The student is poor and dazzled, but he won’t stoop to flattery, not even if flattery will get him regular access to this tantalizing library. After they have discussed for a while the topic, Jewish mysticism, that has drawn him to the lovely lakeside home, he lets his host know what he thinks of him: that he is a dilettante—gifted, yes, but a dilettante nonetheless. “I suppose you think I am a nebbich philologist,” the host says, using a Yiddish word for pitiful. But there is no rancor in his voice. And whatever his reservations, the young student will go on to publish his first two books under the imprint of the Johann Albert Widmanstetter Society, an organization, it transpires, otherwise wholly fictional.

1. A Man of His Time

The man on the receiving end of his guest’s blunt assessment, Robert Eisler, a scholar whose brilliant ideas lacked for nothing except credible evidence, is known these days only to a few avid readers and the occasional History channel conspiracist. His guest, Gershom Scholem, the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, who relates the encounter in his memoir From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, is somewhat more famous. Yet both men belonged to the same precarious milieu. Both were products of a world soon to be destroyed: the world of German Jewry at the turn of the twentieth century. Their encounter, one of the many colorful scenes that illustrate Scholem’s book, is emblematic of this lost world.

In the 1910s and 1920s, when Gershom (born Gerhard) Scholem came of age in Germany, life among Jewish artists, writers, and thinkers teemed with new ideas, outlandish styles, and boisterous politics. The bohemian rich mingled with the enterprising poor, scions of industry devoted themselves to niche scholarship, and assimilated bourgeois transformed into rebbes, or teachers, in response to the spiritual hunger of young men and women.

Born to a bourgeois family in Old Berlin in 1897, Scholem embodied the era. He flitted between Berlin, Jena, Munich, and Frankfurt before his move to Jerusalem in 1923, encountering a wide array of scenes and characters along the way. It was the intellectual ferment of those years that prepared him to become the single most outstanding scholar of Jewish mysticism. Indeed, From Berlin to Jerusalem hints that his most enduring insights about the Jewish tradition were seeded by his social experiences. He learned from them that there is no unitary Jewish tradition. That is not to say that some traditions aren’t better than others.

2. Inventing Kabbalah Studies

Before he published his acclaimed 1941 study, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Scholem was a respected professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem but hardly as famous or well-regarded as his colleagues Martin Buber, Joseph Klausner, Umberto Cassuto, or Yitzhak Baer. These days, only Buber outshines Scholem, and he outshines him as the philosopher of “I” and “Thou,” not as a scholar.

Scholem’s relatively modest renown wasn’t for lack of industriousness or originality. At the time, Jewish mysticism didn’t have much popular or intellectual appeal. In fact, the topic embarrassed most Western Jews, who wanted to be the inheritors of Moses Mendelssohn’s rationalist Judaism. Kabbalah was primitive superstition. There was as yet no Madonna to mainstream Jewish mysticism through red string bracelets. There was no scholar who had systematically shown the relevance of Jewish mysticism to the greater history of Jewish thought. The prevailing attitude is captured by Scholem’s meeting with the previous generation’s authority on Kabbalah, Professor Philip Bloch:

Bloch gave me a very friendly reception—as a young colleague, so to speak. “After all, we are both meshugga,” he said. He showed me his kabbalistic collection, and I admired the manuscripts. In my enthusiasm I said, quite naively: “How wonderful, Herr Professor, that you have studied all this!” Whereupon the old gentleman replied: “What, am I supposed to read this rubbish, too?”

Scholem says that this was a “great moment” in his life. It was probably the moment he realized that a whole field of study lay waiting to be founded.

He delivered the lectures that made up Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism in 1938 in New York at the Jewish Institute of Religion. It may have struck him then that American Jews offered an audience more receptive to his ideas than those in the Land of Israel or Germany (no one yet knew how wholly judenrein Germany would soon become). Scholem decided to publish the book directly into English. That decision launched Scholem—and the topic of Jewish mysticism—beyond the ivory tower. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism was a formative study for generations of scholars, but countless poets, rabbis, and celebrities in the United States and elsewhere were inspired by it too.

Nowadays Jewish mystical ideas are so widespread that they hardly register. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life diagram can be seen on dorm-room posters and inked on forearms, Sabbatean notions of “redemption through sin” feature in contemporary academic theory, and tikkun olam, or repair of the world, is a byword of progressive Judaism. It is doubtful whether any of these examples would exist without the impetus of Scholem’s scholarship.

3. A Jewish Awakening

Growing up in Germany in the first quarter of the twentieth century, Scholem had no idea that his future writings would have such impact. Nor, for that matter, could any outside observer have guessed that the Scholem family would produce an outstanding scholar of Judaism. History and biography combined to occasion the unexpected.

The Scholems were a typically assimilated, bourgeois German Jewish family. As Scholem relates:

In our home only Friday evening, which was considered family night, and the Seder on the eve of Passover were observed. . . . The Kiddush, the Hebrew blessing for the Sabbath, was still chanted but only half understood. That did not keep people from using the Sabbath candles to light a cigarette or cigar afterwards. Since the prohibition to smoke on the Sabbath was one of the most widely known Jewish regulations, there was deliberate mockery in this act.

There is in this description an unexpected hint of things to come. Where many assimilated Jewish families simply grew indifferent to their religion, Scholem’s family mocked the rituals. Mockery assumes the significance of the object of ridicule. It is no small matter that there were only two recorded baptisms between both sides of his family over the previous 100 years.

Whatever the subterranean attachment to Judaism that flowed through his family, the impetus to get acquainted with Judaism was all Scholem’s. Early on, he read Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews, an 11-volume opus published between 1853 and 1870, which, besides being a compelling read, repudiated the anti-Semitic narratives of most previous histories of the Jews written in German. “I devoured those volumes,” he says.

He was so impressed by the narrative of his people’s past that he decided to learn Hebrew. Engaging a local rabbi, he and a friend set to work diligently acquainting themselves with the sacred tongue. When time came for his bar mitzvah, he informed his parents he had no need for a Hebrew tutor; he already knew how to read Torah. His father’s pride lasted only until he realized the depth of his son’s newfound Jewish attachment.

4. Visions of Jewish Life

The rest is history, as they say. From Berlin to Jerusalem recounts Scholem’s coming of age in Germany, culminating in his move to Jerusalem at the age of 25. While such a move seems a logical development from his commitment to Judaism, the memoir hints that, in addition to the pull factor of life in a Jewish polity, there was a push factor. Scholem saw no future for German Jewry.

Scholem wasn’t a prophet; he didn’t foresee the coming destruction. But he knew well the many competing visions of Jewish life on offer to German-speaking Jews.

In addition to the polymath Robert Eisler, he met the religious visionaries Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, the secular philosophers Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin, the converted Catholic Max Fischer, the leader of liberal German Judaism Rabbi Leo Baeck, the future prime minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion and third president Zalman Shazar, the mystic Erich Gutkind and cult leader Oskar Goldberg, the artist Tom Freud (Sigmund Freud’s niece), and the Hebrew writer S. Y. Agnon, who would win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966. Scholem’s brother Werner was a leader of the German Communist Party and the youngest member of the Reichstag upon his election in 1924. Of all the visions of Jewish life held out by these figures (and this list includes only some of the more famous of Scholem’s contacts) only the Zionists’ vision was believable.

Whatever the merits of the views on offer, however, there was no missing the fact that competing visions of Jewish life proliferated. Some Jews went in for mysticism, others for Marxist politics, and still others for aestheticism. Some assimilated Jews became Orthodox, while some Orthodox became atheistic psychoanalysts. Eastern Jews who had fled the pogroms or the Russian Revolution marveled at the richness of cultural life in Germany, and the poverty of the Germans’ Judaism. German Jews gravitated to Hasidism as a wellspring of authentic spirituality. Of the converts who remained part of the Jewish conversation, a few were convicted Christians, but most were opportunists. Hebrew had its devoted adherents; the German language had countless more.

Scholem’s breakthrough insight about Jewish mysticism is of a piece with this background. According to Scholem, Kabbalah explodes the idea of a unitary Jewish tradition. Full of fractious and self-contradictory ideas, Kabbalah testifies to the multifariousness of Judaism. Influenced by the philosophies of their day, many great Jewish thinkers tried to suppress this sprawling phenomenon, fighting with might and main to impose an essence of Judaism. But no such imposition could last long, Scholem argued. As he pointed out in a 1974 essay on Jewish theology, the Hebrew Bible itself contains “disparate elements” which it doesn’t try to hide or harmonize.

Scholem came of age in a world bursting with contradictions. He was prepared by life, as much as by his studies, to grasp the heterodoxy that animated Judaism. He could appreciate Kabbalah because he was not inclined to recoil in anger and disgust when it would not fit into the normative frameworks. It was an expression of other elements of the Jewish imaginary, and he knew that. Some of those elements were vital, and would find their way into (or back into) the mainstream of Judaism. Others would fade.

5. Post-Holocaust Memory

Previous generations had tried to suppress Kabbalah from a desire to lay hold of a singular, authentic Judaism. In Scholem’s lifetime, a different kind of essentialism took over.

The Holocaust wiped out so much of the life of European Jewry that for those who hadn’t lived there—Israelis, Americans, subsequent generations—that dynamic world was reduced to nostalgic vignettes. The Old Country became shorthand for scenes and societies as different as Galicia and the Pale of Settlement, Berlin and Vilna. That within one country, not to mention one city, wildly opposed visions of Jewish life could play out ceased to be a widely understood fact.

I can’t say if Scholem wrote his memoir in part to fix this myopia. He tells us almost nothing of his motivation in the book. But the effect is indisputable. The Jews of Germany, as seen through the eyes of one of their own looking back, remembering the whirl of ideas and events that lifted him up as a child and as a young man, brim with contradiction. It is a portrait as generous and encompassing as it is unsparing.

Unsparing, I say. Why unsparing?

Consider the one rationale Scholem offers for writing his memoir:

In recording some remembrances of my early life . . . I am naturally aware that there is no dearth of memoirs describing one’s youth in Berlin. . . . But I suppose the outstanding feature in this case would be the fact that I am describing the life of a young Jew whose path took him from the Berlin of his childhood and youth to Jerusalem and Israel. This path appeared to me to be singularly direct and illuminated by clear signposts; to others, including my own family, it often seemed incomprehensible, if not vexatious.

The path from Berlin to Jerusalem was clear to Scholem. It wasn’t so to others. And yet where did their paths lead, except to the same gradually narrowing trail, leading into the lightless heart of a cannibal forest?

6. “Enough”

There is an easy mistake to make about Scholem’s insight into Jewish mysticism. It is to believe that because there is no unitary Jewish tradition that means all expressions of Judaism are of equal merit. Scholem spurned that kind of relativism. Certain truths of Judaism, like the oneness of God, are fundamental, he maintained, even if their expression varies across history. A Judaism divorced from its central underpinnings is doomed.

Too many of the portraits Scholem drew of his contemporaries are portraits of doomed Jews. Not all of them were fated for the gas chamber. Some took their own life. Some swallowed the Murti-Bing pill of Marxism. Some escaped the clutches of the Nazis only to go to seed in foreign lands.

Scholem was far from an uncritical Zionist, but Zionism was the only vision of Jewish life that understood that Jewish life was at stake. From Berlin to Jerusalem reveals the intellectual dynamism of German Jewry along with its sterility. Even the most brilliant figure encountered in this memoir isn’t as bright as the unprepossessing scholar, the self-serious young man who leaves behind the country of his birth to go up to his homeland. And in so doing saves his own life.

In 1946, Scholem received a bulky package from England. His friend the dilettante, Robert Eisler, had sent him his latest manuscript. Eisler had managed to flee Germany in 1938, after weeks in a concentration camp. His latest was a “definitive solution of the Palestine question.” Here is Scholem’s full summary of the contents:

All those Jews whom a committee consisting of three Anglican theologians and three strictly Orthodox rabbis did not declare kosher enough to be allowed to remain in the country as pious worshippers were to be given a choice: Either they could return to their countries of origin or (if they wanted a Jewish state) they could take possession of the second district of Vienna (the Leopoldstadt [a classically Jewish neighborhood]) as well as the entire city of Frankfurt am Main. These territories were to be evacuated by the Germans and placed under international guarantees as a Jewish state. After all, after everything they had perpetrated the Germans had now forfeited the right to complain if Frankfurt am Main, the most famous of all Jewish communities in Germany, would be taken away from them and declared a Jewish state. Eisler proposed that the British fleet be used for the transport.

The obtuseness, the impracticality, the ignorance, the arrogance, the glibness, the cruelty, the obsequiousness—the stupidity, in a word—of this so-called solution, drawn up by one of German Jewry’s erratic geniuses, obtained a one-word response from its recipient. It is the word that bears repeating whenever the doom-laden spirit of that chimera—German Jewry, or whatever name it goes by now—rears its head, bold with ideas that do not lead to life.

“Enough.”

The Russian-American rabbi Chaim Tchernowitz, a friend of Bialik’s (1873–1934), called him the “Rashi of Zionism.” What did Rav Tchernowitz mean by comparing Bialik to the foremost Biblical commentator in the Jewish tradition? I think he was remarking on how Bialik forged an interpretive apparatus for Zionism, like Rashi did for the Hebrew Bible, that allows one to understand any moment in the unfolding of Jewish national consciousness in the context of the whole.

That is to say, Bialik created—in poetry and prose, through publishing ventures and cultural statesmanship—a massive gloss on the Jewish People’s resurrection from the rubble of the Second Temple nearly two millennia earlier. He explained this material and spiritual history not as a professor would, in expository fashion, but by way of allusion and citation, tracing soul-deep motifs and phrases across centuries and millennia. Like Rashi before him, Bialik forged himself into another link in the goldene keyt, the golden chain of tradition.

Yet therein lies a mystery. Born in Ukrainian timber country, orphaned at the age of seven, expected to earn a living as a merchant, Bialik is an unlikely cultural hero. “How,” his biographer asks, “did this downtrodden boy become the charismatic leader of Hebrew culture before he was thirty?”

Any answer to that question must be sought in the poetry that made him famous. Already in his first published poem, “To a Bird,” written when Bialik was not yet twenty years old, he struck a note that resonated with Hebrew readers:

    Shalom rav, upon your return, sweet bird,
    from the hot regions to my window-sill.
    How my worn-out soul has yearned for your voice
    since you left me in the winter.
    ............
    And what am I supposed to tell you, sweet bird,
    what could you hope to hear from me?
    You won't hear songs in this cold patch of land,
    only lamentations, groans and whimpers.
              
