Unsettling Jewish Knowledge: Text, Contingency, Desire

By Martin Kavka and Lital Levy

Spanning the fields of literature, history, philosophy, and theology, Unsettling Jewish Knowledge adopts a fresh approach to the study of Jewish thought and culture. By creatively foregrounding the role of emotions, senses, and the imagination in Jewish experience, the book invites readers to consider what it means for Jewish identity and experience to be constituted outside the frameworks of reasoned thought and inquiry. The collection’s eight essays offer innovative and provocative approaches to a diverse array of topics including modern Jewish-Christian relations, the book of Isaiah, contemporary Jewish fiction, and philosophical meditations on Jewish law. Their bold interpretations of Jewish texts and histories are centered on questions of faith, loss, prejudice, and enchantment—and the darker implications of these questions. The book’s essays also illuminate the importance of desire as a key motivating force in the pursuit of knowledge. Weaving together insights from several disciplines, Unsettling Jewish Knowledge challenges us to grapple with the unexpected, the unconventional, and the uncomfortable aspects of Jewish experience and its representations.

Contributors: Anne C. Dailey, John Efron, Yael S. Feldman, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Martin Kavka, Lital Levy, Shaul Magid, Eva Mroczek, Paul E. Nahme, Eli Schonfeld, Shira Stav.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Sep 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781512824315

Book preview

Cover: Unsettling Jewish Knowledge, Text, Contingency, Desire edited by Anne C. Dailey, Martin Kavka, and Lital Levy

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS

Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania

Series Editors

Shaul Magid

Francesca Trivellato

Steven Weitzman

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

UNSETTLING JEWISH KNOWLEDGE

Text, Contingency, Desire

Edited by Anne C. Dailey, Martin Kavka, and Lital Levy

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–4112

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Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5128-2430-8

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5128-2431-5

A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

Contents

Introduction

Anne C. Dailey, Martin Kavka, and Lital Levy

Chapter 1. The Unreasonable Economy of Martyrdom in S. Y. Agnon’s Holocaust Fiction

Yael S. Feldman

Chapter 2. Agnon’s At the Outset of the Day: Body, Text, Interpretation

Shira Stav

Chapter 3. Dirty Books: Narration, Contamination, and Textual Evidence for the Jewish Past

Eva Mroczek

Chapter 4. Jews and the Christian Olfactory Imagination

John Efron

Chapter 5. Imagining a Father: The Wandering Jew and Modern Jewish Identities in Danilo Kiš’s Prose

Galit Hasan-Rokem

Chapter 6. Consolation Beyond Theodicy: A Phenomenological Hermeneutics of Isaiah’s Prophecies of Consolation

Eli Schonfeld

Chapter 7. Beyond Faith and Reason: R. Avraham Karelitz (Ḥazon Ish) on Certainty and Doubt, Love of the Law, and Constructing the Halakhic Self

Shaul Magid

Chapter 8. Enchanted Thinking: Toward a Genealogy of Mitnagdism and Talmudic Conceptualism (Lomdus)

Paul E. Nahme

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ANNE C. DAILEY, MARTIN KAVKA, AND LITAL LEVY

Dirty books. The Wandering Jew. Smelly Jews. A naked girl in a synagogue. Self-sacrifice. Lamentation as consolation. Law as love. The enchanted yeshivah.

In and of themselves, these ideas, themes, and signifiers have little in common. But in the discursive contexts of this book’s eight chapters, these images and ideas represent counterintuitive ways of knowing and understanding that emerge when we turn our critical attention to fantasy, emotions, the senses, and the body. The authors in this volume explore these realms and affects, opening up new ways of knowing that deepen and sometimes subvert traditional modes of scholarly inquiry.

