This huge and unending shower of blessings on our scenes and habitations, on all the life that occupies the planet, on every plant and animal, and on every natural manifestation, serves us doubly: in the first place, what you are taught to praise you will not maim or exploit or destroy. In the second place, the categories and impulses of Art become the property of the simplest soul: because it is all the handiwork of the Creator, everything Ordinary is seen to be Extraordinary. The world, and every moment in it, is seen to be sublime, and not merely “seen to be,” but brought home to the intensest part of consciousness.
Come back with me now to Pater: “The service of philosophy,” he writes, “of speculative culture, toward the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us—for that moment only.” And now here at last is Pater’s most celebrated phrase, so famous that it has often been burlesqued: “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”
But all this is astonishing. An idolator singing a Hebrew melody? I call Pater an idolator because he is one; and so is every aesthetician who sees the work of art as an end in itself. Saying “Experience itself is the end” is the very opposite of blessing the Creator as the source of all experience.
And just here is the danger I spoke of before, the danger Yeats darkly apprehended—the deepest danger our human brains are subject to. The Jew has this in common with the artist: he means nothing to be lost on him, he brings all his mind and senses to bear on noticing the Ordinary, he is equally alert to Image and Experience, nothing that passes before him is taken for granted, everything is exalted. If we are enjoined to live in the condition of noticing all things—or, to put it more extremely but more exactly, in the condition of awe—how can we keep ourselves from sliding off from awe at God’s Creation to worship of God’s Creation? And does it matter if we do?
The difference, the reason it matters, is a signal and shattering one: the difference is what keeps us from being idolators.
What is an idol? Anything that is allowed to come between ourselves and God. Anything that is instead of God. Anything that we call an end in itself, and yet is not God Himself.
The Mosaic vision concerning all this is uncompromisingly pure and impatient with self-deception, and this is the point on which Jews are famously stiff-necked—nothing but the Creator, no substitute and no mediator. The Creator is not contained in his own Creation; the Creator is incarnate in nothing, and is free of any image or imagining. God is not any part of Nature, or in any part of Nature; God is not any man, or in any man. When we praise Nature or man or any experience or work of man, we are worshiping the Creator, and the Creator alone.
But there is another way of thinking which is easier, and sweeter, and does not require human beings to be so tirelessly uncompromising, or to be so cautious about holding on to the distinction between delight in the world and worship of the world.
Here is a story. A Buddhist sage once rebuked a person who excoriated an idolator: “Do you think it makes any difference to God,” he asked, “whether this old woman gives reverence to a block of wood? Do you think God is incapable of taking the block of wood into Himself? Do you think God will ignore anyone’s desire to find Him, no matter where, and through whatever means? All worship goes up to God, who is the source of worship.”
These are important words; they offer the most significant challenge to purist monotheism that has ever been stated. They tell us that the Ordinary is not merely, when contemplated with intensity, the Extraordinary, but more, much more than that—that the Ordinary is also the divine. Now there are similar comments in Jewish sources, especially in Hasidism, which dwell compassionately on the nobility of the striving for God, no matter through what means. But the striving is always toward the Creator Himself, the struggle is always toward the winnowing-out of every mediating surrogate. The Kotzker Rebbe went so far in his own striving that he even dared to interpret the command against idols as a warning not to make an idol out of a command of God.—So, in general, Jewish thought balks at taking the metaphor for the essence, at taking the block of wood as symbol or representation or mediator for God, despite the fact that the wood and its worshiper stand for everything worthy of celebration: the tree grew in its loveliness, the carver came and fashioned it into a pleasing form, the woman is alert to holiness; the tree, the carver, the woman who is alert to holiness are, all together, a loveliness and a reason to rejoice in the world. But still the wood does not mean God. It is instead of God.
It is not true, as we so often hear, that Judaism is a developmental religion, that there is a progression upward from Moses to the Prophets. The Prophets enjoined backsliders to renew themselves through the Mosaic idea, and the Mosaic idea is from then to now, and has survived unmodified: “Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them.” (Deut. 11:16.) This perception has never been superseded. To seem to supersede it is to transgress it.
So it is dangerous to notice and to praise the Ordinariness of the world, its inhabitants and its events. We want to do it, we rejoice to do it, above all we are commanded to do it—but there is always the easy, the sweet, the beckoning, the lenient, the interesting lure of the Instead Of: the wood of the tree instead of God, the rapture-bringing horizon instead of God, the work of art instead of God, the passion for history instead of God, philosophy and the history of philosophy instead of God, the state instead of God, the shrine instead of God, the sage instead of God, the order of the universe instead of God, the prophet instead of God.
There is no Instead Of. There is only the Creator. God is alone. That is what we mean when we utter the ultimate Idea which is the pinnacle of the Mosaic revolution in human perception: God is One.
