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Man, Woman, and Serpent: Kabbalah and High Modernity in the Early 1/6/2019 Wolski_July 26 2018 - Google Docs Man, Woman, and Serpent: Kabbalah and High Modernity in the Early Writings of Aaron Zeitlin by Nathan Wolski In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (January 2019) For the online version of this article: https://ingeveb.org/articles/man-woman-and-serpant 1 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nCD6eWyAUtT1_r4TMnRRrAg88X2f1JwLdv5x7s_cWvM/edit?ts=5c231200# 1/16 1/6/2019 Wolski_July 26 2018 - Google Docs Man, Woman, and Serpent: Kabbalah and High Modernity in the Early Writings of Aaron Zeitlin Abstract: This study presents a translation and analysis of Aaron Zeitlin’s 1924 essay, “ Man, froy un shlang,” published in Illustrirte vokh . The short essay belongs to the neo-kabbalistic phase in Zeitlin’s oeuvre, and is part of the same literary project that includes such compositions as Metatr on: Apokaliptishe poeme (1922) and “ Keser: Fragmentn fun a rapsodye ” (1923). At the heart of the essay is Zeitlin’s creative reading of the Garden of Eden narrative which he claims describes the “eternal connection between three related things: Between death, sex, and civilization.” According to Zeitlin’s interpretation of the Genesis story, which I show to be based on his reading of a Zohar passage, the narrative describes the human condition as the fall from unity and stasis (associated with the male) to duality, multiplicity and change (associated with the female). Furthermore, Zeitlin’s short essay contains the key to understanding aspects of his earlier poetry, namely Metatron and its desire to transcend the fluctuations of history, and “Keser ,” and its desire to transcend phenomenological reality and annihilate time (both associated with the female divine potency in Kabbalah) as the precondition for the messianic breakthrough. My study also presents a translation of his 1926 poem “ Dokument ,” also concerned with the relationship between geshlekht (sex) and geshikhte (history). Nathan Wolski Expulsion from Paradise is in its main aspect eternal: that is to say, although expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in the world unavoidable, the eternity of the process (or, expressed in temporal terms, the eternal repetition of the process) nevertheless makes it possible not only that we might remain in Paradise permanently, but that we may in fact be there permanently, no matter whether we know it here or not. Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe… Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History For some time now I have wondered why scholars of Kabbalah, in particular those interested in its modern manifestations, have not mined the writings of Aaron Zeitlin (1898-1973). After all, his father Hillel has received extensive attention, and no one would imagine writing the history of the twentieth century Kabbalah without reference to his contribution to Jewish thought. Just why this is the case is not readily apparent. Zeitlin’s work is well-known to scholars of Yiddish poetry, chiefly to be sure because of those poems he wrote in the wake of 2 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nCD6eWyAUtT1_r4TMnRRrAg88X2f1JwLdv5x7s_cWvM/edit?ts=5c231200# 2/16 1/6/2019 Wolski_July 26 2018 - Google Docs the Holocaust, but he is also known as a kabbalistic thinker, even if to only a handful of specialists. In earlier studies I have shown how the Kabbalah in general, and the Zohar in 1 particular, lie at the heart of Zeitlin’s poetic-religious quest. This is true of his earliest futuristic-apocalyptic poetry as it is of his later Holocaust poems. The following study is but a small part of my ongoing endeavour, to which I hope others will join me, in exploring Zeitlin’s rich and diverse kabbalistic thought. What will be made clear here, and what is immediately apparent upon reading his wider oeuvre, is that kabbalistic thought and kabbalistic mythopoesis found their modern Yiddish voice in prose, verse, and drama—or farkert , modern Yiddish found its kabbalistic key—in Aaron Zeitlin. The focus of the present study is the translation and analysis of Zeitlin’s essay, “ Man, froy un shlang,” which was written in 1924 and published in Warsaw in Illustrirte vokh 2 (Illustrated Weekly). The two-part essay appeared two years after Zeitlin’s long apocalyptic 3 poem Metatron , and one year after “ Keser: Fragmentn fun a rapsodye .” It precedes the publication of his literary manifesto, “ Der kult fun gornisht un di kunst vi zi darf zayn” (The Cult of Nothingness and Art as it Should Be), written in 1926, in which he explicitly identified 4 the Zohar as the blueprint for Jewish artistic renewal. As I will discuss below, this 1* All Zeitlin translations are my own. For detailed information on Zeitlin’s biography, see the Yivo Encylopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (on-line). Most