Parashat Vayetzei.

Let's talk about Jacob for a minute. Last week's parshah includes a callback to Parashat Toldot:

וַיִּשַּׁק יַעֲקֹב, לְרָחֵל; וַיִּשָּׂא אֶת-קֹלוֹ, וַיֵּבְךְּ.

And Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice, and wept. (Bereshit 29:11)

Why does Jacob weep? In Toldot, after he realizes that his blessing has been stolen from him as well as his birthright, Esau begs his father Isaac:

וַיֹּאמֶר עֵשָׂו אֶל-אָבִיו, הַבְרָכָה אַחַת הִוא-לְךָ אָבִי―בָּרְכֵנִי גַם-אָנִי, אָבִי; וַיִּשָּׂא עֵשָׂו קֹלוֹ, וַיֵּבְךְּ.

And Esau said unto his father: 'Hast thou but one blessing, my father? bless me, even me also, O my father.' And Esau lifted up his voice, and wept. (Bereshit 27:38)

Jacob has stolen his brother's blessing even more shamelessly than he stole his birthright, and my understanding of the patriarchal blessing―influenced, I'm sorry to say, by Bloom's rubbishy Book of J―is that it conveys a metaphysical quality of vitality, a kind of innate power and irresistible charisma passed down from Abraham: a real and crushing loss, like the loss of one's health, a realization of limitation and entanglement. It's the difference between Saul and David, between Jeroboam and Rehoboam, between the nation of Israel and the tiny semitic tribes wiped from the face of the earth before Rome grew old. Esau weeps in annihilated desperation. What has Jacob lost, that Torah repeats these words (וַיִּשָּׂא אֶת-קֹלוֹ, וַיֵּבְךְּ / and he lifted up his voice, and wept) and establishes a secret parallel? After all, Jacob has recognized the love of his life and the last of the matriarchs; the blessing that he stole from Esau, just recently made manifest at Beth-El, is standing in front of him "of beautiful form, and fair to look upon" (29:17).

Rashi says that Jacob experiences a prophetic insight, seeing his whole future and specifically that Rachel will be buried apart from him on the road to Ephrath and not in the cave of Machpelah with himself, Rebeccah, and Sarah. If he does experience this revelation (and I'm not at all convinced that we should call the patriarchs prophets, despite the rabbinical conviction that they certainly were), then he certainly sees his whole future laid out in front of him―of which he will say, "few and evil have been the days of the years of my life" (47:9). But he would also see his immense progeny, his years of happiness with Rachel, his reunion with Joseph: all the glory of the blessing of Abraham. Jacob does not weep for Machpelah.

Esau weeps at his loss. What has Jacob lost?

In his revelation, Jacob will foresee everything: but what happens immediately? He will be indentured to Laban for seven years, cheated, and indentured for seven more. For fourteen years and in order to achieve his heart's desire he will not be his own master; to achieve the fulfillment of the blessing he loses his freedom, he loses the precious days of the years of his life to frustrating subordination while Esau ranges across the wild places and, as they say, waxes very great. Does Jacob weep for fourteen years?

Let's go back to the beginning of Vayetzei, to Beth-El. Now, Jacob has shown himself as a prototype of Joseph, that consummate charlatan, and has―I mean this with the full force of the expression―stolen for himself the vitality of the seed of Abraham, the power and the charisma. He is a young man in terms of the lifespan of a patriarch and has only now broken free from his father's house; he is on the road to make something of himself, to find his own way and to be more than his father's son. To my mind―if I were in his position―there should be at his back a commanding imperative to be an un-Isaac; his father is a pale figure in comparison to Abraham, a man who has lived his life in the image of Moriah and who has been little more than the obedient offspring of the revolutionary who left Ur full of broken idols. What would his escape route be?

