of someone whose God has died.137

The “death of God” experience is not a topic of human discourse. Belief in God had dwindled and faded to the point that the one who lost him no 136

Yaakov Orland, “The Mystery of the Need to Tell You,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1997), 89 [Heb]. See also “You,” in ibid., vol. 2, 201, and “Pass On the Right to My Son,” in ibid., vol. 3, 241. 137 Yehuda Amichai, “My First Days in New York,” in Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry 1948-1994, trans. Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 129.

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longer felt orphaned. From this perspective, the “death of God” represents the gap that opened up between believers and those who stopped believing. But the death of God is not the end. Now that God is dead, another question emerges: how did they conceal his death? This question evokes an emotional response of wonder and sets up a perspective contrary to the first one given that, if God is dead, why talk about him? Concealing the death of God is a declaration about his absent presence, a presence that had been meant to recreate a kind of connection with him. In this poem, however, the experience of God’s presence and absence is translated into internal contemplation, wherein the speaker assumes a new position in reality—he is an orphan who will not be called an orphan. The death of God is thus interpreted as a complex experience, an insoluble reality. Yoram Kaniuk strengthens the death of God experience as one of betrayal, at once expectation and disappointment. On the eve of Yom Kippur, on his arrival at Kibbutz Hulata, he wonders: “The people sanctified him for two thousand years and their life was plagued with sorrow.”138 Kaniuk conveys a feeling that resonates at the depths of Hebrew culture, tying up the death of God with the question of theodicy, particularly following the Holocaust. After the murder of millions, the recurring question has been where is God—does he exist, or are the heavens perhaps empty: Now we’re alone. You understand? Until the Shoah we had a God, after it we no longer do. But belief in him is so strong that we create our own beings as if he were still important to us. And we know that he betrayed. And who does not believe in betrayal after children who had not sinned turned to smoke?139

In this passage, Kaniuk conveys a dialectic experience of God’s death. This experience removes God, but also returns to him and revives him, and this is where it differs from the atheistic stance. Amichai very precisely identified the death of God experience with the sense of orphanhood that, at one stage or another, is part of our personal or cultural biography. The more this experience intensifies and strikes roots in people’s lives, the further they draw away from the death of God event, the greater their distance from the orphanhood experience. They may bear a memory of days when God had been present in their lives, but the sorrow of the death of God experience will probably melt away. They will then fully 138 139

Yoram Kaniuk, “To Touch the Earth,” in Soil and Desire (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1976), 34 [Heb]. “Interview with a Stubborn Man,” in ibid., 51. See also ibid., 122, 125, 126.

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live through the death of God, closing off the possibility of encountering the transcendent. The phenomenology of the death of God experience allows for its distinction from that of God’s absence. The absence of God can be a deep religious experience; believers hope for God, pray to God, and discover that God is not by their side when they walk through the valley of the shadow of death. In the believer’s world, this experience of abandonment emerges as a prayer: “How long will thou forget me O Lord? Forever? How long will thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalms 13:2); “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my loud complaint? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and I have no rest” (Psalms 22: 2-3); “Why dost thou forget us forever, why dost thou so long forsake us?” (Lamentations 5:20). The experience of abandonment, as concretized in a heartbreaking prayer, reaches a climax in Jesus’ turn to God on the cross: “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice Eli, Eli lama sabachtani? That is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?“140 Even when this experience does not turn into a prayer, it may become a religious gesture of faith. Believers yearn for God’s closeness and discover how far they are from him. Indeed, it is as believers that we experience our distance from God as an act of abandonment: the greater our craving for God, the greater our sense of distance from him. St. John of the Cross describes the soul’s tormented voyage when experiencing the gap between the divine light and its own sorrowful plight in the world, to the point “that she nearly swoons away.”141 Now, feeling alienated and believing that whatever used to uphold her has collapsed along with everything else, the soul is convinced that no one has compassion for her. Job pleaded: “Have pity on me. At least you, my friends, have pity on me, because the hand of the Lord has touched me” [Job 19:21].142

140

Matthew, 27:46. See also Mark 15:34. On the question of whether these were Jesus’ words or the writer’s addition, see David Flusser, Jesus (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2001), 21, note 4. Flusser holds that the authors use the verse from Psalms 22:2 cited above. The historical question, however, is not relevant to the current study. Regardless of whether Jesus did utter these words, the religious meaning of the text is clear: the experience of faith is not antithetical to the experience of abandonment—on the contrary, the experience of faith is what enables the sense of abandonment. 141 St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, trans. Mirabai Starr (London: Rider, 2002), 102. 142 Ibid.

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In Likutey Moharan, R. Nahman of Bratslav describes the believer’s religious world in similar terms: And it seems to him [the believer] that God, may He be blessed, does not look at him at all and has no wish for his worship, because although God sees that he shouts and begs and falls on his knees to ask for divine help in his worship, he still remains very far from God.143

The longing for God cannot contain its failure to attain immediate realization because it is in the nature of the Eros to yearn for closeness and unity. But precisely the desire for closeness reveals the unbridgeable distance. The yearning for God cannot be consummated. Hillel Zeitlin profoundly expresses this thirst for God, which is doomed to remain insatiate: “The yearning brings the thirst, and the thirst—the suffering. The essence, the universal and eternal plan of life is—the yearning. The yearning builds and destroys worlds, destroys and builds, and will never know peace.”144 Rivka Miriam conveys this religious experience in the poem “Next to My God.”145 Although the poem expresses a feeling of solitude and abandonment, it does convey a sense of close intimacy with God, an expectation, indeed unrealized, that God the Creator will appear and not leave us in our forlorn loneliness. This feeling grows stronger because of the sense that this is God’s world, since God created it. We all sustain this sense of being creatures—we all “have heard” the moment of our own creation. This world is not empty of God. Faith can also become manifest in a defiance of God and in the option of detachment. Uri Zvi Greenberg movingly expresses this feeling in “At the End of the Ways Stands R. Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev and Demands an Answer from Above.” This poem sharply articulates the problem of theodicy: the Jewish blood spilt in the Holocaust can lead one to the conclusion that God has died or had never existed, but it can also lead believers to call to God or threaten God that they will turn against him. In this poem, R. Levi Yitzhak, the mythical defender of the Jewish people, stands up for them against God, demanding a stop to the bloodshed.146 God should not rely on Jews continuing to believe in him, as they had for generations: And if not . . . We will no longer come in fire and in water, no-no! 143

R. Nahman of Bratslav, Likutey Moharan, Tanina, 27, #45. See also Yosef Weiss, Studies in Bratslav Hasidism, ed. Mendel Piekarz (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1995), 96-99 [Heb]. 144 Hillel Zeitlin, Thought and Poetry, vol. 2 (Warsaw: Tushiah, 1912) [Heb]. 145 Rivka Miriam, “Next to My God,” in Tree Reached to Tree: Poems (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1978), 23 [Heb]. 146 Uri Zvi Greenberg, Collected Works, vol. 6, Sefer Rehovot ha-Nahar: Sefer ha-Iliyot ve-ha-Koah (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1992), 61.

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We will choose our way, as every one of the seventy nations chooses its way. We have not reached the end of days, but we have reached with blood the end of ways.147

And should God not acquiesce to the request, and should the bloodshed continue, R. Levi Yitzhak states, the people will turn away, “leaving behind the shards of their trust in you,/ . . ./ And I will go with the people.”148 But this threat is also a gesture of faith. A demand from God, even a demand that includes a threat of detachment, reiterates the depth of the connection between believers and their God. The religious Eros is shaped precisely by the tension between closeness to and distance from God. The religious distance is thus an element of faith rather than an experience of the death of God, which is not reconstituted by the Eros of closeness and distance. The world has been completely emptied of God’s presence. The death of God is his removal from the world rather than disappointment and yearning for another, more complete God. In the death of God, the experience of absence takes over completely and is not simply a moment or part of a more complex experience. The transcendent entity disappears from the world, ceases to exist within it. This book, as noted, does not deal with the possibility of atheist prayer but with a broad spectrum of prayer without God that also, and mainly, includes the possibility of prayer for one who has experienced the death of God. It focuses on those wounded by prayer, who bear its pain. This concern is also partly relevant to the atheist’s possibility of prayer, but grapples with a more complex question. The former question deals with the possibility of prayer without a divine object—an issue that is also relevant to the atheist—but also with the possibility of mediating between the present— the era of the death of God—and the past—when God was alive. A deep gap splits these two eras, which culminates in the determination of God’s death. Yet, perhaps because of it, the present encompasses the memory of the past prayer. Does this fact enable prayer, or is it entirely irrelevant, given that prayer is impossible in the absence of God?149 Ostensibly, denying God or acknowledging the death of God negates the possibility of prayer. Haim Gouri formulates this insight when he writes: Said the apostates: We did not abandon the true god to seek other gods. 147 Ibid. 148 149

Ibid., 64. Jacques Ellul, Prayer and Modern Man, trans. C. Edward Hopkin (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 90-95.

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Alone we stood, without a set prayer on our lips ... And when we called out in our distress All we heard in response was the echo of our own voices Shattering on the edges.150

After the death of God, we no longer have a “set prayer”; moreover, even if we might pray at times of sorrow, “in our distress,” the prayer will not be answered. Worshippers will hear their voices as an echo, since the prayer has no addressee. The poem recognizes that humans pray when in distress but that lucid awareness makes prayer devoid of meaning. Does the death of God then remove prayer from human life? Did the recognition that prayer has no addressee and that the petitioners’ voices echo back to them lead to any changes in reality? Did human beings, in­ cluding non-believers, cease to pray? No deep scrutiny is necessary to identify the simple fact that humans are praying beings. This is a fact that is not contingent on belief in God and is revealed as primary in human life. Our profound need for prayer is primal, and does not cease even if God is dead. Two poets expressed this basic need for prayer. Anda Amir writes: “In the daytime we go back to mock you,/ God./ But in this dark night of confession,/ Terror and fear of you, the terrible,/ Overcomes us.”151 Amir contrasts day and night—the orderly organized life when we feel safe, as opposed to the dark night, when we experience terror. The daytime mockery will not prevent us from returning to the prayer that recurrently arises within us. In Amir’s poem, God is not yet dead and the petitioner is involved in a closeness-distance relationship. By contrast, Hamutal Bar-Yosef ’s poem suggests envy of one who stands and prays to a non-existent God: I will never be able to touch what you have touched I can only watch you and imagine— the surrender music arouses in me? The blind and unto-death faith in mother’s ready embrace? ... the happy seriousness of the willing slave 150

Haim Gouri, “Rhetorics,” in Collected Poems, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Bialik Institute, 1998), 109 [Heb]. 151 Anda Pinkerfeld-Amir, “In Your Hands, My God,” in Sheaves (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1952), 228 [Heb]. See also idem, “God Is Necessary,” in Nevertheless (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Makir, 1980), 45-46 [Heb].

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to what does not exist which we need above all else.152

Prayer is compared to other significant phenomena in human life—the response to music, the trust in mother, obedience. The poem, formulated as the report of an outside observer, ponders the question of whether these phenomena resemble prayer. Love is closely similar to prayer—the Eros turns to others whereas prayer turns to God. But even this similarity remains doubtful and prayer remains unexplained—it exists, but we cannot fully explain it. And yet, the poem tells us that it is extremely necessary to humans. It expresses a standing of “happy seriousness,” which is entirely unconditioned by a God that “does not exist.” What then is the nature of prayer in the absence of God? Who does it address? The prayer of someone living after the death of God could be viewed as a remnant of a practice that has lost the context wherein it was meaningful. Underlying this interpretation is the assumption that, ultimately, we are all creatures constituted by tradition.153 Given the central function of the religious component in tradition, it is no wonder that religious practices have survived after the death of God. This approach views prayer as an archeological layer that survived after the death of the space within which it had been meaningful. But this approach does not explain prayer, given that many religious practices did not survive the death of God. Religion is full of rituals, and most of them disappeared with God’s departure from the living space. Even if we assume that a specific practice such as prayer originates in religion, its persistent survival still remains unexplained. A psychological explanation is sometimes offered in answer to this problem, touching on the anxiety of life without God. From this perspective, prayer is the moment when anxiety surfaces and breaks into the linguistic realm. This approach would seem to be corroborated by the fact that people pray at times of distress—when the structure of the stable world collapses and we find ourselves without support, when we desperately need help, we turn to God. More than an affirmation of the addressee’s ontological meaning, this turn conveys the existential reality of the petitioner, seeking to hold on to any hint of a promise of order and certainty. 152

Hamutal Bar-Yosef, “Prayer,” in Night, Morning: Selected Poems of Hamutal Bar-Yosef, trans. Rachel Tzvia Back (New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 2008), 79. 153 On this issue, see Sagi, Tradition vs. Traditionalism, 5-14; idem, The Jewish-Israeli Voyage: Culture and Identity (Jerusalem: Shalom Hartman Institute, 2006), 87-121 [Heb].

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This psychological explanation, however, does not fully explain the phenomenon of prayer on several counts. First, people pray not only at times of distress; indeed, many prayers, some of them to be cited below, are recited at times of peace and harmony. If prayer is a response to distress, how are these to be explained? Second, does a reductionist view of prayer, which pretends to explain it through its causes, provide any explanation at all? Is the explanation of prayer a suitable alternative to its understanding, or does the explanation perhaps conceal its meaning?154 Buber, contrary to the psychologistic approach, sought to conclude from the persistence of the “religious need” the existentialist-ontological fact of a human standing vis-à-vis a God. At the center of immanent existence, humans are exposed to the presence of the transcendent.155 Buber refuses to see this presence as merely a projection of subjectivity and the result of a human act. God is not “for me,” he is present in primal ways, unconditioned by humans, who respond or attest to the primal quality of this transcendent presence. Buber therefore seeks to direct attention to the fullness of religious experience, and views psychological or philosophical explanations of it as shallow and reductive. From this perspective, prayer, like the religious experience in general, bears ontological meaning—it attests to the breakthrough of the transcendent into our world. William James presents a similar approach: But the whole array of our instances leads to a conclusion something like this: It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call “something there,” more deep and more general than of the special and particular “senses” by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.156

Buber and James rely on a phenomenology that starts from the datum of experience rather than from the experiencing self. This is also the approach in Heidegger’s phenomenology, where the givenness of the phenomenon is not contingent on the self ’s constitutive processes. This phenomenology seeks to return “to the things themselves,” to acknowledge their primal nature and their transcendent manifestation. This transcendence is “for” the self, since it appears in the self ’s consciousness, but is not conditioned 154

See also William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 8-10. 155 Buber, Eclipse of God, 65-92. 156 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 50 (emphasis in the original).

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by the self. What appears in the self ’s experience is not the fullness of the datum, but only its mode of appearance in the self ’s consciousness. Reality thus appears in the self ’s consciousness without it thereby becoming entirely immanent.157 This approach is opposed to that of Edmund Husserl, who begins with the self. What appears in the realms of subjective action cannot transcend its borders and, therefore, the self does not experience transcendence. It is forever delimited within the borders of subjectivity.158 In Husserl’s formulation: “I can enter no world other than the one that gets its sense and acceptance or status . . . in and from me, myself.”159 Husserl does not confine himself to the epistemological determination that the object is contingent on the subject and raises an ontological claim—what appears in my experience is from me. He thereby negates the possibility of experiencing the transcendent, since transcendence too is absolutely immanent.160 In sum, the difference between these two phenomenologies comes to the fore in the status of the transcendent. According to the phenomenology that begins from the concrete datum, we do experience the transcendent. Prayer itself, however, cannot be the basis for deciding the status of the transcendent. We cannot conclude from the act of prayer the necessity of the transcendent experience, because every phenomenology will suggest a different meaning of the divine addressee: the phenomenology that begins from the experiential datum will explain the appearance of the divine addressee of prayer as the presence of the transcendent in the immanent. By contrast, the phenomenology that begins from the subject will explain the appearance of the addressee as the constitution of immanent transcendence. Decoding the meaning of prayer, then, cannot be contingent on any particular phenomenology, which is ultimately contingent and dependent on a specific judgment. The attempt to explain prayer through psychological categories is also problematic because these categories predicate the meaning of prayer on 157

Concerning this issue, and the difference between Heidegger’s and Husserl’s phenomenology, see Philip Blond, “Emmanuel Levinas: God and Phenomenology,” in Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology, ed. Philip Blond (London: Routledge, 1998), 103-121. 158 See also D. Z. Philips, The Concept of Prayer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 30-41. 159 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 21. See also Herman Philipse, “Transcendental Idealism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 239-322. 160 Paul Ricoeur points to Husserl’s transition from “for me” to “from me”—that is, the transition from epistemology to metaphysics—as one of the prominent and controversial transitions that Husserl makes in, for instance, Cartesian Meditations. See Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans. Edward G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 89, and ibid., note 3.

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its motives. This move does not take into account the fullness of the prayer phenomenon and the experience of connection, which is constitutive of it. The psychological approach founds prayer on the subject without granting any weight either to the subjective or the objective meaning of the prayer experience. It simply points to the causal foundation of prayer—human distress—without decoding the intentional meaning of prayer—its establishment of a connection between humans and God, the entity that prayer addresses. This reductionist view of prayer is tantamount to an attempt to understand a work of art by decoding the needs that moved the artist to create it.161 Abraham Schlonsky did know that the phenomenon of prayer is above all a question, since it cannot be explained merely by decoding the act. He therefore raises a question about the ontological meaning of the object addressed in prayer: I called to you—because you are Or because of the fear of being without you? I heard you speak—because you answered Or because the speaker’s urge is—to hear!162

The opening lines deserve attention: “I called to you.” This is the primary datum no one questions: a call occurred or, in our terms, a prayer. The continuation is an attempt to decipher its meaning. The attempt is interesting because Schlonsky offers both options: on the one hand the ontological stance, whereby the call or the prayer attests to the presence of transcendence, and on the other the psychologistic option, whereby prayer reflects human distress, but this distress has no addressee at all. Moreover, Schlonsky emphasizes the meaning of both options. According to the ontological possibility, prayer is responding to the presence. The ontological foundation—the existence of God—is the basis of the prayer. By contrast, according to the psychological option, the fear of existence without God gives rise to prayer even if it has no addressee, meaning that prayer is a projection of individuals who create God because they fear loneliness. According to the ontological option, God’s response as perceived by the believer is a genuine experience—the encounter with God does take place. According to the psychological one, all that individuals ever hear is the 161

See also Abraham Joshua Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism, ed. Fritz A. Rothschild (New York: Free Press, 1965). 162 Abraham Schlonsky, “I Called You,” in The Complete Collection of Abraham Schlonsky’s Poems in Six Volumes, vol. 5 (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 2002), 158 [Heb].

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echo of their own voice. Throughout the poem, Schlonsky painfully fluctuates between these two options. In another poem, Schlonsky writes: “You are—because I want you./ I am the one who said: Let there be him!”163 The paradox that Schlonsky identifies is clear: after the death of God, God’s existence or presence is contingent on humans. But this conditioning need not imply that God does not exist; rather, the human yearning for God could be an expression of his ontological presence, at least in the person’s being. God is not a projection of the self because the strength of the human turn to God is not coextensive with this psychological role. Yet, God is not free of the self either, and his transcendent existence is entirely contingent on the immanent—on human passion. Prayer after the “death of God” thus leads to a paradox and an insoluble question. We experience a testimony that we are required to interpret and cannot offer anything beyond the question itself. According to the two Schlonsky poems that I considered, prayer is a liminal phenomenon between the psychological and the ontological, and is doomed to be so. In this approach, prayer has an addressee. Like every intentional act, it is directed to a given object—God. But the ontological meaning of the addressee remains open: is God only a “for me” entity, which acquires meaning from me? Are humans the source of God being, his creators? Or is God perhaps a being “for himself ” to whose existence we only respond? Is this the only meaning of prayer after the death of God? Will the meaning of prayer after the death of God be contingent on the meaning and ontological standing of the divine addressee as well? The problem of prayer after the death of God intensifies the problematic that Nietzsche had pointed to: the death of God is not a fact, but an ongoing event, oppressive and bleeding. Is prayer after the death of God an attempt to return to what has already been lost? Elie Munk notes in his preface: Modern man has lost the capacity to pray. Rare, indeed, are the individuals who can free their souls from the paralysing apathy of our days, from the heavy burden of our daily sorrow, from the disastrous spell of Rationalism and materialistic thought, to pray with deep devotion for the realisation of the ultimate purpose in life. . . . Yet despite this the modern world, more than in any preceding epoch feels the necessity to learn anew how to pray.164

163 164

Schlonsky, “Last Verse,” in ibid., 239. Elie Munk, The World of Prayer: Commentary and Translation of the Daily Prayers (New York: Philipp Feldheim, 1953), 1.

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Hebrew literature challenges Munk’s pronouncements concerning the lack of talent for prayer among modern individuals, or even the lack of prayer. As the following chapters will show, poets and writers pray. If literature is testimony, this points to a fundamental phenomenon in Jewish-Hebrew existence. Munk assumes, like many believers, that prayer belongs to believers and therefore sees the loss of faith as the reason for the loss of the ability to pray. So far, Munk’s words are merely a confession about his inner world, which, most probably, is that of many believers: they see prayer as an expression of a religious world that has God at its center. But even Munk could not but sense that “the modern world” needs prayer. As believers do, he sees prayer as a testimony to the quest for God. If believers pray because they believe in God, non-believers pray as an expression of the quest for God. Munk proceeds to enumerate the reasons for returning to prayer: not only the collapse of western culture after the Holocaust, but also, mainly, the ”paralysing apathy” of people who have lost their way. At the moment of existential crisis, people pray and, in Munk’s view, that is when they turn to God. These usual views of prayer are prevalent among believers, for whom the phenomenon of prayer is already clear and set. The study of Hebrew literature, however, problematizes prayer anew. According to Rubenstein, as noted, prayer is not contingent on the existence of God. Even after the death of God, prayer is a meaningful component of Jewish identity. As shown in Chapter Three, prayer is a primal phenomenon in Hebrew literature, unconditioned by God’s existence. The question, then, which Schlonsky indeed poses, concerns its origin. The present book analyzes the phenomenon of prayer without making the somewhat naïve assumptions of believers. Against Munk’s claims, it is worth returning to one of this chapter’s heroes—Dostoyevsky’s Kirilov. This “murderer of God” does not refrain from prayer and prayer rituals. He lights the lamp before the icon and prays, explaining: “I pray to everything. You see the spider crawling on the wall, I look at it and thank it for crawling.”165 Kirilov’s prayer has an addressee—the cosmos. The prayer is gratitude and an affirmation of existence as it is. Rather than constituted by the precedence of the addressee—God—this is a pre-objective prayer. Moreover, it does not seek an addressee but expresses the fullness of the soul in the face of existence. Is this prayer only a quest for God? The attempt 165 Dostoyevsky, The Possessed, 202.

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to decode prayer in this fashion is merely an attempt to control the other through a “look” taken from the world of an inattentive spectator. Kirilov prays, and his prayer is genuine. Only the unquestioned endorsement of this datum can lead one to discover the meaning of this prayer, which has no divine addressee. This book is founded on the precedence of prayer and deals with the problem of its meaning as it comes to the fore in Hebrew literature, which endorsed the notion of the death of God. Only the notion of the death of God enables the transparent recognition of prayer as a primary phenomenon independent of a divine object, given that, for believers, the precedence of prayer is an irrelevant question— even if prayer takes priority, it does not supersede God, who is the prayer’s addressee. The death of God turned prayer into a problem: is prayer unconditioned by God? Is prayer a yearning for a God that has been lost? Or does prayer perhaps restore God’s moment of death? Setting up the problem in these terms allows clarification of a further issue: identifying the texts in Hebrew literature dealing with prayer as texts written from the perspective of the death of God is not always easy. On the surface, these texts could be interpreted from a purely atheistic perspective. But the intensity of the pain, tension, and feelings that break through in the literary discourse on prayer suggest that we are dealing with people “wounded by prayer,” who experience the crisis of the death of God and attest to it. Henceforth, prayer becomes a problem. Be it as it may, the death of God clearly turns prayer from a datum into a problem that can hardly be avoided. Prayer exists, people pray; how do we explain this? The sojourn through Hebrew literature is thus a sojourn through the various meanings ascribed to prayer, which represent attempts to grant meaning to the death of God in concrete life. I open the discussion about the meaning of prayer with an explication of its primacy. This theme, like all the themes raised in the book, will be clarified by following closely in the steps of the textual datum. Indications of the precedence of prayer are widely available in Hebrew literature, and the discussion of this issue will be at the focus of Chapter Three.

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Prayer as a Primary Datum

The death of God could lead to the death of prayer. Indeed, if we assume that prayer is necessarily conditioned by the existence of a divine addressee to whom it turns, who will prayer address in God’s absence? Prayer, according to this view, has no primary, unconditioned status. Its meaning, rather than being autonomous, derives from a previous system, theological or metaphysical, in which God plays a central role. This approach thus presumes an absolutely dichotomy—on the one hand, a religious world where prayer is central, and on the other, an entirely secular world where prayer might be viewed as a disturbance or an inexplicable defiance. A distinct combination of this perception of prayer as disturbing and metaphysical-theological assumptions appears in A. B. Yehoshua’s story “The Last Commander.” The story is structured as a contrast between two sets of seven days. The first set of seven days is juxtaposed to the seven days of creation. In the biblical myth, however, the seven days of creation convey a process of increasing order and meaning, from initial chaos to a perfect order culminating in the sixth day. On that day, God attests: “And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). By contrast, in the first seven days of the story, we witness a process of increasing disintegration and loss of meaning, of futile purposeless movement that leads the soldiers and their commander to sink into sleep: “The utter chaos confused everything.”1 A collapsing, pointless, and meaningless world has no room for prayer and, therefore, “people who used to pray have stopped praying.”2 Prayer, supposes the narrator, assumes its meaning in a context of expected amendment and on the premise that the world has a divine creator that sets it right. A world that does not fit this pattern does not allow for prayer. No one needs to tell people not to pray. In a world where “our human image faded,”3 prayer stops without instructions to that 1

A. B. Yehoshua, “The Last Commander,” in The Continuing Silence of a Poet: The Collected Stories of A. B. Yehoshua (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 240. 2 Ibid., 242. 3 Ibid.

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effect. The linguistic statement is thus descriptive: “people who used to pray have stopped praying.” No command is required, since prayer collapses and dissolves as the metaphysical order falls apart. The days of creation leading to chaos and disintegration are contrasted with another set of seven days, days when the commander appears in a h ­ elicopter from the sky as a kind of divine figure. The biblical text is the metaphysics for understanding this commander’s action, and he does indeed cite it at length in his daily orders.4 He creates and represents an order that is set against the chaos that takes over existence. According to the narrator, however, this is a violent order that engenders terror: “Seven days he was with us, and each day was branded with a hot iron. He tried to impose order, and what he brought was terror.”5 As Heidegger claims, terror isolates us, throws us unto ourselves and deprives us of the assurances and guarantees of an ordered world.6 The experience of terror teaches us that “the world has no meaning.”7 A world without a “commander” will go to pieces, but there is something cozy in this collapse. It is not threatening, it enables sleep and ease, and it is precisely in a world where order and an organizer appear that terror is revealed. Arbitrariness and violent sovereignty lead to a deep experience of loss and disintegration, where humans not only crumble and go to pieces but also become aware of this action’s violence.8 At the height of these events, on 4

Ibid., 245. Ibid., 251-252. 6 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 232-233, 308. 7 Ibid., 231. 8 Note that, in Yehoshua’s narrative, the figure of God appears in contexts of arbitrariness, meaninglessness, and plots leading to disaster. The relationship with God is complex, unsatisfactory, and full of terror, and God’s figure is itself demonic. Besides the current story, see also the character of “the supervisor-general” in another Yehoshua story, “The Yatir Evening Express.”The supervisor-general has divine characteristics. His name is like God’s name: “Mr. Kannaout.” At times he is called “our master” (see Yehoshua, The Continuing Silence, 155), which is an expression of defamiliarization and distance regarding God. He is spoken of as God: “He was regarded by the villagers as all-powerful, though some had been known to doubt him. He was thorough in his work, and nothing escaped his sharp eye; he ruled with a firm hand, and remained completely aloof from the villagers . . . and his ways, they said, were just” (152). The fact that the supervisor-general approves the plan for diverting the railway line, which will lead to a disaster, brings Arditi, the old stationmaster, to mutter to himself: “And I thought of telling him . . . the supervisor-general . . . he who knows everything . . . he who is so fastidious . . . he alone, who . . . and our faith in him grows from day to day” (155). The expression “he alone” is reminiscent of a prayer from the High Holidays liturgy, “He Holds Justice in His Hand,” which says: “And all believe that He alone crowns kings and His is the kingdom.” Reliance on this allusion clarifies the connection between the supervisor-general, who enables and enjoys the catastrophe, and God. Old Arditi is conscious of his human obligation and fears the calamity that the divine supervisor unleashes on human reality. In another story in this collection, “Galia’s Wedding,” the figure of God is confined to a burnt olive tree. 5

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the sixth day, when the mythical order is purportedly perfect, the commander orders prayer: “In the evening he instructed those who prayed to pray. Even the agnostics—it is better for them to pray, to ease their troubled minds. He stood and looked at them until their hurried prayer ended.”9 In a Kafkaesque world of terror and collapse, of violent incomprehensible sovereignty, prayer neither does nor can convey an expectation of change. It is part of the violent gestures by which the narrator finds himself bound. Praying is therefore urgent. Rather than growing from the individual, this is a prayer forcibly imposed by an outside power, a symbolic expression of the violence that intensifies terror. This schematic description of prayer in Yehoshua’s story exposes his basic assumptions regarding prayer. The fundamental assumption is that prayer precedes humans. It does not grow immanently from them and reflects instead an assumption concerning the existence of a leader who creates order in the world, and to whom we turn in the prayer that he himself has commanded. As this assumption gradually vanishes, prayer too becomes pointless. In the reality of an arbitrary, unintelligible world, prayer becomes a violent command imposed from outside, which humans are constrained to obey against their will. Be that as it may, prayer is not a primary phenomenon of human existence because, in a world devoid of metaphysical meaning, a world where there is no order nor any reason to expect it, prayer is meaningless. The one who commands prayer is an arbitrary sovereign. He determines that prayer makes sense because it will “ease their troubled minds,” even though worshippers do not believe in him. But this determination is merely a case of rubbing salt on a wound. In a world full of terror, even worshippers find no rest, and the narrator indeed attests that worshippers could not sleep even after their prayers: “Now it seems that we are permitted to sleep, but we can’t.”10 One who experiences terror loses the sense of home, of belonging to a particular place, and wanders around in permanent All the narrator’s pleas to God are answered with silence and evasion (163-164). In an interview with Maya Sela, Yehoshua admits that, in his early stories, he had struggled with religious authority: “At the beginning of my literary way, there was a struggle with this authority and an attempt to break it. This was my transition to a solid secular consciousness. I see the human meaning of God and view the concern with God as a very human need . . . but I do not believe that there is indeed a God.” Referring specifically to the stories “Flood Tide,” “The Yatir Evening Express,” and “Galia’s Wedding,” Yehoshua states: “God is always presented here as covering up a hidden brutality . . . exposing the vulnerability of the metaphysical authority was a thread connecting the three stories.” See “The Train that Does Not Stop,” Akhbar ha-Ir, 12 June 2009 [Heb]. Thanks to Zvi Mark for bringing this interview to my attention.  9 Yehoshua, “The Last Commander,” 248. 10 Ibid., 248.

