IN THE IMAGE: VIRITUAL RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHICAL TALMUD

Zachary Bratermanm

Chapter Digest

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For Elliot

EPIGRAPH

Aspaklaria (mirror, speculum)—this is the covering that is made in order to see behind it. To me, it is a compound word, safeq (doubt) and re’iyah (sight), meaning that what is seen behind the covering—whether it is made of glass, blar (a translucent material), or a sapphire substance—is not perceived in its true place, as explained in the science of optics. Likewise, it is not seen in its true proportions. The scholars call a covering that is exceedingly clear and does not obscure what lies behind it aspaklaria ha-me’irah (a luminous speculum). This term is by way of a parable regarding Moses’s perception of the Divine: He apprehended the Creator, may He be blessed, to the utmost extent possible for a human being in material form. As it is said, “For no man shall see Me and live” (Exodus 33:20). Accordingly, in Pirkei Avot, the sages said, “All the prophets beheld through an aspaklaria that is not luminous, but Moses our teacher beheld through an aspaklaria ha-me’irah.” Though we have strayed from the legal discussion, we have clarified this.   

—Maimonides, Commentary to Mishnah Kelim 30:2

INTRODUCTION

[[What is philosophical Talmud in the mode of imaging consciousness, especially fantasy]]

This variation on philosophical Talmud and the phenomenology of religion is premised on the claim that aesthetics is first philosophy—a primary aesthesis or the continual crossing back and forth between sense perception and concepts in the reflective and productive work of the imagination. Associated with place, the imagination refers to that ultimately mysterious crown or power of mind that cuts dark, luminous inflections into the order of things upon which it reflects. Outside representation (the vast realm of images, pictographs, symbols, maps and diagrams, and ideas) there is no thinking and no thought, no knowledge and no knowing, no ethics and no law, no wisdom and no possible experience. All figures of thought, even when they resist representation, are caught in the special and peculiar aura of the imaging consciousness….Subject to illusion and violence, the strained life these things assume inside the imagination is simultaneously connected and disconnected to the harsh life and to the gentle life of the actual world as conventionally perceived and experienced by way of representation…(p.1).

[…]

My skeptical caveat regarding the aesthetics of Talmud runs against the grain of an old theme in the radical Western avant-garde of the twentieth century: the conceit of merging art, life, and political praxis. Talmud is a form of life set apart from life. Drawn apart from the actual world and placed behind veils, Talmud maintains an unclear purchase on ethics or politics. Talmud is a phenomenologically rich thing of beauty, a work of art, religion itself, boxlike, a make-believe world of fantasy. And with total fascination comes real and catastrophic effects when the virtual enters into the actual world. For these pages, I hope to have created a simulation in which to tease out new topoi for Jewish philosophy and the philosophy of religion that relate to pictures and phenomenological awareness, human emergence, plastic structure, the image of God, and the place of religion in the world. I do so in critical awareness that the utopia of Talmud does not lend itself to what is conventionally called the real world in any obvious sense, that the real life of the giant and antlike surrealism of Talmud lies “in the image” (p.16).

Chapter 1, IMAGE-TALMUD-CINEMA

[[Talmud is a technological apparatus that creates cinematic images, and the image of an imaginal world]]

On the difference between personae and figures, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari posit that personae are images that magnify the power of pure concepts. A persona is the subject of thinking determined by problems and expressed in the modal form of possibles and becoming, like “the schizophrenic” who lives intensely within the thinker and forces the thinker to think as an intensity of self remote from self. At the origin of philosophical thought, the single conceptual persona is not a finished or complete proposition. Philosophical personae are open, transcendental conditions for the exercise of new thinking that heighten the power of concepts.1 In contrast to the conceptual work of philosophy, “oriental sages,” so named by Deleuze and Guattari, think in figures. In art and music, figures are defined as powers of percepts and affects that surpass the ordinary percepts and affects they magnify. Concepts and figures are distinct but not separable, nor are they one opposed to the other. Rather, figures and concepts pass through each other. One such passage is through religion, which Deleuze and Guattari understand as thinking through figures (p.17).

The places of religion and its fascination are “in the image.” Internal to its own constitution, an image is a type of representation (alongside diagrams, ideas, propositions, etc.). Easily confused with exact likeness, especially in photography, an image is a plastic or mental re-presentation in relation to another thing. At once spectral and physical, the image is a condition of plastic and mental appearance. The image shapes and sharpens human consciousness by magnifying affective and intellectual orientations of awareness entangled into nexuses of physical elements and psychic phenomena. Images absorb within the ambit of consciousness anything and everything that can be imagined. “Spiritual beings,” “gods,” “God,” “world,” “person,” “holiness,” and “community” are bound up, mapped, and given to see in religious place-making and picture-thinking. For-itself, thought bends out of shape and into new shape that which would otherwise simply be in-itself. The mode of being of the image is proximate to nothingness. As grasped by Gilbert Simondon, an image is a “concrete representation with a sensorial content built in the absence of sensory stimulations—or appearing in the absence of such stimulations (p.19).

[…]

But when King David enters the bathhouse, he feels that something is suddenly amiss. David is wearing neither tefillin nor fringes. Instead of God, he sees himself standing naked and exclaims, “Woe is me that I should stand naked without a mitzvah about me!” David now finds himself now stripped of his ornaments and in a sudden state of panic. “But when he reminded himself of the circumcision in his flesh, his mind was set at ease.” The mark of circumcision is itself an ornament for the “man” of Israel that gives him power. Immediately following this vignette, the sugya points back to the three original ensembles of ornamental devices. R. Eliezer b. Jacob comments, “Whosoever has the tefillin on his head, the tefillin on his arm, the fringes on his garment, and the mezuzah on his doorpost, is in absolute security against sinning, for it is written, ‘And a threefold cord is not quickly broken’ and it is also written, ‘The angel of the Lord encamps round about them that fear Him and delivers them’” (Mena􀛊ot 43b).

The contemporary reader can hardly be able to turn away from this figure of David, a statue naked in the bathhouse, without asking if some semblance specific to a woman could ever have been the object of her gaze, the intentional object of her Torah, in her own image in the image of God? Would she even be allowed to dress “like a man” and enjoy the privilege of that sublime vison and visage? For all that rabbinic law privileges the performance of obligatory mitzvoth over supra-obligatory acts, technically, a woman could conceivably wear all the equipment, the tefillin and fringes, worn by a man. What would she see when she looks out over the blue sea and sky toward sapphire visions of the Throne of Glory? The verses encased in God’s tefillin should by all right refer back to her as well. But what would she look for when, like David, naked and perplexed in the bathhouse, she looks down at her own body? Which optical and tactile impressions, modes of figuration, are there given to the eye and hand, which corporeal configurations? How might one conceive the image of the human in the image of “woman” in what is a binary format of the religious imagination? With what kind of icon? (p.49]

Chapter 2, IN UTERO (HUMAN)

[[Talmud images illuminated pictures of soft, emergent human life]]

The apparatus of Talmud is a lens through which to look at sexuated pictures of purity, the primary color of blood, the discharge of tissue and embryonic matter, the illumined form of fetal life: an image of the human defined in terms of vivid matter and eudemonic being. At once clinical and intimate, the human picture is the object of a gaze bound up with earthy and vegetal and animal qualia, the perfection of a pliable hominid shape. In the plastic system of tractate Niddah, attention goes to laws that treat the phenomenon of a woman’s menses as part of the larger order of purities prior and more basic to the signifying capacity of the phallus as a symbol of mind and language. The essence of human life, without which human life cannot be, is spots and compounds of red stuff and white stuff, a basic and formal physiognomic shape, and a living animate soul or nefesh. Intelligence is the superaddition of eudemonistic perfection. I start this exploration into the image following the assertion by rabbinics scholar Charlotte Fonrobert that the laws of Niddah regulating menstruation are on par with circumcision as a primary marker of Jewishness. But more universal than that, they are a fundamental marker of human being tout court (pp.50-1).