The child of a friend of mine was taken to the Egyptian galleries of the Museum. In a glass case stood the figure of a cat resplendent in the perfection of its artfulness—long-necked, gracile, cryptic, authoritative, beautiful, spiritual, autonomous, complete in itself. “I understand,” said the child, “how they wanted to bow down to this cat. I feel the same.” And then she said a Hebrew word: asur—forbidden—the great hallowed No that tumbles down the centuries from Sinai, the No that can be said only after the world is no longer taken for granted, the No that can rise up only out of the abundant celebrations and blessings of Yes, Yes, Yes, the shower of Yeses that praise fragrant oils, and wine, and sex, and scholars, and thunder, and new clothes, and falling stars, and washing your hands before eating.
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Essay published in Moment, July/August 1975.
Remembering Maurice Samuel
When exactly this took place I cannot now recall. I see a plain wood table, a full water pitcher, a small bright space; a lofty Viking of a man; a squarish, briefer man. There is an audience for this so-called “symposium,” and I, in my hungry twenties, am in that moment enduring the first spasms of a lasting blow; afterward the blow will be recognizable as an ambush by the Idea of a Jewish history.
It is more than a mere lacuna, it is a poverty, not to be sure of the place. In those years I used to follow Maurice Samuel from lectern to lectern, running after whatever it was I thought I might get from him. I ran after others too: poets, story-writers, novelists, everyone who might be in possession of a volcanic pen. I supposed the pen itself made volcanoes; I had a perfect faith, common to the literary young, that imaginative power is contained in the mastery of words.
The place, after all, may have been the art gallery of the Ninety-second Street Y in New York—a compromise-hall. If the audience is not large enough to fill the Y’s auditorium, the speakers and their loyal little flocks are packed into the smaller hall, to huddle on metal folding chairs and pretend they are a crowd. For speaker and for
audience there is always something slightly (and secretly) diminishing about the more modest room; it is as if those two elements of the scheme, teller and told, have together failed of permanence and eminence and are designated, even before the first word falls, to the evanescence of a puny event.
The event was not puny. There they stood, the courtly pair, beginning with the same obsession: the history of the Jewish people. One of the two was Erwin Goodenough, the Yale scholar; the other was Maurice Samuel—an uncategorizable presence, thickly though unsatisfactorily labeled: essayist, novelist, activist, thinker, historian, polemicist, (not least) public lecturer. Nor is “Yale scholar” good enough for Good-enough: stand before the row of his books and you ponder a library. Something in his figure suggested the high monument of his work: the great learning, the ordering, erudite, deeply honest brilliance—the mind, say, of George Eliot sans the novelistic surge.
These two had come together as “discussants,” not as antagonists; but afterward they parted in a state of—how to describe it?—metaphysical separation. Not that they disagreed; they did not disagree. What was clear history for the Yale monument was clear history also for the public lecturer. What the noble Gentile scholar, unfolding the centuries, saw, the steady Jewish thinker, though implicated in those dense unreeling scrolls, saw with an equal eye. Eloquence for eloquence, they were a match; grandeur for grandeur, sensibility for sensibility, mind for mind, wit for wit. The room—whatever place this was, Y or other place—swelled to the size of an endless peopled meadow. Before that, and especially afterward, I would find myself a molecule in vaster audiences than this, halls as wide as some Roman plaza: as the years passed, throngs came to witness the fabled speaking fame of Maurice Samuel. All the same, it was in this narrower space that the huge Idea opened.
I do not now remember how the argument came to its crux, by what turnings or challenges; but now, thinking back on it, I see how like a clash of a pair of archangels it was—secular archangels—each intent on hammering out the meaning (or unmeaning) of Jewish history.
“The history of the Jews,” Goodenough began, “is what the Jews have done, and what has been done to them.”
“The history of the Jews,” Samuel said, “is that. And something else.”
“There is no something else,” Goodenough said. “There is only what has been. The history of any people is coextensive with that people.”
“The history of the Jewish people is coextensive with the Idea of the Covenant,” Samuel said.
Then Goodenough: “The Covenant is ought. For history, is is all there is.”
Then Samuel: “For Jewish history, ought is all that matters. Without the Covenant there is no Jewish people.”
Goodenough: “Jewish history is history made by Jews.”
Samuel: “The Covenant made Jewish history. If a Jew worships an idol, is that Jewish history?”
Goodenough: “Yes.”
Samuel: “No. If a Jew worships an idol, that is one Jew worshiping an idol, but it is not Jewish history.”
Goodenough: “And if a thousand Jews worship an idol?”
Samuel: “Then that is a thousand Jews worshiping an idol, but it is not Jewish history.”
Goodenough: “History is the significance of data.”
Samuel: “History is the significance of data. And more.”
Goodenough: “History is what has happened. Nothing else.”
Samuel: “History is what has happened. And also a judgment on what has happened.”
And so on. Obviously I have made up the words of this dialogue, but I have not invented their direction. When the debate halted, it was plain that Goodenough had won it on the ground of “logic.” But Samuel had won it on lesser, or maybe higher, ground: on the ground of stiff-neckedness, which has something to do with the way Jews receive the struggling light of holiness. What had come between them was not the force of fact, but this small persistent flame.
What flew up out of that archangelic exchange was Samuel’s buried theme—the covenantal nature of the Jew. It was a buried theme because so far as his hearers and readers can tell he never again referred to it overtly. It was a volcanic theme because it taught that idea and imagination are the same; and that the imagination of an idea can successfully contradict what is truly known.