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trepidation: “We have had a week of terror, and another week of terror is yet to come. The hours were passing but sleep did not come. Painfully awake, like driven dogs we groped around on the ground to find a place for ourselves.”11 Henceforth, prayer is merely another threatening, violent, meaning-dissolving element. It is senseless and taken from religious contexts that lack any significance in the world as is. In the context of this metaphysics, talking about humans as praying beings or prayer as a primary elemental fact is pointless. Yehoshua’s story outlines a world empty of God, violent and alienated, where people find themselves collapsing and breaking apart. Summarizing an insightful analysis of Yehoshua’s short stories, Avidov Lipsker writes: “The religious element—insofar as it is found in these stories . . .—is a destructive element.”12 Yehoshua, then, presents an extremely radical view that makes any discussion of prayer and its standing almost redundant: the death of God is the death of prayer and, if prayer is still alive, all that proves is that the world is arbitrary and that people without God are still inclined to perceive themselves as subjects. On the other side, in a kind of reversed mirror image, is Aharon Appelfeld. In his work too, we hear echoes of the new Jew or the new Hebrew who demands liberation from prayer as a remnant of a Jewish existence that must be removed: “We came to this land to live in reality, in this reality. Forget the word supplicant. Jews have prayed more than enough.”13 This voice too knows that prayer is a detachment from concrete reality and a turn to what is beyond it, and that is why it negates it, since it perceives it as antithetical to the new Zionist ethos. But this is not the dominant voice in Appelfeld’s work, which is actually marked by a yearning for prayer and worshippers. Intertwined in his work are characters who know the secret of prayer. Bruno Brumhart, the narrator in Appelfeld’s novel And the Rage is Not Yet Over, looks at a worshipper and ponders: Yosef Hayyim is a believing man. I saw him praying once. . . . There’s nothing harder than prayer. Prayer is the readiness to vanquish skepticism. A person who stands in prayer announces to the world that there is higher than higher, and that there is a world of truth that we will one

11 Ibid. 12

Avidov Lipsker, “A. B. Yehoshua—A Retrospective: From a Metaphysics of Evil to a Situational Ethic” (unpublished) [Heb]. 13 Aharon Appelfeld, The Man Who Would Not Stop Sleeping (Or Yehuda: Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, 2010), 144 [Heb].

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day reach. At the time, Father Peter taught me some of the secrets of faith, but I didn’t understand them then.14

According to this approach, prayer is not primary in human existence. Quite the contrary—in order to pray, people have to overcome their skeptical disposition because the meaning of prayer rests on the assumption of a metaphysical truth: the existence of a “world of truth.” Prayer, then, is founded not only on the assumption that God exists but also on “the secrets of faith”—an entire spectrum of truths that endow the practice of prayer with meaning. Paradoxically, Yehoshua and Appelfeld share metaphysical assumptions: both assume that prayer is not a phenomenon that expresses the mode of being human in the world. Prayer is derived from a set of beliefs, and both approach its understanding with a theological-metaphysical world view. And yet, for Yehoshua, these very beliefs epitomize a groundless arbitrariness and must be abandoned. By contrast, in Appelfeld’s view, these beliefs deserve respect and appreciation. Prayer is one of the secrets of faith that humans must learn. Furthermore, prayer is an experience anchored not only in a set of beliefs centering on the existence of God. In order for humans to pray, they must overcome their skepticism. Worshippers thus become witnesses to faith, since their act of prayer attests to the acceptance of faith. Appelfeld does not adopt views claiming, as discussed below, that the possibility of prayer rests on God’s action, but he definitely sees in prayer a testimony to the human situation: the worshipper is a believing being. Prominent in this closeness between Yehoshua and Appelfeld is the theological difference between them, which leads to all the other differences. In Yehoshua’s view, as in those of Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Jacques Ellul that I discuss in Chapter Seven, prayer rests on the existence of a commanding being and attests to the existence of a divine authority that commands it, which worshippers obey. But relationships of authority and compliance create opposition, tension, and a sense of arbitrariness and impotence. When obeying a command only because it is a command we feel that our autonomy has been negated and experience a deep sense of injury. This experience is exacerbated in prayer, where people are supposed to pour out their hearts to God. The arbitrariness in the God-human relationship is what underlies Yehoshua’s deconstruction of the metaphysical 14

Aharon Appelfeld, And the Rage Is Not Yet Over (Or Yehuda: Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, 2008), 54 [Heb].

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authority and, in its context, prayer too becomes a strange and alienated phenomenon. For Appelfeld, by contrast, prayer is one of the secrets of faith; it reflects the human-divine connection. Connections are soft relationships reflecting closeness and intimacy, hence Appelfeld’s empathy with prayer. Worshippers start out from their world as believers and trust that their prayer addresses the divine being. Their world is one of continuity between an earthly reality, where they dwell as beings who turn to their God, and the transcendent reality that responds. Prayer connects them to God and is definitely not a source of alienation. Whatever the case, prayer is woven into a metaphysical-theological web and is not a primary phenomenon. As noted at the opening of the book, however, the view of prayer as a primary fundamental fact, an indisputable “datum,” plays a key role in Hebrew literature. Prayer, then, is not contingent on the ontological or psychological interpretation of the addressee. Indeed, prayer is a pre-objective manifestation and, as a primary fact, it is not contingent on the actual existence of the divine addressee. Human beings are praying beings. The meaning of prayer must therefore be decoded through an analysis of the manifestation itself, independent of any metaphysical, psychological, or sociological theory of God. The importance of explanations and theories is understandable, but an explanation or a theory are by nature only possible (contingent) rather than necessary given that, in principle, every explanation and every theory is refutable. Ludwig Wittgenstein formulated this insight by stating: “But what men consider reasonable or unreasonable alters. At certain periods men find reasonable what at other periods they found unreasonable. And vice versa.”15 Explanations of phenomena change, but some phenomena are fixed and permanent. Prayer is a classic manifestation of this gap. People pray—this is a primary, fixed, and unchanging fact—but the explanations of this phenomenon change. There is therefore a gap between prayer, which is revealed as a basic fact of human existence, and the explanations of this phenomenon, which can never transcend their status as possibilities. Concerning prayer, then, it is worth adopting the traditional distinction between explanation and understanding, between an attempt to propose 15

Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), 43e. See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970), 57.

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a theory and an attempt to explain the datum facing us—that humans are praying beings. Paul Ricoeur16 drew a distinction between two models of interpretive activity: a demystifying interpretation intended to expose what had been hidden and blurred, and one intended to explicate the textual meaning that usually remains vague and undeciphered. Ricoeur calls the latter hermeneutic project, following Rudolf Bultmann, “demythologization.” Bultmann was troubled by the meaning of the biblical mythical text for contemporary believers, who do not endorse the myth, and tried to draw a distinction between the story of the myth and its internal meaning. Believers, argued Bultmann, are not interested in the mythical frame story but in the inner contents of the biblical text, which transcend the cultural context of the myth as such. Bultmann referred to the replacement of the myth with the inner meaning as demythologization, a project that has both a negative and a positive meaning. The negative meaning is that the myth is controlled by its setting within a specific cultural-historical context that contemporary individuals do not find particularly important. The positive meaning is that the inner contents of the text, its meaning for the believer, transcend the mythical context. Demythologization reflects “a requirement of faith itself. For faith needs to be emancipated from its association with a world view . . . whether it be a mythical or a scientific one.”17 Indeed, the mythical symbols are “a window to the sacred,”18 since the believing interpreter is interested in what is in the biblical text rather than in the attempt to place it within a historical, social context that uproots its meaning. Hence, this interpreter’s only way to the text is through the myth. Ricoeur consequently claims that the demythologizing hermeneutic project turns to the text in an attempt to bring it to life: “What he wants to understand is what the text says: the task of understanding is therefore governed by what is at issue in the text itself.”19 At the center of the demythologization endeavor is the text, not the theory about the text. By contrast, the demystification project is essentially negative. In this project, the role of the interpreter is to expose what had been hidden and blurred. According to Ricoeur, featuring prominently in the demystification 16

See Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 223. 17 Rudolf Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (London: S. P. C. K., 1953), 210. 18 Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 49. 19 Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, 389.

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project are such figures as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, who endeavored to expose what had been concealed—the deceit at the foundations of culture. Raphael Samuel impressively conveyed the meaning of this project, referring to it, in the wake of Barth and others, as “reading the signs”: “Reading the signs” offers a more prismatic way of looking at things than a positivist preoccupation with facts. It invites us to consider society as a spectacle, one in which appearances are double-coded, meanings occult and images opaque. In place of the one-to-one fit between evidence and inference . . . it proposes a triadic relationship in which “signifiers” lord it over the “signified,” while external reality . . . lurks uneasily in the background, a ghostly presence at the banquet, flitting from table to table, an unwanted guest, refused the right to speak. Phenomenologically, “reading the signs” exposes the artifice which a camouflage of naturalness conceals. It identifies the sleeping traumas which spring to life in times of crisis. . . . Epistemologically, it probes the visible surfaces of thought in search of hidden depths.20

“Reading the signs” teaches us to relocate a specific domain, a text for instance, within contexts of culture and social activity. The studied domain, for instance the text, is not the ultimate datum—it is part of a social game that reveals and hides. In its ultimate manifestation, the demystification project challenges the existence of a “reality” found “out there,” whether this “reality” is a text, or norms, or a world view. This project may see “reality” as not only a fraud and a cover-up of what is truly “out there” but also, and perhaps mainly, as a deception concerning what is not “out there,” a fiction or an illusion invented for the purpose of control and regimentation. The demythologizing project is also aware of the gap between the linguistic manifestation and its meaning—the linguistic manifestation may be mythical without its meaning being necessarily so. In this sense, embarking in a demythologizing project in a way acknowledges the centrality of the myth-denying present. And yet, embarking in this project means acknowledging that the text’s ultimate meaning is found “out there” and our task is to rescue it from the mythical linguistic garb. We cannot skip the myth. Quite the opposite: we must return to it and interpret it. In this sense, the demythologizing project affirms the existence of a stable text that the interpreter must understand, avoiding the relocation of the text in a context that denies it its overt meaning so that it might fit 20

Raphael Samuel, “Reading the Signs,” History Workshop Journal 32 (1991): 88-89.

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a sociological or psychological framework, for example. In line with my claim above, the demythologizing project gives up on proposing a theory or an explanation and tries to understand the datum, to listen to what it bears within. This conceptual framework adds another layer to what was presented in Chapter One: the analysis of prayer that I propose is, as noted, phenomenological. It assumes the existence of a datum that needs to be explicated. In a literary context, what accompanies this method is a recognition of the meaning of testimony, in Shoshana Felman’s sense: a literary text attests to something beyond it. This method leads to the demythologizing course described by Ricoeur. From this perspective, prayer is revealed as a primary datum that must not be placed in another context, such as a psychological or theological need. The hermeneutic voyage is thus a voyage through the textual “window”—the literary text—in order to expose its inner meaning, which is not transparent. This meaning is borne by the text as a testimony requiring explication. Prayer appears from this angle as a primary phenomenon, since the literary text expresses this testimony. Yehuda Amichai clearly conveyed the insight on the primacy of prayer: Tombstones crumble, they say, words tumble, words fade away, the tongues that spoke them turn to dust, languages die as people do, some languages rise again, gods change up in heaven, gods get replaced, prayers are here to stay.21

For Amichai, prayer is a stable and primary anchor of existence. It is the steady element, “prayers are here to stay,” as opposed to the changing gods. This stability and rootedness imply that prayer is not contingent on a ­specific god, gods change, but prayer remains a fixed feature of human existence. Ostensibly, this text does not make the addressee of the prayers entirely redundant. It assumes an addressee—gods—but holds that the addressee is not fixed. If this reading is correct, it implies that we should not see prayer as a pre-objective activity or one unconditioned by the object; quite the contrary, prayer has an object, but not one specific object. But even 21

Yehuda Amichai, “Gods Change, Prayers Are Here To Stay,” in Open Closed Open, trans. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld (New York: Harcourt, 2000), 39.

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if this reading of the poem is possible, it openly challenges the approach that prayer has no meaning without the God of monotheistic religion. The poem, however, seems to pose an even more dramatic challenge: the poem contrasts the primacy of prayer as a fundamental expression of human existence with the randomness of the object it addresses. The entire poem is marked by the attempt to clarify what is fixed and unchanging in human life. Everything changes, passes, even the gods people believe in, but prayer is the fixed element in human existence. Thereby, Amichai characterizes humans as praying beings, since prayer is the abiding element in their lives. In this poem, Amichai questions the classic attempts to characterize humans as thinking beings, beings possessing a consciousness, or speaking beings. Against this range of cognitive features, Amichai sets prayer. Humans are thereby characterized as praying beings, that is, prayer is what expresses human existence as human regardless of any theology or metaphysics. For the purpose of my discussion here, these determinations will suffice, and a more precise characterization of humans as praying beings will be found in Chapter Seven. The primacy of prayer is found not only in Amichai. Abraham Halfi offers a similar formulation, despite his differences with Amichai: “And why—/ If I’m flesh and blood/ and darkness heavy with chaos/ why should I not suddenly say a prayer:/ Blessed art thou, I don’t know who.”22 In this poem, Halfi points to one of prayer’s deepest foundations: often, we find ourselves praying, prayer suddenly seeking to burst from our depths—“why should I not suddenly say a prayer.” This phenomenon is not based on a voluntary decision whereby we choose to take time off from our chores and turn to prayer, as religious tradition describes this communion. Quite the contrary, we find within ourselves a deep need to pray, and it overwhelms us even if we do not know who the addressee is—“Blessed art thou, I don’t know who.” The worshipper sends this prayer to an unknown recipient, given that the essence of the prayer is not the turn to a divine addressee but its very performance. Halfi goes a step further and points to one of prayer’s deepest sources: distress and terror—“and darkness heavy with chaos.” The traditional believer, when in distress, turns to God: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me” (Psalms 23:4). In Halfi’s poem, terror leads humans to prayer—but not to God. In Chapter Five, I deal in detail 22

Abraham Halfi, “A Miracle of Darkness,” in Poems, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1988), 113 [Heb].

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with Halfi’s view, which differs from Amichai’s precisely because prayer for Halfi is a yearning for an addressee, which should not be confused with prayer as based on a turn to God. Prayer as a turn to God is predicated on the assumption that the worshipper is already standing before God, a standing that precedes and conditions prayer. For Halfi, by contrast, prayer is primary—one prays, and prayer is the movement of searching for the addressee. The worshipper cannot be sure that the addressee will be found. As shown in Chapter Five, prayer will indeed remain a search for an inexistent addressee. Prayer, then, prevails as a basic fact of human existence and is not constituted by God. Yitzhak Lamdan too conveys a clear recognition of the primacy of prayer, which transcends the traditional religious context. Primary prayer is not contingent on religious rituals or on the existence of a religious establishment. In the poem “When He Prays,” Lamdan writes: Even these days A man will suddenly stand and pray, ... In the bustling city next to the tram station, waiting for his carriage, he will stand and pray to one he feels is there.23

The modernist turnabout founded on the death of God and on human sovereignty cannot dismiss primary prayer. Here, in the bustling city, in the midst of the rushing human life epitomizing sovereignty, freedom, creativity and achievement—the tram station—a man “suddenly” finds himself praying. The suddenness is the subject’s takeover by the prayer event. The prayer does not attest to the presence of the transcendent God, whose being is revealed to the individual; quite the contrary, God is the object of human feeling: the subject prays “to one he feels.” It is this feeling, rather than the realization of unconditioned divine reality, that determines God’s place as a being whose existence is constituted by the feeling. Indeed, later in this poem, the primacy of prayer is explicated further: And so, even these days a man will suddenly stand and pray, and he does not cleanse himself, does not repent—

23

Yitzhak Lamdan, “When a Man Prays,” in Collected Poems (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1973), 100 [Heb].

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as many do these days, nor has he given his heart away to a museum to replace it with an artificial one. This heart beats as the human heart beats since time immemorial, since days long gone, this heart will also still pray— and will not be ashamed—24

Prayer is not a return to religion: the worshipper need not become a penitent. Neither is it a return to the old; the worshipper is a living being, he has not given away his heart to “a museum,” that is, to religion. Prayer is a primary element, “since time immemorial, since days long gone,” and thus continues to exist today. The primacy of prayer is an instance of the classic phenomenological fact in relationships between the act and the object—the act logically precedes the object, since it is the relationship’s constitutive foundation.25 Hence, in the relationship between prayer as a human act and the divine object that prayer addresses, if it addresses anyone at all, the act of prayer precedes its object. Through the deep recognition of the primacy of prayer over its object, Lamdan can ask the question: “Is that your voice calling from our depths or Satan’s leading us astray?”26 If prayer is indeed primary and coerced upon us, the question is who coerces this prayer—God or Satan? The primacy of prayer and the secondary nature of the object it add­ resses enables two poets, Abraham Halfi27 and Raphael Eliaz, 28 to write poems whose titles basically contain an oxymoron. Traditionally, apostates do not turn to God since they deny God’s existence, but they definitely do in these poems. In Chapter Two, I pointed to the difference between atheists and apostates. For apostates, God is still a concern, and their acts indeed perpetuate this interest. Apostates too can pray, then. The difference between apostates and believers does not necessarily come to the fore in the actual turn to God but in the characterization of God, who, for the apostate, might be described as a weak being who fails to extend his rule over 24

Ibid., 104-105. On the primacy of the act vis-à-vis its object, see J. N. Mohanty, Phenomenology and Ontology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 140. 26 Lamdan, “From Our Depths,” in Collected Poems, 138. 27 Halfi, “An Apostate’s Prayer,” in Poems, vol. 2, 51. 28 Raphael Eliaz, “An Apostate’s Prayer,” in Poems, vol. 2, The Blue Tailor (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1977), 118 [Heb]. 25

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the world. Thus, for instance, instead of the traditional formulation in the Pesach Haggadah that turns to God with the prayer, “shed your wrath upon the nations”—a prayer that recognizes the power of God’s greatness—Halfi unhesitatingly tells God, “shed your sublime non-being/ on the dream of those who seek you day and night.”29 Without any qualms, Eliaz hurls at God: “O, my God,/ You are a pauper./ A pauper like me!”30 Leah Goldberg, who adopted this view, also offers a moving formulation of God’s diminished image: I saw my God at the café. He was revealed to me in cigarette smoke. Sorrowful, apologetic and limp ... As confessing to a sin before his death, he bent to kiss someone’s feet and ask his forgiveness.31

The weak and sinful God is the one forced to request human forgiveness, rather than the opposite. The forgiveness ritual hints at the ceremony that Jesus performed before his death, when he knew that “his hour had come to depart out of this world,“32 and washed the disciples’ feet.33 This act was Jesus’ farewell ritual and has since been viewed as an act of humility and compassion. In Goldberg’s poem, God performs an act on people’s feet as a farewell ceremony and an act of humility and compassion. The strong God, the sovereign that all turn to in prayer, has become a very weak and humble figure. It is he, not his subjects, who is “wretched and helpless.”34 Nathan Zach, bitterly ironic, writes a poem “imploring/ you to shine your light upon all/ your worms/ . . . at peace/ and not at peace. God/ and not God.”35 This poem describes the state of humans at peace with God, although this state is only attained because God’s figure has been diminished—“God and not God.” The classic features of the divine—transcendence, majesty, holiness, and mystery, which humans experience in what

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Halfi, “An Apostate’s Prayer,” Poems, vol. 2, 52. Eliaz, “An Apostate’s Prayer,” 118. Leah Goldberg, “After All,” in Poems, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1986), 24 [Heb]. John 13:1. See ibid., 13:1-10. Goldberg, “After All,” 23. Nathan Zach, “A Poem at Peace,” in The Complete Poems, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2009), 267 [Heb].

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Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum,36 have vanished. God is now a human figure with whom we can be at peace but certainly not pray to. At most, one can pray for it. In Chapter Two, I noted that the death of God also means the minimization of the divine figure, its transformation into a weak human entity. And yet, humans still turn to God. This turn is not founded on an expectation of divine action that will change the face of reality. A weak, poor God has no power to cause anything. The essence, however, is not God’s action but the apostates’ very prayer—they too, and perhaps mainly they, discover the primacy of prayer, which is not at all conditioned by the recognition of God’s power. We are praying beings. Human existence is the remnant of a language of prayer that remains alive even after the death of God, even after prayer has turned to ashes. Arthur Green sheds light on the primacy of prayer from a philosophical perspective. He directs attention to the fact that prayer endures even after the Holocaust, despite the fact that God has been revealed as indifferent “to human—and Jewish—suffering.” This experience could have led “to cynicism or despair, but not to worship”: But still we find ourselves praying! That is an incontrovertible fact, an essential datum our theology cannot escape. Jews who know full well what happened, who understand that the pious and impious suffered one fate, that there is no divine interference in history, still want to pray. And it is not only dirge and supplication or a cry of protest and anger that comes out when we pray. We want to sing to the universe, to recount its beauty, to celebrate the life that goes on after all. This act of affirmation exists on an infinitely deeper plane than does the question, “Do you believe in God?”37

The various answers to the question of the persistence of prayer that have been given in philosophy and Jewish thought cannot be addressed in this discussion. Green’s answer is certainly not the only one possible. No oneto-one relationship prevails between factual events and faith; indeed, the faithful reinterpret facts in light of their previous beliefs. And yet, Green’s fundamental insight cannot be ignored: we are praying beings, and prayer precedes the theological questions attached to it. Furthermore, Green 36

Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 12-24. 37 Arthur Green, Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992), 16 (emphasis in the original).

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himself suggests a dramatic move, whereby prayer precedes even religion: “Religion begins not with doctrine, not with tradition, but with the need to pray. Theology comes only later, the mind’s reflection on what the heart already knows.”38 Green does propose in his book an introduction to a new theology, which takes as its starting assumption the primacy of prayer as a fundamental gesture of the subject toward his or her existence. My concern in this book is not Green’s theology, which merits separate discussion, but his starting point—the primacy of prayer in human life, which is reflected in prayer as a phenomenon mediated by neither theology nor metaphysics. Theology and metaphysics come after the phenomenon of prayer, as an explanation, and are not its constitutive foundation. How should we understand the phenomenon of prayer as a whole? Who does prayer ultimately address? Is prayer possible without an addressee? The study of Hebrew literature points to various trends in the decoding of the addressee’s meaning. According to one trend, the human subject is simultaneously the sender and the addressee. The analysis of this trend will be the focus of Chapter Four. According to another trend, the “death of God” is not a finished story and God bursts anew into the world, be it as the presence of a being, or as an absence, or as a question about presence or absence. Chapter Five will analyze various forms of this conception. Another approach views prayer as the moment that reenacts the experience of the “death of God.” Prayer is the intermediate moment that reveals the continuity between the past, where God lived, and the future, where God will be no longer. Chapter Six deals with an analysis of this trend.

38

Ibid., xxiii.

Ch a p te r Fo u r

Between Self-Reflection and Ontological Event

The death of God and a world empty of God may lead individuals to themselves, to the discovery that they are enclosed in their aloneness and unable to transcend it. Yitzhak Laor offers a powerful formulation of how the heart confronts the experience of God’s death, without a memorial service or a holy stone: “No gate/ through which/ it passes/ returns/ goes/ returns.”1 Specifically, the death of God leads to the conclusion that there is no gate rather than that the gate is locked. A locked gate denotes what is beyond it. The absence of a gate implies the recognition that individuals remain enclosed within the borders of their immanence. And yet, the passion for the eternal, for what is beyond reality, for self-transcendence, is a “wound” that, at times, gives rise to prayer. Elsewhere, Laor writes: There are such moments: A great pain and faith in the eternal before images vanish and words emerge from the open wound the soul and inflame longing and offer comfort and we promise truly not to forget the dead which means a word which means faith in a word which means prayer which means the love of words. Beyond it one sees nothing truly2

Even if the pain begets passion and longing, prayer, like faith, is a “word” that has no addressee in the reality beyond itself. The word does not help us 1

2

Yitzhak Laor, “Ars Poetica,” in And Loveth Many Days: Poems 1994-1995 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1996), 13 [Heb]. Idem, “The Narrator’s Death,” in Poets on the Edge: An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry, trans. Tsipi Keller (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), 241.

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to go beyond language and the pain therefore remains, anchored in the very recognition that humans are chained to the immanence of their existence. Laor’s poems convey the death of God in several ways. In one of them, the personal, traditional God is deconstructed and assumes semi-pantheistic manifestations. Laor’s poem “If There Is No God” is one instance of this approach: “If there is a God, he is not in heaven . . ./ He is the sea looking at land like a silent/ snake. Like the gaping water wells . . ./ If God, then man.”3 God is concretized in the fullness of existence rather than in the form of a separate, independent entity; indeed, following Nietzsche, the poem can proclaim that, had God been considered a unique, independent entity, then man would have been God: “If God, then man.” In another approach, God has been weakened. Laor ironically describes God in “Bird“: “And even if there is a God, he is not/ as big as the world (though he is bigger than people).”4 Both trends coalesce in one clear vision of the world as a totality enclosing humans within it. The last god is man. In a poem that transforms the “Hear, O God” [Shem‘a Israel] prayer that is emblematic of faith in God, Laor writes: Hear, O man, man, Our God, our God, Man, our God is one, Our gods are as many as the sand Upon the seashore.5

Prayer, however, neither dissolves nor disappears, even if there is no one whom we can “beg for solace,”6 and even if the poet recurrently says: “And speak to God I will not/ speak.”7 The reason is that “there is no gate/ through which/ it passes/ returns/ goes/ returns”8; prayer is as necessary as poetry. Laor can therefore say: “A word is the balm a word/ is the wound a word/ is the salt.”9 Prayer has no addressee for Laor, despite its shared disposition with poetry. Humans express their pain and passion in prayer, but the addressee of prayer, of speech, are they themselves. This experience neither soothes nor 3 4

5 6

7 8 9

Idem, “If There Is No God,” in A Night in a Foreign Hotel (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1991), 10 [Heb]. Ibid., “Bird,” 47. Idem, “Hear O Man,” in Poems in the Valley of Iron (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1990), 87 [Heb]. Idem, “Silence,” in A Night in a Foreign Hotel, 46. Idem, “In the Formless Void,” in Poems in the Valley of Iron, 24. Ibid., “Ars Poetica,” 13. Idem, “The Narrator’s Death,” in Poets on the Edge, 242.

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comforts, since the words of the prayer are the dressing, the wound, and the salt, all in one. We are doomed to live in the tension between an immanent life and a longing for transcendence that cannot be fulfilled. Albert Camus claimed in The Myth of Sisyphus that this tension between imprisonment within our immanence and our yearning for transcendence is what creates the experience of the absurd, which we are fated to bear to the end.10 All we can do is express our pain in poetry and prayer as “needed speech/ holy secularism.”11 Ludwig Feuerbach clearly articulated this view of prayer as an act of self-reflection, in which the individual is both sender and addressee. He described prayer as a turn to God and argued that, ultimately, prayer is “the absolute relation of the human heart to itself, to its own nature; in prayer, man forgets that there exists a limit to his wishes, and is happy in this forgetfulness.”12 These terse sentences sum up Feuerbach’s insight that prayer refutes the absolute power of nature, the causal relationships determining that reality is necessary. He identified the element of hope and expectation in prayer, the fact that prayer fundamentally refuses to accept reality as necessary. He therefore determined: “Prayer is . . . the certainty that the power of the heart is greater than the power of Nature.”13 Considered from this perspective, prayer expresses an essential element in human life—humans refute the necessity of reality and transcend it through prayer. Feuerbach can therefore determine that prayer is our relationship with ourselves, which detaches us from existing necessity. According to this approach, rather than a turn to an external entity, prayer is “a dialogue of man with himself, with his heart.”14 God is an affirmation of the act of transcending nature, the longing and wishes of the heart, the possibility of what nature had declared impossible.15 Feuerbach, as noted, characterized God as the self ’s alter ego. This alter ego, however, has no ontological existence beyond the self. Quite the opposite. It expresses the basic human paradox of the self ’s duplication that Hegel had already pointed out: the self as thinker and thought, subject and object. Franz Rosenzweig, who adopts a religious point of view, tempers Feuerbach’s approach and seeks to distinguish between various types of prayer. Feuerbach had described only one kind. Rosenzweig addresses the 10

On this issue, see Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1959). Laor, “In the Formless Void,” in A Night in a Foreign Hotel, 24. 12 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper, 1957), 123. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 See the discussion in ibid., 123-125. 11

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prayer of Goethe, who says: “Give, oh labor of my hands, the great happiness that I can finish it!”16 In Rosenzweig’s view, Goethe’s prayer is “the prayer of man for his own destiny,”17 except that the term destiny is “a kind of embarrassed expression for the divine one who answers prayer, to whom all flesh comes.”18 Prayer for one’s own destiny means a relationship with one’s own self. The act of prayer is an act of self-judgment, where one transcends one’s life, examines it, affirms it or expects a change in it, but never turns to the God outside it. In Rosenzweig’s terms: He [the one praying] is concerned only that whatever comes should flow into his life, that he be permitted to offer everything, what is his own or what is foreign, what is foreign or what is his own, in the sanctuary of his own destiny. For this he prays. He by no means desires to preserve what is his own; he is quite ready to drift outward, to widen his narrow existence here to eternity, and he does this; but in this desire he feels like a servant of his own destiny, and if he is ready to lay down the walls of his own person—he does not think he can and may leave the holy domain of his own destiny.19

This prayer is clearly expressive except that, through the act of self-expression, individuals transcend the data of their immediate lives, the random and changing circles of daily action. They do not go beyond the typical expressive path, since all instances of self-expression transcend our basic givenness. Speech transcends coerced real existence through the very act of linguistic articulation. Even if only implicitly, speech contains judgments, evaluations, preferences, traditions, memories, and so forth. But prayer, even though it is speech, is speech of a special kind: in prayer, we place ourselves entirely vis-à-vis existence and with existence. Prayer can express an expectation of a new future event and can also be an absolute affirmation of what already exists. Be that as it may, prayer transcends existence but also remains within it. This trend is widely evident in Hebrew literature. Yehezkel Hefets, the protagonist of Yosef Haim Brenner’s Breakdown and Bereavement, experiences at the end of his struggle with illness a sense of absolute 16

Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 293. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 294.

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self-affirmation. He understands that no final repair is possible for our fragile existence: Because ultimately nothing was permanent, nothing was assured. There were only thresholds, moments. . . . There was only a twisting, turning path which was sometimes easy to travel and sometimes not. And all there was to know was the old wisdom: that it was happiness to be lost on this path, happiness to live life and to cherish it, both for its infinite pleasures and for all its rude surprises.20

This moment of acceptance and reconciliation transcends the givenness of reality and shifts to a stance of judgment, through which we return to reality. In Søren Kierkegaard’s existentialist framework, the reconciliation is a kind of “repetition”: completing the circle of coerced givenness, transcending it, and returning to it out of freedom.21 This dual moment of transcendence and affirmation of existence leads Hefets, who is living after the death of God, to express himself in prayer: My Father! Father of Light and of Life, blessed are they, selah! My Father, father of orphans, be good to me: send me a gift of your sunbeams, and I, an orphan among orphans, will gather them gratefully, hopefully, lovingly. I know now to cherish your gifts, your goodness, selah. My heart will rejoice in you, yea, will be jubilant. O Father of Life, blessed art Thou, selah!22

Ostensibly, this is an instance of a traditional prayer that has an addressee— God. A more plausible option, however, is to view it as an existentialist-­ expressive prayer. Hefets carries in his memory the language of traditional prayer and therefore resorts to it, but the essence of his prayer is not his stance vis-à-vis God. For Hefets, the death of God is a certainty.23 The use of traditional language conveys the deep transformation of Jewish existence after the death of God: even when individuals turn to God, they do not really address God but rather express themselves, their own judgment on 20

Yosef Haim Brenner, Breakdown and Bereavement, trans. Hillel Halkin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 256-257. 21 For an analysis of repetition in Kierkegaard, see Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), index, “repetition.” 22 Brenner, Breakdown and Bereavement, 300. For an analysis of the existentialist voyage of Yehezkel Hefets, see Avi Sagi, The Human Voyage to Meaning: A Philosophical-Hermeneutical Study of Literary Works (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press: 2009), 102-148 [Heb]. For further discussion of this prayer, see idem, To Be a Jew: Joseph Hayyim Brenner as a Jewish Existentialist, trans. Batya Stein (London: Continuum, 2011), 117-121. 23 On this issue, see Sagi, The Human Voyage to Meaning, 128-131.

