The Sin of Hebrew Literature

Kafka is guilty of the Holocaust. Therefore, we must correct the literature of nightmares with the literature of dreams

Nitzav Yaakov Shabtai (Source)

I dreamed that the secular people, in their war against religious coercion, decide that it's forbidden to celebrate Simchat Torah [Rejoicing of the Torah] and instead celebrate the Joy of Hebrew Literature. And I see them dancing in circles around a statue of an author with horns. And they tell me that because they waited 40 years and a Hebrew masterpiece was slow to come, they went to their priest, the Literature Professor, and he did a Headstart [crowdfunding campaign], and this golden Agnon [famous Israeli author] came out, just with horns instead of a kippah [skullcap]. And I already understand that when the masterpiece arrives, it will break the text over their heads. But here they are, rising to make merry before the herd of their realistic idols, of humans made by human hands, in a celebration of Hebrew literature, and the doctoral students are sleeping with the professors who are sleeping with the female authors who are sleeping with the critics who are sleeping with the female editors who are sleeping with the doctoral students. And I flee outside the camp and meet there the leprous ultra-Orthodox man, who hugs a Torah scroll because it's the only skin that doesn't run away from him. And I realize that I've finally found an audience, and a captive one at that, and I pour out my bitterness:

Come, at least you listen to me out of all of Sodom and Gomorrah! The biggest mistake Zionism made was reviving the Hebrew language, which turned its culture and literature into a backwater. Into something provincial. Disconnected from Western literature, despite its initial conditions allowing it to speak with all Western languages. But it simply preferred to talk to itself. The revival of the Hebrew language would have been worthwhile only if religious literature had been written here - and that didn't happen. It's impossible to produce religious literature here. Even though the peak of secular literature is always religious, at least in its aspiration for the border, like the last chapter in the last book of the Border Guard commander.

- The Border Police commander?

- Look it up on Wikipedia. It was some peak that secular literature reached when it was pushed to the wall, facing death, and since then it hasn't returned to it and didn't know what to do with it, whether to jump down into the abyss, and remained stuck. When what needed to be done was to build stairs to the heavens. The madness with Hebrew would have been worthwhile only if a complete religious literary movement had been created here, say like biblical literature (which today no publisher would publish). Zionism's great missed opportunity for its destiny was the aspiration to return anew to the Bible, instead of writing a new Bible. The attempt to return to the land of the Bible instead of to the biblical era - as a creative period. And from there everything went wrong.

It's always said that literature predicts political processes because it precedes them. But literature doesn't predict anything, as if it has some crystal ball, or some irrational nonsense of the kind that intellectuals believe in. Literature causes processes. That's the reason it precedes them. Literature is the central force in history. These are things that go way over historians' heads. They don't grasp how viral ideas are, and to what extent the political entity is a cultural entity.

Rome, for example, became an empire thanks to the development of the genre of legal literature in the Mishnaic period. The whole story of lawyers and reserve generals - that's Roman heritage. The legal structure managed to create an unprecedented army, because an army is built on orders and hierarchy and organizational power. Like the Wehrmacht. And the Talmud was the Jews' revenge on the Romans for the destruction. The Gemara caused the fall of the Roman Empire. It broke down the genre of law into a literature of arguments, and crumbled the organization and power into fragments, and created the Middle Ages, as medieval scholars labored for a thousand years to build a new whole and comprehensive system out of the pieces, through the genre of commentary, which became the medieval genre. And then the poskim [Jewish law adjudicators], who decided they were tired of the endless scholasticism and wanted a practical conclusion, brought about the modern era through the genre of halakha [Jewish law], which created the modern state, as a comprehensive legal system.

In other words, the most important struggle in history is a genre struggle, and this is from the very definition of history as the period of writing. The Book of Zohar created the Renaissance, by creating the genre of reviving an imagined golden age. And Kabbalah created modern science, by essentially creating the idea of a systematic structure that operates at the base of the world from afar and in secret, and that operates potentially, not immediately, and not in the revealed. What are called forces, fields, charges, and energies. All the heroes of the scientific revolution, like Copernicus or Newton, were mystics, and Kabbalah had an enormous influence on them. Copernicus determined that the sun was at the center for astrological reasons and Newton devoted much more intellectual energy to planning the Third Temple than to Newton's three laws.

Hasidism created the Romantic movement, and within it, the one at the roots of Nazism is Nachman of Breslov, a lineage that can be shown in detail. He started modernism in literature, in his folk tales, and created a new genre of fantastic literature. From the moment he was translated into German in 1906, the encounter immediately created a new German nightmarish genre, and the Holocaust was a matter of time, for Nazism was a direct continuation of German phantasmatic expressionism to the political realm. And of course, it's all the fault of German-writing Jews, who are the direct culprits: the translator, the fake Admor [Hasidic leader] Buber and his friend the fake holy monk, who immediately after reading the tales began to compose his plagiarisms, a Jew of course, a despicable cockroach with the blood of six million on his hands, an heir to hell named "Kafka" (may the names of the wicked rot). Kafka is guilty of the Holocaust. Therefore, we must correct the literature of nightmares with the literature of dreams. Because literature is the strongest force in the world, and the Jews once knew this. After all, if history is written by the victors, it also works in reverse, that whoever writes history is the victor. That's why the Jews defeated the Babylonian Empire that destroyed the First Temple through the Bible, and the Roman Empire that destroyed the Second Temple with the help of Trojan horses like Jesus and Josephus. This is the method of the Jews. That's why we can still defeat Hitler. The Germans will not write history.

Therefore, before the destruction of the Third Temple, we need more successful literature to win. And like on Simchat Torah, the moment we finish with the wanderings in exile and look at the Promised Land - we need to start the Torah anew. Instead of continuing to the Book of Joshua, to conquer and settle and establish an empire and then split into Judah and Israel and become insolent and worship idols until the known-in-advance end of destruction. The Torah is a radical alternative to history, and to the Prophets and Writings that characterize the inflated prose in the country, with the anxiety and seriousness of the nightmare and the self-proclaimed brave prophecies of destruction (what strained phrasings!) - instead of the fun of the dream. If it's not fun to write, how will it be fun to read? Hebrew prose promises us only blood, sweat, and tears, instead of wine, seed, and spit. Therefore, we need to replace the nervousness and sadness of Hebrew literature with the joy of Torah.