The essays in Unsettling Jewish Knowledge—which span the fields of literature, history, philosophy, and theology—all make important contributions in their respective fields, but they also speak to one another across disciplinary boundaries. Their shared attention to arenas of human experience outside the realm of conscious reasoned thought provides the unifying structure of this book. Some extol the virtues of the emotions, the senses, and the imagination, whereas others draw our attention to the darker significance of the nonrational. Taken together, they grapple with themes of conflict, suffering, and consolation prompted by widening the lens of Jewish inquiry to encompass aspects of human experience that too often escape traditional modes of inquiry. In so doing, they demonstrate how foregrounding the nonrational elements of Jewish life and experience can elicit a more embodied, self-reflective, and capacious Jewish studies.

Despite a shared interest in the nonrational, this collection does not give us a settled blueprint for studying or understanding the place of the imagination, emotions, and senses in Jewish art, literature, or religious life. To the contrary, the effect of this book is to unsettle scholarly wisdoms and self-understandings in novel and intellectually productive ways. The subjects under study are themselves unsettling; many elicit strong and uncomfortable emotions in readers as they take up complex Jewish questions. John Efron’s chapter on the place of the smelly Jew in Christian folklore and art prompts disgust with its graphic depictions of Jews in relation to excrement and bestiality. Eva Mroczek’s examination of textual decay generates deep anxiety over the loss and contamination of precious historical texts. And Shira Stav’s study of the naked girl in the synagogue in S. Y. Agnon’s At the Outset of the Day reorients the story away from religious allegory toward a more concrete and painful incestuous tension.

Attention to these unsettling issues raises important questions about the nature of knowledge, be it self-knowledge, knowledge of God, knowledge of the Other, or knowledge of scholarly traditions such as law or literature. By what channels do we come to know what we know, and what perspectives have been left out? Reason and science have long laid claim to being the most objective modes of academic inquiry, but this book’s essays prompt us to ask what goes missing when emotions, imagination, and the bodily senses are sidelined. An unsettling openness to new ways of knowing permeates the entire volume as the reader confronts recurring motifs of love, suffering, self-sacrifice, and compassion—not only as themes and experiences but also as drivers of knowledge. In bringing nonrational aspects into focus, the essays expand and complicate our knowledge of the subjects and texts under study, often challenging standard divides between law and love, self-preservation and self-destruction, freedom and constraint, reality and imagination, and punishment and consolation.

Galit Hasan-Rokem, for example, explores the role of the imagination in autobiographical narratives in her study of the complicated and ambivalent desire to belong and its rendering in the figure of the Wandering Jew in works by Serbian author Danilo Kiš. Her chapter gives us insights into how unconscious fantasy shapes and informs what we think we know of the world and our own lives. In emphasizing the place of imagination in self-narratives, Hasan-Rokem points toward an understanding of Jewish experience that encompasses unconscious factors—an approach that resonates with psychoanalytic insights into the place of fantasy in shaping the stories we tell about ourselves and raises questions about whether it is possible to separate fact from fantasy in the pursuit of self-understanding.

Similarly, several chapters take up the question of an encounter that breaks down the distinction between mind and body. We see this, for example, in Stav’s aforementioned contribution on Agnon’s reader encountering a young girl’s naked body, Eli Schonfeld’s chapter on Jews encountering God’s comforting presence in liturgical settings, and Mroczek’s reader encountering the (often dirty) physicality of the text. In drawing attention to the physical body, these authors expose issues overlooked or repressed in most standard accounts. For Stav, it is the possibility of incestuous desire, a repressed desire brought to the surface by attention to the actual physical interaction of father and daughter. For Schonfeld, the body brings into focus the experience of God as a comforting presence, a perspective gained by imagining one’s physical proximity to God even amid such overwhelming suffering. And for Mroczek, the focus on the physicality of the texts and the human beings who take care of them opens up whole new ways of understanding both the science and literature of textual discovery and degradation.