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existence. Hefets’ prayer is the affirmation of existence as is, the outburst of a self-transcending being and the absolute acceptance of a flawed reality. In another work, From Here and Here, Brenner presents “old man” Aryeh Lapidot, who is A. D. Gordon. Brenner describes him as a figure representing a non-mystical kind of religiosity: “He is religious not because he is ignorant; he is religious not because he is bourgeois, and his religiosity is not mystical. Say what you want: I admire his prayer. Faced with that kind of prayer, I too can kneel and pray.”24 This prayer, in which even someone whose God has died can take part, only breaks through when the individual has a “spiritual need for it.” Its wording is not that of the set traditional prayers, but one where the individual forges “his own wordings, from his soul.”25 This prayer flows and breaks through out of “instinctual logic, life logic, the essence of life.”26 The death of God, then, does not necessarily eliminate prayer. Instead of directing us beyond our being, prayer is now a voyage to the deep experiences of our individuality, which is perceived solely within the borders of human existence. Brenner’s contemporary, the mythical pioneer Shlomo Lavi, experiences, like Hefets, a moment of absolute self-affirmation when tilling the land, which he too translates into a prayer: He could already listen, while plowing, not only to the steps of the animal and to the murmur of the soft land breaking but also to the murmur of his heart. In his work, he felt like one of the novice priests attending the holy service for the first time, his soul glad, and in his heart the lines from the Psalms: “In the morning shall my prayer attend thee . . . to relate thy steadfast love in the morning . . . for thou, Lord, hast made me glad through thy work,” and more verses he remembered from his childhood, when his soul had been perfectly one with his God. The surrounding cosmos united with his soul. The temple of nature became for him as the temple of prayer. And when the sun rose and a flock of birds passed above his head, his soul prayed: “If only I could be one of them and, like them, free to love and sing.”27

Lavi’s prayer is accompanied by self-reflection. The use of religious language is clearly not a return to the religious world and, actually, makes it even more distant. Shalom Layish, the protagonist of this work, uses the 24

Yosef Haim Brenner, Writings, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1978), 1362 [Heb].

26

Ibid., 1361. Shlomo Lavi, The Arrival of Shalom Layish (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1956), 276 [Heb].

25 Ibid. 27

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words of the prayer that “he remembered from his childhood, when his soul had been perfectly one with his God.” The implication is that his soul is no longer perfectly one with his God but, nevertheless, these words still serve him to express a mood of communion and reconciliation with reality. Although the language of this prayer is carved from a close association with God, its object is not God but destiny and existence—the experience of communion and harmony with the world as is. Lavi’s poetic expression, “his soul prayed,” is a valuable contribution to the understanding of the phenomenon. Prayer is such a primal experience that the soul, as it were, coerces prayer upon us—it bursts out from us and entraps us with its words. The encounter with the land creates these moments of erupting prayer. David Giladi, from Kibbutz Degania, refers to these moments in Between the Jordan and the Sea of Galilee. In a passage entitled “The Tiller’s Prayer,” he writes: The tiller sat on his plow, let go of the reins and silently prayed: Let me be like this good earth, like this earth! In the winter it is all plowed with furrows, like a wrinkled face, in the search for bread, and in the summer, every blade of grass and every dainty flower becomes a prickly thorn . . . but every spring it forgets everything and suddenly laughs joyfully. . . . Thus sat the tiller on his plow and silently prayed: Let me be like you, good earth, let me be like you!28

In this prayer, the earth and its changes are the source and target of the man’s longings. The tiller’s prayer appears as a hope— “let me be”—which is not directed to a specific addressee. The hope is not contingent on action by the divine addressee, but rather directed to the man setting life goals for himself. In one of his poems, Avraham Halfi describes prayer as an expression of personal fullness: A beautiful night to pray for a man’s happiness under a vast sky, ... We both loved the song of the stars On a beautiful night to pray—29

28 29

David Giladi, Between the Jordan and the Sea of Galilee (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1952), 40-41 [Heb]. See also 44-45. Abraham Halfi, “The One Running After,” in Poems, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1988), 27 [Heb].

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Halfi yearns for God, as shown below. But the prayer does not depend on the fulfillment of this yearning: the prayer expresses a personal fullness that transcends and is concretized in its words. An interesting formulation of a prayer that addresses destiny is found in the poetry of Yitzhak Lamdan, who relied on traditional prayer constructs to convey this stance: Out of our depths I will cry to you, our single destiny like the single sun in heaven: O, you, who weave like a spider the intricate web of our paths, And we who tremble like trapped flies—Answer me! . . . Out of the depth-of-our-depths I will cry to you our single destiny: Answer me! . . .30

“Out of our depths I will cry to you” alludes to the verse: “Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord” (Psalms 130:1)—someone turns to God and awaits God’s response. Moreover, the expression “answer me [Aneni]” is an allusion to the wording of the Selihot prayer, expressing intimate closeness to God. Lamdan’s use of traditional language expresses not a return to religion but a deep transformation of it: the experience of standing before God is replaced by that of individuals facing their destiny. The prayer does not have a divine addressee, since “our father in heaven is lost to us and we will walk the earth without his spirit.”31 Instead of the divine addressee, destiny appears as a kind of being that entraps humans. Destiny grows increasingly stronger and goes through a personification process that enables the individual to use the wording of traditional prayers when turning to it. Henceforth, humans are within the domain of immanence. Within this immanence, however, they feel the power of existentialist thrownness. In Heidegger’s words—“the ‘whence’ and the ‘whither’ remain in darkness.”32 Prayer thus becomes a form of inner discourse about one’s own destiny. The meaning of prayer without God culminates in the poetry of Sh. Shalom. Like many of his contemporaries who arrived in Palestine in the years following World War I, Shalom lived through the rift between the old and the new, an experience that intensifies the expectation of revelation, the disclosure of the mystery: “Our tattered lives caught fire in the sorrow./ 30

Yitzhak Lamdan, “Out of Our Depths,” in Collected Poems (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1973), 135 [Heb]. Ibid., 132. 32 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 173. 31

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We wanted something . . ./ We sought something . . ./ Filled with the pain of wandering we await/ the miracle,/ the mystery. . . .”33 Expecting revelation is a classic manifestation of the transcendence experience in Shalom’s generation. Their lives were a longing for the fullness of existence, for a renewed connection with the divine that is imbued with mystical dimensions. But it is precisely this expectation that widens the gap with God. At times, this experience evokes a sense of a calling, but not by God: “Who was it called us, lonely friends,/ in that desert? . . . Something in the thunder, lonely friends,/ is close to the heart . . ./ Is that what you wait for, attentive and tattered/ in the night, in the drizzle—/ without a God?”34 This experience of religiosity, of yearning for the divine and for communion with it, together with the experience of the death of God, could lead to the death of prayer. That, however, is not the case. Prayer does not die and, instead, is profoundly transformed: “My mouth is empty, my tongue has no words,/ only my life, my whole life, pours out in prayer./ And my prayer has no God, which is why it is so pure. . . .”35 The poet rises early for the morning prayer, which the most devout worshippers recite at dawn. He even washes his hands according to halakhic ritual and, as the most God-fearing do, focuses his intent entirely on the prayer: “I cleared all passions from my heart.”36 And yet, he cannot recite the traditional prayer, since he is “mute,”37 “my mouth is empty, my tongue has no words.” The fact that he is no longer capable of saying the words of the traditional prayer does not lead him to ask God to teach him to pray anew, since “my prayer has no God.”38 And yet, he does pray “so pure” a prayer. How can we understand this joining together of “my prayer has no God” and the continuity of prayer? Simone Weil’s formulation is surprisingly similar to Shalom’s: “A method of purification: to pray to God, not only in secret as far as men are concerned, but with the thought that God does not exist.”39 The similarities between Shalom and Weil are clear: for both, the purity of prayer is tied to the change in the meaning of the divine object. But it is precisely against 33

Sh. Shalom, “In the Path of My Homeland,” in Poems (Tel Aviv: Yavneh, 1949), 18-19 [Heb]. Ibid., “In the Group,” 23. 35 Ibid., “Morning Prayer,” 45. 36 Ibid., 44. 37 Ibid. 38 For a similar experience see, for example, Leah Goldberg, “R. M. Rilke,” in Poems, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 2007), 154 [Heb]. See also ibid., “Twilight at the Window,” 80. 39 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952), 66. 34

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this similarity that the difference stands out. Shalom writes: “my prayer has no God.” His prayer has no addressee. Weil, however, holds that prayer does have God as an addressee, but pure prayer is one where the worshipper assumes that God does not exist. The non-existence of God means God’s absolute absence as an object in the world. In Weil’s terms, “God can only be present in creation under the form of absence.”40 Elsewhere, she writes: God exists. God does not . . . I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word. But that which I cannot conceive is not an illusion.41

A pure prayer, according to Weil, is one where humans do not objectify God. They pray to the unknown God, and yet are sure of God’s existence. Weil, like Yeshayahu Leibowitz and many other believers, assumes God’s absolute otherness as a condition of a meaningful religious life and pure prayer.42 Not so Shalom: his prayer has no addressee, since God is dead. The fact that the prayer has no addressee does not imply the death of prayer. Indeed, without the addressee, prayer is exposed in all its purity—“which is why it is so pure.”43 Purity is a consequence of having removed the addressee, enabling the fullness of concrete existence to become manifest in the prayer. Rather than a discourse between individuals and their God, prayer becomes a realm of personal expression and discovery: “only my life, my whole life, pours out in prayer.” Clarice Lispector conveyed a profound dimension of these elements of prayer when saying: “The deep prayer is not one that begs; the deeper prayer is one that no longer begs.”44 Underlying this ambiguous formulation is the suggestion that deep prayer, rather than turning to someone to achieve something, is an expression of the self, as is clearly evident from Lispector’s clarification.45 Together with the fact that prayer is expressive, Shalom’s poetry also conveys the idea that the addressee of prayer is the being itself, in all its manifestations: “Raise your hands in the sanctuary, clouds of wandering, 40 41 42 43

44

45

Ibid., 162. Ibid., 167. See Chapter 5. Even in his later poems, where God does come back into existence, Shalom still leaves prayer without an addressee. Clarice Lispector, “Os desastres de Sofia,” in Felicidade Clandestina: Contos (Rio de Janeiro: F. Alves, 1991), 124. Note that, for Lispector, faith too is an activity lacking an object: “It isn’t necessary to have faith in anyone or in anything—it is enough to have faith” (Idem, The Hour of the Star, trans. Giovanni Pontiero [New York: New Directions, 1992], 25). See note 89 below.

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we will pray to the wonder/ to the tree.”46 The prayer to the tree bears ritual signs. The verse “raise your hands in the sanctuary” is recited when washing hands before a meal, prior to the blessing. In its poetic transformation, this expression conveys the ritual act of self-withdrawal before the prayer. The addressee of the prayer is the being or the wonder of existence manifest in the tree.47 In Shalom’s poetry, then, prayer is transformed from a prayer to God into one that expresses human existence as is, and when this prayer does have an addressee, it is the being itself rather than God. A religiosity conveyed through an experience of existential wonder48 makes prayer its central mode of expression. The death of God returns prayer to its primal original standing as a human expression within existence. The notion of prayer as an expression of the self turning inward is also found in Asher Reich’s poetry, which is pervaded by the experience of the death of God: “Lord of the universe, who went away/ never to return and left behind him/ Holocaust and wars.”49 Replacing the phrase “Lord of the universe, who reigned” [Adon Olam asher malakh] in the ritual poem, the death of God makes God’s kingdom irrelevant—“who went away.” Reich writes further: “Son, do not inquire into the age of God/ do not seek him high and low/ . . . because your voice he will not hear.”50 Despite the death of God, and perhaps in its wake, prayer acquires an even more significant meaning: “By the leave of time and its holy officers/ I am enwrapped in a prayer to myself/. . ./ God is knowledge of ourselves/ even where panic is our life/ only the brain on guard/ will protect us from Godcloud.”51 The poem begins with an allusion to the Kol Nidrei prayer, which opens with the words “by the leave of this congregation and by the leave of God.” Contrary to “the leave of the congregation and of God,” 46 47

48

49 50 51

Shalom, “The Tree,” in Poems, 186. On the cult of the tree in German literature, which had influenced Shalom, see Avidov Lipsker, The Poetry of Sh. Shalom (1922-1941) (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1992), 16 [Heb]. See Agi Mishol, “Discourse,” in Selected and New Ones (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2003), 212 [Heb]. On the depth aspect of the existential wonder experience, see Shalom, “The Tree,” 189. Yeshurun Keshet also prays to the wonder: “All my days, all my hours, I will wait for the wonder/ to come and spring and reign in the heart:/ the powerful wonder, the shining wonder,/ the redeeming wonder, that heals all pain.// I pray for the wonder, for the great wonder// . . . And I pray for the wonder, the wonder that sings!” (Yeshurun Keshet, “The Wonder,” in The Lost Treasure: Collected Poems [Jerusalem: Carmel, 1996], 46 [Heb]). The wonder in Keshet’s poem is a kind of event rather than an object. The object that prayer turns to is hidden: it could be God and it could be undefined. In other Keshet poems, God is indeed the addressee of the prayer (see ibid., 65, 88, 102). Asher Reich, “Instead of Memorial Day,” in The Order of the Poems (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1986), 28 [Heb]. Ibid., 34, “In the Middle of the Poem, the Phone Rang.” See also ibid., 77. Ibid., 26.

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which convey a religious commitment to God and the community, Reich opens his poem by relating to time “and its holy officers.” The experience of time breaks the eternity and infinity that God and the congregation bestow on existence. Humans are creatures in time and, in existentialist terminology—they are temporal creatures. And yet, they pray. Prayer enwraps the self, the self is its object—“I am enwrapped in prayer”—but also its addressee—“I am enwrapped in a prayer to myself.” The biblical allusion denotes the full turn away from the traditional prayer. In Psalms we read: “A prayer of the afflicted when he faints, and pours out his complaint before the Lord” (Psalms 102:1). In this prayer, the man stands afflicted before his creator and wraps himself in prayer, as the exegete points out: “When he is bent and afflicted, as if he had wrapped himself [tying] one end to the other.”52 In this prayer, man is the active being: it is he who enwraps himself, he who pours out his complaint, and this prayer has a clear address—God. In Reich’s version, the subject is “enwrapped” in prayer, as if overtaken by it; prayer forces itself upon him. The poem clarifies the source of this takeover—the “panic” that “is our life.” Prayer bursts out of the individual, and yet, it does not transcend the immanent; instead, “God is knowledge of ourselves.” Echoes of Feuerbach resonate in this poem—God is neither less nor more than our own selves, to which we turn in prayer. God is also a threat to our lives, and only our lucid consciousness protects us from this threat: “only the brain on guard/ will protect us from Godcloud.” Prayer, then, is an important moment in human existence because, although it turns us to ourselves, it also seduces us with the religious temptation that lucid consciousness resists. This view of prayer without an addressee is also found in the poetry of Amir Gilboa. Here, however, another trend emerges, which could be called ontological. In the poem “Prayer as a Wondrous Spread,” Gilboa draws prayer as an autonomous power that conquers humans and assumes a primal ontological dimension vis-à-vis those who submit to it: Prayer as a wondrous spread covers a vast domain, wishes to console my heart. Day and night I wage a great battle to show it this is not its right place.53

52

David Altschuler, biblical exegete and author of Metsudat David (Vilnius, 1864), ad locum. See also Uri Zvi Greenberg, Collected Writings, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1991), 155 [Heb]. 53 Amir Gilboa, “Prayer as a Wondrous Spread,” in Blues and Reds (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987), 153 [Heb].

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The prayer is wondrous—“a wondrous spread.” The experience of wonder rests precisely on the fact that it is experienced passively, as if one would wish to expel it. It is a conquering power, which puts us at peace and wishes to show us compassion. To resist prayer is to resist its consoling power, and prayer then wages a “great battle” against us. But prayer penetrates our existence, as manifest in the movement that the poet experiences. The source of this movement is the future construct of prayer. Prayer, if it affirms what is and conveys an expectation of change, often turns to the future. Prayer, then, is movement, and movement is a shock that is expressed in consoling or tormenting tears. In another poem, Gilboa draws a connection between light and prayer: “Our prayer is in light. To the light. From the light.”54 In this poem, light is the very foundation of existence.55 Prayer derives from this ontological foundation and turns toward it.56 Rather than merely an expression of the individual, prayer is the voice of reality itself. It flows within reality and addresses it. Prayer becomes an autonomous ontological foundation, just as light is a primal ontological element. These two poems together strengthen the power of prayer and, at the same time, diminish the meaning of its addressee given that prayer, which is an independent power, is not contingent on an addressee. Indeed, in one of his poems Gilboa prays, like many poets and believers, for prayer as such, without mentioning an addressee: “In the open field in the song of the/ flowing flowing water/ may prayer flow forever and ever.”57 Prayer, like light, like flowing water, is not an intentional act in a relationship between subjects and their God, but an event and, more precisely, a discovery. In this sense, the praying subject is the medium through which reality expresses itself in the language of prayer. This reality can be the entire cosmos or the individual being. For Gilboa, this kind of prayer “rises/ . . . from the soul/and from the body.”58 The prayer “rises,” it goes out from the individual without an addressee, but it encompasses the whole of human existence. Traditionally, mystical communion unites humans with the supernal worlds or the supernal worlds 54

Ibid., “The Begetters of Light,” in Blues and Reds, 184-185. On ontological and mystical aspects of light, see Aharon Zion, ed. Light: Views and Perceptions (Jerusalem: Ministry of Education, 2003) [Heb]. On Gilboa’s mystical connections, see Eda Zoritte, Spheres of Life and Emanation: Studies in Amir Gilboa’s Poetry (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1988) [Heb]. Zoritte shows that metaphors and symbols in Gilboa’s poetry draw on kabbalistic-Hasidic concepts (see p. 17). On the light in Gilboa’s work, see ibid., 114-117. 56 The trend suggesting that prayer is a yearning for light resonates in Shimon Halkin’s work as well. See Shimon Halkin, “Prayers,” in Poems 1917-1973 (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1976), 29, and also 30-31 [Heb]. 57 Amir Gilboa, “Untitled,” in Collected Poems, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1986-1987), 21 [Heb]. 58 Gilboa, “Communion,” in Blues and Reds, 71. 55

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with one another. But now, in a world without God, communion brings together body and soul that, through the event of prayer, become one identity expressing itself. Just as for Brenner and Lavi, for Gilboa prayer is an affirmation of reality. Prayer expresses the fullness of existence, wherein humans are included: “I write life./ Many things answer me./ . . . I say a flying prayer. I look grass grows.”59 For the phrase “flying prayer,” Gilboa uses a polysemic Hebrew word—porahat. On the one hand, porahat means “grows,” conveying that prayer, like grass, grows from reality. On the other, it hints at the talmudic idiom “the letters are flying [porhot] in the air,”60 which points to the letters’ release from the text—Torah scrolls or the tablets of the commandments— in tragic times. Thus, for example, the midrash reads: “When Moses came down from Mount Sinai and saw the iniquity of the children of Israel’s sin in the golden calf, he looked at the tablets and saw that the writing had flown away [parah] from them and he broke them under the mount.”61 When the two meanings intimated in the expression “flying prayers” are joined together, what emerges is that prayer too grows from existence, but is also released from it and acquires independent standing. Gilboa describes himself as religious: “I am a religious person,” he attests about himself.62 He also notes that, drawing on Hasidic stories and traditions, he can “say ‘Elohim, Elohim.’”63 The transformation of the religious world in Gilboa’s poetry is even more remarkable against this backdrop. His poetry preserves the element of religiosity by intensifying the ontology of reality as a religious-mystical reality; the fullness of existence is religious and, precisely because of it, God becomes redundant as a necessary object of prayer.64 Gilboa’s stance is interesting precisely in light of this tradition of ontological prayer, which reached a peak in the writings of R. Nahman of Bratslav. According to R. Nahman, prayer is not an activity specific to a subject, since “each and every blade of grass has its own unique song . . . and from the song of the grass the shepherd’s tune is made.”65 Decades later, 59

60 61 62 63

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Gilboa, “On Life and on the Poem,” in Collected Poems, vol. 2, 259. See TB Pesahim 87b; TB Avodah Zarah 18a; Pesikta Zutarte (Midrash Lekah Tov), Deuteronomy, Akev 14a; Yalkut Shimoni, I Kings, #208, and more. Seder Eliyahu Zuta, Ish Shalom ed., ch. 4, 180. Cited by Zoritte, Spheres of Life and Emanation, 113. Ibid. See also Amir Gilboa, “Great Are the Acts of My God,” in Collected Poems, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1986), 329. Brenner endorses a similar approach. See Sagi, To Be a Jew, index, “religiosity.” Nahman of Bratslav, Likutey Moharan, Tanina, 63, 29b. See also idem, Sihot ha-Ran, 164.

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this perception recurs in the writings of Rav Abraham Hacohen Kook, who writes, apparently in R. Nahman’s wake: Prayer is the ideal of all worlds. The entire cosmos yearns for the source of its existence. Every plant, every shrub, every grain of sand, all wherein life is revealed and all wherein life is hidden . . . all teems, yearns, bustles, and longs for the delightful perfection of its supreme source, living, holy, pure, and vast. And man absorbs all these passions every time and at every hour, and he rises and ascends in the fervor of his holiness. And this passion for exaltation finds satisfaction in prayer. . . . In prayer, man raises all that is created, unites all that is with himself, exalts everything, raises everything to the source of the blessing, to the source of life.66

But neither R. Nahman’s song of the grass nor Rav Kook’s idea of prayer resemble the notion of prayer in Gilboa’s poem, because, for R. Nahman, the song of the grass has an addressee and, furthermore, is part of “the shepherd’s tune.” Similarly, for Rav Kook, prayer is the cosmos yearning for its creator. Prayer, then, attests to the movement of the entire universe toward God, a God it has been longing and yearning for since creation. By contrast, for Gilboa, the fullness of existence makes the addressee redundant. This sense of superfluousness is not a defiance of God but a testimony to the fullness of the cosmos that expresses itself in prayer, of which the human subject also becomes part. Rachel Halfi, who does not carry the kabbalistic-Hasidic baggage found in Gilboa’s poetry, also expresses the view that prayer has an independent ontological meaning and can therefore be elusive: “A sound goes round the world/ that I could not hear./ I wanted to touch it/ with a sound from inside me/ that I could not tune.// Now when I try/ I am a dense wooden table trying/ to pray.”67 According to Rachel Halfi, the failed attempt to pray is not a sign of our impotence to create a prayer for ourselves, but rather the inability to reach ontological prayer, to tune in to such a prayer. This failure, in her view, denotes that we have become “a dense wooden table,” unable to turn attentively to reality and identify the sound of prayer.68 66

Abraham Hacohen Kook, Orot ha-Koddesh, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1964), 226 [Heb]. Rachel Halfi, “Once I Knew,” in Solar Plexus (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2005), 224 [Heb]. See also ibid., “Dazed Poem,” 173. 68 See also Ozer Rabin, “Evensong,” in Poems (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1953), 29 [Heb]. 67

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In classic sources, we do find the determination that humans are a medium for the expression of ontological prayer. Thus, for example, Augustine writes: Your entire creation never ceases to praise you and is never silent. Every spirit continually praises you with mouth turned towards you; animals and physical matter find a voice through those who contemplate them. So from weariness our soul rises toward you, first supporting itself on the created order and then passing on to you yourself who wonderfully made it.69

Similarly, R. Nahman of Bratslav writes, “when one prays in the field, every blade of grass enters into his prayers.”70 In these sources, ontological prayer enters humans and fills them, and nothing separates them from the world. In Gilboa, this trend continues. Rachel Halfi, by contrast, views humans as more distant from ontological prayer and needing to attune themselves to it, since they had not been initially connected. Ontological prayer may be lost or may elude humans, who must activate their power as subjects in order to go back to it. Traditional ontological prayer, as noted, expresses the notion that the entire cosmos yearns to go back to its divine source. It admits to this source and turns to it. Prayer, then, attests to the longing of the universe for its creator. In Hebrew literature, however, which does not necessarily endorse this theological-metaphysical conception, the premise about the existence of ontological prayer has another meaning. This prayer expresses a fundamental experience of the human being as a praying entity; at times, worshippers do not voluntarily choose prayer but find themselves praying. Prayer is, as it were, imposed on them from outside. This imposition of prayer denotes the subordination of the overt, concrete self to hidden elements beyond its control, which are therefore viewed as an expression of the cosmos. Eliezer Schweid offers a theoretical formulation of this view: Set prayer is . . . an art anchored in a deep wisdom. . . . True prayer stems from an awakening of the worshipper’s innermost soul, and the individual has no more control over his soul and its longings than he has over his body’s life processes. Because the soul . . . like the body . . . has a life that is hidden from the person’s rational “self,” a life rooted

69 70

Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 72. R. Nahman of Bratslav, Sihot ha-Ran, 144. cf. Goldberg, “The God of Geese,” in Poems, vol. 1, 130.

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in an inner regularity of body processes and soul meditations that only God knows and rules.71

It is not necessary to agree with Schweid’s theology. Prayer, according to this passage, is not based on faith in God or on a belief in a metaphysics that has God at its center, yet human beings pray and at times feel a compulsion to pray. In other words, the phenomenological aspect of Schweid’s statement does not depend at all on the causal context, which he proposes as a believer. We may come to experience the compulsion of prayer precisely when prayer bursts out from us.72 In this sense, the difference between the poetry of Gilboa and Rachel Halfi is significant. For Gilboa, the coercing ontological prayer is still in its original garb. By contrast, Rachel Halfi is already somewhat distant from this necessity; necessity is there, since the prayer does occur, but perhaps without putting one’s heart in it. According to the interpretation I propose, this missed moment reflects the detachment between the real, empirical being and the more “mysterious,” unconscious, and primal one. This detailed analysis clarifies the link between prayer as self-expression and reflection on the one hand, and ontological prayer on the other. Prayer as self-expression is a conversation through which we consider our inner existence within ourselves. From the perspective of one who adopts the idea of ontological prayer—the inner being imposes itself upon the real self. Prayer is the moment of self-disclosure and connection with the entire cosmos, not necessarily with God. In a traditional culture, where prayer had functioned within a clear religious context and reflected the human-God relationship, the preservation of prayer after the death of God compels a transformation of prayer from a language between humans and God to a language of self-­expression. Only such a transformation can express the fullness of a non-religious disposition. The absence of such a transformation implies that the non-religious disposition is split: at important moments in life, the religious disposition breaks through. The presence of such a transformation, however, implies that the non-religious stance is sufficiently strong to contain the elements from the religious world as well. Prayer no longer needs rejection and negation and contains instead the religious element within the fullness 71 72

Eliezer Schweid, The Siddur: Philosophy, Poetry, and Mystery (Tel Aviv: Miskal, 2009), 78 [Heb]. Note that some philosophers hold that faith is not voluntary and is coerced on the believer. For a discussion of these positions, see Moshe Halbertal, “On Believers and Belief,” in On Faith: Studies in the Concept of Faith and its History in Jewish Tradition, ed. Moshe Halbertal, David Kurzweil, and Avi Sagi (Jerusalem: Keter, 2005), 15-24 [Heb].

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of its world, thereby transforming the religious conception. An impressive instance of such a transformation appears in the work of Abraham Schlonsky, who, in one of his best known poems, distills the experience of the pioneers: My land wrapped in light as in a prayer shawl ... and hand-toiled roads stream down like phylactery straps. So will the fair city recite the morning prayer for its creator among the creators is your son Abraham, a bard building roads in Israel.73

The prayers of Brenner and Lavi, who had arrived with earlier waves of pioneers, seem traditional. The sense of this prayer changes because the network of meaning constitutive of their world leaves no room for a prayer addressing the God of Israel. In Schlonsky, by contrast, the metamorphosis is complete: prayer is self-affirmation and addresses the creator—humans themselves. In his prayer, sender and addressee are the same and it is this equivalence that constitutes the absolute self-affirmation. Worshippers have no expectations from a transcendent element and the prayer is indeed an expression of absolute self-containment.74 In contemporary poetry, this trend is represented by Gadi Fischman: “Out of the depths bless my soul/ world of legacies.”75 As it was for Gilboa, for Fischman too, prayer is an inner outburst that addresses humans 73

Abraham Schlonsky, “Toil,” in The Complete Collection of Abraham Schlonsky’s Poems in Six Volumes, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 2002), 15 [Heb]. The first section, translated by T. Carmi, appears in Poets on the Edge, xxxvi. Uri Zvi Greenberg also uses the phylacteries metaphor. See Greenberg, Collected Writings, vol. 1, 85. 74 A possible argument against my interpretation is that Schlonsky’s poem is a metaphor and the term “prayer” does not denote a real prayer. Obviously, this option cannot be rejected outright. Nevertheless, I hold that metaphors do not necessarily dismiss the literal, ordinary meaning ascribed to them, but add another layer to it. Metaphors can preserve the original referential meaning, which deepens the metaphor itself. On this question, see George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 57-139. In this view, metaphors blur borders, duplicate meanings and, in Julia Kristeva’s formulation, “Metaphoricalness . . . appears to me . . . as the indication of uncertainty concerning the reference. Being like is not only being and nonbeing, it is also a longing for unbeing in order to assert as only possible ‘being,’ not an ontology, that is, something outside of discourse, but the constraint of discourse itself. The ‘like’ of metaphorical conveyance both assumes and upsets that constraint” (Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez [New York: Columbia University Press, 1987], 273). The fact that the poem was built through the language game of traditional prayer supports the claim that the poem is suggesting a new meaning of prayer, rather than only a metaphorical poetic use. Like any metaphor, it conducts a painful, tormented, and skeptical dialogue with the original signifier—traditional prayer. 75 Gadi Fischman, Yitzhak (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2001), 123 (untitled) [Heb].

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t­hemselves. The transformation occurs in a language loaded with traditional hints: “out of the depths,” obviously hinting at the verse “out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord” (Psalms 130:1), and “bless my soul,” alluding to the verse “bless the Lord, O my soul” (Psalms 104:1). These two biblical verses and the context where they appear convey deep belief in the power of the God who created heaven and earth to respond to the prayers of those addressing him. In Fischman, however, the turn to the depths addresses the soul. This equivalence between sender and addressee is itself a communion he mentions in his poem. Contrary to the traditional communion that amends worlds, the poet’s prayer does not release humans from their distress. Instead, through prayer, the poet attains communion within himself, affirms his tortured existence, and discovers the domain of the “legacies,” the emptiness of existence. Another remarkable expression of prayer as expressing an expectation that has no addressee is Naomi Shemer’s song “May It Be”: A white sail on the horizon Across a heavy black cloud, All we ask for—may it be. And if in the evening windows The light of holiday candles flickers, All we ask for—may it be. May it be—may it be—please may it be All we ask for—may it be. ... If in all of these you hear Only one prayer from my lips All we ask for—may it be. ... So grant serenity and also strength To all those we love All we ask for—may it be.76

The background of this song, written during the Yom Kippur War, was the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” Contrary to the Beatles’ song, however, which affirms reality, Shemer prays for change. This song is indeed a classic prayer, as she says: “Only one prayer from my lips/All we ask for—may it be.” 76

Naomi Shemer, The Second Book of Naomi Shemer, Sixth Song (Tel Aviv: Lulav, 1975) [Heb].

