Text and Spirit

GEOFFREY HARTMAN

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

Delivered at

University of Utah
April 13 and 14, 1999
Geoffrey H. Hartman is Sterling Professor Emeri-
tus of English and Comparative Literature and senior re-
search scholar at Yale University. He was educated at
Queens College of the City of New York, and received his
Ph.D. from Yale University. He is the recipient of fellow-
ships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and the Woodrow Wil-
son Center, has been a visiting scholar at numerous uni-
versities in the United States, Europe, and Israel, and is a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and the Academy of Literary Studies. Early in his career he
produced an impressive body of literary criticism, includ-
ing The Unmediated Vision (1954), Wordsworth’s Poetry,
1787–1814 (1964), The Fate of Reading (1975), and Criti-
cism in the Wilderness (1980), among others. More recently
he has begun to explore the topics of witness and historical
memory, and the cultural and political implications of the
Holocaust. His books on those subjects include Bitburg in
Moral and Political Perspective (1986), Holocaust Remem-
brance: The Shapes of Memory (1994), and The Longest
Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1996).
The face-to-face with the text has replaced the face-to-face with God.
—Edmond Jabès1

Even a casual observer of the worldly scene, or of news that be-

sieges ears and eyes, and becomes increasingly a confusing talk
show with endlessly extemporized sense and nonsense, even you
and I, who are that casual observer, cannot fail to notice how often
the supernatural turns up as a topic. Let me excerpt a moment
close to Christmas 1997. “In Books, It’s Boom Time for Spirits,”
runs a headline of “The Arts” section of the New York Times (Tues-
day, November 11, 1997, E 1). The very next week, this same sec-
tion, devoted to Robert Gobert’s installation piece in the Los
Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, features a Madonna
standing on a drainage grate with a cruciform pipe through her
belly, which elicits the curious headline “Religion That’s in the
Details” (not only entrails) and adds “A Madonna and Drain Pipe
Radiate an Earthy Spirituality.” The number of best sellers on
near-death or out-of-body experiences is well known; spirit rap-
tors proliferate; and the recovered memory syndrome has not only
insinuated devastating suspicions about family values but also
made stars of obscure people who claim to have lived previous
lives as saints, warrior-heroes, and amazonian queens.
Serious scholars too have turned from their literary preoccupa-
tions to write, as Harold Bloom has done, on The American Religion
and, with the approach of the millennium, on omens, angels, ava-
tars, and such. Bloom’s survey of Christian and heterodox move-
ments since 1800 envisions the year 2000 as the triumph of an
unacknowledged, speciŠcally American religion, “in which . . .
something deeper than the soul, the real Me or self or spark is

1 Le Parcours (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 84.

[155]
156 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

made to be utterly alone with . . . a free God or God of Freedom”

who loves every American with a personal love. Bloom would like
to stand aloof, but Šnds he too is part of this scene—as American
as Ralph Waldo Emerson or Walt Whitman. “Religious criti-
cism,” he says, “even if it seeks to banish all nostalgia for belief,
still falls into the experience of the spiritual, even as literary criti-
cism cannot avoid the danger of falling into the text.”2 Though
there is nothing new in the antics of hucksters and televangelists,
or meeting the Lord in the air (in a spaceship, no less, according to
Louis Farrakhan), or weeping statues, or miracles on Broadway
(Tony Kushner, Angels in America), or the amazing ease with which
both preachers and skinheads claim to have heard the call of God,
it is time to rešect on this bullishness in the spiritual market.
Does the mere approach of the year 2000 act as a magnet? My
initial thought is that there is enough craziness in traditional reli-
gion itself, I mean imaginative, poetic craziness, so that this sort of
human circus is unnecessary. At the same time I agree with Wil-
liam Blake that imagination is religion’s birth mother, always try-
ing to free its unorthodox offspring, the poets, from the strictures
of positive religion. But then, of course, one remembers a different
aspect of the spiritual impulse, that it is never entirely disinter-
ested: it often breaks through as the compulsive side of those
whose disgust with the human condition—with themselves or
others or politics—becomes intolerable, and who tend to advocate
purgative schemes of reform.3
2 My two quotations come from The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-
Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 15, 256–57. See also Bloom’s
Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (New York: Riverhead
Books, 1996).
3 I omit entirely, here, the issue of spirituality in politics, except to recall the dam-
age done by the Christian anti-Jewish polemic focusing on the enmity of spirit to the
letter of the (divine) law. Carl Schmitt is not wrong when he writes in Der Begriff des Poli-
tischen [The Concept of the Political] (1932): “All concepts in the spiritual sphere, in-
cluding the concept of spirit, are intrinsically pluralistic and can only be understood by
studying their concrete political circumstances [sind . . . nur aus der konkreten politis-
chen Existenz heraus zu verstehen]. . . . If the center of spiritual life in the last four cen-
turies has constantly displaced itself, then, as a consequence of that, all concepts and
[Hartman] Text and Spirit 157

To write adequately about spiritual experience—or what is

named such—would need the tolerance and comprehensiveness of
a William James. The task of distinguishing between spirituality
and spiritism seems endless. The question of where spirituality is
today is complicated by the increasing predominance of visual
texts, of the movies. How “spiritual” is a Šlm like Seven, written by
Andrew Walker? It is one of many staging the city as an evil place
that requires puriŠcation through a punisher or avenger. Based on
the Christian typology of the Seven Deadly Sins, it tracks a mur-
derer’s grisly serial killings in pursuit of a spiritual quest. The
killer himself imposes the scheme of the Seven Deadly Sins on ran-
domly chosen victims, and the surprise is that, though outwitting
the police, he allows himself to be killed at the end as a sacriŠce to
his own scheme—because he embodies one of those sins. There is
no spiritism here of the supernatural kind; but there is a border-
line sense of the uncanny, as in so many detective stories, where a
Šendish force seems to outmaneuver human reason. The rational
wins only because the murderer (or author) wants it to, in order to
save the concept of motivation. Seven cannot be dismissed as the
gothic exploitation of religious mania: it is a ghastly hyperbole
demonstrating how sinister that mania becomes when the spiri-
tual life runs amok, when its claim to mark and Šght evil is seized
by a despairing intensity that leads to šamboyant acts of procla-
mation.4
In general, the detective story format of looking for clues that
do not yield easily to looking, and mock in their cunning charac-
ter the noisy, clumsy pursuit of the police, points to the need for a
different kind of attention. In such Šlms there is a glut—glut-
tony—of sight that cuts across all attempts to render these moral