Many of these essays center on the emotions as well. Shaul Magid teaches us that it is love—not of God but of the law itself—that might be seen as governing Jewish ritual observance; his meditation on love and law helps us see how adherence to Jewish law engages a complex interplay of emotional and intellectual forces. As mentioned, Efron’s chapter on the smelly Jew posits disgust as a driving feature in Christian depictions of Jews and a key to understanding the antisemitism in Christian folklore and art. Almost every contribution to this volume uses emotion as a guide to broaden our understanding of Jewish experience, history, theology, and literature.

Taken together, the essays thus press us to seriously consider what it means for Jewish identity and experience to be constituted, at least in part, outside the frameworks of reasoned thought and inquiry. But as the contributions by Hasan-Rokem and Efron make clear, the association of Jews with emotions or irrationality has a long history in antisemitic literature, which often depicts Jews as dwelling in a world of debased affects and bodily senses. Going beyond reason therefore forces the reader to confront traditional antisemitic stereotypes about the irrational, emotional, or sensual Jew. The focus on issues such as bestiality, incest, and martyrdom in these essays heightens the tensions around acknowledging these disturbing aspects of Jewish experience, given the forms antisemitism can take.

It is important to note how such unsettling not only departs from prior scholarly contributions but also builds on them. Indeed, unsettling claims to knowledge is what modern Jewish studies, like other fields of scholarly inquiry, has always done. Often, when contributing new ideas to scholarship, we argue that past claims and approaches in a tradition of inquiry have become outmoded. As one form of unsettling, this kind of scholarly revision aims to replace one set of knowledge-claims with a better or truer understanding. Consider Susannah Heschel’s classic work on the Reform Jewish thinker Abraham Geiger (1810–74) and his account of early Christianity, which had emphasized the Jewishness of Jesus. When Heschel published her work, Geiger was seen primarily as a thinker of Reform Jewish identity and practice. In calling her readers to attend also to Geiger’s account of Christian origins, Heschel gave a fuller picture of him as a thinker. Her work showed how Geiger exposed the falseness of Protestant biblical criticism, which was constituted by its anti-Jewishness. As she demonstrated, his argument that Jesus said and did nothing new (as Heschel summarized it) made a forceful intervention that unsettled Christian claims to supremacy and amounted to an overthrow of Christian hegemony.¹ Similarly, Naomi Seidman’s recent book on Sarah Schenirer (1883–1935), who founded the Bais Yaakov movement of schools for Orthodox girls in 1917, seeks to provide a more nuanced portrayal of Schenirer’s role in twentieth-century Orthodox culture. Seidman’s account emphasizes the interplay and tensions … between tradition and innovation, radicalism and piety in opposition to prior accounts that emphasized either one or the other, marginalized Schenirer’s role, or even erased Schenirer from the movement that she inaugurated.²

Such classic scholarly unsettling rightly values knowledge as a good; it sees academic labor as oriented toward the acquisition of deeper, fuller, or more accurate knowledge, giving the reader evidence that one’s approach is the best reading of the text or of the historical facts. Yet Heschel and Seidman also unsettle through their realization that the pursuit of knowledge cannot be separated from its performance. Seidman knows that it is not just scholarship that can rightly recenter Schenirer in the story of Jewish Orthodoxy but also the pilgrimages that contemporary Bais Yaakov women take to Schenirer’s grave.³ Heschel depicts Geiger not merely as a better scholar than his Christian interlocutors but also as a man who is defiant, disruptive, and characterized by ferocity.⁴ At these moments, when Heschel and Seidman turn to aspects of human experience that show that knowing is not something calmly done at a desk or in an archive—that it can occur on sacred journeys and be accompanied by emotional displays—it becomes clear that the scholarly enterprise is not simply an abstract and disinterested one.