This chapter is especially indebted to Jewish feminism and feminist theory writ large for critically reorienting Jewish philosophy and the philosophy of religion around the matter of bodies. But it was art, including feminist art emerging at the same time in the late 1960s and 1970s, that taught me how to see theoretical discourse in a different aspect, to look for pictographs of the human nested in things and images of corporeal potential saturated by desire and affect. If tractate Niddah tells us anything about social reality and actual power, the critique of which dominates feminist theory, it is only indirectly about the sheer vitality of beginnings and the physical objecthood of consciousness. Apart from art, there is no other place to envision these things fully and then to grasp how in a picture, removed one step from the world’s actuality, real things and hard structures begin to soften and dissolve into colors and dots (p.51).

Imaged in tractate Niddah is dead and living human stuff in delicate pictographs of vivid blood-colors, creaturely shapes, and floating fetal formation. The Bavli’s gaze at vital life illuminates for contemporary Jewish philosophy and the philosophy of religion elemental questions about human being. In its preformation, human emergence is caught between organic color and active and fluid potentiality, raw sensorial and affective tissue on the one hand and the emission of dead matter and dead animal mutation on the other hand. Imaged by the Bavli, human being and human becoming is soft, correlate to color and light in relation to vegetal nature, animal shape, and embodied spiritual illumination (pp.53-4).

Critical aesthesis relies on the operation of a technical apparatus composed of double brackets and double powers. The apparatus lends itself to the formation of a new image-constellation from a position inside and outside of the image-work itself. The hard and harsh actuality of the world reflected and reproduced across the entire chain of rabbinic tradition as a phallic bracket is simultaneous to its colorful and fleshy softness. Taking pleasure, looking at human potential and at the liquid power of talmud Torah before the hard power of practical law, the Bavli maintains undergirding commitments to sex and human well-being, to generous and critical creation of figures that are materialist and embodied. Carnal perceptions folded up inside the talmud Torah of the Bavli generate for Jewish philosophy a rich and saturated picture of the world set at a discrete distance from the given and fixed points of view determined in practical law. The superposition of supple brackets inside the harsh actuality of the world makes possible a superb feel for the softness of human being. Full of potential, fluid brackets are free and pliable modalities based not on a stand apart phenomenology of radical difference. A soft place of the holy, Talmud incorporates new potential folds of embodied consciousness, forms of spiritual life in the mode of phantasy vis-a-vis the inter-subjective and trans-subjective mass of the material world as sensed and imagined (p.90).

Chapter 3, PLACE (BEIT HA’MIKDASH)

[[Talmud images pictures of place, fleshy figures of holy place through which it moves]]

The image is a different space and place than place and space conventionally perceived in realist epistemologies and fundamental ontologies. Things take on a fluid and bright constitution, caught inside the soft and stretchy place of the image. As place, the image itself is an emblem of the holy, a nutlike structure full of free potentiality, protected, nested; flat, de-actualized, simulacral, at ease vis-a-vis the world of possible experience. The holy itself is imagistic— assuming all the qualities of an image—a small and set-apart world sustained over time that refuses to die. A textually constituted domain, sacred place is uniquely structured in Babylonian Talmud as an afterimage. Before its destruction, the actual Temple in Jerusalem was the quintessence of the holy. Its afterimage in thought supersedes this quintessence. The afterimage of the Beit Ha’Mikdash is virtual, free from temporal constraints and outside history. Not subject to perception, holiness is transformed into an active power reinstituted in memory and phantasy. No longer somewhere, the intelligent awareness of the Bavli moves around inside the miniature. The holy that seemed solid in the actual world appears weightless in the virtual, a holding place for the nesting God covered up between cuts and folds (p.91).

The spatially horizontal constitution of the Bavli is a direct opposite to “the pious descendants of time” dominating modern Jewish philosophy and thought well into the twentieth century.5 Built on a logic of physical objects and sites, the Bavli provides contemporary Jewish philosophy and thought a platform on which to think about place as a critical topos of theoretical reflection. The primary object and locus is the Temple—not the actual Temple but a simulation. The Beit Ha’Mikdash is a paradigmatic example of what Foucault called “the real space of Society” turned “upside down.” Its flesh there is as “fundamentally unreal” as any utopia. Deep inside the imagination, the afterimage of the Temple forms into a nucleus of the holy, embedded virtually, not actually, in the real world. Set apart inside and cut off from the ordinary or profane world, holy place is a crystallized structure or enclosure. In the “other place” of a utopia, “I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface” (pp.92-3).

[…]

Writing about dreams, Elliot Wolfson finds in Merleau-Ponty and in mysticism a radical freedom inherent to the birth-genesis of a world. Wolfson identifies in dreams the collapse of past, present, and future that determine chrono-topical models of exact time and space in ordinary waking consciousness. Contending that the subject of the dream is not the dreamer but the dream itself, Wolfson, in a gloss on Hegel, sees in the dream and we see in the Bavli the covering of oneself in oneself. Wolfson’s analysis indicates how the Bavli maps on the other side of wakefulness an image of the-world-to-come. Dangerous are those precise waking-points when the virtual reality of the dream crashes into the actual world. Fanatics of religion seek to wake up a people from the sleeping place of an occulted nomos, activating passive orders of holy things in the furious now-time of actual place. In messianism and mysticism, the holy lends itself to being twisted into a violent domain by way of a simple ratio: The more the idea of the holy is set into the actual world, the more it turns into a hard structure, as if simply given, the more socially and politically determined, the more dominated and dominating, the more destructive (p.128).

Non-fanatic, the Beit Ha’Mikdash is free in the world from the reality of God. No overriding or uncanny power dominates the place. All we have seen is the semblance of vague operators moving inside the mental picture of an occulted place as imagined via a textual apparatus controlled by its users. The House of the Holy is a simulacrum. Profoundly rational and non-ecstatic, no figure has shown itself that might have been confused with a mind-independent being situated outside the mirror image. God’s presence is contained inside the place of God, the place of the Beit Ha’Mikdash, inside the text, in a liturgical image, a figure displaced in the mind and concealed there. Bachelard says that when a thing becomes isolated, it becomes “round,” concentrated on itself. From verse to verse in a poem by Rilke, an image of a walnut tree grows in its being—“alive, reflective, straining towards God.” The Bavli is round. The Beit Ha’Mikdash in the Bavli is an icon of God, asleep and dreaming, hidden between lines inside an undulating mental pictograph of nested place (pp.128-9).