words have constantly changed their meaning, and it is necessary to remember the
plurisigniŠcation of each word and concept” (my translation).
4 The criminal as artist (and artist as criminal) is not a rare theme in modern litera-
ture. See Joel Black, The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contempo-
rary Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
158 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

fables spiritual.5 Perhaps the spiritual can only be caught at the

margin, glimpsed, not focused on: it evades being incorporated, or
Šxed as a purely visual event. In Seven, there is a short moment in a
police station where, quite implausibly, strains of classical music
are heard—an allusion, probably, to a more striking scene in an-
other Šlm, The Shawshank Redemption, where music of that kind
transports the prisoners in the yard to a world they have not
known and may never know.6 Brushed by the wings of that music,
they stand still, in their inner space, attentive; then the miracu-
lous notes evaporate into the grim round of their daily existence.
My aim is to cover only one aspect of spiritual experience, that
which involves “listening” to texts. This aspect of spirituality is
linked to my previous examples through the quality of attention
that texts, canonical or noncanonical, foster.
Many have claimed that something read, even as fragmented as
a single sentence come upon by chance, has made a radical differ-
ence and set them on a new course with spiritual implications.
This happened most famously to Augustine; the tolle lege (take up
and read) episode from his Confessions recalls the magical practice
of the sortes Virgilianae or sortes Biblicae, in which you opened the
sacred book and decided on a course of action by taking the verse
that met your eye as an oracle. The practice survived into Method-
ism and was known to George Eliot, whose Dinah Morris in Adam
Bede seeks divine guidance “by opening the Bible at hazard.”7 Saul
Lieberman, a distinguished scholar of the Talmud, speculated that
5 Only Ingmar Bergman’s late TV Šlm, The Blessed, has the courage to portray a re-
ligious folie à deux culminating in a self-mutilation, the eyes being literally put out.
More than Baruch Spinoza, adduced by Bloom, this Šlm presents a love of God that is
the opposite of “The American Religion.”
6 Strains of music like that are also heard in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend and in Ro-
berto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful.
7 Eliot, Adam Bede (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 82. (I am told that this
kind of divination was still practiced—at least into the 1960s—in Methodist circles of
the American South.) Efraim Sicher’s important essay “George Eliot’s Rescripting of
Scripture: The ‘Ethics of Reading’ in Silas Marner,” Simeia 77 (1997): 243–70, links bib-
lical interpretation of this kind to the larger issue of the relation of chance and design in
both secular and sacred texts.
[Hartman] Text and Spirit 159

this sort of divination was also behind the curious notion of bat kol,
echo, literally “daughter of the voice [of God],” heard in an era
when He was no longer audible, or, as the Bible puts it, open vi-
sion had ceased—the era of post-prophetic teachers who between
the third century b.c.e. and the Šfth c.e. were the founding fa-
thers of orthodox Judaism.
The perplexed soul would go out of the house of study and the
Šrst sounds heard were to be a deliverance, indicating the path to
be followed. Some of these sounds must have penetrated the
scholar’s house; but perhaps his devoted attention, his kavanah,
kept them out. The celestial bat kol could also “appear” in dreams
or daydreams.8 This audism has something desperate about it; it is
clear, from such incidents, that “the spirit blows where it lists,” or
that, to cite Bob Dylan, the answer is blowing in the wind.
In order to respect secular experience, to see in it a potential
hiding-place of the spirit—not unlike the way that art after Mar-
cel Duchamp values trashy occasions—we eavesdrop everywhere.
Chance mingles inextricably—as so often in novelistic plots—
with a potential ethics. The surrealists say that such encounters re-
veal an hasard objectif. Today we don’t necessarily consult the
8 See Saul Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York: Jewish Theological
Seminary, 1950). One of the voice’s most famous manifestations is recorded in Berakhot
3a of the Babylonian Talmud, where Rabbi Yose is said to hear it in the ruins of Jerusa-
lem, cooing like a dove and lamenting: “Woe to me for I have destroyed my house and
burned my temple and have exiled my children.” The scene here is clearly an elegiac one,
and the bat kol generally is mild rather than a cause for panic or fear. According to the En-
cyclopedia Judaica, the bat kol was already on occasion heard in the biblical period: mid-
rashic sources gave it a role, for example, in Solomon’s judgment of the two women
claiming the same child. The episode, in book 8 of Augustine’s Confessions, is especially
remarkable in that the voice is both external (“‘Take up and read’”) and textual (“I seized,
opened, and in silence read that section, on which my eyes Šrst fell . . . ”). Augustine
mentions the case of Saint Antony, who, entering the room where the Gospel was being
read, “received the admonition as if what was being read was spoken to him.” (I quote
from the Pusey translation of The Confessions.) Antony was the Šrst of the desert fathers,
and Augustine must be referring to an aural episode recounted in The Life and Affairs of
Our Holy Father Antony ascribed to Athanasius of Alexandria (mid fourth century). We
are told that Antony, entering the church just as the Gospels were being read, “heard the
Lord saying to the rich man, If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor,
and you will have treasure in heaven.” Athanasius continues: “It was as if by God’s design he
held the saints in his recollection, and as if the passage were read on his account.”
160 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

“bouche d’ombre” of Virgil or the Bible and turn them into a lot-
tery; but the world, the very world from which we seek refuge,
still opens to divulge accidental epiphanies. Modern Age spirit-
ism of this kind may have begun with Charles Baudelaire’s Fusées
(Fireworks): it describes a type of trance that parallels a depth ex-
perience also yielded by hashish, but extends it like a magical var-
nish over anything and everything, including “la première phrase
venue, si vos yeux tombent sur un livre” (the Šrst-come phrase, if
you happen to look into a book).9 Poetry itself, Baudelaire sug-
gests, is the product of an intelligence lit up by an intoxication of
this kind.
Indeed, for both orthodox scholars and psychedelic adventurers
the act of emerging from a period of concentration, of isolated
study or brooding, into the promiscuous clamor of the street or the
sad variety of books one admires and cannot make one’s own seems
to hide a sensuous need, the wish for a coup de foudre, a choice as
absolute as Emily Dickinson’s