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And yet, although the song is a prayer, the prayer has no addressee. Only the last stanza intimates an undefined destination: “So grant serenity and also strength.” The subject in this line is concealed, allowing for a wide range of options—the request could be addressed to God, or perhaps destiny, or the cosmos. In any event, the poem merely bears the worshipper’s request and does not turn to the divine addressee. This construct is typical of prayer as self-expression. But why call this self-expression prayer? What is the common denominator of traditional prayer and prayer as self-expression? Do both kinds of prayer belong to the same family, the same language game? Is a prayer without God at all a prayer? D. Z. Philips formulated this basic insight, common to all writers about prayer: “A conviction that one is talking to oneself is the death of prayer.”77 Similarly, Vincent Brümer claims that a therapeutic prayer centering on humans rather than God is an incoherent conception of prayer, which must assume the reality of a God to whom it turns.78 Abraham Joshua Heschel, who devoted much attention to the phenomenon of prayer, formulated this basic insight in several ways. In his view, prayer changes the center of life—from self-awareness to submission to God: “The focus of prayer is not the self.”79 To pray is to be a ladder through which we connect with God and, more precisely, respond to the God addressing us. Prayer assumes that we can connect with God, as evident in our willingness to place ourselves before God: “Prayer is an answer to God.”80 Prayer is an activity meant to allow God to enter human life.81 Uri Zvi Greenberg adopted this view and sharply distinguished believers, who are praying beings, from apostates, who are not.82 The relationship between a prayer to God and a prayer without an addressee does indeed pose a crucial question. Many Hebrew writers, however, relate to this expression as prayer even if it does not address God. Furthermore, a prayer without God is not merely the writers’ reflective expression of the traditional practice of prayer. Many of them pray to a non-God. Philosophers may view this practice as a complete misunderstanding of prayer. But the fundamental question touches on the role of philosophy: is 77

D. Z. Philips, The Concept of Prayer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 41. Vincent Brümer, What Are We doing When We Pray: A Philosophical Inquiry (London: SCM Press, 1984), 25-28. 79 Abraham Joshua Heschel, Between God and Man (New York: The Free Press, 1965), 201. 80 Ibid., 200. See also 198-200; Greenberg, Collected Writings, vol. 9, 42; ibid., vol. 11, 206. 81 Greenberg, Collected Writings, vol. 11, 202. 82 Ibid., vol. 9, 57. 78

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philosophy supposed to trace the facts and decode them or is it supposed to reconstitute them? Philips is the one who referred to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy as having a defined role: “Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.”83 Philips assumed that prayer turns to God because that is the basic practice he encountered. In Hebrew literature, however, another view is salient, stating that prayer does not necessarily address God.84 If we assume that both the prayer that addresses God and the prayer that does not are part of the same language game, we must find their common foundations. The starting point must be the distinction between prayer, even without an object, and other human practices. Aware of various types of prayer, Gordon Allport draws attention to reflective prayer and refers us to Richard Cabot, who views this prayer as a moment of unification in our fragmented lives.85 Cabot points to moments in our lives when we grasp the whole of our being. In these situations, we turn “from part to whole,” and those moments are “near to prayer.”86 If no distinction is discernible between prayer and a cognitive activity of self-reflection, what is left of reflective prayer? In what way is it indeed prayer? These questions lead to the conclusion that reflective prayer includes a further element, beyond the cognitive intellectual one. It perceives human existence beyond the subject-object relationship: worshippers are not subjects who turn their lives into objects of scrutiny. Every prayer, including reflective prayer, has a deep dimension of existentialist, non-cognitive focus on the totality of human existence. Prayer includes elements of passion, fear, and the will to transcend existence as given. It strives for what is beyond. These characteristics will now be at the center of the discussion, which will seek to place all prayers, even those that lack a divine object, within a phenomenological context. Prayer as self-expression or as an affirmation of existence on the one hand, and traditional prayer on the other, may plausibly be assumed to have a common depth construct: the transcendence of immediate existence. This transcendence has two sides: people judge and evaluate their 83

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 84 (124). This approach is also represented in philosophical literature, and Brümer called it “therapeutic meditation.” See Brümer, What Are We Doing When We Pray, 16-22. I cannot accept the term “therapeutic meditation” because it misses the meaning of prayer without God and turns it into a phenomenon that is merely psychological. 85 Gordon W. Allport, The Individual and His Religion: A Psychological Interpretation (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 133. 86 Richard C. Cabot, What Men Live By: Work, Play, Love, Worship (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 275-276. 84

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lives, pointing out what is found in them and what is missing from them, but they do so from the new perspective of prayer. Samson Raphael Hirsch considered this characteristic of prayer from a classic religious perspective: Hithpallel, from which “tefillah” is derived, originally meant to deliver an opinion about oneself, to judge oneself—or an inner attempt at so doing, such as the hithpa’el form of the Hebrew verb frequently denotes. In other words, an attempt to gain a true judgment of oneself. Thus it denotes to step out of active life in order to attempt to gain a true judgment about oneself, that is, about one’s ego, about one’s relationship to God and the world, and of God and the world to oneself. It strives to infuse mind and heart with the power of such judgment as will direct both anew to active life—purified, sublimated, strengthened. The procedure of arousing such self-judgment is called “tefillah.” In English we call “tefillah” prayer, but this word only incompletely expresses the concept, for “to pray,” i.e., to ask for something, is only a minor section of tefillah.87

But prayer is not only self-judgment. In prayer, worshippers express an expectation. Their transcendence from present concrete reality locates them in a future space, from which they return to the present. Both in prayer to God and in expressive prayer, individuals leave their current situation, but not absolutely, since they remain within their bodies while their souls are in the reality for which they pray. In this sense, then, to pray means to challenge the necessity of reality while acknowledging the primacy of possibility, that is, the ability to transcend the given as the constitutive datum of reality. An initial expression of this position is found in the Talmud (TB Berakhot 10a): “Even if a sharp sword rests on a man’s neck, he should not desist from prayer, as it says, ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him’ (Job 13:15).” The starting premise of the talmudic discourse is that overriding reality, whose transcendence is beyond human powers, is an act of God. Many centuries later, Kierkegaard offers a radical formulation of this insight: “To pray is also to breathe, and possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing.”88 This is also the view of Feuerbach, who, as noted, held that prayer expresses a refusal to accept the necessity of nature. 87

Samson Raphael Hirsch, Horeb: A Philosophy of Jewish Laws and Observances, trans. I. Grunfeld (London: Soncino Press, 1962), 472. 88 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 40.

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Contrary to Feuerbach, however, Kierkegaard was a believer who, like the rabbis, held that God could transcend necessary reality.89 Yet this perception cannot mask prayer’s essential foundation: prayer is an act of transcendence beyond coerced factuality, of release from the rule of the given, a recognition of possibility, of which actual reality is only one manifestation. Without the recognition of possibility, of the power of expectation and of self-judgment, prayer would lack all meaning. Ultimately, the two types of prayer share one basic meaning: prayer changes human existence. Even a religious thinker such as Kierkegaard, who assumed that the addressee—God—is necessary for prayer, identified its existentialist meaning: “The prayer does not change God, but it changes the one who offers it.”90 This claim states that, through prayer, humans expose themselves and their hidden inner world. In Kierkegaard’s words: “Much that you are able to keep hidden in darkness, you first get to know by your opening it to the knowledge of the all-knowing One.”91 Heschel, who, as noted, viewed prayer as an expression of the human standing before God, returned to these insights in Kierkegaard’s wake: Prayer clarifies our hope and intentions. It helps us discover our true aspirations. . . . It is an act of self–purification. . . . It gives us the opportunity to be honest, to say what we believe, and to stand for what we say. . . . Prayer teaches us what to aspire to. . . . Prayer is the essence of spiritual living.92

From a non-religious perspective, Lispector suggests a similar view. In The Hour of the Star, the protagonist notes: I can remember a time when I used to pray in order to kindle my spirit: movement is spirit. Prayer was a means of confronting myself in silence away from the gaze of others. As I prayed I emptied my soul—and this emptiness is everything that I can ever hope to possess. 89

See ibid. A comparison between Kierkegaard and R. Nahman of Bratslav may shed further light on this question. R. Nahman held that prayer, like faith, transcends nature. Like Kierkegaard, he assumed that the meaning of this transcendence becomes manifest in the power to change nature, and he says: “Faith is synonymous with prayer . . . and prayer is above nature. For nature is necessary and prayer can change nature’s course” (Likutey Moharan, 7, 8. See also ibid., 9, 12). Kierkegaard and R. Nahman, as believers, assumed that transcending nature, even against natural law, is indeed possible, whereas Feuerbach merely characterized the basic disposition of worshippers—their assumption that possibility can overcome nature. 90 Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing, trans. Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), 51. 91 Ibid. 92 Heschel, Between God and Man, 198.

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Apart from this, there is nothing. But emptiness, too, has its value and somehow resembles abundance.93

In a Hegelian tone, Lispector states, “movement is spirit.” The fact that this movement is concretized in prayer could lead one to conclude that the movement is directed outward, precisely as the subject’s prayer turns to God. At this point, however, Lispector’s stance becomes clear: the movement turns inward because, through prayer, humans turn to themselves. This activity, like prayer, is not necessarily reflective; it is above all activity. Hence, Lispector describes it as “a means of confronting myself in silence away from the gaze of others.” In this inward movement, one does not find one’s authentic “self ” but the emptiness of human existence embodying the “mystery”94 of human life, which is always inexhaustible. Prayer, then, leads to the self as an undeciphered possibility. Its meaning is as an experience focused on human life rather than on the encounter with God.95 These texts, as well as many others,96 clearly attest to a widespread view of prayer as self-exposure and self-molding, through which we constitute our attitude toward ourselves and the world, and, for believers, also toward God.97 The controversy between believers and non-believers does not detract from this basic characterization of prayer, which also applies to prayer without an addressee. Beyond this structural similarity, one can hardly ignore the religious legacy. Those who pray after the death of God return to the language of prayer that is available and reinterpret it in light of the new networks of meaning in their lives, wherein each one of them is the sovereign “creator,” as in Schlonsky’s poetic formulation above.

93 Lispector, The Hour of the Star, 14. 94 Ibid. 95

See also p. 12 above on Elie Wiesel, “Prayer and Modern Man,” in Prayer in Judaism: Continuity and Change, ed. Gabriel H. Cohn and Harold Fisch (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996), 3, and Greenberg, Collected Works, vol. 1, 155. 96 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), vol. 1, 126-127, and vol. 3, 191-193; Jean-Louis Chrétien, “The Wounded Word: The Phenomenology of Prayer,” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, ed. Dominique Janicaud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 153, and his commentary on Aquinas. See also Allport, The Individual and His Religion, 133-135. 97 See also Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba, eds., The Phenomenology of Prayer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), particularly Norman Wirzba, “Attention and Responsibility: The Work of Prayer,” 89.

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Grappling with the Addressee Problem

Expressive or ontological prayer is prayer without an addressee and, consequently, a radical expression of the “death of God” idea. Hebrew literature, however, offers another meaning of prayer as well. Like traditional prayer, this type too has an addressee—God. But contrary to traditional prayer, which assumes the existence of God, prayer after the death of God turns God’s unconditioned existence into a question. In Literature or Life, Jorge Semprún describes the final moments of his teacher Maurice Halbwachs in Buchenwald. Semprún finds himself in a tension between “not knowing whether I might call upon some god to accompany Halbwachs“1 on the one hand, and the understanding that the divine addressee is not a sure datum on the other, but still wondering whether to address a plea to him. Semprún goes on to describes his personal stance: against the doubt about the divine being as a “datum,” the certainty about “the need for a prayer”2 began to emerge. This need forced Semprún to pray in the way familiar to him, that is, to recite poetry: “trying to control my voice and pitch it properly despite the lump in my throat, I recited a few lines by Baudelaire.”3 The primordiality of prayer thus touches on the problem of the addressee rather than the certainty of its existence. Semprún assumes that prayer has some kind of divine object. This fact, however, not only fails to challenge prayer’s primordial quality, but in fact intensifies it: the primordial certainty is the necessity of prayer and the addressee becomes “some god” that has lost its primal status. This approach, which Semprún conveys with his usual succinctness and eloquence, resonates strongly in Hebrew literature. Abraham Schlonsky, whose poems were discussed above, poses this question in clear terms: “I called you—is it because you are/or for fear of being without you?”4 The poet knows that, through the act of prayer, 1

Jorge Semprún, Literature or Life, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Viking, 1997), 22.

3

Ibid., 22-23. Abraham Schlonsky, “I Called You,” in The Complete Collection of Abraham Schlonsky’s Poems in Six Volumes, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 2002), 158 [Heb].

2 Ibid. 4

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individuals create a relationship with God. He does not know, however, whether this God exists as such, independently of the worshipper, or whether he comes into being through human prayer. He recurrently declares, “You are—because of my passion for you./ I am the one who said: Let there be he!”5 Humans, then, create the God they pray to by addressing their prayers to him. The worshipper after the death of God is well aware that the subject takes precedence—if God exists, his existence is contingent on humans addressing him. But worshippers cannot be liberated from the onus of the question about God’s ontological status. The primordiality of prayer, which they discover after the death of God, raises the matter about God’s existence as an open question. Whatever the answer, God has already lost his unique-traditional status to the humans who place him within their world. In Chapter Three, I cited Yehuda Amichai as assuming that prayer is primordial and unconditioned by God: “I declare with perfect faith/ that prayer preceded God.”6 And yet, he does not entirely detach prayer from God, since he adds: Prayer created God.  God created human beings,  human beings create prayers  that create the God that creates human beings.7

According to Amichai, prayer is an intentional act—it requires an object. But this object is not transcendent. Prayer does not attest to the existence of God—it creates God by addressing him. Contrary to the ontological view, which had assumed that the religious experience was a testimony to the presence of the transcendent, Amichai makes do with the manifestation itself. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals the complexity of Amichai’s stance: even if prayers create God, through the event of prayer the object—God—is released from any dependence on humans. Humans may grant independent existence to the object of their intention, going so far as creating a circularity wherein creator and creature exchange places: humans create the God of prayer, who becomes independent from them and is perceived as their creator, and vice-versa. Be it as it may, the prayer addresses God, 5

Ibid., “The Last Verse,” 239. Yehuda Amichai, “Gods Change, Prayers Are Here To Stay,” in Open Closed Open, trans. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld (New York: Harcourt, 2000), 40. 7 Ibid. 6

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even if this God has lost the independent ontological status it had enjoyed in religious tradition. Raphael Eliaz suggests an approach similar to that of Amichai. He adopts the modern view of humans as subjects who constitute their objects, and these objects are therefore dependent on them. In this outlook, the death of God means the recognition that God no longer enjoys independent ontological status. Indeed, we each create our own gods: Every day a new god is born in me. He carves paths to my moons for me, and times for the fading of my stars. ... Every day a new god is born in me so as to share with him a mystery, so as to die with him and be reborn with him bright, strong, shooting arrows at the wind.8

The god of Eliaz cannot live without humans; he is born and dies with them. And yet, like Amichai, the god created by humans assumes a quasi-independent status: “He carves paths to my moons for me,/ and times for the fading of my stars.” What is the nature of this God? Why is such a God, who lives and dies with us, born in us? How does this special dialectic develop, whereby God is created by humans and also guides them? Eliaz, like Amichai, does not answer this question, since their concern is not a reductionist analysis but a horizontal description of the phenomenon: this is the human creature—a being that begets a God. Hence, Eliaz can go back to write “The Apostate’s Prayer,” which I discussed above. The difference between believers and apostates is not exhausted by the believer’s faith in the existence of a divine being, which the apostate denies. Amichai and Eliaz offer a complex approach: both believers and apostates address God, except that the believers’ God does not depend on them and is a powerful transcendent entity, whereas the apostates’ God is surprisingly similar to humans themselves. Both believers and apostates, however, often turn to God. The differences between them are not related to the act of prayer but to the standing of the being addressed in the prayer. 8

Raphael Eliaz, “Every Day a New God Is Born in Me,” in Poems, vol. 1, The Jewelry Box (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1977), 118 [Heb].

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For Abraham Halfi too, prayer is not contingent on the existence of a transcendent God but on the existence of an intentional object, which it addresses. Unlike Amichai and Eliaz, who seek to preserve God as the intentional object of prayer, Halfi describes a situation where prayer can address the void, an object without any attributes or characteristics. In a deep sense, Halfi’s prayer turns to x—the emptiness or absence of the one who should have been but is not. God is a being who is expected but not present. In Chapter Three, I discussed a Halfi poem that concludes with the epistemic experience of ignorance—God is not known—“Blessed art thou, I don’t know who,” and another that translates this experience into ontological terms: “Shed your exalted non-being/ upon the dream of those who seek you day and night.”9 This characterization of God as a non-being is familiar and well known in religious and mystical approaches. The divine being is called “nothing,” denoting our epistemic inability to reach and know God. The divine nothing does not denote absence, negation, or the lack of God, since God, rather than a lacking or missing being, is above any possible lack. The nothing is the manifestation of God’s absolute transcendence and infinity. Out of a deep religious intuition, Hillel Zeitlin wrote, “The nothing is the wondrous moment in creation, the moment that you cannot call by any name and you therefore call it—nothing.”10 In kabbalistic literature, the nothing concept is indeed perceived as “the highest level of the divine hypostasis,“11 and is therefore identified with the sefirah of keter.12 This characterization denotes the human inability to turn God into a familiar object—God is wholly transcendent.13 Surprisingly, the new ontological discourse also resorts to the nothing concept and, in Heidegger’s thought, nothing is the manifestation of the Being itself. A deep analysis of Heidegger’s complex approach exceeds the scope of the current discussion, so I will confine myself to a brief review of this idea. Heidegger draws a sharp distinction between entities in the world and the Being itself. We know the entities in the world—tables, chairs, and so forth. All objects become objects of our knowledge. How do we  9

Abraham Halfi, “An Apostate’s Prayers,” in Poems, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1988), 52 [Heb]. Hillel Zeitlin, On Hasidism and Kabbalah (Tel Aviv: Yavneh, 2003), 12 [Heb]. 11 Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism: Quietistic Elements in Eighteenth Century Hasidic Thought, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Princeton and Jerusalem: Princeton University Press and Magnes Press, 1993), 72. 12 Rachel Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent to God: The Kabbalistic Theosophy of Habad Hasidism, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 25-26 and references in note 3. See also Joseph Ben-Shlomo, The Mystical Theology of Moses Cordovero (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1965), 204-213 [Heb]. 13 See Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Rosenzweig: Understanding the Sick and the Healthy—A View of World, Man and God, ed. N. N. Glatzer (New York: The Noonday Press, 1953), 55-66. 10

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know the Being itself, what is the moment—if any—when the Being itself is revealed and how is it revealed? According to Heidegger, the pure Being is disclosed in the anxiety mood. In Being and Time, he discusses at length the distinction between anxiety and fear.14 In principle, fear is invariably of some object in the world. By contrast, the experience of anxiety isolates us and deprives us of the guarantees and assurances we draw from reality. Objects in the world no longer provide any protection, and we discover that the world is meaningless.15 Anxiety is the moment when we discover the pure Being, the one that is not made up of entities in the world,16 since these entities dissolve in the face of anxiety. This mood enables humans to experience the basic nothing or, in Heidegger’s terms, “anxiety reveals the nothing.”17 The nothing, then, “is the complete negation of the totality of beings.”18 But the nothing does not denote negation and absence. Rather, “we assert that the nothing is more original than the ‘not’ and negation.”19 This primordiality is based precisely on the fact that the primal nothing is an expression of a Being that is neither predicative nor concrete. We have no way of speaking or thinking about the original nothing because, in anxiety, speech collapses.20 At some moments in our lives, however, we do experience this nothing. The nothing, then, is the Being that is absolutely different from any other and yet, the nothing is not nullity.21 Because our lives are organized around objects, we forget the Being itself, and only when we overcome our inclination to present it in terms characteristic of objects or in the language of objects, can we experience the Being as such.22 Simone Weil applied Heidegger’s insights regarding God and wrote, “To pray to God, not only in secret as far as men are concerned, but with the thought that God does not exist.”23 This tradition is further developed in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, which emphasizes God’s absolute otherness. This otherness cannot 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 231-233. Ibid., 231. Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 102-103. Ibid., 103. Ibid., 100 Ibid., 99. Ibid., 103. See also John Deely, The Tradition via Heidegger (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 29-38. Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt: Kostermann, 1950), 104. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952), 66.

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be contained within the transcendental categories themselves because, when consciousness relates to every object, it makes the other identical to one constituted by the self. Levinas attacks philosophy’s constant attempt to contain the transcendent and, through the action of consciousness, make it immanent: From its infancy philosophy has been struck with a horror of the other that remains other—with an insurmountable allergy. It is for this reason that it is essentially a philosophy of being, that the comprehension of being is its last word, and the fundamental structure of man. It is for this reason that it becomes philosophy of immanence and of autonomy, or atheism. The God of the philosophers, from Aristotle to Leibniz, by way of the God of the scholastics, is a god adequate to reason, a comprehended god who could not trouble the autonomy of consciousness.24

In contrast with this despotic attitude of consciousness toward otherness, Levinas speaks of an attitude of responsiveness to the Being and to otherness, an attitude that does not deny the absolute otherness of transcendence. From a religious perspective, this attitude comes forth in the change from a disposition of control and knowledge to one where humans say: Here I am under your gaze, obliged to you, your servant. . . . “I believe in God.” The religious discourse prior to all religious discourse is not dialogue. It is the “here I am,” said to the neighbor to whom I am given over.25

Just like the other, God is not an object of knowledge but a transcendent, other Being, whose “trace” I find in the world. Rather than a sign we can follow to disclose the transcendent, this trace is the presence of an absence: “A trace does not effect a relationship with what would be less than being, but obliges with regard to the infinite, the absolutely other.”26 The trace is thus manifest in one’s stance as “witnesses” to the presence of the transcendent: “I am the witnessing, or the trace, or the glory of the Infinite.”27 The presence of the other, of the transcendent in our world, is 24

Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” trans. A. Lingis, in Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 346. 25 Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 75. 26 Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” 357. 27 Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, 75.

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thus the movement toward the other without striving to contain it in the “identical” to the self. Levinas held that this is the deep meaning of prayer, which is “a movement without return of the same to the other,” a movement he would like to describe with a Greek term which in its primary meaning indicates the exercise of an office that is not only completely gratuitous, but that requires, on the part of him that exercises it, a putting out of funds at a loss. I would like to fix it with the term “liturgy.”28

Henceforth, prayer turns to the other, who remains other. Although Levinas does not resort to Weil’s charged terminology and does not describe God as “non-existent,” both of them agree on the notion of God’s absolute transcendence. My critique of this approach is presented in Chapter Seven. In the context of the current discussion, I will emphasize that the views of Weil and Levinas are represented mainly in the Protestant tradition, which views God’s transcendence as absolute. By contrast, Jewish tradition is based on the paradox of a combination between God’s absolute transcendence and his immanent presence in the world. An illuminating expression of this trend appears in the Palestinian Talmud.29 After a discussion of the tension between God’s holiness and otherness on the one hand and his immanent presence on the other, the discussion is summed up as follows: “The Holy One, blessed be He, appears to be far but there is no one closer.”30 An illuminating expression of this paradox is suggested by R. Hayyim Volozhiner. In his view, representing God as infinity does not convey God’s essence but only “our grasp of him through the powers emanating from him when he chooses to join the worlds . . . because, in truth, he himself, may his name be blessed, has no end and no beginning.”31 And yet, despite this transcendence, humans sense God’s immanence. This immanence is not only a result of human epistemic limitations but reflects God’s movement toward humans after leaving his transcendent concealment: “And in 28

Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” 349-350.

29 PT Berakhot 9a, 62b-63a. 30

Ibid., 63a. See also Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, trans. Israel Abrahams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 66-79; Harold Fisch, Divine Contradictions: Judaism and the Language of Paradox (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2001), 11-16 [Heb]. 31 R. Hayyim Volozhiner, The Soul of Life (Vilnius, 1874), Part 2, ch. 2, 20b [Heb].

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our limited grasp, we give him names and attributes and titles as we find in the Torah and in every type of prayer, all because God, may he be blessed, joins the worlds and, with the powers of creation, imbues them with life as he wishes.”32 Rather than reflecting the human inability to grasp divine transcendence, then, the divine attributes convey the action of God, who appears in the world in a way that humans can absorb. Not only does God leave a “trace” in the world but he is also present in it. This presence is concretized in the pattern of the blessings for the commandments, which are all formulated in second person: “Blessed are thou,” and end in third person, ”who sanctified us . . . and commanded us.” This pattern, according to R. Hayyim Volozhiner, conveys the paradox of immanent presence and transcendent concealment: The members of the Great Assembly therefore set the form of all blessings for the commandments in second and third person. They begin “Blessed art thou,” in second person, and conclude, “who sanctified us, etc. and commanded us,” in third person, because by his choosing to join the worlds, may he be blessed, we acquire some grasp of him.33

Ephraim Urbach sums up his discussion on this subject with the following determination: “His glory, therefore, fills the world, yet it is not, in consequence, a whit less sublime and wonderful.”34 Prayer, then, addresses the holy God but also acknowledges his closeness to those who call him truly, healing the sick, loosening the bound, and bringing peace into his worlds. This conceptual framework allows for reconsideration of Abraham Halfi’s poem. Halfi calls God “nothing,” ostensibly endorsing the approaches of Weil and Levinas, but he actually means to diminish God. Halfi calls God “the eternal who is not,”35 “a poor God . . . almost a man,”36 and “God skin.”37 The divine nothing is not a manifestation of his absolute otherness. Rather, the nothing denotes the void that God left in the world after his death; the divine nothing is an expectation of presence, of immanence, which remains unanswered. Instead of an immanent presence, we have emptiness and absence denoting the void left by God’s death. In this sense, Halfi 32 Ibid. 33

Ibid., 21a.

34 Urbach, The Sages, 38. 35

Abraham Halfi, “To the Anonymous God,” in Poems, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987), 72 [Heb]. See also ibid., “Untitled,” vol. 2, 15 (untitled). 36 Halfi, “To the Anonymous God,” 71. 37 Ibid., “Untitled,” 104.

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formulates a typical Jewish position, stating that God is meant to be both transcendent and immanent. Now, however, God remains enclosed in the realm of his transcendence and is not immanently present in the world—he has departed. From Halfi’s Jewish perspective, this is both a problem and a source of distress, the void of an unanswered call. But this void suffices for the continuation of the practice of prayer. Hence, Halfi can say: This is the alley no-hand-opens the-gates-of-heaven. And here an ear-not-hearing prayer ... This is the alley there-is- no-our-God. Here the non-sayers of prayer until the soul leaves their body see the birth of the new moon the unborn.38

“Until the soul leaves their body” hints at the meaning the rabbis poured into the “Hear O Israel” morning and evening prayers. The Mishnah interprets the verse that opens this prayer—“Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One”—as “assuming the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven.”39 The obligation to accept the yoke of the heavenly kingdom demands a readiness to give up one’s soul for one’s faith. R. Akiva formulates the obligation of this prayer to love God with all one’s soul: “With all your soul—even if he takes away your soul.”40 The Talmud tells us that not only did R. Akiva issue this instruction, he also behaved accordingly. He was a witness to faith. When the Romans took him out for execution, he was accepting the yoke of the heavenly kingdom. His disciples said to him, “Our teacher, even to this point?” He said to them, “All my days I have been troubled by this verse, ‘with all your soul,’ [which I interpret] ‘even if he takes away your soul.’ I said, ‘When shall I have the opportunity of fulfilling this? Now that I have the opportunity shall I not fulfill it?” He prolonged the word ehad [One] until he died saying it.41 38

Halfi, “This is the Alley,” in Poems, vol. 2, 25. See M. Berakhot 2:2. 40 TB Berakhot 61b. 41 Ibid. 39

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The soul leaving during prayer is thus the supreme expression of devotion, when the believer is ready to sacrifice his life in the name of his faith in God. In Halfi’s poem, however, the soul leaving the body is not a manifestation of faith, because this passion does not find its divine object— “no-hand-opens-the-gates-of-heaven.” The soul leaving is the quintessential expression of an infinite passion that remains unanswered, until it consumes the body. The prayer said in silence by the “non-sayers” is the purest expression of this endless passion, which is not consumed by the absence of God. Indeed, the absence actually strengthens it. The worshippers’ experience after the death of God is not that their prayer has been directed to the wrong object. The object is actually right— it is God, who should have been and is not. Ontologically, God’s absence means the presence of absence, which implies an escalating experience of lack. Contrary to the believers who address God as nothing, Halfi addresses God as one who was and now is nothing. And yet, the prayer goes on and does not end: “I will pray,/ I will have my say/ to the one who is-and-is-not with me.”42 The prayer is said—that is a basic fact, reflecting its primal quality. God is there too—and that is a metaphysical fact—but is not “with me”—and that is already the existential experience of the death of God, an experience reflecting both God’s departure from the world and the yearning for him. Henceforth, God maybe is and “maybe is not.”43 This complex experience at times evokes the poet’s demand from God: My God, God of my life! Will you cease loving Will you not lend me a divine ear To listen? ... Shall I speak? 44

The experience of the poem, like the experience of prayer, is one of d ­ istress, a constant distress of presence and absence. Halfi, who views prayer as a primal, non-reductive, pre-objective element, experiences the moment when prayer breaks forth from human distress. His prayer addresses 42

Halfi, “With the Wandering Bird,” in Poems, vol. 1, 182. Ibid., “Untitled,” 325. 44 Halfi, “Untitled,” in Poems, vol. 2, 65. 43

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God—“Blessed art thou, I don’t know who”45—but this God is not there. The pattern of Halfi’s blessing contrasts with the pattern of the traditional prayer. Someone reciting the traditional blessing, “Blessed art thou,” is well aware of who is the addressee. Prayer, any prayer, and certainly a blessing, is the “acceptance of the thou.”46 A specific halakhic instruction preceding prayer is intentionality. Yaakov Emden, in his prayer book Beth Yaakov, summed up the accepted halakhic tradition on this matter: Thought and intention. If intention is split between outer and inner, he [the worshipper] should tie one to the other. First, he should think about the meaning of the words with all the power of his reason and understanding and cleave in his thought to his king, from whom he will draw his hope and expectation, and who is able to fulfill his request. He should therefore first necessarily pay attention to the one he stands before, the creator of his spirit and his soul—all there is, is his doing . . . And if indeed his greatness is unsearchable and his exaltedness knows no bounds, wherever is his greatness is also his humility, taking care of the despised and forever showing them compassion, because all are the work of his hands.47

Yet, this dimension of endorsing God’s presence is precisely what is missing in Halfi. The phrase “blessed art thou” in the poem, rather than conveying recognition of his king’s presence in the universe, is an expectation of presence, of going out toward a presence. But this expectation is frustrated because the one present is not the hidden God renouncing his hiding. The presence is that of an absent god, a void the worshipper does not know what it contains, if anything. This situation of absent presence leads the reflective self to the subject as the stable anchor of existence. Halfi, like Amichai, writes, “Sovereign of the thousands and thousands of universes/what’s between you and me tonight?/ To me it seems that only I am,/ and there is no other.”48 The key words here are “to me it seems.” The poem does not offer absolute certainty and, just as Schlonsky remains with this question, so does Halfi, except that Halfi’s basic experience is one 45

Halfi, “A Miracle of Darkness,” in Poems, vol. 2, 113. See also p. above. R. Tsadok Hacohen of Lublin, Tsidkat ha-Tsaddik (Jerusalem: Machon le-Hotsa’at Sefarim, 1968), 21, Sections 6, 8 [Heb]. 47 R. Yaakov Emden, Siddur Beth Yaakov (Lemberg, 1904), Author’s introduction, 6, b [Heb]. 48 Halfi, “Untitled,” in Poems, vol. 1, 158. 46

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of absence or emptiness. Rather than ending prayer, absence intensifies it. Prayer is henceforth a search for the divine fullness missing from existence. Halfi’s formulation defines the human individual as a homo religiosus, whose yearning is often driven by an ongoing void. Prayer is a profound expression of religious passion representing the constant search for what is beyond us, which is exposed as a void. Halfi gave unique expression to this experience in the poem “The Dream of Your Traces”: “I sought you and did not find you./ I sought you enclosed in a cloud./ . . . I saw the dream of your traces in the garden.// . . . I sought you in the nights and the wind/ I sought you in the heat/ and the dew.”49 The immutable point is the constant search, the thirst for God. In Leah Goldberg’s words: “My prayers wander in the garden of silence/. . ./ and my soul yearns to kiss/ the ashes of heaven.”50 Even if the prayers “wander” and find no address, they reflect the yearning for heaven or, more precisely, for the “ashes of heaven.” The death of God cannot silence the yearning and the passion for him, or what is left of him—ashes. Indeed, God neither does nor can reveal himself again, and what is exposed instead is a void denoting the place of the absent God. Prayer is the depth expression of this yearning, which is doomed to remain unanswered, since God has long been dead. This absence is at times distressing, and Halfi can therefore write, “The end of the flying prayers,/ like birds that flee/ to heaven./ An end to prayers.”51 The status of prayers is independent, as noted, so that God’s absence cannot hurt them. Precisely in these circumstances, the poet prays for the death of prayer, but this prayer is itself a recurring testimony of its autonomous power and strength. Even if prayer has an addressee, it is not the addressee that constitutes its meaning. Indeed, the absent addressee reveals anew the power of self-transcendence and of the passion for God. This element, rather than the experience of God’s presence, is the primal one. Asher Reich’s poetry lucidly conveys the death of God experience. In the previous chapter, my references to Reich’s poems focused on their perception of prayer as expressive, whereas the world picture he traces in the poem below resembles Halfi’s: Lord of the universe who went away never to return and left behind 49

Abraham Halfi, “The Dream of Your Traces,” in Poems, vol. 1, 118-119. See also Zvi Luz, The Poetry of Abraham Halfi (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1994), 19-44 [Heb]. 50 Leah Goldberg, “Twilight in the Window,” in Poems, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 2007), 80 [Heb]. 51 Halfi, “Untitled,” in Poems, vol. 2, 58.