Chapter 4, THE IMAGE OF GOD

[[Talmud images a holograph of God inside the holy of holies of the imagination]]

As it recites the additional (musaf) prayer in the Shabbat and holiday liturgy, the congregation imagines itself with the angels calling out one to the other in the starry heavens. Combining the spectacle of optical and sonic signals, it is in the holiness or kedusha blessing of the musaf that the angels declare that the glory (kavod) of God fills all the world. But they shout this only to then ask each other, “Where is the place of God’s glory?” Another angel responds that the glory of God is blessed from “His place.” From “His place,” God turns in compassion and mercy to the people of Israel, who proclaim twice daily, evening and morning, “The Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” I begin this chapter on this liturgical note to underscore how Jewish tradition imagines God in place, in the image, in relation to figures (tzurot) that are always over there, contained, in relation to place and people and objects. In the image, theglory or emanation of God is set in place, not out of place, given to see from “His” place through a lattice, a fleeting presence made visible by frames and partitions, in relation to a range of texts, garments, graphic letters, and other objects of optical perception (p.130).

[…]

To bracket the Absolute’s bright light and bracing iconoclasm as it appears in radical theology is to think toward a more complete theological shift. After the aesthetic-conceptual-affective canons of modernism and abstract art, a postmodern or contemporary theology in the image would have more in common with pop art and found art, so-called idols, Byzantine icons, spatial configurations, simulacra, and the figures and tiles and the zeros and ones of virtual reality. God’s presence is curious and canny, nestled over there in a corner, circumscribed behind a partition, configured inside the spatial and virtual imaginaries.3 The postmodern God of the Bavli would be “interesting,” not “sublime.” Neither absolute nor abject, the reality of God in the image is given vis-a-vis an ambient sense of things enmeshed into the frames and cuts of mediated structures and envelopes. Against monism, postmodern theology and postmodern religion would look for God’s simulacral presence entangled in medial folds of a mental mesh and apparatus in the phenomenology of place (pp.131-2).

[…]

The Talmud of the Babylonian rabbis is rational and non-fanatic. It institutes a modest place of its own, but not as a place of world-negation. The place of God in Talmud occupies a world unto itself in the world shared with others, an imaginal world, not actual. Non-messianic, Talmud is not the world itself, nor does it try to constitute itself in this way. The Babylonian rabbis establish the power of God inside the limit of their own domain, within the four cubits of the law, a horizontal domain not under the control of God but vis-a-vis God. The postmodern God of Talmud is encountered as place (Makom) and in place. God as Place is the place of the world transposed inside the simulation of a small world nestled in the world at large, one step outside historical time and place (p.166).

As a distinct but not separate sphere, the non-fanatic image leaves alone that which lies outside the partitions that set apart the image-place. As recognized by Barthes at the end of his book on photography, “What characterizes the so-called advanced societies is that they today consume images and no longer, like those of the past, beliefs.” Barthes concludes, “They are therefore more liberal, less fanatical, but also more ‘false’ (less ‘authentic’).”  Rational, non-fanatic religion steps back from the place of the image and moves out into an image of the public square represented by the courtyard, and from there out into the city and countryside. In Talmud, a non-fanatic image of God inside the place of the Holy of Holies gives way to an image of the world outside its confine. The religion of reason demands the robust and simultaneous counterimage of a larger secular or nonholy and ordinary space—Tel Aviv, New York—as a place of unbelief, the counterweight to the threat of actual violence that is inherent to life lived inside one exclusive imaginal frame. There are also other holy sites in the world. About the gods, we will see them in the next chapter. A fungible part of the divine creation, their idols are finely wrought and cosmopolitan (pp.166-7).

Chapter 5, WORLD (IMAGE, NOT IDOL)

[[The Babylonian Talmud is iconodulic, not iconoclastic. The Babylonian Talmud folds intentional consciousness out of and into the world of nature and cosmopolitan empire.]]

The so-called problem of idolatry comes here at the end of this study in order to have explored more freely without it the plastic image and imagistic thinking in relation to the possibility of cosmopolitan world-making in the religious imagination. Discussions of images and the imagination in Judaism and Jewish philosophy almost always begin with polemics and apologetics

and uninformed and underinformed claims in the history of philosophy in Europe about the Jewish Bilderverbot (ban on images). The figure of idolatry is itself an “idol.” An object of theoretical reification, idols and idolatry assume gigantic proportions that stymie any conversation about art, about the world and worldliness before the discourse could even start. It exhausts the solid body of the plastic imagination in the mirage of an absolute prohibition that is supposedly emblematic and exceptional to Jews and to Judaism. Before one even looks at an image, one is forced first to reckon with claims that the second commandment of Judaism against idolatry constitutes a comprehensive ban on every and any kind of plastic art—that Jewishness is, by extension, anti-gentile and world unfriendly. “Against idolatry,” Jewish religion will have been set into conceptually fraught and ugly oppositions to the world, which in the Hebrew Bible is supposed to have been created by God and called “good” (p.168).

[…]

Judaism is no different from any other manifestation of culture and cultural consciousness. With the Bavli as an alternative template to the idea of the Bilderverbot, I have sought throughout this study to tug Jewish philosophy away from the invidious notion that images and imagistic thinking are essentially idolatrous. This is what I set out to prove. Monotheism is not in polar opposition to idolatry. Judaism does not subscribe to a total ban against images. The Jews are not a nation without art or visual pleasure. There are no hard-and-fast social binaries necessarily separating Jews from gentiles. Jewish religion is not alienated from the natural world. The image and imagination situate Jewishness in relation to society, in relation to nature, in a pluralistic universe, in relation to God. Philosophical Talmud reflects on the plastic image as an elementary form of religion placed inside a more “natural” view of the world perceived in terms of individuated beings and objects. Contested here are notions that tear out the life of the spirit from its home in the schematization of the imagination, that set God in opposition to material things and physical bodies as they appear in the world of action (p.169).

[…]

Stitched across little cuts, Talmud institutes a distinct and unusual mode of being in a pluralistic universe. As an inward-looking intellectual practice, the study of Talmud is for its own sake. There is no other absolute center to the Torah of the rabbis, no commanding presence external to the Torah-Talmud system itself. Viewed one way, in an open pluralistic universe the relatively closed form of the image is a particular each-thing strung along with others. The image of the world reflected in the Bavli is a microcosm when viewed this way, as a compressed form of being in the cosmos, a closed, restricted circle, a microcosm embedded in social networks and cosmic strings of being. In the Bavli writ small and in religion writ large, images drawn from the actual world are viewed from inside the protected place of a narrow hollow. Viewed another way, Talmud and religion assume the shape of a planetary macrocosm that envelopes everything in the actual world into its own orbit. The impression of the world is compressed by the Bavli into the image of a mundus imaginalis, a mental object of intentional awareness.

Rejecting pure sensation and pure cognition, for James the “pulse of inner life” is condensed into a prism that mediates both aspects of mind. In the continuity of experience there is also alteration, a spiritual universe, and the problem of consciousness, the separation and connection of things. James entertained the notion that the world is itself an animal, a living and aware kind of being or creature. He posits the possibility of finite minds being “co-conscious with one another in a superhuman intelligence.” Cast in this light of a mental world in a pan-psychic universe, Talmud stands out in the shadow of a superhuman consciousness. Talmud pools, preserves, and distributes energy in the attention it brings to things. James posited the existence of “spook-haunted” regions of inquiry in which the continuity of our finite consciousness is simultaneously sensed and posited within a “wider spiritual environment.” The discontinuity of Talmud is one such narrow region, a world, an individuated human domain in the continuum of this wider spiritual environment. But what kind of world is this? What is the reality of this simulacral eidolon? An imaginary world shaped inside a consciousness, the simulation is either utterly fake or more real than actual (p.213).