The family of Abraham is a cage. Abraham protects Isaac from the kind of marriage that helps transform Esau into an Edomite, his "daughters of Heth" that trouble Rebecca; Abraham went so far as to send his servant with explicit instructions to bring a woman of the tribe to Isaac, to make certain that the boy would have no chance to fall in love with a woman that would undermine the house. Isaac, imitating his father (as in all things,) gives the same instruction to Jacob (26:1-6), but does not send him out with a chaperone: there's no time; Jacob is too weak to defend himself. Whatever plans Isaac might have had for his son are now partially in Jacob's hands, and the son is free―should circumstance present itself―to take whatever wife he wishes. Torah says he assents ("Jacob hearkened to his father and his mother," 28:7), but you can look at any Conservative congregation in America and wonder whether the nature of the male striking off into the world has changed so very much in 3,500 years. Whatever his best intentions, surely the possibility of freedom is at the corners of his mind. When the tent of Isaac dips beneath the horizon on the road to Paddan-Aram the enormous potential of the unfettered blessing must open around Jacob like a O'Keefe vista. Perhaps G-d will never speak to him. Perhaps he will live without compulsion, his own man, his own family, his own future.

He lays down to sleep at Beth-El and dreams of the ineffable god of his grandfather standing beside him, just outside his peripheral vision and speaking in the terrible voice:

וְהִנֵּה אָנֹכִי עִמָּךְ, וּשְׁמַרְתִּיךָ בְּכֹל אֲשֶׁר-תֵּלֵךְ, וַהֲשִׁבֹתִיךָ, אֶל-הָאֲדָמָה הַזֹּאת: כִּי, לֹא אֶעֱזָבְךָ, עַד אֲשֶׁר אִם-עָשִׂיתִי, אֵת אֲשֶׁר-דִּבַּרְתִּי לָךְ.

And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee back into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of. (Bereshit 28:15)

I will not leave thee, I will keep thee whithersoever thou goest. G-d has placed his heavy hand on Jacob as surely as he placed it on Abraham, and his life is not his own. He cannot escape. He, too, is in the cage of Abraham.

Bereshit is punctuated by killswitches, points at which the whole enterprise of creating the nation of Israel could have been nipped in the bud and all the glory and suffering could have passed away: Abraham could have refused to send away Ishmael; Isaac could have died on Mount Moriah; Jacob could have married a Hittite. Later, Moses could have been killed at birth or G-d himself could have aborted his project were it not for Zipporah's intercession at the inn: how many times could the road to Sinai have been stopped short, or a crossroad taken, or G-d repent of his undertaking and spare the world? Had Jacob married a daughter of Heth there had been be no passover, no Sinai, no Talmud, no Israel and no Shoah. Should Jacob weep?

I think he weeps because he sees Rachel and his heart is moved with desire, with real assent to the bizarre project that has hijacked the life of his father and his father's father: he loves Rachel, knows that his life is not his own, and kisses the rod. What of Esau? He weeps to have lost the blessing and the birthright―but he goes on to live in freedom, the pure freedom of all the nations that are not chosen, not born in the cage of Abraham. Edom is free but Israel is holy to the Lord. Edom is erased in its freedom, but Israel endures in beauty and the covenant and every kind of suffering forever.

Every morning I thank G-d that he has restored to me a soul that, much against my will, was also present at Sinai―but I weep with Jacob.

Anton's crush.

When I read Narziß und Goldmund for the first time, the book struck me―hardly surprisingly, lonely and sensitive teenager that I was―immediately and obviously as a kind of love story, albeit a love story gone to seed in cerebrality's garden. In fact Hesse's oddly claustrophobic, utterly homosocial novels have always appealed to my basic romantic loneliness; how could these not be the documented yearnings of a gay intellectual? And yet, a lazy glance at his biography reveals nothing of the kind―the man took wives; I hear no google-rumors of male lovers. And yet, as they say, it moves.

As it happens, I'm rereading Das Glasperlenspiel. The first time through I was too young, too basically stupid to take much from it except a hazy feeling of my own superiority; reading it as an adult―well, as whatever I am now―I tripped and fell across a passage in chapter 3 that confirms that homosexual attraction was at least a pixel in his worldview. Knecht is at Mariafels and encounters a novice, Anton, who immediately succumbs to the influence that Knecht has always exerted over younger men:

As time went on, it became evident to Knecht that this young man with the intense eyes under heavy black brows was devoted to him with that enthusiasm and readiness to serve so typical of the boyish adoration he had encountered so often by now. Although every time it happened he felt a desire to fend it off, he had long ago come to recognize it as a vital element in the life of the Castalian order. But in the monastery he decided to be doubly withdrawn; he felt it would be a violation of hospitality to exert any sway over this boy who was still subject to the discipline of religious education. Moreover, he was well aware that strict chastity was the commandment here, and this, it seemed to him, could make a boyish infatuation even more dangerous. In any case, he must avoid any chance of giving offense, and he governed himself accordingly.

