How Did Agnon Destroy Religious Literature?

Agnon as the prophet of religious superficiality. The external language is traditional, but the entire reality is secular, and only the internal infrastructure is religious - yet terrifyingly primitive from a religious perspective, functioning merely as a skeleton of religion, without the spirit. All the immense complexity stems from the way the complex secular world is superimposed on a simplistic religious myth - and not from mythical-religious complexity in itself, resulting in hypocrisy, which is a gap between practice and foundation. This is the description of a typical Agnon work - but also of the religious world in our time

What connected Agnon to Rabbi Kook? On the link between hypocrisy and kitsch - and on the vitality Agnon drew from his delight in hypocrisy, in the religiosity of cynicism (Source)

The last, and strongest, place of religion - is precisely in romance in its simplest form. The idea of romantic destiny - that there is "the man of my life," "the intended one," and "the love of my life" - still lives, in an era of networked multiple possibilities and connections, only within a religious world - where couplehood has become a religion, and where fate still exists. Because the existence of "the one" and "the one" stems from the existence of "the One," namely God, and a "meeting of souls" requires belief in a "soul." Therefore, a marginal sentence in rabbinic literature, which states that the pairing of so-and-so's daughter to so-and-so is determined by a heavenly voice before the fetus is formed, has now become a principle of faith in Judaism, and today would have opened Maimonides' principles of faith.

What began (in distant romanticism) as a copying of religious ideas (Christian!) to the religion of love, that is, romanticism, meaning secularization - has become the main current religion. Therefore, religious society is obsessively preoccupied with dating and singles, because singlehood is the contradiction to faith, because the religion of love has been internalized - as the Jewish religion. The Jewish home has become more important than the synagogue, the study hall, and the Temple combined. And the secular transition from love to sexuality is already cracking the religion of the home from the outside. Because romanticism is already artificial in secular reality, it is already an ideology - and not a belief. It is kitsch - and not realism.

And Agnon understood all this. Because in Agnon's work, secular reality is a thick sandwich between religious language (on the external side) and religious deep structures (on the internal side). In Agnon's work, there is always a mythical deep structure at the foundation of the plot, and this is essentially what he is telling us: beneath the secular world - there exists a religious world. And the main belief for him, which he understood to be the main belief of religion, is romantic destiny. Hence the issue of [Translator's note: "agunah," a woman "chained" to a marriage] - there is no way to break free from the deep structure. The heroes are not free. They are trapped in the mythical, and only seem to act according to this world. There is no way to break free from who was destined for you, and if it is done, disaster is caused indirectly, or correction and return to the right order is caused indirectly. Just as the Greeks believed in personal fate, so Agnon believes in romantic fate, hence his tendency towards the tragic. The violation of destiny is a catastrophe, whether before marriage or after, and destiny overcomes everything, precisely because of the God who is connected to this destiny as the Moirai are connected to the fate of life. Agnon tries to write tragedies - because at his core, he is not a traditional Jew, but a romanticist.

The romantic motive is central to Agnon's world and his heroes, unlike Kafka for example, where the motive of life fulfillment and existence (and their opposite - death) is central to it. One writes a traitor and the other writes a murderer. And indeed we can classify writers according to those for whom romantic love is secondary to the existence of life, and the opposite, for whom life is secondary to love. Until the modern era, Judaism was a religion whose central motive was life, survival for example, while in modernity it became a religion whose central motive is love. The central promise is not life after death, but a life of love and home - intimacy. Love in the age of the death of love, and the certainty that the spouse was destined for us forty days before our creation. And this is in contrast to the secular doubt - not in the existence of God - but in love, in choice and in the beloved.

The religious person is assured that he was supposed to marry whom he married, for the correction of his soul and her soul (meaning - even if they argue and don't get along), and this is the main example of the providence he believes in, much more than if he is sick (even cancer is no longer caused by God, and certainly not by sins, but by rebellious cells). Therefore, religious people leave religion on romantic grounds, and no longer really secularize on the grounds of illness and death and the question of evil in the world. And therefore, romantic kitsch has completely corrupted religious creation. Agnon destroyed religious literature, because when he is simplified, what remains is the romantic structure (and the romantic longing for language) without a cruel realistic cover, which was created because Agnon wrote for the secular, and therefore had to be outwardly secular (and hide religiosity). And in general - his hypocrisy helped him create depth. But for the religious who learned from him as an example, the hidden has already become revealed - and there is no depth. They are not hypocrites - they are shallow. They believe in love.