Conclusion TRUTH OF AN IMAGE

[[An virtual image is a real thing in the world and “true”]]

The mundus imaginalis in the Babylonian Talmud occupies a little mental corner of the universe from which to reflect critically on the reality peculiar to religion writ large. I have been unconcerned with “really real” things like law, ethics, and politics and have left aside messianism, which is a separate fantasy structure. My conceptual data have been the image, the human and human emergence, sacred place, the theological imagination, the world and worldliness. I chose to look at obscure little mental pictographs: deep red colors, embryonic viscera, fetal figures in utero; the stretchy place of a make-believe temple; a holographic apparition inside the Holy of Holies; iconophilia and cosmopolitanism. Their appearance in the Bavli is not “real” only if by that one means in relation to the “actual” world of time and space as conventionally conceived and perceived. As an object in the phenomenology of religion, Talmud is an apparatus made up of dirty glass. In the mode of phantasy, Talmud gathers shapes of awareness formed around peculiar groups of illuminated figures set apart in porous enclosures vis-a-vis the profane world of the human common. Religion is simulation (p.214).

[…]

The animating power of religion is the image-making power of art, creating a disturbance in the order of appearance as conventionally held. Talmud writ small is the form of religion that shares with art what Langer calls the “unreality” that “tinges even perfectly real objects like pots, textiles, and temples.” Viewed from the inside, religion is the distant aura of strangeness, “otherness,” “pure quality,” a “strange guest” among the “husky substantial realities of the natural world” (FF 50). The sense of this animating power is given off by the plastic freedom under which objects are subject to “deliberate torsion, modification.” The truth of an image is the capacity, per Langer, to project vital feeling and a semblance of life into form, without which religion or art is a dead thing or an empty idea. Religion is the technical apparatus, a mental mirror, a speculum that does not shine, the dirty glass that captures the sense of something alive with an intelligent soul, the creator of obscure worlds full of simulacral life, a reflection of the human being in the image of God in the image of the human being, of God in the image of the human being in the image of God  (pp.233-4).

The truth of religion is that it lies close to death, where life itself is most vital and volatile. Inside crystal shapes of religious institutions and consciousness are made manifest virtual-actual crossings of the real between distinct zones. These are zones of virtual-and-actual life and zones of actual-and-virtual death. Torah is one point or circuit of crossing at the point where zones merge between the material and the mindful and intellectual. Torah is a pharmakon, a drug of life and a drug of death. Entangled in the image, virtual life is for its operators a free place of power, where things switch this way and that along opposite paths. The human operators assume complete control of the apparatus and the power of the virtual. The things one can do inside the place of the apparatus are almost infinite. Almost infinite is the moving around of partitions and the manipulation of creaturely life these mobile parameters make possible inside the world of the imagination.

The coupling of the virtual and the actual is the condition of human life, perhaps life itself, if there is any truth to panpsychism, the notion that mind or awareness is, to one degree or another, a feature of the physical world. The virtual is distinct, not separate from the actual world. Like any technology, the dirty glass of religion attracts to it all kinds of dangerous particles. In the actual world, what goes under the name of the soul, the soul of religion is immersed, material, embedded, entangled, exposed historically contingent, political, and so on. Threads connecting the one and the other, matter and mind in acts of intentional awareness, generate the power of religion, the power of gods and temples and other animated things, the charisma of their charm as objects of utter fasciation. The holy is inherently dangerous. It is brought to bear on the actual world, as often as not, in the form of a collision. A complex form of religious life, philosophical Talmud is a uniquely self-aware mode of awareness situating the holy in the image as a site for careful and discrete looking at the free crossing across realms (p.234).

[FIN]

IN THE IMAGE: VIRTUAL RELIGION AND PHILOSPHIUCAL TALMUD

Zachary Braiterman

Fall 2026 promotional code:  UF2630 at https://iupress.org/9780253076366/in-the-image/

Explainer:

In the Image is a contemporary Jewish philosophy of cinema and bodies, place and space and god, icons and nature and social nexuses –reconstructed in the image and crystalized in the virtual as drawn from pictures of Babylonian Talmud

DEFINITION: Aesthetics is the organization of sensation in perception and the reorganization of sensation in the imagination.

DEFINITION: An image is a physical or mental thing “before” me which refers to thing or presence that is not actually present and before me. Image , especially pronounced in memory and phantasy. (Perception and imagination are distinct but inseparable. The imagination determines  perception just as much as what we perceive via the senses determines the imagination.)

DEFINITION: Virtual is a crystalized form that underscores something basic about the imagination as such. The virtual is real, but not actual. Loaded with potential and an excess of mental structure (composed of bits and bytes). The virtual is the this and not-that of things that are compossible or simultaneous to each other. Mirrors and mirroring images are exemplary. The virtual is the aspaklaria or speculum in rabbinic thought, Rashi, and Maimonides, a lens or looking glass for the imaging of God and things.                                                                                            

THESIS: Religion isa network composed of conjoined (distinct, but not separate) physical and mental/spiritual features or entities. Durkheim: Rites ad reps. The reflect soc, i.e. the actual social world and social structure. But they take on a life of their own vis avi society. Religio enters into individual and collective imaginary. Peirce: icons, indexes, symbols: its own thing, refer to a thing not itself, lifts off from reference to shape world in its own image.

THESIS: Virtual Religion: A lot like a video game or VR, religionisanimated by the virtual, i.e. real, not actual. Religion carries real effects in actual world, but virtual and weird for all that.

THESIS If all religion/culture is virtual, i.e. stamped by the virtual, Judaism itself is even more so because its social base or actuality in the Diaspora is more precarious. Talmud is even more so, as an mental/intellectual project of world creation. Talmud is a looking glass, a techne for seeing, as it were, an imaginal world. In the Bavli, halakhic and spiritual entities are parsed into pieces and lose their substantive hold in the world. The discourse is virtually real, not actual; reflecting this and/or that, a potential compossibility of opposites. The virtual character of religion/Judaism/Talmud explains its animation: enchanting, tense, and even catastrophic meetings of religion and actual world.

WHY French thought? This is a modern book the locus of which is not English (empirical), not German (relational), not American (pragmatic) (or maybe a little bit). The French philosophical tradition is focused on mind (Descartes, yes, Descartes) and mirrors, glass, representations, objects. In the visual and poetic arts, France is the place of impressionism, symbolism, orphism, postimpressionism, and surrealism.

Aesthetics of the Babylonian Talmud? Compare, in contrast to Talmud,  the realist style in the Bible; or Maimonides who could also be compared to a realist, which is to say that there is a real world and there is practical halakha. For their part, the Babylonian rabbis are surrealist or virtualists.  At the heart of their project is pure Torah or talmud Torah, and the holy way of life, or sanctification set in and apart from the actual world.  In the mirror image, the  Torah from Heaven is not in the hands of Heaven; Torah is an elixir of life (sam hayyim) and a drug of death (sam mavet) or, in Greek, a pharmakon.