                                        (my translation)

As elevated as this language sounds today, it struck Bialik’s contemporaries as a perfect modulation of the high-flown poetry they knew. It evoked the familiar tradition of yearning for Zion—the bird having returned to the lands of Exile from the warmer climes of the Promised Land, the bird also a symbol of the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence—but without the overabundance of Biblical citations that made Hebrew poetry of the era feel, even to its admirers, dense and impersonal. Here was a tastefully referential, first-person expression of national longing, one that readers felt came from within.

This blending of personal expression and national sentiment, the public and the private, became Bialik’s signature. According to Holtzman, it was also the secret of his success. When Jews committed to exploring their place in the modern world read Bialik, they saw themselves. By portraying his own desires, fears, wrath, and joy, he portrayed those of his contemporaries. In this way, Jewish modernity became an intimate, shared experience.

But if he had only portrayed what everyone felt, Bialik would eventually have become banal and unnecessary. Instead, he plunged into the depths of the Jewish tradition, retrieving precious stones, half-forgotten treasures. With his publishing presses, Moriyah and Dvir, he produced beautiful editions of the classics of Hebrew literature. Thus he advanced ahead of the crowd, in the vanguard of a mission of cultural recovery. At the same time, he mined the ore that was unique to him: his loves, his orphanhood, his backcountry origins. He never pretended to be other than who he was, even when his admirers were repelled by the grimness that coexisted with his euphoric nature.

In the poem “I Didn’t Win Light in a Windfall,” Bialik sums up the qualities that set him apart, making him an ever-renewing resource for his readers:

    I didn’t win light in a windfall,
    nor by deed of a father’s will.
    I hewed my light from granite.
    I quarried my heart.

    In the mine of my heart a spark hides—
    not large, but wholly my own.
    Neither hired, nor borrowed, nor stolen—
    my very own.

                                        (trans. Ruth Nevo)        

Bialik, the restless soul, full of ambition and strange even to himself, did what R. P. Blackmur once said great poets do: he added to “the stock of available reality.”

Holtzman thus explains how Bialik, a poet of unlikely origins, achieved his immense influence.

But this is just one answer, and it leaves other questions open. Why, for example, did Bialik choose to transmute his inner life into a meditation on national themes, and vice versa, when he could have been a purely prophetic poet, like Uri Zvi Greenberg, or a hermetically personal one, like Avraham Ben-Yitzhak? And what gave Bialik the talent to accomplish the blending of personal and historical so masterfully? Was he God-chosen? Was he the product of a context irretrievably lost? Was he a soul completely aflame with what he alone could do?

These questions may invite endless answers, but it is undebatable that Bialik touched a chord in the psyche of his people. At length his writings became a part of that chord:

The iconic status Bialik attained in his lifetime and continues to enjoy after his death is an expression of an implicit consensus on the existence of a firm set of a canonical values. The suspicions and reservations that today are directed at this concept [of canonical values] in general, and specifically against Bialik, may attest to the processes of decentralization and disintegration currently at play within Israeli society.

Without men like Bialik to forge a consensus, there can be neither tradition nor diversity of opinion, for diversity turns to anarchy or enmity if there is no substratum of relation between opinions. A nation may need a poet to be brought together. What then does it mean that no successor to Bialik’s throne ever emerged? What does it portend that the very concept of a national poet has become passé, not just in Israel but around the world?

Further reading

One of the chief distinguishing factors between halakhah and law as typically conceived is that for at least two thousand years halakhah hasn’t governed a sovereign society. The last time Jews lived in a society ruled by halakhah was before the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and ended Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel (if even then). It’s true that religious Jews since then have observed the laws handed down in the Scriptures, but they have nevertheless been a minority wherever they lived, ruled by others’ laws. In the ghettos of Europe and elsewhere, Jews were often given some authority over their own community, but ultimate legal authority always lay with the rulers of a given society.

So what is law that doesn’t govern, except privately or in limited ways within a community?

To answer that question, let’s focus on three dimensions of halakhah explored by Saiman: halakhah as a phenomenological system, as a devotional practice, and as a vehicle of abstract thinking. (A fourth worth treating another time is sub-halakhah, or regulatory law outside the bounds of official halakhah.) By a phenomenological system, first of all, Saiman means that the study of the laws in the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and later legal codes gave Jews a matrix of meaning through which they filtered experience. An act as simple as breaking bread vibrated with significance because you knew God had instructed you to do so in a certain manner, using a certain blessing, in a certain context. In this way, law becomes more than a set of norms noticeable mainly when they are breached. It fills life and enriches experience.

If this description calls to mind religion more than law, that’s because the study of Jewish law is a religious practice. Torah study, or talmud Torah, became in certain parts of the Jewish world the most cherished way to connect to God and the divine, relegating prayer to second place. In this sense, while it was necessary to practice the laws, marrying practice to study was most meritorious. This is how you end up with debates over laws that were never put into practice. Saiman brings the Talmudic example of the “rebellious city,” a city of such an evil disposition that it must be destroyed. The very rabbis who fiercely debate the criteria by which a city would earn such a designation are the same ones who state that such a city never was—and never will be! But when delving into the law—in all its practical and impractical dimensions—is an act of devotion, applicability hardly matters.

It’s obvious, then, how halakhah became a vehicle for abstract thinking. With such a premium placed on talmud Torah, rabbis and scholars sought to analyze Jewish law in all its complexity and subtlety. Consider the act of transferring ownership. The Talmud records a debate about lifting an item as a way to signify ownership, a gesture similar in today’s terms to signing a document, which doesn’t do anything besides add ink to paper yet creates legally binding documents. The rabbis disagree on whether you have to lift the item nine inches or three. A trivial detail? The Brisker method, a rigorous analytic approach to Talmud study pioneered by Rav Chaim of Brisk (1853–1918), treats it as essential:

The Brisker interprets this debate by probing the nature of the act of lifting itself: What is the legal impact of lifting the object into the air? Does it: (i) effectuate the transfer of legal rights; or (ii), does it merely offer evidence that a transfer of ownership has taken place. To the Brisker mind, each of the contrasting opinions [in the Talmud] assumes one of these positions. The view that insists on nine inches holds that the act of lifting is meant to evidence the transfer of ownership, hence a more pronounced motion is required. By contrast, a minimal motion of only [three inches] is sufficient if the lifting is simply a mechanism for transferring ownership.

As Saiman summarizes: “The Brisker converts a difference of six inches into an inquiry about the nature of a legal formality.” While the attraction to abstraction stems from the devotional perspective, it produces its own perspective, one focused on the minutiae as if for their own sake.

These three dimensions of halakhah—the phenomenological, devotional, and abstract dimensions—aren’t what most people tend to think of as law. The regulatory dimension is primary in the contemporary Western perspective. Law is about making sure societies function effectively, so order doesn’t collapse. Yet as you learn from Saiman about these other dimensions of halakhah, you begin to recognize that they bear on our legal system too.

In America, the law is more than court cases and legal codes. It is also a profession, a pop culture trope, a subject of academic study, and a cultural inheritance of almost sacred status. These dimensions don’t negate the objectivity of American law, or its aspiration to objective justice; they enrich it. Just as the rabbinic idea of law exceeds the regulatory dimension, American law goes beyond a record of laws and decisions. To recognize this fact is to recognize the singularity and fragility of its achievement. It is to recognize that this tradition of law is sustained by a culture, or a set of overlapping cultures, vulnerable to attack in ways the legal system isn’t. Halakhah survived its demise as the official legal structure of Jewish life because it extended beyond the regulatory into the innermost heart. One hopes we never have to learn how deep American law truly runs.

In Revolutionary Hebrew, Empire and Crisis, Aberbach returns to topics he’s explored in previous books (Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature, and Psychoanalysis [1989], Realism, Caricature, and Bias: The Fiction of Mendele Mocher Sefarim [1993]), and he previews the topics of several books to come (The Roman-Jewish Wars and Hebrew Cultural Nationalism [2000], Major Turning Points in Jewish Intellectual History [2003]). His main focus here, however, is the relationship between imperial crisis and Hebrew creativity. Examining the Prophets (who emerged amid the various Mesopotamian empires), the Mishnah (compiled during the Roman empire), the golden age of medieval Hebrew poetry (Muslim Spain), and the peak of modern Hebrew literature before 1948 (Tsarist Russia), Aberbach concludes that Jews were spurred to creativity by a mix of envy, superiority, and anxiety, precisely when these empires were about to collapse.

Aberbach proves to be a convincing, if sometimes unnuanced, reader of these works. He deftly selects texts that show the imprint of their times, from the Prophets’ jeremiads against the empires warring around them to poems by Bialik that dramatize Russian Jewry’s retreat from general Russian culture as the latter turned against them, blaming them for growing societal chaos. Readers who know these bodies of literature well will know that they include much that isn’t conducive to Aberbach’s claims. But read charitably, Aberbach, as a kind of sociologist of literature (he cites the eminence grise of the field, Lucien Goldmann, approvingly), can be understood to say that his selections, while not all-encompassing, are representative.

When approached on his own terms, that of literary sociology or, broadly, sociology of knowledge, a real methodological issue comes to the fore: Aberbach never explains why the end of these empires spurred major creativity, while others didn’t. Why didn’t Babylonian Jewry produce major works in Hebrew immediately prior to the conquest of Islam? Why didn’t Grecian Jewry do so prior to the conquest of Rome? Why didn’t British Jewry before the sunset of the British Empire? A reader can speculate about the factors involved (degree of assimilation, duration and severity of collapse, whether caused by internal issues or unexpected conquest, etc.), but at least some criteria of distinction should have been supplied.

Indeed, the unspoken key criteria seemed rather to be aesthetic than historical or sociological. That is to say, the periods of peak literary creativity also happen to be those in which Jews worked outstandingly in genres Aberbach likes, namely, poetry, fable, short story, and novel. But Jews’ main creative output, at least since the turn of the second millennium, has clearly been the glosses, novellae, responsa, and legal codes of rabbinic Judaism, which Aberbach several times knocks. And that creativity hasn’t been confined to the periods considered here.

But what is creativity in writing? Is it a matter of character and plot? Does it depend on rhythm and rhyme? Imagery or wit? Considering literary genres range from maxims to epics, it’s hard to imagine what criteria could encompass all the possibilities of such creativity. Aberbach says he’s interested solely in Hebrew, despite the fact that Jews have written in the language of every society they’ve been a part of, because Jewish writing in no other language “has been as vital to Jewish identity and survival” in the long run. In other words, creativity for Aberbach isn’t just about expression; it’s also about survival value.

If the importance of Hebrew literature lies in both aesthetic excellence and survival value, then it’s even harder to understand how Aberbach could ignore the main creative output of rabbinic Judaism—halakhic literature. In his monumental Social and Religious History of the Jews, Salo Baron observes:

Jewish survival in the face of terrific external pressures and equally powerful lures to desertion has often appeared enigmatic to philosophers and historians. Wilhelm von Humboldt was not the only one to assert that the entire historic position of the Jewish people is “such an extraordinary phenomenon in world history and the history of religion that many a fine mind has doubted whether it can at all be explained in merely human terms.” However, such escape into the irrational and miraculous is merely a profession of intellectual lassitude.

To Baron, it is obvious that halakhah, or Jewish law, is the eminently rational explanation for the Jews’ survival. Their adherence to the law provided them a framework of living in the midst of turmoil and a sociodicy, as John Murray Cuddihy put it, an internal, validating rationale for the exclusion they experienced after their dispersal from the Land of Israel.

Aberbach’s book is undermined by his inability to do justice to the full array of Hebrew literary creativity. While he didn’t need to explore halakhic genres in great depth, he could at least have gestured to their importance. Without such a gesture, the connection he draws between empire collapse and creativity becomes suspect, since it leaves unexplained centuries of halakhic creativity seemingly irrespective of empire collapse. In fact, if the case of Ashkenazi Jewry in the 11th century is taken as any indicator, such creativity might be negatively correlated to societal collapse.

At the highest level The Innocence of Pontius Pilate is an account of how the West became secular, that is, how it was possible to separate the divine and the worldly in our civic life. That separation doesn’t originate in the eighteenth-century, the era of the Enlightenment. It originates in Christianity itself, as Dusenbury shows. And not in the history of Christianity, he points out, but in its foundation-texts, the Gospels and the Paul’s epistles, and in their depiction of the Roman trial of Jesus. Its full implications, however, were only worked out through twenty centuries of rereading the trial and in the determination of Pilate’s guilt.

More particularly, The Innocence of Pontius Pilate offers a definitive rebuttal of the Christ-killer myth, a ghoulish, un-Christian calumny with no real basis in the New Testament. While Dusenbury doesn’t doubt that the Christ-killer myth haunts the Christian (and Jewish and Islamic) imaginary, he denies (and proves his denial) that the text of the New Testament, read honestly, bears it out. But he also traces the origin of this myth in the tortured, Gnostic mind.

Our modern-day Gnostics—the ideologues, conspiracy theorists, and propagandists of division—now work to falsify and hollow out our histories. Which is why we need books like this. Books to take the fight to them and reclaim the past, for the sake of the present and the future.

Of course, the memoirs of friends are frequently about settling scores.

I remember well the distaste I felt watching The End of the Tour (2015), a film adaptation of David Lipsky’s memoir of a trip with the writer David Foster Wallace. The film (I can’t speak for the book) boils down to a repellent sentiment: I may not be a genius like my friend David, but at least I didn’t kill myself. I felt the same distaste reading A.J. Verdelle’s memoir of her friendship with the Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, Miss Chloe (2022), which can be summed up: My friend Chloe [Morrison] may have won all the awards and taught at a prestige university, but she only achieved that eminence by leaving her community behind—something I’d never do.

These friends sound bitter and jealous. Behind a veil of piety (“Oh, dear friend, dearly departed, I will show the world what you meant to me!”) they make ugly faces at the dead. A memoir gives them a chance to throw darts at a target who would either have ignored them or swatted them away in life. Whatever devotion such friends pour into their writing and research is swallowed up in an abyss of resentment.

Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (1975), by the renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem, bears the marks of resentment. His friendship with Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide fleeing the Nazis in 1940, was “overwhelmingly intense—and only intermittently requited,” says writer George Prochnik. The memoir gave him the perfect opportunity to relitigate the debates that drew them together—two assimilated, German Jewish intellectuals who came of age in the years before the Holocaust—and then drove them apart. But this time Scholem would arrange the debates just as he saw fit.