By attending to the nonrational elements in human experience as sites of knowledge, the essays in this volume unsettle any depoliticized or abstract account of the scholarly enterprise. They offer innovative and provocative readings of Jewish texts and histories that help us see aspects of human experience left unexamined by more orthodox interpretations. In so doing, they unsettle the institutional story of an uncontaminated scientific scholarship to which the discipline of Jewish studies has sought claim. In each chapter, we see a double movement similar to what we find in the work of Heschel and Seidman: the essays not only unsettle, but also move toward an understanding of affect, emotion, or the senses as the center of knowledge and understanding. Each chapter in this book shows the limits of past readings of a corpus of knowledge and gives us a more finely attuned account incorporating the nonrational. But at the same time, each also raises the question of whether these new accounts give us any greater truth at all, be it divine revelation, or a truth that is beyond history, or an unmediated access to ideas that have fallen prey to the ravages of time and nature. Together, the essays offer a self-awareness of individual scholarly mediation that can be liberating in the face of scholarly universalism. As David Myers writes, recognizing that knowledge is simply a construct of the individual historian’s mind need not consign us to an incapacitating relativism, because someone who engages in an ‘act of knowing’ can both do that and be aware that he or she is performing that act.⁵ In these literary, philosophical, theological, and historical contributions, we find that the awareness of that performance is at the heart of the work of unsettling.

For what is more familiar to scholars than the expectation of critique from other researchers and dominant models? At the same time, what is more alien than the right to infer from the constant possibility of critique and being critiqued that all such accounts, including our own, are transitory? After all, who can say in advance that their scholarship, at the moment it triumphs, has cut off the possibility of further criticism? The book’s eight chapters hold onto the contingency of knowledge-claims while affirming the central importance of the nonrational to our understanding of ourselves and the world. In other words, in their unsettling work and in their exposure of other drivers of knowledge-claims and understanding, these projects draw our attention to contingency as an inherent aspect of the production of new knowledge. As we discuss later, they also attune us to the importance of desire as a key motivational force in the pursuit of knowledge. In them, we see how scholarly desire drives inquiry and how collective truth is produced under compulsion from the desires of others and, in both cases, how fragile the act of truth making really is.

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We turn here to the diverse ways in which the eight chapters use nonrational elements as the method or object of study, showing us lines of connection across disciplinary boundaries. The unsettling dynamic is powerfully clear in the two essays on the fiction of S. Y. Agnon. In some sense, Agnon serves as a standard-bearer for this volume, in that his fiction interferes in the scholar’s task of unveiling knowledge. In Chapter 1, The Unreasonable Economy of Martyrdom in S. Y. Agnon’s ‘Holocaust Fiction,’ Yael Feldman notes the tension between the religious origins of martyric practices and their modern-day analogues within secular nationalist contexts. Her interest homes in on the evolution of the Jewish martyr tradition (epitomized by the ‘Akedah) in Palestine as self-sacrifice for the good of the nation. Through a reading of two works from the corpus of Agnon’s post-Holocaust fiction, she resituates Agnon as a harbinger of later Israeli Hebrew fiction from the late 1940s through the 1980s, which rejects martyric traditions in both their religious and secular forms.

Feldman’s readings of Agnon are resolutely anti-redemptive. In her analysis of his 1947 story Measuring Gain by Pain, Feldman emphasizes the failure of its characters to defend an account of martyrdom as kiddush ha-shem, a sanctification of the divine name that would ascribe value to Jewish suffering and martyrdom. In addition, Feldman also emphasizes the inability of the characters in Agnon’s 1939 novel A Guest for the Night to access a Jewish past that might ennoble the suffering of secular martyrs, those who sacrifice themselves for the sake of the nation, in the World War I generation. But if these failures raise the real possibility that the stakes of Jewish lives cannot be articulated with any clarity or coherence, why should Agnon or any other author write about Jewish lives out of anything more than an idiosyncratic obsession? And if it is only an idiosyncratic obsession, why publish that writing? In raising these issues, Feldman opens up intriguing hypotheses to explain Agnon’s refusal to publish the stories he wrote near the end of his life about the Jewish residents of his hometown of Buczacz, most of whom were murdered in the Shoah.