There was a huge crowd of people at Congregation Ansche Chesed for Yom Kippur in the deep well of the synagogue and its liturgical sound. Each person was an ocean, full with their own thought, singular and together. So I can only speak for myself. The terrible violence in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank came in and out of mind, also the synagogue shooting that morning at the Sons of Jacob in Ontario, Canada, which I read about that morning before the mile walk to shul down Amsterdam Avenue.

What struck me this year from the Mahzor was not the Ashamnu we’ve been guilty, we betrayed. For all that the confessional is phrased in the collective voice of the first person plural, the Viddui remains deeply personal, even intimate, not a public spectacle conferring a single and imposed moral meaning or communal rebuke. In synch with the overriding sense of death and human frailty that marks a core of the High Holiday liturgy, I was attuned this year less to guilt than to something more akin to grief.

Liberal and progressive Judaism, of course,  has always loved the Yom Kippur reading from Isaiah 58. What draws attention to itself is that very spectacle, the searing critique of empty religious ritual and clarion call to social justice. Is this the fast, I desire,?! No, this this is the fast, I desire, etc. etc. In the context of Israel and Palestine, a cynic regarding the politics of Isaiah 58 might add that the prophet reminds us also, “not to ignore your own kin” (58:7).

At this political moment, a moment of terrible trauma and social violence, what does Yom Kippur want for people if not a measure of quiet? What caught my eye instead were these few lines, also from the haftarah and also from Isaiah, which I have never actually noticed.  About the wicked and mercy for those who mourn, God says, “I struck them and turned away in My wrath. Though stubborn (they follow the way of their hearts), I saw their paths and will heal them.  I will guide them and grant solace to comfort them, and to the mourners among them.” God says, “Peace, peace to the far and to the near.” Human evil, however, remains like “the troubled sea which cannot be quiet, whose waters toss up mire and mud.” “‘There is no peace,’ said my God, ‘for the wicked’” (57: 17-21, Robert Alter trans., altered).

With a constant eye on moral muck and mire, Yom Kippur is a “thing” that thinks about death and suffering through the prism of mercy more than it is one that thinks about justice and judgment or even the Kingdom of God. Most of the English translations, like the ones in the Mahzor, miss how this turbulence is juxtaposed with the words “peace” and “comfort.” These are unlike the words or dissonant notes of  moral repentance wrapped in pollical rebuke, which might ring false just as often as not –because the ritual is, to one degree, private, not just social.

The world is riddled by death and destruction, the terrible divine decrees, violence and suffering, and full of lies; all of us are responsible and guilty, all of us without exception, myself especially. From the virtual place and power of the U’Netaneh Tokef, the introspective work of Yom Kippur, the entire purpose of it, is to move the Holy One off the Throne of Judgment and onto the Throne of Mercy.

(photo credit: Meg Karalis, Rooster and Chicken at New York State Fair)

Modern Almohads deface an icon with a symbol in Cordoba, Spain. You can read about this assault on Jewish cultural memory and image of human dignity here. According to Ynet, “The monument was created in 1964 by Spanish sculptor Amadeo Ruiz Olmos to mark 760 years since Maimonides’ death. It was inaugurated as part of cultural events dedicated to Spain’s Jewish heritage. The statue underwent restoration and conservation work in 2009.”

How to Talk to a Cat: Buber, Philosophy, and Dialogue with Unspeaking Things

(Prepared by and with permission of the author and Indiana University Press) PROMO code below

CONTENTS

Introduction: Dialogue and the Maintenance of Domestic Bubbles

 1. Homes: Domesticity and Conflict

 2. Animals: Communication and Language

 3. Domestic Cats: Anxiety and Singularity

 4. Plants: Dispersion and Surfaces

 5. Babies: Noise and the Nursery

 6. Sensuality: Tools, Crafts, Decoration

 Conclusion: Death and Dialogue

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Martin Buber was a Viennese philosopher, a theater director, an aesthete, a cat lover, and a Jew. Like many of the fin de siècle set, he had a hunger for immediacy which clashed with an internalized Germanic culture of weight and precision, one sustained by a near-constant ingestion of books. Read from a present where it seems like nobody reads, the fear of the written word that permeated Buber’s world seems quaint, if not delusional. But if we transfer that fear from books to screens it’s more understandable and helps explain why Buber pits dialogue against the world of the grid: the world where everything has its place, whether on a page, in a network, or as part of a model. In rejecting the grid, Buber has lots of company, good and bad, but he stands apart because his work on dialogue and is neither mystifying nor irrational. Buber’s writing can be treacly or fantastical, but his ideas are not. Dialogue is strange, but not irrational; relationships are confusing, but not incoherent, and while we may have grown unaccustomed to reasoning about these matters, that does not make them unreasonable.

This book is about dialogue with entities that don’t use language. In simple terms, it’s about talking-to creatures that don’t speak. Talking-to them, not talking-about them. But what is this “dialogue,” and how much does it differ from the standard definition of the word? Buber’s notion of dialogue (Zwiesprache) is modeled on human conversation but covers much more than discussion. Dialogue is bigger than conversation, but sparser in detail. If we strip dialogue down to the beams we can define it like this: Dialogue is an attentive and reciprocal relationship, a relationship where we are directed toward another creature. Conversation is just one type of dialogue, although it is perhaps the easiest way into the concept. [1]

…

Why this word?

The word in question is dialogue, or Zwiesprache. But why stick with this overused term, one worn near to death by human resources departments and wellness clichés? And why use a term that suggests speech, when the goal is to think about beings that don’t speak?

I’ve a few reasons. First, dialogue evokes a common phenomenon, an experience we’ve all (hopefully) had: an intense, reciprocal, back-and-forth conversation. True, by dialogue, I mean something broader—a much larger set of relationships of which conversation is only a part. Dialogue is a type of relationship, and conversation is merely one type of dialogue. Still, for many, the experience of a powerful conversation is the easiest way to access the broader concept of dialogue. Like Buber, I merely extend the term so that it also covers relationships where there is no speech and where our partner is not human. [5]

…

Domestic Maintenance

Dialogue requires a maintenance budget—we cannot spend everything on the encounter. While the I-You encounter establishes its own place and time, dialogue veers in and out of the space-time of the absolute encounter, so it needs a place to be contained and protected. It is often best if this place cultivates and supports several kinds of encounters that work together to form dialogues. The same comforts that facilitate human dialogues can also inspire nonhuman encounters. This is why the domestic—however fraught—is a chief place for nonhuman dialogue.

