THE GREAT WORKS OF JEWISH FANTASY AND OCCULT
Compiled, translated and introduced by Joachim Neugroschel
 

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.


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