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Holocaust and wars. And today, when I’m older than my father, distant from his prayers, I still await my return from the distant dreams and know that warblers also sing: Lord of the universe, where are you?52

The “Lord of the universe” prayer is part of the morning service, and its opening line immortalizes the kingdom of God—“Lord of the universe who reigned” [Adon olam asher malakh]. But in the opening line of Reich’s poem, which rhymes with that of the prayer, God is demoted: “Lord of the universe who went away” [Adon olam asher halakh]. The poet also hints at the reason for God’s exile from the world—“Holocaust and wars.” A world where evil prevails is not God’s kingdom. The theodicy problem indeed was and is one of the deepest reasons for the death of God in modern culture. A reality where God is dead marks for Reich, and for many other Hebrew writers, the distance from his father’s generation—he is far from his father precisely because he is far from his father’s prayers. Nevertheless, he knows that the entire cosmos yearns for God, to the point that “warblers also sing: Lord of the universe,/ where are you?” God’s death has not removed he passion for him, manifest in poetry and prayer. Halfi and Reich could definitely have agreed with Franz Kafka, who writes in his diary, “Longing for the country? It isn’t certain. The country calls forth the longing, the infinite longing.”53 Prayer is an expression of yearning for the missing being, the being that should have been and is not. Prayer can therefore address God and acknowledge that we stand before him, but can also be a passion for God that remains unsatisfied, precisely because God is dead. The death of God cannot kill the metaphysical passion for his absent being. This context enables us to explicate a paradoxical phenomenon: believers are actually the ones who often have difficulty praying. They may turn to their God with the request: “O Lord, open my lips: and my mouth shall rehearse thy praise”; faced with God, the believers’ lips are muted and they are silent—they pray for prayer. Franz Rosenzweig described this dimension of religious life with great sensitivity: The soul prays with the words of the Psalm: “Let not my prayer nor your love withdraw from me.” It prays for the ability to pray, which is 52

53

Asher Reich, “Instead of Memorial Day,” in The Order of the Poems (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1986), 28 [Heb]. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), 206.

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already given to it with the certitude of divine love. That it can pray is the greatest gift given to it in Revelation.54

In Rosenzweig’s view, as in the perception of many thinkers and believers that I consider in Chapter Seven, prayer is a gift of God. It does not reflect the individual self. Before God, we are dust and ashes, small creatures in the infinite realm of existence awaiting God’s gift and, without it, we do not find the courage to speak. Prayer is no longer obvious, it is not an immanent inner movement, a pouring of the soul, but a moment of divine grace—God addresses humans, reveals himself to them, and enables them to pray. Prayer, then, is evidence of a dialogue, of a divine revelation that we respond to.55 Even someone who does not accept all of Rosenzweig’s theological assumptions could express a similar view, as does Leah Goldberg in one of her better known poems: Teach me, my God, to bless and pray Over the withered leaf’s secret, the ready fruit’s grace, ... Teach my lips blessing and song of praise, When your days are renewed morning and night Lest my day be today like all the yesterdays Lest my day be for me an unthinking haze.56

Goldberg, who in other poems assumes the death of God, in this poem asks God to teach her how to pray. She goes back to the religious formulation: “O Lord, open my lips” (Psalms 51:17), which is recited before the Amidah prayer that is the center of the religious service. She does not address God in order to praise him, but to convey what is special in human existence. The prayer for a prayer is thus a prayer for human existence in all its manifestations. In other words, without God to teach us, we do not know how to thank God and affirm his existence. But what emerges from this review of Hebrew literature is that those for whom God is dead are the very ones who know how to pray; they are the ones who find themselves praying, without needing to pray for a prayer. For them, prayer is primordial and unwavering. This wondrous 54

Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 198. 55 Yehoyada Amir, Reason out of Faith: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004), 198-202 [Heb]. 56 Leah Goldberg, Selected Poetry and Drama, trans. Rachel Tzvia Back (New Milford: Toby Press, 2005), 97.

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reversal between believers and non-believers explicates how far believers are at times from themselves as praying beings, who do not need to pray for prayer because it is deeply rooted in their very existence, in their very standing within and vis-à-vis existence. Yosef Haim Brenner or Halfi do not pray for prayer, they pray. They recite the prayer and do not withdraw into a request for prayer. Worshippers whose God is dead do not pray as atheists or even as apostates, they simply pray, without needing to justify, or explain, or beg for the ability to pray. They actually experience themselves as praying beings. The experience of the primordiality of prayer releases them from the need for justifications and enables them to perform. By contrast, believers who first seek the addressee of their prayer are the ones who may withdraw. Facing the holiness of God and the anxiety it evokes, their lips are muted and they pray for prayer or sense the gift in the event of prayer. Are not believers the ones who sometimes lose their ability to pray? Is prayer, which is “so pure” in Shalom’s words, a privilege reserved for those whose god is dead? We need not endorse a religious stance stating that humans withdraw. A religious stance can also rely on the experience of prayer’s primacy and the immediacy of the connection with God. The God to whom believers refer as father is one to whom humans can relate directly and unhesitatingly, as they do to a close friend, as an I vis-à-vis a thou. This stance, found in Hasidism for example, is well known and familiar. This immediacy in prayer, however, rather than emerging vis-à-vis a close God, expresses a primordial human stance that is actually exposed in the prayers of those whose God is dead. Their prayers, if they do take place, at times convey a sense of coercion pointing to their roots at the depths of the soul. This prayer may have no addressee and may express the human passion for an addressee who was and is no longer. Rather than preventing prayer, then, this absence actually intensifies it—prayer shines from inside.

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Reconstructing the “Death of God” Moment

The last two chapters considered the meaning of prayer in a world where God is already dead, and focused on the aftermath. The discourse on prayer dealt with a world after faith rather than with the rejection of faith or its loss. Views conveying this experience covered a realm extending from prayers without an addressee to prayers where the nature of the addressee created the discourse about prayer and prayer itself. In this chapter, I deal with approaches reconstructing the moment of God’s death. These approaches still bear the memory of a world wherein God had been alive—a tormenting memory for worshippers who know they are living at a time when God is already dead. Prayer thus carries the memory of the traditional version, but continues to exist even without God. It reconstructs the moment of God’s death and bears the past, when God had been alive, and the present, when God is gone. The continuity of prayer could be a longing for a world where God had been present, or a testimony of continued distress, where the living prayer exists despite the certainty of God’s departure. At times, it is an expectation, a search for the renewal of the divine presence. At other times, it represents the memory of the tradition or the pain of its loss. In all these manifestations, prayer is the tense encounter between past and present. This encounter, rather than the question of the addressee, is the focus of the prayer discourse and of the prayer itself. Hayyim Nahman Bialik is the foremost Jewish poet for whom prayer is the tense moment of God’s presence and his departure. A religious interpretation of the death of God, as noted in Chapter Two, may view it as a manifestation of the deus absconditus or as a reflection of the human inability to make God present in the world. According to this analysis, this is a religious experience, rather than necessarily the moment of God’s death. If we consider the history of the “death of God” idea, however, God’s departure is a distinct manifestation of his death. Bialik’s poem “Alone” is a deep and tormented expression of a bond that is no longer: All gone with the wind, all swept away by the light, a new song filled with song the mornings of their lives

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and I, a tender chick, was quite forgot alone under the wing of the Divine Presence.1

This stanza gives the impression that only the poet stayed, and willingly so, under the protection of the Divine Presence [Shekhinah], while all the others abandoned it. But already in this stanza an echo resonates, attesting that the poet remained under the wings of the Shekhinah in a kind of ­forgetfulness—“And I, a tender chick, was quite forgot/ alone under the wing of the Divine Presence.” The minimization indicates that remaining was not a voluntary decision but evidence of a reality, possibly coerced upon the poet as well as the Shekhinah, wherein both find themselves enclosed within one another in their loneliness. The second stanza indeed says: Already driven from all corners, only one hidden, empty, small spot remained— the prayer house—and she hid in the shadow and I was with her in her distress.

A kind of intimacy of loneliness develops between the poet and the Shekhinah. The Shekhinah’s isolation from her believers is a feeling of weakness. The poet runs to her rescue—“and I was with her in her distress.” In the Psalms, the worshipper is the one in distress and turns to God, who responds—“he shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble” (Psalms 91:15). Now, however, it is the Shekhinah who is exhausted and in need of human support. This reversal is a decisive moment in the establishment of the new relationship with God. Sovereign individuals, who have discovered “the light,” find that not only do they depend on God but God depends on them. Up to this point, we could assume that this is a religious experience— humans and God are weaving a new relationship, a new intimacy wrapped in sorrow. But in Bialik’s poem, the discovery is a further stage in the marking of the distance between humans and God. Making God conditional on humans cannot but manifest a deep rift in their relationship. Despite the rift, however, the separation is not accompanied by victorious joy over the death of God and the human liberation that follows it. The poet sees the departure of the Shekhinah and her pain: And when my heart drew to the window, toward the light 1

Hayyim Nahman Bialik, “Alone,” in Songs from Bialik, Selected Poems of Hayyim Nahman Bialik, trans. Atar Hadari (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 23.

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and the place grew small for me beneath her wing— she hid her head in my neck and her teardrop dropped on my prayer-book page. Silently she wept on me and clung as though enclosing with her broken wing: “all gone with the wind, all flown away and I remain alone, alone . . .”

In the second and third stanzas, “alone” had described the poet, who attested “I remain alone, alone . . .,” but now it is the Shekhinah who is alone. Aloneness slowly emerges as affecting both humans and God, who remain isolated and detached. At the opening of the poem, the poet is a tender chick taking refuge under the wings of the Shekhinah. Gradually, we come to understand that the Shekhinah’s wing is broken and that she is the one seeking solace in the poet, who cannot but hear her distress: And like the end of an ancient lament and like a prayer, a plea and a fear My ear heard that quiet wept That boiling tear.

Neither the poet or his images nor the Shekhinah convey any joy. Nevertheless, the poet does not yearn for the Shekhinah’s new presence in his world. Though he cannot detach himself completely from her, he does not wish for her presence in his life either. In Jewish texts, the Shekhinah denotes the immanent aspect of the divinity, its presence in the world. In rabbinic literature, the Shekhinah accompanies the people of Israel in all their wanderings: Withersoever Israel was exiled, the Shekhinah, as it were, went into exile with them. When they went into exile to Egypt, the Shekhinah went into exile with them. . . . When they were exiled to Babylon, the Shekhinah went into exile with them. . . . When they were exiled to Elam, the Shekhinah went into exile with them.2

In The Zohar and in kabbalistic literature, the Shekhinah is perceived as the divine mother of the Jewish people.3 The Shekhinah denotes the immanent, supportive, protective divine presence. But it is precisely this immanence that burdens the poet. 2

Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, trans. Jacob Z. Lauterbach, vol. 1, Tractate Pisha (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 5709-1949), 114-115. 3 Isaiah Tishby, ed., The Wisdom of the Zohar, trans. David Goldstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 379-385.

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The poem “Alone” is not the poem of an atheist and not even the poem of an apostate. It is the poem of someone who has experienced the Shekhinah as one “fencing him in, disturbing him, preventing him from leaving her.”4 And yet, he cannot abandon her altogether; he identifies with her and with her pain, even if he is now distant from her.5 The death of God is not a liberating experience for Bialik but a torment shaping a painful relationship that comes forth in deep questions, full of defiance and disappointed expectations. The poet’s experience is that of “a faith-broken man.”6 For Nietzsche, as noted, the “death of God” is an act of liberation from dogmatism and a readiness to dare: “Finally, our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an ‘open sea.’”7 For Bialik, the “death of God” is a more complex experience, as clearly evident in the poem “Speech”: See, the multitude of night cloaks us, and darknesses enfold and now like blind men we stumble and grope; something happened and no one knows what and no one can see and none can utter if the sun rose or it set— and if it set did it set for all time. And great is the formlessness and terrible the abyss and there is no escape; and if we cry out in the darkness and pray whose ear will hear? ... and there’s nothing left on which to lean and we’re helpless and lost the way.8

The death of God leaves us in a void, a meaningless darkness. But rather than viewing this as a moment of absolute freedom that calls for joy, the poet relates to it as an experience that quashes all meaning, which is replaced by chaos. The magnitude of the destruction attests to the connection to what has been left behind. Schweid shed light on this paradoxical 4

Adi Tsemah, The Hiding Lion: Studies on Hayyim Nahman Bialik (Jerusalem: Kiriyat Sefer, 1976), 167 [Heb]. See also Malka Shaked, “On the Poetic Message in ‘Alone’ and ‘Facing the Library,’“ in Bialik: An Anthology of Critical Essays on His Work, ed. Gershon Shaked (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1974), 219-233 [Heb]. 6 Eliezer Schweid, Longing for the Fullness of Being (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1968), 54 [Heb]. 7 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 199 (emphasis in original). 8 Bialik, “Speech,” in Songs from Bialik, 101. 5

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tension: “The protest, which shifts from a surprisingly crushing pain to a rebellion against heaven, is the sole expression of his faith.”9 For Bialik, the departure of the Shekhinah is an event of vital personal significance. In an autobiographical passage, he describes his complex link with the world of tradition, a world he has fled and also longs for: “I was forced to run away from that life. But even at a distance from it, my soul sometimes yearns for the spring that was its source.”10 This tension, however, was “long ago. . . . And lo and behold, so much has changed. Life has been emptied, the Shekhinah has been expelled from all the hideouts.”11 The expulsion of the Shekhinah denotes that “this faith has already ended, cut out from my heart, and will no longer return.”12 Arieh Strauss, who analyzed the poem “Alone” in great detail, writes: “His attitude toward it [the tradition] is ambivalent, both positive and negative. Bialik sees no way of healing the rift between the people and the tradition.”13 And yet, Bialik cannot deny God’s absent presence. God’s expulsion from the world is a constitutive experience for him, and the resulting complex relationship comes forth in the standing of prayer in his poetry. The poem “Speech” raises the question of the reason for prayer: “and if we cry out in the darkness and pray/ whose ear will hear?” Should we then renounce prayer? If prayer is contingent on the presence of a divine addressee, is there any reason for continuing to pray after his departure? This question is asked—and remains unanswered—in the poem. Bialik offers at least three different answers to the question of prayer after the death of God. According to the first, there is room for prayer after God’s death as well. Prayer can be directed to another addressee, such as the woman, or develop as an expression, without an addressee. Strauss refers us to the connection between “Alone” and “Take Me in under Your Wing.”14 The opening and closing stanza of the latter poem is: Take me in under your wing, and be unto me mother and sister. and let your breast be my head’s rest

 9 Schweid, Longing for the Fullness of Being, 54. 10

Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Hidden Writings of H. N. Bialik, ed. Moshe Ungerfeld (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1971), 213 [Heb]. Ibid., 213-214. See also Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Letters of H. N. Bialik, ed. P. Lahover, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1937), 164-166 [Heb]. 12 Ibid., 166. 13 Aryeh L. Strauss, Studies in Literature (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1959), 112 [Heb]. For a detailed discussion of the poem, see ibid., 111-115. My analysis relied also on Tsemah, The Hiding Lion, 163-169. 14 Strauss, Studies in Literature, 116. 11

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home of my rejected prayers.15

The wing motif, argues Strauss, appears in both poems: in “Alone”— “under the wing”—and here—“take me in under your wing.” In “Alone,” however, the purpose is to detach from the wings of the Shekhinah, whereas in “Take Me in under Your Wing,” the poet seeks protection. The sense of security that God was supposed to have provided is shifted here to the woman, who will be mother and sister, replacing the God that has departed. But what about prayer? Will it also disappear? The poem’s stance is that prayer will remain—it is primordial and does not depend on God. True, without God, it is a rejected prayer, but it will find a new address. Strauss proceeds to clarify: The reference is specifically to a rejected prayer, as if saying, “I prayed to heaven in the past and my prayer was not accepted.” The prayers that have no “rest” now seek a new home, and this home will be “your breast.” The poet remembers the prayers of his youth, when he had sought for himself a homeland, a nest in the tradition, and failed to find it. Now he seeks peace in his beloved.16

Prayer is no longer a duty incumbent on Jewish men but rather flows ­primordially from the depths of the soul. As opposed to the Shekhinah, who answers those who address her, stands the woman at a special time—“sunset”: “At the hour of mercy, at sunset,/ list and I’ll reveal my sorrow’s root.” F. Lahover points out that, in kabbalistic writings, the sunset on the Sabbath is “the hour when will and compassion are revealed.”17 This is a special hour, when our hearts open up and the heavenly temples draw closer to earth. Now, the woman replaces heaven. The time when the heart opens up, which is the very time of prayer, has not changed, but the poet now offers his prayer to the woman. The traditional prayer becomes one of yearning and sincerity. Chapter Four discussed prayer as self-expression. For Bialik, however, self-expression deliberately replaces the traditional turn to God. Bialik is well aware of the transformation affecting prayer as he had experienced it in his youth. In Bialik’s wake, Avot Yeshurun can indeed write: True, I recite the “God of Abraham” prayer of my mother at the end of the Sabbath.18 I myself, I’m not a rock of faith. No. ... 15

Bialik, “Take Me In under Your Wing,” in Songs from Bialik, 52 (with slight amendment).

17

F. Lahover, Bialik: His Life and Work, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1964), 519-520 [Heb]. Yeshurun refers here to a women’s prayer in Yiddish recited at the end of the Sabbath, which opens with the words “Got fun Avrum.”

16 Strauss, Studies in Literature, 117. 18

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Sometimes, a man says God of Avrum and longs for a woman. It’s all for the best. It’s all for love.19

The eros in the human-God connection is now also (and perhaps only) manifest in the man-woman connection. Specifically, prayer is a longing for the eros, for unity. This longing points to the two-way movement at the basis of prayer. Prayer begins with distance—the lover is far away from love or from the beloved and prayer attempts to close this gap and reach unity. The dialectic movement of the eros can address God but, as Yeshurun sensed, it is sometimes a longing for a woman, for a primal connection within existence that will bear it and constitute it. In the poem “With the Sun,” Bialik offers a second answer to the question of the meaning of prayer: prayer is a response to the bountifulness of existence. The poem calls us to rise with the sun, to be the first to climb the mountains, to breathe the air, and “to pray to the sun, to the sun!” We are told to go and search for our oppressed and despised brethren in the dark cellar, to see the light silently clinging to them and to call upon them: “Rise up, my brother, pray—there is room for prayer,/ There is room for hope—await!20 Arthur Green subtly describes the wondrous experience that Bialik speaks of in this poem: The natural world itself may be a source of endless wonderment, unfathomable beauty, inexplicable but overwhelming joy. . . . Returning from such a moment of illumination, our hearts long to pray. The fullness we feel in such a moment seeks to break forth in thanksgiving, reaching out to the mystery that has touched us. . . . All this is the stuff of prayer, in which we find room for both the fullness and the longing.21

Religious thinkers such as John Calvin, Franz Rosenzweig, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and many others whose thinking I discuss in Chapter Seven, assume that God calls us to pray. According to some views, God allows prayer to occur. In “With the Sun,” Bialik articulates a complex stance. Humans are indeed called upon to pray, but the caller is “the light,” 19

Avot Yeshurun, Collected Poems, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1997), 182 [Heb]. Hayyim Nahman Bialik, “With the Sun,” in Poems 1899-1934 (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1990) [Heb]. 21 Arthur Green, Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992), xx-xxi. 20

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which in this poem expresses the fullness of the universe.22 The entire universe displayed before us undergoes, as it were, a process of personification. It becomes a voice that addresses the depths of our being and calls us to pray—to pray, not to pray to God. If this prayer has an addressee at all, it is indeed the universe itself as represented by the sun, which is the source of light: “Pray to the sun, to the sun!” The universe gives rise to the prayer and is also its destination. In this sense, prayer implies integration into the ontological web. This poem, then, is an instance of the ontological prayer I analyzed in Chapter Four. What now emerges clearly is that, even if ontological prayer has traditional sources, it may convey a response to the meaning of prayer at the “death of God” moment. Ontological prayer still preserves the essential characterization of prayer as overriding reality, as strengthening hope and emphasizing the future over the past and the present: “There is room for hope—await!” The statement “There is room for hope—await!” addresses the question of whether prayer without God is justified, and the poem says yes. The justification of prayer is its very occurrence, an event conveying that the future prevails over the given present. God, then, is present when absent or excluded, in the very need for justifying praying without God. Furthermore, God’s traces recur in the title of the poem, “With the Sun” [im shamesh] that hints at the verse: “May they fear you as long as the sun [year’ukha im shamesh] and moon endure, throughout all generations” (Psalms 72:5). This verse has various meanings in the talmudic discourse. Bialik was surely aware of the talmudic commentary that uses this verse in reference to the morning prayer (TB Berakhot 9b) as well as the afternoon prayer (TB Berakhot 29b), both of them related to the course of the sun. The Psalms verse “May they fear you as long as the sun . . .” is interpreted as a prayer that is evidence of God’s existence. Bialik omitted the subject of this statement—God—and a new construct obtains, whereby what had been attributed to God is now attributed to the sun—the source of light and of the cosmos. The death of God, then, cannot remove the divine traces altogether. Bialik’s first two responses convey a displacement in the meaning and standing of prayer, regardless of whether it has a new addressee such as the woman or the cosmos. After the death of God, prayer is reinterpreted: the approach presuming that prayer has an addressee retains constructs from 22

On the various meanings of light in Bialik’s poetry, see Shoshana Zimmerman, From Thee to Thee: The Underlying Principle in Ch. N. Bialik’s Poetry (Tel Aviv: Tag, 1999), Index, under “light” [Heb].

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the traditional-religious conception of prayer so that, even if God is dead, prayer now has a new addressee—the woman. Unaddressed prayer deepens the displacement. Prayer is no longer dependent on an addressee but is an ontological expression of the state of the cosmos, of which humans are also a part. The transformation of the religious approaches represented in these two visions is profound, so profound that the voices of protest, rebellion, and opposition to God disappear altogether. Being oblivious to God perpetuates his death, but this disregard cannot be absolute and God is present in his absence. In the poem “On the Slaughter,” however, Bialik suggests a third response on the meaning and standing of prayer. This poem, which so openly proclaims the death of God, retains the traditional construct of prayer. Prayer has a divine addressee and, since those who had been meant to pray can no longer do so, they hope that someone will be found who can. The two previous responses had evinced, at least implicitly, a kind of reconciliation with the tradition by retaining its central practice in a world without God. The third response, however, stresses the impossibility of containing this practice: prayer had existed only in past generations. Those who have lost their God can no longer pray but they still yearn for prayer, a prayer they cannot recite and thus hope someone else will. In their life, God is already lost and is therefore represented by the heavens: Heavens, seek mercy for me! If there be in you a God and to that God a path and I have not found it— you pray for me! I—my heart’s dead and there’s no prayer left in my mouth and no strength and no hope any longer— how long, and until when, just how much longer?23

The poet is in a world without faith—his heart is dead. In this poem, the “death of God” is not only a proclamation of God’s irrelevance to human life. Bialik’s stance is much more radical—ontological skepticism. He does not know “if there be in you a God,” since he has not “found” it.24 Even if the ontological problem is solved and we find that there is a God, the question will still remain of whether there is “to that God a path,” since “I have not found” it. The disappointment, the despair from God, is profound. Beyond 23 Bialik, Songs from Bialik, 11 (with slight amendment). 24

See also Lahover, Bialik: His Life and Work, vol. 2, 427.

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the sense of having been forsaken by God that, as I argued in Chapter Two, is distinctly a religious experience, this poem unambiguously proclaims the death of God. Bialik’s central consideration in this poem relates to the theodicy problem: a world where absolute evil is revealed, as the one that Bialik experienced, is a world empty of God. In “Speech,” Bialik’s language is no less scathing: “and the heavens keep still;/ they know how they sinned against us, a sin of hell—/and in silence they bear their guilt.” The ontological claim about God’s absence is based on the loss of faith: once the believer’s heart has died, lack of faith not only is manifest in a turning away from the existing God, but also may lead to a more radical stance—the denial of God’s existence. And yet, the poet, as one who has experienced the moment of God’s death, does not renounce prayer but begs the heavens to pray for him. Breaking forth through the loss of faith is the memory of its most central practice—prayer. This tension points to the complex life of those who have experienced the death of faith moment and live in a liminal state between faith and nonfaith, between the memory of prayer and the impossibility of returning to it and renewing it. Alexander Penn wrote a quasi-parodic poem on “On the Slaughter,” where he coined an important term regarding prayer: Heavens, seek mercy for me! . . . From what bottle does this come to me? . . . O yes, From a forgotten depth they cry to me, Bialik’s prayer wounds.25

Bialik, like all those who have experienced the moment of God’s death, is wounded by prayer. The wound gnaws at his existence and stamps his being as a relentless memorial hallmark, even though “there is no God—only I and you.”26 The poetry of Yitzhak Lamdan suggests a similar experience. In his poetry, the father is the character who brings together the old and the new because he represents the past in which the son, who steps beyond him, has his roots. In the poem “To Father,” the son experiences the death of God and tries to see the father as someone to whom the question can at least be posed: “Father, what will a son do not to sin—/ and his heaven holds 25

Alexander Penn, “Untitled,” in The Poems, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2006), 532 [Heb].

26 Ibid.

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no God to love, fear, and pray to.”27 The son turns to the father with an existential question—what should he do given the death of God—but in the rest of the poem, he expects his father to reconnect him with the God who has died: “Where, father, O where shall I go?/ Where is the way to God, where—to the house of prayer?/ You knew!”28 The yearning for a father that will redirect the son to the house of prayer is a yearning for a lost world, which the father distinctly represents. Erich Neumann pointed out that parental figures are the basic archetypes of our existence and the father figure represents the archetype of law and tradition.29 But the yearning for a father, a yearning for the law and tradition that have been lost, is fated to remain unfulfilled, since God is already dead, as is the father. The son can no longer pray and can only remember the prayer that once was. Lamdan, like many of his contemporaries who had experienced the old and many others who had not, longs for prayer but cannot pray: “If only I knew that we still have a God in our distant heavens.”30 In Chapter Three, I found that Lamdan’s poetry expresses the primordiality of prayer and also that, in a way, prayer addresses fate. Together with the passion for traditional prayer—the father’s prayer in which the son no longer has a share—these features reinforce the death of God experience. Rather than a moment of liberation, the death of God is a dialectical event that creates a new life horizon. Humans are praying beings who can no longer pray, a muteness that proves onerous. For Liova Ilmi too, the experience of the death of God is mediated by the figure of the father, who represents the traditional Judaism that ­commands prayer: Someone like my father should come and command: —“To the field!” Pray! Kneel! Because the way is still long.31 27

Yitzhak Lamdan, “With a Covered Face,” in Collected Poems (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1973), 84 [Heb]. Ibid., 90-91. 29 Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 140-143. 30 Lamdan, “With the First Steps,” in Collected Poems, 117. 31 Liova Ilmi, “From the Night Prayers,” in Poems (Rehovot: n. p., 1982), 19 [Heb]. 28

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The poet is no longer capable of spontaneous prayer. He needs someone—a father figure—to come and command him to pray. This imposed prayer bears the signs of Isaac’s prayer: Isaac goes out to meditate in the field,32 and talmudic tradition determines that going out to the field is prayer.33 Similarly, the poet too is commanded to pray in the field. Contrary to Isaac, however, the poet cannot pray. He is living after the death of God: But my mother is far, and my God gone. And only you, my night, Do not banish me.34

Whereas the father represents tradition and the law, Neumann claims that the mother represents the archetype of nature and life.35 The poem thus conveys distance from tradition and the law, but also from nature. Those whose God is dead can find no solace: neither culture nor nature can be their home, and they are doomed to exile from their world. Whoever experiences the death of God as a constant event, rather than as a passing moment, is thrown—like Nietzsche’s deranged hero proclaiming the death of God—into the dark night, inconsolable: “O, how frightened I am, of the fear of tomorrow . . .”36 True, not all those who yearn for whatever is lost will find it. At times, the yearning widens the distance. Ilmi and Lamdan wait for the father (or mother) figure that will bring them back to the prayer that has been denied to them. Abraham Schlonsky’s poetry also reflects a recurrent dialectic tension between the past, when God was alive, and the present. He presents a Third Aliyah37 pioneer who experiences the rift between old and new, between faith and non-faith: “We are torn/ we are tattered . . . the heart is torn and

32

Genesis 24:63. See TB Berakhot 26b, and Rashi ad locum, s.v. bereshit. 34 Ilmi, “From the Night Prayers,” 19. 35 Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, 140-143. 36 Ilmi, “From the Night Prayers,” 20. 37 Jewish waves of immigration [aliyot] to pre-state Israel are numbered according to their dating, and the Third Aliyah (1919-1923) was made up of many ideologically committed pioneers. On Schlonsky’s connection with the Third Aliyah, see Yehuda Slutsky, Introduction to the History of the Labor Movement in Israel (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1973), 270-285 [Heb]; A. B. Yoffe, A. Schlonsky: His Life and Work (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1966), 23 [Heb]; David Canaani, They and Their Times (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1966), 264-267 [Heb]. 33

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barefoot/ the heart will sing in pain. . . .”38 In the world of these pioneers, this rift is constitutive. Their existential experience is shaped by the split between the old religious world and the new world they are creating.39 This split fixates the death of God experience as an ongoing event. Someone for whom God is already dead, no longer experiences the rift and the pain. Those who are finally detached from what had been their world are reshaped as a harmonious whole, where they are sovereignly autonomous. The experience of the split is thus transformed—from one that removes them and detaches them into a uniting and hence painful one. In this context, prayer assumes a special meaning. Those who experienced the death of God bear the living memory of traditional prayer, which they can no longer recite. David Meltz sheds light on this rift in the story “Dove.” The pioneers are enthralled by the poetry-prayer of Aba Hanan, who, as an external observer, voices Meltz’s critique, his lament about the loss of prayer: You are young, you are far from that sorrow, you don’t know that great and terrible fear. The fear that befalls a community. . . . You don’t know that dread. . . . But there are those hours, there are. And I see those Jews before me. Terrified, pale. I am among them. I am one of them. I hear their cry. You won’t know it. . . . The prayer house full from end to end . . . and a powerful cry of prayer breaks forth. One howl from the whole community—merciful and gracious God—I’m sorry that you are strangers to those Jews, sorry that you will not know that great spirit. I’m sorry that your souls do not shake with the fear of the Jewish people and the howl of their pleas.40

For Aba Hanan, the loss of prayer does not mean only the loss of the connection to the God of Israel. The death of God that led to the loss of prayer means that this generation cannot identify with the historical Jewish people that expressed their sorrows, longings, and fears in prayer. Prayer was the concretization of the Jewish people’s consciousness of self, and the pioneers who cut themselves off from their parents’ world can no longer identify with the central expression of their forebears’ being. Despite his understanding of the rift and the detachment, Aba Hanan still laments it. 38

Abraham Schlonsky, “We Are Torn,” in The Complete Collection of Abraham Schlonsky’s Poems in Six Volumes, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 2002), 109 [Heb]. 39 On this issue, see especially Moti Ze‘ira, Rural Collective Settlement and Jewish Culture in Eretz Israel During the 1920s (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2002) [Heb]. 40 David Meltz, Trouble on the Way (Tel Aviv: Beterem, 1947), 121-123 [Heb].