Shira Stav’s chapter, titled Agnon’s ‘At the Outset of the Day’: Body, Text, Interpretation, avers that Agnon’s critics have long interpreted his work symbolically, privileging its covert meaning over its overt layer and the metaphysical over the physical. Stav shows how critical attention to the tangible and material elements in his work, such as the role of human bodies, interrupts allegorical readings that putatively descend into the truer depths of the story. In Agnon’s story At the Outset of the Day, originally published in 1951, a father and daughter seek refuge from enemies in a synagogue courtyard in the evening shortly before Yom Kippur begins. But while they are safe from outsiders, a memorial candle inside the courtyard falls and burns the daughter’s dress, leaving her naked. Critics typically interpret the daughter as a symbol for the soul of the modern Jew, alienated from both tradition and modernity. However, this hermeneutic decision overlooks the significance of how Agnon represents the daughter’s body in its materiality. It also fails to account for two important elements of Agnon’s story: the girl’s nakedness and the father’s bizarre behavior in neglecting to cover her, a failure that Stav reads as suggesting incestuous desire. As Stav points out, this is a story about desire and the impossibility of its fulfillment: that which demands interpretation is left bare, without a stitch of clothing/solution. For her, this is a structural impossibility. Desire arises in the body, and so it cannot leave the body behind without becoming detached from the source of its energy. As a result, this makes our desires for transcendence, for stability in the face of contingency, for safety from candles and fathers, particularly paradoxical ones.

Such interventions and obstructions (be they playful or more serious) cannot but produce anxiety. That anxiety is especially apparent in Eva Mroczek’s Dirty Books: Narration, Contamination, and Textual Evidence for the Jewish Past, which traces the concern that texts from the Jewish past might become mere materiality rather than repositories of knowledge. Mroczek follows this concern in several historical and literary philological settings: Moshe Cordovero’s sixteenth-century account of the discovery of the Zohar, a prominent work of Jewish mysticism, and its recovery from a trash heap; the fictitious manuscript of the history of the city of Gumlidata, infected by the hands of leprous readers, in Agnon’s 1954 story Forevermore; and narratives both of the discovery and the preservation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Mroczek’s turn from the history of the book to stories about the discovery of ancient manuscripts shows that, in all these contexts, an apparatus arises to battle this fear that contamination will lead to the degradation of knowledge. For the philologist, this apparatus might entail the perpetuation of Orientalist myths about Arabs who fail to see the value of the manuscripts that they possess. In Forevermore, it entails the protective wear and gloves that the historian Adiel Amzeh dons in the house of the lepers as he tries to complete his history of the city of Gumlidata. For manuscript conservators, it entails the sterilized environment that is necessary for their work. These apparatuses arise for the sake of the scholar’s belief that there is meaning to be handed down from the text to the scholar, that the past is one of words, not things. The fragmentariness of our knowledge of the past is repressed as the scholar works with the scroll or book to free its words from their material conveyance.

Ideas of contamination and the body play determinative and extreme roles in John Efron’s Jews and the Christian Olfactory Imagination, which focuses on the discourse of the smelly Jew in Germany in the Middle Ages and early modern period, and also addresses how one reads the historical past. Efron follows how stench, as a theological representation of a people tainted by their rejection of Christ, morphed into cultural beliefs about Jewish uncleanliness; eventually, the dirty and smelly Jew became a core tenet of antisemitic dogma. In contrast to the other chapters, the discourse under inquiry here has nothing to do with the psychic mechanisms by which Jews claim to make true judgments of the world around them. Instead, the essay deals with the psychic mechanisms by which European Christians claim to make true judgments about Jews. Out of a desire to neutralize the alleged olfactory threat posed by Jews, the Christian imagination fixated on Jewish bodies, ghettos, and practices. This had the effect of essentializing Jews as depraved and filthy, fundamentally different from other humans in a way that no baptism or conversion could alter. In the context of this book, Efron’s contribution highlights the risk of claiming other paths to knowledge than those authorized by the canons of reason; being unsettled cannot make, or keep, one safe. Because the depths of meaning are not readily legible on the surface, it is always possible for narratives that gain power to cement hegemony and make possible the worst of evils. In this case, as Efron points out in the conclusion of his chapter, the long history of language about Jews as pollutants created a context that allowed Nazis to make sure that representation became reality in the Holocaust.