What is Walter Benjamin, then, but a settling of scores? Prochnik, whose own memoir of conversion to and subsequent disavowal of Judaism is told through an account of Scholem’s life story, offers a succinct explanation of what was at stake for Scholem. In writing the book, Scholem got to defend his choice of Zionism over something “higher.”

While the choice to live in Israel might have been preferable in Scholem’s eyes to entertaining the fantasy of being at home in Germany, Benjamin’s refusal to join him in Palestine reminded Scholem of a yet higher path than that pointing to Jerusalem: a consecrated philosophical vocation, which lay beyond his own sphere of action. In this sense, Benjamin’s life choices constituted a permanent rebuke to Scholem.

In other words, Scholem tells the story of their friendship as a teleological narrative, such that Benjamin’s quasi-Marxist deviation from his calling to Judaism and a salvific emigration to the Land of Israel is seen in retrospect as the path leading ineluctably to the hotel room in Portbou, Spain where Benjamin choked down a fistful of pills to put an end to his sorrows. But Scholem could never, Prochnik tells us, get over his failure to convince his friend to join him. Benjamin, the cosmopolitan, Scholem told an audience in 1964, “truly came from foreign parts.” “These foreign parts must be understood as the transcendent realm,” Prochnik opines. Benjamin didn’t see the need to find a home anywhere.

With his memoir of his late friend, Scholem finally settled the score. He proved he was right to emigrate and Benjamin wrong to spurn his Jewish calling. He was wrong not just because he was hounded to death, his corpse dumped in an unmarked grave, but because he refused to embrace a life in the fray of Jewish destiny.

How cruel of Scholem to win an argument against his dead friend. But he does win it, doesn’t he? One choice led to life, the other to a pointless, self-inflicted death. If all the Jews of Europe had chosen the “higher path” that Benjamin took, they would have been shot, starved, and gassed down to the last infant. This is the flip-side of settling scores. The friend, however bitter-sounding, may be right.

Consider, by contrast, how Benjamin’s self-declared disciples falsify and fetishize his death. The scholar David Lloyd oozes admiration over Benjamin’s inability to get out of the way of the Nazi bulldozer that flattened him, claiming that “he never abandoned whatever ambivalence prevented him” from going to the Land of Israel. To Lloyd his self-slaughter is proof that Benjamin saw through the promise of Zionism, though Benjamin’s refusal to head to America either when he had the chance makes clear that the indecision that led him to such a pass had nothing to do with his views on Zionism.

In fact, Benjamin considered Zionism a source of hope, which could save the lives of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Jews, as he told his friend Kitty Marx-Steinschneider in April 1936. He referred to this hope as “unerläßlich,” vital or essential. That he worried what would happen if Zionism remained just a means to rescue Jews doesn’t make him a nascent anti-Zionist. Such a concern rather puts him in the company of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), who knew that a true political rebirth can only arise from spiritual and intellectual rebirth.

What kept Benjamin from pursuing this insight, as Rav Kook pursued it, and as Scholem did? Not his transcendent spiritual cosmopolitanism, as Prochnik has it. Benjamin was lured away by promises of culture.

Scholem claimed that, deep down, Benjamin “never succumbed to the illusion of being at home” in Europe. But this deep-down feeling contrasts with his stated ambition to be regarded as the greatest German literary critic, an ambition announced in the same letter of January 1930 where he announced the definite end of his Hebrew studies. This announcement coincides with the period of his first real foothold in German letters. Benjamin may not have believed he was “at home” in Germany, but he clearly hoped to fulfill his intellectual ambition within the bounds of its culture. He dreaded starting over as Scholem had, moving to a foreign place, adopting a new tongue, and losing what status remained to a Jew of culture in the era of Hitler’s rise.

Benjamin’s friends also kept him from a path that would have saved him. His on-again, off-again lover, the Marxist actress Asja Lācis, would later brag that she had kept Benjamin from ever visiting Scholem in Jerusalem. Meanwhile the leading avant-garde writer Bertolt Brecht, whose friendship Benjamin considered one of his footholds in the German cultural sphere, complained about his “perennial ‘Judaisms.’” In his final years in Paris Benjamin earned a pittance writing for the Institut für Sozialforschung, run by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who encouraged him to deepen his commitment to Marxist literary criticism. Through direct appeals and promises of commissions, Adorno and Horkheimer encouraged Benjamin to remain in France long after the dangers of such advice became evident.

In fine, these so-called friends used sex, money, and influence to lead Benjamin to a dead end—in life and thought.

What Otto Weininger is to the antisemitic Right, Benjamin is to the Left: a Jew who did the only moral thing, according to each side’s respective politics, that a Jew can do: kill himself. What distinguishes Scholem from the friends and disciples who have claimed to carry on Benjamin’s legacy is that he mourned the loss of his friend, while the rest have secretly (and not so secretly) celebrated it. To them, Benjamin chose the “higher path”—dying in politically correct obscurity, martyr for a Marxist worldview in which he couldn’t even believe after the Stalin-Hitler pact. Prochnik moralizes over Scholem’s melancholy, claiming that he never got over his friend’s refusal to belong anywhere. What errant bullshit. Scholem never got over the fact that Benjamin didn’t have to die.

Before his death, Benjamin composed his most famous essay, “On the Concept of History.” He wrote it following his release from internment by French authorities in the fall of 1939 and it appeared only after his death. Many have trumpeted this work as an exemplary piece of Marxist criticism. Except that “On the Concept of History” is Marxist only in vocabulary. The very first thesis of the essay compares historical materialism to a confidence game whose sole redeeming feature is its disavowed theological essence.

The true import of “On the Concept of History” is its return to ideas that he and Scholem debated nearly twenty years earlier. In their youth Scholem had argued that culture—the Kultur that he and Benjamin, along with the rest of educated, assimilated German Jewry, cherished—was a “metaphor for study,” according to Jean-Claude Milner. That is, culture substituted for Jewish study, the backbone of Jewish continuity. Hence Scholem’s persistent effort to get Benjamin to study Hebrew and come to the Land of Israel. He wanted him to quit embellishing a simulacrum of Jewish study and join in the real thing.

After rejecting this path for nearly two decades, Milner suggests, Benjamin not only admitted his friend’s insight but went beyond him. In Thesis IX of “On the Concept of History” he writes:

There is a picture by [Paul] Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet.

In the angel of history, “we recognize Benjamin, backing away from the metonymic ruins of a single, unnamed object.” This object is the name that German Jews tried desperately to evade: the name “Jew” on whose bearers the ruins of metaphor fell so completely, so disastrously from 1933 to 1945.

Scholem, you see, was wrong. Culture wasn’t a metaphor for Jewish study, and it never could have been. Of all the immigrants and social-climbers who have obsessed over the culture of modern Europe, only the Jews, as a group, believed in it. Culture wasn’t to them a stepping-stone, a way into society, but a dream of the nobility of Europe. When all they were really seeing was a shard of Jewish study stuck in their eye, showing the possibility of persistence where it couldn’t be found.

No, culture wasn’t a metaphor for Jewish study but its unconvincing byproduct. And the catastrophe Benjamin saw was the collapse of the dream into the reality of European culture, whose authorized representatives “threw Marx and French literature to the dogs” when they needed to.

Shortly before his death, Benjamin wrote to a friend: “You can be sure . . . that I have maintained the only state of mind befitting someone exposed to risks that he should have foreseen, and which he brought upon himself in the knowledge of their causes (or almost).” His biographers read this as a comment on his material situation: that he is still in Paris in 1940, when he could have been elsewhere. It might be taken as a comment on his spiritual situation: that for so long he let himself be misled.

Scholem’s memoir of Benjamin is a bitter act of devotion. But the score it settles isn’t just with Benjamin. It’s also with the bad friends who misled him and the worse disciples who cherish his death. Moreover, this was a score Benjamin settled himself, if we accept Milner’s reading. In the end, he, too, repudiated the lies of culture, ancestor to the lies un-Jews now tell themselves (while their friends cheer them on) as they tie themselves to the sacrificial altar of a “higher path.”

Much as he may have liked having the last word, I suspect Scholem would have preferred to lose the argument over whether culture was a metaphor for Jewish study—or something decisively less. If only his friend had lived.

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. Briefe I. Ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966.

Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Trans. Harry Zohn. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.

Eiland, Howard, and Michael W. Jennings. Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.

Milner, Jean-Claude. Les penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique. Paris: Verdier, 2003.

Scholem, Gershom. Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. Trans. Harry Zohn. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981.

It was the month of June, the morning sun was emerging from the clouds, and Alain was walking slowly down a Paris street. He observed the young girls, who—every one of them—showed her naked navel between trousers belted very low and a T-shirt cut very short. He was captivated; captivated and even disturbed: It was as if their seductive power no longer resided in their thighs, their buttocks, or their breasts, but in that small round hole located in the center of the body.

This interest in the navel runs straight through The Festival of Insignificance, reappearing several times. When Ramon, one of the other friends, observes that exposed midriffs are a fashion trend, Alain fires back:

Don’t forget that the navel fashion came in with the new century! As if on that symbolic date someone raised the blinds that, for centuries, had kept us from seeing the essential thing: that individuality is an illusion!

A bared stomach reveals that individuality is an illusion. Kundera, an absurdist provocateur, is poking fun. He is poking fun at Alain, his character, who contemplates the navel, and at us, his readers, who contemplate alongside him. But jokes, Kundera never tired of demonstrating, contain more truth than most logical axioms. Odd as this may sound, the belly button holds a key to the existential question of how one must live.

I admit I was immediately intrigued by Kundera’s riff on the belly button because I too have noticed its ubiquity. I have even philosophized on it, much as Alain does. I used to claim that to reveal the midriff was in fashion because of the Covid pandemic. For some two years school-age girls attended Zoom classes where one’s face was constantly on display. This was the era when Psychology Today published articles on “Zoom dysmorphia,” a type of dysmorphia that arose from having to look at one’s face on a screen all day. What better way to deflect attention from the face than to bare the stomach?

But Kundera reminded me that midriffs have been in fashion since at least the 2000s. I’m old enough to remember that what captivated me about the “Hips Don’t Lie” (2005) music video wasn’t Shakira’s gyrating hips but her stomach.

Now is an exposed midriff really anything besides a trend in revealing clothes? Consider, first of all, what a navel is. Merriam-Webster’s calls it “a depression in the middle of the abdomen.” The Cambridge English Dictionary defines navel as “the small round part in the middle of the stomach that is left after the umbilical cord has been cut at birth.” The French, I think, are here more usefully blunt: cicatrice en forme de cavité—“a scar in the shape of a hollow.”

Kundera, writing in French, has in mind the navel as a scar. One’s navel is the scar of birth. In the novel, Alain’s friend Charles is haunted by the image of an angel. An angel, created not born, has no navel. For the same reason, an angel is sexless. Alain and Charles wonder if this sexlessness isn’t the secret to an angel’s proverbial goodness. Neither born nor capable of sex or giving birth, an angel is scarless and pure. Not like a human being.

A navel, then, is an ultimate sign of our humanness. We aren’t good like angels; we have irrational drives and impulses. We are born, not created.

There have been, however, two human beings without a navel: Adam and Eve. Charles, I mentioned, is haunted by the image of an angel, but Alain is haunted too. He is haunted by his absentee mother, who, during one of his imagined conversations with her, brings up the point about Eve.

To your mind, the model of a navel-less woman is an angel. For me, it’s Eve, the first woman. She was not born out of a belly but out of a whim, the Creator’s whim. It’s from her vulva, the vulva of a navel-less woman, that the first umbilical cord emerged. If I’m to believe the Bible, other cords too; with a little man or a little woman attached to each cord…. [And] from out of the sexual organ of every woman [after Eve] there came another cord, with another woman or man at the end of each one, and all of that, millions and millions of times over, turned into an enormous tree, a tree formed from the infinity of bodies, a tree whose branches reached to the sky. Imagine! That gigantic tree is rooted in the vulva of one little woman, of the first woman, of poor navel-less Eve.

This is the story, in a word, of the Fall. Navel-less Eve begins life like an angel, constitutionally good. It’s when she eats the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that she awakens to conscience and consciousness and plummets into a world of impulses and unreason. God’s punishment is notable: Eve will bear children “in pain” and she will “long for” Adam. Birth will scar and desire is a penalty. And all the belly-button–having multitudes of Earth bear out this sentence.

Given this grim view, is it any surprise that Alain’s mother hoped Eve could be retroactively assassinated and, upon her death, witness the decay of the whole Tree of Life? Of course, this is how Alain imagines his mother thinking, the same mother who abandoned him and, according to his father, never wanted him. The murder of Eve is Alain’s own, disavowed imagining.

If the navel is a sign of humanity, but humanity is riven by the scar of birth and the penalty of desire, where lies the attraction?

Perhaps the absence of attraction is what jolts Alain. He concludes that while every other “golden site” (butt, thighs, breasts) has a shape unique to each woman, all belly buttons are the same. “You could never mistake the buttocks of the woman you love. The beloved buttocks, you’d recognize them among a hundred others. But you could not identify the woman you love by her navel. All navels are alike.”

Here we return to Alain’s insight: a bared midriff reveals that individuality is an illusion. The claim that “all navels are alike” isn’t meant literally, I don’t think. A droopy navel surely differs from a taut one, as does an innie from an outie. What Alain means is that the navel is symbolically supersaturated. It evokes for him what he imagines it evokes for his mother: the whole Tree of Life linked, umbilical cord by umbilical cord, to the source of the human condition. All the little differences that we think make us unique are obliterated in this perspective, for at root and in essence we are the same. “Not only does the navel not revolt against repetition,” Alain tells his Ramon, “it is a call for repetitions!”

Going back at least to The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Kundera wagered that repetition was the basic quandary of existence. “The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one,” that novel begins. “To think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum. What does this mad myth signify?”

The narrator of The Unbearable Lightness of Being gives the example of a war between two 14th-century kingdoms. If such a war occurs and then ceases, never to recur, then it will not have mattered. It will not have mattered even while it was happening, because, like the life of a mayfly, it was ephemeral and ultimately insubstantial. If that seems like a cruel assessment, ask yourself how historians treat their subject matter. Robespierre fascinates the researcher precisely because his existence was contingent, his actions and his fate circumstantial and unrepeatable. In short, he is isolated in time. “There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.”