The domestic support systems required by human dialogue are hidden, but nonhuman dialogue exposes them. Human speech, especially between friends, often seems effortless, weightless and placeless, in a word: easy. Dialogue with mute beings is different, it is troublesome, and for this reason the forces which sustain it are more conspicuous. Nowhere are dialogue’s supports more visible than in the home, where the forces which sustain the domestic also create an atmosphere that encourages dialogues. In this book I avoid idealized, withdrawn, or aseptic concepts of the home, or any model where the family lives outside of time and politics. The desire to live outside of history, while perfectly understandable, is a trap. Instead, I use a concept of the home drawn from Jewish political thought and psychoanalysis. Seen as such, the home is set within politics and history, even as it develops a membrane to protect itself from them. Building and protecting this membrane provides dialogue with the space it requires. [12]

1. HOMES: Domesticity and Conflict

The edifice of twentieth-century Jewish thought has many chambers, and surely one of its most dazzling is the philosophy of relationships. But philosophy untempered by materialism tends to present relationships as placeless: They occur between men of good intention and similar income and seem to float above the world. There is a logic to this placelessness. From the perspective of someone in the midst of an encounter, the background does seem to recede; the location feels less important than the happening. But dialogue takes place over time and needs to be sustained even as we fade in and out of it. When we think about how to sustain dialogue place moves from the margins toward the center of our thinking. Some places are more conducive to dialogue than others; some places contain and shelter dialogues better than others. [14]

…

The domestic is often lazily thought of as an unimportant or castrated space, much as the domestic animal is considered an unimportant or castrated wild animal. If we think of the domestic as a substandard or less-real space or consider the term domestication to be as a slur, we impoverish our thinking about dialogue and how to cultivate it. Conversely, to valorize the domestic, as if it were intrinsically good, is to instrumentalize it, to turn it into a faddish weapon of the weak. [15]

…

From the avuncular to the paternal, the queer enclave or the hippie commune, what all these domestic spaces share, even the most antiseptic suburban monument to fear, is that countless creatures dwell in them. But of these creatures, only a few really enter our dialogical space. Granted, some of us may speak with spiders, but who has had regular conversations with silverfish? One should not too blithely embrace our involvement with companion species. Yes, my skin is covered with bugs, but I don’t notice or care about them. My house was “home” to many stray children, especially those with artistic inclinations. My mother adopted them, the walls adopted mice, the chimney adopted bats, and so on, but the full members of the household—meaning those able to speak and be heard—were the humans and the pets.

This may be good, it may be bad, but it’s how the domestic works: It is a selectively permeable space, not an open one. Slaughtering moths without a thought, we plant flowers for monarchs in our front yards. Culture and location determine which animals are allowed in: Dialogically speaking, “wild” animals are merely animals you don’t usually encounter. A friend of mine grew up in a swarm, surrounded by birds (literally hundreds of them), and had a goat for a pet. I can barely imagine this, and it sounds horrifying to me. One person’s wilderness is another person’s house. We wake in an unseen swarm, but alongside only a few [24]

• ANIMALS: Communication and Language

What does Buber mean when he says that we can dialogue with creatures who cannot speak? Typically, dialogue is a certain use of language, a type of talking, so how is it possible without speech? To understand this, we’ll look at our relationships with animals, what Buber calls the “threshold” of language: “Here the relationship vibrates in the dark and remains below language.” It’s a good place to start because many of us already have language-like relationships with animals. After exploring the hopelessly broad notion of animal we will move on to domestic animals and eventually trade them in for the even more specific Felis catus (house cat).

There is a gap between humans and nonhuman animals. This gap and what it means pose a serious difficulty, one that many theorists try to overcome by fiat. Despite our desire to emphasize our overlapping lives, the chasms between humans and nonhumans remain, and no effusive prose can change this. The most noticeable of these gaps is language. Unsupported by language, animal dialogues face complications that rarely affect human relations. When ensuring that both conversants are on the same page, that we are not projecting our thoughts and feelings onto our partner, animal dialogue presents different dilemmas than human conversation does. Although these difficulties may bedevil practice, they are an asset for theory: It’s easier to think about something when its cracks are showing. Spoken language makes dialogue easy, and when things are easy and straightforward, why think about them? The ability to do things with words, to treat words as things, is an extraordinary power. But speech, because it is facile, obscures its own conditions [26]

•  DOMESTIC CATS: Anxiety and Singularity

Cats are useless, and the history of their domestication reflects this. Cats moved in because they wanted to, and we kept them because we like them. Domestication has changed cats, but they are still very much like their undomesticated cousins. The primary differences between the two are size and sociality. Domestic cats are smaller, more communicative, and more social, whereas Felis silvestris lybica are solitary; domestic cats, even when running wild, enjoy the existence of other cats. Finally, the range and frequency of their sounds increase (such as the meows made when they want attention), and “apart from when they are in heat . . . and when they are angry, adult cats do not usually ‘talk’ to each other. The sounds they make are mostly for our human ears.” Cats communicate with us and for us. The same can be said of our conversations with them. [39]

…

The animal—in this case, the cat—is the preeminent bearer of anxiety about becoming because the animal knows anxiety in a way we cannot. Much as speech irrevocably transforms our sense of self, it also eases our nervousness about becoming by hiding it from us. The cat “owns” anxiety because it knows and expresses it better than we can.[44]

…

How do you dialogue with a cat? By talking to it, petting it, and—for the two writers’ cats discussed here—looking at it looking at you. Dialogue is a common relationship with uncommon (singular) beings. The move between the general categories of the relation and the singularity of the creatures involved (between cats in general and a specific cat) requires us to mobilize tools and methods both within and outside of dialogue. This book stands outside of dialogue, the moving of a boundary by Derrida’s cat, within it. What we cannot do is pretend these lines have been canceled or that all our conversation partners are the same. Groups and lines, kinds and types, these cannot be overcome by fiat, and if we try to do so, we end up being unjust to the beings we encounter. It would be not only cruel to expect the same kind of dialogue from a baby as from an adult or from a cat as a dog; it would also be stupid. [57]

• PLANTS: Dispersion and Surfaces

Animals, especially mammals, are probably the easiest nonhumans to dialogue with. There are various reasons for this—many animals are social, emit sounds, and use sign systems—but movement is central. Animals move in roughly the same way and at the same tempo as humans do; both the tortoise and the hare possess locomotion and gestures on which we can base a folk psychology. With animals, Buber’s belief in nonhuman encounters is easily accepted. This is not the case for things that don’t move or, like plants, that move very differently than we do. The slow movement of plant life can, however, help attune us to the time of dialogue. Where the I-You encounter is fast and takes only an instant—or, at most, a moment— dialogue can be stretched out over days or years, a fact easily missed when we restrict ourselves to human communication. Once more, it is the difficulties of plant dialogues that make them useful for theory. [58]

…

A significant portion of modern Jewish philosophy is concerned with interpretation. The brief flourishings of interest in Jewish thought are almost always driven by this interest in interpretation. It is hermeneutics—not the ethical monotheism industrial complex—that Jewish thought contributes to larger discourses. But Jewish interpretive thought is often concerned exclusively with writing. The fact that most creatures don’t read has led too many Jewish philosophers to ignore the natural world as uncomprehending and uninteresting. This is a mistake. It does not take much imagination to extend the concept of hermeneutics beyond the literate human (even if writing remains the focus of hermeneutics). Indeed, when Freud claims, “Psychoanalysis was above all an art of interpretation,” he shows us a way interpretation can be extended to nontextual material realms (such as sex and shitting). [71] …

It might seem strange to say interpretation is more basic than knowing, but we find instances of interpretation long before we find instances of knowing. At the very least, plant interpretation is more like our interpretation than plant knowing is like our knowing. [72]