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While Meltz formulated this complexity as an inter-generational discourse—Aba Hanan vs. the pioneers—Schlonsky adopts both sides and presents a dialectical attitude toward prayer. In a poem where he weaves notes reminiscent of the Book of Lamentations, he writes: “How shall we pray and we don’t know prayer?/ How shall we cry and we have forgotten?”41 Schlonsky is aware that the rift and the pain that follows it cannot eliminate the basic religious experience of the pioneers, who, in the words of this poem, are “sorrowful objects in God’s Tabernacle.”42 Like many of his contemporaries, Schlonsky knows that the pioneering endeavor has a deep religious aspect, a self-transcendence manifest in asceticism and in the readiness to bear the burden of chaos and creativity in the attempt to create a new world. The term “God” does not necessarily denote the name of a transcendent being, but rather the experience of transcendence and the endeavor of the new monastic order—the pioneers’ order. The great lament for the loss of the language of prayer emerges in the context of this basic experience, a lament expressing the distance from God or, in our language, the death of God. As Schlonsky writes elsewhere: “What is my idiom for prayer?/ What is the way to forgiveness?/ And the father in heaven is so far so far.”43 He also writes: “O where, where is the prayer of the afflicted?”44 The plea for prayer or the prayer for prayer is the stubborn attempt to face God once again. One prays for the ability to pray, for a return to the experience of presence, “face to face” with one’s God. But the death of God is an event that cannot be amended. Those who have lost their God will not find him again. And those who do not turn this event into a moment of great liberation will continue to experience pain. They may then turn to others who have not lost their God and ask them to intervene on their behalf: Chastened will we then go down to the threshold of God’s house, sick envy for all who come will burn our flesh: O you who know prayer! When you appeal to your God offer a small prayer for the star-struck, pray thus: Have mercy on them, God, teach them restraint.45 41

Schlonsky, “Nights,” The Complete Collection, vol. 1, 17.

42 Ibid. 43

Ibid., “Get Thee Out,” vol. 2, 102. Ibid., 101. The “prayer of the afflicted” is a reference to Psalms 102:1. 45 Ibid., “Nights,” vol. 1, 18. 44

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Confronted with the pain, the torn and the tattered feel envy for those whose have a set prayer and ask them to pray on their behalf. Whereas Lamdan and Ilmi, Schlonsky’s contemporaries, yearn for a father figure, Schlonsky addresses all those “who know prayer.” The biblical allusion is obvious. Psalms 89:16 reads: “Happy is the people that know the joyful note: they shall walk, O Lord, in the light of thy countenance.” This verse, which is recited before the blowing of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, denotes the close connection between the people of Israel and their God. Henceforth, those who know prayer are those in the people of Israel who live connected to God and walk in his light. Contrary to Bialik, who turns to heaven, Schlonsky turns to the worshippers. The prayer in this poem does not seek to renew the dialogue with God, an aim now unattainable, but to relieve the pain by restraining it and endowing it with meaning. As noted in Chapter Four, in other poems Schlonsky views prayer as a primal self-expression unconditioned by the divine object. This backdrop actually intensifies the experience of the rift between the new and the old. Prayer or the plea for prayer is now confronted with the traditional prayer, a confrontation that evokes the rift and the pain. Abraham Halfi recounts a similar experience of pain and envy. As noted in Chapter Three, prayer for Halfi is a longing for a God that is no longer. In these circumstances, he cannot but feel envy for believers and worshippers. They are the last keepers of prayer: Happy are the simple believers. They gather, their humanity broken, under wings that protect them from an indifferent anarchy. Perhaps the last keepers of prayers in our world.46

The expression “happy are” that opens the poem is an allusion to the verse ”Happy are they who dwell in thy house: they are ever praising thee (Sela)” (Psalms 84:5). The Psalmist determines that those who dwell in God’s house, those who praise him, are happy. They are happy, explains Halfi, because they are at home and sheltered from the “indifferent anarchy” of a world that, after God’s death, is empty of his presence. The world becomes a neutral place, bearing no meaning, which is not meant to realize a purpose and where humans experience estrangement and alienation. This is 46

Abraham Halfi, “Happy Are They,” Poems, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987), 222 [Heb].

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an essential element of modern human life—the loneliness of existence. We have no metaphysical anchor to lean upon or to secure our hopes and expectations.47 Halfi contrasts this alienated world with the world of the believer manifest in prayer. According to Halfi, prayer is indeed a passion for God, a passion that believers are convinced they will consummate. Amir Gilboa impressively succeeds in combining the experience of rift and the ontological prayer described in Chapter Four: I pray from the heart of a torn prayer book I see all the missing words flying for a long time they have been flying seeking rest for the sole of the foot how shall I heal them and the heart of my prayer book is frayed used up and naked48

Contrary to Schlonsky, Lamdan, or Ilmi, Gilboa prays. The poem opens with a declaration: “I pray.” But not everyone who prays is necessarily within the world of religious tradition and the web of beliefs that shape it. Gilboa’s prayer is a moment of crisis and split, not union. In this sense, his stance resembles that of the writers considered at the beginning of the current chapter. Gilboa, who is deeply rooted in his culture and his place, experiences the rift between the old and the new that is evident in the state of the “tattered” prayer book. Is it tattered due to use? The poem reveals that it is ragged because the words of the prayer are far away from the worshipper. The words do not disappear, since concrete Jewish prayer is one manifestation of ontological prayer, but they assume independent status—they are “flying seeking rest for the sole of the foot.” The biblical allusion is illuminating: prayer resembles the dove that Noah sends forth to see if the waters of the flood had abated, “but the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot” (Genesis 8:9). The prayers, like the dove, look for rest; they seek to return to their place as mediators between the worshippers and their God, but they can no longer do so because the tattering of the prayer book conveys the void between them. In Chapter Four, I considered the special meaning of the expression “flying [porahat] prayer” for Gilboa. In this poem, the talmudic allusion is 47

For a detailed analysis of the modern experience, see Avi Sagi, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2002), 5-24. 48 Amir Gilboa, Collected Poems, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987), 13 (untitled) [Heb].

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even sharper: from the tattered prayer book, which resembles the burning Torah scrolls in the Talmud, the words fly away. In the talmudic context, however, the flying words are the words of the text—the Torah or the tablets—whereas in this poem, the flying words are those missing from the prayer book. The distance from the prayer book, then, is twofold: it does not have all the words, and the words that are missing transcend it. Ontological prayer is thus built on the destruction of traditional Jewish prayer; after God’s death, prayer becomes independent or is perhaps exposed as such. No wonder, then, that both Schlonsky and Gilboa joined the ontological perception of prayer and the special status of prayer after the rift. For the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, prayer marks the very moment when the worshipper experiences, more than anything, “the death of God.” In the past, prayer had an addressee, but we learn that even the departure of the addressee does not dismiss the need for prayer; indeed, it strengthens it: I feel like saying a prayer—but to whom? He Who once used to comfort me won’t hear it now. So to whom shall I pray? The prayer holds me like a vise. ... Yet I must say a prayer. Someone very near, within me, tortured, demands the prayer. Senseless, I begin to babble until dawn.49

The source of the prayer is in the “once,” in an inner pain that demands it. Before the death of God, prayer had an addressee, whereas now prayer occurs even without one, as the realization of an inner wish. Although Sutzkever’s poem appears to resemble the poem of Sh. Shalom discussed in Chapter Four, they are different. Shalom’s poem conveys reconciliation with a reality where God is dead. The “death of God” enables the prayer, releases it into its fullness: “And my prayer has no God, which is why it is so pure/it will flow like a spring. . . .”50 For Sutzkever, the prayer without God is loaded with anguish, it is “a babble.” Whereas prayer had been expected to have God as its object, the death of God again exposes it as 49

Abraham Sutzkever, “I Feel Like Saying a Prayer,” in Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, ed. Marguerite M. Striar (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 141. 50 Sh. Shalom, “Morning Prayer,” in Poems (Tel Aviv: Yavneh, 1949), 45 [Heb].

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a need. Prayer, then, is a dialectical experience that, on the one hand, denies prayer its addressee and, on the other, strengthens prayer and returns it to the praying subject: the self is revealed as a praying being. The moment of the death of God that is disclosed in prayer is thus a prism that sheds new light on it—prayer as an inner need. A contemporary’s special testimony about prayer after the death of God, as an experience of the death of God, is the confession of Dov Sadan: I must make a confession. Even during those many years of apostasy when I was far from observing the commandments, the taste of prayer was alive in me, with all its richness of tradition and form, and I could apply to myself the well-known folk witticism, containing more truth than a dozen arguments against heresy. It is related of an old apikoris (heretic) that he used to say to himself . . . “Sometimes, forgetting the fact that there is no God, I catch myself praying.” It goes without saying that this “deviation” comes to him in the traditional nosah, with all of its details and its familiar melody. And in confidence I may reveal that I have found myself “deviating” in this fashion even without the forgetting part. You pray, and you even pray with enthusiasm, even if that Rock toward which you turn no longer exists for you, for it is enough that it existed for you yesterday, so long as it is exactly the same Rock upon which you and those around you depended in your earliest childhood.51

An emotionally charged and impressive account of the experience that Sadan describes appears in Haim Be’er’s book The Pure Element of Time. The narrator is aware that his father’s life poses a contradiction: he practices religion but he no longer believes, and the son is puzzled by this complex reality: . . . and I said to Father with the angry dogmatism of youth that I was fed up with that wishy-washy world of him and his friends, and that human beings their age had to take a stand: if they believed in God, they should pray like really pious people, and if they didn’t believe, they should be decent enough to stay in their own houses and not trample the house of the Lord with their everyday shoes.52

51

Dov Sadan, “Some Thoughts on the Subject of Prayer,” in Prayer in Judaism: Continuity and Change, ed. Gabriel H. Cohn and Harold Fisch (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996), 16. 52 Haim Be’er, The Pure Element of Time, trans. Barbara Harshav (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2003), 160.

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The father tries to reply that he has indeed lost his faith because he cannot justify God after Symon Petlyura’s savage attacks, but he is as one whose barrel has been broken “and there was nothing left of it except the hoops.” When the son asks him why he does not change the barrel, the father says, “A barrel, even if it’s broken, you don’t change it every day.”53 The barrel metaphor is extremely important in the current context. In his controversy with the “Reformers,” Ahad ha-Am rejected the path of those seeking liberation from Jewish practice in favor of “abstract beliefs,” or those favoring abandonment of the Torah’s sacred Hebrew texts to “retain only their kernel in translations.” Ahad ha-Am retorts: Both fail alike to see that it is just the ancient cask with its ancient form that is holy and sanctifies all that is in it, though it may be emptied and filled with new wine from time to time; whereas, if once the cask is broken or remoulded, the wine will lose its taste, though it be ever so old.54

For Ahad ha-Am, Jewish tradition rests on the assumption of the holiness of the “cask,” the recognition of an unquestionable formal principle of ­primacy found within the tradition, be it practice or the sacred text. In his view, only the recognition of the holiness of the “cask” is essential—that is what characterized the historical Jewish people and enabled change and development.55 Contrary to this view, Be’er suggests that Jewish tradition can prevail even after the cask itself has been broken and recognition of the received sacredness has vanished. The memory of the living tradition suffices to continue its existence and even to enable prayer. Beliefs or dogmas are unnecessary for the practice of prayer, which follows from life itself, from the memory that is stamped on real life. Be’er explains the world of the father, who has lost his God but not the religious practice that includes prayer: “Father’s lament for the rituals of the synagogue and cantorial chanting was a kind of echo, distant, late, and essentially distorted, of European Romanticism of the nineteenth century. . . . And God, whether He had taken off or was revealed or exiled, no longer dwelled within them.”56 53 Ibid. 54

Ahad ha-Am, “Sacred and Profane,” in Selected Essays by Ahad ha-Am, trans. Leon Simon (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1912), 44. 55 See also Rina Hevlin, Coping with Jewish Identity: A Study of Ahad ha-Am’s Thought (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2001), 59-70 [Heb]. 56 Be’er, The Pure Element of Time, 160-161.

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The son looking on does not seem to understand the father. The young boy who poses the faith/non-faith dichotomy is again evident in the figure of the narrator, the adult son, who judges the father and describes his world as “a kind of echo, distant, late, and essentially distorted, of European Romanticism of the nineteenth century.” This narrator-son, whose view has been shaped by a religious world predicated on a clear split between practices that are part of religion—with prayer at the center—and practices that belong to a world where God is dead, could not avoid a somewhat embarrassed judgment, since the more he enters his father’s world, the better he understands him. The father’s world is populated by remnants from another one that are present in memory and in fantasy, and are still sufficiently powerful to guide him. The narrator’s father does not need God in order to pray. He knows his barrel is broken and that God is dead, but the hoops of the barrel, the remnants of memory, suffice to create a world of meaning that leaves room for prayer. This prayer is thus a grip on the remnants of memory and tradition by someone who has left this world behind. The death of God reemerges through this prayer, which does not address God but the living historical memory of parents and family, of widespread practices. The worshipper turns inward, and the act of prayer mediates between God’s life and death, because the present prayer is an expression of God’s death but addressed to a memory wherein God was still alive. Yitzhak Elazari-Vulkani, a leading spokesman of the Second Aliyah, formulated these insights: For a long time, religion was for us a mold into which we poured the main features of our visage and the foundations of our self, and these features have remained our eternal legacy. And even if God’s age-old voice is no longer, its echoes still resonate; “the harp is broken, but its strings still resound.”57

Even after the death of God, we do not need principles and theories to continue the ancestral tradition. Prayer bears this tradition in its words, tunes, and normative form. The narrator’s father, through his prayer, joins his ancestors and their world, and this suffices to establish prayer and perpetuate the death of God at one and the same time.58 57 58

Yitzhak Elazari-Vulkani, Writings, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Twersky, 1944), 30 [Heb]. See also the words of Noah Naftulsky, cited by Shimon Kushnir. Noah felt uncomfortable when the pioneers used to sing non-Jewish songs, and when A. D. Gordon asked him why he had turned away from the singers, he answered: “I miss the songs of the Jews, the melodies of the Sabbath and the festivals, the music of the synagogue. It’s hard for me to hear this medley, which isn’t ours” (Shimon Kushnir, Men of Nebo: From the Story of the Second Aliyah

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Instances of this experience, of prayer as connecting to people and not necessarily to God, are many. In one example, Shabtai Be’eri, among the founders of Kibbutz Beth ha-Shitah, writes to his wife from Athens: Eve of Yom Kippur . . . I went to the synagogue. I did not want to pray but just be together with Jews. . . . I read the prayers and I’m surprised that someone can find solace in them. But I still stayed, hungry for a Jewish community, for a Jewish atmosphere, for Jewish faces.59

Be’eri participates in the Yom Kippur prayers without any attachment to their theological foundations and without joining in the ritual. And yet, he is present in the prayer, since this presence is the way he experiences a connection to the Jewish people. Be’eri’s solidarity with the Jewish people, with the “Jewish atmosphere,” suffices for his integration in the practice of prayer, which he simply “reads.” For others, such as the narrator’s father in Be’er’s novel, this solidarity can create a deeper connection to the practice of prayer. A younger member of the kibbutz, Yohai Gil‘ad, writes a letter to his parents that reveals him as closer to prayer than Be’eri: I’m writing this letter as Yom Kippur ends. . . . The wonderful melody of Kol Nidrei is the only one in my heart, and every time I hum it, I can feel faith in my blood. But it’s the only one. Toward the end of Yom Kippur, I suddenly heard our Avinu Malkenu melody bursting forth from the worshippers in the synagogue here. I shuddered . . . I sat down and I began to sing all our family songs . . . I sang and sang everything. . . . Who ever believed that these mountains and plains would ever hear a Jewish song.60

The words of the traditional prayer become a bridge to the realm of family memory. They are not predicated on metaphysical or theological assumptions—they are a living presence. The value of practice, rather than founded on the sacredness of some “cask,” rests on the fullness of cultural existence represented by a specific prayer. Given the death of God on the one hand and prayer’s roots in the culture on the other, one conclusion is warranted: the religious experience sometimes ignores the power of tradition as an active, primal power. [Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1968], 56 [Heb]). The connection to prayer here is not religious, and conveys the longing for what is “ours.” 59 Shabtai Be’eri, “Yom Kippur in the Early Years,” in Yom Kippur in Beth ha-Shitah between Stasis and Change 19291999, ed. Naomi Adar (Beth ha-Shitah, 2000). 60 Ibid., 20-21.

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The justification of tradition will not be found in theology or metaphysics but in its prominent presence in everyday life. Tradition shapes us and, without it, the culture, ways of life, memory, and ethos so vital to our existence cannot survive. The fullness of our concrete life and our identity are contingent on tradition.61 Due to the constant and imperceptible presence of tradition in our lives, we tend not to pay attention to its central role, and the death of God is one moment that foreshadows its significance. Dan Daor aptly formulates this insight: In a world without God, significance emerges only by dint of cultural tradition. As it develops, this tradition sets up a kind of network of landmarks we are free to choose from, or change, or ignore altogether. The price of ignoring it is apparently cessation, and the price of too swift a change or too sharp a choice, is dogmatism.62

The literary sources discussed so far repeatedly reaffirm this position. Prayers are a fundamental pattern and remain in place even without their theoretical anchoring. They are a basic language, which is seared in the memory of whoever learned it. It need not be explained by setting it in a metaphysical context. Indeed, the removal of the metaphysical context with the death of God underscores the centrality of the language of prayer as well as the language of tradition as such, which is why prayer is also so oppressive. Prayer sometimes reemerges in someone’s life merely because its words are ingrained in the linguistic memory. The difference between this experience and the one Be’er describes is that the latter bears with it the memory of an entire life, serving as a kind of preface to the sights and the remembrances of a full existence. At times, however, prayer is not a preface but a picture, a sight stuck in memory that is hurled at people against their better interests. Andrey Platonov conveys this experience in the story “The Motherland of Electricity”: “Granny, why go around praying? There isn’t any God, and there won’t be any rain.” “I dare say,” the old woman agreed. “Happen you’re right!” “Then why make the sign of the cross?” I went on. 61

On this issue, see Avi Sagi, Tradition vs. Traditionalism: Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008), 5-14; idem, The Jewish-Israeli Voyage: Culture and Identity (Jerusalem: Shalom Hartman Institute, 2006), 185-207 [Heb]. 62 Dan Daor, Introduction to Lattices: Essays, by Dan Tsalka (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987), 10 [Heb].

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“You’re right—we cross ourselves in vain! What haven’t I prayed about? I’ve prayed for my husband, I’ve prayed for my children—and not one of them’s been spared. . . . If I keep going, my dear, it’s from habit—do you think I choose to live? My heart doesn’t ask me, it breathes by itself, and my hand’s just the same—it makes the sign of the cross by itself. God’s our curse.63

Platonov suitably described residual religious practices that force themselves upon us, even against our will, as remnants of past events. At other times, worshippers after the death of God return to the prayers in their memory at the times they had typically resorted to prayer in the past, such as moments of distress. The old man who is the protagonist of The Old Man and the Sea is pursuing a fish he wishes to catch, and begins to pray because his left hand hurts and hinders his hold on the rod: “I am not religious,” he said. “But I will say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys that I should catch this fish.” . . . Sometimes he would be so tired that he could not remember the prayer and then he would say them fast so that they would come automatically.64

The question of who this prayer addresses never bothers the old man, who is more concerned with the problem of retrieving prayers from the depths of his memory and reciting them. The prayer does not have an addressee but still works, as does any other prayer: “With his prayers said, and feeling much better, but suffering exactly as much, and perhaps a little more, he leaned against the wood of the bow and began, mechanically, to work the fingers of his left hand.”65 The act of prayer does not alter the external reality, but does change the disposition of the petitioner, even one who does not believe—he is now “feeling much better.” We do not know the source of this feeling, since nothing has changed and the old man may be in even greater pain, but the inner change has occurred. Prayer can therefore be the basis for a practice whose meaning does not depend on theological assumptions, even if it reconstructs a religious practice where theological assumptions had played a vital role. Two Hebrew poets formulated various aspects of this experience— Yehuda Amichai and Tuvia Ruebner. Amichai writes: 63

Andrey Platonov, “The Motherland of Electricity,” in Soul and Other Stories, trans. Robert Chandler et al. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2008), 265-266. 64 Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (London: Random House, 1993), 54. 65 Ibid., 55.

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The prayers that you prayed in your childhood now return and fall from above like bullets that missed their mark and are returning long afterward to the ground, without arousing attention, without causing damage.66

Unlike the father’s prayer in Be’er’s story, the prayer in this poem has no context. It is incomplete—with words recurring associatively in a context that is entirely different—and it does not express this man’s conscious and intentional stance vis-à-vis himself or his God. The prayers that “fall from above” are imposed on him, as is his memory. Whereas traditional prayer flows upward, to God, in the linguistic memory he finds himself praying and the prayers move downward—from the imposed memory to him. A similar attitude to prayer appears in a Ruebner poem, where “a prayer will fall.”67 Rather than growing from the individual, prayer falls upon him as an outside power and bends his being until he “slopes down further.” This is not a man standing before his God, but someone who is suddenly saddled with a heavy burden that he does not fully understand, because the prayer is in vain. In another poem, Ruebner indeed writes: In the depths of sleep stands the angel, ... He forgot, he forgot. ... He does not hear prayer, His brow asleep, his mouth muted. Far above him spirals the forgotten, silent, world.68

It is tempting to say that Amichai and Rübner do not assume a praying subject—prayer falls or passes through us and leaves us wounded. But Ruebner, unlike Amichai, has not entirely renounced the praying subject. Recounting the experience of discovering nature, he writes in 66

Yehuda Amichai, “Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela,” in The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, trans. Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 66-67. 67 Tuvia Ruebner, “Instead of an Ode to the Days of Awe,” in And Hasteth to His Place: 1953-1989 (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1990), 62 [Heb]. 68 Tuvia Ruebner, “The Angel, in ” The Fire in the Stone (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1958), 122 [Heb].

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“The Acme of Dawn”: “Fire blazes in my secret places/ my earth, the dust heavy, goes up in flames,/ sight burnt-out/ I fall in prayer.”69 This prayer is a response to an experience of revelation and, in this sense, resembles many other similar ones. But the poetic structure is interesting: the earth ascends to God while the worshipper falls down. Even when prayer does occur, then, it is weighed down by the worshipper; it does not convey the passion for transcendence and the expectation of dialogue with God. Prayer probably occurs because it is a practice stored in memory, but bears no meaning—there is no one to hear or answer the prayer, because God is dead. At times, however, prayer after the death of God can return the worshipper to the beginning. Then the gap closes—God again becomes a living being in the worshipper’s world. In a poem whose context is the phrase repeated in the closing prayer of Yom Kippur, Ne‘ilah—“O keep open for us your gate of mercy at the time of the closing of the gate . . . O let us enter your gate at last”—Yaakov Orland writes: In youth I scorned you for why did I need you, and in manhood my heart turned to its pleasures, and only the years of wisdom opened your meanings. Now that the day is turning, remember my loneliness, Let me enter your gate at last.70

Although the prayer in this poem addresses God, the poet describes his voyage toward God. During his youth and his manhood, the poet experienced the death of God, who became irrelevant to him. Despite his “death,” however, God returns to the poet’s life, not through a voluntary decision or through an act of recognition—the yearning for God precedes his existence. In other poems, Orland expresses the depth of religious passion: “Within me God begs/ to come out—and he cannot.”71 In his later years, this passion led to the removal of the block between him and God and to a prayer for God’s response. The death of God is thus woven within his existence, and the presumed dichotomy between God’s death and God’s presence disappears. In a kind of testimony to this process, Hayyim Sabato tells a story about Benny Levy, Jean-Paul Sartre’s secretary and a relative of Sabato, recounting 69

Ibid., “Morning Hymn,” 10. Yaakov Orland, “Now that the Day Has Turned,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1997) [Heb]. See also ibid., “Halkin Prays,” vol. 3, 298-302. 71 Ibid., “Freedom,” vol. 3, 79. 70

R e co n s tru c ti n g th e “ D e ath o f G o d ” M o m ent

his return to Judaism through participation in prayer. Benny Levy prays before his God returns from the dead: I was walking in Paris. In the neighborhood are many small synagogues of Algerian Jews. One of them invited me in to make a miniyan. I went in. It was a Monday and they read the Torah. I was invited to go up to the Torah. They asked me for my name and my father’s name. I went up to the Torah. They gave me a prayer book containing the blessings. I didn’t need it. I recited the blessings by heart with the tunes I had heard at my father’s house as a child. The rabbi approached me. “Where did you learn that tune?” he asked. “At my father’s house,” said I. Childhood memories surfaced. I studied Maimonides before I studied Sartre, and from here, things happened as they happened.72

The childhood memory surfacing in the act of prayer leads to faith. In sum, prayer as a reconstruction of the death of God can lead one far away from God but can also lead back to God. Prayer is a basic cultural fact, part of the web of tradition with which everyone living after the death of God must grapple. People can give it room in their lives, but can also reject it. The responses to prayer not only represent various ways of coping with the specific question of prayer’s place in people’s lives after the death of God, but also expose their existential stance. Even when they recognize their debt to the tradition, even when they know they are not abstract “selves,” people still assume a stance of freedom toward the tradition within which they find themselves. One can hardly find a topic that is at once more oppressive, painful, and seductive than prayer. Hebrew writers keep going back to it as an obsession that pursues them, precisely as they themselves pursue it. Is this not proof that humans are praying beings above all? Should not this phenomenon be viewed as prayer’s success in overcoming the modern and postmodern waves that push us out of the realms of prayer into creativity and self-molding? The literary testimony that I read as a phenomenological datum reveals that humans are praying beings. Chapter Seven analyzes this phenomenological datum.

72

Haim Sabato, “Was It Not Like That,” Akdamot 23 (2003): 199-203 [Heb].

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Humans as Praying Beings: A Phenomenological Profile

Why did I pray? A strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?1 The analysis so far allows for a portrayal of humans as praying beings. Before I turn to a detailed consideration of this determination, however, a caveat is in order: I do not pretend to make any claims about the essence of human beings, and the discussion is limited to the literary texts considered in the book. The focus could easily have been on texts that negate prayer and the view of humans as praying beings. The phenomenological depiction cannot transcend the textual datum and, therefore, from a phenomenological perspective, I assume a suspension of ontological judgment and abstain from essentialist claims about human nature. The characterization of humans as praying beings, however, is still important because it envisages this existential possibility as a real option. This distinction between the description of a possibility and the description of an actual reality is extremely significant. Usually, phenomenology follows the actual experience and, within it, finds “the meaning”—the idea implicitly conveyed by it. The standard phenomenological move thus extends from the implicit—the actual experience—to the explicit—its meaning. In that sense, the project presented in this book is more modest. Although the texts considered cannot absolutely validate the determination that humans are praying beings, they do point to an existential possibility— humans can be praying beings. We are certainly free to avoid prayer, but these texts clearly indicate that in a given culture at a given historical time—Hebrew contemporary culture—this existential possibility is indeed actualized. This discovery, however, transcends the “datum”—the literary texts—wherein it appeared. The possibility of humans as praying beings is now presented as an independent option, an ontological challenge, and mainly a critical reflective 1

Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Avon Books, 1960), 13.

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moment that enables a new vision of human existence. When the “datum” considered is a series of texts from a post-­religious, secular culture, this discovery emerges as particularly significant—even in a culture where “God is dead,” humans are still praying beings. Other findings—prayers in Oriental religions that do not have a god or moments of prayer outside a religious context—add further significance to this description. Even if a classic version of phenomenology, such as Husserl’s, claims that we must remain attached to experience, human experience unquestionably includes its possibilities as well. One of the deep insights of existentialist thought, from Søren Kierkegaard up to Jean-Paul Sartre, is that humans are constituted by their possibilities and actual reality is only one of them. The possibility that we are praying beings, then, rests on our ontology. In human life, possibility is the manifestation of self-transcendence. We are not bound by our factual data, and human existence is manifest in the ceaseless rejection of factuality. In this existentialist phenomenology, prayer is a clear alternative, recurrently actualized by people from different cultures at different times. Refusing subservience to factual data, humans return to prayer and thereby open up a horizon of hope and future. We pray even if we do not believe in God, and even believers who pray do not do so because of a set theological doctrine. Prayer breaks forth from the depths of the heart at different times, independent of a theory or a metaphysics of prayer. At times, we do confront a reality from which prayer disappears, but the disappearance of prayer is not its death. Prayer returns to life in poetry, music, and other forms, all of them coming together into the “pouring out of one’s heart.” Only someone who identifies prayer with its traditional forms will fail to discern its manifestation in other modes. This claim is not meant to dismiss differences—poetry and music have autonomous contexts of meaning that are unconditioned by their understanding as prayer. At times, however, the prayer aspect of these manifestations is clearly evident, and no sensitive observer will be able to ignore it. One implication of this possibility is the erosion of the religious-secular classic dichotomy. The characterization of humans as praying beings offers a new option, wherein what seems contradictory and impossible—the combination of religiosity and secularism—assumes new meaning. If humans are praying beings, and if this characterization is not contingent on a response from God, then a practice that is traditionally attributed to religion and faith—prayer—breaks down the walls enclosing both religion and secularism. A discussion of this determination must begin by contrasting it with antithetical positions, which do not derive the meaning of prayer from the

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worshipper’s act. These positions split into two: one views prayer as a transcendent act and another as a heteronomous obligation. Many thinkers have viewed prayer as a direct act of God, which conveys divine grace.2 Blaise Pascal resolutely states: “But we believe that we hold prayer of ourselves? This is absurd; for since, though having faith, we cannot have virtues, how should we have faith?”3 Elsewhere, he writes, “So it [salvation] is not in our power, since the obtaining of (the grace) to pray to Him is not in our power. For since salvation is not in us, and the obtaining of such grace is from Him, prayer is not in our power.”4 John Calvin too holds this view, and cites Epistle to the Romans: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (8:26). Relying on this text, Calvin emphasizes that, given human weaknesses and imperfections, God helps by showing the right and proper way of praying.5 In Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett also suggests this approach. Estragon asks: “What exactly did we ask him [Godot, the God of the play] to do for us?” He does not accept Vladimir’s answer, “Oh . . . nothing very definite,” and answers himself, “a kind of prayer,” which he defines as “a vague supplication.”6 Prayer, then, is to be requested from God. It cannot be an autonomous human initiative. R. Hayyim Haykl of Amdor offers a milder version of this stance. He endorses a quietist world view, stating that the way to God demands self-negation to enable the influence of divine action.7 The activist meaning embodied in prayer thus poses difficulties for him, since in prayer it is human will that influences God. Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer, who deals at length with the thought of R. Hayyim, quotes his exegesis of the verse: “The will of them that fear Him he performs” (Psalms 145:19). According to R. Hayyim’s interpretation, God is the one who “performs” the will of those who fear him. It is not humans who take initiative and are active, but God: The Holy One, blessed be He, desires the prayers of the righteous, and this is “the will of [them that fear Him he will perform]”—that is, 2 3 4

5 6

7

Karl Barth articulates this view in Prayer, trans. Sara F. Terrien (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1952). Blaise Pascal, Pascal’s Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (London: Dent, 1954), 140. Ibid., 281. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 855-856. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (London: Faber and Faber, 1955), 18. Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism: Quietistic Elements in Eighteenth Century Hasidic Thought, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Princeton and Jerusalem: Princeton University Press and Magnes Press, 1993), 65-66.

H uma ns a s Pray i n g B e i n g s : A Ph e n o m eno lo gi c al Pro f i le

the prayer of those that fear Him is performed by the Holy One, who places in their heart that they should pray for a certain thing, for the man who fears [God] will not wish to pray or to ask for anything at all, for one does not need any thing!8

Prayer, then, is God’s initiative, since believers who seek self-negation within the divinity cannot even imagine praying. Franz Rosenzweig and Abraham Joshua Heschel are among the Jewish thinkers who adopted this perspective. Rosenzweig viewed prayer as “the greatest gift given to it [the soul] in Revelation” and wrote: This is the last that is reached in Revelation, an overflowing of the soul’s supreme and perfect trust . . . The soul prays with the words of the Psalm: “Let not my prayer nor your love withdraw from me.” It prays for the ability to pray, which is already given to it with the certitude of divine love. That it can pray is the greatest gift given to it in Revelation.9

Heschel uses contemporary metaphors to describe the divine act that occurs in prayer and enables it. Prayer is “a gift coming down to us from on high like a meteor, rather than rising up like a rocket.”10 Continuing this tradition, Aharon Appelfeld, in The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping, distinguishes between two types of prayer. The first describes a state where worshippers are passive and hear God’s voice speaking to them. A lower rung of prayer, which comes forth in “talk of prayer,” involves an active worshipper: “You should know that prayer is not talk but silence. He who knows how to be silent hears God speaking to him. Talk of prayer is a lower rung. Great strength is needed to be silent with the prayer book.”11 The other position on prayer views it as expressing an obligation. This view, which is articulated by two contemporary thinkers—Yeshayahu Leibowitz12 and Jacques Ellul13—rejects the transcendent meaning ascribed to prayer. Leibowitz, like Catholic Ellul, draws a contrast between prayer as an obligation and prayer as a spiritual need. In his view, the determination  8  9

10

11

12 13

Ibid., 160. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 198. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism, ed. Fritz A. Rotschild (New York: Free Press, 1965), 199. See also William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 358-360, 368-369. Aharon Appelfeld, The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping (Or Yehuda: Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, Dvir, 2010), 160 [Heb]. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, trans. Eliezer Goldman et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 30-36. Jacques Ellul, Prayer and Modern Man, trans. C. Edward Hopkin (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 99-138.

