Free The Ritual of New Creation by Norman Finkelstein Page A

closedtext. Once more Kugel offers an analogy:

 

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The basic unit of the Bible, for the midrashist, is the verse: this is what he seeks to expound, and it might be said that there simply is no boundary encountered beyond that of the verse until one comes to the border of the canon itselfa situation analogous to certain political organizations in which there are no separate states, provinces, or the like but only the village and the Empire. 65
The free movement of the interpretation is circumscribed by canonic authority, a dialectical process that Scholem describes at length in "Revelation and Tradition." Successive generations transform Midrash into Torah; hence the famous Talmudic saying, "Turn it and turn it again, for everything is in it."
But successive generations have also interpreted with progressively greater freedom; in Bloom's terms, participants in the Jewish tradition of commentary have had to become more and more extravagant revisionists. Drawing on Scholem, Bloom speaks of the classic textual dilemma facing the first medieval kabbalists:
How does one accommodate a fresh and vital new religious impulse, in a precarious and even catastrophic time of troubles, when one inherits a religious tradition already so rich and coherent that it allows very little room for fresh revelations or even speculations? The Kabbalists were in no position to formulate or even reformulate much of anything in their religion. Given to them already was not only a massive and completed Scripture, but an even more massive and intellectually finished structure of every kind of commentary and interpretation. 66
Thus arose the revisionary theosophical doctrines which culminate in the catastrophic vision of Isaac Luria, the messianic debacle of Sabbatai Sevi, and thence the popularization of Jewish mysticism in Hasidism. As relatively modern a figure as Nahman of Bratslav (17721810), who produced his teachings not only under the internal pressures of a tremendous interpretive tradition but under the increasing external pressures of secularization and the Enlightenment, reaches what his biographer considers an extreme in the freedom of his commentaries:
But in the extent to which he carries this process, Nahman seems to express a desire to extend this method to its breaking

 

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point. Almost any association is now possible. He frequently gives the impression of a creative artist straining against the limitations of his medium, and seeking to extend its borders so that he will have room in which to create. In a statement rather surprising for a Hasidic master, he advocates complete freedom in the realm of interpretation, as long as the law remains unaffected 67
A Creative artist straining against the limitations of his medium: it is a description that could be applied to a contemporary literary theorist as well as an eighteenth-century Hasidic rabbi. Nor is this as great a leap as one might suppose.
Bloom, after all, is a self-proclaimed heir to this tradition, and his project can be regarded as a dramatic, perhaps definitive expansion of the midrashic and kabbalistic stancewhat Hegel would call its " Aufhebung ." As an idiosyncratic Jewish intellectual, Bloom has overstepped the limits of the canon but has maintained the formal interpretive attitudes of earlier modes of Jewish textuality. In other words, Bloom's audacious interpretations, including his notorious attack on the boundaries between literature and criticism, stem from age-old textual assumptions, such as Rabbi Akiva's "All is foreseen, but freedom of choice is given." All is no longer foreseen in the work of a post-Enlightenment humanist (and even less so in that of a deconstructionist!), but freedom of choice certainly still applies. I am reminded of Walter Benjamin's observation that Kafka ''sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility." For Bloom, even more of a latecomer than Kafka, truth is transmissibility and little else. The act of