Foreword
Fantasy is a subjective notion. The various ways we define it and respond
to it are determined by so many cultural attitudes - religion, science,
mysticism, rationalism. Our concepts run a gamut precarious and unstable
categories.
Dovid Bergelson's terse story "At Night" sums up all such energies
of fantasy and skepticism.
A train is hurtling through a rainy night across the wastes of Russia,
a dark void that is really the modern era which has terminated the absoluteness
of previous life and set up a system of rational and relative values, emphasizing
skepticism and inquiry.
Inside the train, the narrator, the "I," is suddenly confronted with
a stranger, the "Night Jew," a mysterious and omnipresent individual, who
is always to be found on trains, but who appears quite suddenly out of
the darkness, as though not previously there. He asks the narrator: "Where
are you going, young man?" And the narrator never replies; he doesn't know.
The train is still hurtling through the void. But everyone is asleep. Only
a baby is crying.
A baby can cry in hunger, but a male baby cries at the circumcision
ceremony, which is the first rite of passage, initiating a new born Jewish
male into (Jewish) life. The next rite of passage in Jewish existence is
the bar mitzvah, the initiation of the Jewish boy into adulthood, into
the right to take part in a minyan, the quorum of ten male Jews required
for a divine service in synagogue. And this adolescent rite of passage
takes place: A young Jewish boy suddenly emerges next to the Night Jew,
and the latter teaches him the Bible, starting with the Creation and pausing
at Noah's Flood and the subsequent salvation and grace of humanity. This
instruction replaces the ten years of study that an orthodox Jewish boy
traditionally undertakes at the age of three until his bar mitzvah. Afterward,
the study of the sacred texts of Judaism remains his daily activity and
is the key to his, and his wife's, salvation.
The teaching in Bergelson's story stops with the destruction and salvation
of the world, as symbolic of the end and beginning of humanity, foretelling
a messianic era. It is autumn in Russia, the Jewish year has only just
begun. Every week Jews read a portion of the Pentateuch in synagogue, and
now, in mid?autumn, they have reached the portion narrating the Deluge
and the survival of Noah and his family. Hence: the story of Noah in this
train that is hurtling through the autumnal void, which is really the early
part of the year, and not the closing part as in the Christian calendar.
Likewise, the Jewish day begins at sunset. The deep of night is the first
part of the twenty-four-hour cycle, and not the end, as in the Christian
day. And the concept of grace, although not traditionally Jewish, brings
in a mythic component that is fused with Noah through cabbalistic gematriah,
i.e., the reckoning of the numerical values of the Hebrew letters. The
two Hebrew letters spelling Noah's name, when reversed, spell khein,
the Hebrew word for "grace." This integral cabbalistic touch likewise betokens
the reintegration of mysticism and mythology into religion, which, at certain
points, must be revitalized by literature and the imagination.
The ignoramus, the Jewish youth who was never instructed in the religion,
has now been initiated, and the old man, the Night Jew, who performed the
rites of passage in the speeding train, turns out to be Noah himself, both
an archetype and an avatar, reincarnated to bring divine grace into the
fearful void of modern life.
This assurance of grace, this promise of the future beyond the deluvian
wastes outside the train, this sense of progressive life from the squalling
baby, through the adolescent, up to the old man, is a perfect example of
messianic belief, revitalized by poetic energy.
Noah saves the world, just as poetry and the imagination save religion
and reincarnate it in an aesthetic that is turned toward the divine and
the eschatological, without truly resolving the questions voiced throughout
the story.
It would seem as if what we call "fantasy" is often an attempt at understanding
what rational and daily experience fails to grasp: forces, notions, possibilities
frequent in our everyday life, often at remote points in our coordinates
of infinity and eternity.
Jews obviously did not regard their Bible and Talmud as "fantasy."
For them, the Scriptures, especially the first five books, were millenial
objects of study, and a portion of the Pentateuch was read each week in
synagogue, thereby forming an annual cycle. The Bible and the Talmud were
the basis, of a national constitution, a code of laws, a way of life, at
the core of acting and thinking, particularly outside the Holy Land, and
imbued with the promise of a messianic future.