The soul selects her own society

Then shuts the Door—
To her divine Majority—
Present no more—(303)10

Love too amazes, akin to Grace, because it occurs involuntarily

among the impossible diversity of human beings with whom one
wishes to be intimate. As we have seen with the Jonestown sui-
9 He also uses the word “spirituel” to describe it, which connotes in French both
spiritual and witty (the latter word reinforcing the intellectual character of the experi-
ence) and evokes a sense of strange “correspondences” between different events or per-
ceptual phenomena (sounds and colors, for instance). Swedenborgianism (Balzac, for
instance, made it in the early 1830s the subject of SeraŠta and Louis Lambert), Thomas de
Quincey (his Opium Eater, which Baudelaire translated), and Edgar Allan Poe contrib-
uted their inšuence throughout the nineteenth century: in fact, the attempt to view po-
etry as a highly conscious hallucinogenic gateway came close to being programmatic in
French symbolism. In the United States too, spiritistic phenomena, including Turning
Tables, assumed fashionable proportion from the 1850s on.
10 The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little
Brown and Company, 1960), p. 143.
[Hartman] Text and Spirit 161

cides, the need to love, or to cleave to a strong, ordering voice,

whether that of the guru or the text he claims to embody, is essen-
tial to this kind of spirituality. We too easily neglect the fact, how-
ever, that the promise of life, of rebirth, can produce its own rigor
mortis: in Dickinson’s words, a closing of the valves of attention
“Like Stone.”
Myself, I have never graduated beyond fortune cookies; and
even those lost their charm when I opened one and received the all
too probable message: “What you have eaten isn’t chicken.” But I
admit that, being a student of literature, and reading a lot, in the
canon as well as miscellaneously, there are times when a passage
has taken my breath away: when I have been tempted to call the
impact of such a text spiritual and supposed that others would also
call it such. The Šrst case I will take up is perhaps too good, in that
the subject-matter is already in the religious realm. I read Cardinal
Newman’s Dream of Gerontius again, a play structured as a viaticum
or ultimate rite of passage: it describes the individual soul passing
from the instant of death to the judgment seat. It was not so much
Newman’s daring conception that held me, as he shows the dying
man moving like a somnambulist along that fatal path, accompa-
nied by the voices of the funeral mass and the intercession of orders
of angels. What held me was an early moment in this process,
when Gerontius expresses his terror: terror of dying, timor mortis,
but also of God’s judgment closing in. Newman places heroism at
life’s end, as it is overwhelmed by pangs related to the physical ag-
ony of death, pangs that contain an intuition of damnation:

I can no more; for now it comes again

That sense of ruin, which is worse than pain,
That masterful negation and collapse
Of all that makes me man. . . .

In this prayerful monologue Gerontius does not address himself to

God, Christ, Mary, or other intercessors—till he is seized once
more by a spasm of fear. The comfort of address, of being called or
162 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

being able to call upon, is removed, as he begins a free fall, dying

alone, without steadying hand or voice:

as though I bent
Over the dizzy brink
Of some sheer inŠnite descent;
Or worse, as though
Down, down for ever I was falling through
The solid framework of created things. . . .

Like Gerontius, at that moment, we realize how ordinary life

bears us up; so that if the term “spiritual” can enter appropriately
here, it also refers to the gratitude we owe created or material
things for their support. The earth generally does not give way;
and we trust our body, for a time. There are intimations, however,
that this conŠdence cannot last: either at the end of our life, or at
the end of days, or indeed at any time in the course of individual
existence, we are deserted, a trapdoor opens, the pit yawns. Then
spirits enter or reenter, and the immediate frontier is death.
In considering the colorful aspects of free-šoating spirituality,
as well as that closely linked to an organized religion like Catholi-
cism or Judaism, I will try to avoid cornering myself into a deci-
sive deŠnition of the phenomenon itself. Like Nathaniel Haw-
thorne in “The Celestial Railroad,” I am anxious not to become a
Mr. Smooth-it-away. I suggest, then, that we often seize on one
event, whether disturbing or exhilarating or both, that cuts across
a relatively careless, wasteful, or ignorant life. We focus on what
was revealed: on what turned us around, not necessarily from bad
to good but toward a sense of purpose and identity. The quality of
attention so aroused is not inevitably the outcome of a religious
exercise: it can involve acts of attention described by Nicolas de
Malebranche as “the natural prayer of the soul.”11 Or there is John
11 Cf. Simon Weil: “L’attention absolument sans mélange est prière,” in La pesan-
teur et la grâce, intro. by Gustave Thibon (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1948), p. 135.
[Hartman] Text and Spirit 163

Keats’s wonderful analogy: “I go among the Fields and catch a

glimpse of a stoat or a Šeldmouse peeping out of the withered
grass—the creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with
it.”12
These accidental and deŠning events can be textual. Readers,
poetically inclined, yet also distracted by passages that seem to
stand out, must Šnd a way to go where these lead. Such readerly
absorption is, I think, becoming rarer, not just because books have
multiplied and the World Wide Web is there to be manipulated,
but also because Šlm has become a major art form; and Šlm is pan-
oramic, requiring a more diffused as well as demanding attention,
or one that hypnotizes through a variable zooming and focusing.
The tyranny of the eye, the simple pleasure of Šlmic omnipotence,
combines distraction with a faux-semblant of concentration.
Of course, some intensity of the visual has always existed: the
use of religious icons or the meditative “exercises” of Ignatius of
Loyola tell us how important images, inner or outer, have been.
Or, as in D. H. Lawrence’s “Bavarian Gentians,” written a few
months before his death, the coming darkness renders the visible
more visible, counterpart of a kindly light purely and intensely
nature’s own and that acts as a psychopompos:

black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue

giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter’s pale
lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead the way.13

Yet unless the discipline of reading has Šrst come about, with-
out being routinized by print culture, it is doubtful we could even
approach an analysis of “spiritual value,” at least in our civilization.
12 To the George Keatses, March 19, 1819.
13 There are two versions of “Bavarian Gentians” (as well as related drafts with the
title “Glory of Darkness”). I am quoting from The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed.
Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 697.
164 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