Cold as this view of life may seem, ephemerality offers relief from judgment, responsibility, and guilt. “For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral?” A lion guts a zebra and paws its entrails while the nostrils are still flaring. A little boy grows up to be a mass murderer but his baby pictures are still adorable. Nothing is required of you except to live. Eternal return, by contrast, forces you to assume ultimate responsibility, because when things recur they can’t not matter.

“What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?” The weight of return is a burden, but it gives life meaning. Lightness, the lightness of fleeting existence lets you float, “soar into the heights, take leave of the earth.”

What will you choose? Repetition or difference?

This is what Alain sees in the navel. A choice. The choice to go on with the cycle of human misery yet knowing that therein lies meaning. Or to quit the cycle and watch the Tree of Life wither.

Alain’s friend Ramon, one of the other four friends of The Festival of Insignificance, gives a speech near the end from which the title of the book is drawn. He tells a man he believes is dying from cancer:

Insignificance, my friend, is the essence of existence. It is all around us, and everywhere and always. It is present even when no one wants to see it: in horror, in bloody battles, in the worst disasters. It often takes courage to acknowledge it in such dramatic situations, and to call it by name. But it is not only a matter of acknowledging it, we must love insignificance, we must learn to love it.

Kundera has always done a wonderful job evoking this vision of the “festival of insignificance.” We live and die, he suggests, in a tumult of transitory passion and violence, where nothing really matters. Absurdity is kind of lovely, when you get right down to it, even when it’s deadly. A compelling vision, all told, for a postmodern West which has laid its “grand narratives” aside.

But what some readers, and some of Kundera’s own characters, tend to forget is that embrace of the absurd is only one option, and not necessarily the noblest. The Luxembourg Garden where Ramon gives his speech isn’t a battlefield. He strolls slowly among marble statues of the great women of France’s history and pauses to take in a children’s choir. Past and future surround him; they guard the peacefulness of the scene.

Yet a strange figure, who might be Joseph Stalin, enters the park to shoot the nose off one of the statues, making everyone laugh. Meanwhile Alain debates whether children aren’t just a perpetuation of human misery. Ramon’s speech is framed by dangers to the past and future, a reminder that the peace they guard is preserved by the present. As history teaches, festivals can turn into massacres if no one is interested in preserving them. And in the vision of the fleeting absurd, there’s no difference between the insignificance of joy or terror.

Now consider, again, the navel. It is, Alain says, “a call for repetitions.” A navel calls for eternal return, the Tree of Life, the “weight of unbearable responsibility.” It doesn’t revolt against the sameness of human existence; it embraces the eternal, shunning the evanescent. It is a reminder that absurdity is only one option, and arguably the worst.

All this from a belly button? Kundera isn’t afraid of making a lot out of something little. Someone once said that history happens “by way of scoring and fractures that can easily pass unnoticed. But they are irreversible.” How much more so for a bared midriff, which doesn’t pass unnoticed at all?

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Fathers and Sons remained on my bookshelf for several years. I seem to remember opening it once or twice; I wasn’t compelled. After college, when I had lost touch with that friend, I downsized my personal library and parted with the book. But I never forgot who first recommended it.

Now some decade and a half later, I have finally read Turgenev’s novel, and I understand why my friend recommended it. No novel I know offers a tenderer depiction of generational conflict. It contains lessons that at seventeen I couldn’t have grasped. Lessons necessary for all of us now.

Fathers and Sons isn’t like the Russian literature that people tend to go on about. It’s not like War and Peace, which sweeps you up in historical drama, or Crime and Punishment, which hits you over the head with human depravity. Fathers and Sons creeps up on you. As far as Russian writers go, Turgenev appears as the quiet and reflective type, sharing more with the Chekhov of The Steppe (1888) than with the better-known, stormy personalities. Fathers and Sons builds slowly, linking its characters act by act until they hang together in a complex web, where anyone’s action sends a shiver through the rest.

The protagonist, Arkady, brings home a guest after graduating from college. Bazarov, his friend, is the original self-proclaimed nihilist, a character whose imitators continue down to the present. He claims to care for nothing, to have no ideals or principles, not even liberal ones. “There are only sensations,” he declares. “Is honesty also a sensation,” Arkady replies? “Indeed it is.” Despite this attitude, Arkady feels about Bazarov much as I did about my friend: he admires him completely.

Although at first the novel seems like a classic “unexpected guest” narrative, where a guest disturbs the tranquil order of the house he enters, Turgenev adopts another narrative form: journey and return. Arkady and Bazarov quickly quit the former’s family home and travel to that of a mysterious liberated woman, and from there to Bazarov’s own family home. In the second half of the novel, they head back, stopping at the same places, and then head back again in the initial direction. At each stop, they encounter characters who push them together and, eventually, apart. There’s a reason journey stories tend to end when the hero arrives back where he started. You can’t go home again, as they say. It’s Turgenev’s stroke of genius to show what happens when his protagonists try.

While the novel moves back and forth in space, it also does so in generational time. At each stopping place in their journey, Arkady and Bazarov meet members of their own generation and their parents’ generation. Between the generations lies a spiritual gulf. Their parents and older relatives can’t understand these young men. Sometimes the lack of understanding is due to the previous generation’s conservatism. More often it’s because the progressivism of the old guard has become outmoded. Rebels in their youth, the fathers’ rebellion now looks quaint to the sons.

On this generational conflict, which stands at the heart of Fathers and Sons, Turgenev writes with sympathy and tenderness. On the one hand, he graciously describes the headiness of youth, treating their superciliousness with understanding. Their ideals (or professed lack thereof), he knows, will in turn be superseded by those of a succeeding generation. On the other hand, he surfaces the hopes and longings of the fathers, the dreams of youth that never fully fade. Perhaps the tenderest note is struck when Turgenev invites us into the mind of Arkady’s father, Nikolai Petrovich:

He thought once again about his late wife, not as he’d known her through many years, not as a good, domestic housewife, but rather as a young girl with her slim figure, her innocent, inquisitive look, and her tightly knotted braid over her slender, childish neck. He remembered seeing her for the first time. He was still a student then. He’d met her on the stairs of the apartment where he lived; accidentally bumping into her, he turned around to apologize, but could mutter only, “Pardon, monsieur,” while she bent her head, started laughing, and suddenly, as if frightened, scurried away. At the bend in the stairs, she glanced back at him quickly, assumed a serious look, and blushed. Then he recalled his first timid visits, half-words, half-smiles, and the embarrassment, sadness, upheavals, and finally the breathless rapture . . . Where had it all gone? She became his wife; he was happy as few people on earth ever are . . . “But,” he thought, “those first, sweet moments, why can’t a person live an eternal, immortal life in them?”

Michael Katz, the book’s translator (whose inestimable work includes several other classics of Russian literature), notes that Turgenev’s sympathetic portrayal of Bazarov almost ended his literary career. “Radicals regarded the hero as a caricature of themselves; conservatives felt the author was being far too generous.”

Nikolai’s reflections, however, make me wonder whether beneath the outrage over Bazarov lay another source of fury. How dare Turgenev portray the conservatives, the hated aristocrats as fully fleshed men and women, with souls, dreams, and their own genuine version of a hope for change? And how dare he remind the jaded, the ones who have finished with all childish hopes and dreams, of what they used to believe, of longings that might yet linger in them too?

In our current time of conflict, generational and otherwise, these types of reaction can be seen all over. They arise when generational conflict is seen as zero-sum. Turgenev suggests that such conflict fits into a grand scheme: the transmission of meaning and authority from one age to the next. If the one will not let go, or the other tries to snatch them, they may kill each other. Tussle is inevitable; mutual destruction is not. For Turgenev, family provided the means of smoothing this passage. That it could not do so in Russia’s actual history, which, half-a-century after Fathers and Sons appeared, gave birth to the totalitarian nightmare, is a sobering fact.

I’m old enough to have some reflections like Nikolai Petrovich. While I have a few years to go until I reach middle age, Turgenev’s description of the period already rings true: “That troubled, twilight phase of life when regrets resemble hopes, and hopes, regrets, when youth has passed, but old age has not yet set in.” Many of my youthful dreams beckon with the same intensity they did when I first conceived them. Others have dimmed.

I wish I still admired anyone as wholeheartedly as I did the friend who recommended Fathers and Sons. But if my time of wholehearted admiration has passed, I can at least follow through on some things I wanted to do when such feelings came readily. Reading Fathers and Sons let me revive that admiration for a moment and, unexpectedly, reflect on it. It turns out not all the passions of youth are insubstantial.

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That is what Controversies (2012), a dialogue between Alain Badiou (b. 1937) and Jean-Claude Milner (b. 1941), promises. What it delivers instead is a rambling conversation between two septuagenarians—interesting at times, not so much at others. And instead of the expected debate over the reason for their break (spoiler, it’s a debate over the name “Jew”), only a nugget of their core disagreement. But from that nugget a pointed analysis can draw out a major conflict, whose ramifications are seen well beyond the pages of this otherwise disappointing book. It’s on that conflict that I’m focused here.

To start, who are these apparent luminaries? Both Badiou and Milner are well known in France, though neither is a household name abroad. Each boasts a following among intellectuals, and Badiou in particular has emerged as a darling of the academic Left. The latter’s darling status rests on his unrepentant advocacy for Communism, to the point of remaining a sort-of Maoist, and hefty oeuvre, divided between dense, abstrusely philosophical tomes and lively polemics. Badiou’s integration of serious mathematics into philosophy no doubt flatters the pretensions of his largely humanities-trained readers.

Milner is much less widely known at least in the Anglo-American world, judging by how few of his books are translated into English. However, he is respected in French academia for his early linguistics research (he studied under Chomsky briefly at MIT) and he has something of a cult following as an interpreter of the notoriously difficult psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He has come to broader renown of late for his cutting analyses of French intellectual life and European politics, causing storms of controversy with his trilogy of books on the name “Jew” and contemporary anti-Judaism.

It is on this latter subject that Badiou and Milner broke off relations. Acquainted since the tumult surrounding May 1968 in Paris, when they were Maoist fellow-travelers, they had diverged greatly in the years that followed. Badiou remained committed to the idea of Communism, despite the failure of Maoism, while Milner viewed the Chinese Cultural Revolution (and the Khmer Rouge) as invalidating the very idea of revolution and with it politics of a certain future-oriented strain. But they did not break definitively until 2000, when Badiou attacked in print the philosopher Benny Lévy, Milner’s friend and teacher. The attack focused on Lévy’s noted transformation from Maoist activist to observant Jew.

Considering the nature of the break, whose momentary bridging is a draw of the book, you would expect it to take up a good portion of the dialogue. That expectation is sorely disappointed, as the debate over the name “Jew” (contemporary French shorthand for the Jewish Question redux) occupies six measly pages. The rest of the book is concerned mostly with Marxist criticisms of state, society, and culture on which Badiou and Milner agree in all but the most abstract details.

There are topics of interest—more or less of them, depending on your taste. For example, I found revealing the debate between the two over the question of politics. For Milner, what lies at the heart of politics is the “issue of bodies and their survival.” Badiou argues that such a focus reduces politics to biopolitics. He cites Spinoza to the effect that “death and survival have only ever inspired moral or religious thinking.” For him, by contrast, the “real political issue has always been: what is the true life?”

The two agree that the Plague of Athens offers a test-case for the divergence of their philosophies when it comes to politics. Plato, who mostly ignores the plague in his writings, provides the model for Badiou. The idea of the City (in Plato) or of Communism or the revolution (in Badiou’s work) are the proper subject of politics, since politics is fundamentally the “organized realization” of such ideas. As such, bodies and their survival—in Athens or elsewhere—are considerations of a less-than-ultimate significance compared with the unfolding of an Idea, defined by Badiou as a truth-event in the world.

Thucydides, on the other hand, who wrote a famous section of the History of the Peloponnesian Wars on the Plague of Athens, is Milner’s model. As he explains:

One ought to grant political relevance to every event in which the survival of the community is at stake, especially if that community has established itself as a community having a political existence. In the writings of Thucydides, Athens is the city par excellence, not necessarily the best one but the only one he speaks about directly. Yet it’s the Athenians who are hit by the plague and who, under its impact, will act like primitive people, without human or divine law. . . . Events like these . . . have political relevance structurally, precisely to the extent that they can make politics disappear.

That politics can disappear, and not because the Idea of it fails to get executed, brings us back in a roundabout way to the subject of Badiou and Milner’s break.

I said that the Jewish Question occupies only six pages of the dialogue. However, perhaps recognizing that it constitutes a main draw of the book, a postscript has been appended, which consists of a written exchange that addresses the topic. Milner gets started with two propositions about Badiou’s outlook and a set of questions he invites him to answer. The first proposition is that he “has underestimated the imaginary force of anti-Judaism”; and the second, that he “has overestimated the political significance of the name ‘Palestinian.’” The questions on which he then asks Badiou to bring his philosophy to bear are the following:

• Does the name “Jew” have a right to be used?

• Does it have a future or only a past?

• So long as nation-states exist (whether for good or ill), does this name have the right to be inscribed in the lexicon of nation-states?

• Does the fact that such an inscription is necessarily inappropriate (since “Jew” is neither a state name nor a national name) constitute an insurmountable objection?

Badiou never answers these questions directly. Based on what he does respond, the answer to all of them is “no.” He claims, to start, that Milner and Benny Lévy, the friend whose targeting led to the break, “turn ‘Jew’ into a hyperbolic name.” He doesn’t clarify the term “hyperbolic name” (a sign, maybe, that he’s in a polemical rather than philosophical mode), but you can put two and two together and see that it’s an unflattering remark. It suggest that the name takes on more (importance, significance, emotion?) than it deserves. He then claims that the “number of Arab and black dead” since World War II “was out of all proportion to the number of Jewish dead.” (Removing World War II from the equation rather tilts the scale, doesn’t it? For of course the killing of 1/3 of all Jews from 1933 to 1945, including 2/3 of European Jews, has no match in terms of percentage, even remotely, until the Rwandan genocide in 1994.) Finally, he argues that a “name” can only be considered “political” if it “inscribes the desire for a higher unity.” Therefore, the “name of an identity” can never be “political.”

All of this (and a bit more) boils down to the conclusion that Jews don’t have a right to consider themselves deserving of any special discussion. They are incidental. Hence the refusal to answer directly any of Milner’s questions.