• BABIES: Noise and the Nursery

Babies are, in a literal sense, prelinguistic, as most of them are on their way to language. Loud and aggressive communicators, babies signal with indexes and icons, screams and cries, not words. Not all babies will develop into language, but (I assume) you and other readers of this book are ex-babies. This embarrassing fact might lead one to expect that baby dialogue would be easy for us, or at least easier than others discussed in this book: Although I have never been a cat or a tree, I have been a baby. But my previous job experience offers me little guidance. I have no recollection of being a baby, and my own infants were as foreign to me as were my cats. Perhaps more so. One of my cats lived with me for twenty-one years, whereas infancy is temporary; once you’re used to it, it’s gone. [77]

…

I have known people, real people, who believe you can talk to God, but who do not extend the same courtesy to babies. I understand: Babies are loud, chaotic, and often disgusting. …

 The expressive does not thrum and pulse like the divine spheres; rather, it spits and wails. Babies take up inside our walls and pull us into inhuman dialogues through play and feeding. With babies, more than any other being discussed, the domestic sphere is essential to cultivating dialogue; without some form of it, the baby is likely to die. So, we build and reinforce the domus to hold the baby as it moves toward language and locomotion. These little gods of noise can easily destroy a home, and so broader circles (family, neighbors, friends) often come to help maintain the space for the first period after birth. Ideally, we can give these monsters a place of stability, creating a world that does not move apace with the vortex of becoming that rages in the streets. [93]

• SENSUALITY: Tools, Crafts, Decoration

I’ve made it easy on myself by sticking to living beings. This is because life can be thought of as engaging in reciprocal, hermeneutic relationships. Even if these relationships are strange, it’s not too difficult to see how we can join them. But nonliving beings? “Dead” matter? Even this latter term is too much—a stone is not even dead. And yet our relationships with nonliving things (or “mere things”—tone matters here) can be dialogical: pianos, knives, chisels, cars, banisters, pens, laptops, and so on. These things, even manufactured things, can enter reciprocal relationships.

…

To understand this, we will examine the tools we use to craft things. Tools allow us to see dialogue within instrumental relationships and challenge the cliché that we shouldn’t treat people like things.[95]

…

Nowhere is it harder for me to determine whether a relationship is dialogical or merely comforting than with manufactured objects. It’s easier to do so with repairing and maintaining. When I repair a wall, I am trying to maintain a space while also working with it in a manner that sometimes seems reciprocal, if hostile. The tools I use vacillate between being media through which I engage material, and being themselves a kind of conversation partner. With cooking, it is easier to dialogue. With arts, crafts, and decoration, it is easier still. Immersed in material, I can work with it to find and create things. And there is something of a circle here. With decoration, the attempt to maintain a space that encourages dialogue (through its warmth or richness) can easily veer into becoming a dialogue itself. And so on until we die. [110]

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Walter Benjamin made the New Angel into an intellectual icon. The Angel Applicant by Paul Klee from 1939 is a different creature with nothing messianic about him. His eyes are downcast and blackened, looking at nothing past his own misery caught in time under the melancholy of a crescent moon. One expects nothing from him. Not blown by the winds of history, he is ugly and dog-faced.

As described here:

[Klee] covered a sheet of newspaper with black gouache on which he then drew the outlines of the figure and of the crescent moon with a thick, soft graphite pencil. Then he filled in these forms with a thin white wash. It is the black ground peeking through the white pigment that gives this creature its ghostly shimmer.

TOC + TRANSLATION

Netzaḥ Yisrael (1588/1589) by the Maharal of Prague Themed for the fast day of Tisha b’Av is themed on place and time, the world of non-existence, the exile of Israel, and the coming of the Messiah, The title trades off the homology in the Hebrew term between “eternity” and “victory.” We see that homology at work in the introduction, where the Maharal writes, “God has granted Israel eternity, ensuring they will not perish, despite their harsh and heavy exile. It will also be shown that God Himself is eternal, victorious over the fourth kingdom that currently holds dominion” (introduction). After the “glory of Israel” the supernatural Torah that is the topic of his book Tiferet Yisrael, the Maharal turns in this text on the “eternity of Israel,”  conceived as a supernatural object.

The World of non-existence: The big world-picture of the Maharal is a baroque composition of connections marked by a metaphysical array of opposites and separation (dark/light, exile/redemption). Chapters 5-10 are long and largely based upon historical legend drawn from rabbinic sources about the destruction of Jerusalem, Tur Malka, and Beitar, and the fate of the evil emperor Titus killed by a virtual mosquito that lodged in his skull. The philosophical frame is founded on the theory that the knowledge of all things stems from opposites and opposition (chapter 1). In this metaphysical cum political  construction, there is this world and there is the world to come, Jacob and Esau (chapter 15), the non-existence of total destruction and the miracle of new existence. The level of the Messiah is separate from this natural and physical world; the physical opposes the non-physical and stands in opposition to the Messiah (chapter 28, 34).

Nature and super-nature: This is an early modern book whose visionary place and eschatological time are this world and the future. Nature and the transformation of nature into a super-nature are key to the futurism of the Netzaḥ Yisrael. Nature is pure potential manifesting the power of reception and sustained existence. The true cause of a thing is understood as that which sustains the existence of the created being or entity (chapter 1). Natural is the Land of Israel, whose beauty and vitality is like that of a deer (chapter 6). Fire is associated with Israel (chapter 5). Rome, or rather Christendom, the 4^th Kingdom, is associated under the sign of a red sun (chapter?). Natural being or matter is epitomized by the power of animal sensation, something human beings lack; because human beings, due to the importance of their form, are not designated to receive sensation as animals are. Due to their greater simplicity, animals sense more from the higher realms than humans, who are not as simple (chapter 26). The earth is particularly prepared for this, to bring forth beings into actuality, whether fruits or other things (chapter 34). In the messianic era, nature becomes supernatural; the supernatural earth-tree-man producing perfect fruit constantly. Regarding humans and the fruit of the tree, they will produce offspring every day, and regarding the earth, it is said that it will produce complete things (chapter 50).

The world is upside down. The world of nature rests upon a basic inversion, which is ultimately overcome, even in its perfected form.  “Man” himself is an inverted tree: the tree’s life comes from the earth, while man’s life, his soul, comes from the heavens (chapter 7). This inversion is essential to understanding the non-existence of exile. The 4^th Kingdom (Edom/Rome/Christendom) is monstrous power, huge in size, its cities filled with multitudes of people, sound, and heat that manifest the power of destruction and non-existence itself (chapters 17, 26). The non-existence of the 4^th Kingdom is like a peel to the kingdom of Israel. Just as the beginning of the fruit’s growth lies within the peel, when the fruit reaches its perfection, the peel falls off and separates from it (chapter 28).

Israel: The  “eternity of Israel” is changeless because of the bond with God, who owns them, makes them supernatural, Israel the first nation (chapter 10). As such, Israel is an object, the OBJECT of God’s possession (chapter 11).Beyond good and evil, Israel is not suited for this world (chapter 15).  The election or covenant of Israel is eternal, involves the klal, is not specific or individual. For that reason, the covenant between and God and Israel does not depend upon morality or ethics, or piety, or mitzvot, or righteousness. Israel is, if anything, predisposed uniquely to the yetzer ha’ra, the evil inclination, precisely because of their high level and Torah (chapter 2). The covenant is made with them not because they are individuals, but only because of the nation, that is, the name of Israel, because Israel is in the image of God. (chapter 11). The Maharal remarks upon the complete adherence of Israel to God, one alongside the other, the two compared to two identical date palms (chapter 12). In the image of God, Israel in exile is a separate form, their bad traits originating from inherent excellence. Their stiff-necked character comes from the fact that Israel possesses a distinct, non-physical soul. As potential, matter is susceptible to influence and is not a stable thing; whereas that which is distinct and dominated by form is not influenced to accept change, but rather stands firm (chapters 14, 25). Israel is associated with fire, the nations with water. When mingled, water consumes fire. When set at a distance, fire dries up water.