In many conversion experiences, as William James has shown, ter-

ror and turmoil are aroused or allayed when a voice is heard utter-
ing Scripture words.14 Poetry’s dense or enigmatic phrases have a
parallel effect; they often induce a contemplative mood, asking to
be carried longer in the womb of the mind, and do not bring a pre-
mature and disenchanting clarity to birth.
Is spirituality, then, linked to the sense of the individual as
such being found, or found out? That those affected feel directly
called or addressed is probably more important than recognizing
whose voice it is, or the exact content of the call. A sudden, myste-
rious utterance outšanks our resistance to being identiŠed, or
known too well. Is not the oldest—and youngest—game that of
hide-and-seek? Shock, surprise, self-consciousness, unanticipated
arousals of guilt or joy, even a negative correlative of these, “Blank
misgivings of a Creature /Moving about in worlds not realized”
(William Wordsworth, “Ode. Intimations of Immortality.”)—
such radical moments, not always verbal, though demanding a
verbal response, or a temporal, sustained act of consciousness, may
not constitute the spiritual as such or bind it to the ordinary life
we lead. Yet they furnish a disruption from which we date a con-
scious birth.
The individual is always singled out, is always one of three
stopped by an Ancient Mariner, transported by a musical phrase,
“looked at” by a work of art, as when the archaic torso of Apollo
admonishes Rainer Maria Rilke: “You must change your life.”
There is often a heightened sense of place or virtual embodiment.
The spiritual in those moments approaches ecstasy, but does not
leave the body except to enter, at the same time, a speciŠc vision-
ary expanse. So Jacob at Beth-el: “How full of awe this place!”
(Genesis 28:17). Or the šashbacks of trauma: “I think I would
have no trouble even now locating the spot on the median strip of
Commonwealth Avenue [in Boston] where they [the repressed ex-

14 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lecture IX, “Conversion.”

[Hartman] Text and Spirit 165

periences of many years ago] emerged out of that darkness. . . . ”15

Krzysztof Kielslowski’s Šlm The Double Life of Veronique intimates
how strong and sensuous the pull is toward union with a second
self, which is always in another place, and whose absent presence is
felt as a loss, even a disembodiment. This ghostly, complementary
other becomes the obscure object of desire: it is endlessly imag-
ined, mourned, pursued. Aesthetics classiŠes such feelings as sub-
lime; religion generally as full of awe. They exalt, terrify, and
humble at the same time.
The torment of individuation seems to be essential even when
the newly minted person šees from it into the arms of a brother-
hood, sisterhood, or God. It is notoriously difŠcult, as we all know,
to distinguish the sense of election from mania. Then how do we
get from such instances of spiritual experience to a communal
bond without betraying or falsifying them? To hear voices is a
form of madness; random textual surprises are borderline cases
that interpellate the reader and can be ampliŠed as inner quota-
tions, cryptomania, or internalized commands. Yet once we have
redeemed that madness by turning to methodical exegesis, are we
still in the precarious domain of being singled out, or do we sim-
ply conŠrm what we already know through doctrine or doxis? Has
astonishment or awe turned into dogmatic faith?16
We should not underestimate the importance, negative or pos-
itive, of hermeneutics in religion: an activity that šexes the mean-
ing of a canonical text, as we seek wisdom or, more dangerously, an
altered identity. The methodical character of hermeneutics tries to
minimize eccentric responses by establishing a true, authoritative,
original meaning. Yet everyone who has ventured into the Šeld of
interpretation, even when it represents itself as a discipline or a
15 Brooke Hopkins, “A Question of Child Abuse,” Raritan Review (Winter 1993):
35.
16 Cf. A. J. Heschel in God in Search of Man (New York: Jewish Publication Society
of America, 1955), who goes so far as to assert: “Awe rather than faith is the cardinal at-
titude of the religious Jew” (p. 77). He identiŠes awe with Yir’at shamayim, or what phi-
losophers of religion after Rudolf Otto call the tremendum.
166 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

science, knows the polyphony if not cacophony of exegesis, and

how endlessly interesting it is to try to meet the challenge of texts.
Though we take for granted that the voice of God is no longer
heard in the way the boy Samuel heard it, or which would make
the interpreter reply “Here I am,” a part of us returns to certain
texts as to vestiges in which strength of spirit condenses itself and
could achieve what Robert Frost memorably called “counter-love,
original response.”
I have given my talk the title “Text and Spirit” because it has
always puzzled me how dependent spirituality is, not only on
books—necessary for cultural transmission, once there is disper-
sion, or as the oral tradition becomes too complex—but on textual
issues. The rivalry of religion with religion could not continue
without systems of interpretation that activate in speciŠc ways the
faith-community’s Scripture, which may be a book shared by sev-
eral religions.
It must already be clear, in any case, that there is a link between
text and spirit when textual incidents, in the form of fragments or
citations, are like a voice falling into us, taking hold of us. Though
elaborated and restored to their Šrst or another context, such au-
dita remain snatches from a ghostly conversation or a more abso-
lute book. I have represented this receptivity to spiritualized
sound, to “the secret that has become audible in language,”17 as a
psychic and existential fact. Moreover, I have stressed its contin-
gency, as religion itself often does, when it depicts a divine inter-
vention: a prophet is unexpectedly called, a commanding voice is
heard, a rebus or inscription appears.
17 “[D]as hörbar gewordene Geheimnis in der Sprache” is one of Gershom Scho-
lem’s formulations. Scholem does not mean that the secret is revealed or directly ex-
pressed in language: it becomes perceptible as a secret, or, as Sigrid Weigel says, it points
to the “Bedeutungspur eines Bedeutungslosen,” which transcends “Mitteilung and Aus-
druck.” See Scholem, Judaica III: Studien zur jüdischen Mystik (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp,
1970), p. 271; and Weigel, “Scholem’s Gedichte und seine Gedichtstheorie: Klage.
Adressierung, Gabe und das Problem einer Sprache in unserer Zeit,” Deutsche Viertel-
jahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, Sonderheft (1999): 49. Walter
Benjamin’s well-known fascination with the quotational form, his wish to write a book
consisting only of citations, is also relevant here.
[Hartman] Text and Spirit 167