This certainly doesn't prove anything about Hesse―although I'll leave the elaborate prophylaxis to Henning Bech and his absent homosexuality―but just in case this is insufficiently explicit, a page later we watch Knecht watching Anton watching Father Jacobus with filial solicitude, which the anonymous pedant explains in unambiguous terms:

Knecht's first reaction was delight; the sight was pleasing in itself, as well as evidence that Anton could so look up to older men without any trace of physical feeling.

Well, I leave this for what it is. There are doubtless subtle articles on the topic, but, bless the Lord, I'm a schoolteacher; why should I do actual research when I can instead attend three-hour classes on administering Formative and/or Summative Assessments? These, by the way, mean "exam" and "final exam" to the initiated, if you are curious.

I take my quotations from the R. & C. Winston translation, one of the very few paperbacks I've bought in recent memory―sometimes you need to possess a book At once!!, as Propertius may well have known.

From the florilegium: Conrad.

I had started to put book darts in my Glass Bead Game when I abruptly ran out. Where were the rest? A search reveals them still tucked into my edition of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which reminded me of the whole peck of quotations I'd never gotten around to copying down. These are they.

Marlowe chats to his friends in terms that remind me very much of my relationship to my boon companion, as was, Heldenberg―

I had then, as you remember, just returned to London after a lot of Indian ocean, Pacific, China seas―a regular dose of the East―six years or so, and I was loafing about, hindering you fellows in your work and invading your homes, just as though I had got a heavenly mission to civilize you.

Near the close of my graduate studies he had begun to refer to me as "hopelessly itinerant"―let me tell you, nobody likes to find himself standing on a doorstep with an Israeli duffel bag on one shoulder and the carefully concealed irritation of his friends at the threshold in front of him.

Conrad has an ear for satire. About his early attempts to get a position that will take him into Africa, he complains that

The men said 'My dear fellow,' and did nothing.

In these straits he throws himself on the ministrations of the women―much to his chagrin―and soon finds himself en route to Brussels to present himself to his new employer:

In a very few hours I arrived in a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre. Prejudice no doubt.

Ceterum censeo Unionem Europaeam delendam esse. Speaking of wise cynicism in the face of modernity, Marlowe jokes about his interview with the company doctor that

I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.

I watched Berg's Wozzeck recently―as of this writing it's available on Youtube in a fairly nice video production, much to my delight―and am reminded of the doctor in that work as well, also a specimen of that particularly ugly 20th century literary trope, the vile man of reason. Doesn't Alex Ross say that Berg was working out some of his frustrations with Schoenberg in that character? Well, I digress. Do I need to introduce the following? The spooky majesty of Conrad ventriloquizing Marlowe ventriloquizing Kurtz stands on its own. We've all read this before, anyway, so reread, if you like; and if not not.

You should have heard the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying 'My Intended.' You would have perceived directly then how completely she was out of it. And the lofty frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! They say the hair goes on growing sometimes, but this―ah―specimen, was impressively bald. The wilderness had patted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball―an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and―lo!―he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite. [...] You should have heard him say, 'My ivory.' Oh yes, I heard him. 'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my―' everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him―but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible―it was not good for one either―trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat among the devils of the land―I mean literally. You can't understand. how could you?―with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you on or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policemand, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums―how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude―utter solitude without a policeman―by way of silence―utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion?

It is magnificence. More, and famously:

All Europe had contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by-and-by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his―let us say―nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which―as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times―were offered up to him―do you understand?―to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, 'must necessarily appeal to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings―we approach them with the might as of a deity,' and so on, and so on. 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' etc. etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence―of words―of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!'