Exile is nature out of order, namely non-existence and death which is the most opposite and terrible change. The essence of exile is division and dissension (chapters 1, 25). The ultimate purpose or end is to be nivdal or separate (chapter 42) and simple [chapter 41??]. As viewed in this metaphysics of opposites, “the days of the Messiah will be a new existence that is not of this world.” The Maharal cites the Babylonian sages (Sanhedrin 99a) that the days of the Messiah are a world unto itself” (chapter 46). In what is, indeed, a lachrymose version of Jewish history, the suffering and calamities of the Jews in exile are beyond belief (chapter 49?). In this world of inter-connecting opposites, the greatness of Israel is revealed in the humiliation and dispersion in exile (chapter 49). But rather than put the onus of destruction, on the sins of Israel, the Maharal sets it on God. What is now called a defect in existence is “entirely attributed” to God who was the actor or agent responsible for the damage in the first place and from whose action the defect came. And since the defect which is suffering and non-existence came from God, it is fitting that God completes it so that no defect remains from Him, only complete repair (chapter 61).

Land of Israel: More than time, place occupies the key point in this conceptual world, about which there is a basic contradiction relating to the Land of Israel. There is, to be sure, what is taken by many to be a proto-Zionist assumption that the natural place for Israel is in their Land, that the exile is essentially unnatural (chapter 24). Israel is exiled because the spies despised the Land of Israel (chapter 20). But for the Maharal, the Land of Israel will be blessed in everything when the Messiah comes (chapter 50). What complicates the Zionist reading of the Maharal is the counterpoint, which is that the Land of Israel is not the “natural” place for Israel. If the Land was a natural place for Israel, and if the spies had longed for the Land, then they would have remained eternal. But the generation of the spies wept an empty weeping and did not want to come into the Land. This teaches that the Land is not the natural place for Israel, that everything returns to God, and that is why they would not remain there (chapter 8). The exile is due to the fact that Israel, as a possession of God, is not suited for this world (chapter 15).

Jerusalem is not a natural city. Jerusalem is a divine city; and any Object that already had a divine status will increase in holiness and divine status beyond what it had before. Made of precious stones, the wall and the gate are the form of the place. The archangel Michael, who is in charge of water, said that the form of the holy city should be goodness, clinging to kindness and goodness. Therefore, the wall should be of shoham, the archangel Gabriel, who is judgment, said that the form of the place should be yashpeh, whose color indicates judgment. Because God’s Name includes everything, makesJerusalem a city that includes everything; judgment and kindness. In the future, when a person will be a holy house, and the soul, which is a spark from the Blessed Name, will reside in it, just as there was a spark of His glory in the Temple. The height of a person will be two hundred, corresponding to both matter and form, and neither will be nullified by the other. Cloud is separated from the earth by three parasangs. This explains the supreme holiness of Jerusalem (chapter 51).

The Temple: The Temple is the holy place of connection between upper and lower. Called mountain, field, house by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Temple is God’s dwelling with the lower beings, while the Temple is elevated above everything. The Temple will sing. The Temple is the completeness of the world and a fulcrum of divine power. The destruction of the Temple, even though it was done by the nations, is attributed to God due to the great power involved in its destruction, which was an act of strict justice, and this act is attributed to the Holy One, blessed be He. “The Temple is called ‘Ariel’ because of its great power. But when the Blessed Name departs from ‘Ariel,’ leaving only ‘Ari,’ the holy power that was in the Temple is lacking, and the power of ‘Arieh’ prevails over ‘Ari,’ destroying ‘Ariel.’” (chapters 52, 55, 61)

The Messiah: The anti-matter of the Messiah is a divine emblem of time and song. Physical things are under the rule of time. It is therefore not difficult that the footsteps of the Messiah are delayed, because the time suitable for him is at the end of time (chapter 27). At the gates of Rome, Messiah can come any day “today” because the Messiah is completely non-natural and non-physical, and what is non-physical is not under time (chapter  28). Though the Messiah tarry, wait and receive reward. Don’t calculate the end lest people despair and stop waiting (chapter 31). The coming of the Messiah is a new existence that will destroy the first existence preceding it (chapter 32). The greatness of the Messiah is opposed by the natural world, and there therefore no end to the sufferings of the Messiah, because the natural world opposes the divine matter. The existence of the Messiah is only in potential, not actual until the future. This future will be a new world, a separate world, and he will no longer have any opposition, and he will no longer suffer (chapter  34). A sign of the coming of the Messiah is total destruction,  of all things, natural things, man-made artificial things (which are not as susceptible ordinarily to damage), and intellectual beings (even for scholars) (chapter  39). At the end, no longer physical, the human person and the world become divine, and God is one. Messiah unites and connects everything in the world as one, i.e. including the nations, i.e. the first 3 Kingdoms, except for the 4^th Kingdom.  Song is essential to the Messiah who comes when the sherakrak bird, indicating mercy and connection, sits on the earth whistles (chapters 41, 43). The world’s perfection beyond nature operates in a supernatural manner. When a person is in complete perfection, he gives a song and praise to the One from whom that perfection comes (chapter  43).

Also regarding the time of the Messiah and the end of exile is the social separation of Israel. The Maharal insists that Israel has to be especially mindful in his own generation  of maintaining social barriers. This is because he believed that the end of the exile was now, in his own day, imminent. The Maharal complains that people in “our generation” are lax and emulating gentiles in dress, etc. (chapter 25). Now that we are at the end of our exile, which is harder upon us day by day, it is important to keep distinction from nations even more (chapter 25) This is the secret, that the end is coming, that Israel is adjured not to reveal to the nations lest revealing the secret connects Israel and the nations and delay the end (chapter 24, 25).

One final world about Israel at the end of time: The Maharal is ontologically invested in the separation of Israel, which is an OBJECT in the larger world of separation (olam nivdal) that stands apart from this world of time and non-existence. Until chapter 58 towards the very end of the book. God is going to fight for Israel and put the nations under judgment. These are, perhaps, only words of comfort for a people whose sufferings are, for the Maharal, beyond belief. In the very last chapter, all of the gentile kingdoms, except for the 4^th are folded forward into the messianic concern  (chapter 63). On this point I would refer to a certain softness to the Netzaḥ Yisrael. We see it with what counts as the loving attention to birds which are counterpoints to the suffering of Israel in exile (chapter 14), and with messianic sound-signs (chapter 42). The Maharal writes with great beauty on the lightness of wild animals and  birds (chapter 57). As a figure of thought, the Messiah is, after the suffering of Israel and destructive birth pangs that bring an end to the violence of non-existence, as easy and light as the ascent of a dove (chapter 51).

From 1905, the Hero with the Wing is satire for our time. Now at the Jewish Museum in New York, he is resolute, set to fly, but unable to do so. Bad things are about to happen.