But I have also said that the orthodox hermeneutics we have in-
herited, while respecting life-changing responses to source-texts
with canonical status, seeks to limit these.18 Though some pas-
sages are more astonishing than others, and though, through un-
known mediations, even ordinary biblical pericopes can have a
startling effect, both religious and literary theories of interpreta-
tion take much pride in the doctrine of context—a predetermined
context, shielding the reader from subjectivity and speculative ex-
cess. Similarly, in evangelical or charismatic movements, where
startling conversions—even convulsions—are expected, what
takes place is, as it were, programmed in, and becomes a sacred or,
at worst, sacrilegious mimicry.
The force of the acoustic fragment, then, surprises, because it
comes from outside, even when that outside is within us. It does
not matter how we analyze the psychic fact; what is important is
that this metonymic textual condensation, this appearance of
word as vision, leads back to a source-text, or is the germ, as in cre-
ative writing, of a leading forward, a transformative moment that
creates its own narrative support.19
18 The opposite is true of the Kabbalah, which often “relativizes” the letters in
Scripture, claiming the Torah was originally, as one mystic claimed, “a heap of
unarranged letters” combining in different forms according to the state of the world. See
Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, tr. Ralph Manheim (New York:
Schocken Books, 1965), pp. 74–83. It is Emmanuel Levinas’s distinction that he sees in
non-Kabbalistic midrashic calls to “seek and decipher” an orthodox hermeneutics that
does not sacriŠce multiplicity of meaning: “That the Word of the living God may be
heard in diverse ways does not mean only that Revelation measures up to those listening
to it, but that this measuring up measures up the Revelation: the multiplicity of irreduc-
ible people is necessary to the dimensions of meaning; the multiple meanings are mul-
tiple people” (Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, tr. Gary D. Mole [London:
Athlone, 1994], p. 134). This is reminiscent of Isaac Luria’s development of the concep-
tion that the 600,000 souls that received the Torah at Sinai are disseminated by transmi-
gration into “sparks” present in every generation of Israel, and that “[i]n the Messianic
age, every single man in Israel will read the Torah in accordance with the meaning pecu-
liar to his root” (Scholem, On the Kabbalah, p. 65).
19 Jacques Lacan, seeking to deŠne the action of the unconscious, disputes the
Christian commonplace that the letter kills while the spirit gives life. He would like to
know “how the spirit could live without the letter.” “Even so,” he adds, “the pretensions
of the spirit would remain unassailable if the letter had not shown us that it produces all
the effects of truth in man without involving the spirit at all.” In short, Freud discovered
that this “spiritual” effect of the letter points to the existence of an unconscious process.
168 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

In talking of spirit, we have an obligation to go Šrst to where

the word ruach appears in the Hebrew Bible.20 After “In the be-
ginning God created the heaven and the earth,” Genesis discloses
that “the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the
face of the deep.” The ruach elohim that “hovered over the face of
the waters” is close to that darkness on the face of the deep. But
this might suggest that chaos, the tohuvabohu of unformed earth
and water, may have preexisted; in which case the creation would
not be ex nihilo, out of nothing, but only a form-giving event. The
Bible’s opening phrasing defeats that thought; and the “spirit of
God,” with the formless darkness mere backdrop, manifests itself
as a commanding voice instantly originating light. Yet even here,
in this place of power, “Light is called, not torn forth.”21
In the second chapter of Genesis, there is a subtle parallel to the
spirit hovering over the face of the waters: “there went up a mist
from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground” (2:6).
This is a transitional sentence that could be joined either to the
previous verse describing the barren, soon to be fertile, earth or to
the next verse that retells the creation of humankind: “Then the
Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into
his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” The
words for breath and soul are not ruach but respectively neshamah
and nefesh. As a picture, then, of the creative act, there is some-
20 There is a wonderful feeling on reading that ancient text, which Buber and
Rosenzweig capture in their translation of it: a feeling of the sheer impress of each word,
as if it were newly created. We never quite lose the sense that reading the original aloud
and understanding it remain parallel yet separate activities, despite generations of effort
to have sound and sense converge. At the same time, what is communicated by the He-
brew Bible is, to borrow Goethe’s phrase, an “open mystery.” Or, as Levinas remarks,
transcendence is intelligible.
21 John Hollander, The Work of Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press,
1997), p. 37. (No wonder the Gospel of John, with its more ecstatic quest for union with
God, identiŠes logos and light.) Hollander suggests two things in his chapter on “Orig-
inality” from which I take this: that comparative religious (cosmogonic) texts could
make us expect a cataclysmic account of creation, and that perhaps such an account, re-
vised, may have been the original version. What matters, though, is that the text as it
stands does not entirely efface this suppositious trace of a “more” original account of the
origin.
[Hartman] Text and Spirit 169

thing gentler here and more intimate: a proximity of divine to

human one does not feel in the Šrst creation-of-man account (Gen-
esis 1:26–29), despite the theme of zelem elohim, of being created in
God’s image. In fact, where we might expect the ruach to reappear,
as in Genesis 3:8, we Šnd instead a voice, “the voice of the Lord
God walking in the garden.” The earlier depiction showed the
spirit of God as a hovering force in the formless darkness; in the
later picture, however, the mist rising from the ground and water-
ing the face of the earth is an image taken directly from nature,
and the creation that follows is distinctly anthropomorphic, in
that its subject is literally the shaping of a man, while the very art
of description is friendly and naturalistic. Genesis 3:8, moreover,
augments the idea of a relation between ruach elohim and voice, the
voice that generates light. Without, to be sure, a deŠnite body,
that ruach-voice now addresses and interpellates the lapsed human
being, an act that can be said to call it to consciousness or con-
science.
If my analysis is correct, ruach is not anthropomorphic (it is, if
anything, closer to theriomorphic), though as a speaking and in-
telligible voice it moves toward a pathos at once human and sub-
lime. Ruach never forfeits its quality as a tremendum.22 This is borne
out when we enter the later, more historical era of Judges, where
the voice of God, while still manifest, often escapes those who
search for it. The episodes that focus on the relation between Sam-
uel, Saul, and God are particularly disturbing: indeed, here the
verb lidrosh, the root of “midrash,” meaning to seek out the voice,
appears.23
The episodes are disturbing because while God’s relation to
Samuel remains familiar, allowing responsive words of obedience,
22 On that notion in the history of religion, see Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy
(1917), trans. John W. Harvey (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1959).
23 See First Samuel 9:9, perhaps interpolated; but Saul’s name in the Hebrew sug-
gests asking, most clearly after Saul’s death in Samuel 1:28:6: “When Saul inquired of
the Lord [vajish’al Shaul be-adonai], the Lord answered him not, neither by dreams, nor
by Urim, nor by prophets,” which leads into the episode of the ghost-seer of Endor.
170 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