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of R. Yosef Caro, “One should strengthen himself like a lion to rise in the morning to serve his Creator,”14 sums up the sense of prayer as an obligation. It does not follow from an inner need, since the inner need is in no way a religious phenomenon, even if it is used and conveyed in a religious context.15 At its core, prayer is an obligation: “As obligatory, it is not what a person desires but what is demanded of him; not prayer initiated by him, but one imposed upon him.”16 The life of the soul and the religious world are thus entirely compartmentalized, ensuring that religion is a response to the divine command rather than yet another mode of existence that results from human needs. The position endorsed by Ellul and Leibowitz shares one aspect in common with the previous one. Both positions view prayer as a phenomenon that, even if its motivation is immanent, cannot be justified on immanent grounds because an immanent motivation cannot explain the occurrence of prayer as we know it. Prayer, then, must be justified either by divine grace or by a divine obligation. The difference between the two positions touches on the meaning of the transcendent in prayer. The former claims that transcendence influences the worshipper directly, as evident in the very ability to pray. The latter views God as a legislator imposing an obligation that humans must fulfill as best they can. Their struggle is to sustain prayer’s authentic meaning. In Leibowitz’s thought, the struggle against human needs, against the human disposition to pray for these needs, and against the perception of God as being “for-the-self ” is constitutive of the religious world. Jacques Ellul has a similar view of faith and prayer. Prayer conveys for him the human struggle against the self and its dispositions, a constant struggle for the right prayer, a struggle against ourselves. Following Feuerbach, Ellul too sees prayer as an act of self-duplication, where the worshipper is both sender and addressee. But whereas Feuerbach, in Hegel’s wake, had viewed the duplication as a typical expression of the self ’s consciousness, Ellul views it as a struggle within the self to fulfil the obligation properly.17 Jacques Derrida suggests that a balance prevails between the transcendent and immanent facets of prayer. He rejects the notion of prayer as the act of a transcendent being, but agrees that prayer addresses the other as other. Prayer is the “second word” that comes as a response to and an affirmation of 14

Shulkhan Arukh, Orakh Hayyim 1:1.

15 Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, 30. 16 Ibid.

17 Ellul, Prayer and Modern Man, 139-178.

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the other. Derrida argues that, even before the subjective act of prayer, the worshipper is the object of the other’s call. Prayer does not end with “Amen” but opens with it.18 Derrida’s stance on prayer is vague in its formulation and lacks a strong phenomenological basis. It is still present in the contemporary philosophical discourse, however, and fundamentally claims that, in the act of prayer, we affirm the other’s being. I will not enter here into a detailed critique of this position, but I will argue that a view of prayer as based on the affirmation of the other—the other in general and not necessarily God—cannot be a basis for the phenomenology of prayer. It does not relate to the worshippers’ act and certainly not to the textual “datum” that I analyzed in this book. For Derrida, prayer is merely one more manifestation of the self-other relationship, whoever that other might be. A phenomenological outline of prayer requires liberation from religious theories or religious positions. It must depart from the data: practices, rituals, and the worshippers’ discourse on prayer.19 In this book, the phenomenological “datum” are the literary texts that I have considered. The outline takes a basic fact as its starting point—humans are praying beings. This phenomenon is not necessarily derived from membership in a particular religion or from acknowledgement of an obligation imposed by a particular religion. The fact that humans are praying beings is a primary phenomenological fact, pre-religious, pre-theological, and pre-metaphysical. The determination that we are praying beings means that prayer is a human act and should be understood as such. Heschel offered a radical formulation of this position: “Prayer is not a need but an ontological necessity, an act that expresses the very essence of man. . . . He who has never prayed is not fully human. Ontology, not psychology or sociology, explains prayer.”20 In Heschel’s thought, this claim sums up the essence of his religious world. But if we isolate it from its metaphysical-religious context, it seems to convey the portrayal of humans as praying beings, pointing to the source of prayer as immanent rather than transcendent. The claim that prayer 18

Keith Putt, “’Too Deep for Words’: The Conspiracy of a Divine ‘Soliloquy,’” in The Phenomenology of Prayer, ed. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 142-153. See also Gideon Ofrat, L’autre Derrida (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2008), 149-156 [Heb]. 19 In this sense, Benson and Wirzba’s book, although claiming to deal with the phenomenology of prayer, misses the point because most of the articles included in it deal with theories of prayer, particularly by followers of Derrida, Levinas, and Heidegger. 20 Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 116 (emphasis in original).

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has an immanent foundation could be interpreted as a secular stance that grants primacy to the subject. Nathan Rotenstreich formulated the connection between the primacy of the subject and secularism as follows: By secularism we do not mean atheism. A secular framework does not preclude a possibility of a contact between man and God, or at least does not obviate the possibility of a religious belief. What characterises the secular attitude is not the denial of the existence of God but rather the denial of his central role as a constitutive factor in human reality. In other words, within a secular framework, no idea or theory or belief or value will be recognised as possessing regulative authority merely because it originated in a divine sphere transcending human reality.21

Phenomenologically, however, the crucial question is not secularism but how to explicate the human need to pray. The standard religious response presented above views prayer as a response to God, and the primordial transcendent element thus precedes the immanent one. But the analysis of the textual “datum” reverses the relationship—the immanent is primordial. Even the sense of the need for prayer, which many writers emphasized and Abraham Sutzkever formulated as “Yet I must say a prayer,”22 does not point to the primacy of the transcendent. Rather, the need is immanent and originates in humans. From this perspective, prayer is also a religious practice, but religion holds no monopoly over it and, in institutionalized religions, prayer may undergo changes. Among the prominent ones is the positioning of prayer as a heteronomous obligation incumbent on humans. Leibowitz pointed to the systematic contrast prevailing in religion between two types of prayer. The first type is, “A prayer of the afflicted, when he faints, and pours out his complaint before the Lord” (Psalms 102:1). A prayer of the afflicted comes from someone pouring out a complaint before God. The second type is the obligatory prayer incumbent on humans.23 This contrast could reflect the transformation that prayer undergoes in the context of the religious conceptual network: prayer, a primordial phenomenon that reflects humans as praying beings, undergoes a metamorphosis and is now an obligation. But even within a religious context one need not endorse the position of Leibowitz and Ellul. Prayer 21

Nathan Rotenstreich, Humanism in the Contemporary Era (The Hague: Mouton, 1963), 26-27. Abraham Sutzkever, “I Feel Like Saying a Prayer,” in Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, ed. Marguerite M. Striar (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 141. 23 Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, 30. 22

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as an obligation can be viewed as the organization of a subjective-immanent world within a new network of meaning, which does not deny these elements but adds to them. Within the network of obligation concepts, religion shapes and organizes all of a person’s subjective experiences, but it regiments them without denying their existence and still recognizes the primacy of subjectivity.24 The fact that prayer is a primordial phenomenon and that humans are praying beings enables us to compare prayer to another phenomenon— conscience. Heidegger delineated a phenomenology of conscience and took as his starting point that conscience is, above all, a phenomenon that comes forth in a call.25 We are used to the expression “conscience calls.” According to Heidegger, this call is a primary phenomenon enabling the full explication of conscience. Since the methodological starting point of Heideggerian phenomenology is everyday reality, one should pay attention to the everyday use of the “call of conscience” phrase.26 And yet, Heidegger stresses, the call need not be one that is heard. The gist of the call of conscience is that it provides its addressees with something that is intelligible—the call of conscience exposes something.27 What captured Heidegger’s attention was the fact that the call or the voice of conscience is coerced—humans do not initiate the call that, as it were, is imposed from outside, “from afar.”28 The call at times appears as “a higher court for Dasein’s existence.”29 The individual does not choose conscience. Indeed, when speaking of conscience, we say: “’It calls [Es ruft]’ against our expectations and even against our will.”30 But this call does not come from some place outside. In Heidegger’s formulation: “The call comes from me and yet from beyond me.”31 If we translate the Heideggerian terminology, these phenomenological findings are evidence of various existential levels in the self. The call of conscience is a call that rises from the depths of the self and, in Heidegger’s terms, enables the authentic existence of the day-to-day self. The call warns

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

This approach is suggested, for example, by R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik. See Avi Sagi, Tradition vs. Traditionalism: Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008), 21-28. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 317-319. Ibid., 313. Ibid., 314-316. Ibid., 316. Ibid., 313. Ibid., 320. Ibid. (emphasis in the original).

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and directs or, in Heidegger’s terms, summons32 (aufrufen) the self to itself. In his view, the voice of conscience that appears in the web of our identity and our day-to-day life is a call to our real being. Heidegger’s analysis directs attention to the fact that conscience is not directed to specific acts. It is the voice of being, which is blurred in day-to-day life: “The call itself discloses not the power of an ethos but the difference of human being, its being, from the traditional ways of life.”33 At the basis of this phenomenological analysis is the assumption that, in its routine existence, the self forgets or abandons its potential authentic being and lives in ceaseless processes of de-individualization, in which it becomes blurred and vague, what Heidegger calls Das man. Conscience is an affirmation of a different possibility of existence, more primal and authentic. It also mediates between this possibility and the day-to-day, given that, in Heidegger’s conception, conscience directs us to this possibility of existence.34 I have delved into a phenomenological analysis of conscience because both phenomena—conscience and prayer—share a common denominator. First, ontologically, both show humans as transcending their concrete existence, their being not exhausted by everyday pursuits. Prayer, like conscience, points to another, inner layer in human life. Second, prayer, like conscience, is sometimes coerced upon us. This coercion has been interpreted in both cases as a sign of the transcendent being’s active power, but, phenomenologically, transcending the borders of immanent givenness is impossible. Humans are beings whose existence is immanent, and the inner phenomena of their lives should therefore be interpreted in this light. The coercion in prayer is only the voice from depths beyond daily life. Prayer, like conscience, is the breakthrough of these elements into the day-to-day. The view of humans as praying beings implies that humans transcend their given existence. Prayer is a phenomenon of self-transcendence, which is immanent by nature, since its source is in humans.35 Friedrich Heiler identifies this element and defines prayer as “the expression of a primitive

32

Ibid., 318. Charles E. Scott, The Question of Ethics: Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 106. 34 For further discussion of the phenomenological analysis of conscience, see Avi Sagi, “Conscientious Objection and Jewish Tradition,” Democratic Culture 11 (2009): 253-293. 35 See also Paul Tillich, What is Religion (New York: Harper, 1973), 82-83, 116. 33

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impulsion to a higher, richer, intenser life . . .—it is always a great longing for life, for a more potent, a purer, a more blessed life.”36 The worshipper’s possibility of joining previous generations or praying for the other is a distinct sign of prayer’s self-transcendence dimension. Even if worshippers constitute their prayer out of and within their being, prayer is a manifestation of independence from immediate and concrete conditions and circumstances. Prayer is an act of freedom enabling worshippers to stand as historical-cultural-social creatures. Like any form of self-transcendence, it could also become a routine act involving mainly the fulfillment of an obligation. But these circumstances, rather than being constitutive of the meaning of prayer, express the difficulties of self-transcendence, which may direct its action against the self that constitutes it.37 Since prayer is an immanent act of the worshipper, the act of prayer as described in the course of the book precedes the object it is meant to affect. At times, prayer as self-transcendence turns to a divine addressee, a phenomenon that requires explanation. Ostensibly, prayer is an intentional act directed to an object, so that the object is secondary to the act of prayer. Supporting this assumption is the fact that the divine addressee is described in the act of prayer—God becomes what he is through the immanent action of humans. Against this simplistic approach, however, we must take into account that, for believers, God is not a constituted being but, indeed, the constitutive being that they are conditioned by and dependent upon. The phenomenology of humans as praying beings cannot negate the believers’ actual experience. This gap between the immanence of the act of prayer and its object, as opposed to the religious experience in the attempt at transcendence, requires a more cautious view of the immanence-transcendence relationship. In Chapter Three, I pointed to two phenomenological trends in this regard. Greater precision is now required when characterizing the standing of the transcendent in prayer. Prayer does not necessarily bring a person to an experience of transcendence, but the transformation from immanent to transcendent can apparently occur in one of two modes. According to the first, the worshipper may have had an autonomous religious experience, unconditioned by prayer or transcendence. Its analysis will not be my concern here, but the fact of this experience for believers is undeniable. In the 36

Friedrich Heiler, Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Religion, trans. Samuel McComb (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 355. 37 Cf. Walter Kaufman, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), 367-368.

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general organization of the believer’s world of meaning, this experience is woven into the meaning of prayer. The believer’s prayer has an object—the God that the believer has already experienced as a transcendent being— and the prayer is therefore addressed to this being. The second mode is founded on a new religious experience that occurs in prayer. Prayer, an immanent act, may give rise to an experience of the transcendent because it often creates a distance between the worshippers and the God they address. Worshippers do not only describe this God, they also empower him and position themselves as finite beings that depend on him, leading to a disposition wherein they may experience the presence of the transcendent. The transcendent is not constituted by prayer, but rather the opposite—prayer may lead people to a mental attitude that enables them to experience the transcendent as transcendent. In the immanent realm, they come to experience themselves as dependent on God, as in the presence of a being that is not constituted by the subject. In prayer, subjects come to experience themselves as created rather than sovereign beings. Thus, the immanent occurrence itself becomes the foundation of the new ontological experience of a transcendent God. These two modes implicitly rest on the assumption that the experience of the transcendent, like any other human experience, unfolds in the immanent realm of action. Conceptions of prayer in institutionalized religion that view it as an obligation or explain it theologically or metaphysically also point to its immanent basis. That is the nature of prayer as a human act. These conceptions grant primacy to the transcendent element as well. Prayer, then, is primarily immanent.38 This matter, which has been noted recurrently in the book, is explicitly corroborated by two thinkers who are unquestionably religious. Auguste Sabatier writes, “Wherever this prayer39 springs up in the soul and moves it, even in the absence of all form and doctrine clearly defined, there is true religion, living piety.”40 Similarly, Ellul writes, “Prayer comes into existence before we can have a definition of prayer, or a precise definition of God.”41 38

See also Samuel H. Dresner, Prayer, Humility and Compassion (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1957), 22-28. As noted above (pp. IX-X), Dresner did characterize humans as praying beings, but the meaning he proposed for this characterization goes beyond phenomenology into a theological speculation that is not compelled by the phenomenological analysis. 39 Sabatier defined the prayer that he is referring to here as “the movement of the soul putting itself into personal relation and contact with the mysterious power whose presence it feels even before it is able to give it a name” (Auguste Sabatier, Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion Based on Psychology and History [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957], 26). 40 Ibid. 41 Ellul, Prayer and Modern Man, 59. This, as noted above, is also the view of Arthur Green.

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Had prayer been necessarily constituted by the object, meaning God, and had its meaning been contingent on the primacy of the other it addresses, as Derrida held, a prayer not resting on clear acknowledgement of the object it addresses would be meaningless—if worshippers do not know who they pray to and cannot clearly trace its being, how can they engage in a dialogue with it? How can they even know it is worth addressing the divine other in prayer? Given the sublimity of the divine, should not a creature that was taken from dust and will return to dust be silent? R. Hayyim Haykl of Amdor formulated this as follows: “How dare we ask the Creator to have mercy on us?”42 Only because worshippers imagine and know something about their God even before praying can they allow themselves to address God in prayer. R. Hayyim Haykl indeed answers this question by stating that prayer rests on the belief about the “love of the father for the son,” and this love allows us to overcome divine transcendence. If believers have no assumptions about God, how can they know what is proper to say in prayer? They can be silent and await God’s action to teach them the proper way of praying—“O Lord, open my lips; and my mouth shall rehearse thy praise” (Psalms 51:17). And even this expectation is exaggerated, given that the daring of the act of prayer rests on the assumption that God answers those who address him. A profound religious thinker such as Augustine pinpointed the problematic of prayer: “Grant me Lord to know and understand” . . . which comes first—to call upon you or to praise you, and whether knowing you precedes calling upon you. But who calls upon you when he does not know you? For an ignorant person might call upon someone else instead of the right one.43

Even Augustine faces the question: is praying to God possible without some knowledge about the God who is addressed? Is the call primal because it is a divine act, or is it perhaps incumbent on humans to find who they address in their prayers? Christian tradition in all its manifestations assumes that prayer is, above all, an act of absolute submission to God.44 As part of it, worshippers may find themselves renouncing all of God’s predicative content, and even believers who have established their world on a specific philosophy or 42

Cited by Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism, 158. See also 144-167. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3. 44 George Stephens Spinks, Psychology and Religion: An Introduction to Contemporary Views (Boston: Boston University Press, 1963), 117-118, 122. 43

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t­ heology may reach this stance. Thus, for example, Samuel Hugo Bergman cites Nicolai de Cusa, who presents a conversation between a Christian believer and a pagan. When the pagan asks, “Who is [this] God whom you worship?” the Christian answers, “I do not know.” And when the pagan asks, “How is it that you worship so seriously that of which you have no knowledge?” the Christian responds, “Because I am without knowledge [of Him], I worship.”45 Bergman describes this book as the prayer of a philosopher who is also a believer: “The philosopher rightfully says he knows nothing about God, but he is not thereby prevented, as a believer, from praying. Prayer, in Rosenzweig’s terms, is an event between God and man. The event can occur, but it provides man no positive knowledge about God.”46 From a phenomenological perspective, this is a hard position to endorse. Assuming that we do not rely on the (unnecessary and contingent on religious belief) notion that divine grace constitutes prayer and that we do not see prayer as an “occurrence” where humans encounter God, but rather as one where they address God, addressing God in prayer and even praying for prayer is only possible if worshippers have some image of the God to whom they are praying. The fact is that believers’ prayers will differ according to the image of God they have endorsed. The object of prayer is therefore secondary to the actual prayer, even if the object is transcendent. Worshippers are not theologians or philosophers who need to precede their prayer with an understanding of God. Instead, prayer is the language through which they think about and imagine God. When attempting to determine the image of God in a specific religious tradition, the most reliable course is to make its language of prayer the object of philosophical study. This analysis will show that faith and prayer fixate the image of God and the mode of God’s presence in the life of believers and worshippers. The extensive discussions in the book on the image of God in Jewish tradition as simultaneously transcendent and immanent can serve to illustrate this point. Divine immanence is evident in the believers’ address to God in both second and third person—“thou” and “he.” Worshippers ascribe a predicative content to God that combines these two contradictory aspects, as revealed in the language of the prayer. By contrast, the confessions of Augustine discussed above are those of a Christian believer 45

Samuel Hugo Bergman, Men and Ways: Philosophical Essays (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1967), 299 [Heb]. For the dialogue between the pagan and the Christian quoted by Bergman, see Nicolai de Cusa, De Deo Abscondito (On the Hidden God), vol. IV, Opuscula I, of the Heidelberg Academy edition of Nicolai de Cusa, Opera Omnia (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1959). 46 Ibid.

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from whom submission is required, and they grow from the very core of Christian belief. At times, the believer’s prayer is a demand to overcome what the act of prayer conveys—whereas believers address God as a figure with a predicative content, various theologies reject this prayer and constitute it as a way of overcoming this predicative disposition. This fact, in and of itself, compels a distinction between theories of prayer and the phenomenological analysis of prayer as a subjective act. This analysis, however, does not warrant Heiler’s conclusion that the idea of God precedes the act of prayer.47 Quite the contrary—the very idea of God could be constituted by prayer, given that prayer, as noted, is a way of speaking to and about God. Its religious pathos notwithstanding, the widespread claim that prayer is speech to God, rather than about God,48 is implausible because any address to the other rests, at least implicitly, on certain assumptions. Without these assumptions, addressing the other would be impossible. Thus, for example, the address assumes that the other understands our language, can listen, and can respond. In a deep sense, it also assumes that sender and addressee share a common network of meaning. Concerning God, several other assumptions are evident in the language of prayer: that God is merciful, omnipotent, and so forth. Hermann Cohen articulated this notion when stating, “the prayer depends upon belief in the good God, who wants to, and can, help the individual man.”49 Thus, even if worshippers cannot and need not fully describe God, by the very act of addressing God they perform, non-reflectively and non-thematically, an act of objectification. Prayer, therefore, “not only speaks to God, but of God, so that prayer preserves a relationship with a predicative content.”50 Phenomenologically, then, the basic datum is the worshipper’s act of prayer, as concretized in its linguistic articulation. The language of prayer is the language of the worshippers, which reflects their insights and with which they address God, reflecting their implicit understanding of the divinity. What is primal, therefore, is the act of prayer rather than the 47 Heiler, Prayer, 355. 48

See, for example, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 156. 49 Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972), 378. 50 John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 38-39 (emphasis in original).

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givenness of the divine being it addresses, even if one experiences this being’s transcendence. The fact that we depict God in our prayers might lead one to mistake God for no more than an immanent object constituted by humans, but this is not a necessary conclusion. The determinations about the predicative content ascribed to God in the act of prayer do not deny the assumption about the transcendence of God, whom worshippers are meant to address. Prayer is founded on the worshipper’s immanent act, but worshippers could still experience God as a transcendent being. Gabriel Marcel conveys this insight: “Not only does the word transcendent not mean transcending experience, but on the contrary, there must exist a possibility of having an experience of the transcendent as such, and unless that possibility exists the word can have no meaning.”51 Marcel rejects the possibility that humans make meaningless statements and, therefore, if they address a transcendent being in their prayers, we must assume they have some experience of it.52 This experience, however, will always be within what human knowledge can contain. In Edmund Husserl’s terms, transcendence is immanent and, therefore, the primal act of prayer and of the faith within which the prayer evolves determines the meaning as well as the presence of the transcendental experience. In Yitzhak Lamdan’s formulation: “As long as prayer happens—an ear hears.”53 The transcendent addressee exists only for the worshipper whose act is immanent. Lamdan’s poetic statement contradicts Pascal’s determination, “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.”54 Pascal, as noted, assumes that prayer is the event through which God works. The immanent movement of one’s lips in prayer is merely the opportunity for God’s action. By contrast, from a phenomenological perspective, moving one’s lips in 51

Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, vol. 1, Reflection and Mystery, trans. G. S. Fraser and Rene Hague (Chicago: Regnery, 1960), 57-58. 52 See also D. Z. Philips, The Concept of Prayer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 39-40; Yehuda Gelman, “Prof. Leibowitz and the Religious Experience,” in Yeshayahu Leibowitz: His World and Philosophy, ed. Avi Sagi (Jerusalem: Keter, 1995), 33-37 [Heb]. See also Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, 110. 53 Yitzhak Lamdan, “When the Fires Die Out, After Prayer,” in Collected Poems (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1973), 69 [Heb]. 54 For this quote from Pascal, see Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 168. Note that Althusser interprets this text idiosyncratically. In his view, the material act of prayer creates God, moving one’s lips creates God. But this reading distorts the view of Pascal, who speaks of faith rather than of God, of the human stance vis-à-vis reality rather than of God’s existence. Furthermore, Pascal claims that the act of prayer, like the act of entering a church, leads us to faith. Faith and prayer do not happen through the mere physical performance, but by opening one’s heart to the occurrence of God’s action. Althusser reads his own thoughts into Pascal’s text, and is unwilling to listen to Pascal’s clear stance.

H uma ns a s Pray i n g B e i n g s : A Ph e n o m eno lo gi c al Pro f i le

prayer is the act within which and for which the existence of a transcendent being is potentially meaningful. The transcendent addressee, however, is only one of prayer’s possibilities rather than its only possible concretization, since prayers do not necessarily address God. Beside the texts I have considered in this book, the classic example is prayer in Buddhism, which cannot be addressed to a god and does not reflect a divine presence because this religion does not assume the existence of a god. Prayer in a Buddhist context conveys a deep belief in the potential wholeness of the self, which can be attained through prayer. In this tradition, the linguistic act of prayer addresses humans and serves as a means of inspiration and self-amendment.55 Heiler distinguishes the psychological impulse at the basis of prayer from its essence and, in the terms of this study—its phenomenological meaning.56 He states: “Every prayer is a turning of man to another Being to whom he inwardly opens his heart; it is the speech of an ‘I’ to a ‘Thou.’”57 But the description of humans as praying beings implies that prayer, as the act of a subject who yearns to transcend its specific being, also precedes the address to the other being. What Heiler saw as the psychological foundation is thus the phenomenological aspect of humans as praying beings. In order to understand the full meaning of the difference between the psychological and the phenomenological perspectives on prayer, I will rely on the distinction between “need” and “desire.” From a psychological perspective, prayer is the fulfillment of a certain need. As is true of any need, the need fulfilled by prayer follows from some lack, from circumstances burdening the individual: distress, fear, illness, and so forth. The need creates a movement whose purpose is non-movement, concretized in the fulfilment of the need. Need, therefore, is always temporary, even if its temporariness stretches into infinity. Need creates a movement meant to be nullified. Paul Valéry described these circumstances through the metaphor of walking. Walking has a “clear goal,” derived from a spectrum of motives ultimately intended for the “attainment of a goal.”58 Need, then, makes a circular movement that begins with a lacking self and ends up with a self that is whole. The definition of prayer as need fixates its status as a movement of the self, from itself to itself. Prayer is founded on a need that moves humans to 55 See Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (New York: T. and T. Clark, 1930), s.v. Prayer, 166-170. 56 Heiler, Prayer. 57 58

Ibid., 356. Paul Valéry, The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 70.

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address God, and its fulfillment positions humans in a harmonious state, when the need that gave rise to the prayer is satisfied. Prayer is thus the mediating element between the primary state of lack, which creates the need, and the final state, manifesting its fulfillment. Since prayer responds to a need, the fulfillment of the need makes prayer redundant. Prayer thus becomes a momentary act without any fixed foundation in our being and, given its basis on a need, other ways might be found to satisfy it, at least in principle. Thus, for example, people who pray because they are in distress may find a response no less satisfactory in conversation with others, in meditation practices, and so forth. Prayer is thus not only momentary, but also replaceable. But if prayer is evidence that humans are praying beings, it has no alternative and cannot be the expression of a momentary need. A view of humans as praying beings implies that they are self-transcending. They are not content merely with being and are always beyond, always constituted by possibility rather than by what they already are. Alexandre Kojève, in his inspiring interpretation of Hegel, characterized humans as beings who desire: “The man who is ‘absorbed’ by the object that he is contemplating can be ‘brought back to himself ’ only by a Desire.”59 Desire, argues Kojève, is the manifestation of constant transcendence, it “moves him [man] to action” that, fundamentally, is a negation or at least a transformation of what is. It is a constant emptiness and a negation that are perennially unsatisfied. Desire represents the individuality and the historic character of human existence.60 Sartre, who like many of his contemporaries was influenced by Kojève, proceeds on this course and argues that “human reality is before all else its own nothingness.”61 This “own nothingness” implies a refusal to identify the self with a specific mode of being. Humans are always “toward,” because the future horizon of possibility, the fact that their reality is open, implies that they are always moving beyond themselves. The movement, however, is not toward being non-human but toward being what they can be. Human life is thus constituted by the movement from what Sartre called “in-itself,” the r­ eality as given, toward the “for-itself,” the refusal of the given. 59

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 3. 60 Ibid., 3-8. 61 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1957), 88.

H uma ns a s Pray i n g B e i n g s : A Ph e n o m eno lo gi c al Pro f i le

Ontologically, the “for-itself ” is defined as “lack of being.”62 The lack is not temporary. It is in the nature of human existence that it is not exhausted by specific modes and can always transcend its givenness. This approach explicates the nature of desire and its difference with need. Desire is emblematic of humans as lacking beings. It has no specific object within a realm it must cover. The object of desire is human existence itself, which is not open and attainable.63 Walking, as noted, was the metaphor that Valéry used to describe need. Desire, however, is not a walk toward the attainment of a specific and defined goal that will eventually lead to rest, making the walking metaphor unsuitable. Valéry thus represented pure desire through the metaphor of dance: “It is, of course, a system of actions; but of actions whose end is in themselves. It goes nowhere. If it pursues an object, it is only an ideal object.”64 In sum, need does not represent human existence but a specific transient state. By contrast, desire is emblematic of human existence, of humans as transcendent beings. In Sartre’s well-known formulation in Being and Nothingness, desire has no purpose. If we assume that humans are praying beings, meaning that prayer conveys their essence as beings, the self-transcendence underlying prayer does not convey need—an action that begins and ends with the self. Prayer is not a momentary action, since humans are always praying beings, always transcending their own selves. Prayer is therefore a never-ending, perpetual motion. We pray again and again. From this perspective, the self-transcendence of prayer is founded on the desire that is beyond need. Prayer is thus movement beyond the self, even if this “beyond” does not involve addressing God. Prayer is the ceaseless movement of overcoming the self, an unquenchable desire, an inextinguishable eros.65 Is the fact that different cultures convey the practice of prayer through dance merely a coincidence, or could this pairing reflect that both of these practices are expressions of pure desire? This phenomenological-ontological analysis indicates that the description of humans as praying beings, rather than a phenomenon apart from 62

Ibid., 565. See also 87-90. Ibid., 565-566. For an analysis of humans as the subjects of desire, see Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). As Butler’s analysis shows, the conception of humans as desiring beings is a cornerstone of post-Hegelian French thought. 64 Valéry, The Art of Poetry, 70. 65 On the distinction between desire and need, see also Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” trans. A. Lingis, in Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 350-352. 63

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others that also view self-transcendence as constitutive of human existence, is part of a continuum—humans as free, interpreting beings, artists, and so forth. All share the basic assumption of self-transcendence, of refusing the given. Ludwig Feuerbach, as noted, understood prayer itself in these terms—as an expression of the dichotomy between nature and freedom, between the givenness constituted by the past and the centrality of a horizon for the future.66 This dialectic experience was impressively conveyed in the suggestion made by a panel member at a Kibbutz Beth ha-Shitah symposium in 1991 on the new melody that Yair Rosenblum had composed for the Yom Kippur prayer u-Netanne Tokef. This traditional prayer deals with God’s judgment and a call to repentance. In the course of the prayer, human consciousness is reflected as that of a finite, limited being: “A man comes from dust and ends in dust, risks his life to earn his bread, is likened to a broken shard, to withering grass, and to a passing shade.” The participants attested that the new melody that Rosenblum had composed for these traditional words had evoked a special feeling of religiosity and had enabled members of the kibbutz, many of whom had lost sons in the Yom Kippur war, to add this unique experience to the other experiences of the holy day. A second-­ generation member expressed her feelings as follows: I open up to prayer (not to God) and I accept that I am dependent on many factors. Opening up to this depth strengthens hope. In the past was a will to change the world, today I am satisfied with the hope that life will remain life, without any sudden catastrophe.67

Prayer, then, is a moment of reflection where our being is fully exposed. Prayer does not necessarily lead one to God, but above all to oneself; worshippers discover they are finite, contingent beings, and yet are capable of hope, that is, of self-transcendence. Joseph B. Soloveitchik characterizes prayer as founded on “experiencing the complete helplessness of man, his absolute dependence upon God.”68 But this is a one-sided perception of prayer. Prayer does assume that we are finite creatures dependent on circumstances, but not that we are helpless. Prayer teaches us that we are not omnipotent, but not necessarily dependent on God. Soloveitchik’s view is that of a believer who interpreted 66

Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Prometheus Books, 1989), 123. Cited in Ruti Peled, “u-Netanne Tokef,” in Yom Kippur at Beth ha-Shitah between Stasis and Change 1929-1999, ed. Naomi Adar (Beth ha-Shitah, 2000), 72 [Heb]. 68 Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Family Redeemed: Essays on Family Relationships (New York: Ktav, 2000), 40. 67

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the meaning of prayer according to his own unique religious views. The phenomenon of prayer weaves together the recognition of our finitude and our power of self-transcendence. It reflects the fact that we are free and do not submit to coercing circumstances. Felix Weltsch, a friend of Kafka and an independent thinker whose work deserves to be better known, subtly describes the nature of “creative freedom” as a freedom able to overcome hindrances. Indeed, “creative freedom is actually built on hindrances and necessity. These two are its materials, and the extent of the effort depends on the resistance.”69 For Weltsch, the quintessential manifestation of creative freedom resembles “the enthusiasm, the passion of devoted prayer, wherein man rises above himself and far beyond his natural powers.”70 This reflection, pointing to human dependence and finitude, “strengthens hope” because it shows that we transcend finitude and coerced factuality through the reflection referred to above as “opening up.” This existential reflection is not necessarily thematic and does not necessarily occur beyond the act of prayer but rather with it. Traces of this perception of prayer as a reflective act that denotes self-transcendence is also evident in rabbinic literature. The Talmud determines that “the Holy One, blessed be He, prays” (TB Berakhot 7a). God’s prayer cannot address God and, in that sense, it is a prayer without God, who is both the subject and the object of the prayer. God thus presents the paradigm of prayer as an act of return to the self. Furthermore, the Talmud identifies this reflective act as one whose concern is to overcome the self. It answers the question of “what is God’s prayer” by stating, “May it be my will that my mercy may suppress my anger, and that my mercy may prevail among my attributes, and that I may deal with my children in the attribute of mercy and short of strict justice.”71 According to the Talmud, then, God’s prayer is God’s desire for self-control. It puts the present and its circumstances to the test: in the present, God is angry, and his prayer is an expectation of his mercy suppressing his anger. This prayer turns to the future asking that it may differ from the present. The character of God’s prayer fully conveys the tension between a present that is given and a future possibility that is not assured. The “may it be” wish fully conveys the precariousness of the future. Prayer is thus an attempt to overcome the 69

Felix Weltsch, Gnade und Freiheit: Untersuchungen zum Problem des schöpferischen Willens in Religion und Ethik (München: K. Wolff, 1920) 92. 70 Ibid., 90. 71 TB Berakhot 7a.