Galit Hasan-Rokem’s account of the role of the Wandering Jew in the prose of the Serbian author Danilo Kiš echoes Efron’s account of the Jewish–Christian relationship in Europe as showing us the darkest sides of the nonrational. The legend of the Wandering Jew originated in the late antique Christian imagination as a figure for Jews, cursed to wander the world eternally for their unbelief in Jesus, yet the legend is also reclaimed in Jewish folklore and literature at various times. Here too, Hasan-Rokem notes that the Wandering Jew was unable to hide because his stench gave him away. But whereas Efron’s chapter takes up the myth of the smelly Jew as a destabilizing presence in medieval and early modern Christian Europe, Hasan-Rokem addresses the liminality of Jewish identity in mid-twentieth-century Europe. In Imagining a Father: The Wandering Jew and Modern Jewish Identities in Danilo Kiš’s Prose, Hasan-Rokem traces how Kiš (1935–1989) confronted his inability to remember his father Eduard, who died in Auschwitz in 1944 or 1945, by assigning the traits of the Wandering Jew to the father characters in his fictional works. The inability to know his father as he really was drives Kiš into the territory of legend; by taking on the traits of a type, Kiš’s father regains presence in and through the son’s imaginative acts. Hasan-Rokem locates a synergy between the open-ended and unstable identities of both the father and the historical figure of the Wandering Jew in Kiš’s 1965 autobiographical novel garden, ashes and in his 1972 Hourglass, which reconstructs the final weeks of his father’s life before being murdered at Auschwitz. It is this entry into a realm on the borders of imagination and history, life and death, Jewishness and Christian culture that allowed Kiš to cope, to some extent, with loss and to reclaim a Jewish identity. Nevertheless, in Hasan-Rokem’s contribution, the imagination does not provide an avenue for transcending suffering and loss; its coping only allows for the development of a liminal Jewish identity, something that remains on the borders, never entering a territory of consolation.

Questions of consolation and compensation return in Eli Schonfeld’s Consolation Beyond Theodicy: A Phenomenological Hermeneutics of Isaiah’s Prophecies of Consolation. Schonfeld takes up the oddities of the Jewish liturgical calendar in the seven weeks after the holiday of Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E. The passages from the prophetic texts of the Tanakh (haftarot) that are read in synagogue services on the Sabbath during these weeks seek to console the people of Israel in their suffering at the hands of others. In these haftarot, God is depicted in ways that diverge from the normative understandings of the divine found in the writings of Moses Maimonides and in various modern examples of Jewish theology, in which a depersonalized God exists outside the temporal flow of history. Schonfeld’s turn to liturgy shows us a more personal God who both enters history and consoles. However, given that these passages are read year after year, it cannot actually be the case that God has come into history and vanquished the enemies of Israel to end Israel’s suffering. So how, then, do these haftarot console? Schonfeld interprets the opening verses of Isaiah 52 to show that God consoles not through divine power (by vanquishing enemies, for example) but simply by expressing emotion upon witnessing the people of Israel’s suffering. Here, God’s empathy compensates for the collective suffering of Jewish experience.