the pressure on Saul is terrifying. Saul is an am ha’aretz, going to

the seer for a mundane, bumpkin-like purpose—“Can you give
me guidance where my asses are?”—and being confronted by a
fearful demand, a question that is not a question at all but an as-
tonishing, exalting imposition: “And on whom is all the desire of
Israel? Is it not on thee, and on all thy father’s house?” (Samuel
1:9:20). Samuel then predicts Saul’s journey home, which culmi-
nates in his joining a band of prophets: “And the spirit of the Lord
will come mightily upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy and be
turned into another man” (Samuel 1:10:1–7), where “come
mightily upon” translates zalachat, “seize” thee or “fall upon” thee
(cf. Samuel 1:11:6 and 1:16:13). A power of transformation is
evoked, akin to that of the ruach in the Šrst lines of Genesis.24
Clearly, the open vision and voice are passing from Israel. The
presence of God returns in the prophets, but with more violence,
ambivalence, chanciness, and—in Abraham Heschel’s sense—
pathos: so the devar-adonai is like a burning Šre consuming Jere-
miah’s heart and bones ( Jeremiah 20:9). God’s ruach reverts to
something of its aboriginal appearance: we are made to feel its
incumbent mystery and transforming violence more than its
intimacy.
It is well known that the sealing of the canon of Hebrew Scrip-
ture is linked to a recession, if not disappearance, of prophetic
voice and vision. With the destruction of the First Temple, then
decisively with the destruction of the Second and Bar Kochba’s de-
feat, inquiry of God must go through “midrash.” The Sages may
still be looking for asses, but these include the Messiah’s donkey.
Those rabbis are not shy; they assert on the basis of Deuteronomy
30:11–15 that the Law is not “in heaven” but among them in the
earthly tribunal; indeed, they abjure the authority of the bat kol
and seek to shut down the prophetic impulse, even as Saul ban-
ished the witches whom he was nevertheless forced to consult.

24 In Saul’s Šts of anger against David, when he seeks to kill him, the ruach is cited
as a cause, and the English translation has to parse it as “an evil spirit from the Lord.”
[Hartman] Text and Spirit 171

This means, in effect, that spirit has become textualized; inquiry

of the Lord, in the post-prophetic and post-priestly era, is medi-
ated by the recitation, reading, and contemplative study of Tal-
mud Torah.
This multilayered commentary continues to call itself an oral
tradition, however, and claims descent from Sinai; the image of di-
rect transmission, through the voice of God or daughter of that
voice,25 is never entirely given up. To read in the Talmud, or to ex-
tend its inquiry, becomes a religious experience itself. Priest and
prophet are replaced by the Šgure of the rabbi of exemplary learn-
ing who walks with the Law (halakhah, the path), even as the righ-
teous of old had walked and conversed with God.26
The rabbinic revolution, as it has been called, seals the canon
and draws the consequences of that closure.27 In the Sages’ own hy-
perbole God is made to say of an errant Israel, “Would that you for-
sake me, and keep my Torah!” (Lamentations Rabbah, Introduction,
chap. 2). This expresses, of course, a fear that God has forsaken the
community; in captivity and dispersion, only the Torah remains.28
But whatever dryness of spirit ensues, whatever constriction and
25 No one has explained why it should be “daughter” of the voice: in the masculine
atmosphere of rabbinic religion the Shechinah is another instance of the feminine as a
Šgurative religious inšuence. It is possible to speculate that the rabbinic founders recog-
nized that, in a normal human context, voice had a distinctly feminine inšection, and in
most cases tried to guard against that “profane” element. How strongly the metaphor of
voice persists, even where there is no sacred text, and can be none, is shown when Emil
Fackenheim adds to the revealed commandments or the 613 mitzvot the “Commanding
Voice of Auschwitz” forbidding Jews to give Hitler a posthumous victory by abandon-
ing Judaism, or escaping from the “intolerable contradictions” of historical existence af-
ter Auschwitz. See his The Jewish Return into History: Rešections in the Age of Auschwitz and
a New Jerusalem (New York: Schocken Books, 1978).
26 In the Zohar this peripatetic notion becomes a technical expression “to illumi-
nate the path [derech].” For an interesting discussion of how prophecy becomes exegesis,
see Emmanuel Levinas, Transcendance et intelligibilité (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1996), pp.
63–67.
27 The best account of what that closure meant is found in Moshe Halbertal, The
People of the Book: Canon, Meaning and Authority (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1997).
28 One other aspect of divinity, however is imaginatively discovered and developed:
the Shechinah or “dwelling” of God, closely linked to Torah. The Shechinah becomes a
complex and consolatory personiŠcation elaborated by the Kabbalah into the feminine
aspect of the divine.
172 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

narrowness of purpose, the act of reading strengthens and takes on

a quality of prayerful recitation: of a crying to God in words of the
canonized text—in His own voice, as it were—as well as a listen-
ing for His response.
This sort of feeling may even be discerned in the exegetical
method of Midrash. It is true that its tendency to atomize Scrip-
ture is the historical result of an editing process that conveys with
great economy the interpretive wisdom of generations of rabbis.
But does not this style of exposition have something unique? One
might think that how Midrash usually atomizes Scripture would
diminish the latter’s eloquence. Its divisions of Scripture certainly
sin against plot or story, the very features that entice us to look at
the Bible as literature. What matters in Midrash is the verse, or
part of the verse, even a single word or letter. Meaning is achieved
by the montage of biblical patches. Gershom Scholem once called
the “mosaic style” of the great halakhists “poetic prose in which
linguistic scraps of sacred texts are whirled around kaleidoscope
like.”29 Yet a sense remains that these are written voices accumu-
lating, though fragmented, as one voice.30
29 Scholem goes on: “and are journalistically, polemically, descriptively, and even
erotically profaned”—but this part of his sentence must refer to Karl Kraus’s style,
which he sees as being derived from “the Jews’ relationship to language.” See Walter Ben-
jamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication So-
ciety, 1981), p. 107.
30 By now we accept the atomism of Midrash as the natural form of Jewish com-
mentary; a good way of collecting and ordering the combined wisdom of generations of
rabbis and learned readers to the present day. Yet its methodical segmentation, which
tears a seamless robe or exposes the stitching, and even sows contradictions (though only
to resolve them), equalizes all verses and sharpens concentration. It is as if bat kol were
still at work, allowing disjunct fragments and phrases to circulate and catch us. There is,
to be sure, sustained symbolism and story-telling in the Kabbalah and, later, in Ha-
sidism; and the genre of the retold Bible never dies. But a sense remains that each verse,
phrase, word, letter (and letter-ornamentation) counts; the segmentation is a synoptic
wager. Moshe Idel has emphasized that in AbulaŠa’s prophetic Kabbalah (kabbalah ne-
vu’it), the Hebrew of the Bible is considered as hiding the names of God, and knowledge
of Him is revealed not by studying its language as a conventional human sign-system (an
accommodated lashon b’nei adam) but by engaging in a contemplation that leads to so
radical a deconstruction, or creation of new signiŠers, that it engenders a striking meta-
phor: “Read the entire Torah, both forwards and backwards, and spill the blood of the
languages.”
[Hartman] Text and Spirit 173