Yet Samuel’s subject, by and large, was what is truly known—flat history, history exactly as Goodenough would have it: a record left by a people, not an afflatus divinely breathed, still less a Voice. Samuel was on the side of the pragmatic and the concrete: the “real.” He was not in the prophetic line, in however minor a fashion; he gave public lectures to uneven audiences (every age, every “level”), and he did it, in fact, for a living. He was called, and did not mind calling himself, a maggid—an itinerant preacher. But he was no more a maggid than he was a contemporary lesser prophet; he did not preach, or exhort, or redeem; perhaps, now and then, he reminded. Even his reminders were informational, not clerical. He was learned, but he had taught himself. He was scholarly, but the excuse for this was a fevered need to know. He revered language, but he loved idea more. He was meticulous, but his range kept widening. He was, in short, not a closed system. If, as a public speaker, he had no title and arrived on every scene without an official description or affiliation, and was neither preacher nor professor, and not quite performer either, what exactly did he do?
His métier was thinking: thinking aloud. In his autobiography Samuel distinguishes between “reciters”—cautious types who declaim a fixed text—and genuine lecturers like himself, who evolve, or discover, a text. But perhaps there has never been another lecturer as daring as Maurice Samuel. He set out like a climber negotiating a ledge; he hit on a point, sometimes an obstacle, sometimes a gratifying piece of good fortune; whatever it was, he assessed it, grappled with it, took his victory, and sprang on to the next peak. Along the way he tossed in his talismans of erudition, irony, and above all the long view. He was quick, he was fleet, he was dogged, he made connections. And still, when all this has been described, nothing has been described. What did he do? What was his job?
His job was to address a generation and to explain. In essence he was an argumentative explainer. This is different from maggid, prophet, sage, teacher—they all, in their several degrees and guises, have the kind of authority that emanates from their persons. They are beings, voices, conscious of speech and the effect of speech, conscious of themselves as representing value, tradition, core. They know they are there to be; and that by being, they will transmit. But an explainer is out to give an explanation, not a tenet. The explainer thinks aloud; he is not thinking of his role; he has no expected, usual, given role. An explainer hurls himself into his story. He becomes the story. How does he do this? By joining himself with its elements, by taking sides with its various parts. By sorting out. By setting aside error and misapprehension—only after first entering into their spirit.
In brief: through polemics. Polemics is the chief instrument, the illustrious and ancient mode, of the explainer. Through polemics, as through no other means, an idea can be beaten out. Polemics is a hammering, a hacking into the flanks of imagination. It has the furious relation of stone to sculpture; there is no serenity in its progress. It begins with what is deformed, and only after the ringing and the smashing does it lead to grace. But the aesthetic analogy does not go far enough. Polemics is thinking in the furnace of antithesis. Polemics sees the adversary as an outrage, but also as an advantage. One reason it is inappropriate to define Maurice Samuel as maggid, or prophet, or sage, or teacher, is that not one of these avatars commands the antiphonal as a necessity. Wisdom-teaching, whatever its devices, goes in a straight line; it knows what it knows and is not really required to look over its shoulder at what does not pertain. In that sense it may be more correct for tradition to have assigned Moses the epithet “our polemicist” instead of “our teacher.” “Thou shalt not” is as concerned with the antagonistic culture as it is with the ideal culture and is perpe
tually looking over its shoulder at alien practices: to shun is to see.
Maurice Samuel is above all a polemicist, assuredly the best of our time. Leo Baeck is a consummate polemicist, but only once (though that once is a pinnacle), in his essay “Romantic Religion.” Walter Kaufmann, Baeck’s translator and the author of Critique of Religion and Philosophy, is a more consistent polemicist, though more often from the standpoint of idiosyncratic, rather than Jewish, thought. But Samuel is a polemicist from beginning to end: which is to say an unrelenting critic of thought—and always from the Jewish standpoint. For Samuel the Jewish view is almost never yielded up through simple declaration or exposition; it is wrested out of the engagement with, and finally a disengagement from, an alternative world view. The Gentleman and the Jew and The Professor and the Fossil are only the most emphatic of such demonstrations.
Nothing serves Samuel’s powers better than Arnold Toynbee’s misrepresentations, errors, and contradictions. It will not do to say that if Professor Toynbee had not existed, Maurice Samuel would have had to invent him: given the actual history of the West, there is no way for Professor Toynbee not to have existed. He is the classic anti-Semite in scholar’s clothing, as was Apion (died 45 c.e.) before him. The same can be said of the configuration of the “gentleman.” There is no way, given the actual history of Europe, for the “gentleman” idea, with its code of honor, heroism, and valor based on bloodshed, not to have manifested itself in contradistinction to the Jewish code of moral decorum—mitzvah. But in both instances the polemicist must have not merely significant mastery but complete mastery of the code, cult, culture, and overriding concepts of his antagonist. Indeed, he must include in himself his antagonist. A polemicist must first embody that which he hopes to expel. It must be a version of self he casts out.
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