Retyping this tonight I'm struck by the virtuoso satire of which Conrad was capable and the calculating, even manipulative intelligence hiding beneath his naturalism―it makes me want to fast-forward past the rending of the temple veil, to one of the Faulkner novels I've been saving for the event of intestinal fortitude. Well, hope springs eternal. Meanwhile, Conrad on Marlowe on a particular kind of character type we've been seeing since the dark ages, if not before, perhaps seen critically for the first time:

The glamor of youth enveloped his particolored rags, his destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile wanderings. For months―for years―his life hadn't been worth a day's purchase; and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all appearances indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and his unreflecting audacity. I was seduced into something like admiration―like envy. Glamor urged him on, glamor kept him unscathed. He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on through. His need was to exist, and to move onwards at the greatest possible risk, and with the maximum of privation. If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this bepatched youth.

Marlowe is wiser than I am, and as such in his case it's only something like envy, whereas I'm drinking my dissatisfaction neat. Do we have the strength for more concentrated Kurtz? Of course not. Yet:

And, don't you see, the terror of the position was not in being knocked on the head―though I had a very lively sense of that danger, too―but in this, that I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low. I had, even like the niggers, to invoke him―himself―in his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! He had kicked the very earth to pieces. he was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air.

And more. Is this about our century? Was this prophecy?

"Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! it rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now―images of wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas―these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments. The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mold of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinctions, of all the appearances of success and power.

This could have been written in 1949. One last, here in the mouth of Kurtz' Intended:

"Who was not his friend who had heard him speak once?" she was saying. "He drew men towards him by what was best in them."

I am reminded of Heldenberg.

"The same sort of song."

I spent several days laboring over a half-formed essay about a footnote in Gibbon accusing Pope of "improving on Homer's theology" in Iliad 15. Several pages of block quotes in two languages later I decided that my earthshattering exegesis―that Pope's Jove is omnipotent and Homer's is just more potent―couldn't justify the labor, space and mouth noise. If I'm bored with a topic I can only assume that you would be, too. So, for lack of an intelligent thought, something that made me smile instead:

"Horace was one of the least self-deceptive of writers and like many expert craftsmen and artists he found it progressively harder to satisfy his own animum censoris honesti. He had worked his vein very thoroughly and even the most undemanding reader cannot deny that there is a grain of uncomfortable truth in the schoolboy's complaint that 'Horace always seems to be singing the same sort of song to the same sort of tune'." A. T. von S. Bradshaw, 1970. "Horace, Odes 4.1." CQ 20: 142-53. (142)

In any event, all this futility with Pope's pretty poem led me to some material worth sharing: have a look at the labors of a certain Jim Manis of Penn State, an e~lexandrine (forgive me) copious library of PDFs, certainly a κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί for those of us melting our hearts in the blogosphere of the muses. I also ran into this micro-compendium of Greek aphorisms, perhaps worth a look on a rainy day.

Oh,―apropos of nothing―I had been joking lately about Gilgamesh in terms that reminded me of this interesting video, in which a pair of very earnest PBS types play with a reconstructed mesopotamian lyre to the tune of a recitation from tablet 10; you may enjoy it too.

Negative theology.

"Do you believe in G-d?"

I was recently excoriated, as sometimes happens, for describing myself as religious―how could I have fallen into such self-involved mysticism? How could this have happened? Indignation vied with contempt for a few minutes before the subject, and conversation, were dropped. (Unclean, unclean! A whole generation of my peers has codified its very own secular leshon hara.)

The new atheism just isn't designed for confrontation with religious intellectuals. It asks the wrong questions, it's too confined by its own discourse to engage the sacred in meaningful terms; its enthusiasts just aren't equipped―as far as I've experienced―with the literary or contemplative background to approach people like myself, sitting on top of my column here in the dregs of time.

Still, though, the argument put me to thinking about that great conversation-at-midnight question of our century―I wonder how many people would find it strange, if they really thought about it? I mean the question itself as well as its strange relationship to history. Think of it―it began very objectively, almost empirically: "Why did Sarah laugh?" It was a question of power, an old transitional monotheism of the omnipotent struggling to define itself against the warring dominions of heathen cult. I think it's very easy to lose the revolutionary force of Bereshit 18:14 in the smallness of Abraham's concerns: for some time now I've been searching out the point at which G-d first reveals himself to Abraham as more than a personal divinity, and though I don't think this the point at which our ancestor realizes that he must be more than a henotheist―if that ever comes; it may not come at all until Moses―I think HaShem might be intimating exactly that, just in passing, an offhand remark that Abraham accepts in silent perplexity. After all, his god is striding off to destroy a city; under the circumstances you can't judge him too severely for being distracted from novel theological questions. So it begins as something quite different, a question of confidence rather than faith in the 20th century sense: the Jahwist author wonders whether we're confident in this alien presence and his mightiness.