This conclusion is belied by the fact that almost a third of Badiou’s collection of political essays, Polemics (2006), is devoted to “Uses of the Word ‘Jew,’” that he is the co-author of a book titled Reflections on Anti-Semitism (2011), and that he devoted a whole book to that preeminent Jew of the ancient world, Saul of Tarsus. As he admits elsewhere in the dialogue,

the word ‘Jew’ certainly has a unique position in the dialectic of the universal. This is obviously one of the reasons why Paul . . . could only appear in the Jewish world and always mentions this belonging to it as a source of pride.

Clearly, Badiou is exercised by the Jewish Question. And clearly Jews require special discussion. (Notice, however, the circumlocution he uses to avoid calling Saul/Paul a Jew: “[he] could only appear in the Jewish world and always mentions this belonging to it...”) Why the ambivalence then? Perhaps because a discussion of Jews will tend to cast doubt on the viability in the real world of Badiou’s ethereal philosophy.

The chasm that separates Badiou and Milner on the name “Jew” ultimately comes down to politics and its attendant philosophical conception. As a matter of survival, Jews have found the political Ideas of the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds insufficient. Destruction of monarchical sovereignty by the empire of law (the Romans) was followed by oppression and persecution under regimes of nominal universality (Islam and Christianity), which was followed in turn by genocide and cultural destruction by the combined forces of fascism, socialism, and Communism, while today we witness the attempted murder of Jews and stripping of their national autonomy by an axis of identitarians, Islamic imperialists, and the human rights industrial complex.

The situation of Jews isn’t absent today of terrors and uncertainties, but they have landed on peoplehood as a means to combat the onslaught of hate. They won’t wait around for an Idea that will supposedly, someday, free them from all perplexities, just like they won’t consent again to deracinate themselves as a gesture of goodwill to some freedom-to-come. Milner recognizes this, while Badiou refuses to.

In the meantime, while philosophers debate, most Jews (and most people in general) will go on scratching together what is necessary—politically and otherwise—to survive in a world “doomed to perpetual disorder.” Disorder, as Milner says, is not “Evil,” though the obsessive insistence that all must be sacrificed to a supreme Idea whose reign of order lies on the horizon, despite the bloody consequences of such predictions in the past—that insistence, I believe, borders on evil.

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I could be describing certain regions of the mind. Those whorls of gray matter that formed long before our earliest ancestors grew conscious. There, in the psychic darkness, monsters grow. They are probably nothing but neurons misfiring, adaptations rendered vestigial by environmental change. Despite these reasoned assurances, my dreams still fill with their shapes.

Beowulf comes from the same place. It predates its own composition, some thousand years ago, originating in the darkness known as prehistory. Grendel, Grendel’s mother, the wyrm, these creatures parallel shadows in the human story: the anomic renegade, blood-vengeance, the human-animal struggle, an inexpungible penchant for evil. Their cthonic nature strikes you as hear them described:

     When the dragon awoke, trouble flared again.
     He rippled down the rock, writhing with anger….
                         The outlandish thing
     Writhed and convulsed and viciously
     Turned on the king.

Writhing, rippling, convulsing, the dragon slithers out of the deepest layers of the unconscious, disgorging ancient fears. Beowulf gives shape to the inchoate forces within, transfiguring nightmare into narrative.

At a glance this Anglo-Saxon epic resembles an exorcism, an attempt to kill the malevolent forces at the back of the mind. It’s better understood as an act of containment. Beowulf, the hero, dies defeating the last of the monsters. Finishing them off means murdering a part of himself.

The poem itself, however, overcomes the darkness without eradicating it. It preserves the monsters forever in the story of a hero’s triumph over them. The hero narrative, which Beowulf exemplifies, is a psychic script for combatting the primordial evils. Beowulf’s Christian elements have been downplayed, criticized, and denied any authenticity, but they are an expression of the poet’s belief in redemption, the spiritual mechanisms of overcoming.

Consider how Grendel’s fate is sealed:

     The captain of evil discovered himself
     in a handgrip harder than anything
     he had ever encountered in any man
     on the face of the earth. Every bone in his body
     quailed and recoiled, but he could not escape.
     He was desperate to flee to his den and hide
     with the devil's litter, for in all his days
     he had never been clamped or cornered like this.

As a result of this tousle Grendel’s arm is wrenched from its socket; he frees himself from Beowulf’s grip only to be left limbless and mortally wounded. The socket and the unrelenting grip are clues to this scene’s template—Jacob’s wrestling with the angel. Grendel is a dark angel for sure, but victory over him grants Beowulf a name (recognition) and bounty (his reward by King Hrothgar).

Reading the poem, reading about Beowulf’s victories over the shapeless imaginings of the night made flesh, is like watching the dawn come on. The eyes have time to adjust as the light flushes the woods. Things take on a familiar aspect. There are still creatures lurking in the underbrush; they remain a danger. I can’t abolish the night or the monsters that fill my dreams. But in the day-lit world I can come to grips with them through the stories I tell. Or die trying.

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Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift (1975), which won him his second Pulitzer Prize, makes the case that being good is no such thing. In fact, it’s the only possible cure for an American obsession with so-called realism.

The kind of realism I’m talking about is abundant in hip hop. I’m not the first to say that the genre’s terrific success is tied to its perfect encapsulation of the American obsession with hard knocks and hustle as the essence of life. In “I’m The Man,” 50 Cent raps:

     I came in the world cryin' and fussin'
     N****, we ain't have nothin'
     Every ghetto I know the same
     We tryna make a little change
     Preacher man come around talkin'
     I don't wanna hear it, keep walkin'

The opening lines set the scene. It’s like a thought-experiment, based on his own life, that 50’s sharing with listeners. Imagine you were born in poverty. No savings, no high-earning parents. No prospects. What would you do?

One answer is the “preacher man’s.” It’s easy to imagine what sort of stuff a preacher is “talkin’.” Turn to Jesus, not crime. Do good, raise up the community, humble yourself. Bear your cross. 50 and presumably his listeners aren’t interested. “We tryna make a little change.” And in America, ghetto or elsewhere, a little change can turn to a lot if you’re willing to mix grind with crime.

Why is it so easy to dismiss the preacher man’s gospel truth? Because it’s so—how else to put it?—fake. The Marxists will say religion places reward in the afterlife to distract from what’s wrong here on earth. A good old boy might give a version of “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Both are realist answers, focused on what you can see hear feel and touch. A common sense answer for commonsensical America. None of this pie in the sky stuff for us.

If the answer’s that straightforward, why does preacher man appear at all in 50’s song? Why do Marxists waste time railing against false consciousness? Maybe, just maybe, the allure of the transcendental affects us despite ourselves. Famously hard-headed America is also famously sentimental. Given our typical attitude, you’d expect Americans to brush off tragedy as the stuff of life, but our mourning is liable to take on soaring dimensions. Contrary to popular opinion, as foreign policy expert Michael Doran points out, war makes us squeamish. Maybe contempt for transcendental values is proportional to their attraction.

This swirl of ideas lies at the heart of Humboldt’s Gift. Charlie Citrine, a classic Bellovian schlemiel, is a washed-up playwright and biographer, coasting on the profits from a two-decade–old smash hit, while friends, lovers, and scoundrels bleed him dry. The same people who bleed him dry complain and criticize that he lets others do it too! Why act like such a sucker, Charlie? Why even try to be good?

But Charlie hasn’t been a sucker as long as he has for nothing. He knows he could do better for himself and in scene after scene where he gets taken advantage of, he wonders if he shouldn’t change his way of relating to the world, become a hard-nosed player. He never changes though. He never changes because he thinks there’s something to trying to be good.

“Something” doesn’t cut it in America. Intuition not directed to money business is just funny business. And Charlie fulfills the stereotype. As he says early on: “I had a talent for absurdity, and you don’t throw away any of your talents.” Throughout the novel he’s obsessed by the occult musings of anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner. Any chance he can get he quotes Steiner on the soul and its relation to the Sun and the stars and the practice of astral projection and becoming one with the mountains, the streams—you get the picture, weird irrational stuff.

But there’s a there there. Charlies knows that if there’s something to being good then there’s more to this existence than it appears.

The “realism” touted by many is really an everyday scientism, that is hyper-materialism. It’s a belief system that there’s nothing to this life more than what you can see with your own two eyes. A rather arrogant outlook when you consider that every era’s certainties have been overturned by the next. Charlie, a product like anyone else of modern disenchanted secular society, nevertheless rejects this outlook.

For Durnwald the only brave, the only passionate, the only manly life was a life of [rational, analytic] thought. I had agreed, but I no longer thought in the same way. I had decided to listen to the voice of my own mind speaking from within, from my own depths, and this voice said that there was my body, in nature, and that there was also me. I was related to nature through my body, but all of me was not contained in it.

Bellow has Charlie articulate something like a schlemiel’s wager. Where Pascal said there’s only upside to believing in God, Charlie argues (by word and deed) that doing good is worth the inevitability of being exploited because it’s a wager on the Good as an expression of the divine. To Charlie, who comes around to a belief in the immortality of the soul, it will have been metaphysically worth it to do good even though it costs you. The “gift” of the book’s title, without spoiling anything, is a kind of narrative proof that he’s right.

Humboldt’s Gift is the culmination of several thematic trajectories in Bellow’s work. Bellow rejected the drama of alienation after his first two novels in favor of psychic affirmation, but here he proceeds from affirmation to the conviction that the alienated outlook isn’t just stultifying, that it’s morally socially and logically wrong. His break with liberalism too comes into its own with this novel. There’s an intuition before that moral relativism is a phony ideology, but here Bellow begins to offer a vision of the Good. Moreover mental breakthroughs in previous novels, like Eugene Henderson’s or Moses Herzog’s, give way in Humboldt’s Gift to a spiritual breakthrough, however hokey its premises.

Whatever you make of the book’s metaphysical claims, Bellow clearly saw art itself as a participant in his transcendental wager. Art and our attraction to it point to a higher realm. Beauty can’t have value strictly speaking—it adds nothing. Still it commands sums and attention and respect. This is why the various leeches in Charlie’s life ridicule his art yet gravitate to him. He is strange and mysterious to them, a walking contradiction to their firm assurances that cash rules everything around them. (Of course it’s no accident that Charlie made tons of dough from his art; that’s Bellow’s nod to the American money-making ethos.)

To bring this thing full circle, 50 Cent too is such a walking contradiction. The viewpoint of a song like “I’m The Man” suggests a street-hardened outlook, all brass tacks and no time for distractions (“Too much on my mind right now / I’m on the grind right now”). Except that 50 sings rhymes croons pouts shouts, a consummate artist adding flourishes to his steely narrative. All of hip hop—as I’m again not the first to observe—places its transcendent value not in the vaunted trap but in music. He may not have time for preacher man, but 50 Cent is himself that most unworldly of figures, a poet.

Between Bellow, 50, and all their imitators in prose and song, American so-called realism has some pretty serious dissenters, whether or not consciously. And maybe the benefit of being good isn’t such a losing case.

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Given Zionism’s success, the question naturally arises: Well, how did it come about? What impetus lay behind the emergence of modern Jewish nationalism? The answer should intrigue anyone interested in the resurgence of nationalism in the twenty-first century. Shlomo Avineri, the late political scientist, offered an answer back in 1981, which is still persuasive. What he nonetheless gets wrong about the future of Zionism is perhaps just as intriguing.

To start, it’s worth admitting that the rise of Zionism doesn’t make much sense. Nineteenth-century Jews lived in the best time to be a Jew since the destruction of the Second Temple 1,800 years before. The Industrial Revolution and other dimensions of modernization changed daily life, increasing the availability of food, medicine, education, transportation, and luxury goods. Emancipation meant that many Jews, most of whom lived in Europe, gained civil rights. They could live, move, trade, and mingle with relative freedom. Things were looking up. Why exchange a decent situation for an unlikely prospect in a distant land?

Because of antisemitism, of course. While the 19th century offered Jews unprecedented opportunity, it brought new forms of the oldest hatred. Racial antisemitism, originating in early modern Spain, attains its recognizable shape in this century. In 1881, a pogrom erupts in the Russian Empire, which fully unleashes the building enmity. A survivor recounts:

We are virtually under siege. The courtyards are barred up and we keep peering through the grillwork of the court gates to see if the mob is coming to swoop down on us…. We all sleep in our clothes and without any bedding… so that if we are attacked we will immediately be able to take the small children, who also sleep in their clothes, and flee. But will they let us flee?

Moshe Leib Lilienblum, the author of this recollection, narrowly escaped being beaten to death. He experienced the mob as the recurrence of an ancestral plague:

I am glad I have suffered. At least once in my life I have had the opportunity of feeling what my ancestors felt every day of their lives. Their lives were one long terror, so why should I experience nothing of that fright which they felt all their lives? I am their son, their sufferings are dear to me, and I am exalted by their glory.

Lilienblum’s recollection is chilling. Inadvertently, though, this passage suggests a problem with the conventional origin story of modern Zionism outlined above, which sees the latter as a response to antisemitism.

If Jews have been persecuted for generations, if the pogroms in Russia were a most disturbing kind of deja vu, then why did Jews react differently to antisemitism in the nineteenth century than they did before? Previously, they submitted to martyrdom, fled, converted, tried to buy protection, changed their trade or profession, made themselves invisible as possible, and occasionally, fought back. Jews never decamped to the Holy Land to restore their ancient sovereignty. What made this time different? It appears antisemitism can’t be the whole answer.

Shlomo Avineri’s classic study, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State (1981), offers a convincing alternative account of the origins of the Jewish state, one that has since become de rigueur among scholars. Avineri (1922–2023), the late esteemed political scientist, who held high positions in government and the academy, originally delivered his pathbreaking work as a series of lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the late 1970s. Its analysis still bears up after four decades, which is no doubt why the book was reissued with a new epilogue by the author in 2017.

The Making of Modern Zionism is a compelling assessment of the liberal, socialist Zionism that percolated among the intellectual forebears of the Jewish state and then guided the State itself through its first 30 years of existence. It’s the kind of assessment that emerges in the wake of the fall of an idea. Avineri wrote under the impact of the Israeli elections of 1977, which brought the right-wing Likud party to power, ended the political dominance of the Labor party, and inaugurated a chain of center-right governments down to the present.