What I have tried to do is sketch a minimalist theory of spiri-

tuality, inšuenced mainly by the Jewish commentary tradition.
Some of you will be disappointed by this modest approach. Spiri-
tuality is a word with great resonance, yet I have not extracted for
you large, exalted structures of sensibility or discourse. Were I to
do so, on another occasion, I would have to respect an entire oeuvre
or midrashic sequence and show how words dim the eyes as well as
refresh them, insofar as visuality and idolatry may be linked. I
would have to deal with the issue of anthropo/gyno/morphism—
or divine pathos—as a fertile, if always disputed, wellspring of re-
ligious energy, and stay longer with the way ruach breaks into
voice, or becomes voice-feeling, close to the heart of the throat, yet
threatening to turn the human response into a stammer. The very
word “spirituality,” moreover, still seems somewhat foreign to tra-
ditional Jewish thinking and observance: it got preempted by
Pauline Christianity. Only to Emmanuel Levinas might it be ap-
plied: his theology evokes a vigilance, even an insomnia, that
keeps human Šnitude, traumatized by the inŠnite, from enclosing
itself in “the hegemonic and atheistic self” for which life reduces
to equanimity.31
There is one further generalization I want to venture. It returns
to something almost as equivocal as dreams, namely the gift of
speech and what Dante and Franz Rosenzweig both call its “gram-
mar”: voiced thinking that becomes writing and seeks a coinci-
dence of spirit and letter. That coincidence is rare and demands a
price—an engagement that takes time, perhaps a lifetime. For
there is no guarantee that poetic words, ancient or modern, will
31 See, e.g., Nouvelles lectures talmudiques (Editions de Minuit, 1996), pp. 28–29.
Also: “[P]eut-être cette théologie s’annonce-t-elle déjà dans l’éveil même à l’insomnie, à
la veille et à l’inquiète vigilance du psychisme avant que la Šnitude de l’être, blessé par
l’inŠni, ne soit porté à se recueillir dans un Moi, hégémonique et athée, du savoir” (Tran-
scendence et intelligibilité, p. 29). But the most difŠcult task would be to engage with issues
of purity and impurity; not only to take up arms against the charge of Jewish literalism
as a blind or imperfect reception of spirit but also to examine the emphasis on biblical
and rabbinic Judaism on the efŠcacy, practical or mystical, or laws of purity that seek to
bring Jews into the Presence as a holy people.
174 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

make sense, or the same sense, to different readers throughout his-

tory. In fact, the more earnest our attention to language, the more
the conventional links dissipate, and a nakedness appears in the
words as words, one that both arouses and threatens the process of
intellection.
We often feel, then, that biblical words say too much to be
received: their anagogical force, while helping to break what
Rosenzweig calls the shell of the mystery (“die Schale des
Geheimnisses”),32 can make us feel as poor as Edward Taylor, the
Puritan poet:

In my befogg’s dark Phancy, Clouded minde,

Thy Bits of Glory, packt in Shreds of Praise
My Messenger [i.e., his poetry] doth lose, losing his Wayes.33

We cannot presume to win spiritual coherence lightly, when the

spirit itself is so often Šgured as a preternatural, disruptive inter-
vention. The not-foundering of communication under that pres-
sure is unusual, for speech could turn into nothing more than a
contiguous mass of alien sounds.34 Perhaps, then, shards, klipot,
Edward Taylor’s “Bits of Glory . . . Shreds of Praise,” must suf-
Šce.
Let me end by recounting what happened to Martin Buber. His
path to the great Buber-Rosenzweig translation of the Bible was

32 Rosenzweig applies the expression to the creation that follows upon God’s word.
“Gott sprach. Das ist das zweite. Es ist nicht der Anfang. . . . Gott schuf. Das ist das
Neue. Hier zerbricht die Schale des Geheimnisses” (Der Stern der Erlösung [Heidelberg:
Lambert Schneider, 1954]), II.1.31.
33 “Meditation Twenty-eight,” in The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor, ed. Thomas
H. Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 139.
34 Another way of putting it is to say that its coherence, or sense, might disappear,
and that the fallout from any false imposition of meaning could lead to a cosmic sort of
skepticism: “If the sun or moon should doubt / They’d immediately go out” (Blake, Au-
guries of Innocence). Philology, when it becomes inspired criticism, senses the lacuna in a
text or the wrong word that has Šlled it.
[Hartman] Text and Spirit 175

very complex, but one episode stands out.35 Well-acquainted in

early youth with the Hebrew original and then with several trans-
lations including Martin Luther’s, he noticed shortly after his Bar
Mitzvah that he read the Bible with literary enjoyment—which
upset him so much that for years he did not touch any translation
but tried to return to the Urtext, the original Hebrew. By then,
however, the words had lost their familiar aspect and seemed
harsh, alien, confrontational: “sie sprangen mir ins Gesicht.”36
Thirteen years later (one thinks, therefore, of a second Bar
Mitzvah), Buber attended Theodor Herzl’s funeral and came home
feeling oppressed. As he reached for one book after another, every-
thing seemed voiceless and meaningless (“stumm”). Then, as if by
chance, and without expectation, Buber opened the Bible—and
happened upon the story of how King Jehoiakim had Jeremiah’s
scroll read and consigned piece by piece to a brazier’s Šre (Jere-
miah 36:21ff.); this went to Buber’s heart, and he began to face the
Hebrew once more, conquering each word anew, as if it had never
been translated. “I read [the Hebrew] aloud, and by reading it this
way I got free of the whole Scripture, which now was purely Mi-
gra’.”37 A few years later, while reading a biblical chapter aloud,
the feeling came over him that it was being spoken for the Šrst
time and had not yet been written down, and did not have to be
35 I am indebted for this example to Herbert Marks, “Schrift und Mikra,” in Logos
und Buchstabe: Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit in Judentum und Christentum der Antike, ed.
Gerhard Sellin and François Vouga (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1996), pp. 103–26. See
also the same essay in English: “Writing as Calling,” New Literary History 29, no. 1
(1998): 15–37.
36 I am using both the German version as printed in the appendix to Anna Eliza-
beth Bauer, Rosenzweigs Sprachdenken im Stern der Erlösung und in seiner Korrespondenz mit
Martin Buber zur Verdeutschung der Schrift (Freiburg dissertation), published in the series
Europäische Hochschulschriften (Frankfurt a/M: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 447–63, and
the English translation (which I sometimes modify) found as appendix a in Scripture and
Translation: Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, tr. Lawrence Rosenwald and Everett Fox
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 205–19. Buber’s “[The Hebrew
words] sprang into my face” is ironic in the sense that what the religious seeker desires is
precisely to “see” God, to diminish the hester panim.
37 Scripture and Translation, p. 208.
176 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