Then of course it changes dramatically: now we have the missionary question put to half-reconstructed pagans, "do you believe in my god, all three of him, though you didn't before?" You hope this is closer to Elijah and his barrels of water than to another misguided species of henotheism―"your gods exist, but they're demons; only this god is omnipotent"―but this is wishful thinking, isn't it? Europe was littered with idols in everything but name until the Reformation.

But now Christianity had covered Europe like a settling snow; we entered an age of religious monoculture, of heterodoxy and heretics in a land where everyone takes the same god as a given stretching onward toward apocalypse. The 20th century question of faith would have been meaningless to these peasants and potentates: the question was never existential but doctrinal, and accusations of atheism were more than a little disingenuous.

Suddenly it occurred to mankind that there might not be a god at all. The rest is a long history of widespread banalities and the secluded palace of the mandarins: we acquired the Enlightenment, and when Gibbon writes of pagan antiquity that

the various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful (ch. 2, p. 22),

I wonder if he isn't speaking rather more of his own age than Trajan's. But yes, by the philosophers indeed: don't think I'm sneering at them. Their tendency was toward the Stoics' almost-monotheism or else the rigorous materialism of their rivals; if you put theology in the hands of intellectuals it almost always seems to tend one way or the other. Small, wonder, though―Kohelet is right; of making many books there is no end, and much study is weariness of the flesh. Over and over again we pile book on top of book in our scramble toward G-d, turn back, see that we've built a ziggurat, and privately despair.

Or at least I do.

But now we've come to the 21st century where the question has become well and truly existential, very much like asking whether someone believes there's life on other planets. I look back over the different ways we've asked that unusual question―first exultant, next suspiciously, then as an inquisitor, finally with caliper in hand―and I wonder whether you can really ask that question of a monotheist, or as a monotheist.

Is it meaningful to ask whether you, such as you are, acknowledge the existence of―can we even call him a being? better to resort to a naked relative pronoun―that which cannot be described except in negative terms, which is so different from us on an ontological level that to use the verb "exists" is to abuse the language? Omnipotence and omnibenevolence: what is all this in the face of a god without qualities? Omniscience and simplicity: these I understand. But you can't wash good or action clean of their human context, or at least clean enough to really apply them to our one G-d; and omnipresence is beyond my ability to question. Perhaps it's a misuse of language, perhaps not―at this instant, at least, I simply don't know.

My negative theology:

I am afraid that I will solve these problems with either mysticism―with a theology of sentiment―or resignation.

I am afraid to find G-d in the logos because this is a philosopher's heresy, a bounding of the incommensurate, idolatry in iconoclasm.

I am unable to believe in the literal truth of scripture because it manifestly isn't, but suspicious of the double-mindedness by which I hold it to be true without being truth: that 20th century willingness to discard the exclusion of the middle makes me queasy.

I am suspicious that I can formulate the thought the study of religion is the study of literature, but the reverse is not true: inevitably the disjunction will fall away; I'll conflate the books I love with the G-d my soul cries out to worship.

There is a god; he is one; and from this nothing follows. The use of language unravels into nonsense; reason is inadequate but feeling is idolatry. Every form of belief is idolatry. But this can't be true―οὐκ ἔστ᾽ ἔτυμος λόγος οὗτος. My spouse accused me of "sublimated, postmodern Judaism" the other day―well, what else can I possibly have? Where can I go from here? I am totally unequipped to wrestle with the angel.

I mentioned Stylite saints in passing and this led me to Tennyson's "St. Simeon Stylites," which you can find here along with a very engaging and humane critical essay by USC's J. R. Kincaid as well as the arresting photograph included above, which I found unattributed on a blog unworthy of mention: I wonder what it is? A reenactment? A 19th century emulator? Very mysterious.