Denied and forgotten, the aspiration to Jewish nationhood broke out again in the nineteenth century because of two era-defining events. Emancipation and the rise of nationalism, Avineri demonstrates, electrified European Jewry, releasing energies that long lay dormant in them. On one hand, Jews gained civil rights that freed them from the ghettoes and psychic bondage that entrapped them. As a result, they had to confront the problem of how to remain united without the ready-made solidarity of social alienation and shared oppression. On the other hand, Jews saw all around them ethnic and cultural groups agitating for their autonomy and independence. Why not the Jewish people too? As the victories for such groups (Greeks, Italians, Bulgarians, etc.) racked up, the case for a renewed Jewish nationalism became undeniable.

Avineri summarizes:

Zionism, then, is a post-Emancipation phenomenon. While drawing on a historical bond with the ancestral Land of Israel, it made into an active, historical-practical focus a symbol that had lain dormant, passive though potent, in the Jewish religious tradition. Jewish nationalism was then one specific aspect of the impact of the ideas and social structures unleashed by the French Revolution, modernism, and secularism. It was a response to the challenges of liberalism and nationalism much more than a response merely to anti-Semitism, and for this reason it could not have occurred at any period before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

He goes on to elaborate how nationalism and the dilemmas of civic freedom play out in the work of the key Zionist thinkers. As a liberal himself, most of these thinkers fall into Avineri’s camp, though some belong neither to one nor the other side of the political spectrum.

Avineri concludes by arguing that modern Zionism is a revolutionary project. To rescue the Jewish people from persecution and grant them a chance at liberation, like anyone else, social relations had to be overhauled completely in a Jewish state. Mere amelioration of the conditions under which Jews lived for 1,800 years could never answer the Jewish Question, the question how this enduring people could live on its own terms. Avineri sees the collectivist, socialist-inspired governance of Israel’s first three decades as the fulfillment of a promise of “permanent revolution” in Israeli society.

But writing in 1981, four years removed from the end of the Labor party’s dominance in political life, Avineri had to rationalize the departure from that revolutionary direction. Projecting into the future, he claims that Jews won’t settle for a capitalistic society like the ones they fled. Like Ahad Ha’am before him, Avineri warns, regarding the road down which Israeli society is headed, “This Is Not the Way.”

Three-and-a-half decades later, in the new epilogue to his book, Avineri had to admit that Israelis didn’t agree.

Israel exemplifies this shift [toward free markets in the West], as evidenced by the diminished role of the kibbutzim [collective farms] and the once powerful Histadruth Labor Federation. The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange has flourished in the newly globalized economy, and privatization has become an almost messianic credo.

Since the early 1980s, Israel has emerged as a tech hub, proud of its achievements in trade and eager to expand its markets. While Avineri insisted in 2017 that the road to expanded capitalism remained unpromising as ever, it turns out that Israeli society long ago left him standing where the roads diverged. To paraphrase Robert Frost’s poem: knowing how way leads on to way, I doubt if Israelis will ever come back and take the road that Avineri hoped they would.

In the end, the intellectual origins of Zionism are a necessary but not sufficient starting point for understanding the nature (and future) of the Jewish state. Woven through Avineri’s portraits of Zionist thinkers is a thread of steely pragmatism, pliant but uncuttable. The truth is that Zionism emerges from the Jewish people’s survival instinct. That instinct mixes with the intellectual movements of the time.

Socialism, Marxism, and communism had their moment in the sun. As new ideas emerge in place of the “God that failed,” Zionism will adapt and mix and change. The aim, whatever the ideas, is to foreclose the question Lilienblum asked, huddled in his house as the mob closed in: “Will they let us flee?” There will be no more fleeing; the Jewish state is the refuge aimed at through 1,800 years of flight.

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If you know more than the broad strokes of this story, you are likely to have heard the name Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. Regarded as the father of Modern Hebrew, Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922) was a linguist, lexicographer, and essayist who, in 1881, immigrated to the Land of Israel with the stated purpose of reviving spoken Hebrew and the Jewish national consciousness. By many accounts, he succeeded. (A beneficiary of that success, the Israeli musician Matti Caspi, wrote a song about him in 1978.)

A treasure-trove of information about Ben-Yehuda is his memoir, A Dream Come True, serialized in the Hebrew magazine Ha-Toren from 1917 to 1918, and translated by T. Muroaka in 1993. I knew Ben-Yehuda’s story from classes in Jewish day school, but until this week I had yet to hear his story from the source. As it turned out, the memoir served as a reminder of the enormous role played by the small nations of Europe in the rebirth of the State of Israel. Indeed, without the Bulgarian Revolution, modern spoken Hebrew might never have undergone its revival.

Before I turn to that odd conjuncture, I want to address a criticism of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. I should say, a criticism of his legacy.

It’s fashionable now to pooh-pooh Ben-Yehuda’s contribution. Giving him the credit for single-handedly jump-starting modern spoken Hebrew feels too much like Great Man–style history. How can the revival of an entire language be laid at the feet of one poor, tubercular Russian Jew? It doesn’t help that Ben-Yehuda was boastful of his forerunner position. Here he is comparing the birth of his child, the first in centuries to be raised in a Hebrew household, to the reestablishment of Jewish civic life in Israel:

Is it not one of the astonishing things in the chain of events in the world that the beginning of our territorial revival, if one may put it that way, and the beginning of our linguistic revival fell together, on the same day, almost at the same hour?

On the day the first settlement of the nation was established in the land of its forefathers to which it had decided to return, on that day was born the child who was to be the first of the children of the nation to resume speaking the language of its forefathers.

Ben-Yehuda himself admits it’s an arrogant comparison. Why does he make it? Because it’s undeniable. Great men (and women) are out of fashion, but they exist. Ben-Yehuda, like Theodor Herzl after him, made a dream into reality. He didn’t do it alone—a dream becomes real only if other people agree that it’s real—but as a friend tells him, “‘Justice requires that the first with an idea has the right to have it called after him, and no man is entitled to renounce that right.’” Ben-Yehuda was the first to put spoken Hebrew on the agenda, and he deserves the credit.

If Ben-Yehuda’s self-aggrandizement bothers you, then his memoir may not make for enjoyable reading. A Dream Come True is studded with details that assume you recognize his importance. Then again, it’s written in such a spare, straightforward style that, combined with its brevity, you’ll likely read it in one sitting anyway. And if you can lend some credence to the idea that what Ben-Yehuda did with spoken Hebrew really mattered, those details I mentioned become captivating. A whole dissertation could be spun out of the detail that his path from yeshiva bochur to chief Hebraist was paved by a Hebrew translation of Robinson Crusoe!

The most striking of these details is surely the one I began with: how the Bulgarian Revolution made a Zionist of Ben-Yehuda. While Herzl’s come-to-Judea moment is well known—as a newspaper correspondent in Paris, he witnesses the persecution of Alfred Dreyfus and realizes there’s no place for Jews even in emancipated Europe—Ben-Yehuda’s was a complete surprise to me. Because I suspect I’m not the only one unfamiliar with the details, I’ll quote him at length:

The flame of love for the Hebrew language, which was being stifled under the ashes of nihilism, did not go out [in me] completely and needed only a fresh wind to make it flare up again….

The wind came blowing from the land of the Balkans. There the Bulgarians rebelled against the Turks; and in all Russia there arose a great cry that it was a sacred duty to hasten to the aid of their “little brothers,” free them from foreign yoke, and restore the Bulgarian people to their ancient territory….

I read the news in the papers thirstily, at first without recognizing any link between it and myself. I noticed only… [that] I was more interested in the news from the battlefield than any of my school friends, was happier at every Russian and Bulgarian victory, and found more pleasure than they did in newspaper articles about the freedom of the Bulgarian people and the liberation of the land of Bulgaria.

Then…. suddenly, something like lightning flashed across my mind, and my thoughts flew from the Shipka Pass in the Balkans the fords of the Jordan in Palestine and I heard an astonishing inner voice calling to me:

The restoration of Israel and its language on the land of its ancestors!

This was the dream.

Who would have guessed the impact of the Bulgarian Revolution on Jewish history?

The specific revolution aside, though, Ben-Yehuda’s story shares a lot with that of other Zionist pioneers. While there were major figures in the Zionist movement who came from Western Europe, the major impetus came from South, Central, and Eastern Europe, where dreams of nationhood were in the air.

It’s commonly supposed that Jews from these regions aspired to national sovereignty in response to antisemitic persecution that demonstrated their inexpungible second-class status. That may have played a role, but at least as important an impetus for Jews’ national aspirations was the Romantic and nationalist ferment they witnessed. Although he became disillusioned in Paris, Herzl, for instance, was an Austro-Hungarian, born in Budapest. In his youth he sympathized with the separatist nationalism of the Hungarians. He was not alone. Nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals were swept up in the frenzy for Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Romanian, Lithuanian, and, yes, Bulgarian nationalism. They were inspired by the example of “small nations,” as Milan Kundera puts it, fighting for their existence.

A Dream Come True offers a fascinating look at Modern Hebrew’s most influential pioneer. It is also a sterling reminder of what the Jewish people owe the small nations of Europe. Had it not been for the ground-swell of small-nation nationalism that overtook Europe in the nineteenth century, Jews may have failed to seize their moment to return to the land of their forefathers. As Ben-Yehuda reminds us, Zionism constituted a “twofold national revival: territorial and linguistic.” That is to say, territorial and intellectual. It’s not enough to have a land; you must believe in the spirit of the people—their uniqueness, in tongue and character, and their right to existence, despite the cajolement of empires eager to swallow them.

The bone I have to pick concerns his magisterial 1961 novel, Riders in the Chariot. White’s novels tend to be intimate character portraits written with the intensity of an epic. His best-known novel, Voss (1957), is a vertiginously constructed look inside the psyches of the title character, the German explorer Johann Ulrich Voss, and a young women he meets shortly before setting off into the depths of the Australian outback. Riders in the Chariot follows the same pattern, focusing on the lives of four oddballs, who meet in a suburb of 1950s Sydney.

What you might not expect based on this description, or what I mentioned about White, is that Riders in the Chariot is a Holocaust novel. And it is among the best ever written. Of the four main characters, arguably the central, Mordecai Himmelfarb, is a German Jewish refugee, an erstwhile scholar of British and German literature, whose family perished in the Holocaust. His narrative ties together that of the other three, and of many of the side characters too. In telling Himmelfarb’s story, White tenderly evokes the world of pre-Holocaust German Jewry, before detailing its systematic destruction—an achievement of immense historical research. Not until Sophie’s Choice, published 18 years later, would another non-Jewish novelist attempt such a feat of Holocaust story-telling.

However, the parallels to Styron’s controversial novel don’t stop there. As with Styron, there are aspects of White’s approach that give pause. Namely, his use of the Jew.

“The Jew” is what the narrator and several characters call Himmelfarb from time to time. But the epithet isn’t the problem. White made no bones about his scorn for Australian society, and most of the characters are depicted as cruel, backstabbing, ignorant, devious cretins. The epithet is meant to drive home the atmosphere of xenophobia and casual racism that pervades Sydney. It’s this critique, not the slur, that’s off-putting. At its heart one finds the Jew, used as a figure of thought.

Opposed to Australian society—backward, pretentious, and thuggish, as White saw it—stands the Jew. Himmelfarb is by no means a perfect man, but compared to the cast of degenerate wife-beaters and hysterical social climbers who populate the novel, he’s a paragon of humility, openness, and fair-dealing. It would be one thing if White left it at that, since Mary Hare, the crazed heiress, Alf Dubbo, the aboriginal painter, and Maudie Godbold, the saintly housewife, offer a similar contrast. He goes a step further, however, and places Himmelfarb at the center of the novel’s drama. The Jew becomes a foil for White’s personal vision.

Without revealing exactly how the drama unfolds (you must read the book yourself to find out), suffice it to say that Himmelfarb endures much torment as a resented refugee. Like the Jews of Germany, he is blamed by the locals for Australian society’s woes. He becomes to them a symbol of everything they hate, including themselves. The process occurs in real-time in the mind of Himmelfarb’s chief tormentor:

Then Blue, who was hanging his [head], began to feel lonely, began to feel sad…. At the same time he was trying to remember—always a difficult matter where moral problems were concerned. His ear was aching with the effort as it pressed against the telephone of memory. But did at last distinguish the faintest: . . . suffer every Easter to know the Jews have crucified Our Lord. All the sadness pressing, pressing on a certain nerve. It was Them, Blue. All the injustice to which he had ever been subjected grew appreciably sadder. But for all the injustices he had committed, somebody had committed worse…. And must not go unpunished.

White claims that when he published Riders in the Chariot, his Australian critics refused to believe they had anything in them like the bigotry and baseless hatred that mobilized the Germans only two decades before. “It can’t happen here,” they told him. White clearly believed otherwise, and he uses the Jew to show it.

In the first place, Himmelfarb is the kind of decent man whom White thinks is in short supply. He is open-minded—one of the few characters not repulsed by Alf, routinely mistreated as an aboriginal, or Mary, laughed off as a crazy woman. Moreover, he shares with these outcasts a countercultural appreciation of beauty, natural and otherwise. Nor could anyone fault Himmelfarb’s generosity of character, to the point of ultimate patience with his tormentors.

Indeed, Himmelfarb’s torment reveals what else White uses the Jew for. A bystander to his torment has a kind of revelation:

Miss Mudge was trembling horribly for the discovery she had made; that she, herself quite blameless, might be responsible for some man, even all men. Now her responsibility was tearing her. Her hitherto immaculate flesh… did not know how to cope.

Above all, White, like James Baldwin, hated innocence, that is, the pretend-innocence of ignorance. White used the tormented Jew to show that not caring about the weakest members of society—aboriginals, refugees, the desperately poor—is the equivalent of casting them into the outer darkness. Miss Mudge realizes that her indifference to Himmelfarb’s fate makes her complicit in it.

Except is that true? Is not caring the same as tormenting someone? You might be guilty of something, but are you ultimately responsible? How could you be? Unless you are responsible for everyone, everywhere, all at once, since no one has less of a claim on you, in that case, than anyone else. And if that’s so, then you might as well give up, because you will never overcome being condemned for someone else’s fate. There’s simply too much to care about.

And this is what doesn’t sit right with me. The Jew is used to scold. After his backstory is narrated, Himmelfarb’s personality is nugatory; he might as well be a cardboard cutout. Sure, he’s possessed of spectacular visions, like his fellow travelers, and White’s prose in these passages of transport is utterly compelling and completely his own. But White beats you over the head with his moral. “Treat others as you’d like to be treated” is wonderful as an aphorism, eye-rolling as the basis for a novel.