written down. “The book lay before me, but the book melted into
voice.”38
Buber has not left us a rešection on why the “found” passage
from Jeremiah affected him so powerfully, and he does not refer
explicitly to the bat kol.39 But his stated wish to “get free of”
Scripture by Šrst converting it into an aural experience is remark-
ably candid. The Hebrew root gara’ in migra’ may have helped as a
Šrst step toward a retranslation of the Bible that challenges
Luther’s strongly vernacular version.40 Qara’, as in Q’ryat Sh’ma,
denotes the action of calling, of a crying out or reciting, as well as
naming: the content of this prayer is, after all, a naming of God.
Qara’ as “reading” never loses its residual meaning of “calling
out.” Moreover, in the episode from Jeremiah, the verb qara (when
spelled with ayin rather than aleph) is a near-homonym of “tear-
ing”—a sacrilegious act on the part of the king, but one that re-
calls two distantly related events. First, the destroyed scroll is
rewritten by Jeremiah’s scribe Baruch, a doubling that could recall
that of Sinai’s tablets, as well as raise the issue of the relation of
written to oral Torah. Both Buber and Rosenzweig try to express
the link between text and spirit in a radical way, one that goes
38 Buber writes typically, in 1936: “das biblische Wort ist von der Situation seiner
Gesprochenheit nicht abzulösen, sonst verliert es seine Konkretheit, seine Leiblichkeit.
Ein Gebot ist keine Sentenz, sondern eine Andrede . . . ” (“Ein Hinweis für Bibelkurse,”
Rundbrief, quoted by Ernst Simon, in Aufbau im Untergang: Jüdische Erwachsenbildung im
nationalsozialistischen Deutschland als geistiger Wiederstand [Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr,
1959], 67).
39 One should remark the similarity of this to Luther’s experience on discovering
through a “found” passage in the prophet Habbakuk the meaning of Romans 1:17:
“Now I felt as if I had been born again: the gates had been opened and I had entered Par-
adise itself,” quoted by Heiko O. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and Devil (New Ha-
ven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 165. It is signiŠcant that this discovery may have
come through a “Št” in Wittenberg tower (or its “cloaca”), as Luther came upon that pas-
sage in Habbakuk. Once again, and in the most humble or worldly circumstance, a
found text leads to a startling inner event.
40 In what follows I am indebted to Herbert Marks, “Schrift und Mikra,” pp.
125–26. On Buber’s “metanomianism,” especially in comparison to that of Scholem and
Rosenzweig, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Law and Sacrament: Ritual Observance in Twen-
tieth-Century Jewish Thought,” in Jewish Spirituality: From the Sixteenth-Century Revival
to the Present, ed. Arthur Green (New York: Crossroad, 1987), pp. 317–45.
[Hartman] Text and Spirit 177

through the restitution of its oral or aural resonance, but otherwise

does not seek to transform the Bible by any type of spiritualizing
interpretation. “Schrift ist Gift [Script is poison],” Buber quotes
Rosenzweig, from a letter shortly before their work of translation
began, “holy Schrift included. Only when it is translated back into
orality can I stomach it.”41
The episode from Jeremiah, moreover, leads intertextually to
Second Kings 22, in which Shaphan the scribe reads the newly
discovered book of the law (sefer hatorah) to King Josiah; but there
the king tears his clothes,42 not the scroll, and—after instructing
Shaphan to “inquire of the Lord” (dirshu et adonai, i.e., consult the
oracle of the prophetess Hulda)—has it read aloud to the assem-
bled people. This episode occurs in chapter 22 of Second Kings,
whose chapter 2 had recounted the story of Elijah and Elisha: how
Elijah ascends in a whirlwind and perhaps leaves to his disciple a
“double portion of . . . ruach.” But when Elisha dies, there is no as-
cension and no mention of a ruach legacy. The Šery chariot and
horses carrying Elijah away become, when Elisha is lamented (Sec-
ond Kings 13:14–15), no more than a Šgurative allusion, an excla-
mation (“My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and the
horsemen thereof!”)43 expressing the fear that the ruach will de-
part from Israel with Elisha’s passing. This sequencing of episodes
41 Rosenzweig’s audacious statement has a traditional root in the reluctance of the
Sages to remove the written Torah from the context of an oral tradition, which, while it
built fences around the Law, remained open to an awareness that the lava of the Sinaitic
revelation had never entirely petriŠed—that words could be montaged, revoweled, redi-
vided, recontextualized, even their letters (especially in the Kabbalah) permuted.
42 Elisha tears his clothes at the passing of Elijah (2:12), as does the king of Israel
having read Naaman’s letter (5:7), which might portend a disaster. The g’ria is to this
day a ritual tearing of clothing on the death of a close relative or a public calamity. An-
other homonym, the word for “it happened,” enters in 5:7. A question could be raised
about the relation between the apparently neutral “it happened that” and the meaning
bestowed by the other two homonyms.
43 Since King Josiah, as chapter 23:11 tells us, in his purifying of religious wor-
ship, takes away “the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun . . . and burned
the chariots of the sun with Šre,” I would guess that this Šgure refers not only to Elijah’s
strength, by way of a military metaphor, but also to a strength that comes from a God
who transcends the idolatry of the “constellations and all the host of heaven” (23:5).
178 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

in Kings suggests the transition from prophecy as open vision to a

scroll that must provide vision by inquiry, by a midrashic process
linked to recitation and learned research. Despite the sporadic per-
sistence of prophecy, the spirit will now have to reside mainly
within the temple of a text.
I leave the last word to Levinas, who suggests that talmudic
and midrashic literature shows that “prophecy may be the essence
of the human, the traumatism that wakes it to its freedom.”
Thought itself is said to be an elaboration of such a moment. “It
probably begins through traumatisms to which one does not even
know how to give a verbal form: a separation, a violent scene, a
sudden consciousness of the monotony of time. It is from the read-
ing of books—not necessarily philosophical—that these initial
shocks become questions and problems, giving one to think.”44
Prophecy and the ethical coincide, where self-identity, challenged
by otherness, instructed and roused by particular texts, becomes
“la spiritualité de l’esprit.”45

44 From an interview of 1980, in Ethics and InŠnity, trans. Richard Cohen (Pitts-
burgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), p. 21. For Levinas’s ambivalent relation to lit-
erature, see Jill Robbins, Altered Readings: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1999).
45 Nouvelles lectures talmudiques, pp. 36–37