of Zeitlin’s Yiddish poems can be found in the two volume collection, Aaron Zeitlin, Lider fun khurbn un lider fun gloybn (New York: Bergen Belsen Memorial Press, 1967 and 1970). A small English selection is available in Morris Faierstein, Poems of the Holocaust and Poems of Faith ( New York: Iuniverse, 2007). Three of his plays have been translated into Hebrew. See Yechiel Szeintuch (ed.), Brener, Esterke and Weiztman the Second (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993). For a detailed bibliography of Zeitlin’s works, see Yechiel Szeintuch, Aaron Zeitlin and Yiddish Literature in Interwar Poland [Be -reshut ha-rabim u-be-reshut ha-yah id: Aaron Tseitlin ve-sifrut yiddish] (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000), 335-36, and the entry for him in the online Lexicon of New Hebrew Literature (Lexicon ha-sifrut ha-ivrit ha-h adashah) . The best scholarship on Zeitlin is to be found in Yechiel Szeintuch’s numerous studies. See, by way of example, “Between Literature and Vision: The Warsaw Period in the Bi-Lingual Work of Aaron Zeitlin” [“Ben sifrut le-h a zon: tequfat Varsha be-yetsirato ha-duleshonit shel Aharon Tseitlin”] in Studies on Polish Jewry: Paul Glickson Memorial Volume, eds. Ezra Mendelson and Chone Shmeruk (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1987), 117-142. See also Isidor Niborski, Mysticisme et Ecriture: l’Oueuvre et la Pensee d’Aaron Zeitlin (These du Doktorat, Sorbonne , 1992); Miriam Trinh, “Anticipation of the Holocaust in the Poetic Works of Aaron Zeitlin” [“Hatramat ha-shoah be-shirato shel Aharon Tseitlin”], Khulyot 6 (2000): 141-185; for a general overview, see Emanuel S. Goldsmith, “Aaron Zeitlin” in Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work, ed. S. Lillian Kremer (New York: Routledge, 2002), vol. 2, 1352-1359. As for my own research, see N athan Wolski, “The Secret of Yiddish: Zoharic Composition in the Poetry of Aaron Zeitlin,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 20 (2009): 147-180; idem, “Aaron Zeitlin’s Yosef della Reina: A Modern Sabbatean Tragedy,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 38 (2017): 7-52; Aaron Zeitlin, “My Father.” Translated by Nathan Wolski. In geveb (January 2017); Nathan Wolski, “The Sktik Kabole Niger Couldn’t Digest: Poetry, Messianism, and Literatoyre in Aaron Zeitlin’s Keter,” I n geveb (December 2018). 2 Aaron Zeitlin, “ Man, froy un shlang, ” Illustrirte Vokh 25 and 27 (June 26 and July 10), (Warsaw, 1924), 14-15, 15. 3 Idem, Metatron: Apokaliptishe Poeme (Warsaw: Alt-Yung, 1922); idem, “Ke ser: Fragmentn fun a rapsodye” in V arshever almanakh (Warsaw: Beletristin-Fareynikung, 1923), 1-19. 4 Idem, “D er kult fun gornisht un di kunst vi zi darf zayn: Protest un ani-ma’amin, ” in V arshever shriftn (Warsaw: Literarn-klub baym farayn fun yidishe literatn un zshurnalistn in Varshe, 1926-27), 1-9. 3 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nCD6eWyAUtT1_r4TMnRRrAg88X2f1JwLdv5x7s_cWvM/edit?ts=5c231200# 3/16 1/6/2019 Wolski_July 26 2018 - Google Docs remarkable short essay has much in common with the aforementioned poems and contains the key to unlocking aspects of his earlier poetry. Man, Woman, and Serpent 1. We die because we love “And my tribe,” sings Heine, “it is the Asra, who die, when they love.” We die, however, not only when, but also because we love. Between death and sex is a kinship like between lightning and thunder. When one opens the Bible, one finds at the very beginning the story of the first-woman Eve and the first-man Adam—two direct God-descendants. They are warned not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil—eat they do, however, the serpent coaxes. As for the second tree, the Tree of Life, it mourns over the wrong of the first two world-created, seeing that they have lost eternity for the sake of a fruit of a tree, on which good and evil grow together. Do you grasp the profundity of this Genesis-tale? Here lies the key to the tragedy of all who love and die, here are concealed all the loud and quiet screams of history, here are crystallized the tears born in the eye by all generations. The old story with two trees in an old garden seeks, among other matters (I say “among others matters” for it contains, like pearls on the sea-floor, countless meanings), to describe the eternal connection between three related things: Between death, sex, and civilization. Da’at . Knowledge—in Hebrew—means: sex-consciousness (“And Adam knew Eve”). The Tree of Knowledge—the Tree of Sex and Knowing—bears double fruit. Fruit of good: evolution; fruit of evil: death. Adam and Eve, the first couple, became detached from the eternity-tree, where they grew together with divinity—expressed differently, they exchanged domains from cosmic love to egoistic, personal-human love and began to live for one another: Adam for Eve and Eve for Adam.
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