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self in a domain that is invariably unsure. Furthermore, if God prays, his prayer is obviously not momentary, since God is eternal and his deeds are eternal. This text thus conveys a primal intuition: prayer is a permanent phenomenon representing the ontology extending from a given present to an open future, from which we judge the present and envisage an option of renewal.72 In what way, then, is the description of humans as praying beings unique? This description reflects the fact that all the features of humans as transcendent beings culminate in speech. Ontologically, to be praying beings means that humans are speaking beings who, through speech, transcend themselves.73 Speech is free of factual givenness. In speech, we can transcend our givenness ad infinitum and exhaust our creative powers without any limitation. And yet, prayer as speech is unique in that the speech of prayer is not descriptive; it does not reflect the given. Prayer involves a verbal judgment of existence—an affirmation of existence or an expectation of changing it. The speech of prayer is therefore beyond descriptive speech. Prayer as transcendence that is expressed in speech is full of pathos and the concentration that single it out and position it among such phenomena as poetry, music, and dance. Prayer is an act of speech. Every form of speech turns to an add­ ressee, but this speech does not necessarily turn to the other—God. Pheno­ menologically, a monologue can also be based on an act of self-duplication, where the speaker addresses his or her own self, who is located “out there,” and speech is then inner speech. From the act of speech as such, therefore, we cannot conclude the necessity of assuming an external addressee, given that an act of self-duplication also creates a distance between sender and addressee. The speaking sender addresses his inner being, the foundations of her existence that are beyond their day-to-day manifestations. The act of speech is based on a kind of externalization, but in prayer as speech, the externalization may be directed to the one who is actually speaking. Mostly, prayer does turn outward,74 possibly but not necessarily to God as an external object. Prayer is an act of self-transcendence and, therefore, it is invariably an act of exiting a given reality, but it need not be ­concretized in any specific act of objectification. The object of prayer as speech could 72

I am grateful to my son, Nir Sagi, who made these suggestions when we studied this text together. The association between humans as praying beings and as speaking beings was noted by R. Yehuda Lowe, known as Maharal (1520-1609). See Netivot Olam, vol. 1, Netiv ha-Avodah (Bnei Brak, 1980), ch. 2, 81. See also Aharon Appelfeld, The Man Who Would Not Stop Sleeping (Or Yehuda: Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, 2010), 84 [Heb]. 74 Peter L. Berger, Questions of Faith: A Skeptical Affirmation of Christianity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 82-83. 73

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be the ideal reality that the worshipper desires or the concrete reality that prayer judges to be the ideal. The speech in prayer thus hinges on the individual and their existence in the world. Many prayers are never conveyed in objectified speech, they are expressive and convey humans as beings who are prayer—“I am prayer.”75 Even when the speech in prayer is objectified, it sometimes expresses the desire for the God constituted by the prayer,76 and sometimes the yearning for the God conveyed in the notion of the object as void. At other times, prayer is entirely released from its object and becomes a deep expression of human existence or of existence in general: humans are praying beings who transcend their existence, turn to the future, and return to the present. The fact that prayer is self-transcendence, desire, is uniquely conveyed in the work of two poets. One is Avot Yeshurun, in a poem that was discussed above.77 The other is Agi Mishol. Prayer for her, however, is only one expression of the transcendence typical of reality as a whole, not only human reality: “because everything that can/ leaves the earth:/ chimney smoke/ prayer/ jumps for joy.”78 Prayer is a longing, a desire whose object could be a woman and not God; it conveys the deep inner feeling of transcendence. The experience of prayer recognizes the border of existence and the possibility of transcendence within it. This view of prayer is correct not only in the context of the views presented in Chapters Four and Five, but also in the context of the view analyzed in Chapter Six. Even a prayer expressing the death of God in the present conveys transcendence and a longing for what is beyond the given. Note that even Hermann Cohen, who was a man of faith, identified desire as the permanent element of prayer, and although he held that prayer has an object—God—he could not avoid stressing that prayer is a constant transcendence that is always beyond the specific act: Prayer is longing. The desire for God expressed in prayer is a quest for God and always wants to be quest only; for the finding cannot be actual, but can have as its goal only “the nearness to God,” only the drawing near to God. This drawing near, however, is always love, always longing, always an affect. . . . The quest is the end in itself of 75

On the Hebrew phrase “Ani tefillah” [I am prayer], see p. IX above. Cf. Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, 374. 77 See p. 128 above. 78 Agi Mishol, “Not for Nothing I Stand Here in the Evening,” in Look There: New and Selected Poems, trans. Lisa Katz (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2006), 71. 76

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the religious soul. The longing signifies and fills the entire inner life of the soul, insofar as it is focused on the correlation with God for the purpose of engendering religion.79

My analysis does not confirm Cohen’s claim that prayer is necessarily a quest for God. But despite the religious context delineating the borders of Cohen’s view, he could not avoid confronting prayer’s constitutive foundation—its being a quest that is not actualized or, in my terms, an act of constant transcendence. Contrary to Cohen, the current analysis shows that prayer is not a religious act, and the religious ritual of prayer is only one expression of human existence: “The need to pray is also felt by an individual who assuredly defines himself as a ‘non-believer.’”80 The phenomenology of prayer shows that the classic religious/secular dichotomy crumbles, to be replaced by a mediating approach denoted by the term “religiosity.” This term now denotes human existence as one that constantly transcends its givenness. Religiosity is a refusal of coerced givenness, a discontent with the surrounding reality, and a desire for what is beyond. This desire may lead us to find God, just as it may throw us back onto recognition of our finite, “absurd” existence. At other times, it may remain as an unsatisfied desire that pushes us back to the borders of our existence, which we cannot transcend. We are thrown against the border, retreat, and then go back. Religiosity is the constant eros of the movement that begins with immanence and is then shaped as a movement of transcendence, whose meaning we implicitly or explicitly decode in our existence.81 Weltsch is the one who recognized the foundation of religiosity in the act of transcendence: He [man] stands only before what surrounds him, but can expand his horizon. As soon as he does so, he notices that his surrounding world is only a small part of the real world. . . . This attitude to the unknown, to the infinite, including its influence on feeling and will, is usually referred to, in the broadest meaning, as a religious attitude.82

In this attitude, the focus is not the divine or transcendent object but the act of transcendence as such. The gist of religiosity is to recognize the depth

79 Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, 374. 80

Eliezer Schweid, “Hoping for Prayer,” Moznayim 36 (1973): 397 [Heb]. Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, The Frankfurt School and the History of Pessimism (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996), 263-272 [Heb]. 82 Felix Weltsch, Franz Kafka: Religiosity and Humor in His Life and Work (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1959), 62-63 [Heb]. 81

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of spiritual life.83 Religiosity is the recognition of human life’s encoded ­mystery. The discovery that being bears a mystery, that the self ’s existence is mysterious, positions humans in a new realm, raises many questions and allows for various answers. Existentially, the recognition of an encoded element in existence bears implications also, and perhaps mainly, for human ontology. Erich Neumann points out that “the soul is increasingly revealed as a mystery.”84 This discovery, however, is indispensable if humans are to find themselves: “Out of this sense, modern man can renew his being, through an experience whose numinous meaning is assured from within, and no longer depends on the reliability of a tradition whose historical character necessarily casts doubt upon it.”85 Writers and poets have used paradoxical expressions to convey this view of religiosity. Thus, Yitzhak Laor creates the compounds “holy secularism”86 and “religious intentionality without God.”87 Yitzhak Orpaz resorts to the phrase “secular pilgrim.”88 These and other expressions break the religious/secular dichotomy and set up an alternative that I denote with the term “religiosity.” Religiosity is an attitude of holiness toward existence, a recognition that reality is deeper than what is revealed in the empirical day-to-day. George Simmel drew a significant distinction between religion and religiosity. Religion is the system reflected in norms and institutions, by nature a historical phenomenon, rooted in a particular time and place. Religiosity denotes an inclination or a disposition that creates a general attitude toward existence.89 Martin Buber accepted Simmel’s distinction: I say and mean: religiosity. I do not say and do not mean: religion. Religiosity is man’s sense of wonder and adoration, an ever anew becoming, an ever anew articulation and formulation of his feeling that, transcending his conditioned being yet bursting from its very core, there is something that is unconditioned. Religiosity is his longing to 83 84 85 86 87 88

89

Ibid., 63. For an important elaboration of this view, see Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). Erich Neumann, Krise und Erneuerung (Zürich: Rhein-Verlag, 1961), 57. Ibid., 58. Yitzhak Laor, “In the Formless Void,” Poems in the Valley of Iron (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1990), 24. Ibid., “Chapter Two: In the Light,” 21. Yitzhak Orpaz, The Secular Pilgrim: An Essay (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1982) [Heb]. George Simmel, Essays on Religion, trans. Horst Hurgen Helle and Ludwig Nieder (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 9-22.

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establish a living communion with the unconditioned, his will to realize the unconditioned through his action, transposing it into the world of man. Religion is the sum total of the customs and teachings articulated and formulated by the religiosity of a certain epoch in a people’s life; its prescriptions and dogmas are rigidly determined and handed down as unalterably binding to all future generations, without regard for their newly developed religiosity, which seeks new forms.90

Underlying this distinction between religion and religiosity is the assumption that institutionalized religion rests on the experience of our encounter with reality. Buber describes this experience as an encounter with the absolute, as an outburst that transcends our empirical world. From a phenomenological perspective, statements about the absolute transcend our concrete experience, since they are already a metaphysical stance. What can be affirmed about religiosity is that it is based on discontent with transient and changing existence, and that it conveys a desire for what is beyond this temporariness. This desire is the very transcendence that humans experience, and has many expressions: humans do not merely live, but judge and evaluate their lives; humans are not only acted upon and coerced by circumstances but can also transcend them as free creatures. Indeed, the human cultural endeavor reflects that we transcend the nature that binds us. Above all, however, this transcendence reveals humans as multilayered creatures. Daily existence does not exhaust what they can be, what they sometimes become. The endless longing, the refusal to be content with the given, is the experience of religiosity that, contrary to Buber’s view, need not materialize in religion. It may, but need not, assume an institutional garb, and reflects their absolute seriousness toward themselves and their existence. Tillich’s definition of faith as “ultimate concern” seems to fit the notion of religiosity outlined here.91 According to this approach, faith is not the concern of religion or any particular religious establishment, but rather the human attitude toward existence. The act of faith thus precedes its object, given that its essence is ultimate concern. As ultimate concern, faith must be anchored in the total personality, which is why Tillich can say: “Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements.”92 Since faith is an essential 90

Martin Buber, On Judaism, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1967), 80. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 1. 92 Ibid., 4. 91

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element of personal existence, the personality is by nature “ecstatic” and invariably transcends the givenness within which humans find themselves. It transcends rationality, feelings, and dispositions, even when it contains them.93 At the same time, faith is a kind of affirmation of existence in its full depth, as Weltsch writes in the opening lines of his book: Every answer of faith assigns to finite human existence the meaning of infinity, and this meaning will not be consumed by pain, by lack, or by death. . . . Faith is not only the disclosure of things hidden, it is not revelation . . . it is not accepting what we were told, as faith is usually thought of. Faith is recognizing meaning in human life, by dint of which man is not just consumed but lives. Faith is the power of life.94

Faith is, in this view, an expression of trust in existence, in what is in it and what can be in it. Existence has “the meaning of infinity.” Faith represents life not only as movement in space but also as movement inward, into the depths of existence. It is a recognition of the mystery of life, not in the sense that somewhere “there” is a mystery that can be revealed. The mystery of life lies precisely in its being unexplained, inexhaustible. Neither rationality, nor religion, nor feeling can decode existence. Life is a mystery doomed to remain a mystery. Recognizing the mystery of existence means accepting that knowledge has a limited capacity to grasp and understand, and that consciousness must remain within its immanent borders. These borders, however, do not exhaust everything, given the human longing to transcend this immanence. Faith in this immanent sense is the religiosity beyond the religion/secularism dichotomy. These insights on religiosity underlie the notion of humans as praying beings. Indeed, they endow prayer itself with meaning, since prayer, as noted, is a refusal to accept the coercing power of the given, a belief that the given requires affirmation or correction. In all circumstances, it is the refusal of an inexplicable submission to reality. Prayer is the essence of religiosity in the sense that was described, and not necessarily the essence or property of a particular institutionalized religion. Amichai expressed this insight: The open hand stretched out to see if rain drops— that is the most innocent hand of all, 93

Ibid., 6-8.

94 Weltsch, Gnade und Freiheit, 7.

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the most believing, more prayerful than all the worshippers in all the houses of prayer.95

Prayer is a basic existential gesture, a hand movement expressing the expectation of an event. It does not transcend the web of life. Indeed, quite the opposite—it is woven into it and expresses it. Arthur Green, who, as noted, devoted special attention to prayer, understood that prayer is founded on the recognition of the wonder of existence and on the fact that the soul is not exhausted by cognitive approaches. Recognizing “the wonders” of life and nature causes us to turn inward. We seek within our own inner depths the threads of a fabric that will allow us to draw such isolated experiences together.96 Our prayer is a cry and a song to life itself, called forth from our innermost self, addressed to the wonder and mystery of life.97

We need not endorse the mystical overtones of Green’s approach to accept the kernel of truth within it: prayer breaks forth long before it is endowed with religious or metaphysical meaning. It expresses the main stance visà-vis existence in general and one’s individual existence in particular. Philosophers of religion can continue to deal with the meaning and the coherence of prayer after the “death of God.” But if they understand philosophy as an effort to explicate existence, the question is not whether there is room for prayer without God, but what is the meaning of the prayer that people, believers and non-believers, pray. The answers to this question should not be sought in philosophy books but in the way people explain prayer in their own world. This book is an attempt to trace the meanings that people in a specific culture ascribed to prayer. The analysis follows in the wake of a textual “testimony” that sheds light on the meaning of prayer and on the ontology of humans as praying beings.

95

Yehuda Amichai, “For Love Must Be Spoken, Not Whispered, That It May Be Seen and Heard,” in Open Closed Open: Poems, trans. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld (New York: Harcourt, 2000), 163-164. 96 Arthur Green, Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992), xxi. 97 Ibid., 13.

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187

Index

A

Abrams, M. H., 15 Absurd, 51, 85, 150, 170 Ahad Ha-Am, 140 Akiva, R., 115 Alienation, 73, 136 Aliyah Second, 141 Third, 133 Allport, Gordon, 103 Altizer, Thomas, 48 Amichai, Yehuda, 55–56, 76–78, 108, 117, 144–145 Amidah prayer, xii, 120 Amir, Anda, 60 Amitai, Levi Ben, x, xi Anthropology, 20, 22 Anxiety, xii, 33, 42, 61, 111, 121 Appelfeld, Aharon, 10, 71, 73 The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping, 151 And the Rage is Not Yet Over, 71 Aquinas, Thomas, 106n96 Arikha, Yosef, 2 Aristotle, 15 Ars poetica poem, 11 Atheism/atheist, 1, 2, 21–23, 31–32, 36, 43, 45, 48, 49, 56, 59, 67, 79, 112, 121, 125, 154 Augustine, 98, 159–160

B

Bachmann, Ingeborg, 15 Barth, Karl, 47, 75 Bar-Yosef , Hamutal, 60 Beatles’ “Let It Be,” 101–102 Beckett, Samuel, 150 Waiting for Godot, 150 Be’er, Haim, 139 The Pure Element of Time, 139 Be’eri, Shabtai, 142 Being itself, 110–111

Beirnaert, Louis, 17 Berdyczewski, Micha Yosef, 54 Berger, Peter, 29–30 Bergman, Samuel Hugo, 160 Beth ha-Shitah, kibbutz, 142, 166 Bialik, Hayyim Nahman, 9, 54, 122–128, 125, 129–131 “Alone,” 122–123, 125, 126 death of God, 125, 130 departure of the Shekhinah, 126 “On the Slaughter,” 130 prayer after the death of God, 126–127 “Speech,” 125–126, 131 Book of Samuel, 13 Brenner, Yosef Haim, 54, 96, 121 Breakdown and Bereavement, 86–87 From Here and Here, 88 Brümer, Vincent, 102 Brumhart, Bruno, 71 Buber, Martin, 3–4, 45, 46, 62, 171, 172 Buddhism, 163 Bultmann, Rudolf, 74

C

Cabot, Richard, 103 Calvin, John, 128, 150 Epistle to the Romans, 150 Camus, Albert, 51 The Myth of Sisyphus, 85 Canetti, Elias, 7 Caro, R. Yosef, 152 Catholicism, 29 Celan, Paul, 9 Christianity, 22, 23–26, 30, 48 Coercion, 121, 156 Cohen, Hermann, xii, 3–4, 161, 169–170 Consciousness, 4, 9, 20, 24, 25, 28, 50, 62, 63, 77, 94, 112, 134, 152, 166, 173 finite aspect, 20 infinite aspect, 20 Crucifixion, 24–25

I n d ex

D

Daor, Dan, 143 Death of God, 1–3, 5, 16, 18, 23, 81, 93, 107, 109, 116, 119, 120, 129, 142, 146–147 Barth’s interpretation, 47 based on Christian faith, 23–27 Bialik’s interpretation, 125 Certeau ‘s interpretation, 47 as death of faith, 49 Dostoyevsky’s interpretation, 34–36 “early” history of, 31 Gouri’s interpretation, 59–60 Halfi’s experience, 136–137 Hanan’s interpretation, 134–135 in Hebrew literature, 54 Hegel’s interpretation, 44 Heine’s interpretation, 27–31 Ilmi’s experience, 132–133 Jacobsen’s interpretation, 31–33 in Jewish context, 50–53 Kaniuk’s interpretation, 56 Marion’s interpretation, 46–47 and nature of prayer, 61, 65 Nietzsche’s interpretation, 36–38, 43, 49, 125, 133 Orland’s interpretation, 55 Rubenstein’s interpretation, 50–53 Sadan’s experience, 139 Schlonsky’s interpretation, 133–134, 136 Sutzkever’s interpretation, 138 Wieseltier’s interpretation, 54 De Certeau, Michel, 47 De Cusa, Nicolai, 160 Demythologizing project, 75–76 Derrida, Jacques, 152–153, 159 Desire, 164 Divine nothing, 110 Divine Presence [Shekhinah], 123–125 Divine Transcendence, 49, 80, 114, 159 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 31, 33 The Brothers Karamazov, 34–36 The Possessed, 33, 36 Dresner, Samuel, ix

E

Elazari-Vulkani, Yitzhak, 141 Eliaz, Raphael, 79, 109 Ellul, Jacques, 72, 151, 154, 158 Emden, Yaakov, 117

Beth Yaakov, 117 Enlightenment, 26 Epistemology, 21, 45, 63n160 Eros, 58–59, 61, 128, 165, 170 European Romanticism, 140, 141 Exile, 46, 119, 124, 133 Existentialism, 8n22, 43n98 Existentialist philosophy, 8–9 Explication, xiv, 7, 11, 67, 76, 155

F

Fackenheim, Emil, 24n32 Fear, 111 Felman, Shoshana, 7, 76 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 3, 5, 19, 21, 49–50, 85, 94, 166 The Essence of Christianity, 20 quality essential for existence, 20 version of atheism, 23 Fischman, Gadi, 100 Freud, Sigmund, 75

G

Gil’ad, Yohai, 142 Giladi, David, 89 Between the Jordan and the Sea of Galilee, 89 Gilboa, Amir, 94, 96, 99, 137–138 God, ix, xi absence of, 57, 59 absolute otherness of, 111–112 as an epistemic object, 21–22 atheist’s views, 1 death of. see death of God difference between believers and apostates, 109 Feuerbach’s, 21–23 God’s existence and God’s concern with humans, 18 Halfi’s, 114–115 Hegel’s, 23–26, 24–26 Heidegger’s, 39–41 Kant’s, 29 Laor’s, 84 longing for, 58 as a non-being, 110 non-existence of, 92 rank of, 22–23 Schlegel’s, 22–23

189

190

I n d ex

as separate divine existence, 21 transcendent God, 19 weak and sinful, 80 Yehoshua’s narrative of figure of, 69n8 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 18, 22 Goldberg, Leah, 80, 118, 120 Goldman, Eliezer, 151n12 Gordon, Aaron David, 36 Gouri, Haim, 59 Great apostasy, 36 Green, Arthur, 81–82, 128, 174 Greenberg, Uri Zvi, 58, 102

H

Haggadah, 80 Halbwachs, Maurice, 107 Halfi, Abraham, 54, 77–79, 89–90, 110, 114–115, 118, 136–137 Halfi, Rachel, 97, 99 Hanan, Aba, 134 Hasidism, 121 Haykl of Amdor, R. Hayyim, 150, 159 Hazard, Paul, 18 Hebrew culture, 14 Hebrew literature, 14, 15, 54, 66, 67, 73, 82, 86, 120 “eidos”, 5 existence of ontological prayer, 98 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 20–21, 23–27, 24, 25, 37, 41, 44, 45, 49, 85, 152, 164 Heidegger, Martin, 33, 51, 62, 69, 90, 155–156 Being and Time, 111 distinction between anxiety and fear, 111 nothing concept, 110 Heiler, Friedrich, 156, 161, 163 Heine, Heinrich, 27–28 “Disputation,” 30 Hermeneutics, viii, 74n16, 74n18 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 45–46, 102, 128, 151, 153 Hirsch, Samson Raphael, 104 Holiness, 12, 80, 97, 113, 121, 140, 171 Holocaust, 10, 56, 58, 66, 81, 93, 119 Hope, xi–xii, 12–130, 30, 32, 35, 51, 57, 85, 89, 105, 117, 149, 166–167 Human-God relationship, 27 arbitrariness in, 72–73

Human Knowledge, 21, 162 Humans as praying beings, characterization of, ix–x, 71, 77, 148–174 Husserl, Edmund, 63, 149, 162

I

Identity, ix, 51, 53–54, 66, 96, 143, 156 Idolatry, 14n40 Ilmi, Liova, 132 Immanence, 19, 29, 32, 40, 44, 49–50, 83–85, 90, 112–114, 124, 157, 160, 170, 173 Individuality, 19, 88, 164

J

Jacobsen, Jans Peter, 31 Niels Lyhne, 31–32 James, William, 62 Janouch, Gustav, 13–14 Jewish blessing, traditional, x Jewish existence, 52–53 Jewish self-identity, 51 Jung, Carl G., 43 Judaism, 53, 132, 147

K

Kafka, Franz, 7, 13–15, 119 Letters to Felice, 7 Kaniuk, Yoram, 56 Kant, Immanuel, 29 Kibbutz movement, x Kierkegaard, Søren, ix, 7, 9, 20, 30, 33, 44–46, 51, 87, 104–105, 149 Kojève, Alexandre, 164 Kol Nidrei prayer, 93–94 Kook, Abraham Yitzchak, 97 Kook, Rav Abraham Hacohen, 97 Kundera, Milan, 6 Kurzweil, Baruch, 53

L

Lacan, Jacques, 42 Lahover, F., 127 Lamdan, Yitzhak, 78–79, 90, 131, 162 Laor, Yitzhak, 11–12, 83–84, 171 Lavi, Shlomo, 88, 96 Leibowitz, Yeshayahu, xii, 17, 72, 92, 151, 152, 154 Levinas, Emmanuel, 111–113

I n d ex

Levy, Benny, 146, 147 Life testimony, 7 Lipsker, Avidov, 71 Lispector, Clarice, 92, 105–106 Literature closeness between existentialist philosophy and, 8–9 gap between philosophy and, 10 phenomenology of life, 8 as testimony, 7–8

M

Marcel, Gabriel, 162 Marcuse, Ludwig, 30 Marion, Jean-Luc, 43 Marx, Karl, 49–50, 75 Meltz, David, 134–135, 135 Midrash, 96 Miriam, Rivka, 58 Mishol, Agi, 169 Muffs, Yochanan, 14 Munk, Elie, 65–66 Murdoch, Iris, 8n22 Myth, 68, 74–75, 85

N

Nahman of Bratslav, R., 3, 96–97 Likutey Moharan, 58 Neumann, Erich, 132, 171 Nicholls, William, 48 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 9, 23, 27–28, 28, 30, 31, 34, 36–39, 43, 49, 51, 75, 84, 125, 133 The Gay Science, 38–39 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 39 Non-believers, xi

O

Objectification, 21 Ontological prayer, 94, 95–98, 129, 137 Ontology, 45, 96, 149, 153, 168, 171, 174 Orland, Yaakov, 55, 146 Otto, Rudolf, 81

P

Pascal, Blaise, 26–27, 150, 162 Penn, Alexander, 131 Petlyura, Symon, 140 Phenomenology, 6, 8, 11, 57, 62–63, 148–149, 153, 155, 157, 170

Philips, D. Z., 102 Philosophy, 5–7 Platonov, Andrey, 143–144 Poetry, 5–7, 9, 10 affinity between prayer and, 11–14, 84–85, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96–97, 99–100, 118–119, 126, 149, 168 connection between faith and, 11 Gilboa’s, 94, 96–97, 99 Lamdan’s, 90, 131–132 Reich’s, 93, 118 Schlonsky’s, 133 Shalom’s, 90, 92, 93 Prayer, 61 affinity between poetry and, 11–13 Amichai ‘s views, 144–145 Amidah, 120, xii as ancestral tradition, 141–143 as an expression of personal fullness, 89–90 as an expression of self turning inward, 93 as an expression of the human standing before God, 105 as an obligation, 151–152 Appelfeld’s interpretation, 151–152 Beatles’ song, 101–102 Bialik’s idea of, 122–128 in biblical literature, 13, 94, 101, 123, 129, 136 Brenner’s idea of, 86–88 as call of conscience, 155 childhood memory in, 147 comparison between prophecy and, 5 connection between light and, 95 as a direct act of God, 150–151 as disturbing and metaphysicaltheological assumptions, 68 of Dostoyevsky’s Kirilov, 66–67 element of hope and expectation in, 85 eternity of, xi experience of wonder in, x–xi as expressing an expectation, 101 expression of ontological, 94, 95–98, 129, 137 Gilboa’s idea of, 96, 99, 137–138 God’s, 167–168 as God’s calling, 128–129 Goethe’s idea of, 86 Halfi’s views, 116–117

191

192

I n d ex

in Hebrew literature, 5–16 Jewish tradition, 4, 13 justification of, 129 Kol Nidrei, 93–94 Lavi’s idea of, 88–89 Levinas’ views, 113 loss of, 134–135 meaning of, xi–xii in metaphysical context, 71–72 non-religious perspective, 105 object of, x perception of, 3 phenomenological outline of, 153–156, 157, 160, 161, 170 as a phenomenon of self-transcendence, 156–157 philosophical views, 102–103 primacy of, 76–79, 81–82 as a primordial phenomenon, xiii, 132 in Psalms, 94, 101, 123, 129, 136 psychological explanation, 61, 62 psychological vs phenomenological perspectives on, 163 Rav Kook’s idea of, 97 reductionist view of, 62, 64 role in human existence, ix–xi Ruebner’s views, 144–145 sacrifice and, 4 as self-expression, 99–100, 102–103, 127 self-transcendence in, 13 Shalom’s idea of, 90–93 Soloveitchik’s view, 166–167 speech in, 168–169 talk of, 151–152 theory of, xiv transcendent and immanent facets of, 152–153, 156–158, 161, 168 for transcendent experience, 63 turning to God, 4–5 Wiesel’s comparison of literature with, 13 without an addressee, 102 in Yehoshua’s story, 70 Prophecy, 5 Protestantism, 29–30, 53 Psalmist, ix, x, 13, 136

R

Radical theology, 48 Rashi (R. Shlomo Yitzhak), ix Reich, Asher, 118–119

Religion, 3, 11, 12, 14, 18, 21–23, 25–28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 38, 39, 49, 50–51, 53, 61, 77, 79, 82, 90, 139, 141, 149, 152, 154, 155, 158, 163, 171, 172, 173, 174 Religiosity, 170–171 distinction between religion and, 171–172 Repentance, 166 Ricoeur, Paul, 74–75, 76 Romantic poetry, 6 Rosenblum, Yair, 166 Rosenzweig, Franz, xii–xiii, 8, 85–86, 119–120, 128, 151 Rosh Hashanah, 136 Rotenstreich, Nathan, 154 Roubiczek, Paul, 43 Rubenstein, Richard, 50–53 Ruebner, Tuvia, 144–145

S

Sabatier, Auguste, 3, 158 Sabato, Hayyim, 146 Sabbath, 127, 141n58 Sacrifice, 4 Sadan, Dov, 139 Samuel, Raphael, 75 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 9, 51, 146–147, 149, 164–165 Schiller, Friedrich, 19, 22 Schlegel, Friedrich, 5–6, 12, 18, 19, 22, 23 Schlonsky, Abraham, 64–65, 100, 107, 117, 133, 135–137 Schweid, Eliezer, 98–99, 125 Science, 6 Secular, xiii–xiv, 8, 11, 14, 16, 26, 52–54, 68, 70, 149, 154, 170–171 Secularism, 154 Secularization, 15, 28 Self-knowledge, 21 Self-transcendence, 13, 83, 118, 135, 149, 156, 157, 165–169 Semprún, Jorge, 10 Literature or Life, 10, 107 Shemer, Naomi, 101 Shulhan Arukh statute, xii Simmel, George, 171 Skepticism, 71–72, 130 Small apostasy, 36 Soloveitchik, Joseph B., xii, 3, 4, 5, 166 Speech, xi, xiii, 12, 13, 84–86, 111, 161, 163, 168, 169

I n d ex

St. John of the Cross, 57 Strauss, Arieh, 126, 127 Subjectivity, 5, 45, 52, 62–63, 155 Supernal worlds, 95 Sutzkever, Abraham, 138, 154 Szenes, Hannah, x

T

Talmud, 104, 113, 138, 167 Theist, 1 Tillich, Paul, 172 Torah, 138, 140

W

Weil, Simone, 91, 111, 113 Weltsch, Felix, 167, 170, 173 Wiesel, Eli, 12–13 Wieseltier, Meir, 54 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 73, 103 Worshippers, xiv

Y

Uffenheimer, Rivka Schatz, 150 Urbach, Ephraim, 114

Yehoshua, A. B., 68 Yeshurun, Avot, 127, 169 Yitzhak of Berdichev, R. Levi, 58–59 Yom Kippur prayers, 101, 142, 146, 166

V

Z

U

Valéry, Paul, 10, 163, 165 Volozhiner, R. Hayyim, 113–114

Zach, Nathan, 80 Zeitlin, Hillel, 58, 110

193

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