Then there are the implications. Himmelfarb is a Wandering Jew. He’s at the mercy of his hosts. Their cruelty to their guest is the ultimate indictment. White relishes this opportunity to point out his society’s heartlessness. Yet by the same token he seems to prefer the Jew remain a perpetual stranger than demonstrate the ability to determine his own fate. A family of Jews in the novel who have assimilated to Australian society, the Rosetrees, come in for some of the harshest treatment of any characters. It’s as if Jews who join up with the larger society must be portrayed in the ugliest light to ensure that no one mistake their path for a decent one. White’s cursory treatment of Jewish nationalism, likewise, suggests annoyance at the phenomenon. The symbolism of the Jew-as-eternal-victim loses resonance when Jews have the power to fight off the world’s psychic projections.

I can’t deny the power of Riders in the Chariot. Its prose is transcendent; the interwoven story-lines are funny and strange, moving and bittersweet. I can’t deny the power, but I detest the moralism. It rings hollow to me—this we-are-all-responsible-for-one-another philosophy, this distaste, as it seems to me, for nationhood, and this innocence, innocence regarding the real difficulties of multiculturalism.

I love Riders in the Chariot, and I dislike it. Maybe it comes down to the simple fact that the Jew whom White has invented—to help him think through what he finds wrong with the world—is no Jew I recognize. Despite all his research, and his uncanny powers of characterization, he couldn’t get inside Himmelfarb’s head, and instead settled for the idea of a Jew.

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My intuition was a good one. Frost is a great American nature poet, arguably the greatest. His intimate knowledge of the flora, fauna, and winters of New England renders that landscape universal. His nature poetry is not merely raptures over greenery. Poems like “Birches” and “Mowing” emerge from a specific context, yet they allow readers to discover in that specificity a shareable moment of insight.

Admirers of Frost, however, know that he was more than a nature poet. A master of the dramatic monologue unlike any since Robert Browning, Frost is also a storyteller. Using the same blank verse dialogue Shakespeare did in his plays, he tells stories of the rural uncanny. These poems features witches, widows, unreliable guides, and spouses caught at moments of revelation. In them, Frost proves as sharp an observer of human nature as of the natural world.

It wasn’t until I read New Hampshire, the collection that earned Frost his first Pulitzer Prize and launched him into literary stardom, that I fully comprehended how these two parts of the poet—the naturalist and the humanist—fit together. As it turns out, Frost never attempted in his mature poetry to portray nature as such, but only nature as it is touched—and altered—by human experience.

The title poem of New Hampshire attests to this twin focus. “New Hampshire” is a long monologue by a Frost-like speaker, confessing his deep love for the state. What strikes this man about New Hampshire is its lack of commerce. Every other state has its special industry or product, while every resident of the rest of the (then) 48 states is busy buying and selling, hawking and huckstering. New Hampshire has only “specimens”—“One each of everything as in a showcase, / Which naturally she doesn't care to sell.” He goes on:

     One each of everything as in a showcase.

     More than enough land for a specimen
     You'll say she has, but there there enters in
     Something else to protect her from herself.
     There quality makes up for quantity.
     Not even New Hampshire farms are much for sale.
     ..................................................

     Apples? New Hampshire has them, but unsprayed,
     With no suspicion in stern end or blossom end
     Of vitriol or arsenate of lead,
     And so not good for anything but cider.

New Hampshire is a refuge from the state of constant busyness, not to mention business, that pervades the nation.

It is also and perhaps for the same reason distinguished by its natural beauty and its fascinating human “specimens.” The rest of New Hampshire, in fact, unfolds as a series of “notes” on this initial poem, treating first the people, then the nature that compose the state. Many of these poems are justly famous. They include “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” mentioned above, but also “Fire and Ice,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” “The Witch of Coös,” and “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”—a veritable hit parade of beloved Frost poems.

But it was another set of lines in “New Hampshire” that brought home to me the signal importance for Frost of the nature-man entanglement.

Near the end of this rather free-wheeling poem, the speaker takes up the topic of nature worship. Distancing himself from the Transcendentalist tradition to which you might expect a New England nature poet to adhere, Frost’s stand-in is wary of the sublime. The horror of nature worship that recurs throughout the Hebrew Bible lets him express why:

     Even to say the groves were God’s first temples
     Comes too near to Ahaz’ sin for safety.
     Nothing not built with hands of course is sacred.

In the next line, he assures us that “here is not a question of what’s sacred; / Rather of what to face or run away from,” but the insight—the fiercely anti-pagan insight that the sacred comes from nature mixed with human effort—resonates throughout the collection.

To face up to modernity, the huckstering mentality that besieges American life, you can’t just retreat to the mountains of New Hampshire. You must bring something back. Nature unmixed with human effort is no refuge but a terror at least equal to the onslaught of modernity. What Frost brings back is poetry.

This line of thought explains the seemingly boundless arrogance of “The Aim Was Song.” The conceit of the poem is that human beings taught the wind how to blow. That is, how to blow “right.” It reads, in full:

     Before man came to blow it right
          The wind once blew itself untaught,
     And did its loudest day and night
          In any rough place where it caught.

     Man came to tell it what was wrong:
          It hadn’t found the place to blow;
     It blew too hard—the aim was song.
          And listen—how it ought to go!

     He took a little in his mouth,
          And held it long enough for north
     To be converted into south,
          And then by measure blew it forth.

     By measure. It was word and note,
          The wind the wind had meant to be—
     A little through the lips and throat.
          The aim was song—the wind could see.

Human beings add something to the natural world. This is how we can dare to teach the wind to blow. While there is a tongue-in-cheek quality to the poem, it is due to the absurdity of the situation, not the fact of it. To be sure, the natural world is self-sufficient. It overawes us. And yet we puny creatures have something—the ability to create art, to make out of the beauty of existence something lasting—that all the rest of nature combined can’t muster. It’s funny, but it’s true.

No, Frost isn’t interested in nature as such. Its magnitude too much outstrips us. He is interested in what people learn about themselves by being in nature, by going outside and looking back on themselves from without. It is what we carry back for our dialogues, our odd encounters with one another, which moves him. Hence the two parts of New Hampshire—the tales of human encounter and the epiphanies experienced in nature—brought together for a while in the garrulous title poem.

The first edition of New Hampshire is interspersed with woodcuts by the illustrator J.J. Lankes. The final woodcut perfectly captures Frost’s dual obsession. A large, hand cranked grinding stone stands beside a tree. The grinding stone look low and squat in comparison. But the product of that stone, a sharpened ax blade, can topple the tree. So the grinding stone and the tree stand together in unmatched symmetry.

While poetry is no doubt symbolized in the grinding stone, Frost knew that an ax blade without a handle—or with, heaven forbid. a rubber one—is a diminished tool. And without anything to chop, it is nothing at all. Both are necessary for the poet’s art.

Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2006) has the makings of a sci-fi classic. It won China’s top prize for science fiction, then a Hugo Award upon its translation into English in 2014, and it is admired by critics and readers alike. Only time will tell, but in half a century The Three-Body Problem, plus its two sequels, could well hold the status of A Canticle for Leibowitz or Stranger in a Strange Land.

Given that it is held in such esteem, Liu’s book deepened my conviction that I don’t love science fiction. Don’t get me wrong, I like sci-fi—M. John Harrison, Philip K. Dick, and Ray Bradbury are great storytellers and, when they want to be, talented prose stylists. I simply don’t love it. Reading The Three-Body Problem helped me understand why.

But to give credit where it is due, let’s start with what’s great about sci-fi. The opening premise of The Three-Body Problem is—what if one day the laws of physics broke? At the start of the novel, Wang Miao, a nanotechnologist, is told that precisely this has happened.

An acquaintance informs Wang that the high-energy particle accelerator he works with can no longer produce consistent results. He compares the situation to a game of pool, where one knows that hitting the cue ball into the black ball at the correct angle will cause it to go into a pocket. Now “imagine another set of results,” Wang’s acquaintance says.

The first time, the white ball drove the black ball into the pocket. The second time, the black ball bounced away. The third time, the black ball flew onto the ceiling. The fourth time, the black ball shot around the room like a frightened sparrow, finally taking refuge in your jacket pocket. The fifth time, the black ball flew away at nearly the speed of light, breaking the edge of the pool table, shooting through the wall, and leaving the Earth and the Solar System.

While at the macro level, things proceed as normal, at a fundamental level something is amiss in the universe.

A strength of sci-fi is incredible ideas like this. A great science fiction writer is like a philosopher chock-full of thought experiments. But instead of using them to point to contradictions or limit cases in prevailing systems of thought, he fleshes them out. Liu does this admirably, exploring the human and civilizational consequences of some far-fetched ideas.

By contrast, a weakness of literary fiction—indeed, of fiction in general—is a certain flabbiness or outright absence of ideas. Domestic tragedy and the mid-life crisis sometimes seem to be the only narratives with which contemporary fiction writers are familiar. Sci-fi may at times focus insufficiently on complexity of character or stylish prose, but the result is to give us new perspectives on ourselves, the world, and the future.

Ideas are where science fiction shines, but they are also a key source of weakness. I can’t remember the writer who warned that “Ideas are not stories,” but it is a serious piece of advice. Too much sci-fi reads like someone had a cool idea and wrote a story around it. The idea, in this case, doesn’t generate a story but takes a plot and some characters and wraps them around itself like a blanket. The story is just a vehicle to deliver a clever thought experiment.

The Three-Body Problem mostly avoids that danger, yet it can’t escape a related one. A core idea or set of ideas is so important to most sci-fi that the narrative emphasis is usually on revealing it rather than developing the characters. In some cases, where the world-building is rich, the author becomes obsessed with showing us all the fascinating implications of a certain way of altering our reality. In others (and this is what happens in Liu’s novel), the book becomes a kind of mystery thriller, except that the breathless rush of the plot doesn’t lead to the culprit but an innovative idea. The Three-Body Problem has an intriguing idea hidden behind the premise that the laws of physics are broken. In pursuit of that idea, however, the characters get short shrift, displaying little developmental arc or psychological depth.

That same breathless rush may also be the cause of the pedestrian quality of much science fiction prose. The Three-Body Problem is full of clichés and paragraphs of uninteresting declarative sentences. A passage taken at random reads:

When I was a second-year student in high school, a math teacher noticed me. Back then, many high school teachers had impressive academic credentials, because during the Cultural Revolution many talented scholars ended up teaching in high schools. My teacher was like that.

There is a woodenness to this prose—perhaps due as much to the translator Ken Liu as the author himself—and a lack of syntactic economy. But since the important thing is to keep the plot moving, so that we can get closer to uncovering the mystery, the unpolished writing doesn’t matter.

Literary fiction, for one, can’t afford such lack of polish because its world is basically our own. Readers must be compelled by the way this world is presented, otherwise they could get their fill by putting down the book and looking around them. Great fiction must, like great poetry, “add to the stock of available reality.” Or it must expand one’s “awareness of the possibilities of life,” as F.R. Leavis said. Certainly, there are works of sci-fi that do these things at the levels of prose and insight into human psychology, but for the most part they do so by imagining worlds other than our own, which, to my mind, sidesteps the assignment.

Though I’m told it is the weakest in the trilogy, I enjoyed The Three-Body Problem. I intend to read the rest. As I said above, I like sci-fi. The ideas often blow my mind. But I’m not always in the mood for a mystery or to observe a series of thought experiments unfold. Frankly, world-building leaves me cold. I’d much rather see how a writer interprets—in words and plot—this world we share, which is usually strange enough for me.

Over the past two decades, a foolish idea became common on college campuses: “Intent matters, but impact matters more.” In our culture of safetyism, the notion that what someone says eclipses his intended meaning spread like wildfire. If you phrase something poorly, or use an out-of-vogue term, then it doesn’t matter what you intended to say, your interlocutor has a free pass to abort the conversation by announcing that he was harmed. If you have the temerity to respond that you didn’t mean the harm, you were just trying to make a point or interact, then you may be reprimanded, “What matters is the impact, not your intent!”

This has, alas, become the quickest, most self-righteous way to kill an interaction or argument. Reading Oedipus the King (c. 429–420 BCE), however, I began to wonder if the catchiness of the intent-impact dyad goes deeper than safetyism.

In an art museum somewhere at an indeterminate time in my childhood, I came across a video installation that told the story of Oedipus. I can’t remember my age, or which museum, but I will never forget the terror and revulsion I felt on seeing the bloody hollows where Oedipus’s eyes belonged. It is a memory that leaps out from the vagueness that envelops so much of childhood. A more gruesome punishment, I don’t know that I had yet seen.

Despite the video, I seem to remember that Oedipus’s crime remained unclear to me. Some decades later, though this was the first time I read Oedipus the King, I already knew his crime before the reveal. It is hard not to know the story in advance. Like the Athenians of Sophocles’s time, we have heard it from various sources. But like the bloody hollows where Oedipus’s eyes belonged, something about the play still inspires terror and revulsion, despite what is foreknown.

When the play begins, the city of Thebes withers under a curse from the gods; Oedipus, a decent king, commiserates with his subjects. He is eager to expose the cause of their misfortune and rectify it. He does not know, though we do, that he is the cause. Every step he takes to solve the mystery of the curse brings him closer to the revelation that he is the son of King Laius, whom he killed, and Queen Jocasta, the mother of his children.

Maybe what rattles the soul, no matter how often the story is told, comes through in the lines of the chorus, which say:

     All the generations of mortal man add up to nothing!
     Show me the man whose happiness was anything more than illusion
     Followed by disillusion.
     Here is the instance, here is Oedipus, here is the reason
     Why I call no mortal creature happy....

     He was our bastion against disaster, our honored King;
     All Thebes was proud of the majesty of his name.

     And now, where is a more heart-rending story of affliction?

Oedipus became the plaything of the gods, a victim of fate or chance. At birth predicted to do what he eventually did—kill his father and marry his mother—the infant Oedipus was cast out by his parents to die of exposure. It would seem that his rescue by a shepherd was miraculous. So, too, his upbringing in the family of the King and Queen of Corinth, and eventually his vanquishing of the Sphinx that terrorized Thebes. But his escape from death, his lucky adoption, and his heroism contrive to grant him an outcome worse than death. Nothing he did mattered. He plunged headlong into gravest sin, without the slightest clue about what he did.

