Free The Ritual of New Creation by Norman Finkelstein

(which he also sees as the founding desire of all poetry) always pulls him from the supposed continuity of tradition, but because he is wedded to the Book (as is all poetry), he can never truly depart. The result of this ambivalence is Bloom's search for gaps and contradictions, his fascination with the agon, his resistance to all forms of stability, and above all, his paradoxical longing for an authority that will never assert itself as a positive belief. David Biale explains why Scholem was attracted to Kabbalah:
The Kabbalah itself was an underground movement for revival in Jewish history; yet it accomplished its work by appropriating the normative tradition and transforming it. Because it represented "freedom under authority," the Kabbalah proposed bold and farreaching new interpretations of the tradition without destroying the tradition altogether. 60
Bloom begins where Scholem ends: Gnosticism, in the demonic purity of its self-knowledge, represents the final interpretive step that undoes all tradition. As I have argued, Bloom will never take that stepneither his audience nor his own critical voice will be transformed or end up "elsewhere"but instead, Judaism provides the site where Bloom's ambivalence toward the Book is endlessly rehearsed.
If this site appears to consist not solely of Jewish texts but of all textssince Bloom, beginning as a modest explicator of the British Romantics, now wanders endlessly among the genres and disciplinesit is because he has appropriated the most inventive and most

 

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powerful of Jewish interpretive processes and has "decentered" it to suit his own syncretic devices. Arguably, the rhetorical as well as psychohistorical rationale for Bloom's nomadic discourse is not only generally Jewish but specifically midrashic. The endless textual turnings of traditional writers of Midrash provide the critic with a way of moving between texts, for as Bloom himself observes, "Interpretation, Midrash, is a seeking for the Torah, but more in the mode of making the Torah larger than in opening it to the bitterness of experience." 61 Bloom is correct when he speaks of enlarging the Torah (or filling in its lacunae), but he is anxiously hedging in his resistance to "the bitterness of experience." "Midrash," according to Barry W. Holtz, ''arose as an attempt to keep a sense of continuity between the ancient tradition of the Bible and the new world of Hellenistic Judaism." 62 I would speculate that in a strangely parallel manner, Bloom's midrashic project arises as an attempt to keep a sense of continuity between the ancient tradition of humanism and the new world of Postmodern literary attitudes.
How is Bloom's work midrashic; and how does it allow for continuity, given the overt concern for rupture and crisis both in his own books and throughout contemporary literary theory? Born out of cultural anxiety and, (once again) as Bloom himself knows, partly derived from the alien Platonic tradition, 63 Oral Torah in its midrashic form operates out of a scrupulous textual anxiety as well. James L. Kugel explains:
a perceived contradiction between passages (for example, two slightly different versions of the same law), or a word that does not seem to fit properly in its context, or simply an unusual word, or an unusual spelling of a wordall of these are the sorts of irregularities which might cause the reader to trip and stumble as he walks along the biblical path; and so over such irregularities midrash builds a smoothing mound which both assures that the reader will not fall and, at the same time, embellishes the path with material taken from elsewhere and builds into it, as it were, an extra little lift. 64
The truth of the Law is thus to be found through elaborate verbal play; what initially appear to be problems in the text provide opportunities for greater religious insights. The sanction for what appears to modern readers as dizzying intertextuality is the Bible's status as a canonizedthat is,