The Cabbalah, a medieval Jewish mystical movement, may have brought
mythology into the Jewish religion and into Jewish history. But the "fantasies,"
the "fairytales," the "fables" in the Bible, and in the post-biblical commentaries
and exegeses in the Talmud and what came after, were not really regarded
as fantasy by the Jews themselves, until perhaps the Haskalah - the rational
movement in nineteenth-century Judaism.
It is the legacy of that era and of the West European Enlightenment
that makes us talk about fantasies and fairytales. The polarity of the
rational and irrational in regard to such literature does not historically
exist for Jews, at least not in the way we regard existence as rational
and practical on the one hand and fantastic and irrational on the other:
a clean split, which literature and the occult movements try to bridge
and turn into a dialectic.
It is this retrospective attitude that lets us seek out "fantasies"
among Jewish stories, just as the Haskalah satirists attacked the irrational
and mystical traditions in Judaism, from the Bible and the Talmud, through
the Cabbalah and its Eastern European offshoot, Hassidism, which has become
a major religious force. By seeking out fantasies, we are actually tearing
existence into two parts: the rational and pragmatic, the irrational and
mystical. We are destroying the oneness of experience and imagination,
earthliness and divinity.
Yet such fantasies and fairytales, such mystical stories, actually
preserve the unity of human life. They show that divine and supernatural
forces are quite human and natural; or vice versa: that the human and the
natural are really integrated in a cosmos that allows for anything in the
human or divine imagination.
In modern life, the need for such a reintegration of human thought
has led to the worst and best, from the inhuman myth and mysticism of fascism
to the most daring exploits of poetry and science.
And it is this need for a reintegration of all experience, for a synthesis
of all apparent contradictions between rationalism and fantasy that has
produced such exciting literary adventures. For Jews, the ultimate synthesis
would be the Messianic Age, the advent of an era in which such polarities
or dialectics once again become meaningless.
The presence of these contradictions is steady and inevitable, and
often spells a secularization of messianism, as evidenced by the rationalist
satires that made use of fantasy and the occult, giving them more credit
than intended. Skepticism and inquiry belong to the tradition; after all,
they also generated the Cabbalah and thus, curiously, added a mystical
rather than rational energy to Judaism.
The messianic thought, the doleful and cheerful expectation of that
nearby and distant era, imbues all levels of these stories, from the anguish
of frustration at the human condition to the sometimes happy endings that
prefigure the ultimate Happy End, which is really a Happy Beginning. Moyshe
Kulbak's The Messiah of the House o f Ephraim shows the anguishing
side of messianism. Peretz's The Three Wedding Canopies is an ambiguous
inquiry into the very concept and its possible realization on earth. Der
Nister's A Tale of Kings points out the arduous road to earthly
fulfillment. And Gotlober's rationalist satire The Gilgul or The Transmigration
is a hilarious and pessimistic exposure of both human folly and the inadequacies
of traditional religion in aspiring toward messianic goals.
The two traditions, rationalism and fantasy, are so intergrown as to
point out a recurrent theme: the attempt to reintegrate mysticism and messianism
into religion and practical experience.
This will become obvious throughout the anthology. The works are matched
and contrasted along those lines. The arrangement according to the seven-day
cycle refers both to the start of cosmic life, the Creation of the Heavens
and the Earth, and to the ultimate promise of messianism, the ultimate
Sabbath, anticipated in God's first Sabbath, the promise of that ultimate
age, which is mystically reiterated once a week in Jewish life. However,
the true nature of the ultimate and eternal Sabbath is still beyond our
ken. Thus, the Sabbath story terminating this collection could only be
Rabbi Nakhman's "The Tale of the Seven Beggars." A beggar came every day
of the week, and then on the Sabbath...? The story, and the anthology,
has to end with a question rather than an answer. So far, fantasy and skepticism
are still dialectical. They will only be fused into one when the Messiah
comes. |