That is what frightens me. How unwitting Oedipus is. Like the poor cases you hear about—men and women with brain tumors who suddenly act like someone else, sleepwalkers who commit unspeakable crimes—and yet worse, because he is fully himself, he is wide awake, while doing irreversible things he doesn’t even realize. You work your whole life to be the person you want to be and, in an instant—the instant the Greeks called anagnorisis—everything falls apart. Through no fault of your own, you no longer control what you do. Whatever you do turns against you. What frightens me are the unintended consequences of what I do; the things I do without knowing it.

Is this the secret fear that lurks beneath the surface on college campuses? Not the worry that “Intent matters, but impact matters more,” but the fear that intent doesn’t matter at all. The former is a social hang-up, the anxiety you feel when you don’t know how your words will land, or else an excuse you use to shut down a view you dislike. The latter is an existential fear. Are you like Oedipus, who “held the key to the deepest mysteries,” and “was envied by all his fellow-men,” yet who ends a poor, broken, wretched evil-doer? Will anything you do matter, not in the grand scheme, but even in the minor part that is your own life as you intend it?

Sophocles presents us with these questions and, despite the religious nature of Greek drama, he doesn’t offer us any consolation. We cannot propitiate the gods to prevent perhaps becoming Oedipus. Oedipus was, by all accounts, a decent man, if somewhat short-tempered. He neglected neither the gods nor his city nor his personal responsibilities. There is no charm against the misfortune of fortune. If it visits you, it does so unavoidably. All that remains for us is to know that “none can be called happy until that day when he carries / His happiness down to the grave in peace.” In the meantime, we tremble with the fear that one day we must make bloody hollows where our eyes belong.

No one falls in love on purpose. We can then be lucky or unlucky in love. I was lucky. I fell in love with Polish literature.

Here in America, Polish literature has lost its vogue. In the last decades of the previous century, when anti-communism mattered to the powers that be, Polish intellectuals were fêted in The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. Czesław Miłosz, Leszek Kołakowski, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Zbigniew Brzeziński, and Ryszard Kapuściński appeared regularly in their pages, the subject of reviews and essays or with articles of their own.

Who, born in the twenty-first century, knows these names? They belonged to heroes in the soft power battle against the Soviet Union, artists and intellectuals from a country subjugated by the evil empire, exposing its tyranny. As time goes on, I see them mentioned less and less.

Poland now embarrasses the same liberal elite who once praised its dissidents. When Poland regained its autonomy, thanks hardly at all to the Western powers, it fervently embraced its European heritage. By contrast, America and Western Europe, which were spared Communist rule, embraced internationalism. Like Hungary and Czechia, Poland emerged from the Cold War skeptical of any compromise of its national sovereignty. Today Poland is smeared as nationalist and xenophobic because the European Union’s supranational ambitions can’t abide domestic interests.

Lucky in love, I neither knew nor cared that Poland was out of favor. My love affair began with Czesław Miłosz’s final collection of poetry, Second Space (2004), and it continued with more poets, including Wisława Szymborska and Tadeusz Różewicz, then with trailblazers like Zofia Nałkowska and Olga Tokarczuk, and finally with such oddballs as Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz. I admired the steadfastness of Polish writers, who remained wryly observant and eerily humorous under Russian imperialism, Nazi occupation, Soviet oppression, and even in exile.

With wryness and humor to match the best of them, the poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924–98) survived the Nazis and outlived the Soviets. During the years of Soviet rule, he left Poland for years at a time, traveling through Europe and America. But he was never exactly an exile, not like Miłosz or Gombrowicz. And all the time he was writing: poems, essays, art criticism.

In 1974, Herbert published his masterpiece Pan Cogito. The title signals his ambition. It riffs on the title of Poland’s national epic, Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (1834). Translated twice—by John and Bogdana Carpenter and by Alissa Valles—as Mr Cogito, the English title Mr Thinker might also work. While Mickiewicz’s “Mr. Thaddeus” finds himself thrown into the fight against Russian imperialism, Mr Cogito’s battle is internal.

     All attempts to avert
     the so-called cup of bitterness...
     ....................................
     let you down

     you have to consent
     gently bow your head
     not wring your hands
          ("Mr Cogito Reflects on Suffering")

What Mr Cogito wants above all is the ability to think freely. Communist authoritarianism is an impediment to that, but so is the body, with its aches and pains, its nostalgia and aimless yearning. Suffering recurs in the collection as a reminder of human frailty. So does the legacy of the Stoics, who counseled mental fortitude through life’s travails. Mr Cogito wishes he could emulate Marcus Aurelius and attain a purity of mental life capable of weathering the storms of private tragedy and the twentieth century alike. Instead he is brought down into his body again and again, for good or bad.

     At home it's always safe

     but just over the threshold
     when Mr Cogito goes out
     on his morning stroll
     he meets—the abyss

     this is not the abyss of Pascal
     this is not the abyss of Dostoevsky
     this is an abyss
     to Mr Cogito's size
          ("Mr Cogito's Abyss")

The good to be found in this Mr Cogito–sized abyss is the discovery of Mr Cogito–sized deeds. Herbert and every Pole of his generation watched countless friends and family die heroically in the fight against Nazism and Communism. These freedom-fighters deserved every ounce of respect they inspired. Their memories, however, came to be used as a litmus test for those who came after. If you don’t die for the cause, if you don’t bear arms or go into permanent exile—what right do you have even to dream of a free Poland? Herbert defends small deeds against such belittlement.

In the rousing final poem of the collection, he commands the reader, or Mr Cogito, or both to take up the battle for the soul. The soul, too, not just one’s country, needs saving in dark times. And it may be the only battle you can win.

     be courageous when reason fails you be courageous
     in the final reckoning it is the only thing that counts

     and your helpless Anger—may it be like the sea
     whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten
 
     may you never be abandoned by your sister Scorn
     for informers executioners cowards
          ("The Envoy of Mr Cogito")

Herbert’s humble, self-deprecating, and fiercely intelligent poetry is a call-to-arms to both mind and body. Mr Cogito reminds us that the body can’t be transcended, nor can the times we live in. But neither must the mind be given up as insignificant in the face of the pseudo-arguments of bullets and bombs.

None of this makes for easy counsel. Herbert urges us to do the hardest thing—live in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,” as John Keats said. “We live in a world of contradictions and we ourselves are the victims of contradictory ideas, impulses, imaginings,” Herbert writes.

Talent is a valuable thing, but it goes to waste without character. What do I mean without character? I mean without a conscious moral attitude toward reality, without a stubborn, uncompromising borderline between what is good and what is evil.

Replace “talent” with ambition, motivation, or the desire to good and the claim applies to almost every human being.

The Soviet Union is gone now some thirty years. Herbert died before the new century was born. We live in a multipolar world. Things have changed. But I’m grateful I fell in love with Polish literature; it puts me in good stead for the much-heralded dark times ahead. Things have changed, yes, but not everything. The soul will always need saving.

     he would like to rise
     to the occasion fully

     fate looks him in the eye
     in a place where he once
     had a head
          ("Mr Cogito on Upright Attitudes")

“A prophet is not without honor except in his own town.” No philosopher had a greater impact on the West than Aristotle, but if you asked his contemporaries they would have said that he was simply Plato’s greatest student. (Some would have denied him even that.) In his day he confined his own original thought, taking strong exception to several of Plato’s theories, to the classroom and his uncirculated lecture notes. Two centuries after Aristotle’s death, the Roman statesman Cicero still praised him as an articulator of his teacher’s thought.

With the publication of Aristotle’s manuscripts, in the same century that Cicero lived, everything changed. The Ethics, the Politics, his work on physics, zoology, and literary criticism together express a massive attempt to come to grips with the nature of reality—human, divine, physical. These teachings, “composed in a strictly technical style with only the rarest attempt at grace in the writing,” as translator J.A.K. Thomson comments, would go on to influence Scholastic and modern philosophy, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian theology, and American republicanism. Even Aristotle’s detractors, from Machiavelli on down, bear his influence.

It should come as no surprise, given this impressive history, that the Ethics remains convincing after 2,300 years. Yet surprised I was.

I don’t know exactly what I expected, except that “virtue” seems such a lofty word. Virtue ethics sounds downright unrelatable. What interests little old me is how tomorrow I can be better than I was yesterday, not how to die nobly in the battlefield, like some hero out of Homer, or how properly to avenge a passing insult in the agora. The Ethics, for all its bona fides, looked to me full of the latter.

My instincts misled me. While there is plenty about battlefield courage and the magnanimity of wealthy men, the focus is quite squarely how to be happy. Aristotle’s key claim is that if you want to be happy, you must be good. “What is the supreme good attainable in our actions?” he asks.

“It is happiness,” say both intellectuals and the unsophisticated, meaning by “happiness” living well or faring well.

Happiness, he explains, is neither momentary nor merely physical pleasure. It is “an activity of the soul in conformity with perfect goodness.” What then is the good?

Aristotle gives no definition of the good, besides equating it with happiness. But without pretending to be an Aristotle scholar, it seems to me that the good is synonymous with the virtues. We are good insofar as we act virtuously. And how to act virtuously constitutes the bulk of the Ethics.

Acting virtuously is also the subject that puts Aristotle’s common sense on full display. By and large the virtues are familiar: courage, temperance, gentleness, modesty, etc. Equally familiar is the notion that each of the moral virtues is the mean sought between contrasting dispositions. Liberality, for instance—defined as sufficient and ungrudging expenditure on proper things, like one’s friends—is the mean between stinginess and profligacy. In other words, you shouldn’t be a tight-wad, but also don’t be a spendthrift.

The rest of the virtues can be framed according to this same principle of the golden mean. The “golden mean” is now common parlance, the basis for a kind of everyday ethics whereby people try to find the middle path between equally bad impulses. (Though it derives from his virtue ethics, Aristotle doesn’t himself use the term.) It’s a strange but real feeling to be boiling mad at a work problem, say, and in the same instant to want to give up and do nothing about it. The beauty of golden mean ethics is that in that moment Aristotle, or your gut, or a minute of reflection (if you know to wait for it), can bring you the magic phrase: righteous indignation—and a way to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of rage and lassitude.

In short, Aristotle is relatable. Reading the Ethics is a helpful review of things most of us know, with some hot takes and philosophical digressions to boot. Among the many insights is a lovely expression, for instance, of the irreversibility of human action and our responsibility for the consequences:

When once you have thrown a stone, it is gone for good and all. Still, it lay with yourself to let it lie instead of picking it up and throwing it; the origin of the act was in you.

Clearly Aristotle believed in personal responsibility (“the origin of the act was in you”), but without being narrow about it. He looks outside the individual to see how a world of consequences ripples out from the personal (“it is gone for good and all” means gone from one’s control), as if the stone were thrown into a pond.

A question, however, about the relatability of the Ethics remains. How, after 2,300 years, can Aristotle sound so right? I don’t live in a slave-owning society, like he did, where women can’t vote. I neither speak Greek, like he did, nor claim descent from nobility. I live in a capitalist country under democratic-republican government. Like 99% of people who read the Ethics throughout history, I share little with its author. Times supposedly change, and nothing stays the same, yet here I am saying yes, and yes again, as I flip the pages of this book.

Two answers come to mind. Maybe I am simply the product of a West that bore out Aristotle’s vision. Even though almost every circumstance of my life differs from what Aristotle knew, or could have reasonably expected, maybe his ideas were infused in societies that arose millennia after him, so that they seem strikingly self-evident.

Maybe. Or maybe he was right about human nature. And if he was right about human nature, then was he right that there is such a thing as natural law? Another question for another time.

Because high schools teach Socrates’s life in reverse, beginning (and often prematurely concluding) with his trial and execution, most people know how he died: clear-eyed, dignified, and iconoclastic to the bitter end. This is a good indication of life he led. Cowards don’t tend to muster their courage on the chopping block.

Yet life isn’t lived always at the end. At moments of high drama, bravado can masquerade as courage. On the other hand, the habit of conducting oneself rightly, day in and day out, is near-impossible to fake.

Protagoras features Socrates in the prime of his life, aged 34. He is already a formidable thinker and debater, highly regarded by his friends and known to traveling philosophers. The dialogue opens with his friend Hippocrates barging into Socrates’s house before dawn to announce the arrival in Athens of the titular sophist and his intention to pay Protagoras whatever sum he requests to be his teacher. He desires to learn from Protagoras how to be “as wise as he is himself.” He thinks this is how he will become a good man.

It’s clear from the start, then, what kind of people Socrates surrounded himself with—the kind who rush breathless toward wisdom. He, too, of course, was a wisdom-seeker, though less impetuous than his friend. In fact, Socrates seems dubious about Protagoras’s merit as a teacher. A lover of knowledge, he remains also skeptical and discerning. As he says,

Do you see what kind of danger you are about to put your soul in? If you had to entrust your body to someone and risk its becoming healthy or ill, you would consider carefully whether you should entrust it or not. . . . But when it comes to something you value more than your body, namely your soul . . . I don’t see you getting together with your father or brother or a single one of your friends to consider whether or not to entrust your soul to this recently arrived stranger.

As a favor to Hippocrates, Socrates agrees to debate Protagoras to see if he is worthy of being his friend’s teacher.

The verbal boxing match that ensues is a fierce affair. At stake is the question whether virtue can be taught, with Socrates opposing and Protagoras supporting the idea. Protagoras tries to use eloquence to overcome his conceptual contradictions, while Socrates, employing the dialectical method, presses his advantage as a thinker. Both resort to less than upstanding tactics and the atmosphere deteriorates. The debate ends with Protagoras bested but, intriguingly, the debaters having taken the opposite view from where they began.

The deciding argument sheds light on our opening question. Protagoras asserts that while most of the traits of virtue can and must be taught, an exception is courage, which even the foolish may possess. Socrates is scandalized by this claim. With methodical insistence he demonstrates that courage without knowledge is merely confidence, and mere confidence the ignorance of cowards. One must know what one faces to be considered truly courageous; the alternative, blind brazenness, is a form of stupidity. For Socrates, knowledge is the basic good from which all virtues flow.

In light of his estimation of knowledge, Socrates’s life and death appear to form a whole. All his life, he pursued wisdom, surrounding himself with friends who ran headlong after it, debating the smartest men he could find. All his life, in short, he accumulated virtue. Facing death, how could he be a coward? Plato’s Protagoras reveals, through the young Socrates, the kinds of conduct, the habits developed through love of knowledge, which sustain one in extremis.

There is as much to be learned from Socrates’s life, I submit, as from his death. What kind of life did he lead? A well-examined one, he hoped. That is to say, a virtuous one.