Compensatory work occurs not only in extreme experiences of trauma but also in more ordinary guises. That ordinariness appears in two accounts of modern Orthodox religious life in this volume. Shaul Magid’s Beyond Faith and Reason takes up the treatise Faith and Trust by R. Avraham Karelitz (1878–1953), an important rabbi known as the Hazon Ish. In his essay, Magid introduces us to a self that desires piety but does not know whether its desire can be fulfilled. This is in part because the halakhic life that constitutes piety often goes counter to human instinct, which is in part determined by the evil impulse (yetser ha-ra‘). In response to anxiety over whether Jews can fulfill the demands of halakhah, the Hazon Ish prescribes an attitude unique in the corpus of Jewish thought—ahavat ha-halakhah, or love of the law. This kind of love is strange within the Jewish tradition: it is not quite a love of God, nor does it suggest any kind of experiential relationship with the divine. Rather, love of the law is a willed emotion that allows submission to halakhah, enabling one to rise above the nagging question of whether one has been led astray by reason or by the yetser ha-ra‘. The claim that Jews are to love the law allows for a kind of certainty about their relationship with halakhah, a certainty that Magid associates with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of subjective certainty. Magid also explores the law as a source of self-knowledge, suggesting the term halakhic self and discussing it in the context of modern musar literature, where certainty and doubt take the place of faith versus reason.

Uncertainty and doubt also play a role in Paul Nahme’s "Enchanted Thinking: Toward a Genealogy of Mitnagdism and Talmudic Conceptualism (Lomdus)," which traces a history of approaches to talmudic study and interpretation characteristic of the modern yeshivah in Lithuania and elsewhere. In that tradition, God’s transcendence shows us the limitation of human reasoning, denying us certainty about the correctness of human judgments. But as R. Aryeh Leib Ha-Kohen Keller (1745–1813) argued, that very limitation drives the yeshivah student’s pursuit of new interpretations of Torah, meant to bring the supernal Torah into the world so it can enchant that world through human acts of reasoning. Nahme’s reconceptualizing of yeshivah study and its effects on the students sets its sights on the secularization theory of Max Weber, which assumes that rationalization necessarily disenchants and depersonalizes the world.⁶ Unlike much contemporary scholarship that takes the twenty-first-century return of religion as evidence of the failure of secularization theory, Nahme shows that the error of Weber’s readers (and possibly Weber himself) was the assumption that secularity was always and everywhere opposed to religion. In the nineteenth-century yeshivah, halakhah was taken to be both enchanted and the product of reason. We cannot look at the texts of the Lithuanian yeshivah and determine whether they fall conclusively on the side of reason or tradition; of modernity or superstition; of human authority to interpret halakhah or divine authority to command halakhah.

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In these chapters, it is contingency that emerges as the ever-present gadfly that cannot be conquered by the quest for knowledge. Often, the confrontation with contingent existence arises in the experiences of war and murder. In Agnon’s A Guest for the Night, as analyzed by Feldman, the character of Daniel Bach is scarred by witnessing the horrors of World War I; he is driven to heresy by the world around him. In Shira Stav’s discussion of At the Outset of the Day, the father and daughter only find themselves in the synagogue on Erev Yom Kippur because they are seeking refuge from their enemies. Similar themes of disrupted agency are present in Schonfeld’s analysis of the biblical book of Isaiah (and the post-Holocaust context in which he places it, with reference to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas) and in Hasan-Rokem’s treatment of Kiš’s garden, ashes. Magid’s and Nahme’s chapters admit from the outset that contingency is fundamental to the human experience. For the Hazon Ish, our individual situatedness in the world gives the yetser ha-ra‘ free rein, while for the mitnagdic authorities whom Nahme addresses, the uncertainty of existence stems from our limited reason.

The compensatory moves described by Hasan-Rokem, Schonfeld, Magid, and Nahme are, from a certain angle, failures or at least incomplete. The fact that Sabbaths of consolation repeat from one year to the next suggests that Israel is not consoled. Danilo Kiš’s father remains hidden, even in the ink on the page. Love of the law does not erase the yetser ha-ra‘. Uncertainty remains constitutive of human reason for Heller; as Nahme points out, for Heller, even the Oral Torah may very well be judged incorrect according to a divine reason. Yet these moves compensate nonetheless. The person who hears Isaiah 52 is imagined to be